Hindu goddess Kali getting crunk One of the great things about the Internet is that buried in its trillion or so pages are instances of bullshittery so audacious that they are nearly worthy of admiration. Or conversely, kindling worthy of being mashed by satire, set on fire by sarcasm and stomped into the fine ash of ridicule. I’m better at that than I am at admiration, so that’s what we’re going to do here.
I refer to “15 Ancient Hindu Predictions That Have Come True,” a post on the web site detechtor.com, another mash-up on the Web that is composed entirely of clickbait, and is one of those posts that try to convince the average mouse potato that people who lived 5,000 years ago and had to find time to get clairvoyant between being snacked on by tigers (or jaguars, if we’re talking Mayans, or crocodiles if we’re speaking of Egyptians), eerily predicted the exact sad, Doomsday-looking circumstances that we find our civilization in today.
First off, we are told we are living in the Age of Kali Yuga. Kali is the Hindu god of death, sexuality, violence and motherly love (Like all beings with extra arms, Kali is good at multi-tasking). The first thing we ought to notice about ourselves, according to these ancient snobs, is that “Religion, truthfulness, cleanliness, tolerance, mercy, duration of life, physical strength, and memory will all diminish day by day because of the powerful influence of the age of Kali.”
To that this column says “Mega-churches, Google, antibacterial soap, political correctness, food stamps, 117-year-old Japanese women, steroids and Adderall. These things are all going strong over here in Kali Yuga, so stay dead if you want to avoid being wrong.”
Just kidding. You can be wrong and dead at the same time, as many people over the course of history have proven.
Another prediction for Kali Yuga is: “Harassed by famine...people will resort to eating leaves, roots, flesh, wild honey, fruits, flowers, and seeds. Struck by drought, they will become completely ruined.”
We don’t have famines worth a damn anymore. I haven’t seen a picture of a tribal child with its belly distended by starvation in years. Famine is so last century we had to invent anorexia to replace it. Yeah, we do eat all that stuff listed above, but not because we have to—we eat it because it’s gluten-free. Drought struck, but the only thing it completely ruined were the owners of ski resorts.
“The maximum duration of life for human beings in Kali Yuga will become 50 years.” Yeah, right. Never has society been plagued by more old farts than it is now, me included. I should have been dead by that standard a while back and sadly, most of the women who still find me sexually attractive should be, too. Between the AARP and Centrum Silver and a horde of medical professionals sworn to keep us alive as long as our health insurance will pay for it, a future of spending years being hooked to tubes while our organs slowly dissolve into pink slime is assured for most Americans.
“Uncultured men will accept charity on behalf of the Lord and will earn their livelihood by making a show of austerity and wearing a mendicant’s dress.” All right, when you throw a bunch of predictions on the wall, some of them are bound to stick. For sure all those guys you avoid eye contact with at major intersections aren’t veterans. One for the ancient Hindus.
You can bad-mouth the future accurately by saying stuff like “Men and women will live together merely because of superficial attraction, and success in business will depend on deceit. Womanliness and manliness will be judged according to one’s expertise in sex.” Or “A person’s propriety will be seriously questioned if he does not earn a good living.” You are certainly going to be correct about all those things, but I wouldn’t get all smug about it, dead prophet guys, if I was you.
Because I bet it was exactly the same back then.
I refer to “15 Ancient Hindu Predictions That Have Come True,” a post on the web site detechtor.com, another mash-up on the Web that is composed entirely of clickbait, and is one of those posts that try to convince the average mouse potato that people who lived 5,000 years ago and had to find time to get clairvoyant between being snacked on by tigers (or jaguars, if we’re talking Mayans, or crocodiles if we’re speaking of Egyptians), eerily predicted the exact sad, Doomsday-looking circumstances that we find our civilization in today.
First off, we are told we are living in the Age of Kali Yuga. Kali is the Hindu god of death, sexuality, violence and motherly love (Like all beings with extra arms, Kali is good at multi-tasking). The first thing we ought to notice about ourselves, according to these ancient snobs, is that “Religion, truthfulness, cleanliness, tolerance, mercy, duration of life, physical strength, and memory will all diminish day by day because of the powerful influence of the age of Kali.”
To that this column says “Mega-churches, Google, antibacterial soap, political correctness, food stamps, 117-year-old Japanese women, steroids and Adderall. These things are all going strong over here in Kali Yuga, so stay dead if you want to avoid being wrong.”
Just kidding. You can be wrong and dead at the same time, as many people over the course of history have proven.
Another prediction for Kali Yuga is: “Harassed by famine...people will resort to eating leaves, roots, flesh, wild honey, fruits, flowers, and seeds. Struck by drought, they will become completely ruined.”
We don’t have famines worth a damn anymore. I haven’t seen a picture of a tribal child with its belly distended by starvation in years. Famine is so last century we had to invent anorexia to replace it. Yeah, we do eat all that stuff listed above, but not because we have to—we eat it because it’s gluten-free. Drought struck, but the only thing it completely ruined were the owners of ski resorts.
“The maximum duration of life for human beings in Kali Yuga will become 50 years.” Yeah, right. Never has society been plagued by more old farts than it is now, me included. I should have been dead by that standard a while back and sadly, most of the women who still find me sexually attractive should be, too. Between the AARP and Centrum Silver and a horde of medical professionals sworn to keep us alive as long as our health insurance will pay for it, a future of spending years being hooked to tubes while our organs slowly dissolve into pink slime is assured for most Americans.
“Uncultured men will accept charity on behalf of the Lord and will earn their livelihood by making a show of austerity and wearing a mendicant’s dress.” All right, when you throw a bunch of predictions on the wall, some of them are bound to stick. For sure all those guys you avoid eye contact with at major intersections aren’t veterans. One for the ancient Hindus.
You can bad-mouth the future accurately by saying stuff like “Men and women will live together merely because of superficial attraction, and success in business will depend on deceit. Womanliness and manliness will be judged according to one’s expertise in sex.” Or “A person’s propriety will be seriously questioned if he does not earn a good living.” You are certainly going to be correct about all those things, but I wouldn’t get all smug about it, dead prophet guys, if I was you.
Because I bet it was exactly the same back then.
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