Apocalypse NWO! (The devil is in the details)
By Alisa Craddock
web posted June 12, 2006
Well, 6/6/06 passed without any earth-shaking, apocalyptic events, just as Y2K did -- much ado about nothing. Actually, scholars are now saying that the number of the Beast is 616 in the earliest known documents, but I'm not a biblical scholar, so that's for others to ponder. It's not as intriguing, though, is it? 616 just doesn't bear the ominous overtones that are associated with the sequence of repeated numbers that form the legendary symbol of the Evil One, the Beast of Revelation.
The 666 thing is always popping up in one form or another in popular cultural mythology and legend. People have used various means to try and guess who the antichrist might be, assigning ASCII numerical values to the letters in peoples' names to try and find out the identity of the Beast: Apparently the name Bill Gates, Jr. when converted to numerical values added up to 666. So did "Vicar of the Son of God" (using the Latin translation, referring to the Pope). Of course, whoever came up with that one had to invent the title to get it to add up to 666 -- "Vicar of the Son of God" is not a title ever conferred upon the Pope or ever used to describe him, but most people wouldn't know that, and those who wish to promote this particular calumny are disposed to let that minor detail slide. These formulas have less to do with prophecy than with the individual prejudices of the one doing the prophesying.
Then there are the speculations that the "Beast" is not a human being at all. Using Hebrew numerical values, 666 = www (as in world wide web), and some have speculated that the web will be the source of our enslavement. A friend's mother visiting from California once upbraided the manager of a local grocery store for having self-checkout lines in his store. "Mark of the Beast," she told him. It's all so tedious. Any good and useful thing can be turned to an evil purpose. It does not qualify those things as the "Beast".
However, as a Christian watching the world slide towards Gomorrah, it is always in the back of my mind, these "signs of the times". We believe in the Resurrection of the Lord, and that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead at the end of time. In the Catholic Church, many believe in a great chastisement that is to come. There are countless saints who have given vivid descriptions of the "end times" or of the time of the great chastisement that, reading them today, must make us pause, even gasp, at their accuracy. Here are some examples of Catholic prophecies:
"The great chastisement will come when carriages go without horses and many accidents fill the world with woe. It will come when thoughts are flying around the earth in the twinkling of an eye, when long tunnels are made for horseless machines, when men can fly in the air and ride under the sea, when ships are wholly made of metal, when fire and water great marvels do, when even the poor can read books, when many taxes are levied for war." How's that? That's Mother Shipton, (non-Catholic mystic, 16th C.).
"God will punish the world when men have devised marvelous inventions that will lead them to forgetting God. They will have horseless carriages, and they will fly like birds. But they will laugh at the idea of God, thinking that they are ‘very clever'…Men will indulge in voluptuousness, and lewd fashions will be seen." Blessed Rembordt, 18th century.
And here are snippets of others:
"When a very large number of bad books have been spread…"
"Horrible books will be freely available"
"People will speak only of money."
"When men indulge in sensuous pleasures and voluptuousness"
"When no one wishes to obey anymore"
"Men will wear women's clothes, and women will put on men's clothes."
"When the Latin Church is desolated, humiliated, and afflicted with many heresies."
"A large number of priests will join in the revolution."
"The Mohammedans will come again."
"Every man shall speak that which pleaseth him, and my [the Lord's] priests shall not have peace among themselves but shall sacrifice unto me with deceitful minds…" The apocalypse of St. Thomas, 1st century (Apocrypha).
It is startling to see the current age reflected so profoundly in these prophecies, even if one is not a believer. For those of us who believe, as far as discerning who the antichrist might be, or when the Lord will return, we are not really given a formula to figure that out. The Lord himself maintained he did not know the time of his return. We are instructed to watch for the signs, to be vigilant, and to be ready. Given the symbolic nature of the entire book of Revelation, I don't think any of it is going to be obvious, including the so-called mark of the Beast. No horned, cloven-hoofed Devil is going to come out with an arrogant smile and forked tongue and say "take my mark, or suffer the consequences." The devil never says "choose between me and Jesus" because people would choose Jesus. Instead he says "choose between freedom and slavery" -- just as Christ does. The difference is in how they/you define "freedom" and "slavery". It's that distortion mirror image again, and here is where the devil can play with your head. Like the difference between "charity" and "tolerance" how cleverly he can weave a half-truth. Not an opposite. An appealing, easier "alternative", a look-alike, a tare among the wheat, that the unwary soul might assent to, might deceive himself into believing is the same thing, until he sees later the fruits of that choice, and then the face of his deceiver is revealed when he realizes the deception.
So I have pondered often, and have done so more of late, with all the renewed interest in 6/6/06, and the recent visit of the comet whose name translates to "Watchman," exactly how a world so steeped in 666 lore could possibly be persuaded to take the devil's mark. But I have watched with increasing alarm how effectively and ferociously knowledge of Christ is being stamped from our public life, how he is ridiculed in our classrooms, treated as a product of superstition, while wise and time-tested morals are discarded as ‘relics' of a backward age. This new generation won't know any better! But that ignorance is only part of the story. The real story is the way in which we are already being conditioned to "take the mark". Read the passage in the book of Revelation that refers to the number 666.
"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. [my emphasis.] (Revelation 13:16 -- 17)
Everywhere that this new secular ideology is being foisted on the people, the threat of punishment (in the form of litigation, fines, even jail) hangs over their heads, or the withholding of vital food and medicine, or economic sanctions, or termination of employment within corporations (such as institutions where a "diversity" agenda is being instituted) for non-compliance with the goals of the New World Order. In the United Nations, the UNFPA has consistently used the tactic of denying food and medicine to countries, even in times of natural disaster when charity and compassion are the natural human response, unless those countries accept "reproductive health services" (abortion). The European Union has already begun to pressure its non-compliant member states with a threat of future economic sanctions if they do not provide reproductive health services and permit gay marriage. Individual corporations institute programs that by their nature are hostile to the religious beliefs of their employees, and compel political and ideological conformity (or complicity) from the employees, all under the pretense of a "corporate mission" or "public relations image" or "promoting diversity". But the bottom line is, if you resist, you could lose your job. And so, if you need your job, or if you don't want to lose the economic benefits of membership in a regional cartel, or if you don't want to starve to death or die of malaria or cholera, you have to submit to their diversity programs, their perverted morals, their anti-Christian goals; swallow your principles and your morals, accept what is unacceptable, take their portable vacuum aspirators and condoms and birth control pills and let them teach your children perversity in the name of "tolerance", even as you stand there shaking your head asking how anything so evil could find so many willing to promote it.
That is how we are being made ready to receive the "Mark of the Beast." It is as if we are being shown now that we have no power. "You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." It's all being controlled by money used as a club to coerce compliance, from the lowest levels to the highest. Whether the "mark" is an RFID chip or merely an assent of the will, ultimately we will all have to choose between accepting the Lie and living in comfort and security, or affirming the Truth and accepting the consequences for it. Those who choose to stand for the truth will be persecuted, for people do not easily tolerate perversions, much less live by them, so they must be coerced. When a new generation of kids has grown up without Judeo-Christian morality, they will not recognize the evil that they have been taught. Like the Hitler babies, they'll grow up with an ideology of hate and elitism, a rigid vision of utopian perfection with no room in it for love or charity or "useless eaters". If you start them young enough, you can make even the most perverse behavior sound normal and reasonable, while authentic charity is eschewed as a scourge that encourages reckless breeding of "dysgenic stock", as Margaret Sanger believed. Speaking the truth will be a hate crime, and we who speak it, criminals. Their sickness will be called virtue, while our virtue will be treated as a sickness requiring mind-altering drugs. (Or did you really think the mandatory mental health screening in schools was about lining the pockets of the drug companies?)
A new report from the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) exposes the continued insistence by the World Bank and other organs of the U.N. that "Reproductive Health Services" be included as part of the Millennium Development Goals. "Though the controversial notion of "reproductive health" has twice been rejected by heads of state," writes Austin Ruse, President of C-Fam, "the World Bank and other institutions continue to claim it is part of the Millennium Development Goals." The World Bank holds the purse strings, right? They have the power. So in the end it doesn't matter what the heads of state want. It doesn't matter what the people want. It doesn't matter what the U.N.'s stated goals are. Truth itself does not factor in. The U.N. is a many-tentacled monster, and while up front its apparent goals are trying to alleviate hunger and provide for better health care, decreasing poverty, increasing education , making a better, safer, more peaceful world, other organs operate like extortionists selling "protection". Corruption and lies seem unstoppable, whether at the micro or the macro level. There is so much money and power behind it. In the end, they all report to the same masters, who report to theirs. Just follow the money.
I have written here before that I feel that the most important thing we can do in this country to begin to restore sanity is to overturn Roe v. Wade . That was the "big lie" that was imposed on the people of this country, and has been held there by force, as all lies are. There is no greater issue separating us than how we regard human life. All of the evil that has befallen us in the wake of Roe v. Wade has at its core a fundamental change in our attitude toward the sacredness of human life, or the denial of it. We set an amoral precedent with the legalization of abortion, and we can reestablish a moral precedent by restoring the primacy of the "right to life" and an appreciation of the value of life as a gift from God essential to our individual self-worth and collective wellbeing. The notion of "brotherhood," so vital to our sense of connectedness to one another, cannot exist without acknowledging the sacredness of human life. To deny it is to deconstruct humanity itself.
That notion of brotherhood is also essential to our national identity and character, the "E Pluribus Unum" that made us great. Let that be the mark we wear, and tell the devil to go jump in a lake…(of fire). 
Alisa Craddock is a political columnist and activist in the culture war, a convert to Catholicism, and describes herself as a Christian Libertarian. In addition to Enter Stage Right, her columns have been published on Alain's Newsletter and Out2 News. She may be contacted at acrock43_j@yahoo.com.