When the Book of Revelations is preached as a prophecy of doom and gloom chapter six is one of the most quoted sections. That chapter is typically portrayed as a prophecy of the evils that God is going to inflict on humanity as a punishment for our sins. The problem with that portrayal is that it directly contradicts the description of Jesus found in the gospels. Now I have not forgotten that we have still not dealt with the question as to whether or not there is a God. But I ask that you humor me for a bit as we first assume there is a God and then try to figure out why we have contradictory views of his motivations. Once that issue is resolved then I promise to come back to the earlier question.

Do you agree with this approach? Do you agree that the following evaporating cloud describes the dilemma that we face?

The first section of chapter six is often known as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. There is a white horse, a red horse, a black horse and a pale green horse. I propose to plot those descriptions on my simple little grid and see what information we can glean from the results.

The first horseman rides a white horse and has a crown. White is the symbol for purity and traditional Christian theology associates this horseman with Jesus. The action that this horseman takes is to conquer. Here I am going to build upon the work from the previous article and associate the word conquer with the word transform. Transformation is symbolized on my graph with a butterfly. It is high in dissonance.

The second horseman rides a red horse and the result of his action is war. War is conflict to the extreme. Thus this horseman ties to the location on my graph symbolized by the tea kettle. Here we have a definite problem. Somehow I am going to need to explain how God’s actions cause war while maintaining my hypothesis that God only acts through love and dissonance. I need to come back to this in a bit.

The third horseman rides a black horse. This horseman is the only horseman that speaks. I suggest we temporarily link the speech that this horseman makes with dissonance. The message that he brings is of calamity. On my little graph high dissonance and high conflict are plotted as chaos—the black tornado. This conjecture, however, seems a bit shaky so I ask that you indulge me for a few more minutes and see what I can do to shore up this position. I realize that I am asking a lot. There is no doubt that it is going to take a lot of energy to unravel my presentation. I appreciate your patience.

Do you remember that I had one critical point still unresolved from earlier. That critical point is whether or not there is a God. Let us use the openness of that question to see what light it can shed on the problem of famine. Let us assume for a moment that there is no God and that famine is strictly the result of natural causes. Now if famine is the result of natural causes then there is no one we can blame. So, if famine strikes some country in Africa then no one can be blamed for the thousands or millions that die. It is certainly not my fault that famine is killing people every day. And yet, in making that assertion I imply that there is something that I could do. Do you know how many homeless people die every year in your town? We seldom know because we really do not want to know. We have nothing against those people and wish them no harm. And yet, we do not love them enough to hunt them down and feed them. We see them on the streets and yet we ignore them. We live in tranquility while people all around us are dying. Assuming there is no God, then the cause of death from famine is you and me. Our inaction allows people to die when humanity already solved the problem of food distribution three thousand years ago.

When Abraham needed better pastures he moved. When Israel was hungry he sent his sons to Egypt to ask Joseph for food. When Jerusalem was hungry Paul collected money so they could import grain. We have known how to solve famine for a long time and yet it persists because we do not listen to the dissonance and do not have compassion on those who suffer. If there is no God, then the blame for famine rests solely on us.

Now, having accepted responsibility for famine, let us reconsider war. There is a very simple process that will create a war. Silence the dissenting opinions and inflame the hatred. If you do this for a brief period of time people will kill each other. We do not need to invoke some mystical divinity to do this when we are perfectly capable of doing it all by ourselves.

And we know all about chaos. Start with conflict and amplify the dissonance. Begin with underlying tensions, publicize it on a daily basis, interview all the participants and soon we will be utterly lost and confused. We do this all the time.

Of course, there is one point where Revelations chapter six differs from our every day ordinary world of famine, war and chaos. The events that transpire in chapter six are massive. It is here that we encounter the third axis of this little grid—energy. All of humanity combined cannot collaborate effectively enough to create calamities of the scale depicted in chapter six. We can come close. Millions can die from famine. Millions have died in wars. Millions are dying from Aids. In fact, in some countries the majority of the people are dying from Aids. And, if some of the forecasts regarding global warming come true then millions or even billions could die. The author of the Book of Revelations was a prophet who interpreted current events and told us about his vision of the future. Scientists today prophecy about our future.

Scientists today ask us to have compassion on children that will be born a hundred years from now in a place that we will never travel to see. That is an amazing dimension of love that we humans have never before been able to express. They clamor with statistics and data that creates a flood of information more massive than has ever before been disseminated. They warn us about events that will dispense energy levels we cannot comprehend. And yet, despite their best efforts we still live for the moment.

The fourth dimension that is revealed in the Book of Revelations is the massive time span that God uses. Has any human yet succeeded in their boast of a thousand year reign? The ability to conceptualize those time spans is something at which we fumble. And yet it seems like it is almost within our grasp.

Have I now helped you see that the image of the Book of Revelations as a description of God’s intervention into our lives converges with what we think we know about our world today? Examine it for yourself and see if there is any calamity mentioned in the Book of Revelations that some scientist somewhere has not already warned us could come true. We hear about giant asteroids, immense tidal waves, massive shifts in temperature, the death of hundreds or thousands of species. Our understanding of our actions in this non-linear system of cause and effect is converging with the description in the Book of Revelations. And the way forward from here is to align our efforts in love. The way to chart our course is to seek the dissonance. The only way we can succeed is by expending massive amounts of personal energy. Then we need time.

Historically we call the point that represents infinite love, infinite dissonance, infinite energy and infinite time by the name God. Let us, for now, adopt the name God simply as a social construct. I personally have a different opinion, but for now, can we reach agreement that the word God is the vocabulary term that people throughout history have used when they search for that which is greater than we. If we can agree to work with that hypothesis, then I suggest the following update to the suspended dialectic.

Can you agree with me that if we simply state that God is a vocabulary term that people coined to describe a point of infinite love, infinite dissonance, infinite energy and infinite time then the updated evaporating cloud is a reasonable representation of what we know? Please take the time to discern.
 
 
 

If, then we can temporarily accept God as a social construct — a point in the time-space continuum, then ponder the explanation that I propose for the Book of Revelations.

I titled this set of three articles “Teaching”. It is my assertion that the purpose for the description of woe in the Book of Revelations is to amplify the dissonance. Like Jezebel, we are called to alignment. When we, like Jezebel, chose to stay in conflict, then the result is chaos. The combined confluence of calamities described in the Book of Revelations is the greatest description of chaos found in the Christian Bible. We reach chaos when we filter God’s love and remain in conflict until God counters with more dissonance.

The solution that I propose to the dialectic regarding the existence of God is to obviate the whole. If I chose to accept the concept of an all powerful God who I must obey, then I am in conflict with God. If I chose to accept the concept that there is no God but only a natural system, then I have no choice but to accept the fact that I am in conflict with that same natural system. Which ever way I go in that dilemma, I am in conflict. The solution is alignment. Obedience is conflict. Disobedience is conflict. It is only in alignment that we permanently resolve the conflict.

The path to alignment is to accept both sides of that dialectic as equally true and find the point at which they converge. The name humans use for that point of convergence is God.