What is the whore of Babylon - part 2

Remember the book 'Animal Farm'? They probably made you read it in high school and if you're like me you thumbed through the Cliff Notes version so you could pass the test and forget the whole bloody thing the next day.

Too bad. It's a classic book. It's also a longer, more in-depth version of Revelations 17.

In Chapter 17 we are introduced to a pattern of destruction that goes like this: Whore seduces Beast to kill the Saints. Beast kills them. Beast then turns on Whore and kills her. The rock-paper-scissors ends with God avenging the Saints by destroying the beast, but that part comes later. For now lets focus on the events of chapter 17.

In Orwell's Animal Farm a group of farm animals decide that they aren't going to take it anymore and rebel against the farmer. A pair of pigs named Snowball and Napoleon lead the charge. When the dust settles the two pigs write up a manifesto for animal rights and proclaim all the animals equal. Napoleon then decides to do away with Snowball and trains the dogs to become a kind of animal Nazi secret police so that he can assume absolute power.

The book is an allegory of the totalitarian regimes that were sprouting all over Europe in those days. And just like with good food and bad movies it all started with the French:

The French Revolution was the first of the high-minded "let's make everybody equal (oh, and while we're at it lets kill off all those religious nuts)" political movements. A group of "enlightened" thinkers overthrew the king, created this new-fangled thingie called the guillotine and started chopping off heads. Then something strange happened. They turned on each other. The more violent, or "beastly", among them starting killing off those high-minded thinkers. Eventually Napolean (the man, not the pig) siezed power and started marching his armies across Europe.

Then it happened again. This time in Russia. King overthrown, Christians and Jews killed, manifesto written... and then the more violent faction turned on the thinkers and slaughtered them. Then it happened in Germany, then Italy, eventually China got in on the act. Each time the same: thinkers incite killers, killers kill establishment and Christians/Jews (and this part happens even in places like China, where the Christians weren't truly a part of the "oppressive" establishment. Once the killing of the former rulers and religious types is complete, the violent arm of the movement seems to get fed up with all the noise and high ideals coming from the thinkers and turns on them. Whore gets Beast to kill Saints ---> Beast then turns on Whore.

Animal Farm was considered a visionary work of literature. Revelation 17 -- written almost 2,000 years earlier... not so much.

The Bible gets no respect....

So what is the whore, really? It's a religious movement (verse 5) centered on a city (verse 18) whose citizens stretch all over the world in some way (verse 15). The dittie about seven hills (verse 9) is a give away since Rome was famous for it's seven hills. The trick is that the Beast upon which the whore is sitting is also Rome. This is where something like Animal Farm comes in handy to help us flesh out the concept:

We are talking about two separate faction operating within one single regime.
Now, as we continue to flesh out the concept of the whore of Babylon, and why it matters to us, let's see how Gnosticism compares to Christianity.

Christianity may not classify as a "mystery religion", but it certainly has elements of the 'mysterious' connected to it. We are told that God works in "mysterious ways" (meaning that His ways are not predictable to our finite minds), we are also told that His ways are foolishness apart from a spiritual experience -- this certainly sounds a little like Gnosticism. But don't be fooled. The difference between the two is as basic and fundamental as it gets: Christianity doesn't have a score card. Gnosticism does.

Example: two people accept Christ as their lord and savior, one spends the rest of their life trying to understand God and how He relates to His creation, the other one doesn't. Which one is justified in the eyes of God?

The answer of course is that they both are since it is God's work that is important for their salvation, not there own. The Christian journey is one where a person gradually becomes more Christ-like, or more Holy (a loaded word which boils down to "whole" or "complete"). Now, one element of this journey is knowledge about God, but it is just one element; it's not even the most important. No, that one would be desire. We see this played out in 1 and 2 Samuel with David and Solomon. Solomon is the more knowledgeable, whereas David is the "man after God's own heart", meaning that David wants what God wants. At the end of Solomon's reign we are told that God would judge the man and his kingdom if it were not for the vow he had made with David. Despite David's inferior knowledge, his life and legacy were viewed as a success; in spite of Solomon's superior knowledge, his life and legacy were mixed between success (wrote three Bible books, enriched the country) and failure (integrated foreign paganism into the royal line which directly led to the nation's downfall, burdened the people with crushing taxes).

In God's economy the mind is good, but the heart is better.

In Gnosticism the ultimate desire is always self-serving and the mind is the way that the self is going to get served.

Historically, what happened was that in each one of the Biblical "times" we see intellectual faction that inspires a militant faction to kill believers. The first one of these is obvious -- the pagan thinkers in Rome wanted to kill the Christians because they blamed Christians for the ills of the empire. The Christians did not sacrifice to the pagan gods, and this made the gods angry so the thinking went. These thinkers inspired the more military minded Romans to kill Christians. So did these military minded individuals then turn on the pagan intellectuals? They did. After those military types became Christian. It started with Constantine. After him, it came in waves, with a pagan emperor persecuting Christians followed by a Christian emperor turning around and persecuting pagans. Good times.

In the medieval "time" it gets a little harder to spot. Remember that Gnosticism is a shape-changer. It's like a body snatcher and in the medieval phase I feel like a b-movie victim pointing and screaming at someone that looks perfectly normal to everyone else. In this age, there was certainly an intellectual faction within the Roman Catholic establishment that incited the military faction to violence (you might have heard of this, it was called the crusades). And those military "dogs of war" killed Christians with the passion that they killed Muslims. But is that enough to classify them as "the Whore".

Remember that "the Whore" is a personification, something like a team mascot. We'll talk more about why a whore is the right mascot for this particular belief system, but for now just notice a funny little connection -- in medieval times the church actually got into the prostitution business. In fact, in you were in Rome 13th century and you wanted to pay for sex there was just one place to go: church. Well, usually the brothels were just somewhere close to the church buildings, not actually in them. They were however owned and operated by the churchmen of that age.

The history behind this is a little strange (you might have guessed that). In earlier times the church outlawed prostitution and on several different occasions tried to stamp it out. This never worked, and there was always an outcry as to what to do with the women who would be indigent without this kind of work. The church gradually changed it's stance to a grudging acceptance. Next it took on brothels as a charitable outreach. But as the church became increasingly corrupt it couldn't help but notice that there was money to be made in this business.

This is a broad statement that wasn't true everywhere in Europe, but to an astonishing degree, the medieval church was the sponsor of it's prostitution.

Next post, Gnostics vs. Christians in 20th century American court, or as it was more commonly called: the Scopes trial.