Sure, it’s fun to see failed predictions, but you know what’s even better? Watching a very specific prediction that you know is going to fail in advance. It’s almost godlike: you get to see the certainty of the prognosticator, and you know the prediction is going to fail, but he doesn’t. Plus you get all the stages of prophecy grief — shock and anger at the lack of fulfillment, scriptural contortions and rationalisations afterward, and finally acceptance as the whole incident is (shall we say) ‘clarified’ for those who still believe.
Well, here comes just such an example now. There’s a fellow in Utah that calls himself the “Parowan Prophet”. He’s been crackpotting around for years — I remember reading about him in the 90’s — and now he’s made a splash in the news. Unfortunately, the prophet failed to predict his bandwidth needs, so yesterday his site was throwing a 509 error. Bit of a worry. Make sure to vet your prophets before trusting them with anything important, like interstate marriage legislation.
Anyway, he’s predicting that nuclear bombs will prevent Obama from taking office in January.
“I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the ‘riots’ that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn’t lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said.”
These riots, according to his prophecy, will encourage the “old, hard-line Soviet guard” to seize the moment and rain down nukes on the United States, killing at least 100 million of us.
You heard the man. Obama will not take office. Now what hermeneutical gymnastics will we see from P. P. and any true believers on January 20th? And how long will it take them to forget the prophecy was ever made? My prediction: three femtoseconds.
3 February 2009 at 7:44 pm
ok prophecy has failed.. now what? Believe me I am no Obama fan, but where are the story updates of his failure to predict the future?
4 February 2009 at 5:03 am
This is kind of embarrassing, but I had forgotten all about this post. Which I suppose is the point. Psychics and prophets rely on our poor memory.
I do see on his website, however, this little gem:
And the Obama committee plans to spend over $170 million on the inauguration package with up to 3 million visitors expected. That means millions of Blacks will be gathered within just a few square miles of area. The largest gathering of Blacks in the history of the world. Even a small “Nuke” would burn 25 square miles. And lots of tares. (my emphasis)
That’s a biblical allusion there. It would seem that the Parowan Prophet feels that African-Americans are like some kind of evil weed that will eventually be gathered into bundles and burned. Nice guy, huh?