Things are getting crazy out there, and the crazy will escalate. In response to something someone said about compulsory vaccination, I wrote the comment below. I believe it is relevant here.

-------------

This is right over the target. Whether or not THIS is THE 'mark of the beast' is yet to be determined. It could just be the warm up for the real thing. But it is in the same category. Here is what I think that passage is really talking about: people buying into the 'system' to such an extent that they are willing to lose themselves in it at any and all costs--even their own soul.

Our Enemy is a great imitator. He likes to take good things and bastardize them, creating human casualties along the way. (especially children) The 'system' is the ultimate. Christians are one in Christ. Not as a metaphor, but a reality. Satan wishes to create the same kind of relationship but he is, well, not God. So he looks for other ways. If God will create a plan to unite humanity in his own body, Satan will do the next best thing, unite humanity in his system.

More than a specific 'mark,' it is about the willing complicity to subsume one's self to an arrangement one knows is evil to its core. The 'mark', whatever it ends up being, is only the outward symbol of what the heart has already decided.

Lib-progs and not a few conservatives do not understand the significance of the freedom to buy and trade and move and travel. How we spend our money and where is tied up with all our daily choices, choices which themselves are an expression of our desires, priorities, and so on. People say, "We will just restrict businesses; we'll leave the people alone." Not a few conservatives go along with this. But if one restricts business broadly enough, it has the SAME EFFECT as if you had shackled the people, or channeled them in the direction YOU wanted. Which is why every totalitarian regime made sure to hold the reins of commerce so tightly and so brutally.

As the wickedness of the 'system' becomes more vivid, the moral choice as to whether or not we can, in good conscience, participate in it, will become starker. If one does not want to be forced by their own poverty to participate in such wickedness, they must take steps NOW to develop a parallel 'system' which will allow them to make an alternate choice, without seeing their children wince with hunger.

The above is perhaps the most important thing I've ever written.