Prophecy is regarded as a divine revelation or a glimpse of future events, but acquires in our minds, when closely examined, a function that is internal to religions. The article on religions as an epistemological machine did not go far enough and was content to describe the mechanical basis of a religion: how they are an extension of our animal nature. We’re caught in mental loops. Each of our thoughts and actions has a corresponding neural circuit that is always reinforced when used: we call these neural circuits “theories” and the actions that result from them “rituals.”  Prophecy is, in this view, a strategy of falsification of religious theories, where a new belief system is bound to emerge. In this article, we will examine Jewish, Christian, and Muslim messianic expectations and analyze how these prophecies might be mechanisms of falsification, and conclude on conversion as an individual mechanism for discovering the truths that religions contains.

Falsifiability: scientific criterion

To say that a theory, whether we refer to the neural circuit or to an interrelated set of statements, is falsifiable means that it opens the possibility of being contradicted by experiment or empirical observation. Thus, the sciences wanted to distinguish themselves from religions with this precept: if a theory is unfalsifiable, then it is not scientific. For example, if I say “all geese are white”, then I am putting forward a scientific theory because it is falsifiable: you only have to see a black goose to falsify that theory (and it did happen indeed).¹

Where the sciences are wrong to distinguish themselves from the other epistemological machines we call religions, is that they focus on the conceptions of God held by religions, but keep in the blind spot both the values, the network of symbols, and the prophecies as such: as if religion were only about God. This is because they confuse religion and theology. Indeed, a theology cannot be falsified, but can be contradicted : this is the case between Christianity and Islam, where a new religion emerges without having fulfilled the prophecies of the previous one, all the while presenting itself as its sequel.

Jewish Messianic Expectations

Jewish beliefs in a Messiah, an anointed king of God, state that it he who will come to restore the kingdom of Israel and whose reign will be a golden age for this people. According to the prophecies, the Messiah will be a descendant of David and his coming will mark the beginning of a new era, where peace and prosperity will reign on Earth. “The Messiah, as king and priest, represents the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham and his people, and the fulfillment of the vision of peace and universal justice.”² This expectation represents the falsifiability of the theory called “Jewish religion”, in which the Messiah establishes a new religion that replaces the previous one: the falsifiability of a religion is that which we call hope. (So yeah… it’s that bad…)

However, it must be recognized that, in the book of Joshua, the prophecy has already been fulfilled: the Promised Land has already been given, then lost during the exile, and found again thanks to Cyrus, who was then seen as another messianic figure, and then lost again. The theory is falsifiable in that the roots of the Jewish faith are in a promise of that Land: as long as they do not have the Promised Land, they will bring out this prophecy from the texts: the prophecy fulfilled, but the Messiahs who have come (Joshua, David, Cyrus, Jesus, Shabbetaï Tzvi) have not falsified the Jewish religion. Only one has successfully falsified it, but only to half of Israël : Jesus.

Thus, we can see that the theory is falsifiable: it is only that we often have to look to the past to see how it has been falsified. The Tanakh is a self-sufficient text: the prophecies made in it are all fulfilled, and if there is some that aren’t it could’ve happened without entering the text : so I consider for myself the Tanakh a case closed. Even the curse of God, prophesizing that the Israelites would eat their children if the covenant was not kept on their part occurred, has happened (2 Kings 6:29), so we can already consider the covenant dissolved. This is because the Jewish religion, and we will also see, the Christian religion, are both caught up in a cyclical temporality where it is the neural circuits that keep them waiting. They expect, in a way, an eternal return, as Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), himself a prophet, would say : all that happened is bound to happen again and we are bound to live the same lives over and over again. Nietzsche’s prophecy is the only I try to invalidate. We can’t blame Jewish people for keeping hope. I know I can do something about it, wishing the world would let me. In the meantime, let’s see how Jesus took Israel out of its religion to create Judaism and Christianity.

How to “pull a Jesus” 101

The steps are :

1. The prerequisites of the prophecies are fulfilled…
2. … all the while all expectations shattered…
3. … in such a way as to trigger a transvaluation of all values and of the world.

I won’t go into details here, but roughly speaking, Jesus fulfilled the prophecies (again) of the Old Testament in a totally unexpected way and it resulted in the divorce of Israël into Christian and Jewish beliefs. While the Israelites were expecting an epic and grandiose completion of the promises of the Sacred Text, for they had already read Joshua’s (the similarity of the names Jesus (Yeshua’) and Joshua (Yehoshua’) was not left to chance), Jesus served humble and symbolic fulfilment of prophecies. Jesus is, after all, the prophet of symbolics.

The Israelites now had two choices: accept Jesus the Messiah or reject him. To accept is to admit that one was wrong about God, the world and his religion, and then have to rethink everything, “leaving no stone unturned” (as Hannah Arendt said but concerning ideology). The debates raged, but hit a wall: it’s a matter of faith after all. Many even thought that Jesus was a troll and that it was all staged coup to make fun of their religion: that’s how much expectations were shattered. So as much as they were shocked, they doubted the good faith of the other position.

And this other position, if we compare it to “ancient Judaism” (which is in truth the religion of Israel), we notice extraordinary novelties about which Jesus himself did not theorize (he only alludes to something that could be a hell, but that’s nowhere near Dante). The novelties of Christianity are: heaven, hell and purgatory, and the soul too, and the rest has been turned upside down. The early Christians discovered a new world and a its new backstage. As he prophesied, “This world and heaven shall come to pass, but my word shall not.” Thus, the world in which we live is that of a religious genius: the secularism of the State is his invention³ individualism and egalitarianism too⁴… It seems that for more than two thousand years all our political debates have revolved around the details of the principles he established. Even philosophy, culminating in Hegel, sought to understand how he could contradict himself so much and still make sense.⁵

So we can understand our so-called “Western” societies from edge to edge as Christian to the bone, and should call them as such. Even OnlyFans is Christian : “This is my body, which is for you, my followers.” Having followers, as Jesus was followed, is a particularly Christian phenomenon. Just like the teenage crisis: Jesus said he came with the sword to separate parents from children, and even today, Christian parents are so annoying that children have a crisis in adolescence to, just like Jesus did, go get their own system of values. We are, one would say, in the Kingdom of Heaven: this is the world that Jesus envisioned. And yet, we still look to the sky waiting for his return…

Christian Messianic Expectations

Christians await Jesus’ return to establish the Kingdom of Heaven, a spiritual kingdom that will replace today’s earthly governments. According to Christian tradition, Jesus Christ is indeed the promised Messiah to the Jews and the son of God, so why don’t they consider what we have as the promised Kingdom? His coming into the previous world. Jesus proceeded to falsify the religion of Israel, which no longer exist. He negated Israel’s world to give instead the Kingdom of Heaven. And so we have Judaism, which does not believe it to be the Kingdom of Heaven and we have Christianity, who used to believe it so, but not anymore. We can read in a Catholic Bible such a section on this belief: “Christ, as King of the Kingdom of Heaven, is the center of our faith and the hope of our salvation.” That’s how bad the Kingdom of Heaven really is… Take it from me : when it’s been 2000 years, it’s safe to move on from a guy not showing up.

Again, the promise has already been kept: Jesus falsified the religion of Israel, and he brought together a church that was no longer bound together by only family ties. What Christians are waiting for is a take-two of Jesus Christ. They already have everything they need to establish the Kingdom of Heaven they imagine: they have trillions of dollars, liberal values, the majority, and individualism. It would only need for them to decide to do so. But the Christians, instead of making the Kingdom as they themselves dream of it, are waiting for Jesus to return, even though in the Gospels he has already returned: then he left, and it was two men dressed in white, who are not even named, who prophesized he’d come again. Well, I think he did come back again, as Karl Marx⁶: he saw us struggling and brought a formula for making this famous Kingdom, in an industrial age, where all workers are paid the same wage whether they work an hour or twelve hours a day (go back and read the parables, Jesus does indeed describe a Kingdom with a fairly generous communistic wage system) and where all are fed, as if by magic.

At the end of the day, the Second Coming is not even a promise of Jesus, but of two strangers dressed in white saying : “Why stand there looking up at the sky? This Jesus who was taken from you into heaven will return in the same way that you saw him leave. (Acts 1:10-11) The same way… that is to say, in a small committee of a select club of apostles, and not some sort of end-of-the-world blockbuster movie that we imagine ourselves to be. I repeat, “Why sit there looking up at the sky?” Make the Kingdom of Heaven yourselves! If you absolutely want a Jesus, I can be Jesus too⁷: The contact form is here. I’m playing it Judge-Joy. The pope will be symbolically crucified on Madonna’s disco cross to inaugurate, after my Christian-Punk denomination, the religion of “disco-pop(e)”.

Muslim Messianic Expectations

For Muslims, the Messiah has also already come, they recognize him in Jesus, but instead of falsification, they proceed by contradiction: a completely theoretical method. It is the Christian belief system that is itself contradicted⁸ by a simple and effective conception of God. Christians say that the Father is God, the Holy Spirit is God, and Jesus is God, but the Father is not the Son, the Holy Spirit is not the Father, etc. Islam makes this Trinity a mere symbol, a kind of idol that hides the true God: thus Christianity fails this test of monotheism, and thus Muslims direct their religion towards a God who’s preceding the Holy Trinity: this would be, in comparison, the true God. “Allah,” was an outbidding of the Holy Trinity just like Christians have outbid YHVH/Jehovah.

Muslims await the coming of the Mahdi, an imam (spiritual guide) who will appear in order to refresh Islam and bring justice and peace to the Earth. According to Islamic tradition, the Mahdi is a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and his coming will mark the end of times and the emergence of a new spiritual era. This expectation can also be seen as a prophecy of falsification, where the Mahdi establishes a new religion, namely: true Islam, which replaces previous interpretations and practices. Mahdi means “the converted,” so it is in all likely hood, not a Muslim-raised individual, and one that understands Islam is a totally novel way (I’m thus a perfect candidate.)

Well, this Mahdi already came once and suffered the same fate as Jesus Christ. He’s called the Báb, “the door”, and has opened the door to the successor of Islam: the Bahá’í religion, which in a way, would be the “true” Islam, as reading the Kitab-i-Aqdas, he changes the law previously prescribed by the Quran. But, the majority of Muslims doubt the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh and His Bahá’í – who nevertheless announced a new spiritual era, as promised by prophecy, in the middle of the 19th century which was factually a turning point in our ways of being (Factually, too, the hated Bas (Bab, Bahá’u’lláh, Bahá’í) are more of a running gag in Islam but  I believe in it, just as I believe in Shabbai Tzvi, and in all those who call themselves Prophets or Messiahs: for if thou falsifieth, I followeth.), but as with Christianity, something grandiose is expected. But in truth, the falsification of religions is a process that does not require a cinema-spectacular: there are some minimal requirements to be met, but since expectations can be demolished at such fundamental levels, that the whole worldview is subject to destruction and restructuration, then if I can be Jesus-Too, I can also absolutely do the Mahdi too as well.

After all, if the prophecy is that the Mahdi will return to establish true Islam, then somehow, somewhere Muslims think that the current Islam is not the true one. It doesn’t have to be that hard to rally to my Cause if the belief system tells Muslims that they don’t have the right religion: if you believe in Islam, then you’d believe in the prophecy of the true Islam of the future and therefore, at the same time, the inauthentic Islam of the present.⁹ And I’m a Muslim, I believe in it. And I’m also a Christian, and I procrastinate my going to the synagogue to make my Jewishness official… for although I have said that Joshua has already fulfilled the prophecy of the Messiah of Israel, it does not mean that I do not believe the Jews. If this is madness it’s because of my Mahdi-ness.¹⁰ I take belief systems very seriously, I approach them the way a surgeon approaches a patient’s body. That doesn’t stop him from operating on several patients in a day, or cracking jokes about cases with colleagues. Whenever I use puns, it’s not merely joking around, it’s because all religious texts are full of wordplay (if you read them in the original language, of course), and these articles, while not intended to be sacred texts, are inspired by all the ones I’ve read so far.

The Implications

But how can someone, like me, be so cynical in his approach and study of the subject and yet believe in it with all his heart? It is simply because the transvaluation of values and the world that is sought is a genuine quest for me. We can think of “societies” as a sounding board where vibrations culminate in a point where there is an individual who, in order to survive so much noise and discordant waves, proceeds, first on his own, to this transvaluation. Once it has happened, there’s no turning back. He’s entered a new world, and there’s only one option, one thing he can do: make the old world come to pass.

“This world and this heaven will come to pass, but my words will not.” Jesus was able to make this prophecy because he knew very well what he was doing. Either the prophecy will be forgotten after some time and no one will remember it being said, or it will be fulfilled if he succeeded in his endeavour. Thus, a prophet loses nothing by making this kind of prophecy. The falsification of religions by religious genius is a phenomenon that can be observed historically: study the case of Jesus in more depth because Ancient-Judaism is well documented, but not Islam, from which we have little information (that isn’t in an Islamic point-of-view), about the polytheistic religions that preceded it. Moreover, Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of Judaism, which is not the case with the Prophet Mohammad, who instead came out-of-nowhere like a hurricane.

The prophecies that lead to the creation of a new faith, and that replace, with a bang, the existing belief systems are produced for the purpose of stabilizing the belief system : a prophet wouldn’t want his work nullified by the next one coming around a bit too soon. Now, these millenary religions are due for composting. The falsification of a religion generally makes quite a fuss, such that during the lifetime of the apostles of Jesus, they were able to spread the religion as far as Rome. On the Islamic side, the Mohammad-phenomenon has been able to make thousands of converts during his own lifetime all by himself. Jesus did not convert: he healed the sick. It was his resurrection that enabled the apostles to turn his coming into a new religion with material for conversion. The messianic expectations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims clearly illustrate the dynamic of falsification where prophecies are used to establish new faiths that replace the old ones: even Islam has known micro-Jesuses in the persons of the Báb and Bahá’u’lláh.

Conclusion

So what about the scientific certificate that religion acquires through falsification? Well, whoever validates the new prophet goes from one world to another. In this way, he acquires a knowledge about the human being that is not otherwise accessible as long as he understands, albeit subconsciously, what the transition from one religion to another means. It’s human behavior, which at first seems chaotic, who suddenly seems to make sense, as if the pieces of a puzzle fall into place. I learned so much about the human being by studying Israel’s transition to Judaism and Christianity. And likewise, by adding to my template the religion of Islam and how it differs from Christianity. And again with the Bahá’í, though I think I can do better. Conversion is never a negation of the past faith. Just like when you convert a file on a computer, you keep the original file: and that’s when it’s very rewarding.  So, even if I sound cynical, I have acquired so much knowledge about humans through religions (even more than by studying in so-called human sciences), that I can only believe religions to be something real. Cynical doesn’t mean you don’t non-believer : it means you’re a player and not just a spectator.

I studied philosophy to which the term in the Islamic tradition is falsafa. I do believe all languages are related and that falsification of a religion has philosophy as a bridge in between them is quite revealing. Maybe it is time to falsify religions to the point where is become the philosophication of religions. Once one is properly philosophized, we can move on to falsify into the next religion.

1. You can read more about scientific falsifiability in a book by Karl Popper. I’m not in an academic context, so I won’t torture myself looking for the reference. ↩︎
2. Institut juif de la culture, “Le Messie et la rédemption du monde” (All references have been fished out by artificial intelligence, hence their quality leaves something to be desired, but I’m sure it can be improved) ↩︎
3. There is no religion that gives so much to Caesar; religions go hand in hand with politics, so that we can say that politics is an invention of Christianity. Without Christian influence, it is still the gods who clash across peoples. Thus Moses gave the law! The same goes for the Prophet Mohammad. Jesus, on the other hand, gave general principles, parables, etc. He left the legislation into the hands of Caesar, a pagan elite that took from Athens its model and its academic language. We can still see religious courts in several countries, such as in Lebanon, where everyone is judged according to the law of his faith. If the court is secular/liberal, it is a Christian court. (To say “Christian secularism” is like saying “ascending to go up”.) ↩︎
4. By breaking family ties and uniting believers in the body of Christ, of which each is a member (yes, the term membership comes from the body of Christ), there is the emergence of the so-called individual : a person is no longer the representative of his family, he is a brother or sister of the Church where all are equal… in front of the priest… hélas! ↩︎
5. The principle of non-contradiction is first and foremost a weapon that we use to invalidate each other, it’s not a law of the cosmos but its rule of thumb. It’s just that for Jesus we wanted to validate everything he said. He says, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies,” this what led to the invention of the soul and life after death. We wanted to validate him to the end and thus we created a new world. To stand firm behind an individual and to try to resolve his contradictions is what recreates the world. This is what happened with Muhammad as well: we can explain all the contradictions in the Qur’an, because there is a long tradition of Islamic research that has treated these contradictions in the same way as it did with Jesus. It’s a sacred text : it must be true (plus, the Quran states it has no contradictions so they must be explained away). When it comes to truth revealed by divinity, we structure our whole way of thinking around Revelations. In other words, we can live with contradictions. ↩︎
6. And with the Karl-Marx-Christ, we also had the Lenin-St.-Paul, who made the same Pharisaic translation from good principles into questionable institutions. Christian mode of prophecy is analogous to the process of nourishment: it always has a precursor hungering for something new of a higher nature (a John-the-Baptist), the whole plate fulfilling the hunger (a Jesus) and a successor, often a Pharisee-like figure, telling you how to digest what you just read (a St.-Paul). There’s something ironic in Jesus picking a Pharisee as his successor as if he was himself turning the other cheek. “Alright, you got me killed and I resurrected. Now, do the same to my teachings, they’ll resurrect just as well when the next Jesus comes around.” Here I am! Kid yourself not, Jesus understood what he was doing and knew another one like him was to emerge from his own new world : a Jesus is more of a role that one plays in a group dynamic as to allow it to move forwards, anticipating its future challenges by giving it a new neural circuit. The Pentecost was the phenomenon that happened as the neuro-circuitry was rewiring to the new theor-ethical framework. ↩︎
7. My pen name is not Messy Erzast for nothing. My real name is along the lines of Yisra’el Shaddaïk, that, in English, means : Israel (God prevails) Mine-Yours-All-Mighty-God. ↩︎
8. Literally: a counter-diction, saying counter-to. ↩︎
9. Religions are a sandbox for contradictions: those who can live with them are limited only by heaven. And even there, like Jesus, heaven can pass through it. ↩︎
10. Parallel to the ancestor, El said: “Mahdi, don’t wait for the Medina. You may dine but wait for mates-sinners. Now, note to Ba’al: no one to Bow/Heil, either it hates Beau-El or irritates bowels. No high-raised hand, it’s not the Umayyad and its knots, Deo may add. For write their ills, but hooray free them real : chosen  Pürophaith Messy of ersatzs*daat*com. An imp pious with unbiased love. Mosque at Damascus: where prays behind me Jesus-Too2, Elli-Yah and the Mahdi: let them appear and diss a peer. My El, my pure El, said: it is really for not the sheikh, but for the Shaddaiak the puremancer. ↩︎