Chomsky has made this point recently. "There were people in the Bible who we would call intellectuals, then they called them a word that is translated as 'prophets,' but they weren't prophesizing anything. They were basically intellectuals, they were giving geo-political analysis, they were calling for moral behavior, treating orphans and women properly and so on. They were public intellectuals criticizing power and calling for moral behavior and they also predicting that the efforts of the kings trying to extend their power would led to destruction -- all the things that critical intellectuals are supposed to do."
Prophecy in this sense is passed as a crucial element in the successors to the religion of the Hebrew bible -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. And there's always room for "flawed human understanding": if you pose hard questions to these traditions ("doing theology"), the answers are usually going to be partial. --CGE
On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, Carl Remick wrote:
> It might be said that idolatry is also the sin that is most
> characteristic of the Abrahamic religions. It can certainly be argued
> that in each case adherents worship the religion itself more than they
> do the supreme being. After all, each of these religions makes the
> same self-contradictory claims that: (1) God is beyond human
> understanding, and (2) this particular faith understands God very
> well. Logically, one conclusion is unescapable: If you try to worship
> God using the precepts of these religions, you are not worshiping God
> the Unknowable at all; you're worshipping a bogus version of God, an
> idol, served up by flawed human understanding.