Thread by @drvolts

This is probably bad of us, by my 17yo and I are reading this story & it is prompting gales of laughter. What do you do when "charismatic Christian revivalist prophets" disagree with one another? What are the criteria for evaluating such things? politico.com/news/magazine/…

Honestly, every paragraph feels like a perfect set-up and a punchline.

Sincerely: how does one "reform" a movement based on supposed religious revelations of prophecy? Testing prophecies agains reality? That sounds a little like science. So ... what? What exactly is the proposal to maintain "spiritual integrity"?

OK but this is where we just lost it.

I just want to thank the universe for this paragraph, which amuses me to no end. (Imagine doing a dissertation on the empirical accuracy of fundamentalist prophecies. "Turns out they're usually wrong!")

Then, 3/4 of the way through the story, we get this:

"Some observers argue the prophecies at times were an attempt to curry favor with a powerful political figure and movement."

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?! 🤯

🤣 #credibilitygap

Jennifer LeClaire, former editor of Charisma magazine: “I believe some prophets who prophesied a Trump win never heard God at all. They merely tapped into the popular prophetic opinion because it was what so many in the church wanted to hear.”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?! 🤯

Again: ***what would this mean?*** The entire story is shot through with vague references toward holding prophets accountable, validating prophecies, evaluating prophecies. But how? Based on what criteria, what metrics?

One idea: you could call prophecies "hypotheses" and test them against evidence. You could require that their predictive power be replicable. You could set up a social practice whereby prophetic claims are rigorously scrutinized by peers, perhaps in journals of some sort.

But of course, ha ha, that's science, and they don't want that. So, once you get rid of the idea that the truth value of a claim rests on its correspondence to evidence & its predictive power ... what is the "evaluation" you're doing? How do you distinguish between prophecies?

I'll quit ranting. It's just wild to me, this utterly un-selfconscious talk among religious fundamentalists about rigor or accountability. You kinda tossed those overboard when you went fundamentalist! Too late to bring them back in now. </fin>