Bible skeptics, did you know the Bible predicted global warming?
The Bible reveals that in the near future, there is coming a time of great distress upon the earth: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken” (Luke 21:25-26).
If the Bible is not divine, how could they have specifically predicted climate change thousands of years in advance?
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So basically, the Bible knew that people could see stars, that nations tend to go to war, and that... water is wet.
Wow.
That 'specifically predicts' nothing. It's just one of many indistinct predictions that could, and no doubt will, be applied to anything bad that occurs in the world.
Assuming God exists, and He actually does have foreknowledge of disasters and calamities, He must be pretty annoyed with the authors of the Bible. His wisdom has effectively been boiled down to, 'Some bad shit's gonna go down, the sky and the sea'll be, like, whuushhhhhhh, and people'll be, like, woahhhhh, and Christians'll be all, "Yeah, dude."'
" If the Bible is not divine, how could they have specifically predicted climate change thousands of years in advance?"
Because any fuckwit can tell that...uh...water goes wooosh?
Also, how is thousands of years the near future? Especially since this prediction took a third of the universe's entire history, according to you people?
This could equally be 'predicting' a comet or meteorite hit or near miss. Or an underwater or surface vulcano with associated atmospheric disturbances. Or some maybe earthquakes with landslides and tsunami - I don't know whether this could cause atmospheric changes, though.
'Signs' could even be strictly astrological in character, in which case nothing is really being 'predicted' except some stormy weather.
This is not a very specific global warming 'prediction'.
If the Bible predicts it, how come there are so many conservative Christans refusing to see that the climate is changing rapidly?
And how can you get those words to mean Global Warming? What are the signs in the sun, in the moon, in the stars? There is no change up there.
And how many other things have people interpreted that to mean, over the years? The "great" thing about prophecies are that they are so muddled and woolly that they can mean just about anything and everything, all at the same time.
That's the reason why you can never convince fundies by argument. Just a while ago, Global warming was a satanic hoax, now that they can't deny it, it's foreshadowed in the bible.
Despicable.
And there shall in that time be rumours of things going astray, and there will be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things with the sort of raffia work base, that has an attachment that will not be there. At this time a friend shall lose his friends's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before ...
Oh that's specific alright.
It basically says, paraphrased, "something will happen!"
Incomes you declaring it a prophecy.
"predicted global warming?...predicted climate change thousands of years in advance?"
Wait, which one is it predicting?
The old storytellers ran out of material, so they started imagining their strange dreams as visions of the future. That's no surprise.
Modern-day people who believe that shit, on the other hand,...
No, no ... that wasn't a prediction of global warming - that was a prediction of Hurricane Katrina - no, wait - it was a prediction of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 - or, no, wait! wait! I've got it! It was a prediction of the tsunami in Indonesia!
"Bible skeptics, did you know the Bible predicted the fall of Rome the Black Death WWI the Russian Revolution the Spanish Flu WWII Hiroshima the fall of the British Empire global warming?
The Bible reveals that in the near future, there is coming a time of great distress upon the earth: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken” (Luke 21:25-26)."
fixed.
BTW, what did "Luke" consider to be the "near future?"
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=49&chapter=21&version=31
The lines before this talk about Jerusalem being trampled on by the Gentiles and it being a sign of the end of the age. Later it also mentions that this will all happen before this generation passes (though the footnote says generation could also mean race).
It's ok though. Global warming will only affect the people in Judea. That's what it says in the bible too.
You could interpret that as a lot of things.
Besides, global warming won't produce "signs" in the sun, moon and stars. And the sea and waves always roar, especially when there's a storm. Nations have always been distressed for one reason or another. And there are a lot of things to be afraid of without bringing in supernatural things.
Like all biblical prophesy, I could easily read nuclear war, tactical world war, polar shift, comet/meteor/asteroid strike, or any number of other natural disasters into that verse. So what is your point, exactly ?
Wow, this is multi-layer stupid. Not only is she trying to stretch these words farther than spandex on a fat man, but she's also implicitly disavowing any hand of man in the equation by saying it was going to happen no matter what.
Yeah, the Bible is so scientifically accurate. I'm dreading the day when all those stars start falling to earth. Being that our sun -- a smallish star -- is nearly a million miles in diameter, even one star falling into Earth is going to be really, really bad. ... (Even worse than teh Raptur!).
Huh, because what I get out of that, is:
~ astrology
~ war/famine/pestilence
~ storms
~ men feeling fearful
~ more storms
Can you point to a period of history where these weren't true?
The Mayans revealed that in the near future (2012) there is coming a time of great distress in the universe. Unfortunately, christians destroyed all but a couple of the Mayans' writings so they may have destroyed details of the coming calamity.
But we need only to notice the volcanoes, hurricanes and tsunamis that we have experienced recently to know that the Mayan writings are divine. Otherwise, how could they have predicted such things hundreds of years in advance?
"Bible skeptics, did you know the Bible predicted global warming?"
Really? That would be quite an achievement and may go a very small way to restoring even the tiniest sliver of credibility to that book of bronze age fairy tales. Ok, lets examine the evidence...
"The Bible reveals that in the near future, there is coming a time of great distress upon the earth: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken” (Luke 21:25-26). "
Ummm...*nowhere* in the above is global warming even mentioned, never mind predicted. As I first thought, just another lying bible freak.
"If the Bible is not divine, how could they have specifically predicted climate change thousands of years in advance?"
But it didn't and to assert as such makes you a dirty, filthy liar.
Read the whole chapter. Go on! Read it! Don't just throw a verse at me. Context is everything!
Have also Christians been persecuted? I mean really persecuted, and not just "baww nobody's listening to us anymore" - slammed in some jails, betrayed by their close friends, and condemned to death. Have armies besieged Jerusalem a lot lately? Have Gentiles downtrodden it?
And has the climate changed a lot due to this activity?
Are you claiming that this alleged persecution of Christians and the sacking of Jerusalem that we somehow missed is the real cause of global warming?
My memory was a bit hazy - when did Romans destroy the Temple again, and can you point at the global average temperature graph and say that there was a notch to any direction at the time? What about the Crusades? And what the hell is with the giant rise in the recent centuries - surely, Jerusalem hasn't been besieged too much lately, has it?
Besides, the passage speaks of "signs" in the nature. People are not concerned of natural climate change, or even miraculous one, for that matter - it's the man-made, rapid global warming that's giving us the headache.
"And yea shall it come to pass that in their greed shall the nations of the earth give unto the sky, in quantities vast, gases like unto those that come from cows. And yea shall it come to pass that the ice at the ends of the earth shall melt and so shall the seas rise and devour the earth"
Oh, wait. That's not in there ;-(
"Fundamentalists are stupid" (Mitchell 12:24-26)
My book must be more divine, its definately more accurate.
"Bad things will happen" is not a specific prediction. Never once does it say anything about the climate in any part of the earth changing in that passage.
And frankly, I always interpreted that passage as "Guys, I'm coming back, but it's gonna be a long time until then. Long enough for freaky things to happen in the skies, nations to rise and fall, etc."
@ The L:
Surfie Jesus:
"Yo righteous dudez, what's up dog? I've been like totally cruisin on the green and I see some gnarly shit happening in the future, so like I'm gonna shack up until the swells die down dudez!"
This isn't sacreligious, I honestly think Jesus would be cooler as a surfie, I mean he has the hair for it, and considering he was most likely arab, he probably had the skin.
One day, they say that it doesn´t exist. Other day, they say that the Bible predicted it, using information a posteriori. Adorable.
I get it - the "earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth" are supposedly a reference to the widespread panic of GW, and the sea roaring is supposedly a reference to any GW-related floods from icecap-melting, and so on. But the Bible isn't the only scripture with similar predictions - so has the Muslim and Hindu scriptures. So is this Christian fundy willing to claim that these scriptures are "divine" as well because they also supposedly "predicted climate change thousands of years in advance", and in the case of the Hindu scriptures thousands of years before either part of the Bible existed?
Plus, these 'predictions' are morphable to many situations. I've seen better (and more specific) predictions elsewhere - particularly in Hindu scriptures, as well as scientific journals, that actually sound more like global warming than these vague predictions.
That could mean just about anything, and doesn't really suggest global warming to me. It doesn't really suggest anything in particular. None of those prophecies suggest anything specific, because their authors knew they were making shit up and didn't want to get caught so they wrote stuff that could be interpreted to refer to a lot of things.
I will have to assume that he's also been betrayed by both his parents and siblings (just a few verses before the quoted passage) for the quote to be in proper context, as well as hated by "all men.".
Sorry pal. I don't hate you. I pity you for your lack of wisdom, but not "all men hate you".
Or that's a prediction of a really bad storm, one that might result in tsunami type waves. Which happen all the time of course. So, not exactly a prediction as much as hedging one's bets against people too stupid to follow patterns and realize this is nothing new.
Um, can you tell me how climatologists are using the Moon and Stars to tell that the earth's climate is changing?
Your verse specifically says that there are signs of (according to you) climate change in the sun, stars, moon....
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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