The Nostradamus Effect

There was a time when I thought that the Prophecies of Nostradamus were something to be revered and respected. Whenever there was a war or a disaster, or 9/11, a quatrain from the seer would be dragged out and analyzed and it would be determined by guys in capes with bad haircuts talking on the "History" Channel, that it had been foreseen. Wow. Amazing. This guy who lived many centuries ago saw the collapse of the Twin Towers, the rise and fall of Hitler (even missing his name by one letter), and the first Iraq war (or was it the second?). Yes, whenever something major happens in the world, it turns out that Nostradamus had already seen it coming.

WAIT! Hold on just a cotton-pickin' minute!

The major thing happens AND THEN we see the prophecy? That's not how it's supposed to work. A prophecy is supposed to be a prediction of future events, not a reporting of what has already happened. That's called news. And actually, reading some of the "prophet's" quatrains, they don't necessarily describe future events as much as past and current events can be shoehorned into them to make them look like prophecy. That is precisely what has been happening all along.

Somehow, after a major thing happens, a quatrain is referenced and shown how it precisely manages to describe every part of the event with laser-precise accuracy, down to the date and time of the event. However, when one of these "scholars" is asked about future predictions out of these quatrains, it becomes quite vague and murky. Suddenly, the precision is completely lost and it suddenly becomes a range of five to twenty years, and the location is somewhere on a continent.

Shouldn't a prediction of future events actually be a prediction? What good is it if we're told that "bad thing" will happen between now and 2025 somewhere in western hemisphere? So, I have a challenge for the Nostradamus believers out there. If you're truly a scholar on Nostradamus, then make a prediction of a future event with the same precision as he supposedly predicted events that have already happened. I will be generous and give you a window of a week and geographical precision within a region of a country.

Nostradamus was either a fraud for money (a prophet for profit, if you will), a political writer who got a sweet gig acting like a seer or scryer, or just insane. My money is on the second (if I actually gambled). I personally think his writing were a sort of political blog written in a coded language that spoke to the proletariat and was meant to look like prophecy to the upper class.