Thing 215 Read Revelations

I'm not here to peddle my religion, but I'm a Catholic, a practicing Catholic if you like using those kind of terms, I don't. I think they make it sound like I'm at home training to be a Christian in my spare time. One thousand reps of loving my neighbour followed by twenty reps of honouring my father and my mother. As a Catholic it only makes sense that at some point I should open a bible. Oddly enough, I haven't really ever sat down and looked at it, in fact, I've so little experience with the Good Book that it took me three attempts to spell "bible". Sad.

Trying to read the entire Bible in a day as a Thing would be pointless and impossible, so I settled on one book of the Bible. Specifically, the alleged craziest part, the Book of Revelations. The Old Testament is basically a log book of who was who's Dad for the most part, followed by God basically being a little harsh on some of his less holy subjects. The New Testament is all about Jesus, which is to say miracles and people being nice... until you get to the plot twist right at the end... Revelations... The end of the world.

And what an ending.

Like many other religious books and scriptures, this one is open to interpretation. It could mean anything. The "seven headed beast" could mean a country with seven rivers, a nation of seven cities, a place with a range of seven mountains. It's vague in its meaning. Where it's not vague are the crazy specifics of it. The river of blood from Babylon will be 180 miles long and as high as a horse's bridle. Now for the panic bit - how high is a horse's bridle? Should I be frightened by this?

For all of its crazy specifics, apparently God really knows how he wants to fuck us up. If revelations is anything to go by, we're really not going to enjoy this very much. There's going to be Seven Bowls of stuff which when Angels pour them out, is going to be bad news for us. There will be rivers of blood, oceans of blood, lakes of blood. There's going to be sulphur raining down from the heavens.

Also, did you know that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are on God's side? Seriously, they turn up so that God can turn them loose on us... How boned are we? They're not even on the bad guy's side, they're the good guys allies...

It's a short little book mind you. But they do manage to squeeze in quite a bit of crazy. It's jammed in there right at the end of the Bible. Which seems off. You spend the whole of the New Testament reading about how we should all be nice to each other and how Jesus was pretty cool, then just in case you forgot that religion can be crazy, here's one more book jam packed with pure insanity and mind boggling destruction of the entire world...

Took me about two hours to finish it all. Worth it to have done it. I wonder when they're going to make the movie of it?