My Husband's Been Asked To Take The Mark!!

photo credit: ekai

Because his job requires that he access secure areas of quite a few places, including the Port of New Orleans, he’s going to have to get one of these:

TSA: Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC™)
TWICs are tamper-resistant biometric credentials that will be issued to workers who require unescorted access to secure areas of ports, vessels, outer continental shelf facilities and all credentialed merchant mariners.

Obviously, I’m kidding about this being the mark. If you’re not familiar with that term, in certain end-times beliefs in Christianity, people believe that there will be a period of great trials and tribulation in a period of time leading up to the return of Jesus. One of those things will be a requirement to swear allegiance to the antichrist and take the mark to prove it.  Some kind of permanent identification, without which we will not be able to buy things, including food, and with which we will not be able to get into heaven.  There’s a handful of verses in the bible on this, and a lot of dissension and in-fighting about what they mean. Personally, I’m not that interested.

None of it is a dealbreaker in terms of the Christian faith – and by dealbreaker, I mean things like Jesus’ divinity or his atoning death for sin; things that form the very foundation. Tim LaHaye has made a bundle off it, and guys like this have lots of dedicated followers. I generally mock those people, but not so meanly that I’ll have to apologize profusely if they’re right. Bottom line: people who get paranoid about every little thing (“Social Security numbers are the mark of the beast!”) annoy me. Given the rate of technological advancement today, there’s simply no way to predict what’s going to be developed in ten years or even in five.

When I first saw, in 1981, how computers could be connected across a great distance, there is no way that I dreamed of the current internet and the way things are connected today. And few, if any, other people did. Back then, most people had black and white monitors. I don’t remember if the acid-green or amber monitors had even come out at that time, so I’d be pretty surprised if any person back then envisioned something like, say, YouTube. Getting into Digital Equipment Corporation’s mainframe in the middle of the night to play Legend of Zork didn’t exactly inspire dreams of the wii.

My point is that IF you subscribe to all these beliefs, you STILL have no real idea how it’s all going to play out. And EVEN IF you’re right… what difference does it make? It’s not like you can spread the word, raise awareness, and stop it from happening. If it’s all foreordained, if this is all inevitable, then why stress yourself out over it?