Relax folks! The Bible is great for quotations because a lot of people used to hear it when read to them in Church back in the day but as far as prophecy goes, it’s complete rubbish!
As for the label “Babylon the great”, admittedly I haven’t researched its origins but during the Victorian period it was a great slur used by Protestants against “Popery”, as if to affirm a superiority of post reformation Christianity. In Episcopalian and C of E circles, it is very passé not to say un-ecumenical to condemn Catholics by this term today.
However in the early centuries of the Common Era it was well understood that the Christ cults took their doctrines from earlier religious themes and at the time under Roman rule there was not yet the partisan hatred of sects who held differing viewpoints. What mattered then was whether you were observed as an individual to be ”pious,” which meant that you respected and practiced devotions to the Gods. The attribution of piety presumably implied that you were a conscientious and reliable Roman citizen.
It was likely that in the second century the apocalyptic visions of an individual in a state of mystical passion were written down and attributed to John who records a religious harlot having intercourse with the kings of the world. It represented the beginnings of a new sensitivity to doctrine and temple affairs being contaminated by political influence. Note by contrast how in Judaism the political and religious were recognised as two elements of the same thing and this ideal still obtains there today. The cults wanted independence and no interference from Rome. It was as if for the sake of religious purity, i.e. godliness, that the Jesus cults would want to plough their own furrows and not have Rome or anyone else butt in.
Yet perhaps it was due to a foreboding of the inevitable Imperial Roman monopoly on religion which made the writer envision harlotry to describe what he thought was a flagrantly wrong relationship? Whatever the impulse, the writer represented a constituency which wanted a sense of doctrinal and religious sanctity, thinking that the invisible deity would rather have this kind of worship.
Whatever the true origins of the expression of “Babylon the great” it represents religious anxieties of people eighteen hundred years ago which certainly have no meaning, prophetic or otherwise, for people today or relevance to real life in the present world.
There is no such thing as false religion anymore than its opposite, true religion, they are both fictions of the Watchtower cult imagination. Neither is there a meaningful “Babylon the great” today , it cannot be destroyed since it doesn't exist.
To keep them alive in religious discourse is just more stale sabre rattling for the purpose of mind control by the out dated, irrelevant governing body of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They have been flogging this dead horse for more than a century!