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NeoLambent | Against such things there is no law.
'Seven times in Daniel and time times and half a time in Revelation...surely there is a connection!'
I have often tried to imagine the epiphanies experienced by the founders of my previous religion. Although the various elements of Daniel and Revelation have often been compared by many theologians, I believe few concepts have so deeply influenced as many lives as the specific one I am going to discuss.
The basic idea is that seven times in Daniel chapter four is a literal time period that can be calculated by comparing Revelation 12:6 & 12:14. Do some math and apply the 'day for a year' prophesy rule(Numbers 14:34 & Ezekiel 4:6) to come up with 2520 years. This is said to correlate with the 'gentile times' of Luke 21:24 and point to Christ's presence/coming, that is if you assume that the tree in Daniel chapter four represents more than just Nebuchadnezzar's kingship but also God's direct governance of earth. It is supposed that the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem is when God's 'tree' is cut down since this is when the line of his anointed Judean kings ends. This event is given the incredibly unlikely date of 607 BC (all the best historical and archaeological evidence points to 587 BC). Count 2520 years from 607 BC(no zero year and only one year '1') and you get 1914 AD. Wow...thank you if you are still reading.
Okay so there are a lot of issues with this concept and my intent really is not to address it's theological viability, that has been tackled thoroughly and successfully by many others(I'd recommend Gentile Times Reconsidered by Carl Olof Jonsson). What I see here is a conceptual psychological condition called apophenia. The Skeptic's Dictionary at http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html defines it this way "apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena." I recommend reading the whole article. As the article points out the word apophenia is a misnomer, the original word was apophany. An apophany referred to a schizophrenic's perception of delusion as revelation. From what I've read, how this grew into the word and concept apophenia is not know. Regardless I think both concepts are applicable to our subject.
I regard the moment of realization that the seven times of Daniel and the time times and half a time in Revelation are connected as an apophany in a certain sense. I don't believe the individual who had this experience to be a schizophrenic nor do I think it was necessarily an apophany for himself as an individual. Any sort of personal religious revelation is essentially impossible to prove to anybody who did not share the experience, and therefore can be regarded as an epiphany only to the individual(s) involved. It is my opinion that such personal epiphany's can lead to apophenia. As the apophenia continues more "connections" are made to prove the original concept, eventually confirmation bias dominates the reasoning process until everything is proven or disproved by the original idea itself. Here is where I feel the transition from epiphany to apophany occurs, primarily with individuals who have been convinced of the accuracy of the "epiphany" based on all the "connections" made later. For those individuals it is very much an apophany.
Lets look at this from a different perspective. In statistics there is what is know as a Type I Error, this has been linked to and is sometimes synonymously referred to as a form of apophenia. A Type I Error occurs when the Null Hypothesis has been incorrectly rejected, often times based on a perceived pattern that doesn't really exist. What is the Null Hypothesis? Investopedia at http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/null_hypothesis.asp defines the Null Hypothesis this way "A type of hypothesis used in statistics that proposes that no statistical significance exists in a set of given observations." So in other words we assume that no significant correlation exists between to observed phenomena(i.e. the 'times' in Daniel and the 'times' in Revelation) until we prove that one does, only then we can acceptably reject the Null Hypothesis. I am a person who was raised by people who were raised by people who were taught this concept by people who were taught this concept by people who may have know the individual who had the epiphany and may have shared the the experience enough to call it an epiphany themselves. As such a person I now can clearly see how the experience deteriorates over time, how what may have been an epiphany for them became an apophany for my father and for me. To me the epiphany they claim to have had does not allow for a rejection of the Null Hypothesis. All the apparent "connections" used to support the concept as absolute truth and not just personal truth appear to me to be apophenia and confirmation bias not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
I would argue that the need for there to be a connection at all even by the original individual for whom it was an epiphany is based on an underlying emotional need. That emotional need could be many things and would probably be different for everybody. So for me the big questions were and continue to be: What was the emotional need that caused me to tenaciously cling to that apophany for so long? Without identifying that need how can I know that I won't simply adopt someone else's epiphany as my new apophany? These questions lead me to working on developing emotional awareness. When I was mostly emotionally unaware I tended to follow my emotional states blindly and largely unconsciously. In that state I was basically a codependent to the religious leaderships addiction to the concept. They need it to be absolute truth and they need followers who believe their reasons that it is absolute truth as a continuation of their apohenia. It is an ever evolving Type I Error.