Judith, I experience that site as what I will call mind garbage.

I could find nothing worthy of mention there aside from its absurd claims, and I looked around the site long and hard.

How many times must that man mention "worthy" Christians as being the ones to be taken away in the two raptures he touts?

He seems awfully concerned that a Clinton administration will take away everyone's big dogs and assault rifles. That doesn't sound very Christian to me.  He also dismissed global warming as a moot topic because in 2050 there will be no more earth as we know it. I think there was a rant against homosexuals in there as well.

This pastor is teaching fear to those who are not discriminating, and those who want to feel good about their supposedly superior status.

These people don't want peace, or they don't believe it is possible without catastrophic interventions that injure countless innocents. That much is clear.

I have heard that there is a part of humans that has a natural death wish. I see these kinds of rapture rants as pure projection.

This is no better, and actually worse, than the hyped up media stories we get these days, all designed to get our adrenaline pumping.

Adrenaline feels good to those who are dead inside.

love, blink

I wonder how many years will pass without the rapture happening, before people are willing to admit that this futuristic/dispensationalist way of interpreting the book of revelations is false. Some will justify "further in the future, further in the future." My hope is that they don't get completely turned off to Christ, as some people do after being involved with the fundamentalist way.

I watched Anderson Cooper on CNN about a month or so ago. His show reported that while many Christians were supporters of George W. Bush a few years ago (80+ percent), his approval rating amongst young college age Christians has fallen to 40+ percent. They consider issues like the environment and the war in Iraq to be more important than the gay marriage issue. One man at a Christian rally said it isn't very Christian for our leaders to keep lying to us.  

The Christians I know are mostly Catholics.  They were never George W. Bush fans.

More interesting than reading new interpretations of Nostradamus is to read old ones regarding future events, because you then can check how well the interpretations fits with the events (future events to the time of publishing). I have one book written by "N.A. Centurio" (well that sounds pretty much like a pseudonyme), and there, some events had been predicted fairly well- but, a smart one could have predicted this without reading Nostradamus as well. Others, about big worldwide events predicted to occur around the millennium change, were completely wrong.

Spooky

Hi Juditha-
I don't recall Nostradamus being involved in satanism. He was a working physician, had dubious credentials, at times was able to help people battle the plague through simple cleanliness and was otherwise a relatively average person, except for his scrying and astrology.

From what I've gathered, Nostradamus used a shallow pan of water (it provides a "living" surface) to look at. This is a common method for "seeing things", and based on my experimentation,  seems to present images in a layer of "stuff" floating a tiny bit above the surface of the water. Beladonna was popular in Nostradamus' day, and will enhance images like that. (Don't try that - it's poisonous, very unpleasant, and can do permanent damage to people with glaucoma etc.) The modern equivalent would probably be taking a few puffs of marijuana. (I don't recommend that either, but it's harmless.)

The other half of Nostradamus work was astrology, in which he used the very early correlative methods that dated back to the time of discovery of writing. The idea was that if everything were to be put in books, the cycles of nature by which things happened could be isolated and described, and that this was valid predictive knowledge. As an example, the rise of Sirius over the Nile meant that the annual flooding was coming.

When these ideas were new, the longest period known was the moon's cycle. Because women are obviously tied to the cycle of the moon (since we came out of tidal flats umpteen million years ago) that was taken as the ruling astrological interval. The gods were all feminine, reflecting this, and men were simply discounted, leaving lots of matriarchical societies.

The moon gave way to the discovery of the solar cycle when people started keeping written records. The female gods were replaced by male gods, and lineage shifted from matrilineal families to patriarchal families. The "Magii" would write everything down, and then, months or years later, they could read the books and predict things. Obviously magic?  This is about 10,000 years ago.

By keeping detailed records of this sort, and then by attaching the times to observations in the sky the ideas of the cycles of nature came to be viewed as caused by the stars and planets. Again, Sirius was thought of as somehow causing the Nile to flood. So what eventually came out of this was a lot of cycles of nature, all written down in lots of musty old books, plus astronomical clocks to which each cycle might be attached. The fact that blaming it all on the stars was like the tail wagging the dog seems to have been overlooked.

Nostradamus seems to have studied both the cyclic records of events, and also the psychic aspects obtained through scrying. Thus, what his quatrains were probably intended to do is to reproduce the collection of probabilities for future events that he discovered in the books, with the flavor of what he scryed out of the water. That means that he was trying to express tendencies, as opposed to specifics, and that his basis was essentially historical records. Since this stuff is cyclic, what works in one cycle comes around again in the next cycle etc, so it's unclear just what mix of information he was using. However, it is clear that the repetition of cycles means that a lot of material will apply to more than a single period.

I'm inclined to look at his works as fascinating in many ways, but difficult to use predictively because they can't be pinned down to anything. Even the ages he cited are foggy and imprecise. In support, however, his method of analysis of everything and determination of natural cycles has been adopted by stock market speculators, using "neural nets" of computers to sort, correlate and predict. The various weather services of modern societies use the same methods, a combination of immediate situations plus cyclic changes. In this usage these are predictive techniques, and they have a pretty good accuracy.

Unless you happen to feel that a computer houses its own set of demons, I can't see anything satanic in any of this. However, I imagine that you have more direct access to reality as a medium, and it might not be worth the trouble to try to figure out what Nostradmus said about things.

dave

Juditha I think it is also relevant to remember that the bible was pened by mere men and at the times of its writing, anyone who could be construed as believing in anything else or doing such things as majic (medicine) as healing the sick must be a believer in the occult and could be put to death. He could do things that the RC priests or the Pope  could not do. Therefor he must be practicing the devils work.
Joe

My instincts would be to assess N by his works. Which isn't easy admittedly at this remove. But I'm not so far aware of his being associated with anything on the left path so to speak.

It's probably the case as well that living in the times he lived in that anything with a 'super normal' or supernatural tinge to it would have been labelled as occult and nasty by the ignorant.

Or by those like the church who over the centuries fought to block any move towards mass education - never mind self knowledge or gnosis by labelling it was witchcraft, wizardry, heresy or whatever.