But did they really think that it would be so fucking obvious? If that were the case, where would the deception be? Deception implies trickery, some tricky shit going down, so getting the literal 666-mark on the body isn’t going to be too subtle, is it? Maybe some fundie who knows his bible might suddenly say, “Hey, that’s the mark of the Beast! Everyone’s got the number 666 all over them. Gee, this must be the doing of the Antichrist,” and so forth so on, you get the drift, it’s too in-your-face, there simply isn’t any deception involved; it would simply be blatant 666-ville everywhere you look.
No, that literal, evangelical-fundie interpretation is part of the deception. It is a false interpretation. No one is literally getting the mark of the Beast written anywhere on them or on their credit cards. Can you imagine what would happen if that became a mandate? Yeah. The Antichrist wouldn’t be all too wily then, would he?
I was a Reaganomics-Republican Christian from ’79 to about ’82. It started fading from me, I started to shed its poisons already in ’82, though it took a little while afterward, and there were several distinctively demonic field-influences that tried to get me back in, they were few and far between, but they did happen a very small number of times over the years following. Reagan is the cornerstone of today’s Republican-Christian America, he is its revered contemporary patriarch.
So, today’s Republican Christian, who is the Only True Christian, is a proponent of the Reagan paradigm, in fact they refer to him as the “greatest president” (whatever that means). Remember all the hype about Reagan and 666? How his full name Ronald Wilson Reagan has six letters each, how he moved to a ranch with the street address of 666, how there were all kinds of uncanny Book of Revelation correlations to him, Nancy, and his presidency? The guy was just a puppet, but that’s not the point. Was Reagan the Beast? That's not the point. Because that’s not where it ends, that was just the beginning. The mark of the Beast is not the literal number. The mark of the Beast is a paradigm. It is an ideology. Hence, if it is embraced, as it is embraced indeed with fervent, irrational, patriarchal zeal, one gets imprinted with it. It seeps in. It gets assimilated into the body, into your head, and everywhere. It overtakes everything, because the paradigm becomes your world-view, your socioreligioeconomic Wissenschaft: “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.” Revelation 13:17 (KJV).
Things, events, and all living things⎯the totality⎯have fields, spheres of influence, they extend and radiate to reinforce feedback loops of Habit, they self-perpetuate. You can debunk the whole Reagan-Beast correlation and consign it all to coincidence, and believe that somehow the collective unconscious did not pick up on something; you can say that it’s all just a ruse by the Antichrist to keep the masses deceived about True Christianity, which is Republican and founded upon the precedent of Reagan, and that you worship the one true God. Indeed, if anything that keeps you from your Republican Jesus is just a lie for you, if synchronicities are not enough, if you believe in “science” only when it suits you, when in fact you believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and that the sun stayed in the sky without setting so that Joshua and his army could massacre the Canaanites, then so be it. So be it, so be it, because that’s the nature of the Beast.
