Ancient Prophecy Is Modern Reality

Blackbear · 07-29-2005, 09:25 PM

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FROM: INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY NEWSPAPER

_http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411327_
(http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411327)

Ancient Prophecy Is Modern Reality

(javascript:PrintWindow();) Posted: July 28, 2005 by: _Editors Report_
(http://www.indiancountry.com/author.cfm?id=471) / Indian Country Today
Christians don't have a monopoly on prophecies that tell of an ''end of
times'' or an end of an ''era.'' Many tribal nations, significantly the Hopi
and the Haudenosaunee, but including many others such as Cree and Lakota in
the North and Maya, Lokono and Maquiritari in the South, have prophecies within
their spiritual traditions that describe an ''end of times,'' an era very
similar to our present times and depicting or describing prophetic signs
apparent to those who watch for such things. The signs, according to each culture
and prophecy, reveal that major changes are afoot.

The Christian tradition is compelling in that it dictates a clear scenario
for believers that accepts, on faith, the belief in the resurrection of Jesus'
physical body from death itself. The resurrection myth propels to an
end-tale with the return of the living Jesus. This ''Second Coming'' is to gather
those who had believed in him as the only way to salvation. These would, in
fact, be resurrected and ascended into heaven to live in eternal grace with
their Lord. Everyone else, unfortunately, ends up in hell for torture and pain
throughout eternity.

There are those who say that the Second Coming, which is also described as
''the Rapture,'' is already guiding American foreign policy. Certainly, it
appears that the true believers within the present circle of U.S. policy makers
and of many media outlets are steering toward connecting the worldly events
in their various fields and departments to the sign of the coming Rapture. No
doubt, many fully expect to be among those who board the celestial ship to
life eternal. These analysts, mostly but not exclusively on Christian radio
and television shows, conjecture for millions of Americans that propelling
Israel as a major super military power in the Middle East and invading and
occupying a whole country - Iraq - at the ''cradle of civilization,'' portends the
acceleration of the struggle between ''good and evil,'' expectedly toward
Armageddon, the final mother of all battles, after which comes the return of the
living body of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps this is so, or perhaps it overstates the Christian case; but no one
can deny we live in the age of terrific religious fervor, when more and more
of humanity attaches itself to essential or elemental stories that are the
basis of whole religions, whose dictates and strictures can often clash and
expand into dangerous areas - including that of self-fulfilling prophecy. We are
also in an era when the resources of the Earth that have fueled and
supported industrial lifestyles are quickly diminishing. This is where some of the
Indian prophecies come in.

John Mohawk, Seneca historian and Indian Country Today columnist, recalled
not long ago the mutual visits by Hopi and Haudenosaunee traditionalists as
early as 1948, where a prophetic tradition, popularly referred to as ''the
purification,'' was exchanged. This was way before the ecology movement, before
''New Age'' and even before the ''energy crisis.'' The elder Indian
spiritualists from the Hopi of that time not only had prophecies of meeting ''Indians
from the East,'' they actually fulfilled their own tradition and traveled east
to meet and tell the Haudenosaunee about it. The sincere exchange of views
that followed saw these and other Native peoples review and renew their
prophetic traditions and this dialogue, largely unrecorded, has gone on for more
than a half a century after the 1948 visit.

Unlike the faith-based Christian liturgy, what the Hopi tradition warned
about involved patterns of human activity on Mother Earth that had profound and
predictable consequences. They expressed, as have most Indian traditionalists
to this day, that the greed for material possessions and technological
gadgetry had the potential to severely affect the systems of the earth and that
this was in fact happening within Western civilization, which they were
witnessing, and that they had been told they should warn all peoples about the
impending changes and disasters.

No one listened then and too few are listening now, as the ancient Indian
warning is diluted by modern economic and political concerns, but the message
does resonate with observers of our current energy crisis who tell us of major
and very difficult changes ahead for most of humanity.

Blackbear · 07-29-2005, 09:26 PM

cont....

The American ''way of life'' predicated on the wanton consumption of cheap
oil is in its last throes. Quantitative reality points to severe developing
problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We are
entering what a well-researched book recently excerpted in Rolling Stone magazine
terms the ''end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era.'' (''The Long Emergency'' by
James Howard Kunstler, Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005.)

The term ''global oil-production peak'' is very important in this context.
This is the ''turning point,'' when global production will generate ''the most
oil it will ever produce in a given year,'' after which annual production
can only decline. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 at 11 million barrels per
day. Currently some 20 million barrels a day are consumed just in the United
States, which produces 5 million and imports the rest.

There is now developing consensus that the global oil-production peak,
expected by 2010, is happening now - in 2005. The remaining half of the world's
oil deposits is in large measure unextractable; that which is extractable is
increasingly difficult and costly to extract, of poorer quality and located
mostly in places hostile to the United States. The industrial world's principal
source of energy, which underwrites everything about the international and
particularly the industrial economies - from transportation to heat to food to
the hugely integrated range of most other production - is drying up fast.

The new energy crisis is permanent. The cheap energy, cheap food and cheap
living produced by cheap oil has no detectable replacement that can sustain
the current industrial lifestyle. And not only oil, but natural gas is also
declining (by five percent a year), with steeper declines expected. Most power
plants built after 1980 and half the homes in America run on gas. Nuclear
energy, touted by some once again, comes from plants such as Three Mile Island
and has many serious unsolved problems, in long-term radioactivity control and
waste storage, which generate intense opposition in the population.

It gets worse: clean water is also diminishing fast. Already, globally, more
than a billion people don't have safe drinking water. About 15 million
children under the age of 5 die miserably each year from drinking polluted water.
(See: ''With a Push From the U.N., Water Reveals Its Secrets,'' William J.
Broad, The New York Times, July 26, 2005.)

The news on declining oil and water, and on costly extreme weather
disasters, is sobering. The convergence of forces now seen as permanent reveals trends
that will severely change life as we know it, limiting Western technological
society and altering the familiar economics and social planning of the 20th
century.

Large-scale social change could help. But while these threats compound, the
American media and major news channels grow shrill while losing the ability
to tell schlock from substantive and useful information. Socially asleep at
the wheel and led by the easy profits of ''reality'' shows, infotainment of
bizarre cases and celebrity gawking, most basic reporting is replaced by
hackneyed pundits repeating their spin on channel after channel. Public trust and
doctrines of fairness are now hostage to profit incentives. No major idea or
power in the current society is likely to be challenged, investigated and
analyzed for fear of losing its corporate or governmental support.

Breaking through this wall of disregard for natural reality was the intent
of the elders who came out of their remote communities to tell their
prophecies and perceptions in the mid-20th century. Because they did not call for
miracles over life and death, because they did not request we ''act on faith,''
their admonitions merit attention more than ever today: they said that the new
way of using up the earth will have dire consequences; indeed, the new
reality is of a world where the promise of industrial progress is much reduced.

The elder Indians spoke of food self-sufficiency and of fighting tenaciously
for your lands as the basis of tribal survival. They urged the younger
generation to stay close to the earth, aware of the sources of good water and land
for growing useful plants and animals as the ''real economy.'' They spoke of
staying physically active and the people striving to work together in
harmony. Even back then, they warned the leaders to prepare for a future of great
uncertainty. ''Prepare from the ground up,'' they said. ''Community by
community and family by family, learn to do these things for yourselves.''

Given the callous disregard for these life-threatening issues by America's
current political and media leadership, the elders' advice - to do for
ourselves and to prepare to meet all conditions - might be as good as we are likely
to get.

Usdigvhi · 08-01-2005, 12:03 AM

i didnt read your whole post but i know the prophecys that they're talking about and i definitely believe it. most ppl i know read the stuff and blow it off tho

goodgirl · 08-01-2005, 06:33 AM

Well as a white Christian, I do believe in the end of times and the Rapture, but I also for the life of me can't figure out how environmentalism is NOT a core Christian value. Stewardship, the Bible calls it, and good stewards Americans are not, as a whole.

I live in Atlanta, where the air is so bad that I am now on 3 daily asthma medications, having taken none 10 years ago when I lived in N.C. I give my dogs and cats filtered water because of the level of chlorine in my tap water. And I resent the fact that my WNC mountains are brown with the smog that blows north from the city where I now reside, and south from Cincinatti and Chicago.

On the other hand, I drive 60 miles a day to and from work. I am seriously a part of the oil problem, but so far I can't find a good solution. I suspect I am like many others. I try to make up for it in other ways, but ultimately I'm a polluter and I know it.

A study earlier in the year showed that the typical American family has more wealth and possessions than the Pharoahs of Egypt. The difference is the Pharoahs valued gold and jewels, whereas we currently value plastics and electronics. We have gone from "the yellow metal that makes white men crazy" to "the clear petroleum-based substance that makes white men crazy that they then throw away and replace with equally cheap and inessential garbage."

We need to all get very serious about the problem, and I guess it'll take a major shift in priorities -- toward families living closer together, lowering the divorce rate, going back to personal responsibility and public accountability, away from the 3-car-garage, $200 jeans and $2,000 gaming computer mentality. Christianity could be a much bigger help than it's chosen to be so far.

On another note, it'll be interesting to see what happens with oil prices and accessibility, and indeed with hostility in the middle east, now that King Fahd has died.

goodgirl · 08-01-2005, 06:40 AM

oh -- and coal and nuclear energy don't seem to be good solutions, as far as I can tell. President Bush wants to foster a resurgence in nuclear energy production. In a speech earlier this year, he made clear that he knows it's risky and so he proposes measures that would protect ...

... THE NUCLEAR ENERGY COMPANIES from lawsuits in case anything went wrong. Nice to know. And I'm not a Bush-hater, it's just that stuff like that makes me want to go snatch-bald.

As for "clean burning coal", I'm skeptical of that, but even if it really is clean-burning, that still doesn't solve the problems of mountaintop-shearing, soil ruination, severe erosion and climate change that results from the clearcutting of trees and lowering of mountain peaks. Is it just me, or, duh?

07-29-2005, 09:25 PM	#1 (permalink)
Blackbear Space Cowboy Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: Alaska Posts: 9,622	Ancient Prophecy Is Modern Reality ************************************************ ******** This Message Is Reprinted Under The Fair Use Doctrine Of International Copyright Law: _http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html_ (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html) ********************************************** ********** FROM: INDIAN COUNTRY TODAY NEWSPAPER _http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411327_ (http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096411327) Ancient Prophecy Is Modern Reality (javascript:PrintWindow();) Posted: July 28, 2005 by: _Editors Report_ (http://www.indiancountry.com/author.cfm?id=471) / Indian Country Today Christians don't have a monopoly on prophecies that tell of an ''end of times'' or an end of an ''era.'' Many tribal nations, significantly the Hopi and the Haudenosaunee, but including many others such as Cree and Lakota in the North and Maya, Lokono and Maquiritari in the South, have prophecies within their spiritual traditions that describe an ''end of times,'' an era very similar to our present times and depicting or describing prophetic signs apparent to those who watch for such things. The signs, according to each culture and prophecy, reveal that major changes are afoot. The Christian tradition is compelling in that it dictates a clear scenario for believers that accepts, on faith, the belief in the resurrection of Jesus' physical body from death itself. The resurrection myth propels to an end-tale with the return of the living Jesus. This ''Second Coming'' is to gather those who had believed in him as the only way to salvation. These would, in fact, be resurrected and ascended into heaven to live in eternal grace with their Lord. Everyone else, unfortunately, ends up in hell for torture and pain throughout eternity. There are those who say that the Second Coming, which is also described as ''the Rapture,'' is already guiding American foreign policy. Certainly, it appears that the true believers within the present circle of U.S. policy makers and of many media outlets are steering toward connecting the worldly events in their various fields and departments to the sign of the coming Rapture. No doubt, many fully expect to be among those who board the celestial ship to life eternal. These analysts, mostly but not exclusively on Christian radio and television shows, conjecture for millions of Americans that propelling Israel as a major super military power in the Middle East and invading and occupying a whole country - Iraq - at the ''cradle of civilization,'' portends the acceleration of the struggle between ''good and evil,'' expectedly toward Armageddon, the final mother of all battles, after which comes the return of the living body of Jesus Christ. Perhaps this is so, or perhaps it overstates the Christian case; but no one can deny we live in the age of terrific religious fervor, when more and more of humanity attaches itself to essential or elemental stories that are the basis of whole religions, whose dictates and strictures can often clash and expand into dangerous areas - including that of self-fulfilling prophecy. We are also in an era when the resources of the Earth that have fueled and supported industrial lifestyles are quickly diminishing. This is where some of the Indian prophecies come in. John Mohawk, Seneca historian and Indian Country Today columnist, recalled not long ago the mutual visits by Hopi and Haudenosaunee traditionalists as early as 1948, where a prophetic tradition, popularly referred to as ''the purification,'' was exchanged. This was way before the ecology movement, before ''New Age'' and even before the ''energy crisis.'' The elder Indian spiritualists from the Hopi of that time not only had prophecies of meeting ''Indians from the East,'' they actually fulfilled their own tradition and traveled east to meet and tell the Haudenosaunee about it. The sincere exchange of views that followed saw these and other Native peoples review and renew their prophetic traditions and this dialogue, largely unrecorded, has gone on for more than a half a century after the 1948 visit. Unlike the faith-based Christian liturgy, what the Hopi tradition warned about involved patterns of human activity on Mother Earth that had profound and predictable consequences. They expressed, as have most Indian traditionalists to this day, that the greed for material possessions and technological gadgetry had the potential to severely affect the systems of the earth and that this was in fact happening within Western civilization, which they were witnessing, and that they had been told they should warn all peoples about the impending changes and disasters. No one listened then and too few are listening now, as the ancient Indian warning is diluted by modern economic and political concerns, but the message does resonate with observers of our current energy crisis who tell us of major and very difficult changes ahead for most of humanity. __________________ Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.

07-29-2005, 09:26 PM	#2 (permalink)
Blackbear Space Cowboy Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: Alaska Posts: 9,622	cont.... The American ''way of life'' predicated on the wanton consumption of cheap oil is in its last throes. Quantitative reality points to severe developing problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We are entering what a well-researched book recently excerpted in Rolling Stone magazine terms the ''end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era.'' (''The Long Emergency'' by James Howard Kunstler, Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005.) The term ''global oil-production peak'' is very important in this context. This is the ''turning point,'' when global production will generate ''the most oil it will ever produce in a given year,'' after which annual production can only decline. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970 at 11 million barrels per day. Currently some 20 million barrels a day are consumed just in the United States, which produces 5 million and imports the rest. There is now developing consensus that the global oil-production peak, expected by 2010, is happening now - in 2005. The remaining half of the world's oil deposits is in large measure unextractable; that which is extractable is increasingly difficult and costly to extract, of poorer quality and located mostly in places hostile to the United States. The industrial world's principal source of energy, which underwrites everything about the international and particularly the industrial economies - from transportation to heat to food to the hugely integrated range of most other production - is drying up fast. The new energy crisis is permanent. The cheap energy, cheap food and cheap living produced by cheap oil has no detectable replacement that can sustain the current industrial lifestyle. And not only oil, but natural gas is also declining (by five percent a year), with steeper declines expected. Most power plants built after 1980 and half the homes in America run on gas. Nuclear energy, touted by some once again, comes from plants such as Three Mile Island and has many serious unsolved problems, in long-term radioactivity control and waste storage, which generate intense opposition in the population. It gets worse: clean water is also diminishing fast. Already, globally, more than a billion people don't have safe drinking water. About 15 million children under the age of 5 die miserably each year from drinking polluted water. (See: ''With a Push From the U.N., Water Reveals Its Secrets,'' William J. Broad, The New York Times, July 26, 2005.) The news on declining oil and water, and on costly extreme weather disasters, is sobering. The convergence of forces now seen as permanent reveals trends that will severely change life as we know it, limiting Western technological society and altering the familiar economics and social planning of the 20th century. Large-scale social change could help. But while these threats compound, the American media and major news channels grow shrill while losing the ability to tell schlock from substantive and useful information. Socially asleep at the wheel and led by the easy profits of ''reality'' shows, infotainment of bizarre cases and celebrity gawking, most basic reporting is replaced by hackneyed pundits repeating their spin on channel after channel. Public trust and doctrines of fairness are now hostage to profit incentives. No major idea or power in the current society is likely to be challenged, investigated and analyzed for fear of losing its corporate or governmental support. Breaking through this wall of disregard for natural reality was the intent of the elders who came out of their remote communities to tell their prophecies and perceptions in the mid-20th century. Because they did not call for miracles over life and death, because they did not request we ''act on faith,'' their admonitions merit attention more than ever today: they said that the new way of using up the earth will have dire consequences; indeed, the new reality is of a world where the promise of industrial progress is much reduced. The elder Indians spoke of food self-sufficiency and of fighting tenaciously for your lands as the basis of tribal survival. They urged the younger generation to stay close to the earth, aware of the sources of good water and land for growing useful plants and animals as the ''real economy.'' They spoke of staying physically active and the people striving to work together in harmony. Even back then, they warned the leaders to prepare for a future of great uncertainty. ''Prepare from the ground up,'' they said. ''Community by community and family by family, learn to do these things for yourselves.'' Given the callous disregard for these life-threatening issues by America's current political and media leadership, the elders' advice - to do for ourselves and to prepare to meet all conditions - might be as good as we are likely to get. __________________ Don't worry that it's not good enough for anyone else to hear... just sing, sing a song.

08-01-2005, 12:03 AM	#3 (permalink)
Usdigvhi Little Wildcat Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Columbus, OH Posts: 374	i didnt read your whole post but i know the prophecys that they're talking about and i definitely believe it. most ppl i know read the stuff and blow it off tho __________________ "So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and nothing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." -Tecumseh

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08-01-2005, 06:33 AM	#4 (permalink)
goodgirl Pow Wow Visitor Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 17	Well as a white Christian, I do believe in the end of times and the Rapture, but I also for the life of me can't figure out how environmentalism is NOT a core Christian value. Stewardship, the Bible calls it, and good stewards Americans are not, as a whole. I live in Atlanta, where the air is so bad that I am now on 3 daily asthma medications, having taken none 10 years ago when I lived in N.C. I give my dogs and cats filtered water because of the level of chlorine in my tap water. And I resent the fact that my WNC mountains are brown with the smog that blows north from the city where I now reside, and south from Cincinatti and Chicago. On the other hand, I drive 60 miles a day to and from work. I am seriously a part of the oil problem, but so far I can't find a good solution. I suspect I am like many others. I try to make up for it in other ways, but ultimately I'm a polluter and I know it. A study earlier in the year showed that the typical American family has more wealth and possessions than the Pharoahs of Egypt. The difference is the Pharoahs valued gold and jewels, whereas we currently value plastics and electronics. We have gone from "the yellow metal that makes white men crazy" to "the clear petroleum-based substance that makes white men crazy that they then throw away and replace with equally cheap and inessential garbage." We need to all get very serious about the problem, and I guess it'll take a major shift in priorities -- toward families living closer together, lowering the divorce rate, going back to personal responsibility and public accountability, away from the 3-car-garage, $200 jeans and $2,000 gaming computer mentality. Christianity could be a much bigger help than it's chosen to be so far. On another note, it'll be interesting to see what happens with oil prices and accessibility, and indeed with hostility in the middle east, now that King Fahd has died.

08-01-2005, 06:40 AM	#5 (permalink)
goodgirl Pow Wow Visitor Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 17	oh -- and coal and nuclear energy don't seem to be good solutions, as far as I can tell. President Bush wants to foster a resurgence in nuclear energy production. In a speech earlier this year, he made clear that he knows it's risky and so he proposes measures that would protect ... ... THE NUCLEAR ENERGY COMPANIES from lawsuits in case anything went wrong. Nice to know. And I'm not a Bush-hater, it's just that stuff like that makes me want to go snatch-bald. As for "clean burning coal", I'm skeptical of that, but even if it really is clean-burning, that still doesn't solve the problems of mountaintop-shearing, soil ruination, severe erosion and climate change that results from the clearcutting of trees and lowering of mountain peaks. Is it just me, or, duh?

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