For several months, I have been re-reading the Book of Revelations. It takes about an hour to read it, and a lifetime to think about it. So far, I have not found a convincing case as to its meaning .
I have twice read Isaac Newton’s vast commentaries (certainly the most learned) on Revelations, as well as the writings of a half-dozen other sincere men (women seem strangely absent from those trying to understand Revelations) who have spent years trying to fathom it.
One thing is obvious, most of the interpreters have an agenda, usually pushing one Protestant denomination or another. Many of them are anti-Catholic. Aside from that, there is often some truth in many of the details they have uncovered.
Coming from Catholic Fundamentalism, whose positions on everything are, of course, always right, (and, stop that snickering, you, there, in the front row!), it seemed that nothing could be more worthwhile than to try to understand Revelations in light of the fact that The Roman Catholic Church, still pro-life while most denominations around Her have sunk into the Culture of Death, could hardly be the evil that many of the early Protestant commentators made Her out to be in the Book of Revelations.
Soon, my humble efforts will be available in a separate title on the heading of the site. I hope that the thoughts that will appear there are worthwhile. They will consider an odd idea of time. All through Revelations, a “year” is translated to be a “day” or some other period of time. I will begin one analysis with the thought that the time period The Programmer may have used as a “base-line” for a period of time is either 11 years or 22 years.
Eleven years is an average solar cycle. The solar cycle that follows has a reverse polarity, so one entire solar cycle is approximately 22 years. This is made more complicated by the fact that some cycles can be as short as 9 years or as long as 14. That makes things more challenging. I look forward to incorporating that into the “timetable” that Revelations has posted for us travelers and see if Catholic Fundamentalism may succeed with the new, untried tool of a unit of time that determines much that happens on earth.
