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Persecution

An idea from thin air, hardly.
Track the history of various ways 666 has been interpreted.  Things such as numerology with names for Reagan, Nero, even Caligula, to harmless things like the lunar calender, have nothing to do with these "tags".  But such tagging has been considered for years.

The scarring and tattooing done to prisoners has often been rendered to be used by a sinful order in attempt to bear everyone a sin, an identity in sin.  Even people called the marking of Jews in the holocaust a method of the mark of the beast's presence.  The scarlet letter type punishments could and has been interpreted to be involved as well.

From v-chips in the extreme, to social security numbers, and barcodes, all have been involved with 666 in somebody's eyes.  I know someone who honestly believes the social security numbers are derived from Satan himself, and according to his take on an old numerology - his spells out "murder".  He is also a nut who went and had to find the numerology method out of dozens to do so, and had to twist things (it's not 701, it's 71, and the 0 doesn't count, and 71 here is the sound "ur" or "er", or some crap like that).

Brandishes, including implants of some sort, and identity tags (IE: notice every item of identification you have is marked and numbered?), is used as a tag on modernized branding.  Branding by the beast.  People even considered prison numbers to be a marking in a specific prison in Spain that used a numeric and alpha count for cells/areas, and was used by the church - don't forget many believe the palpacy to be the anti-christ, and all sorts of inner christian hate mongering from other sects or even the same sect has been a target for 666 throwing since christianity had more than 2 ideals.

These "magical tags" are nothing new, and are brandished in our ideals of identity and fearfulness of being watched, known, and counted.

And if you think by counted I mean "hi i'm number 4" learn some other definitions people :straightthumb:

Though really, I'm not Christian despite what my mother would want to believe, and I'd be totally against these implants.  I'm against that implant people have with the kids and things like that, in general as a whole if it was a yes or no vote, I'd have to vote no.  And I know a few people who have no Christian ties who feel the same.

Problem with religious ideology is it brandishes one thought.  US.  THEM.
Us and them.  Us vs them.  Whatever it is, we as a human species have done it with every faith that's stayed true.  We separate "us" and everyone else ("them"), we write and take it as "us" as a unified and global front.  We are a utopian union, we don't disagree, and we don't falter.  Despite the fact that I've yet to get the same answer for anything that "mattered" from any group of same faith peoples, it's what we decide to lie to ourselves about.

I heard one guy, it was fun.  He was on one of those Sunday prayer talk shows, the kind that are on at like 3am on public access channels.  And he said, "We as Jews are for the War on Terror.  The war on Iraq."
Another man, another RABBI turned around and said "Hey, I'm Jewish but I'm not for a war that kills hundreds, even thousands."
See that?  "We as Jews".  This man, a rabbi, decided that all people of his faith/background believed one thing.  It's the way we protect ourselves from the world's odd sense diversity.
 
Dia, your first post links to a Wikipedia page, that attempts to backup it's argument with bunk data. You can't backpedal since everyone knows the evidence isn't strong and run the faith argument.

Besides, what you're describing is the apocalypse mentioned in the book of Revelations. If you just said that from the start, and that you had faith that it's happening soon or whatnot your point might've been a bit stronger.
 
It's pretty easy to predict that "the world will collapse due to shit economy" because well, anybody with half a brain knew it was coming.  You can't ride the high life forever.  It's a bit harder to make it line up with any religion.
 
lol

you people realize that the market's crashed a bunch of times before and then eventually bounced back, right?

great depression? black monday in 1987? 9/11? hello?

some shitty market turns are par for the course. People are GOING to spend money, the economy's not just going to magically implode one day and then everyone in the world will go instantly to a barter system?

Market analyses are a silly basis for predicting the apocalypse!
 
@sixty: Yes Christianity only accounts for 2.1 billion people, but it is still the largest religion, which is what I was saying.

  1. Christianity: 2.1 billion
  2. Islam: 1.5 billion
  3. Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
  4. Hinduism: 900 million
  5. Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
  6. Buddhism: 376 million
  7. primal-indigenous: 300 million
  8. African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
  9. Sikhism: 23 million
  10. Juche: 19 million
  11. Spiritism: 15 million
  12. Judaism: 14 million
  13. Baha’i: 7 million
  14. Jainism: 4.2 million
  15. Shinto: 4 million
  16. Cao Dai: 4 million
  17. Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
  18. Tenrikyo: 2 million
  19. Neo-Paganism: 1 million
  20. Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
  21. Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
  22. Scientology: 500 thousand

Source (not scientifically accurate but close enough, didn't feel like searching around more

And I'd be pretty fuckin impressed if all the other religions "banded together" to take down the MANY sects of Christianity! Good luck with the Muslims, they don't enjoy other peoples' company much. ;)
 

mawk

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Damn straight. Can't stand you guys. >:{0>

The whole number-chip thing sounds very Orwellian, definitely, and I'd probably move into the mountains because I enjoy my right to act illegally without having them sic the Rats on me. I think the move would meet with heavy opposition (I for one am a believer that the Leviathan should mind his own beeswax past a certain point,) and religious folk have found crazy ways of declaring people the Antichrist before (hi Barack Obama,) but I don't think it'd be a wide enough movement to affect global religious tensions. There are already a bunch of christians that think we're all chilling in satan's palm right now, that (X prominent personality) is the devil incarnate, but they don't get off their soapboxes very often to do things and people don't treat it like such an earth-shattering concept that we'd wind up with a Religious Cagematch Free-For-All.

Also, I'm a little encouraged that crazy-ass Scientology has fewer followers than the less crazy-ass (and also cooler because the dialect includes words like "apprecilove") Rastafarianism.
 
lol Rasta is all about smokin' the ganja and cooking a lot. It is WAY fuckin cooler than Scientology.

Hell, even those Baha'i hippies are cooler than those assholes.
 
Diaforetikos":rkn8adcp said:
I heard about the Mayan calander, but I don't believe in that. It said 2012 is going to be the but I think God wouldn't make it that predictable. Jesus said he doesn't even know the date for the end of the world. God only knows. No one but him. That is if you believe in God.
You said it yourself.  By Christian viewpoints, it is hopelessly impossible to predict the end of the world.  If not even Christ himself knows when the end is coming, how is this self-proclaimed "prophet" supposed to know?  What he's really doing has been said before:
Miek":rkn8adcp said:
The whole thing seems like some old "prophet" trying to score himself some Follower Points with some scaremongering and an offer of the opportunity to be martyred. The rest of his predictions are such generic fundamentalist "end days a-comin'" stuff that I'm not even going to address them; they should speak for themselves. It's all possible, but if it does happen, it won't be because some ego-driven fundamentalist said it would.
Either that or he was tripping on acid when he made this "prophecy."

The closest person to the Antichrist I know of in the last two hundred years is Adolf Hitler.  He fits every prerequisite, and he just about did cause an end to civilization.  If we intend to look for another antichrist (which we shouldn't anyway; read the next paragraph) s/he will have to be AT LEAST as diabolical as Hitler.

There are a lot of things that completely miss the point of Christianity.  One such thing is Revelation.  The point is not to wait for the end times, when you will ascend into heaven.  The point is to live according to Christ's word.  Let God worry about the end times.  It's not our place to question Him.
 
Why would the anti-christ be like Hitler? He is supposed to bring peace to the world. He is so supposed to act like Jesus without all the peacefulness about him. That is how he will rise to power (according to the bible). And I'm not worried about the "End Times". I'm just asking a question.
 
According to the bible, the Pope is a better candidate for the anti-christ than Hitler, but people like to imagine some raving lunatic instead of the calm collective wise guy.
 
Hitler, like the anti-christ, was extremely charismatic and was able to lead a rising number of people to follow him.  His eventual goal would have been world peace, given that it's under the flag of the Third Reich.  He'd have eliminated all opposition, including real forces like other nations and political opponents, as well as imaginary forces like the Jewish elite and homosexuals.  He also made many people wear the mark of the beast, either as proof that they're proper Aryans or forced proof that they're 'undesirables' (Jews, etc).

However, if you're to say that the anti-Christ is Christlike without the "peacefulness" (which I've never heard before from any biblical scholars), it would sound to me like any popular evangelist, particularly the ones who claim to have divine revelations and the like, are greatly in danger of being the anti-Christ themselves.
 
mark":hwshj6p4 said:
According to the bible, the Pope is a better candidate for the anti-christ than Hitler, but people like to imagine some raving lunatic instead of the calm collective wise guy.
I made a mistake, should've been

..., but people like to imagine Hitler as some lunatic instead of...
 
I think, if my bible knowledge is good enough, the anti-christ has to come from Rome, or at least Italy. It has to be a male, he has to have been horrible attacked as a child, yet came out miraculously unscathed, and this will help him rise to power as people will believe he is superhuman. He will unite Europe and then the world, will become the one leader of the world and there will be 7 years of great wealth after every "good" christian in the world disappears, leaving behind only the clothes on their backs (so they're properly attired for the God orgy in heaven while the rest of you heathen maggots suffer with rivers of blood and swarms of locusts and shit before there's a great war and everyone dies, and any on the fence christians are persecuted, and Abaddon comes to Earth to FUCK SHIT UP while the earth opens up with the indelible pangs of birth, the birth of destruction afterwards where you will all be thrown into a lake of fire for eternity (which really isn't eternity since it was a mistranslation), but we all pretend it is so we feel good about judging other people who watch their skin melt off as waves of maggots joyfully bursts from their distended bellies in a cacophony of torture, cold and burning soulless vertigo from the guts of Sheol, the great void of existence where nothing has meaning as the eternal damned shamble about in their blind suffering, never once realizing the impenetrable truth we all christians understand as heralds of god's infinite wisdom and mercy, crushed like insects to fuel our just pretentious, yet our morals beget single tears for your doomed race you bastards of humanity, the seed of lucifer's most liquid seed sewn through the cracks of joy gestating in an ice shell of ignorance. You walk as dead men: ab-yet shegoul zibben' ul cthulhu yen shaggoth er', BWAHAHAHAHAH!!)

brb: my "Simon Zealotes" just had a revelation and I need to clean up.
 

___

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Venetia":pigr6zr2 said:
lol

you people realize that the market's crashed a bunch of times before and then eventually bounced back, right?

great depression? black monday in 1987? 9/11? hello?

some shitty market turns are par for the course. People are GOING to spend money, the economy's not just going to magically implode one day and then everyone in the world will go instantly to a barter system?

Market analyses are a silly basis for predicting the apocalypse!
Actually if you follow market theory, you might believe that one could create an index against the apocalypse and it would be the most effective predictor we have :)

@Ixis: actually you are waaay off on your Revelation theology, even before your rant, but I'm just not interested enough in the conversation to specifically correct you :(

Hitler was the best candidate for antichrist in recent history, but he blew it. Nero was a really good one too. There's probably been a good number of them through history, I can think of a couple Popes but I don't remember their names and I don't have time to look them up.

The overarching point though is that as much as certain sects of Christianity would like to believe otherwise, the book of Revelation, the prophecies of David and others relating to the Biblical apocalypse are extremely vague and apply to many situations throughout history. There have been several points in history where many of the "signs" have lined up, the first was probably with Nero, and there are weapons, wars, conflicts, social systems, and popular figures who have very closely matched the descriptions given in the Bible existing almost since the time the Revelation was written. John believed his visions would come true within the lifetime of the people he addressed if you make some simple inferences from both Revelation and some of his other works, and I believe that to the extent orthodox Jews believe in an 'end time' it is supposed to happen within the lifetime of the messiah.

Hell you can read the wikipedia article on the Book of Revelation to learn a little bit about the controversy surrounding it, it was nearly not included in the Biblical canon and several times nearly removed. I think the biggest problem with Revelation, and with interpretations of the Bible in general, is that the people who spend the most time doing these interpretations are alarmingly ignorant about the history of the text itself. They're operating with about the same level of understanding as a person who reads the Lord of the Rings as history, for lack of ever bothering to read about the author.
 
Hey, I'm going off what I saw during a late-night movie on some Bible channel.

Anyway, I think it might help if you covered the various positions on the book of revelations (literalist, fundamentalist, "it was a parable concerning the christian uprising after the fall of rome and thus now we're living in the golden age after revelations"-ist)
 

mawk

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It's generally a bad idea to go off of other people's interpretation of any holy book. The entire reason the jihadist movement exists is that people didn't read the qu'ran for themselves and when the radicals said God wanted them to blow up America, they took their word for it. If you want any understanding of any religious subject that isn't 100% bullshit you're better off putting in the time to study the literature -- people always interpret these things in the way that best complements their world view, and some people have seriously crazy world views.
 

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