Soothsayers and prophets, they can be found in the Bible, in history books, ancient texts, behind the pulpit or the house down the street. Whether you believe these people or not varies greatly on the prophet, the message or who you are. There are those that believe card readers, some who believe Pentecostal preachers, some the writings of Nostradamus, others believe the prophets of the Bible, etc. Oddly, most of these while believing one form of prophecy, seldom believe the other forms.

If we use the theorem that you can foretell the future, how could it be done? There are only two real possibilities. Either somebody from the future tells you, or you can travel into the future, for example spiritually. As for somebody telling you, there is not one single shred of evidence even among the conspiracy wackos that there has ever been a time traveler. That along with the laws of physics can lead us to believe that none of us are going to see Captain Kirk drop in on us any time soon. That would leave us with a spiritual being. There are thousands of accounts of spiritual beings visiting people. Too many in fact, to be just brushed aside. Unfortunately, in every case I know of, the spirit being is from the past. There is evidence that spirits can travel from place to place near instantly, but not of them traveling through time. It’s always somebody that met an untimely demise and has been hanging around since that unlucky event. So if our spirit can’t travel through time or that of poor old Grandma Evens, that means we have to have a vision supplied to us by somebody. That would mean that person would have to much more than just a spirit. He’d have to be a god. The Christian Bible does in fact allude to the possibility that God is a time traveler. It also states that he does give his prophets clues as to the future. It also tells that God is dead set against any form of witchcraft which makes it unlikely that he’d being sending any messages to the local palm reader. That means there would have to be somebody else like God that can do it. The good book says Lucifer can’t, so without further evidence we’ll have to go on the premise that God’s the only one who can. If you don’t believe in God I guess the point is moot. Either way, it extremely unlikely that flipping over cards in a certain order, or looking at the stars is going to do the trick. Every case I seen of this has been completely bogus. For those people that have told me how it worked for them, after some serious investigation, it turned out looking more like self fulfilling prophecy. The kind where somebody tells you what’s going to happen and you consciously or unconsciously do your best to make it happen. Let me qualify this by saying when foretelling the future, I mean the ‘real’ future. Not a vision you might have of the bridge falling as you start to drive onto it, you stop and the bridge indeed falls. That vision can easily be given to you by a spirit that is able to see structural defects with the bridge and can guess the outcome and give you warning. Using some kind of lense to see things at speeds faster than the speed of light couldn't possibly work either. The future is not fixed so how could you look forward to a set time and see what will happen. If that's the case, then how would God do it? That's acutally not that hard to see. Sort of like the bridge scenario. God sees ya screwing up enough and can make a pretty good guess at what the most likely outcome will be. That's made easier because being a three dementional time traveler, he can look at all the possible outcomes. If you get to a point where all the possible outcomes are us destroying ourselves...well, that's not so hard after all.

That doesn’t leave us with a great number of possibilities. There are prophets in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the Qur’an but that’s like me saying I remember crazy old Uncle Zeke told me the barn would burn down and two days later it happened. How the hell do you know if I even had an Uncle Zeke and if he did in fact say anything? All you might have is a burned down barn as evidence and my word to the fact. There are really only two contestants left, Nostradamus and John who wrote the book of Revelations. The theories about Leonardo’s predictions have been pretty much laid to rest. There is Daniel in the Old Testament but there is some question as to if he was predicting our future or his future and our past. There is Jesus and Mohammed but they did more teaching than prophesying.

I looked at the quatrains of Nostradamus and while I know of people who absolutely believe the validity of them. I find them hard to believe. First of all, they are so convoluted and cryptic, they could mean just about anything. And example of this is quatrain XII 52.

Two bodies, one head, fields divided in two,

And then to reply to four unheard ones:

Little ones for great ones, clear evel for them,

Lightning at the tower of Aiguesmortes, worse for "Eussouis"

I know somebody that absolutely believes that this is proof of Nostradamus’ ability because this foretells the story of the September 11 attacks. The first line he believes refers to the twin towers. What? Two bodies, one head, fields divided in two? How does this get interpreted into two towers? They didn’t have towers in ancient France? They ended up building a pretty good one and he even mentions a tower in the last sentence. Another good example of a quatrain that people bring up is II #24.

Beasts ferocious from hunger will swim across rivers:

The greater part of the region will be against the Hister,

The great one will cause it to be dragged in an iron cage,

When the German child will observe nothing.

The common theory is this is referring to Hitler’s . Somehow the name Hitler became Hister. As you can see though, the four lines could fit almost anything you want. The biggest problem I have with Nostradamus is he is obviously being vague on purpose. Why not spell it out? He wasn’t from that far back into the distant past that he couldn’t be more accurate. His writings look more like somebody off the psychic hotline taking guesses until he hits the target. John, the writer of Revelations is pretty bizarre but at least he’s trying to describe something in our future from the time period the wheel was invented.