 Good day, May 40 here. So I grew up a Seventh-day Adventist, which is a Protestant Christian denomination so the seventh day of the name comes from the church's emphasis on keeping the Seventh-day Sabbath from Sunday on Friday night to Sunday on Saturday night and the Adventist part that comes from the word Advent, which means soon coming. So Seventh-day Adventists have a very strong belief that, you know, Jesus is about to come back any day. So what happens at the end of the world, it's also known as apocalyptic or eschatological, these type of beliefs about what's going to happen both in this world and then what happens to us after death are at the very core of Seventh-day Adventism. So my father did did a PhD essentially in eschatology. So he did two PhDs or told my father was a evangelical Christian theologian. So let's have a look here. So my father did a PhD in Pauline Ratterick at Michigan State. Then he did his second PhD in 1972 from the University of Manchester and his thesis was the Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology. So his, his main, my father's main area of expertise was biblical apocalyptic literature such as Daniel and Revelation. So apocalyptic literature is a genre of prophetic writing developed in post-exilic Jewish culture. So about 2000 to 2300 years ago, particularly popular among millennialist early Christians, apocalypse is a Greek word meaning revelation. So it's an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known, which could not be known and eschatology means a study of the time of the end. So my father did this thesis, the Abomination of Desolation in Biblical Eschatology. I think that had to do with you can find it, find it online. It had to do with the interpretation of Daniel 814. So the Biblical book of Daniel chapter 8 verse 14 and he said unto me, unto 2300 days then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. And so there were, there were some Jewish commentators and then later Christian commentators who held that 2300 days you should use a year day interpretation. So 2300 days from the cleansing of the temple. So that's when Ezra rededicated the temple in 456 BCE if you use a year day interpretation. So 2300 days from 456 I believe you get 1844. And so this is the basis for the notion that God's coming back, Jesus is coming back to earth in in 1844. Okay, fascinating article here in the New York Times. Christian prophets are on the rise. What happens when they're wrong? So the the Hebrew word for prophet is Navi, right? And Navi does not really mean prophet. So prophet is a mistranslation of Navi. So Navi means spokesman. So people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, almost the prophets in the Hebrew Bible from the Jewish perspective are God's spokesmen. So they're not primarily about predicting the future. So I'll put a link to my father's second PhD thesis here in the video description. But due to that English mistranslation, there's a tremendous amount of emphasis on prophecy among, generally speaking, lower IQ Christians and lower IQ Jews. So there aren't any replicable, you know, established methods of predicting the future, right? It's just, it fools errand. We have no way of knowing what's going to happen in the future. But the more miserable you are with your life today, the more incentive you'll have to preoccupy yourself with, if not the next life, then prophecies about what will happen in this life. So Christian prophecy is primarily occurring in the lower IQ forms of Protestant Christianity. So New York Times has an article here. Christian prophets are on the rise. What happens when they're wrong? They are stars within one of the fastest growing corners of American Christianity. Now their movement is in crisis. So I remember the first time I watched the Donald Trump rally was in something like August of 2015. And I watched the rally and I got the chills and was on a Friday afternoon. I came to synagogue the next day instead of telling people that Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the United States. And people thought I was a buffoon. And then when Donald Trump was elected, people called me Navi, not in the literal sense of God's spokesman, but in the more Goetia sense of profit. So it's easy for me to remember the prophecies that I got right. I think I saw the movie Flash Dance on about its first day of release. And I remember getting the chills watching this movie and I told everyone this is going to be a huge hit. So I tend to remember the prophecies I got right. I remember in political science class in college, the professor in the early days of the Iran Contra affair said that Ronald Reagan is the Teflon president. This is not going to stick to him. And I argued that this would be tremendously damaging to his presidency, and which it did turn out to be. And when that occurred, I remember my political science professor, Larry White, acknowledged me in front of the class. You were right, Mr. Ford, about the consequences of Iran Contra. So I think we all tend to remember more clearly the times we get prophecy right than when we get prophecy wrong. So New York Times today, Jeremiah Johnson, a 33-year-old self-described prophet, was one of the few evangelical Christians who took Donald J. Trump's political future seriously back in 2015. So Trump's victory in 2016 was an outlier. The good day, John. How are you, mate? So the professionals essentially gave Trump about a 10% to 15% chance of winning. Then when he shocked everyone, those who were correct in their prophecies, they got a lot of status from that. So this track record of correctly predicting Donald Trump's political future created for Jeremiah Johnson, this loyal audience of hundreds of thousands of people now who follow him on social media, and they hang on his predictions about the coronavirus pandemic, the makeup of the Supreme Court, the possibility of a spiritual revival in America, and they took comfort ahead of the last presidential election when Mr. Johnson shared a prophetic dream of Mr. Trump stumbling or running the Boston Marathon until two frail older women emerged on the crowd to help him over the finish line. But then, when Joseph Biden was certified as the winner of the election, Jeremiah Johnson had to admit that he let his followers down. So to follow someone because you think that they're a prophet, that's a pretty low IQ thing to do. And so he posted online, I was wrong. I'm deeply sorry. I asked for your forgiveness. I would like to repent for inaccurately prophesying that Donald Trump would win a second term as president of the United States. So it's a very human desire to want to know the future. And I remember one particularly dark period of my life where I thought I was all alone. And while I was waiting in line at a pharmacy to get pain meds after an operation to repair a broken wrist, this woman standing next to me says, I'm getting a special feeling about you. And I was so vulnerable that I took her card. She was an astrologer, a gypsy astrologer. And I went to see her and because it was only $5, but then they hook you in. She gave me the $5 treatment and it was so good. I wanted the $20 treatment. So I ended up dropping like 900 bucks on her over the course of about two weeks in something like May of 1998. So one time I've indulged astrologers. So it's irresistible to people, particularly low IQ people. And Christianity in particular, prophecy plays a much bigger role among Christians than it does among Jews. Like Jews generally speaking spend very little time trying to use their religion to predict the future. So I didn't think I've ever had a serious conversation with a Jew about the Messiah. So it's definitely a doctrine in Judaism. And there are many different Jewish thinkers with many different opinions about the doctrine of the Messiah, but it has virtually no consequence for the way Jews lead their lives. Okay. So in recent years, we've got all these self-described prophets proliferating across the country and they've been gaining in stature over the course of the Trump era. So the rise of Trump and the subsequent hatred of Trump from the mainstream media led those who liked Trump to seek out alternative sources of information because 90% of media coverage of Donald Trump has been negative. Therefore, if you want to find something positive about Trump, you have to go to non-mainstream sources. And some of these non-stream mainstream sources are these Christian self-described prophets. And there are hundreds of them who believe that they can channel supernatural power and their special insight into world events. They tend to be evangelical Christians, charismatic, Pentecostals. This is not something that mainstream Anglicans or Presbyterians or Lutherans or Methodists do. So they operate primarily online. They make appearances at conferences or guest speakers at churches and they make money through book sales, donations and speaking fees. And they are just part of the rising appeal of conspiracy thinking in Christian settings echoed by the popularity of things like Qanon. And there's a widespread resistance among these lower IQ evangelical, charismatic, Pentecostal Christians resistance to mainstream sources of information. So these prophets would analyze events in pop culture like Kanye West's recent return to evangelical Christianity. They have got a particular focus and fascination with Israel. They caution their followers against trusting what they read in the news. And in the place of the conventional news, they offer an alternative news cycle and they refract and interpret events in the real world through a supernatural lens. So Michael Brown, this evangelical Christian radio host and commentator says, in my lifetime, 49 years as a follower of Jesus, I've never seen this level of interest in prophecy. So my father specialized in prophecy and apocalyptic and eschatology what will happen at the time of the end. And this did not generally attract the best crowd. Like my father just got besieged by nutters because people who are, you know, the most miserable are the most likely to be fascinated by prophecy because reality sucks. And so they want to lose themselves in fantasy. While people who are enjoying their life and thriving, they are much less likely to buy into conspiracy theories and to seek out prophecy and these kinds of forms of cheap grace and cheap thrills. So overall, the people who wanted to talk to my father about what will happen at the time of the end were not the best. Okay, did not bring out the best. They generally did not tend to be professors or doctors or lawyers or even accountants. So this past year has been riddled with these evangelical Christian prophecies that did not pan out. So there are all these Christian prophets issuing public assurances that it would be done by, by Passover. And then in the fall, many of these Christian prophets incorrectly predicted the reelection of Donald Trump. Now, when Jeremiah Johnson apologized, got tremendous backlash. He got multiple death threats and thousands and thousands of emails from Christian Singh. The nastiest and most vulgar things I've ever heard toward my family in my ministry. He lost funding from donors. He used him as being a coward, a sellout and a traitor to the Holy Spirit. So even though all these self-proclaimed, self-anointed Christian prophets that are really bad track record over the past year, their popularity is not waning. So mainstream Christianity is declining across the board, but you've got these magnetic independent leaders who are stepping into the void and proclaiming themselves prophets and basically giving the message, you can't trust anybody except for me. I'm channeling God. So Ellen G. Wyatt was the female founder, essentially, of Seventh-day Adventism, and she would have these ecstatic prophecies and visions that would inevitably support whatever it was that the church leadership had decided upon. So it's very convenient church leadership would decide on something and then she'd go into some kind of vision or proclaim a vision that would just so happen, coincidentally support whatever it was that the church leadership had decided. So people don't trust institutions anymore. So with the flood of information, the more fallible we find out our institutions are and the more reasons we have to be wary of the mainstream news media. So people think mainstream institutions are corrupt, whether it's university science, government, the media, they're searching for real sources of truth and low IQ evangelical Christians are frequently turning to these self-appointed prophets. And according to the New York Times, these evangelical Christian congregations are awash in misinformation. So I noticed growing up, lower IQ times much more likely to buy into weird conspiracy theories. So half of Protestant pastors frequently hear memes of their congregations repeating bizarre conspiracy theories about current events. So self-anointed prophets, just one facet of the fast-growing charismatic Christian movement, that's another charismatic Pentecostal, same thing. It's a subset of evangelical Christianity as the lower IQ version of Christianity. So charismatic Christianity has about half a billion followers worldwide, believes in the gifts of the Spirit, including speaking in tongues and supernatural healing. And these people have overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump. Trump's primary faith advisor was Paula White, the charismatic pastor and teller evangelist. A few weeks before the 2020 election, no, live stream this. Trump attended a healing prophetic mega church in Vegas, where speakers shared predictions and visions about his second term. The evangelical, the charismatic Christian movement is notably multi-racial, but the most successful politically oriented self-appointed Christian prophets in the Trump era are White. So these Christian prophets meet a hunger for reassurance and clarity. So at the same time, we've got astrology is exploding in popularity, and more than 40% of Americans apparently believe in psychics. And prophecy is not just a predictive tool for the future. It's also an analytical lens for making sense of history. So everybody who's low IQ wants that magic key that unlocks history. So the most successful prophets, they can connect, you know, all this seemingly disparate pieces of data in some kind of grand narrative, adding new layers of interpretations as events unfold. So there's one church to invite Mr. Johnson to read his prophecies. And one guy in Florida trusted Mr. Johnson because of his recent prophecies that proved true, including one where the Los Angeles Dodgers would win the World Series. This is Pastor Scott Wallace, who's a pastor and a prophet himself. It made perfect sense to him that God would be involved in every outcome of the American election, just as God is involved in every aspect of human life. And Deas believed that God created the earth and then left it alone. But Theists don't believe that. And Pastor Wallace had a friend who prophesied to him in 2014 that he would soon marry, even though he did not even have a girlfriend at the time he was married by the end of the year. So the internet makes it a lot easier for these Christian prophets to disseminate their visions. And then their social media, their podcasts, their books, their YouTube and a whole traditional media ecosystem that remains under the radar for more intelligent Christians. So an appearance on It's Supernatural, an interview shared hosted by the octogenarian televangelist Sid Roth, is often a career making move for prophets. Also, if you can get an endorsement from the venerable Elijah List newsletter, which claims 240,000 subscribers, then there's Charisma Magazine and the Christian Broadcasting Network, which often offers prophetic predictions. So there's Jennifer Ivars, who calls herself the praying prophet. She realized in college that she could hear God's voice. So one way of understanding differences between Judaism and Christianity is that Judaism has much more skepticism with regard to prophets and with regard to God speaking to individuals. So you can understand the Christian split from Judaism that 2000 years ago, some Jews came along and said God had communicated with them and communicated a different way to pursue their religion. And so those Jews who believed that God had made a divine revelation 2000 years ago, they split off and form Christianity. But from the traditional Jewish perspective, prophecy ended with Malachi, about the prophet Malachi in English about 2200 years ago. So she and her husband started to lead a church in central California, and she would keep having these divine visions. And she started recording training videos on prayer and prophecy. And she caught the eye of the Elijah List. As her profile rose, she became an internationally sought after conference speaker at events with names like Inner Healing and Deliverance Institute and the Prophetic Wisdom and Prayer Conference, where believers pay to gather for music, prophecy and inspiration. She would offer public prophecies about national and international events in May 2015. She announced the California drought was over and the rains were coming back. And these kind of visions, she says, only come to her once every year or two. And she's watched with alarm as predictive prophecies have come to dominate the prophetic movement. It's like fact shopping. She says social media rewards buzz and sensationalism over wisdom and pressures independent prophets to churn out fresh predictions every few days. So there's this charter bus driver in North Carolina. He pays attention to synchronicities, what other people might call coincidences. So he believes God is intimately involved in war events and closely attuned to the prayers of his people. So if his phone is on the table and if he mentions wanting to go on a cruise and the phone hears him starts offering advertisements for cruises, he says God works the same way as Siri. He listens to everything you say. So Mr. Johnson appears chastened. He's begun a new YouTube series titled I Was Wrong, which he plans to survey the prophetic movement and where it's gone awry. But everything God speaks to us privately should have been public knowledge. He says, I got caught up in the movement. So if you go to a gathering of clergy in process, so Christians and Jews who are studying to become clergy, you'll typically hear Christians talk about how they've heard the divine call and that's why they decided to become pastors or priests. And you rarely, rarely, rarely, rarely hear Jews talk that way and said they'll talk about how they didn't get into business school or they didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer. So Judaism is an unromantic religion. Christianity is a romantic religion. A romantic outlook on the world means that you see more in reality than is actually there. So Judaism is pragmatic, unromantic, focused on your behavior and your minute decisions in your daily life. So let's have a look here at the chat. Mimi says, I don't know about everyone being low IQ. They're high IQ, SDAs who believe in Ellen G White. They're also, those who remain said they have been something because of Job's family and culture. Yeah, but the charismatic Pentecostal movement, these denominations have much lower IQs than Anglicans. So Anglicans and Ashkenazi Jews have average IQs around 110. But Assembly of God and charismatic Pentecostal Christian churches have average IQs around 90. So smart people can believe dumb things, but generally speaking, a higher proportion of dumb people believe dumb things than smart people believe dumb things. So the happier you are with your life, the less need you'll have for the cheap fix of prophecy or the cheap fix of conspiracy theories. If you're thriving, if you're happy, if you're competent, if you're navigating life successfully, you don't need these escapes. But if you're failing at life, if you're frustrated at life, or if you have a strong psychological need to feel special and unique, then you'll, you know, seize on these forms of special knowledge, because it helps you to feel unique. It helps you to feel inspired. And so even though your life may suck, you feel sure that you, you finally understand how history works, how the world works, and that you're going to get rewarded in time.