The Book of Revelation

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I'm Atheist, but the Book of Revelation in the Bible genuinely scares me. I know the leading Bible scholars of our time view it as a largely symbolic book, meant to psychologically aid the Christians in their struggle against the Roman empire. I know that the numeral "666" stands for Nero in the Hebrew Alphabet, and that the Beast, Dragon, etc. all refer to Roman emperors and the Roman empire.

But some things still stand out to me. They all claim that the Book of Revelation was symbolic in the present tense, but if that is true, why is the books author speaking in the future tense? When one reads the book, one gets the impression that these are prophesied events that have not yet come to pass, but will.

Also, I've heard that the "locusts" in the book, described as having plates of iron, making noises similar to horses hoofbeats and racing chariots, sound a lot like modern day helicopters.

Regarding the mark of the beast, 666, I keep hearing increasingly about legislation to enable tracking devices to be implemented under the skin, to help track disabled individuals if they get lost or something. I understand the noble intentions, but what if this is laying the basis for mandatory subdermal skin tracking implants for everyone? Doesn't this seem uncanny, too similar to the events described in the book of Revelations?

Also, calls for one global government, and a single worldwide currency.

I swear, I really am an Atheist. I'm not pretending to be one when I'm really a Christian. I'm very pro-science, and I hate how the religious right is trying to dominate society in the USA.

For those interested in studying these kinds of things, what are your thoughts?

Yes the idea of global government and currency is good in theory but can be abused by those in power: democracy is fragile.

My religious extremist folks (mom / stepfather) believe it all as fact and that a severe dictatorship is on the cards. My sister has also studied it all in detail but to be honest, there is so much in that book which is subject to wildly opposing interpretations even among solid Christians.

Having tracking devices is also a very good thing: already used to track stolen cars or to locate lost pets via microchip could also work for people who need to be found - but once again this practice could be subject to abuse if it were forced down people's throats. I read some months ago of a block of flats where people could be voluntarily microchipped for access in/out and to use the laundrette etc - forget where but may have been Sweden.

There are plenty of arrogant politicians who would love to control the masses thus and make more North Koreas but let's hope that people power is still strong enough to protect basic human rights.

I'm sure our culture and those in power have made moves that have wrapped around the narratives outlined in this book - both deliberately and unthinkingly for a long time.

When I really studied it and tried to make sense of it I saw it this way:

Almost all of it happened between 66 and 70 AD. The horns talked about on the Great Beast were Vespasian and Domitian, the three horns destroyed were three Roman emperors who died in rapid succession in the course of a year before Vespasian became Emperor.

What's interesting to me is the talk of a millennial reign of Christ - Roman Catholic hegemony could be argued to have lasted about that long. Also if you ever read Francis Bacon's New Atlantis or ever see the parts of Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight - there were a lot of people, particularly in Continental Freemasonry, who wanted to make the United States the New Jerusalem. Seeing FDR put the unfinished pyramid on the US 1 dollar bill though was interesting and in some way it almost seems to suggest that the completed pyramid, ie. New Jerusalem, didn't come about the way they thought it would by curating culture for a few hundred years - that the world was more complex than they might have considered and that our cultural evolution still had a long way to go before we could really suggest that we were in the position where the lion could go lay down with the lamb and they could chew cud together.

Also, I'm not averse to the idea that there could be some kind of real substance to the idea of prophecy and active prophecy being a real thing, just that the heavy symbolism that you see in books like the Apocalypse of John, Daniel, Zechariah, Joel, Amos, the merkabah in Eziekiel, etc. seem heavily archetypal and Jungian in flavor. It's a bit like saying that we have layers of our minds that can pull together a type of topography that takes too much computation for us to arrive at discursively and that our deeper minds give it back to us about the only way they know how to communicate - ie. symbol.

The thing that I'd be the most worried about, for no eschatological reason other than the sheer ease of tyranny, would be a cashless society. We'd need to be in a place, culturally speaking, way past the days of strong central governments to really want to do that or, alternatively, we'd need so much red tape between central governement and that system that it would be a line central government couldn't cross.

As for chips in a person's skin or head - I think it's stupid for reason of constant obsolescence. Clearly we don't want the kind of governments in power who would try to record our thoughts for a secret police or shock us anytime we thought in certain ways, or the capacity to poison a person by means of an implant if they felt a person was a threat. I do think there's something to the modern 7 year tribulationist idea of completely giving over personal autonomy to become a cell or cog in a machine where 'you' literally weren't allowed anymore or considered expedient enough to exist.

Hard not to blabber on this topic because it seems to hit on so many interesting sociological and bioethics topics!

Also, a completely different aside - 666 is also the sum of 36, referring to the sun square. People were making fun of Mitterrand when the Louvre pyramid was completed and counted to 666 panels by jokingly referring to him as the Sun God.

I find this really hard to believe. That is to say, I think you must come from a very Christian cultural background to have this book not sound like a bunch of acid tripping nonsense or just ranting rubbish.

I am a sort of non-theistic agnostic Christian, but my cultural background is very atheist, or at least, as much as it can be while being a child of the European enlightenment tradition.

Seriously, though, taken at face value,

sounds like nonsense. As one of the Westworld androids would put it, "that doesn't sound like anything to me."

He had stars in his hand? Seven of them? Even the smallest substellar objects that might be considered star-like, the brown dwarfs, pose a real challenge to imagine making any sense as objects that could be held in a human hand. Or a mystical hand that had a human appearance. You are talking at least 13-14 times the mass of Jupiter per substellar object, so the combined mass of the held objects would be at least 91 times the mass of jupiter... These are still objects around which planets orbit.

Unless the figure "like a son of man" is on a scale that is totally unlike a son of man, there ain't no way he's holding seven stars in his hand.

And what is this about a sword coming out his mouth? How exactly does that make any sense at all?

It doesn't get any better from there: Stars are angels and lampstands are churches? Is the son of man off his meds?

I know, I know, it's like a poetic image and not to be taken literally... but if you can extend that pass to this bit of writing, why not to the rest? Yes, you can imagine that the insects are really Hinds or Apaches, but why would you? What could be more important than redemption and the ultimate fate of the souls of the people of the world, why would god be so vague, even coy about what is intended in these passages? Why not spell it out clearly?

Moving deeper into chapter 2, we find notes about... the church in Ephesus, the Nicolaitans, the Chruch in Smyrna, the church in Pergamum (where Satan lives-this is unambiguously stated!), the church in Thyatira with their Jezebel problem... Do you have any reason at all to think these notes are not about Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum and Thyatira? When you are looking for attack helicopters in Revelations do you just skip this stuff and move on to the good bits?

In the free interpretation spirit of those attack choppers, what is this about:
"To everyone who conquers and continues to do my works to the end, I will give authority over the nations; to rule* them with an iron rod, as when clay pots are shattered— even as I also received authority from my Father. To the one who conquers I will also give the morning star."

What is this "iron rod?" A ballistic missile of some kind? Maybe a railgun? Or some kind of ballistic missile? How about just a rod? Or maybe a tank, self-propelled gun or some kind of aircraft or warship? Oooh! I know, maybe it's an orbiting battlestation! US Space Command and Jesus for the win! Or maybe China. Whatever.
And how about that Morning Star? What is that? Could be Venus, of course. Or some kind of weapon system! It has been noted as a title for Lucifer, but that doesn't make sense as a gift from the son of man to the faithful, now does it?

There isn't really a solid ground in the book itself for the attack helicopter thing, so I think you must be bringing other sources into your imaginative interpretation. Perhaps the baby jesus according to "Gunnery Sergeant Hartman?"


Why do you think you, a supposed atheist, "have an ear to hear" what is being said in these pages?

You could just pick bits out and speculate about them:
Hey what about those "seven thrones" maybe they are the "eyes" of the supranational intelligence institution revealed by Edward Snowden? After all, the book says, "Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind:"
Full of eyes in front and behind sounds monstrous and demonic, if taken literally, but if we are not taking it literally couldn't it be those guys at GCHQ and Langley? Or maybe not...

You could also pay attention to dedicated and devout scholars:
http://www.usccb.org/bible/revelation/0


If you are truly an atheist, then there is not a drop of reason to find this weird book full of fantastical and tripy imagery frightening. But if you are kind of a closet Christian and think maybe there is something in it, you might want to face up to the serious problems that come with this text and take note of the very good reasons why mainstream biblical scholars do not take it as thinly veiled future history or even weird "heavy metal" fantasy future history.

One thing would be to recognize that revelations is part of a genre with conventions and not some unique thing with no precedent. Then maybe find out what those conventions are and how the other works in the genre have been interpreted and used. That might provide some context for interpreting this particular example. Or it might be a colossal waste of time...

@Adamantium

I actually really am an Atheist though. I never understood the whole concept of the "Trinity," and I think most likely Jesus was really just an apocalyptic prophet.

I do come from a Christian background, and I have experimented with a variety of religions in my past.

Of course, I think the book is largely ridiculous. It assumes unrealistic views about Jesus, says that Satan the dragon will knock down a third of the stars to earth, and the existence of an all-powerful Anti-Christ where in reality the divinity of Jesus was only decided three centuries after his supposed death. These are all absurd views, if the book is taken literally.

What I was originally saying was, that I'm just concerned that allowing for voluntary and mandating microchipping for certain individuals can form a precedent for eventual microchipping of everyone. This, coupled with calls for a one-world government and a unified global currency, worries me.

And I'm concerned about the fact that not many people really seem to be noticing these kinds of developments, and if it is mentioned to them they just shrug it off and accept it...it just seems weird and unnatural to me...

Taking texts like these 'on face value' in ridicule or in literal belief seems equally absurd though for all the reasons you outlined above.

The symbolism of stars falling from the sky was in Joel and at least potentially in Daniel 8 with mentions of the heavenly host falling. Daniel's visions also had horns fighting each other, new horns cropping up, etc.. I think its feasible to say that all of these terms had cultural meanings. Similarly the overdose of sevens and twelves in books like these, whether the seven-eyed stone in Zechariah or destruction in three rounds of seven was highly relevant to a culture who saw the seven luminaries identified as the seven Elohim, rulers, or governors and a lot of pagan pantheons were built on the identities in what you might call an astrotheology, really a religion based on the day and night sky. In the west we seem to have found the seven luminaries so important that we named the days of the week after them and I think only the Portuguese went so far in religious zeal to overthrow the naming convention at a particular time in history to start calling Monday thru Friday by 1st day, 2nd day, etc..

You'd have to remember that people from these times weren't stupid in any formal manner, many of the scribes and scholars were quite educated as well albeit they were using their minds in ways that we aren't accustomed to and were likely educated to some extent along similar lines particularly if their interest was religious or mystic philosophy. If you think these books are particularly strange also try reading the texts of famous alchemists of the renaissance like Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, Michael Meier, etc. or trudging through Jacob Boehme's work. You'll get the idea - that you have idioms in use that are particular to what the authors are thinking or meaning to suggest to the reader. It's also part of that 'language of the birds' game - ie. speaking an initiatic language that sails over top of the reader's conscious mind to say something more directly to their subconscious mind.

Also what I'm suggesting above has nothing to do with believing these things so much as being able to admit that people have believe these things and written accordingly.

Radon123, I don't see it.

Unless you are sweating the "what if the bible is really literally true???" question. all these concerns come down to:

"Why aren't people worried that the rapid pace of technological change may enable dystopian futures?"

And, of course, many people do worry about that and there is lots of discussion about it.

Ed Snowden had good information about the dystopian aspects of the permanent security state. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Ray Kurzweil have been known to say very scary and plausible things about the dangers of technology. On a more imaginative level, you could say these themes show up all the time in fiction like Margret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale or Frank Herbert's White Plague or Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

But if you take a good hard look a the scarier possibilities implicit in the new tevhnology, is there really anything useful at all in the bible about them? I don't think so. It's worth just about nothing as an information source on current or future tech.

As for the one world government or unified currency... looking at the political scene today, the likelihood of a one-world government seems about a close to nil as you can imagine, ditto for currency. On the other hand, what is really so scary about these ideas, outside of the context of Christian mythology? Is being the citizen of a global government somehow supposed to be intrinsically so much worse than being the citizen of a continental scale government like the USA, Russia, Australia or India?

I don't see it, myself.

Libertarians chant the "all power is bad and more power is worse than less" mantra, but I've never found their assertions to be convincing and there are all kinds of examples of inhumanity and abuses of power and small government or anarchic situations. I think Christians play these games freaking themselves out with prophecy like cats chasing their own tales. It's a lot of cheap thrills and mental wanking, as far as I can see. Jesus would not approve.

"...no one knows the day or hour when these things will happen, not even the angels in heaven or the Son himself" except for your local end-time pastor, who urgently needs donations to further the great commission before it's too late! So give whatever can and give it right now!

The value in the bible has to do with what it says about the forces at work inside people, not in their technology.

Techstep, I've read Paracelsus, Blake and Borges, too. I have no difficulty believing that people have found various degrees of value in the apocalypse of John--but that doesn't for a moment mean that it makes any sense for atheists to think there is some kind of scarily true prophecy of things that will actually happen involving world governement, microchips or armored dragonflies.

Given the trend in current weapons tech, wouldn't it make more sense to worry about dragonflies as an archetype for military drones than as a symbol for attack helicopters?

I tend to agree with Sam Harris about the 'bad sociological software' bit and I think the smartest thing we can do going forward is try to diffuse any of these notions that the end is nigh due to some religious text or prophecy of one type or another. On one hand ideas like that encourage us to wantonly abuse the environment, and on the other hand they seem to encourage societal suicide or wars to be started as if it's a good idea to immanentize the eschaton.

Some additional thoughts:

Interesting things that happen for me when I look at people who are of the tribulation now perspective. The first is that most of their sense of the mystical power of the bible or it's inscrutability as if there's all the rest of world history and then - the bobble - in completely different boxes comes from either their lack of reading of it or heavily interrupted and conditioned reading of it. To read the bible without a mainstream authority over one's shoulder you can see quickly that what it's publicly sold as and what it is are two very different things, also the more we look at it the more it actually is scrutible and one can separate out what came from what culture. The other thing, and the part I find most interesting - is that the whole heavy-handed interpretation of Isaiah 14 into a story of the devil based on the 'son of the morning' bit catches an amusing curveball twice in Revelations - first as the morning star being a gift to the overcommers at Thyatira (almost all of these gifts seem very pagan-mystery in flavor), and then Revelations 22 - Jesus being the bright and morning star.

One thing I hope we can do, culturally going forward, is make archetypal mythologies that are actually healthy and grounded in the best logic today has to offer. They have a way of helping a society build cohesive identity. That ease and accrued authority I think is part of why the bible has stuck around as long as it has and why so many people still use it as a touch-stone of identity; we haven't bothered to replace it with anything better or to take it's most relevant insights and couch them in the context of an increasingly global society.

The bizarre and frightening descriptions in Revelations were borrowed from Persian Apocalyptic writings, which made ample use of such picture language to be symbolic of something else. The writer of the book, identifying himself as John (probably not the disciple Jesus loved John) used such imagery probably to avoid the wrath of the Roman authorities, who he equated with the power of Satan on earth.

One school of thought is that it's all or mostly about the Roman Empire and the distrdestruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD rather than anything that's supposed to take place in the 21st century. The type of language and descriptive imagery is very similar to old testament accounts of when the Babylonians coming in and destroying Jerusalem and the Temple and so on a thousand years (or whenever) before that.

Yes, Revelation was written by and for early Christians. However, you can see similar symbolism in Daniel and Zechariah. And, if you've read the Old Testament prophets, it's hard not to conclude that we face similar criticism in modern times, suggesting that what was appropriate prophesy then is not out of place now.

That said, apocalyptic literature shouldn't be taken literally. It was written in code, extremely symbolic. And its ultimate point was that good would eventually triumph over injustice. It was a message of hope for believers who wondered why God hadn't acted yet on their behalf. (In the first century, Christians were killed on a fairly regular basis. Being Christian was a dangerous choice.) And there's a caveat: much of the apocalyptic literature references a time of purification, recognizing that even those who are believers aren't always as clean as we (yes, I'm a believer) like to think.

The other thing to remember is what Jesus said: "But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Matthew 24:36) Anyone who claims to know when the end of the world is coming is probably wrong. One local "prophet" where I used to live has been wrong eight times already. (But I guess he only has to be right once!)

The bible is a collection of arbitrary works and selected gospels.

I fail to see why they give this person's revelation credence and not the thousands of revaluations from others.

The Book of Revelation is primarily a political work and largely metaphorical.

I believe the the point of early Christianity was political not so much religious. it is just that the temple was the seat of local power in those days, even the Romans knew that, which why they controlled access to it.

I'm Atheist, but wonder if there are Christians that reject The Book of Revelation or give it much less credence. I don't really see why it should have significance, compared to other doctrine.

Also you are right to be worried, as these sort of ideas have influenced religious extremism.

Revelations was written by a genuine psychotic.