The idea of prophecy is kind of curious when you think about it. These days if you said you had a vision of the future that you literally saw and were so sure about, people would tell you you were dreaming, and if you kept insisting, delusional.
Plenty of fiction uses "future seeing" as an interesting plot device, (Dune for instance, and currently the Foundation tv series), so we clearly find the concept intriguing, but it is relegated to fiction of course, so likely we generally find it preposterous, and perhaps it's all just biblical references after all.
But it seems that there was a time that people could get away with prophecy as a real claim. It's hard to put your mind sometimes into a pre-scientific mindset, but obviously enough people found these claims compelling. (I realize there is some survivorship bias going on here.). How did they get away with it, I wonder? Just make it vague enough and far enough into the future to be unverifiable? Just make it scary enough that people don't want to take the risk that you are wrong?
When you think about it, it's amazing that some of these stories made it so far and that people even today still believe them. I mean this from a kind of anthropological point of view I guess. Makes you wonder what we commonly believe today that will seem silly 1000 years from now.
Plenty of fiction uses "future seeing" as an interesting plot device, (Dune for instance, and currently the Foundation tv series), so we clearly find the concept intriguing, but it is relegated to fiction of course, so likely we generally find it preposterous, and perhaps it's all just biblical references after all.
But it seems that there was a time that people could get away with prophecy as a real claim. It's hard to put your mind sometimes into a pre-scientific mindset, but obviously enough people found these claims compelling. (I realize there is some survivorship bias going on here.). How did they get away with it, I wonder? Just make it vague enough and far enough into the future to be unverifiable? Just make it scary enough that people don't want to take the risk that you are wrong?
When you think about it, it's amazing that some of these stories made it so far and that people even today still believe them. I mean this from a kind of anthropological point of view I guess. Makes you wonder what we commonly believe today that will seem silly 1000 years from now.