I've done some reflection on this lately. As with Salix, I don't believe in prophets at all, but it's still a 'thing' in our world, and can occasionally hold my interest. In another place, I read of a follower of a certain person with a prophet calling another group's prophet (the Siberian Jesus) a *******. It got me curious. So I did my re-research into messiah claimants, and all that. Besides Christ and Muhammad, it seemed that Joseph Smith, Baha'u'llah, and the Ahmadiya person had managed, over time, to garner the most support, after starting out with only a few people. The Russian 'Jesus', now in jail, was the only current one I looked into at any depth, but there are several others. The Russian guy has about 10 000 devotees, many whom have moved to a community in Siberia. They are pacifists, much like the Doukabhors, Hutterites, and Mennonites that have come from that area of the world, out of orthodoxy.
There were two intriguing commonalities amongst all of them. The first, not everyone, but the vast majority, made the claim that their guy was the real deal and all the rest were false. (So I visualized about 25 men standing in a circle, each taking turns stepping forward and screaming, 'No, you're not the messiah, I'm the only real messiah!' It would easily have been the followers themselves.) So I found that curious. Talk about a double standard. Few have the ability to step outside of their own bias.
The second commonality is that they were all self-declared. Nobody else suggested they were the new messiah, they all came to that conclusion on their own. Now this is suspicious for me. What exactly makes you so great? Frankly, it reeks of ego or grandiose delusion, or both. Of course there are many such declarants that are hospitalized for mental health reasons, as they have lost enough rationality to either be a danger to themselves or to others. We've also had one or two come to this forum.
So then I meditated. What I got was the word 'resonate'. For some reason, unknown to anyone else, either the vibration of the person, or the words of the person resonate in some way with the individual's adherents. And it's all okay, with any of them, unless they start harboring guns or are planning terrorism. As long as they aren't about to use violence to take over the rest of us, and have a 'you leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone' mentality, I see no harm in it.
The mentality just isn't mature enough for me personally, as I NEED to think for myself (and could never be that stubborn), and not use others to do my thinking for me.
The whole phenomena is there in neo-Hinduism as well. We've had our avatar claimants like Satya Sai Baba, Meher Baba, Mother Meera, the leader of Sahaja Yoga, and more. But it's not part of the tradition that I and many other Hindus follow. What we follow is that there are wiser men than ourselves, whom can offer us great advice and vibrations. In my own tradition, back in the early days, some 70 years ago, some devotees tried to spin my Guru into a messiah, but he immediately distanced himself from those ideas. Smart move, in my opinion.
Sorry, I don't believe that they couldn't do more.
