The end of prophesy, or When is wrong finally wrong?

For the last several days, I have been pondering the question of what it would take to convince a conspiracist or end-times prophet to admit that they were wrong. You hear someone like that asshat Howse speculating that the U.N. or some foreign power is going to take over the country--and then nothing happens! Or that Obama is destroying the country or deliberately trying to wreck the economy. And over and over and over these people are completely wrong, and they never address it. The economy is still here. The union is still intact. I can admit when I've dropped the ball. I was wrong when I thought that Bill Sparkman, the census worker who was found swinging, had been murdered. I thought it was likely a militia-related lynching. Luckily for everyone, I think, he was troubled, and there are not militias going around killing federal workers. But do we ever hear those ideologically committed to conspiracy say that? How do they account for a lack of anything like progress toward the supposed goals of the world dominionists? They simply don't, I suppose.

Part of the problem with end-time prophecy is that in order to make the prophecy, the world has to not have ended yet. This means, of course, that the world might end. It's like an anthropic principle for the End Times.

Of course, every actual date that has been predicted to be, well, the last one, has passed without any remarkable consequence. I think that end-timers realize this, and they no longer fix dates. Fixing dates would allow us to test them. And they fall back on the old Bible verse: "No man knows the day or the hour..." as if that was sort of revealed truth, when it is in fact common sense.

Sigh.

I'm sorry, but I'm a bit distracted ths morning...Grading to do. Baby Man is in his playpen at the moment, but I think he's loading up his diaper. Gr.

HJ