Refuting Revelations Interpretations

May 17, 2005 8:39 PM

My daughter is all freaked out about the proposed national id and peak oil. Now some Christians have given her a verbal tour of the book of Revelations (along with the common born- again interpretations) and she is asking me questions. Not believing that the bible is anything too special, I am at a loss as how to enlarge her view from American Judeo-Christian to a more serious world view. Does anyone have any sources that refute common Revelations prophecy or sourcing for other end stories of different religions? Any other ideas are welcome. My goal is not to prevent her from believing anything but to show her that the world is a very broad place. Thanks!
posted by jswanson19 to religion & philosophy (38 comments total)

How about going to the beginnings-- creation myths from other cultures? it would show that everyone has stories about how the world begins (and by association, could end). Much more positive.

How old is the kid? here's are flash versions of some of them
posted by amberglow at 8:47 PM on May 17, 2005

Maybe the best thing you could do would be to read other Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts with her and discuss the imagery they have in common and the ways they disagree with one another. Revelation seems so exotic and scary because it's at the end of the bible and has imagery that doesn't appear anywhere else in the bible.

If you help her to see that Jews and Christians used to write all kinds of crazy texts, she might find the imagery less evocative and more curious. At minimum, she'll realize that Revelation isn't so unique, which should be a net gain.

Better than saying: "they're wrong", you're telling her that her Christian friends only know half of the story.

Here's a good anthology. It's also got supplementary bibliography, if you want to do a little more in depth reading.
posted by felix betachat at 9:10 PM on May 17, 2005

Be sure to let her know it is all make believe before the virus spreads.
posted by Mean Mr. Bucket at 9:11 PM on May 17, 2005

The Revelation of John, the Apocalypse, also must be looked at from the perspective that it's not the only such piece of apocalyptic literature that we have. In fact there are lots of apocalypses. Some thirty or forty of them from the ancient world that we know by name and we can actually read still to this day. ... So when the author of the Book of Revelation sat down to write, there was a very strong paradigm of what revelation literature should look like and sound like. The stock of characters, the list of images, the symbols one uses are pretty commonplace, if you're in that environment.

- L. Michael White, Professor of Classics and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin

More than you ever wanted to know about Revelations, from the PBS series, Apocalypse! which won't hep you expand her Judeo-Christian worldview, but it will help you help her put it in proper historical perspective.
posted by headspace at 9:12 PM on May 17, 2005

Does anyone have any sources that refute common Revelations prophecy

I don't know how old she is, but...

My goal is not to prevent her from believing anything

Be careful that your goal doesn't discourage her from rejecting things based on evidence.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 9:15 PM on May 17, 2005

Or you could just tell her that the very people that run this country and want her to have a national ID are evangelist born agains.....and members of actual, scary sounding cults.
posted by michaelkuznet at 9:18 PM on May 17, 2005

I swear I put a note in brackets in that message above saying that I didn't necessarily believe that, but it must have been interpreted as HTML. So with parenthetical goodness instead: (I don't necessarily believe that.....).
posted by michaelkuznet at 9:20 PM on May 17, 2005

Hey, jswanson. I thought about your situation more on the way home. I think it's even simpler than I suggested above.

You should just read Revelation with her. When you get to a specific passage, say Rev 13.18, the number of the beast, find out who her friends say the "beast" is. When she tells you that it's Hillary Clinton, Michael Schaivo or Barak Obama or whoever the fundamentalists have latched onto this week, ask her, "how do they know that?" Then do a quick google search on "Revelation 13:18" with her and find out all the other hypothesized "beasts". There are a lot of them. At some point, it should become apparent that a lot of people are making arbitrary decisions about a pretty vague text.

Then you ask her why she thinks her friends have chosen to put their trust in such a creepy document in the first place. Then read A Wrinkle in Time together.
posted by felix betachat at 9:40 PM on May 17, 2005

Why not talk to leaders of different Churches. For example, Catholics generally don't accept the Rapture. Most Priests would be more than glad to sit down and have a talk about it. Ditto goes with various Christian denominations- not all church leaders buy into the Rapture. As already suggested, also take the Jewish slant and check with a Rabbi.
From a literature approach, go to the religion section of your local bookstore and you will find a plethora of books about various religions including some from a comparative religious context. Find something interesting and then check amazon.com for reviews (or go straight to amazon.com)

Also, this process may be helped a lot if you look at this as an opportunity not only to broaden her horizons, but yours. I tend to think that if you put in the effort to learn about different prophesies and religions, than you can also have intelligent conversations allowing her to learn a lot more.
posted by jmd82 at 9:44 PM on May 17, 2005

Most chilling prophecy I ever read, at the age of about 12:

And the world to an end shall come
In nineteen hundred and eighty-one!

Yeah, that was very scary in 1980...

Show her the many prophecies that have failed to come true (many of them derived from reading the Revelation) and let her draw her own conclusions.

Also, get her some Dawkins and Sagan books.
posted by kindall at 9:55 PM on May 17, 2005

I'm with jmd82. There are plenty of Christian denominations that accept the book of Revelations to be true, but interpret it figuratively.
posted by achmorrison at 9:56 PM on May 17, 2005

As others have mentioned above, a whole series of things have been labeled as "the mark of the Beast" including UPC barcodes, Social Security and lots of other crazy shit. Hopefully, if she sees how wrong people have been in the past, she'll be more skeptical.
posted by thewittyname at 9:59 PM on May 17, 2005

I think Penn and Teller did a good "Bullshit" episode which basically was summed up "There's been a ton of apocolyptic predictions and talk, everyone of them has been wrong."

Get her some serious (i.e. academic, scholarly, researched) interpretations of the bible. I recommend anything from a Catholic (Jesuit, Augustinian, etc.) or Jewish perspective -- as those would be most accepted as objective.

Just have her read the history of other civilizations. As scary as peak oil and national ids are, human society has seen much worse. I think many people get in the rut of thinking not much happened before us, or at least don't put things in perspective. Personally, I think what we're living in now pales in comparison to the isolated monastaries being devestated by Vikings in Ireland or the collapse and sacking of the Western Roman Empire.
posted by geoff. at 10:04 PM on May 17, 2005

Meanwhile, there are plenty of secular reasons to be freaked out about the RealID and fossil fuels. As you talk to her about these things, you might want to separate out those issues -- you don't necessarily need to minimize the sensible concrete concerns in order to head off underinformed magical thinking about them, and will probably be more credible if you acknowledge the immediate real-world consequences.
posted by redfoxtail at 10:04 PM on May 17, 2005

Show her all the different creation and apocalypse myths out there. The Viking Ragnorok myth and the Aztec earthquake myths are much, much cooler than ol' Revelations. The reason Revelations has such a powerful effect on young'uns (I memorized the book when I was 8) is it's their first exposure to phrophecy as such. If you can get across the idea that Revelations is one of many apocalypse myths and explain why people use these apocalypse myths then she should be able to draw her own conclusions.
posted by nixerman at 10:35 PM on May 17, 2005 [1 favorite]

Skeptic's Annotated Bible
posted by madman at 10:40 PM on May 17, 2005

One doesn't "disprove" or "refute" convictions or ideas that come about as a result of faith. For example: many Christians believe It's immoral to commit adultery. Why? Well, there may be good rational reasons why, but even if there are, they won't matter to someone who simply has faith that Christian teachings are correct. God said it, therefore it's so. Yes, it's circular logic. Yes, it's irrational, but if that's where your critique of these ideas ends, then you're really missing the point.

We're talking about two different ways of acquiring knowledge. There's direct, empirical experience and logic - what we can call rational thought. Then there's stuff like religious experiences, LSD trips, artistic creation, enlightenment, etc; these are forms of nonrational thought. Knowledge gained in this manner is not subject to rational critique or review. If God reveals the truth to me, how are you going to convince me that he was lying?

You don't argue someone out of a revelation. And everyone has some form of nonrational thought in their life; no one gets along entirely without it. It's how you know that a song is a work of genius, that you're in love with your girlfriend, that murdering people is morally wrong. So you can't get rid of non-rational thought and you can't smack it down with rational thought.

Instead, show your daughter some other versions of non-rational thought. Hinduism, pacifism, hedonism, Episcopalianism... whatever. They all tackle the same issues that born again christians do and they all use non-rational thought to do it. It doesn't even have to be any organized system of beliefs or ideology. It could be the work and thought of a particular writer. I believe that a lot of people who first show an interest in Evangelical christianity do so simply because it's the first system they encounter that tries to explain what's good and bad in the universe and why it is that way. But if they see another system that does likewise... why, they might like it better than the first. But you can't replace it with rationality; it just doesn't fill the same needs.
posted by Clay201 at 10:42 PM on May 17, 2005

I don't think you're going to have much refuting prophecy. Unless it gives a particular date, all believers in the prophecy understand is fulfilling it or delaying it.

Seconding Sagan, particularly Demon-haunted World.
posted by ontic at 10:42 PM on May 17, 2005

You still haven't told us how old she is, which makes a great deal of difference to the advice that one could give. But in any case, I would suggest that you avoid tackling this head on, which may only make it stand out more in her mind (tell her you don't know much about the Apocalypse, and that it doesn't really interest you that much. After all, one lesson she'll need to learn is that Mum/Dad/Teacher and so on are neither omniscient nor infallible).

Build on what she knows and is interested in, and help her see these things in a rational, inquiring manner; if you furnish her with method, she will be better equipped to withstand the blandishments of the irrational.
But please tell us how old she is.
posted by TimothyMason at 11:44 PM on May 17, 2005

Skepticism is good and all, but a living in a post- petroleum world is an issue you as a family should deal with separately from religion.

I wish I could open up a dialogue with my family on peak oil.

Judeo-christian mumbo-jumbo concerning our energy use is only noise.
posted by sourwookie at 11:46 PM on May 17, 2005

She's right to be worried about the National ID.

Peak Oil on the other hand is just a modern apocalyptic cult. I suggest buying her The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. I haven't read it yet, but it's in my pile.

As for her religious stuff, it's all just fiction. Try teaching her basic analytical skills.
posted by krisjohn at 12:01 AM on May 18, 2005

Teach her skepticism and you wont have to go throug this again whe she picks up Buddhism. Or New Age. Or Born-Again. Or whatever.

Addressing just Revelation is attacking the symptom, not the problem.
posted by skallas at 12:45 AM on May 18, 2005

Catholics generally don't accept the Rapture.

Really? I've got to tell all my catholic friends now. They're gonna be shocked.

Seriously, you're going to have to walk a fine line. Broaden but don't destroy. Telling her it's all fiction makes you look as brainwashed as you (might) think she is.

Also, remember to avoid advice from fanatics on the other side also (ie. skallas).
posted by justgary at 1:38 AM on May 18, 2005

i actually lost sleep over peak oil until a succesful stockbroker friend of mine assured me that we'll be absolutely the last nation to be affected by peak oil.

there'll be plenty of time to buy guns. tell her that.
posted by fishfucker at 3:42 AM on May 18, 2005

I reccomend engaging your daughter in religion personally, otherwise she will never or find it difficult to understand why people follow the words of a higher power. A couple Joseph Campbell books couldn't hurt.

Joseph Campbell:
In modern progressive Christianity the Christ -- Incarnation of the Logos and Redeemer of the World -- is primarily a historical personage, a harmless country wise man of the semi-oriental past, who preached a benign doctrine of "do as you would be done by," yet was executed as a criminal. His death is read as a splendid lesson in integrity and fortitude.

But wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.
posted by raaka at 4:04 AM on May 18, 2005

Whatever you do, do not let her friend's friends get their paws in her! Fundamentalists employ cult-like psychological methods to ensnare the young and naïve. A fun day playing volleyball quickly turns into a bible meeting. Exaultations on the joys of life quickly turn into condemnations of the sinners amongst us. Please be careful.

As skallas said, skepticism is a far more practical religion for separating the horse from the horseshit.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:28 AM on May 18, 2005

justgary - You'd be doing your Catholic friends a favor. Check out the New Advent articles on the book of Revelation, and millenarianism. Catholics accept that most of the book of Revelation was about Roman politics rather than religion - furthermore, as noted in the article on Revelation, "The Church has wholly cast aside the doctrine of a millennium previous to the resurrection." Your friends may believe in the Rapture, but that's certainly not _Catholic_ doctrine. [Of course, many people, particularly if they didn't go through something like Catholic high school where one gets a chance to study doctrine and original writings in more depth than at a Sunday school class, are often in the dark about many details of their faith.] Though the Church does believe that at some point the world will end, Christ will return, and everyone will be resurrected bodily and judged, the end will otherwise not look particularly like Revelation [no thousand-year Jerusalem, no beast, no Rapture.]

The links I have above point to a relatively evenhanded [though skeptical] reading of Revelation from a Catholic viewpoint, but talking to a priest might be more clear, particularly if your daughter is young. [The idea of seeing a rabbi also sounds good.] There are plenty of critical readings of Revelation that focus on its political allegory or the way it was written [some people surmise that it was actually more of a Jewish apocalyptical screed, somewhat adapted for Christians]. Check out the apocalypses described in other cultures - Ragnarok in Norse mythology, the end of the Mayan Long Count [coming soon to a planet near you on December 21, 2012], the Hindu end of the Fourth Age, etc. Oh, and address the [rather less fanciful] issues regarding peak oil and the national ID separately. Conflating them with the book of Revelation will only confuse things. Teaching your daughter to be able to question things, look for information from many sources, and draw her own conclusions is one of the best things you can do for her.
posted by ubersturm at 5:38 AM on May 18, 2005

As other have suggested above, first try the historical perpective by highlighting the fact that these are texts that were written by real people with certain perspectives. I have always enjoyed the way that Elaine Pagels described the historical period surrounding early christianity (in fact the period if tme when its own adherents still mostly self-identified as jews). The history of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, the rise of a charismatic radical teacher, and the internal squabbles that resulted do a lot more to explain the Book of Revelations than Peak Oil or national ID (each bad separately, no confluence necessesary!).
posted by Verdant at 6:58 AM on May 18, 2005

First, I have no idea how old your daughter is, which is important; and second, I don't really 'get' this question. Nothing in Revelations is true. The whole thing is completely untrue. All of it is made up. There is nothing to 'disprove' or argue with.

The solution is: deny, deny, deny. Tell her all the other stuff these people believe: they believe the world was created in six days 3,000 years ago, that everyone who isn't in their church is going to hell, that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood, and so on, and so on. None of that stuff is true; ergo, Revelations is untrue. Religion is interesting because a) is gives you a framework in which to think about your life, and b) it has shaped the course of history and ideas. But it is not interesting because of its literal truth, in the same way that Shakespeare isn't literally true and doesn't need to be.

I'm not sure how old your daugher is, as I said, and it may be that the Elaine Pagels approach--i.e., a historicization of the Bible--will be over her head and/or boring. It shouldn't even be necessary, however; she has no reason to believe the people who are telling her this stuff.
posted by josh at 7:21 AM on May 18, 2005

I was obsessed with the more dramatic parts of Christianity when I was 10 or 11. When my parents tried to tell me that it all was bunk, I stopped listening to anything they had to say and began trying to convert them, since clearly they were unbelievers. 15 years later, we all can have a good laugh about it, but at the time, it got pretty ugly, Many nights were filled with me crying at the kitchen table because I didn't want my parents to burn in Hell for eternity.

Being 10 or 11 is a funny age because you're just beginning to develop the capacity for Big Ideas, but haven't yet developed critical thinking skills. Strange ideas are accepted wholly and literally. And when you truly believe something as scary as the book of Revelations, the world is a terrifying place.

I wouldn't try to argue with her too much about the specifics of these things she's latched onto. As others have said already-- gently leading her toward a healthy skepticism is a great strategy that will serve her well later in life.
posted by 4easypayments at 8:30 AM on May 18, 2005

there are very good suggestions. I'd just add that you can read a very eloquent and scientific (from a historical and textual viewpoint) critique of the literal reading of the Bible, of all places, here. a literal reading of scripture, historically, doesn't make sense. it's not even a "liberal" point of view -- Pope Ratzinger, just to name one, thinks that, too. it just isn't done.

about Revelation -- as others have pointed out, Jewish apocalyptic literature is a very messy field -- you can make sense for yourself reading the Revelation chapter in a good Introduction to the New Testament (Raymond E. Brown's and Bart Ehrman's, for example, are very highly regarded)


also, if she were my kid, I'd brotherly warn those who scared her with primitive, intolerant bullshit that next time they try that crap I'm going to unleash Armageddon on their asses.
posted by matteo at 10:29 AM on May 18, 2005

I'd go with felix's suggestion upthread -- you don't need to scare her off of Christianity in general, just give her some perspective. Look back at the number of groups that have linked certain events in Revelations to people and symbols that seem relevant for their time and show how nothing happened.

You could bring up some recent groups -- I wouldn't delve too deeply into those like the Branch Davidians, but there was a recent religious group who set a concrete date for the end of the world -- and it passed a couple years ago. The Seventh Day Adventists had a similar date at one point. It's always seemed like a very self-absorbed viewpoint to believe that you live in the end times, and it's often used as an excuse to not take action on issues like those your daughter is worried about.
posted by mikeh at 10:54 AM on May 18, 2005

Nostradamus too.
posted by amberglow at 1:36 PM on May 18, 2005

I was just watching The History Channel, and they have a program on tomorrow evening (thursday) at 8pm (eastern time) about "impending armageddons" that have been predicted throughout history. Looks very interesting and worth a watch.
posted by jmd82 at 5:40 PM on May 18, 2005

you might mention the holocaust, rwanda and george w.'s war in iraq based on a pack of lies ... and ask her how there could be an intelligent/compassionate god that would allow such hideous evil things to happen on his watch?

then share with her an introduction to buddhism
posted by specialk420 at 9:42 PM on May 18, 2005

an introduction to buddhism
posted by specialk420 at 9:43 PM on May 18, 2005

Preterism is a Christian eschatological viewpoint that treats most of New Testament bible prophecy as having already happened. Remember: the kooky dispensational premillenial viewpoint -- as well as literalist young-earth creationism -- have only recently experienced an upsurge among Christians. These things are cyclical, and churches at other historical periods have held to a more rational, less frantic view of scriptural interpretaion. Knowing one's church history and acknowledging hermeneutic diversity is a great help to this kind of breathless fundamentalism.
posted by brownpau at 8:25 AM on May 20, 2005

justgary: "Catholics generally don't accept the Rapture.

Really? I've got to tell all my catholic friends now. They're gonna be shocked."

It's wierd it must be a completely American thing. I'm Irish at 90%+ Catholic country, I went to Catholic school (like almost everyone else) and never ever heard of the Rapture (in the American fundamentalist sense) until about 4 years ago. It's similar to the fact that many many American Catholics are creationists despite the fact that creationism isn't the official teachings of the church.

In Catholism, you have to accept that a 'second coming' will occur but you don't have to buy into the antichrist etc., etc.. Likewise with the creationism, as a Catholic you simply have to accept that a God was involved in the creation process at some point, whether that was 4,500 billion years ago or at the point of the big bang or whenever.

So yeah you probably can tell your Catholic friends that they have been warped by the fundamentalism of America.

Sure wasn't that one of the interesting aspects of 'The Passion of the Christ' the fact that Mel Gibson's father broke away from the Catholic Church because it wasn't fundamentalist enough.
posted by daveirl at 10:57 AM on May 20, 2005