The Revelation of St. John the Divine is taken as a true eschatology by a smallish and very novel heretical splinter sect, arising in a land known for its tende

The Revelation of St. John the Divine is taken as a true eschatology by a smallish and very novel heretical splinter sect, arising in a land known for its tendency to produce such wild-eyed, footless new religious movements, and which has had a lately outsized profile. Don't mistake that for the doctrine of any of the Eastern or Western orthodoxies, or indeed even any of the mainline Protestant denominations. And "divine," in this usage, is a countable synonym for "mystic." You said yourself you weren't catechized in that stuff. Neither was I, and I was also raised by Catholics. Your catechists should have warned you off this crap when they noticed you getting into it, the way mine did, and told you not to presume to know the mind of God. Not that that helped me a few years later, but at least I knew enough then to take the happy-clappy foot-washing Southern Baptist stuff as cynically as it deserved. It's hard to argue much else in direct response here, since that confusion seems so pervasive - not precisely a criticism, only I would rather we start from a true axiom. I guess I would say I also see the cosmic horror aspect of it - something Land knows he's doing and Bostrom doesn't, though for the latter this is only one case of his pervasive confusion of genres - but I don't really see much cause to credit with similar insight most people who actually cherish the belief. (Note specially also the phrase 'semiotically indistinguishable,' which is unusual. One example might be that stories based intentionally closely on Campbell's 'monomyth' structure tend rarely to be very semiotically distinct from one another. Here of course we discuss not a thousand-faced hero but a Tausendjährige kingdom of God, but in both cases we see the same superficial variation in expression of a consistent animating myth.)