Real Christians are going to disappear abruptly someday soon. The world is going to descend into a bloodbath while someone known as the Antichrist attempts to seize control of the planet. That is what some of your neighbors think — and some of your politicians. Many of them even relish the thought. Is Revelations, the last book in the Bible, a set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations? Neither, says Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard Washington.

If the Book of Revelation isn’t a blueprint that tells us what is coming in the End Times, what the heck is it?
Like any book in the Bible, Revelation was written from the perspective of faith for the purpose of giving faith. It was written in the early days of the Jesus movement to a persecuted minority that was fearing worse persecution.

As the Jesus movement started in Jerusalem and Jesus was crucified, and there was this experience of resurrection, at the same time, there was a simultaneous political movement within Judaism of rebellion against the Roman Empire. It peaked in the 60′s and 70′s. It culminated finally — horrifically — in the Roman legions marching into the country, destroying Jerusalem and burning down the temple. These two factors — the young Jesus movement and the brutally crushed rebellion — intersect in the writings we now call Revelation.

But Revelation doesn’t talk about Jerusalem being destroyed. It talks about a beast with many heads and a dragon and the four horsemen…
That poetic language which sounds so strange to us was actually familiar to ancient readers. The author was writing a dramatic script in a form of popular media. Today we all recognize different modes or “genres” of writing — the detective novel, the love sonnet, manga. Each has its own familiar structure and images. The same was true in the past.

The book of Revelation belongs to a then popular genre of literature called apocalyptic. The term apocalypse means “unveiling.” There were lots of apocalypses, each a graphic poetic vision of some radically transformed future in which the good guys win. This genre began around 200 BC and went out of style around 150 AD. The book of Revelation is also called the Apocalypse of John, and it is one of several explicitly Christian apocalypses that still exist today. In each, metaphoric language was used to communicate something that, experientially, felt too big for words. It was a way of trying to speak the unspeakable — and to inspire endurance and hope.

So what was the author of Revelation unveiling?
Revelation was written about twenty years after the fall of Jerusalem. The author, who we know only as John, had lived during the horrors that accompanied fall of the city. Imagine: the Roman Empire is surrounding Jerusalem. At the same time, civil war is raging within the walls. People are literally starving to death. As the siege continues, the Romans capture 20,000 Jews and crucify them on the walls of the city — while the city still is under siege.

20,000! We think of the crucifixion being unique.
No. Crucifixions happened all the time. There were thousands and thousands of crucifixions. The Jews wanted freedom. To them it was a blasphemy to have the Romans in their land. Many of them rebelled, and they lost. Eventually, the city fell, and the people were slaughtered. Many remaining were expelled from the land. This is part of the Diaspora — the scattering of the Jews, who became dispersed around the Mediterranean — Asia Minor, Greece, Northern Africa and Europe.

But the author, John, is a Christian.
Remember, the earliest members of the Jesus movement were Jews, and so early Christians scattered with the rest of the Jewish people. Over time, thanks to this scattering and missionary activity, Christianity began to be adopted more widely by gentiles and at that point it began to grow rapidly throughout the Mediterranean. John is writing to Pauline (gentile) churches, but they are very rooted in Judaism and the Hebrew scriptures.

At the time Revelation is written, about twenty years after the devastating events of The Great Revolt, the young scattered Christian movement is being persecuted. They are treated like Blacks in the South during the ’30s and ’40s. A Christian carpenter might not be able to get work. Some are lynched. John, himself, is writing from exile, so whatever he was preaching was viewed by the Roman Empire as a threat to law and order.

Why was the message so threatening?
Clearly, part of his message was “Stop participating in the imperial cult. Stop participating in the patriotic way of life of the Roman Empire which requires paying homage to the gods of the Empire and in particular the emperor as an incarnation of God.” The Early Christian movement was an alternative to the way of empire. You know, Jesus is called “Lord and Savior”. If you ask where did that language came from, that language came from Caesar. Caesar was “Lord and Savior.” Christians celebrate the birthday of Jesus on December 25, which was when Roman celebrated the birthday of the Unconquered Sun. The pagans believed that if they didn’t take care of the gods, the gods wouldn’t take care of them. By forbidding the cult of the gods, the Christians threatened this balance.

One thing confuses me. Is John writing about events in his past or events in his future?
First of all, he is writing from a lived experience of what Empire can do. That is the key to understanding his perspective. He is writing a book that combines familiar political images. The dragons, for example, are much like our political cartoons. When you see an eagle and a bear you know it means the United States and the Soviet Union. For him, he is using images largely out of Hebrew scripture to convey what the Roman Empire is, and what he believes will happen to the early Christian movement. John’s primary message comes in Chapter 18: Empire will fall. Rome cannot last. This power structure that seems so big and is so crushing of the people will crumble, and God will re-create out of the ruins a new Jerusalem. John continually counsels the movement to hold fast: Those who endure to the end will be saved. This is a book of hope: The empire is going to fall. God is going to make a way where there is no way.

But had he… lost it? With all of the bizarre images, I’ve heard Revelation called “John on Acid.”
No. Almost all the imagery in the book of Revelation is rooted in the Hebrew scriptures, and some comes from Greek myths. In Chapter 12, you have the woman clothed in the sun and Satan falls out of the sky and there is this dragon that chases the woman. Well, that is the birth of Apollo. Domitian, who is the emperor at that time, he likens himself to Apollo. He is the sun god. So John is taking this known story and writing a counter-myth. He is saying that Domitian is not so important as he thinks. The birth of the child, Jesus, that’s the real big story.

The images of Jesus himself are rooted in Hebrew stories. They simply cannot be understood unless you know that they are coming from the book of Daniel and Ezekiel and Zachariah. The narrative, the story line is rooted in the Exodus story in which God liberates the Jews from Pharaoh’s empire — walks them through the Red Sea and the wilderness and sends them to a promised land. Revelation is a recapitulation, a retelling of the same story. God is the god who frees us from empire, whether Pharaoh or Dominion. We will come out of this into a land flowing with milk and honey. One of the big exhortations of the book is: “Come out of her.” — Come out of Roman Empire (as the Jews came out of Egypt).

What you are saying helps me to understand why people who are immersed in this theology are so fearful of empire — the League of Nations, the Soviet Union, the United Nations — any form of internationalism. Among the “Left Behind” crowd, people who are bridge builders or peacemakers are seen as evil and to be mistrusted. That is what John was talking about, that was his experience, even if people take it out of context.
From the very beginnings, part of the Christian message was the notion of an end time. God is going to clean up the world — which is a messy awful a place with a lot of violence and evil. After all, the central hero of the Christian story is tortured and crucified — put to death by an empire! How is God going to clean up the world? Jesus is going to come back and rule the world and shepherd the nations.

The Hebrew understanding of history is that it is going somewhere. It is linear, not cyclical, which is a break with the agriculture-based earth religions. Christianity, which is a child of Judaism, picks up the Hebrew storyline: History is linear. But — and this is really important — in the Bible the end is never the end of the physical world. It is the end of an age. It’s the end, for example, of the Roman empire, and then what happens is not that everyone is whisked off to heaven but that on earth there is a renewal, a renewal of the earth itself, of culture, of the nations, peace and justice, everyone has their own vineyard and fig tree.

So, where did the notion of everyone being lifted out of their clothes and cars and cockpits come from?
That comes from the 19th Century. An Anglo-Irish theologian called John Darby created a new interpretive lens for the Bible. It’s called Dispensationalism, because in this system, history is divided into seven “dispensations” or ages within an age. In this system, the Rapture leads to the Millennium when Jesus reigns on Earth for 1000 years but before the Millennium is the reign of the Antichrist. At different historical junctures different bad buys are picked as the Antichrist. In the 1970′s, thanks to Hal Lindsey’s book, “The Late Great Planet Earth”, it was all about Russia. And the ten nations, the European Union would become part of the Beast. Today dire warnings about Barack Obama being the Antichrist are scattered about the internet. Or Osama Bin Laden.

Believe me — I’ve seen plenty of both — even Chavez and Bono. But come back, for a moment, to the Rapture itself. What about that verse in Thessalonians (1 Thess. 4:16). There’s the Lord descending with a trumpet, and the dead in Christ rising and then “we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air.”
That is wonderful graphical mythical language which, when written, had very little to do with the plot of “Left Behind.”

Thessalonians is Paul talking with an early church in southern Europe, and he faces a specific challenge: Christians have died. We had expected Jesus to come back before that happened. Now what do we do? Paul thought he was living at the end of an age. He thought he would see the day that God would come back, clean up the earth and restore Paradise. But it hasn’t happened within the time frame he expected, so he offers an explanation that integrates the existing facts — instead of Christ returning before any Christians have died, the dead and the living are united with Jesus together.

Flash forward a little bit. When you study very early church history, if you study the art of the early church you don’t see a lot of images of the crucifix or scenes of the crucifixion; you see images of paradise. And there was a proclamation of the early church that had an optimistic view — that where we were headed — on earth as in heaven, was a paradise. This was the expectation of many in the early Jesus movement.

There was a historical process, and over time this expectation changed for some. This process, which I don’t have time to go into, was wrapped around when Constantine became emperor and absorbed Christianity as the state religion. Rather than being a minority faith it became the dominant faith. Once it became the dominant faith Christianity radically changed because it became about politics and power and control of the nations.

You have this book that is all about how evil empires can be because he has this horrifying experience and now all of a sudden Christianity is in power; empire is on the side of Christianity. That’s a little awkward.
Yes. And, the book of Revelation was dormant for many many years because of this. In our time the book of Revelation has come back with a vengeance because the imagery is made to order for wild interpretation. You’ve got an entire generation of children being raised in these fundamentalist end-times churches, being told they are the last generation.

You obviously think this is a bad thing.
Well, thankfully these families don’t live as if what they say is true is really true. They are still stashing away money to send their kids to college and for their own retirement. If they really believed you would see a hardening of the faith. There is a far right segment of Christian in which you do see this hardening — churches focused on “spiritual warfare” building walls rather than bridges, organizing services to celebrate gun rights, praying public prayers for the death of abortion providers or Barack Obama or judges. This kind of far right hardening comes out of the misuse of apocalyptic literature. Christianity gets translated into a quest for purity and righteousness that will bring these prophesies to fruition.

You said earlier that there were lots of apocalypses. It was a popular medium. How did this particular book get into the Bible?
Well, there was controversy about that. Many Christians didn’t want it in the Bible, and even Martin Luther questioned the decision of the Catholic councils to include it. Revelation got into the Bible because the church fathers chose to believe that the same John who knew Jesus in person was the author of this and several other texts. Their primary criterion was “apostolic authority.” What we now know — this is just the evolution of our own knowledge — is that the authors who wrote the Gospel of John, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Letters of John, and the Apocalypse of John, were not the same person. The script is very different. The same phrases are not used. One is written by a highly educated Greek author, the other written by a person whose primary language is Semitic.

These books that the counsels thought were written by John, the companion of Jesus, they were written by two or three people?
The people who actually knew Jesus, the twelve, none of them left writings for us. All of these writings are written well after the death of Jesus. The Church was looking for authority, and so they tried to choose writings that fit a hierarchical form of Christianity and that traced their lineage through the apostles back to Jesus. The Bible is the book for the church and it was compiled by the Church for the purpose of helping the Church advance faith. The books didn’t become finalized as scripture till 300 years after Jesus lived and died.

I was taught as a child that the Bible was essentially dictated by God to the authors. I was never taught about which books were chosen and how. But I would assume that Catholics believe God gave perfect insight to the councils that made the decisions?
I would assume so. And that is a wonderful mask for authority. When religion becomes a pursuit of power — a system to keep people in control, you are always going to have those games that are being played. Against religion, you have the message of Jesus, which is a spiritual message — a message of freedom.

Part of what this comes down to is: What is the Bible? When you are dealing with an end times fundamentalist Christian, you are dealing with a person who believes that the Bible was written by God — God writes it and there is a secret code and if you are in the know you will know the code and the elect will know the code. The Bible itself becomes a magical book, a secret script. If you just know how to read the script, you’ll know where the world is going. And so people begin to live this script as if they live in the end times.

We’re so into that secret knowledge thing, aren’t we? You see it many places: Gnosticism, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Mormon temple, childhood clubs, Skull and Bones…
Yes, and I think you see it in all religions. I think that part of the religious impulse easily gets perverted into a quest for secret knowledge because it makes me more than you. I am special, I am elect, I am closer to God, I know the truth. The reality is that we are all schmucks trying to muddle through as best we can.

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59, and I was in my mid-thirties. In one of our last deep conversations before his 300 meter misstep, he expressed his abiding hope that I would “get right with God.” Dad was the son of Italian immigrants, all Catholics, who got converted by door-to-door Pentecostals some years after their arrival in Chicago. His mother lived out her life in the Assemblies of God denomination that had recruited them all, while Dad settled into a closely allied form of Evangelical fundamentalism without the speaking-in-tongues bit. As far as I know, he never questioned his belief that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God and that Jesus died for his sins. And yet of his six children, three of us, by Evangelical standards, are now slated for eternal torture. We are on the wrong side of a battle being waged on a spiritual plane, a battle in which those who are not on the side of God are agents of evil. If Dad were alive, our lack of belief would grieve him.

Religious belief is one of the most powerful forces in our world. Believers think that it has the power to save us all. Increasingly, doubters fear that the opposite may be true: a tribal mindset, unaccountable to ordinary standards of reason and evidence but armed with state of the art weapons may hasten our extinction. In the United States, religious affiliation is the best predictor of political party alliance. Almost half of Americans insist that humans were created in their present form sometime within the last 7,000 years because the Bible says so. In the Middle East, Sunnis and Shia split over theological differences that seem trivial to the rest of us, but that in their minds create tribal boundaries worthy of lethal conflict.

Why is religious belief so widespread and powerful? The traditional Christian answer is: because it’s true, and people who haven’t hardened their hearts against God recognize this when God’s plan of salvation is presented to them.

But the recent explosion of knowledge in cognitive science offers a new way to look at this question, not from a moral or theological standpoint but from a practical standpoint. What is the mental machinery that lets us form beliefs? What does evidence and reason have to do with it? How is it that six devoted Christian kids can turn into three devoted Christian adults and three agnostics?

The more we learn about the hardware and operating systems of the human brain — the more we understand about human information processing — the more we glean bits of insight into the religious mind.

This article is the first in a series of six. Each takes a look at some part of our mental machinery, how it relates to our tendency toward religious belief. The articles will focus on the following questions:

• How does the structure of human information processing pre-dispose us to religious thinking? Given how our minds work, what kinds of religious beliefs are possible and what kinds are we immune to?
• How do we know what we know? What gives us a feeling of certainty? What is the relation between reason, evidence, and our sense of knowing?
• How do conversion experiences work? What makes religious conversion transformative?
• How does our social group influence or even control our religious beliefs? How do beliefs get transmitted from one person to another?
• Why do missionaries target children? How does religious identity develop in childhood? How is belief in childhood different from belief acquired as an adult?
• What makes beliefs resistant to change? What causes people to lose belief? When are people open to re-examining religious assumptions?

Before looking at these questions, it is helpful to understand why belief is so important in Christianity. For traditional Christians, belief is the heart of the Christian religion. It is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell. In the final analysis, believing that Jesus Christ died as a ‘propitiation’ for your sins is the thing that matters to God. No matter how kind and loving your life may be, no matter that you strive to love your neighbor as yourself, no matter what great things you may accomplish in the service of humanity or the world at large — if you believe wrong you are doomed.

This focus on belief is not characteristic of all religions. In the Ancient Near East, the birthplace of Christianity, pagan religions placed little emphasis on belief. The existence of a supernatural world was broadly assumed because there seemed to be little other way to explain the good and bad things that happen to people or natural events like storms, earthquakes, illness, birth and death. But the point of religion wasn’t belief. It was to take care of the gods so that they would take care of you and your community. The word “cult” (Latin cultus, literally care) is related to the word “cultivation.” We talk now about cultivating ground so that it will bear fruit. Non-profits talk about “cultivating donors.” That was what the gods cared about, and so it was the heart of religious practice.

From the beginning, Christianity was different. Jesus worshipers cared tremendously about right belief, or orthodoxy. Bart Ehrman’s book, Lost Christianities, offers a fascinating window into the struggles that went on during the first and second centuries as groups with different beliefs about Jesus criticized and competed with each other, and one of them won out.

Some of groups (e.g. Ebionites) believed that Jesus was a fully human Jewish messiah and that Jesus worshipers must follow the law. Others (e.g. Marcionites) believed that Jesus was a being from the spirit world who only took on human likeness. Still others (Gnostics) believed that the human Jesus was inhabited by a divine “Eon” during the years of his ministry — revealing to his followers secret knowledge that would let them escape this corrupt mortal plane. Others, now known as proto-orthodox or Roman, had ideas about Jesus that lead to the views of Christians today. (“Roman Catholic” means Roman universal.) What all of these groups agreed on was that it was tremendously important to believe the right thing about who Jesus was and what Christianity should be.

This emphasis on right belief was and is unique to monotheism. It existed in a rudimentary form in Judaism, but even today Judaism is more concerned with living right than believing right. Christianity’s exclusive truth claims and emphasis on right belief helped it to out-compete other religions in the Roman Empire. Polytheists often are quite agreeable to adding another god to their pantheon. Christians could persuade pagans to add the Jesus-god and then could wean them off of the others. Today, in India, for example, Evangelical missionaries are much more likely to target Hindus than Sikhs or Muslims who would have to immediately abandon their primary religion in order to embrace the idea of Jesus as a god.

Eastern religions don’t share Christianity’s concern with belief. The emphasis is more on practice or “praxis” — spiritual living, self-renunciation, insight or enlightenment — and among ordinary people, a sort of cult or care-taking of the gods like that practiced by ancient pagans. Right belief isn’t what lets you move up through cycles of reincarnation or attain nirvana. Nor is it what gets you the favor of gods.

Just as biological organisms have many different adaptive or reproductive strategies, so religions compete for human mind share (market share) in different ways. An emphasis on propagating belief (ie. evangelism) and purity of belief (ie. orthodoxy) is only one of those.

In the late 19th and early 20th Century, a movement called modernism emerged within Christianity. Modernist theologians began re-examining traditional orthodox beliefs in light of what we now know about linguistics, archaeology, psychiatry, biology, and human history. In this light, traditional Christian certainties looked less certain, and many modernist Christians are more like members of Eastern Religions in that their primary concern is with spiritual practice rather than belief. But a backlash emerged in response to modernism. People who proudly called themselves fundamentalists insisted that no one who didn’t hold the traditional beliefs was a real Christian. Evangelicals inherited the fundamentalist torch, and even some of the more inquiring denominations have reverted back toward emphasis on right belief.

This is the mindset that dominates Christianity in the public square. It is the mindset that sends Christian missionaries out into the world seeking converts in impoverished corners of the planet. It is the mindset that prints Bibles to be distributed in Iraq and has organized to establish control of the American military hierarchy, seeking to create an “army of Christian soldiers.” To understand American Christianity specifically or Western religion more broadly, it is necessary to understand the psychology of belief.

Now, I’m going to show how the days of the week are based in ancient mythology and paganism. So, when you mention the days of the week, remember that you are invoking an ancient polytheistic or pagan concept. And remember, there is no ownership of holidays, days of the week, or anything else by Christianity. In this table, I’ve provided French days of the week to stand in for all the other romance languages, since they are essentially the same.