Re: Rapture's delight?
The moon doesn't shrink by a third, though. Yes, you can find ways to match the signs in Revelations to current events - but also to current events in 1910, 1880, 1750, 1600, so on and so forth. It is so metaphorical, you can translate it a dozen different ways. Look at the events we're told to watch out for:
Conquest, war, famine, death, martyred souls cry for vengeance, natural disasters, 144,000 people are "sealed", increase in worship of God, hail and fire, third of the oceans destroyed, rivers poisoned, sky darkened, locusts attack, 1/3 of population killed by army, ark of the covenant appears, rise of the harlot, rise of Satan, dragons, leviathan, more followers taken, sores, sea turns to blood, water turns to blood, sun scorches the earth, darkness and pain, earthquake, babylon destroyed, everyone dies.
So, if we fuzz the numbers a bit and spread the events over time, which of these have we NOT seen already? We don't know what the dragon or leviathan are supposed to be precisely. But we have seen everything else except for 'water turns to blood' and 'everyone dies', in one way or another. In fact most of these things are just considered normal aspects of being alive. It gets worse if you have people who can't agree whether the 'great Satan' is America, capitalism, selfishness, Catholics or atheists, and the 'martyred souls' are Christians, Jews, fetuses, civilians, or Palestinians. Finally, we can't even agree on whether we will recognize we're in revelations until that whole 'everyone dies' step at the end. Accepting that Revelations is real, I wonder if it's not referring to the singularity, when people transfer from human bodies to posthuman (and thusly surpass death).