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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't the name. America has an absolutely huge number of Christian Fundamentalists and Evangelicals who honestly believe that a national ID card is the Mark of the Beast that's talked about in Revelation 13:16-17. Even mentioning it as a politician will cause large sections of the country to start referring to you as the Anti-Christ (it's not even political: it happened with Bill Clinton and it happened with Bush just the same).

The people who believe this vote at a much higher rate than the people who don't. And even the people who don't directly believe it, many of them are influenced by the people who do. "I don't actually believe Politician X is the actual Anti-Christ, but Preacher Y does make a good point about their tax policy..."

Anything new that could be called a "national ID" is going to be met with a lot of money saying it's the Mark of the Beast.

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Did they completely zone out when all this "Real ID" nonsense was rolled out? It's a defacto national ID that's going to be required for travel in the country (flying) but manages to skip out on providing any of the actual benefits a unified national Id would provide.

They absolutely did not.

Is REAL ID the beginning of the Mark of the Beast? https://www.endtime.com/podcast/real-id-update/

Students of Bible prophecy recognize this as a possible fulfillment of the prophecy found in the book of Revelation - https://www.jeremiahproject.com/new-world-order/u-s-roll-nat...

The Real ID – A National ID or Mark of the Beast? https://escapeallthesethings.com/real-id-act/

Is coming national ID 'mark of the beast'? https://www.wnd.com/2006/05/36029/

National ID Cards and the Mark Of the Beast https://countdown.org/en/entries/features/national-id-cards-...

> The people who believe this vote at a much higher rate than the people who don't

I noticed as I read that statement my first instinct was to blindly agree with you, because it feels like it might be true (from inside my bubble). But on second thought, do we actually have voting stats to back up this idea, or is it more of the phenomenon that the minority opinions making the most noise seem to be more numerous than the population who generally keep to themselves?

"white Evangelicals were an identical 26 percent of the electorate in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018" [1] even though they're only 15% of the population [2]. That number is dropping sharply as younger generations are less likely to be part of an Evangelical church.

Millennials and Gen Z are the biggest voting bloc at 27% of the population, but only represent 20% of the votes cast [3].

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/in-midterms-white-eva...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18070630/white-evangelicals-tu...

[3] https://medium.com/s/youthnow/ruined-entire-generation-of-yo...

Is the lot of money going to exceed $5B? And of course such a system could be implemented outside of a representative system influenced by voters, as many other national policies have been.

The mark of the beast is pretty specific in that it requires the right hand or forehead. I once thought maybe we'd see something with embedded RFID in that space get the fundies riled up, but machine learning of faces and gestures and gait and so forth are quite sufficient. The future for us meatbags will look more like an Amazon Go store experience, you carry the mark already as original sin just because of your slight differences from everyone else that machines can pick up on!

Make fun of the fundies if you must, but don't ignore that longstanding books are written in response to longstanding problems.

Early Christians had a lot of experience with oppressive bureaucracies -- The Holy Roman Empire, among others -- and willfully subjecting yourself to a system for faraway emperors to scrutinize and inject themselves into your personal dealings is generally not a precursor to good times and personal prosperity.

Do you mean the Roman Empire, rather than the HRE?

All of it, really. Caesar through Napoleon and plenty before, after and in between. They each did their share of taxing and warring and conquering, generally not much to the advantage of those on the outskirts of their empires.

I’ve seen many news articles against National IDs allude to that Bible verse in an obviously allegorical form, but even as someone who originally grew up in a predominantly Christian town in the American Midwest, I have never come across anyone who genuinely believed that nationals ID cards actually ARE the “Mark of the Beast” as you stated. Do you have any sources?

I added some sources in another comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20428361

Note that there is a big difference between "Christians" and "Christian Fundamentalists" or "Evangelicals". Fundamentalists and Evangelicals are politically conservative groups, Fundamentalists even more so.

I do wonder how much political influence fringe religious groups really have.

"White Evangelicals were an identical 26 percent of the electorate in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018" [1] even though they're only 15% of the population [2]. That number is dropping sharply as younger generations are less likely to be part of an Evangelical church.

Millennials and Gen Z are the biggest voting bloc at 27% of the population, but only represent 20% of the votes cast [3].

[1] http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/in-midterms-white-eva...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/11/7/18070630/white-evangelicals-tu...

[3] https://medium.com/s/youthnow/ruined-entire-generation-of-yo...

https://www.ffcoalition.com/record-evangelical-vote-in-2018-...

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