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Three Steps To Becoming A Successful Prophet

March 9th, 2009 by Oskar Kennedy

Recently, the comments on a ten-month-old post barfed up a great example of how easy it is for people to be taken in by simple rhetorical tricks. By following this simple plan, you can start making predictions and converting followers to your religion/basement sex cult in no time.

First, a little background. Back on May 1st, 2008, I wrote dismissively about some observations made by pastor Mark Biltz, of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, WA. Pastor Biltz noticed that a series of lunar eclipses in 2015 are going to coincide with some Christian festivals. He took this coincidence as a hint that the long-awaited Christian apocalypse might finally be getting off the ground.

The initial flurry of comments insisted that pastor Biltz wasn’t like every other crackpot who ever shoehorned current events into biblical prophecy. It wasn’t until July 30 that BrotherMark revealed the prophetmaking plan in all its brilliance. BrotherMark is a prophecy blogger, who can’t seem to grasp the simple fact that folks have been certain that they were living in the “end times” since about a week and a half after Christianity was established.

Here is the plan. Try not to be overwhelmed by its simple beauty.

Step 1: Pick a time frame. For best results, make it a date range that is likely to yield a major news story.

BrotherMark said that I should “Try September 29-30, 2008.” It’s a brilliant choice. It doesn’t take a prophet, or even a particularly insightful guess, to predict that something big and newsworthy will happen during the week before a U.S. presidential election.

Step 2: Don’t provide any detail whatsoever.

Again, BrotherMark’s “prediction” was brilliant at this. ”Try September 29-30, 2008,” was the entirety of his prophecy. And when I asked him to elaborate, he was smart enough not to take me up on my challenge. This is key. The less information you provide about the event you’ve “predicted,” the easier it is to take credit for anything that happens during your date range. Any accident, natural disaster or particularly noxious public flatulence suddenly qualifies as the event you’ve “foreseen.” Which leads inevitably to…

Step 3: Take credit for “predicting” any ol’ thing that occurs during your date range.

This step is where BrotherMark dropped the ball. He forgot to come back and gloat when something big happened on September 29th. Luckily, another random commentor discovered BrotherMark’s vision, and was happy (five months after the fact) to drop by and rub it in my face.

Forgiven: The market crashed at the end of September! The end may not have appeared evident to you in May when you wrote that dribble (sic). But other people saw it and have been preparing. How are you feeling now?

I think I speak for the entire skeptical community when I say “oooh, BURN! In my FACE!” I must be feeling pretty stupid, now that I see that BrotherMark predicted financial Armageddon two months before it happened. Surely I’m ready to devote my life to whatever deity gave BrotherMark the gift of such a remarkable prophecy.

Only, not so much. BrotherMark’s “prediction” really only points out how easy it is to fool glorified pattern-seeking monkeys. Because he picked a date out of thin air, and didn’t give any details that we could use to verify or impeach his prediction, we can pretend that any random event fulfills his prophecy. Congress just happened to reject the proposed economic stimulus bill on Semptember 29th. The stock market took the news pretty badly, and now Forgiven gets to declare a win for BrotherMark.

It doesn’t even matter what happened, just that something did happen. A forest fire, a train derailment, or another Barbra Streisand “farewell” tour; any of these things could have been counted as a hit, because the “prediction” didn’t contain any actual information. Luckily for BrotherMark, Forgiven was happy to deep-throat his generalities and snowball him a big load of completely post hoc validation.

I’d like to wrap up with a prediction of my own. I asked Forgiven to provide some evidence that there were actually people who were prepared for the financial downturn. Something on the order of financial records showing that anyone pulled all their money out of the market on September 28th, which would be a first step in validating the claim that someone predicted the crash in advance. I’d like to predict that Forgiven won’t actually step up with any evidence, and we’ll just have to trust that BrotherMark was totally talking about the stock market when he made his pronouncement.

EDIT: I just realized that I totally should have called this post “Step Three is Prophet.” Once again, I am thwarted by my humor impairment.

spread the panic!