In the first half, biblical prophecy expert and scholar, Carl Gallups discussed his latest work telling the story of Israel's most venerated Orthodox Rabbi, Yitzhak Kaduri, and his alleged statement on the identity of the Messiah. A year after his death in 2006, a note that Kaduri reportedly wrote was posted on his website. According to Gallups, Kaduri used an encoded message to name the Messiah as "Yehoshua," a name many translate as Jesus. While some of Kaduri's followers contend that the note was a hoax or has been misinterpreted, Gallups believes that the beloved Rabbi had a vision toward the end of his life in which he saw Jesus and realized he was the Messiah, rather than someone yet to come. And instead of stirring up a controversy, Kaduri decided to have this announcement shared via a note, revealed one year after his death.
The significance of Kaduri's note, Gallups suggested, relates to the biblical prophecy that in the last days even the Jews would come round to seeing Jesus as the Messiah. Describing the second coming as a kind of dimensional shift, he said the prophecy speaks of "the sky being rolled up like a scroll [and the] appearance of stars falling from the heavens." As it gets closer to the end, eventually Satan will embody a human being (as the Antichrist) and set himself up Jerusalem as a great world ruler, Gallups added, but true believers won't be duped by him.
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Do we pray for what we need or what we want? Do we pray for the economy or our own benefit? Is there a secret in prayer? In the latter half, prayer researcher, Bill Sweet, reported on the scientific laboratory tests he's conducted to measure the good and bad motivations of prayer and the effectiveness of asking for help from above. At the Spindrift laboratory, experiments were performed in which people prayed for plants that had active factors hindering their health, and there was a control group of plants that no one prayed for. "We found that a certain number of people were able to benefit the plants with their prayers," he reported.
Sweet cited two types of prayers-- goal-directed, and 'thy will be done' (prayer asking for what is best for the situation). The latter seems to be more effective, he noted, as there appears to be some kind of divine intelligence that knows what is needed, which a person making the prayer may not know. What he referred to as "associational linkage"-- the emotions, concentration, and intention behind a prayer can empower it in a kind of entanglement. Unfortunately, many people use these techniques seeking negative outcomes, and he cautioned that they should monitor and "clean" their energy.
News segment guests: Howard Bloom, Lauren Weinstein