Living With Nirvana: A Survivor's Guide
what sorrow for those who say evil is good and good is evil
this being the telling of the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth
I
lady justice
Revelation 17:3-6
So the angel took me in the Spirit into the wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that had seven heads and ten horns, and blasphemies against God were written all over it. The woman wore purple and scarlet clothing and beautiful jewellery made of gold and precious gems and pearls. In her hand she held a gold goblet full of obscenities and the impurities of her immorality. A mysterious name was written on her forehead: "Babylon the Great, Mother of All Prostitutes and Obscenities in the World." I could see that she was drunk - drunk with the blood of God's holy people who were witnesses for Jesus. I stared at her in complete amazement.
i
babylon the great revealed
Revelation 17:18
And this woman you saw in your vision represents the great city that rules over the kings of the world.
For more than a century now, Jehovah's Witnesses have been taught to regard that most sacrilegious woman whom John saw drunk upon the blood of God's holy people as a world empire of false religion.
While there is little doubt that only an authority with a winning international jurisdiction could exercise dominion over the world's entire cadre of leaders, the Book of Revelation in no way suggests that Babylon the Great has religious connotations.
Despite this shortcoming, Jehovah's Witnesses are nevertheless determined to view that great city as being founded upon religion, but not because such a view is evident through reading Scripture, but because an empire based upon religion is all that remains once the only two other kinds of empire prominent on the Earth today - the political and the commercial - have been ruled out through even a casual reading of what John was instructed to set down for posterity.
Having drawn the short straw as it were, religion being the bedrock of Babylon the Great causes a paradox that can only be resolved by exacerbating this case of mistaken identity such that this religion's blasphemies and murders indicate that this so-called religion must be a false religion.
Despite the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses still believe after more than a century that there are indeed only three kinds of world empire present on the Earth today, there is yet - and always has been - another world empire present on this Earth, an empire which - unlike even the supposed empire of false religion noted above - possesses the kind of sway needed to persecute and destroy even the holy ones of God while at one and the same time convincing everyone else that they need not turn a blind eye to all this mayhem but that instead they should actually want the holy ones of God destroyed and should genuinely insist that such a thing should happen.
Given that another world empire of some kind actually exists (as shall be seen in just a moment), the really remarkable thing about Babylon the Great, then, must be this: everyone the world over knows exactly what this great city is even if they themselves think they do not, for so sly is Babylon the Great that she hides in plain sight of the entire world knowing very few of its inhabitants - those who toil for her included - can see her for what she actually is: the god of this world's global empire of counterfeit justice.