Pseudepigrapha Psalad Psurgery IX(b): Small World, Small God II

Continuing my comments on the New Testament book known as The Revelation of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 8

• Verse 1: "...there was silence in heaven for about half an hour." What? Silence from even the Chatty Cathys from Chapter 4, Verse 8, who never shut up, day or night? Maybe they used sign language for that half hour. Or maybe, someone whose level of narcissism is more healthy than that of Yahweh kicked them out of heaven? It must have been something like that, since the bible contains no contradictions.
• Verse 5: "...and there came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning and an earthquake." These terrifying displays of power are awfully small for a Supreme Being, don't you think? Why not solar flares, black holes, quasars, supernovas? You might wish to say that John probably did see such things but did not know how to describe them. I say that if he can come up with locusts that "looked like horses prepared for battle" (see Chapter 9, Verses 7 - 10), then he could take a stab at describing a solar flare. As I've mentioned in other posts, if the bible contained even really bad descriptions of the things we now know, it would be a lot more credible.
• Verses 7 - 11: hail, fire, a third of this burned up, a third of that destroyed, a mountain thrown into the sea, a "star" falling from the sky (note that this "star" must be considerably smaller than the earth, given that there are enough surviving humans after the impact that many can die from drinking the bad water): this god is awfully earth-centric.
• Verse 12: we finally get away from the earth a bit here: "...a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars..." Oh, it looked promising, but we're still stuck in our own solar system. And don't get excited about the "stars" mentioned here; it's obvious that the writer didn't know the difference between a hunk of space rock and a real star. If even one real star "fell" to earth, the earth would be utterly incinerated. Further, what would it really look like if a third of the actual stars "fell"? The word "fall" has no meaning outside a localized gravitational field. Even if a third of the visible stars all started moving in the same direction (and note that most of them would have to far exceed the speed of light for their motion to be detectable), the odds of them appearing to fall, meaning to move apparently down, are frightfully slim. Perhaps even as slim as abiogenesis, no? This vision is not from the god of everything. It's from something far, far smaller. If I were to worship something, it wouldn't be the pissant desert totem Yahweh.

Chapter 9, Verse 21: Yahweh's disgusting so-called morality rears its ugly head again: murder, magic arts, sexual immorality, and theft are at the top of its list of sins. How can you guys have any respect for this petty little twerp of a non-deity?

Chapter 10, Verses 5 - 6: "...the angel I had seen standing on the sea...swore by him who lives for ever and ever..." Yes, this fits with Matthew 5:34-37: swearing is from the evil one. The evil one is Yahweh.

Chapter 11, Verse 13: A "severe" earthquake causes only a tenth of a city to collapse and results in the deaths of only 7000 people? So it must have been a much more powerful god who caused that one in the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day in 2004 and killed 230k people. Yahweh is a schoolgirl.

Chapter 12, Verse 7: "...there was war in heaven." Why? If Yahweh can speak an entire universe into existence, why would it need Michael and his angels to fight on its behalf? Why would it need any deputies or executors at all? Stories of the battle between good and evil are great, but they make sense only when the forces of good and the forces of evil are closely matched. When one side has omnipotence, the story becomes quite dull.

Chapter 13, Verse 18: The number of the beast, 666. It's funny, during my decades of desperately trying to figure out how to avoid eternal torture, I stumbled across the Seventh-Day Adventists. Let me tell you, these guys really hate the Catholic church. One of the things I learned there, which I'm pretty sure is bullshit, but I don't really care whether it's true, is that the pope wears a ring bearing the Latin inscription, "VICARIVS FILII DEI," which means, "The vicar of the son of God." Remember that Latin didn't have the letter "U" but used "V" instead. Add up the Roman numerals in the Latin phrase and guess what you get:

• D = 500
• C = 100
• L = 50
• V = 5 (two of them make 10)
• I = 1 (six of them make 6)