you know what i think that the truly sad part about people that continue to follow an end-times interpretation of the messianic religions is? it's that the predictions were actually largely accurate. the events unfolded thousands of years ago...

if you existed in the middle east at really any point in it's history, you had to see that you were at a conflict point where east meets west. it had happened. the persians marched west, and the greeks and romans marched east. and, before that the assyrians marched into egypt, and before that the egyptians marched into asia. there would have to be a point of cataclysm, eventually, where east and west met into a single, epic struggle.

and, it happened. it happened at the end of the long war between rome and persia, which finally broke down in the seventh century. rome finally defeated persia. but, that defeat took so much out of itself that it was a casualty of it's own victory. when the epic struggle between east and west did finally happen, neither survived the pyrrhic victory: the arabs, instead, took advantage of the power vacuum and aggressively conquered the near east.

so, what do you gain by taking an insightful geopolitical analysis of the near east from thousands of years ago and applying it to a different culture on a different continent? i mean, at least be a mormon. no. really. being a mormon makes more sense because at least it's local.

here's an interesting fact: moscow is actually to the west of jerusalem. and the russians are actually the cultural heirs to constantinople, meaning they're actually the greeks - the west - in the biblical narrative. and america is impossible to even imagine in any relevant context, except maybe as a mythical atlantis.

these texts have historical value. sure. and deciphering them in the context of real history is actually quite fascinating. they show real insight. but, to take them entirely out of context and then hold to them as predictive documents for a future they could have never imagined? nobody that wrote these texts wanted you to do that. that's madness.