Let us read about the jerk who wrote “Revelations:”
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/148125942PAGELS: The images that have always captured people, one of them is an image of an enormous bright red beast with seven heads, with crowns on his head - a violent, raging, threatening monster.
Another is a giant whore called the Whore of Babylon, who sits on the back of one of these monsters, one of these dragons with seven heads, bright red, and she's drinking from a golden cup the blood of innocent people who have been killed.
Then there's another image of Jesus coming forth from the sky and starting the battle of Armageddon, which ends in, you know, heaps and heaps of corpses at the end of the book.
GROSS: It just seems so counter to all the images of Jesus in the rest of the New Testament.
PAGELS: It's absolutely counter to that. It's the response of one of the followers of Jesus, who was, after all, last seen on Earth crucified in a humiliating and horrible way, tortured by the Romans and dead, a very insignificant man, and his follower John sees that Jesus enthroned in heaven and returning as the ruler of the world. It's almost like a perfect retaliation for what he sees as the execution of Jesus.
GROSS: So what do we know about who wrote Revelation and when it was written?
PAGELS: Most people who look at this history think that the author - he calls himself John of Patmos, that's his name - that John was a refugee from the Jewish war that had just destroyed his homeland, Judea. And the center of that whole territory, which was Jerusalem, the Temple of Jerusalem, had been utterly leveled by the Romans in response to a Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire.
So I don't think we understand this book until we realize that it's wartime literature. It comes out of that war, and it comes out of people who have been destroyed by war.
So it does not really apply to now!
And John of Patmos, refugee, could easily have turned to drugs, like Larry, for inspiration or comfort. Certainly explains the trashy crap that is Revelations!