The Mark Of The Stupid (Fiery The Angels Fell, A Series, Part Three.)

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13:16-18

There's something I'm getting really tired of seeing. There's a lot of these nuts and two-bit conspiracy theorists who keep coming at me with "The COVID-19 vaccine is the "Mark of the Beast" or some secret way to microchip people, or some stupid shit like that.

Even my ex-wife is one of these nuts. Mike Lindell, the "My Pillow Guy" is just the latest idiot to parrot this crap.

I'm a former member of the End Times Prophecy movement myself. From that standpoint I'd like to say that if you're getting religious or theological advice from drug-addled bedding company CEO's you probably need to go home and rethink your life.

And why?

Among other things, let me fucking tell you, these people must have calves the size of Cantaloupes from all that moving of the goalposts every damn time something happens. 

I'm serious. Everything is proof of the End Times to these fucking people, or at least everything but whatever debased shit their 'side' is doing, i,e, whoever it is the "Conservatives" favor, which is usually what's closest to actually fitting the bill. But no, no, not THAT authoritarian imperialist regime.

I'm here to tell you, all the End Times Prophecy shit turned out to be for a lot of people was just another way to ratfuck liberals and moderate conservatives. It's horse shit, and this very rapidly became apparent in the post-Y2K era especially given the movement's relative torpor during the Bush 43 years and how it very rapidly spun back up during the 2008 election cycle, then there was the Harold Camping false prophecy, the 2012 bullshit, and of course, the entire Trump era.

These people basically all signed up to follow somebody who could've easily been written as a bumptious, buffoonish Antichrist in one of their stupid End Times novels, and I say that as somebody who both purchased and read roughly the entire first half or so of the Left Behind series novels.

Revelation is very specific about the form that a lot of this stuff, if it ever actually happens, would take. But even more to the point, so are the popular interpretations thereof. You're telling me, that if some potential Antichrist came along and told all the MAGA nuts and the Q-freaks that they could kill all their imagined enemies...that they wouldn't be lined up 'round the block to take whatever "Mark" this particular "Beast" had to offer?

Listen here, first off, I just had to set up a new cell phone today. Nobody needs a "Mark of the Beast" when we all quite willingly carry around these little bricks of technology that track our every move and connect us in a vast web to basically every other person in the world that has one.

Secondly, what the "Mark of the Beast" itself signifies in the context of Christianity is the acceptance of the World's false system of having politics, popularity, power and wealth...and those people and things that symbolize them...be your God. If you've rejected the poor brown-skinned Jewish carpenter and itinerant Rabbi in favor of the brash orange real estate guy turned President, you're already screwed according to that metric.

Third, how these people ever got from something as simple as a number (granted, that is still allegorical to any number of other concepts) to things like microchips and vaccines and various forms of politics is something I'll never understand. And then, they end up failing according to their own standards.

The sooner we all find a way to decouple American Christianity from conspiracy theories, and more to the point from the fear, hatred of the other and heretical Gnosticism that always goes with that, the better off we're all going to be. People have been trying to find shortcuts to get to the good part of the afterlife at least since Ancient Greece, and it never seems to work out in the end, but people still do it.

If you think God, or the gods, or whatever's out there isn't smart enough to have figured that bullshit out by now, you deserve whatever you're going to get. But all too often, this crazy bullshit comes from the fear that somebody else...especially somebody these people don't like, might get to go to heaven instead of them.

Stop living in fear, because it's fear that divides us from the truth. It's a mark of foolishness to keep believing in conspiracy theories.

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

~Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Part Two