In Reply to: Re: Welcome to Journeys, Natasha posted by Natasha on January 28, 2004 at 11:52:23:
Well, Natasha, I personally agree with much of your political assessment of the Bush Administration and it's threat to democracy as we know it in the U.S.
Nevertheless, I'm very dubious about the end-time prophesies to which you provided links. Maybe that's because of my experience in the COG, but more likely due to my personal spiritual journey and scientific training.
You base the validity of "prophesy" on this assumption (among others): "Though God has not predestined us, He did create the space-time continuum. Where God is, there is neither time nor space, and so all of time is as a simultaneously occurring event before Him. Therefore He knows what we shall do, to ourselves, our world, and to each other."
OK, assuming that is true, what of free will? Events and situations that hold a certain future outcome today can readily change (through human agency) to situations that predict an entirely different set of future outcomes.
Assuming it is true that God is beyond the space-time continuum, it is important to remember that HUMANS ARE NOT in such a place. Human understanding is bound by time and space and the multiple possibilities that each passing moment in time produces or eliminates.
There's a thing called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle that says the perspective one takes during an observation appears to influence the reality of what is being observed. More specifically, if I view light from one perspective (the time/space continuum), it looks and acts exactly like a wave. If I move to another position along the time/space continuum, that same light looks and acts exactly like a particle. Did my changed perspective vis-a-vis the time/space continuum make the wave change to a particle? Or is light something else altogether and I simply don't have a category for understanding it properly?
This point about light brings me to that scripture about seeing through the glass darkly. God may know the future, but I do not believe any human can clearly know what it is that God knows. That is because we are limited by our finite perceptions to a finite understanding of a finite set of possibilities.
At best, prophetically-minded humans can say: If this set of unjust conditions persist, I am strongly convinced as a matter of faith that the outcomes will be such-and-such. That, in my opinion, is what the biblical prophets did and contemporary prophets do.
For the most part, I don't believe in a psychic capacity to predict a revealed future that is independent of human agency (free will). However, I'm open to looking at evidence that such a thing is possible. There are people who have an uncanny ability to predict accidents. I don't know if that is purely a matter of chance or a matter of statistical significance.
Frankly, I don't care. It is a more authentic expression of my spiritual understanding to trust that God will be present for me regardless of what the future brings. Anything else seems to be an affront to my blind trust in a God unseen by human eyes.