re portland earthquake archau saturn wwc edu austin c archer writes i am interested in views about the non event of may seriously how can a christian discriminate between messages from god which are to be taken seriously and those which are spurious is there a useful heuristic which would help us avoid embracing messages which by their non fulfillment are proven to be false thus causing the name of christ to be placed in disrepute is this a problem at all i believe that a careful understanding of scripture can help us here it seems to me that anytime we are proven by events to be mistaken it points to a serious failure in understanding god s will it should result in a reevaluation of what we accept as truth i must hasten to add that i was always skeptical even cynical about these prophesies as i tend to be concerning all such but clearly many christians put much stock in them if the church represents christ in the world then christians must avoid being made the laughing stock of the world lest we dishonor him further the more often we cry wolf the less seriously we tend to be taken any comments good point it is very true that these false predictions are dangerous we are warned more than once in scripture about false prophtets however as is often the case with other issues one cannot let those who falsly report such visions as a reason against believing in any of them i did not get the impression you were asserting this by the way i consider my response not so much a response to your posting but a response to the topic as a whole example the appearances of mary at fatima portugal in among other things she predicted the conversion of russia to atheism something that happened less than a year later w the bolshevik revolution she also predicted the second world war that is predicte predicted that it would occur during the papacy of a certain pope who was not the current one it happened just like she said she warned there would be fire in the sky as a warning that the second world war was about to start about a week before germany invaded weathermen and women i suppose all over europe from england to spain to eastern europe reported the most spectacular reddish color in the sky ever recorded to this day some try to explain it off as the northern lights and the relation to mary s prediction simply coincidence you all can decide for yourselves mary predicted that the atheistic russia would spread her evils all over the world and persecute religion she said many other things as well too numerous to list here every single one has been realized one can only use the term coincidence so many times in the same explanation before its use becomes ridiculous so yes there are many false prophets and many false reports there are true ones too we must always remain open to that fatima was one example there is another one currently occuring the apparitions that have been taking place at medjurgorje yugoslavia or whatever its called now mary has been appearing every day for eleven years now it s time the world started listening more info available to any who want it peace in christ our lord mike walker mdw uxa cso uiuc edu
