Babylon the Great Mother of All Harlots & Abominations -- Revelaton 18

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

If U look at the stars on the back of the $1-bill you will see that the 13 stars form a hexagram (Israeli Star).

 

[socko]

First Portilo and now the goddesslsdxtc666 is quoting Revelations 18. What's the big deal with revelations 18, you two ?

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

^^^ I used to (and still sometimes) cry when I read Rev 18. I can see it happening. I certainly won't be gnashing my teeth at Babylon's fall. I'll be rejoicing eating corn & soybeans after my lentiles & rice runs out. (Stock up on a year's suply of vitamin C (250mg -- U can split them in half, it makes the bland food taste better fooling your body).

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

Babylon the Great!

Revelation 18

18:1 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

18:2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.

18:3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

18:5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.

18:10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

18:11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise any more:

18:12 The merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble.

18:13 And cinnamon, and odours, and ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves, and souls of men.

18:15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her, shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing.

18:16 And saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious stones, and pearls!

18:17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off.

18:18 And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

18:19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

Awesome poetry!

Revelation 18:23 Greek NT: Textus Receptus (1550)
και φως λυχνου ου μη φανη εν σοι ετι και φωνη νυμφιου και νυμφης ου μη ακουσθη εν σοι ετι οτι οι εμποροι σου ησαν οι μεγιστανες της γης οτι εν τη φαρμακεια σου επλανηθησαν παντα τα εθνη

Pharmakia is Greek word for Drugs translated as "Sorceries"

And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

In the Beginning was the Logos (Logic/Reasoning) -- John 1:1

That's the most incorrect translation I've ever seen. Logos doesn't mean logic, the English word logic is simply derived from it.

 

[kultron]

It appears you don't know how to read a dictionary. see that little 'f' there? That means 'from'.

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

It appears you don't know how to read a dictionary. see that little 'f' there? That means 'from'.

Yeah, it's from LOGOS (duh), it's NOT from a "dictionary" (it's from a book of etymologies) and it says, logos RARELY means "Word." A better translation is: "In the beginning was the Logos," i.e., Logic, reasoning.

Like the Aramaic word "Mammon" means Money and they chose NOT to translate that because, Jesus said, "No one can serve God & Money . . . but the Pharisees who loved money (Greek, philarguron) heard all this and scoffed." -- LUKE 16

SOURCE: Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Hastings, James, ed.:
New York, Scribners, 1908-1921. 12 vols.

 

[Obyron]

The Beast was Nero. The Whore of Babylon was Rome. Revelations stopped being relevant in like the 5th century AD.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

^^^ Thank you for making me feel vindicated, Obyron. Whenever I encounter an old piece of writing which is hard to make sense of, I always strongly consider the possibility that it was a political satire or coded message, written at a time when nobody in positions of power tolerated any dissent.

 

[coelophysis]

When people are saying, "Peace and security," then sudden disaster comes upon them, like labor pains upon a pregnant woman,and they will not escape.
4
But you, brothers, are not in darkness, for that day to overtake you like a thief.
5
For all of you are children of the light 1 and children of the day. We are not of the night or of darkness.
6
Therefore, let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch.

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

Mark of the beast is MONEY

History is cylclical. Babylon is New York City (A city of commerce & confusion), Rome is Washington, DC, the CIA, George Bush, Sarcosi, Israel, fanatics, fascists, fundamentalists. The "Mark (Gk, charagma) of the beast" is MONEY!

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

^^^ U gotta look at the whole context: "No one buys or sells without the MONEY of the beast on/in mind or hand."

Nero's pic was on the $$$ of the time. Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar." He upset the tables of the moneychangers. He called the Pharisees (pharisees=jews, ask Rachmon) moneylovers (Luke 16), Jesus sent his disciples out without $$$ in their purses.

If the Pope told the Truth and "christians" disregarded "Saint" Paul, the world would be saved.

Truth/Logos will rise again.

http://www.666ismoney.com/MoneyQuotes.html

 

[socko]

Thanks for teh replies goddesslsdxtc. It's impressive that you've learned to read the bible in the original? greek. It's also interesting that people (those who believe in the rapture?) are so interested in sthing written 2000 years ago by a certain group of people. My knowledge of biblicalc history isn't so good, so I'm sorry if what i say might be somewhat inaccurate. My take on what you say is that a group of people who were at war with or maybe were political refugees from the roman empire somehow found it so pressing to write about present day New York when, instead, they could be writing cloaked, allegorical pieces on their dire situation at that time. Maybe these messages, rev 18, could have served to help unify these people during a time of crisis. Someone mentions they wree being oppressed, so they had to cloak their messages of hope in the allegory of babylon. Weren't the peope who wrote this being persecuted by Nero and Rome at the time of the writing? My background isn't chistian and I'm also strung out on IV coke. I hope i'm making sense.
"If the Pope told the Truth and "christians" disregarded "Saint" Paul, the world would be saved."
What means this?

 

[aanallein]

^ here you can read about it yourself. John wrote it while chillin on an island.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Revelation

 

[Obyron]

^^^ U gotta look at the whole context: "No one buys or sells without the MONEY of the beast on/in mind or hand."

Nero's pic was on the $$$ of the time. Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar." He upset the tables of the moneychangers. He called the Pharisees (pharisees=jews, ask Rachmon) moneylovers (Luke 16), Jesus sent his disciples out without $$$ in their purses.

If the Pope told the Truth and "christians" disregarded "Saint" Paul, the world would be saved.

Truth/Logos will rise again.

http://www.666ismoney.com/MoneyQuotes.html

I had a whole nice response to this post, and accidentally hit the back button on my mouse and lost the whole thing. Woe is me.

I respect that this is your opinion, and it's obviously something you've thought quite a bit about, and not just some random notion that popped into your head one day, but I can't get over the feeling that it's a whole heapin' helpin' of crazy.

I too think that certain parts of the bible sound nice and official, what with all those important sounding words in spooky dead languages, but I don't think that qualifies it to be the One True Prophecy For Modern Times any more so than an ancient scroll of Assyrian tax law. You don't seem to believe in Zeus, or Odin, or Isis (who had her own politically influential Roman Empire-era cult), or Huitzlopochtli, or Inanna, or Amaterasu, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What gives the bible any sort of spiritual provenance that the holy books of these other religions don't have? To paraphrase Richard Dawkins: "We are all non-believers about 99% of the religions that the world has ever known. Atheists just add one more." The Bible has no more claim to be "true" prophecy than Nostradamus, and surely you don't put faith into that old saw of quacks and charlatans?

If you subscribe to the belief that "the mark of the beast" means money because Nero's face was on the coins (and what ruler up until pretty much the modern era HASN'T had their face on money? Even the Commonwealth countries still slap Elizabeth II on their cash), then it seems like we agree that Nero was The Beast spoken of in the Apocalypse. Assuming we also agree that Nero has been dead for nearly 2000 years, what's the relevance to today?

"No one will trade without the mark of the beast on his hand" was pretty literal, because commerce in those days was strictly cash and carry. They did not believe in credit (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, and more on that in a minute). Complex financial instruments which we take for granted nowadays (like checks) would not even come into existence until the 12th century AD with the Templar Banks, and even then the concept of a bearer instrument representing your own money (ie: Not getting into credit, or usury-- I'm going there in a sec-- but strictly representing X amount of your own money that was being held in reserve at another location) got them into an enormous amount of trouble, because it was just a little too close to the sort of thing the Church thought was heretical. In the Middle Ages it was a mortal sin for Catholics to commit usury-- the lending of money at interest. Since Protestantism had not happened yet, this means that if you were a Christian you could not lend or borrow money at profit. In theory this sounds like economic emancipation for the serfs, but think about what this really means. It means that when the king wants to wage a war, if he doesn't have cash on hand to pay his soldiers to fight then he's going to need to get some money, and in most cases that meant they were going to either need to have neighboring rulers to help share the expense, or that they were going to have to ask the church for money. Look at all the land in Europe that the Church owns in the form of monasteries and cathedrals, and think of all the political influence the church had. A lot of this came from the fact that they were holding the purse strings, and had the power to declare rival "banks" as heretics.

A major part of the reason that anti-semitism took root in Europe and persisted into the modern era is that Jews were not similarly bound against usury. They were allowed to lend money at interest, and this gave rise to a lot of the old stereotypes about Jews being good with money, and being involved in finance. In some cases this goes back generations, because there was a time when they were the only people who were allowed to.

Changing ideas about money played a major part in the Renaissance and the Reformation, with the rise of the Medicis in southern Europe and the Hanseatic League in northern Europe. Trade was becoming globalized (insofar as anything could be said to be global in the 15th century), and this was the era that really started to see the birth of the middle class, the rise of people having disposable income, followed by a Renaissance of art and science along with a philosophical and political Enlightenment that changed the world.

We live in the modern era, where we've had the benefit of the economic teachings of people like Smith, and Keynes, and Nash, and even Marx. We have defined what money is and what money means, and we have an understanding of money that the ancients simply did not have. No matter how pretty their writing seems to us (after hundreds of years of translation and rephrasing), we have to remember that these people weren't far removed from being nomadic sheep herders. Of course the concept of needing a piece of metal with Nero's picture on it to buy food seemed evil! These were people with a rich political history of their own, but they also had a history of slavery going back to the Egyptians, Babylon/Persia, and Assyria. I can imagine how horrible it seemed to have yet another bullying empire enslaving them and making their emperor's face the coin of the land.

What does that have to do with us, now, 2000 years later? We are not the superstitionist world of the 1st century Levant where the phrase "having money" literally meant that you either had coins in your pockets, or you had precious metals or other valuables that could be so converted. Are you seriously trying to make the argument that "666" or "the mark of the Beast" means that no man may trade unless he has a Bank of America credit card? If anything cash is now a measure of economic FREEDOM (as opposed to credit, or financial instruments that leave a paper trail) as opposed to the time when it was thought of as slavery to the Emperor. We are a long way from a cashless economy, no matter what some of the New World Order types seem to think. Is the first move of the fictional antichrist going to be to shut down offshore banks in the Caymans, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Bahrain, Dubai, etc.? I wish him a lot of luck.

As for some of the other ideas you seem to espouse, I think it's interesting that Sarkozy just got elected, and already he's a devil on par with Bush and Blair. It's good to see conspiracy theorists will still have someone to bitch about after the elections this November. Is Howard out of power in Australia yet? If the entire conservative Old Guard vanishes I think some people's whole ideology will crumble. Also you talk about how the symbolism of Apocalypse now means New York City and D.C., but what about the equally prominent theory among armchair eschatologists which says that the European Union is the new Roman Empire? There's always more than enough crackpot lunacy to go around for everyone.

There are a LOT of ideas on the Revelation, and so I'm sure everyone will forgive me for quoting my favorite one-- that it's all bollocks. The following quote is from a letter from Thomas Jefferson-- who was a noted biblical scholar, and a deist, who went so far as to write his own version of the bible, omitting events of an overtly supernatural and miraculous nature, viewing Jesus merely as a philosopher of peace, and who excised the Apocalypse wholly from his text:

It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it, and I then considered it as merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams. I was, therefore, well pleased to see, in your first proof sheet, that it was said to be not the production of St. John, but of Cerinthus [An early Christian heretic. Link to Wikipedia. Ed.], a century after the death of that apostle. Yet the change of the author's name does not lessen the extravagances of the composition; and come they from whomsoever they may, I cannot so far respect them as to consider them as an allegorical narrative of events, past or subsequent. There is not coherence enough in them to countenance any suite of rational ideas. You will judge, therefore, from this how impossible I think it that either your explanation, or that of any man in "the heavens above, or on the earth beneath," can be a correct one. What has no meaning admits no explanation; and pardon me if I say, with the candor of friendship, that I think your time too valuable, and your understanding of too high an order, to be wasted on these paralogisms.

I have a habit of writing really long posts lately, so please forgive me. Hopefully XTC/LSD will see it as me thinking enough of the time she's spent formulating her ideas to consider them worthy of long-winded rebuttal, rather than mere dismissal. I stand by my statement that any of the "prophecies" of the Revelation (insofar as they were even prophecies, and not merely vaticinus ex eventu; written AFTER the events had happened, with an eye toward seeming prescient and insightful, which surely was the case if the Apocalypse was authored after Nero's death, as seems to be the case-- most sources I've read date it to the reign of Diocletian) ceased having relevance with the fall of the Roman Empire, if they ever had relevance at all. The fact that they allow one to make an interesting ANALOGY to modern times does not make the analogy true, and yet tenuous connections to the Apocalypse of St. John always seem offered as being somehow suggestive of veracity, or perhaps, just verisimilitude?

So I got everything in. A rebuttal, a history lesson, a quote from a famous dead person, and even some off-the-cuff Latin. If anyone actually reads this whole thing, you have my apologies.

Edit: Had left a few words out and made a few typos. The connection between my brain and my fingers sometimes drops packets.

 

[B9]

I once had the wild notion I agreed with XTC/LSD - then I read what she actually wrote - Let those who are without sin cast the first stone - does that cut it for you MDAO - or do you want something a little more obscure?

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

My take on what you say is that a group of people who were at war with or maybe were political refugees from the roman empire somehow found it so pressing to write about present day New York when, instead, they could be writing cloaked, allegorical pieces on their dire situation at that time.

"If the Pope told the Truth and "christians" disregarded "Saint" Paul, the world would be saved."
What means this?

Socko: At the time "Revelations" was published, the Jews were at war with Rome and started coining their own $$$. This was like treason. Nero was the emporer at the time. His pic was on the Roman coins. Nero's name spells "666" in Hebrew letters where "A" = 1, B =2 etc.

The writer "John" was writing for his time but it's still revelant today.

If the Pope would tell the truth: the correct definition of "Mammon" and notified everyone that the "Mark" of the beast is MONEY and if everyone was Christlike, they would go forth without $$$ in their purses. (Jesus told his disciples to not carry script ($$$) on their journies.) The Esseans did not have $$$ either. They abhored $$$ according to contemporary historian Josephus who wrote a wondeful book about the Jewish war of 66 AD - 70 AD.

EDIT: "Saint" Paul is anti-Christ (anti-Logos-Logic) because he is either trite or illogical. His idea that if you "confess with your lips that Jesus has risen from the dead, you will be saved," is total BS. Most of these "Christians" who think they are "saved" are the Pharisees Jesus rebuked, who Jesus will "not know" when the SHTF.

 

[MyDoorsAreOpen]

B9, that'll do.

As with most conspiracy theories, Goddess's shpiel takes most of its value from the imaginative way it connects the dots, rather than its dogged observance of Occam's Razor. Fun like literature, not fun like science. I don't have any reason to believe it's true, but it sure is clever.

 

[GoddessLSD-XTC]

MDAO, (I'll nickname U "Doubting Thomas"), you "don't have any reason to believe it's true"?! Specifics, please! U doubt the correct, in context translation of Chragma or Mammon?!

Another favorite bible verse:

"Behold, I stand at the door (of your mind, MDAO), and knock." -- Jesus.

"Pride goeth before a fall." -- Proverbs. That's especially true with falling into love. (Pride goeth before falling into love.)

My grandfather had only one verse highlighted in his buy-bull. It was in Deuteronomy and went something like this: "If U have a stubborn and rebellione son, take him to the edge of the city and stone him to death." I was "stubborn & rebellious."

 

[socko]

Very interesting comments about Revelation. People have understood it in so many different ways. Goddessdslxtc, thanks for the response. I've recently read the entire kning james version of the bible. For me, Paul's stuff was the most disturbing of both the Old the New Testaments. While reading him, I had to wonder what was going on with him. But this thread is for only bible quotes, not bashing, so I"m not going to offer anything more there. Your grandfatehr must be a character for underlining that thing in Deuteronomy. My good friend's mother goes around quoting that line to him. He says that's the only bible quote she knows and that it's here favorite one. Poor guy.
That was very informative and insightful Obyron. I read your whole post and I read the wiki on Revelation somebody linked, as well. I liked the T. Jefferson quote.