Tragedies, prophecies...meanderings...

I have been hearing a lot about prophecies. Is the world going to end?Is this the apocalyptic fulfillment of the blah, blah, blah…This is understandable with what is happening in the world today, one could surmise that the apocalypse is coming, but if such is the case…hmmm just relax and enjoy.

We, humanity, have been expecting the end of the world for a thousand years now. Great tragedies have struck civilizations with regularity, wars, deaths, destructions…these are normal phenomenon that people of long ago accepted with surrender and also with hope. Civilizations vanished, nations exterminated, cities swallowed by volcanic eruptions, earth quakes and tidal waves have occurred regularly in our history.

During the middle ages, when the bubonic plague almost wiped out Europe killing 6o percent of its population, a staggering almost 100 million deaths, though it took almost 150 years to recover, yet, humanity survived-we better suited for survival than rats and cockroaches. The two world wars is also another example of tragedies that almost wiped us out, but still we are here. The list of catastrophes goes on.

Catastrophes happen and will continue to happen and no prophecy could accurately predict them, nothing we could about it. Of course, today prophecies (especially the Mayans the Biblical ones) are being used to scare the hell out of everyone into submission to one faith or to another. (To tell the truth we have enough prophecies to last us a lifetime, and more prophets coming out claiming divine authority is divinely superfluous.)

But behind it all, behind every prophecy, are hope encapsulated. Prophecies are expressions of helplessness in times of great tribulation, and also they are expressions of redemption hoped for. They inspire hope for the future. It is common knowledge among interpreters of ancient books ,especially the Bible, that most prophecies were written after the actual events that the prophets were prophesying about, a posteriori, so to speak. So, the purposes of prophecies are, in reality, more of a hindsight than a foresight, to prepare, to encourage and; so to speak, not to scare, or to scare. Prophecies are something more…they contain wisdom. A distillation of, may I say, scientific observations of their time. Especially the ancients civilizations who have mastered their astronomy and science, like the Mayans and the Aztecs.

Of course whenever tragedies struck, the occults are conculted. Numerology practitioners suddenly start to have authorities, and so are the astrologers, entrails readers etc... These things are nothing more than efforts to seek solace . Explanations are needed, comfort is wanted. But unfortunately, they are nothing more than psychological placebos.

Anyway…will the world end tomorrow? As Hume said: “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.”

What in the world was Hume saying? He was simply saying,” anything could happen!”