Jar, the Book of Revelation is a spiritual book written to believers. It is not easily understood, and certainly not without a willingness to adopt the perspective necessary to delve it's mysteries. Faith can be thought of as a perspective. It is a view of things, and some deeper aspects must be viewed with earlier more fundamental "views" in-hand.
Think of it like math. You will have a hard time understanding the mathematical symbols of even algebra and certainly calculus, differential equations, etc,... without being taught them, and really hard if you don't know arithmatic yet.
A good start is the context of the book. The book details an actual experience of John's, a vision, and is therefore the only exclusively "prophetic" book in the New Testament. By "prophetic", I mean in the same vein of writings of the Old Testament prophets.
Without getting too much into it, prophecies can often have multiple fulfillments, or at least an early and a later one.
One of the fulfillments was the blood of the martyrs being spilled by a new creature (new system) based on the old system (beast) that was fallen. The prophecies specifically speak of a harlot, which indicates a religious institution and spirit that corrupts and substitutes or masquerades as true religion, represented by the pure Bride.
If that doesn't describe the rise of Roman Catholicism's merger with the Roman Empire, and it's intense political persecution, I don't know what does.
That's one, but like I said, the book is probably not written nor intended to be understood by the non-believer.
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