# Non-Christian Dopers: Would you feel any trepidation about 666 or a mark on your head or hand? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 22, 2020, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384 "2020-04-22T22:15:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/1 "2020-04-22T22:15:49Z")
In Great Debates, we had a thread called [“Pandemic opens the door to the mark of the Beast in Revelation.”](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=22264488#post22264488) It is a prevalent belief among some Christian circles that there will some day rise a tyrant with global power who will require all people to have a special mark on their right hand or forehead - and that without this mark, one will not be allowed to buy or sell. Some relevant Scripture is as follows: > [@](#): > > He also makes all people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, in order that no one may buy or sell unless he has the mark—the name of the beast or the number of his name. Here is wisdom: Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, because it is the number of a man. His number is 666. (Revelations 13: 16-18) > And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name. (Revelations 14:11) This Mark of the Beast has been the subject of countless conspiracy theories and endless speculation for many years. Now, the vast majority of people worldwide do not ascribe to this belief - either because they are not Christian, or, although being Christian, do not believe in a futurist/literal interpretation of Revelation. But, I was curious to ask around: For non-Christian Dopers, suppose there were some day some bar code or digital chip, or the number 666, or tattoo/mark that became universally required of everyone in order to buy or sell - would you feel any trepidation about having such a mark put on your body? (Not necessarily for theological reasons, but also for civil-rights, political, Big Brother/Orwellian concerns or any other such reservations) ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/2 "2020-04-22T23:26:43Z")
> [@](#): > > Non-Christian Dopers: Would you feel any trepidation about 666 or a mark on your head or hand? Good God, no. ---
**Author:** ![snfaulkner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snfaulkner/32/433_2.png) [@snfaulkner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snfaulkner)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/3 "2020-04-22T23:30:30Z")
Who says I don’t have one already? ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/4 "2020-04-22T23:32:41Z")
if everyone had one, I’d be stupid not to, eh? ---
**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2020, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/5 "2020-04-22T23:39:32Z")
I don’t want ANYTHING tattooed on me. Making it 666 is irrelevant. ---
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 12:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/6 "2020-04-23T00:11:22Z")
I don’t understand the question. Is this about the superstition around the number 666, or the idea of some kind of “mark of the beast” which isn’t religious in nature? If the former, it’s just a number and I couldn’t care less\*. If I’m forced to have a tattoo or bar code, I’ll happily take 666. If it’s the latter… fine, I’ll bite. That would be undesirable. But, and I’m not the first to make this observation, we already have that in small ways. Very difficult to do business without a credit card. Or a bank account. Or some kind of technology accounts for phones, email and whatnot. - One of the important official numbers in my life actually has 666 in there very prominently. Enough that people ask me about it all the time. I tell them it was assigned randomly… as far as I know. I also once lived in an apartment 13. They’re just numbers. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/7 "2020-04-23T00:34:46Z")
Wouldn’t Jewish dopers be more apt to “have trepidation”, remembering when a government wanted people to have a number tattooed on them? Me, I’d be suspicious of it given the “Big Brother” aspect of it. (Christian here, but one who can recognize analogies and over-the-top Apocryphal Lit like the Book of Revelation…) (Oh, and who realizes the Bible was not meant to be a history book… either past or future). ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/8 "2020-04-23T00:49:57Z")
We’ll certainly soon have implanted devices for various purposes, which will no doubt be met with some initial resistance, then widely accepted. The question of whether our behavior can be tracked is an important civil rights issue, but really no more so than with mobile phones. The specific idea of “some bar code or digital chip… that became universally required of everyone in order to buy or sell”? Well, we’re likely to go cashless in the near future, and credit & debit cards could be replaced by payment systems implemented with implanted technology. So I can easily see this happening in our lifetimes. But I don’t think there’s anything inherently nefarious about technology progressing in this direction. The world has had plenty of totalitarian regimes with oppressive levels of surveillance using primitive technology - or no tech at all, when the population is encouraged to spy on one another, as in the Cultural Revolution or North Korea. Technology is not the problem, there’s no reason we can’t have free democratic societies with _any_ level of advanced technology. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/9 "2020-04-23T00:57:38Z")
I would love it, as I could then bug fucking Christians by waving the mark at them and making growling noises. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/10 "2020-04-23T01:01:21Z")
> [@Llama\_Llogophile](#): > > …If I’m forced to have a tattoo or bar code, I’ll happily take 666… I would not, because of the significance attached to it by religious nutjobs. I would not want to enable their nonsense. The same type of people that I would not vote into senior government positions with access to nuclear launch codes - people who believe that conflict in the Middle East is _desirable_, as fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. ---
**Author:** ![MEBuckner](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mebuckner/32/2896_2.png) [@MEBuckner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MEBuckner)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/11 "2020-04-23T01:03:20Z")
American, secular humanist, lifelong atheist here. The number 666, zero trepidation. If I got a new license plate number or a new bank account or credit card or something, and it happened to have the number “6” three times in a row somewhere in it, I’d just laugh and crack a joke about it. Being required to have some kind of mark on my body, or having to have a microchip implanted in me, _would_ bother me, not for theological reasons but for civil liberties / privacy / general human dignity and autonomy reasons. Now, I’m assuming this is just something like, for reasons of “national security” we all are now legally required to carry a photo identification with us at all times; or, persons who have already had the virus and/or been vaccinated are given a Certificate of Immunity they have to carry around with them when they go out in public for some period. The first scenario I would object to on civil liberties grounds; the second scenario might be a pretty reasonable thing to do under the circumstances (the details would definitely matter). But either way, I still wouldn’t be thinking anything along the lines of “Wow, I was wrong! This is all coming to pass exactly as it was foretold in the Book of Revelation in the Holy Bible! There _is_ a God, and I’d better accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior!” Of course one thing that always bothers me is the way non-Christians are portrayed as totally clueless in certain Evangelical pop literature. I mean, if thousands and thousands of born-again Christians mysteriously vanish, and then some mysterious charismatic person is elected President of the World (and is also head of the New Global Religion), and the new World President decrees all good World Citizens must have a QR code tattooed on their right hand and on their forehead–at some point, it becomes a “Duh!” moment. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/12 "2020-04-23T01:24:34Z")
> [@snfaulkner](#): > > Who says I don’t have one already? I have a 999. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/13 "2020-04-23T01:39:49Z")
666? Not a consideration at all. My vet’s phone number used to have 6660 at the end, and there were certainly beasts there, but other than that, I don’t know why the opinion of a person with psychosis who happened to get published should influence me. ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/14 "2020-04-23T02:08:33Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I have a 999. The tattoo on your tummy looks like an upside down goat in a pentagram with a 999 to you… ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/15 "2020-04-23T02:12:32Z")
The only misgivings I would have would be that all those fundamentalist Christians who would view me as The Beast etc and could become violent or refuse me service or whatever ---
**Author:** ![Isosleepy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/isosleepy/32/479_2.png) [@Isosleepy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isosleepy)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/16 "2020-04-23T03:12:49Z")
I guess if I were in an originalist mood I’d insist on 616, and sneer at all you mislabeled sheeple. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/17 "2020-04-23T03:23:32Z")
What would a mark/tattoo/encoded number in a chip with the number 666 on everyone accomplish? That’s foolish and has no informational value at all if everyone gets one. And as should be noted, the number 666 is simply the sum of the numeric values of “Caesar Nero” in Hebrew spelling, and that’s really mundane if you think about it. Revelation is a fevered/drugged/psychotic dream about the state of the world at the turn of the first to the second century AD, heavily cribbed from Daniel and other apocalyptic books of the Old Testament, so I can’t see how this drivel should have any influence today. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/18 "2020-04-23T03:33:38Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > What would a mark/tattoo/encoded number in a chip with the number 666 on everyone accomplish? That’s foolish and has no informational value at all if everyone gets one. It promotes teamwork. And egalitarianism. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/19 "2020-04-23T03:35:27Z")
> [@Isosleepy](#): > > I guess if I were in an originalist mood I’d insist on 616, and sneer at all you mislabeled sheeple. I once had 6616 as the PIN for my debit card. Was easy to remember. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [April 23, 2020, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384/20 "2020-04-23T03:37:34Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > It promotes teamwork. And egalitarianism. That’s no more egalitarian than the fact that (almost) everyone has two eyes. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-christian-dopers-would-you-feel-any-trepidation-about-666-or-a-mark-on-your-head-or-hand/852384.md?page=2)