Unfulfilling Prophecy

when trying to reason with biblical literalists they'll say that their Bible is historically accurate even though the best they can show is that only some of the people in places mentioned in those fables were real which of course they would be since fictional stories are usually said in real places and often mentioned famous people of that time but there is absolutely no historical or archaeological evidence that the stories are true and biblical scholars often admit that they're evidently not true believers might also argue that the Bible is scientifically accurate even though the earth is not flat there is no firmament the Sun is just another star snakes and donkeys can't talk whales are not fish and bats are neither birds nor locusts ritual spells won't purify anything much less cure anything because diseases are caused by pathogens rather than demons or curses and looking at a stripe at stick will not cause a cow to conceive a stripe at calf there was never a global flood either nor could there have been everything the Bible says about any field of science is laughably and in defensively wrong a failing both past and present defenders of the faith typically turned to the future citing prophecies in the Bible which believers imagined to have been fulfilled because religion is all about make-believe and the Bible says that interpreting prophecy is one way to convince yourself if you really just have to swallow all this supernatural mumbo-jumbo some way it's not just Christians who do this Hindu scripture shows that one way to fulfill prophecy is to amend the text to insert a prophecy after it has already been fulfilled in similar fashion the authors of Jesus's early biography in the Gospels have him travelling around as a baby apparently to artificially contrived fulfillment of a handful of different prophecies that it would be a Nazarene but at the same time also from Bethlehem and yet still somehow come out of Egypt even though that last prophecy was obviously talking about the people of Israel personified as a person in a tale that was supposed to be from centuries earlier likewise Isaiah 53 is again talking about Israel personified and not Jesus and Christians interpret this chapter is the Jews explaining why they rejected Jesus centuries before they ever heard of him and how they would eventually atone for their current faith by coming to believe in Christ at some point in their future seriously but of course Isaiah was not talking about why he didn't contradict himself in other Hebrew prophets from the mainstream Jewish perspective Jesus doesn't qualify as Messiah because he failed to do any of the things the Messiah was prophesied to do so he didn't fulfill Old Testament prophecies at all Isaiah 52 clarifies that 53 is talking about Israel not Jesus 52 was hopeful for Israel and 53 described their eventual Redemption though obviously not through Christ and while 53 has a few notable parallels with the Jesus story that doesn't matter it'd be like saying that the original story of Sargon's child had prophesied that of Moses being so similar or that the story of Moses child had prophesied Jesus for the same reason the similarities don't make a prophecy there are also important distinctions like Jesus was never crushed and he never shut up kings because it was never recognized by kings and he never had any descendants the word seed is consistently used in the Bible to describe offspring rather than unrelated followers of a precedent so when Isaiah mentioned seed it refers to the Jewish children of Israel not Jesus's followers and Jesus was never a mere servant of God like Israel was who he was never beaten and afflicted by God like Israel was his life wasn't prolonged either obviously nor did he share spoils with his peers because he didn't have peers and he wasn't a conqueror with spoils to share like Israel was so this chapter is not talking about Jesus most of it is in past tense so it can't be a prophecy of any kind which is why none of it is messianic according to Jewish sources Isaiah never mentions resurrection either which would have been the whole point of the story if it was about Jesus so this chapter is obviously about Israel just like it says and can't really secretly be a prophecy about Christ Isaiah 9 isn't a prophecy either it's a seventh century coronation him in which any new king would bring hope for better or more peaceful times than any king of Jerusalem would be the might of God as it is sometimes translated or as messenger as it is in the Septuagint it doesn't refer to Jesus because Jesus is not the everlasting father as some believers argued that Jesus could be considered the father of eternity but that's a stretch referring to a king as everlasting is really no different than say long live the king after you've learned that the king is already dead this is just her traditional reference of reverence recognizing royalty in many of the prophecies that Christians point out as being fulfilled by Jesus or that we're supposed to have predicted Jesus are either Jewish prophecies talk about someone or something else or they aren't written as prophecies at all like pretending that King David was writing about Jesus rather than himself and David wasn't even a prophet and his Psalms are not considered prophetic within the Jewish religion David is talking about being encircled by his enemies hunting him with dogs biting in his hands and feet and that may work from David's perspective at least metaphorically as he seems to imply it here but it doesn't work in any sense at all for Jesus now does it Christians imagine this passage to me about crucifixion this misinterpretation is based largely on a mistranslation which has resulted in a few other misinterpreted prophecies - for example Isaiah 7:14 talked about a young maiden who was unmarried and not necessarily virgin the Gospel of Matthew claims Jesus to be a fulfillment of this prophecy which it can't possibly be Isaiah did prophesy about about an entirely different situation with no possible connection to Jesus regarding an unremarkable kid who lived and died centuries before Jesus so not only does this new interpretation this prophecy fail but the original version failed too spectacularly every way that it could fail Isaiah had written in a time limit every good prophecy should have that but very few of them do because that's how we know when they failed once they've passed their expiration date for example the Mormons bragged that their Prophet Joseph Smith accurately predicted where and why the civil war would begin because it was right about that which is weird because he spoke in plain language not in any convoluted code like so many prophecies are interpreted to be but the Mormons don't mention that the very next passage after that predicted that Jesus would return in the year 1891 awkward though his second coming seems to be contingent on Smith living that long which show see how close he was to God if my prophet isn't there I'm not going and Jesus himself said that some but not all of his disciples would still be alive to see him return to Earth in the clouds at the right hand of but every one of his disciples are dead now and our boy is at least nineteen hundred and fifty years late so I think it's safe to say we've been stood up he ain't coming for a prophecy to have any value at all you should state clearly and unambiguously what's going to happen to whom where and when and knotted symbolic lingo that has to be decoded it should be something that wouldn't have happened eventually anyway but if it is then it should definitely have a time limit without that you can't claim success either because anything that can happen will happen if given enough time just look at Jesus's prophecy for the end times for many will come in my name saying I am Christ it will mislead many and you will hear of wars and rumors of wars for nation will rise against nation and Kingdom against Kingdom and in various places that will be famines and earthquakes and people hear this and think wow that's how it is now well of course it is that's how it's always been every year for the last couple millennia at least has met every one of those criteria there were a couple other prophecies that were plainly stated and included an expiration date and both of them failed - for example Ezekiel prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar - king of Babylon would conquer the city of tyre destroy it utterly breaking down all the walls streets and towers and killing or driving away everyone therein then God was supposed to step in and caused the city to sink beneath the deep and be lost forever it would never be found again because it would be unrecognizable just an uninhabitable Rock in the midst of the waters no more than a place for fishermen to spread their nets but none of that ever happened Nebuchadnezzar never took the island city someone else did a sense for your soul later but not the guy who was prophesied to do it and the city was quickly rebuilt when it wasn't supposed to be and people still live there when it was supposed to be abandoned because the island never sank every part of this prophecy failed in Ezekiel even admitted that in another of his prophecies which also failed this time he said that the land of Egypt would become a desolate wasteland where neither man nor beast would ever set foot for at least forty years again this was supposed to have been at the hand of Nebuchadnezzar but it never happened at all neither then nor at any other time even when it is this obvious believers will never admit that none of these prophecies were fulfilled has subscribed and the excuses they used to rationalize this can be desperate indeed and these include the nebulous use of prophetic language where the same story can be read both literally and figuratively at the same time as if a Jewish prophecy can be applicable to the Jews who compose and recount it but that the entire text of the same story can equally true as an entirely different prophecy for Christians any excuse will do as long as they never have to admit that they're wrong my prophecies particularly appeal to the paranoid and are especially popular with conspiracy theorists seeking patterns that are not apparent to any rational person believers determine their interpretations by arbitrarily shifting from literal to metaphorical and back with no rhyme or reason or discernible distinctions reading between the lines and then ignoring the lines such that one verse has taken to refer to a whole other topic than the rest of the chapter just because it sounds similar to something else as if every author of the Bible had attention deficit disorder what the scripture actually says is seldom what it means to whoever believes in it when it says this it really means that connecting the dots between discordant verses and unrelated books by different authors talking about disparate things that are not all connected but where devotees believe that every seemingly random coincidence is somehow intentionally orchestrated and all the evidence of reality is dismissed as only an illusion this is why prophecies shouldn't be written as vaguely as a fortune cookie or an astrology chart because then it's like reading the quatrains of nostradamus it's hard to disprove any of his predictions but when it's that and malleable you can take almost any current event and link it to something he said or that the Bible said is if Nostradamus where the Bible predicted it for example the sixties psycho-killer Charlie Manson thought that the Beatles were the four locusts with the hair of women that are mentioned in Revelations 9 he thought this because the song revolution number nine which is on their unlabeled White Album which Manson took as a personal message to stage a white revolution called helter skelter after another song on that album he thought they were talking to him because another song on that album was sexy Sadie and his main squeeze at that time was Sadie Mae klutz that and because his name was Manson which of course means son of man which meant that he must be our Savior he thought that the Beatles were sending him secret messages in their lyrics as if they couldn't communicate with him directly in plain English he lived with the Beach Boys at that time it would have been easy from the Beatles to reach him but he had the sort of mind that looks instead for coded messages in every song as subtly symbolic meanings for every image because everything happens for a reason and nothing is as it seems Christians prefer to adapt Jewish prophecies for their own purposes for example all four Gospels point to zechariah 9:9 is referring to jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem however again this is a Jewish Scripture and the rabbinical interpretation is that the Philistines were supposed to be converted and the Land of Israel enlarged by this prophesied king but that didn't happen with Jesus the story says he was rejected by rabbinical assembly where fulfillment of this prophecy would have required Jesus to have been accepted there are also prophecies referenced in the New Testament that don't appear in the old and no one knows what they are because there are books referenced in the scriptures that don't exist anymore at all how did the prophets not foresee that and why did no one predict the age of automotive automation all these agencies could foresee current events thousands of years into their future but none of them noticed airplanes what's the point of a prophecy anyway if God or his prophets really could see into the future that means that the future is fixed just like the past if he knows what we're gonna do and we can't change it that means we have no free will ironically about the only clear and unambiguous prophecy that actually did come true was Ezekiel's prediction that Jerusalem would be restored which is not surprising anyone suffering a defeat like that is likely to say that this isn't over and we'll be back once we rise again what makes this prophecy interesting is that Isaiah made the same prediction but he added that the nation would be born all at once in one day and that certainly sounds like May 14th 1948 when the nation of Israel was founded but there are a handful of problems even with that one is that there isn't a time limit or even a frame of reference to allow an event 2500 years into his future not if it mentions the establishment of Israel but fails to mention the Holocaust that preceded that there would be kind of a big deal for Jewish people but then anything happening more than a hundred generations in the future is probably beyond anyone's cultural interest there are a number of Christians who dispute this prophecy also saying that Ezekiel referred only to when the Jews would return to Palestine in the fifth century BCE when the temple was rebuilt Isaiah prophesied that the nation would be founded not by men but by God and the problem with that is that God is not recognized as the founder he's not mentioned anywhere in the proclamation of statehood instead modern Israel is a secular state citing the natural and historic right of Jewish people so God didn't get the credit that the prophecies he said he would and another problem with this is that it's also a Muslim prophecy cited as proving the Quran and this was a thousand years after a zekiel or Isaiah but well more than a thousand years before the fact the Quran has a lot of fulfilled prophecies enough to warrant another video just to address them apart from the Bible the Quran even predicted trunk so are all you Christians gonna turn Muslim now because if Quranic prophecy doesn't matter to you at all then imagine how little your misinterpretation of Jewish folklore means to me I asked Christians to give me their favorite examples of fulfilled prophecy and the ones I just talked about we're the best y'all could do nothing that was unambiguous meaningful or in any way helpful or compelling nor that even met the minimum criteria required to be fulfilled Christians brag that Jesus fulfilled hundreds of prophecies in the Old Testament but if they're all as contrived as these then it's no wonder the Jews are still Jewish as I wonder any of you still believes in God at all

Channel: AronRa

Views: 221,734

Rating: 4.8018332 out of 5

Keywords: Prophecy, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Matthew, Psalms, Nebuchadnezzar, Nostradamus, Manson, Zechariah, Israel, Beatles, Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith, mashiach, Micah, Hosea

Id: 5YPVtSaqwi4

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Sun May 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/OldWolf2642]

Three words should cover it quite nicely:

'All of them'

[u/mrevergood]

But but...what about all the “laser accurate” predictions that Jesus fulfilled? /s

Basically what someone said to me the other day in defense of the historicity and accuracy/divinely inspired nature of the Bible.

[u/Cranky_Squirrel]

I guess it's true. Religious trolls come home on Sundays feeling empowered and think they can 'take on the godless heathens' as this thread shows.

Spoilers: You just look more foolish than usual, dear theists.

Edit:A Word.