Superstition

I spoze this was overdue: the blending of a good politics with bad Bible readin'. Fortunately, we don't have far to look for the culprit; just round up the usual suspect. That would be John, the exile of Patmos, whose Revelation is the downward-slanted terminal of the Good Book all the nuts roll into.

It's undebatable that John, who wrote his prophecy in about 95 C.E., was addressing the situation of Christians living through the first-century persecutions inflicted on them by the Roman Empire. Rome, the whore who sits on seven hills, has given birth to a beast, initially Nero, under whom the first persecution occurred at the time of the great fire, and in John's time Domitian, in whom Nero becomes the head (of the beast) which "lives again."

Even fundamentalists usually concede that John was addressing current events, but they don't stop there. They go on to ascribe superhuman abilities and divinely-inspired prescience to this modestly talented scribe who expanded his own experience of the corruption and degradation of the larger society to accurately predict its ruin. But that ruin was not as imminent as he thought. Over a century elapsed after the writing of Revelation before Rome began to show serious outward signs of weakness, and the final collapse was still nearly 400 years away.

You don't have to be an atheist or agnostic to reject the notion that John was given a unique, comprehensive knowledge of the divine plan, or that history's unwinding is scripted and beyond our understanding. All that's required for a person to reject this superstitious fatalism is a belief that there is such a thing as free will, and faith in the observable truism that human agency has consequences.

I suppose a lot of Revelation's appeal lies in its mystery. We don't know whether John was writing a grand metaphor or expected the special effects sequences he described as Rome's fate and the Christians' reward to be enacted literally. I suspect the former. The other prophet who incorporated the tetramorph (those four-headed creatures) in his own vision, Ezekiel, was certainly speaking metaphorically, and had no intention of anyone taking his vision of Jehovah's chariot literally.

The Revelation has proved itself infinitely elastic over time. When I was a kid I heard people saying that the end-time disease John describes, in which people's meat falls off their bones, was radiation sickness. Twenty years later people were saying it was AIDS. That's just one of the problems with interpreting a metaphor in literal ways the author never intended. The prophecy itself changes in order to meet changing conditions, sort of like a roulette player who claims he bet the winning number no matter what number comes up.

You don't have to be a prophet or have access to the divine website to know that the United States is going to go the way of the Roman Empire, and, it would seem, do so a damn site quicker than those old pagans did. Even just a light skimming of world history shows that empires suck the life out of the parent societies, and that the bigger they come and the higher they rise, the harder and more disastrously they fall. We don't need a revelation from God to know these things. Leave God out of it.