Prophecies R Us

After hearing the prophecies.us website mentioned on CNN last night, before the end of the election, I had to go have a look.

It's a thoroughly amusing place, really! Some of the predictions and prophecies given in that place are utterly ridiculous, but the one that caught my eye last night was the following:

mccain will win the presidential election in 2008.

i am absolutely certain of this and i am only posting it here for proof prior to the date like a postmark to prove my prediction.

my abilities have been validated by a university with an average hit rate of 80%.

i am not a democrat, i am not a republican.

the outcome of an election is irrelevant to me.i am not political and believe that you create your own reality despite who is in the white house. you are the weaver of your destiny and share in shaping the destiny of the planet. no man or woman in political power can save you. no man or woman can pay your bills, win a war, save the planet, stop poverty or feed the hungry. you and i create reality. placing your faith in politics is not good. it abdicates you from responsibility for your life. politics are always corrupt despite the best efforts of the people involved to be good people. their intentions are good but they serve too many interests. i believe in serving your fellow man and uplifting everyone around you.

the mccain people are welcome to contact me and thank me. the obama people can hate me. i have a gift, granted by the universe, higher power, god or whatever you might term it... neither mccain nor obama can take that from me.

Psychicgirl.

Aside from her terrible grammar and spelling, it was the 'validated by a university with an average hit rate of 80%' thing that got me.

What university? What tests did they run? Is the research available for perusal? Did they have any peer-reviewed papers released? I'd like to know! If her hit-rate is that high, she aught to be very well documented and lauded from on high!

But seriously.

It's pretty safe to say that this girl was about as wrong as it gets, but someone commenting on her prophecy seems to be trying to give her an out:

Obama won the election...but he won't be the one inaugurated as President. Read my upcoming prediction which should be posted here eitehr today or tomorrow to find out who our President will be.

Damianos.

I eagerly await her 'upcoming prediction' as it hasn't appeared yet. I have a feeling hers will be just as bad and just as wrong as PsychicGirl's was.

PsychicGirl has yet to respond to the actual results of the Election - I have the uncanny feeling that she'll just disappear and refuse to acknowledge her rather public 'miss'.

A further comment from someone named 'KK' has this to say on the subject:

If McCain is considered the winner. It will be due to another election stolen by the electronic voting machines with no paper trail that go through the RNC servers. These are the same servers that mysteriously lost all the Bush admin's emails. Not by voter fraud but by election fraud. This happened in 2000 and 2004 and it has been proven that democrats won both elections. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, the American public will not be fooled a third time. We are ready to take back our country.

KK

So will PsychicGirl simply claim the results were tampered with?

Even if they were, her prediction was wrong! If she wanted to be right, she should have said 'McCain will win, but tampering with the votes will result in Obama taking the Presidency' - which of course, she didn't say.

On a more serious note, though.

This all just makes me wonder why the hell people do this. I know there is a huge belief in prophecy and prediction - world wide, as I understand it. Pretty much all religions have some form of prophecy inherent in the belief system.

What is the human fascination with prophecy? I know we are one of the few animals on this planet with the true ability to conceive of a future at all, but why do we feel this need to prophesies? Surely we can't be so scared and lonely that we need these stories to make ourselves feel better?

And what about this strange fascination with psychic abilities? From reading through the above linked website, it appears there are a great many people who falsely believe they have some psychic ability to see the future - god given or otherwise.

Why? It's just yet another delusion we blind ourselves with. For the most part, these things are simply coincidental dreams (and even a basic understanding of The Law Of Truly Large Numbers will explain those to anyone who cares to give it even a modicum of thought) yet no-one seems to want to tell these people this simple fact.

I feel it is at least midly dangerous for us to humour these people. To allow them these delusions, allows them to delude themselves in other fashions. And as we all know, that just leads to further problems and possible tragedy.

(Think the religious family's that refuse to medicate their horrendously ill children - an extreme, but highly realistic end point to allowing people their dangerous delusions.)

What we need to do is to explain to these people that coincedence is far more common than they want to believe. We need to point out the many many times they've dreamed something and it hasn't come true (because, believe you me, there are far more of those types of dreams, than the ones that do come true in some fashion or other.)

Until people are made aware of these things, this ridiculous obsession with prophesy and pyschic abilities is going to continue. And while websites like prophecies.us can prove amusing, I fear they can also prove detrimental.

I've even heard it mentioned that some truly right-wing fundy types voted for Obama because they believe he's the Anti-Christ and they believe he's going to bring about Armageddon! Which is just unutterably stupid and proves my point.


Edit:

It get's worse, I just discovered their forum.

It covers all the bases - from The Bible Code to Tarot Cards. It makes fascinating reading - but bloody hell, these people must surely be on something >>