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Unique ID In India Causes 'Fear of the Beast'
bhagwad writes "India's attempts to tag everyone with an ID number has run into a roadblock is some Christian villages. Apparently the villagers fear they will be associated with the devil since according to the Bible, everyone having the 'mark of the beast' will go to hell. These people are not afraid of punishment. They relish this opportunity to prove their faith because the Bible also proclaims that they will be persecuted."
As a long-time minister I can tell you two things that are commonly misinterpreted by the nominal Christian crowd.
1. Revelation is almost entirely using symbolic language (it says so in the first paragraph).
2. Nearly everyone goes to hell. Hell is just the state of being dead, nothing more. Even Jesus is spoken of as being in 'hell' when he died.
The 'mark of the beast; is not a literal, physical mark. Rather, it is some kind of behavior or trait associating one with the Devils machinations (i.e. participating (or tacitly approving of) in genocide)
Anyhow, you have to agree that he was right, for the wrong reason. Giving read/write permissions to everybody is the number of the stupid, not the number of the beast.
The parent isn't kidding. The official user number of Anonymous Coward is 666. Log in and click here for proof:
http://yro.slashdot.org/zoo.pl?op=check&type=friend&uid=666
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Kind of. It was political allegory pointed at the Romans, and unsurprisingly, some of it has slight social relevance today.
Oh, and it was written far before the Middle Ages. References in then-contemporary writing place it at least before 200 AD, and it might be as old as the Gospels.
~ C.
It's equally reasonable that the Beast was an idea shared by 7 rulers (an idea like communism, or some other great evil). The "number" is almost certainly 616, not 666, and IIRC it's the "number of his name", the once-secret trick of assigning numbers to each letter of a name and adding them up in a certain way (kabbalism that used to be seen as real magic, but was commonly done in my highschool to see if lovers' names matched). Your key point, of course, was that everyone would wear the same mark, not a different mark for each, which makes this worry a bit silly.
But of course the book was about the political stage at the time it was written, and the events described came to pass (or not), shortly thereafter. Time turns prophecy into history.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.