I acknowledge a large number of threads on UM talking of impending doom, and predictions for the future. These most noteably are 2012 with the Mayan calender and Nostradamus.

I am not going to talk about these as this is not the nature of the post (at this point in time anyhow).

Many of the prophecies are from hundreds and thousands of years ago.

What we forget is that Earth was certainly not a global communicator. Even as recent as 1850, people would rarely leave their homelands and the only news received was by travellers.

If you take a prophecy of doom from such a time, surely it can only refer to the immediate geography. Talk of fire cascading down from the heavens as predicted for 2200, and the area of concern could quite easily be volanic islands where eruptions are to some degree predictable.

Taking the year as 500BC, and a talk of fire raining down and the world ending to a community that lives in a small niche, and this is wholly true. It probably happened in 1000BC and their prediction of it occuring in 1AD would be fairly accurate to that community.

Fast forward to modern day with global markets etc...., and people are now using this story for Earth. It was never meant to be for Earth as the peoples were not wholly aware of Earth in a climatic or geographical sense, only perhaps that there were places, away from them.

Regards

i agree with you 100 percent
but also there are many predictions out there of wat will happen in the future

Very nice point. I never considered it that way before. Certain predictions, like the example you gave regarding a town's destruction by fire, could very well be just as you said: Meant not for Earth, but for the town in question. I can see that making perfect sense.

Though, I find the year 2012 as being just another "Y2K" scare. Nothing overly traumatizing is going to happen. I hear the world is going to wobble on her axis, all of the planets are going to align, and then there will be global peace. Suppose we'll just have to wait and see. :3

I never understood how wobbly earth equaled global peace.

Anyway, very good point. Predictions made before mankind had a grasp of the planet as a whole kind of seem like they could not have been meant for the planet as a whole, huh?

Kudos.

Roj 47, you're absolutely right. It tends to be that the peoples who make these prophecies tend not to be a mobile peoples. The Celts (which I believe are still with us- ie, the spread far and wide throughout Europe and even Western Asia, and there are a lot of us in Europe no doubt descendents of these peoples!) were found far and wide and tended to make quite vast journeys, and yet there are no surviving accounts of such prophecies of doom; even though there are plenty other surviving accoutns and stories of great philosophers and clairvoyants. I've never heard of any Mayan great exodus. And prophecies are so vague that really they could mean anything.


Finally, Nostradamus. We take these poems written by a doctor who watched his family succumb to disease and probably became highly depressed as truth. Would you believe the ravings of a mad man?


Oh, and I believe Hister was the classical name for hte Danube... not Hitler...