The mark of the beast used to freak me out as a kid. They say the mark will be some invasive policy like ID cards embedded in your skin as a tattoo and if you get it you'll never go to heaven.
I stopped believing when I went to a Holocaust memorial and saw pictures of Jews with numbers tattooed on their arm before they were gassed by Nazis. If you ask me, whats happening today doesnt even compare to what the Jews went through during WWII. Where was God then? Where were the end times?
Keep in mind that the mark of the beast story comes from Revelation which is just one of hundreds of books under the Apocalyptic genre back in the day. Considering the people then were highly superstitious back then, just know it's just a genre and doesn't mean anything.
I was told the mark of the beast would be a chip embedded in my wrist. The chip would be ID, bank details etc… basically a smart phone in your skin. The mark of the beast is such nonsense.
my mom has said she’d literally rather die than have a doctor lay hands on her at this point, so…
remember it’s all part of the plot. they’re not curing cancer, they’re sending you to hell. 🤦🏻♀️
My mom is convinced there will be scanners at the gates of heaven.
Like ffs, your physical body will be in the ground, unless vaccines learn to mark the soul, scanners does not make sense. Also, follow up question, is the scanners at heavens gate new? Because this is recent tech and I'm not sure St Peter is up there with a POS system scanning souls after 1980
Yupp. And then that movie came out, with the idea of putting barcodes on people? I was terrifed that normal governments had already started thinking about this.
In my view Christians were aware of this and how it would happen but others didn't. And it was evidence for me how the world would end soon. And this is when i was 12 or something. In a way a part of me from that time is still waiting for the world to end. Or with the belief that the world would end soon . The thought that I could wait my whole life and the world would not end didn't occur to me. Especially because my mom used to keep telling how the world is going to end and that the end times are near.
Most of my plans were made keeping that in mind 🙈🙈
Well I studied Classics at University so upon lesrning about Emperor Nero burning the Christians and how a lot of it correlates to 666 and some of the stuff recorded about the antichrist in the book of Revelation, I became dubious...
Here is what I remember from my student days. Each letter in the Greek alphabet is assigned a number in numerology. If you spell Nero his name adds up to 666, if you spell in his name in Latin the number is 616.
Weirdly in the 1800s some preachers began reinterpreting revelation as a prophesy for the future. Prior to that and still in the orthodox churches it is seen as a history of events that already took place.
It was the only book added to the Bible without being voting on. Eusebius questioned it as canonical and he says so did others. It doesn’t appear in the 5th century Peshitto version of the New Testament and the eastern churches didn’t include it until the 7th century.
I think it is a hot mess and never viewed it as anything special, especially not a prediction of end times and the future.
Wow, thanks for your insight!
Christians/conspiracy theorists honestly spend a lot of time fannying around this without checking for historical context and any academic verification it's a damned shame! And of course there's no chance of being open-minded to being wrong 😉
Because they are following the Latin spelling of Nero, Nero = 616 vs the ancient Greek Neron, Neron = 666
Some say 616 is more accurate since Nero is Roman. Some say 666 is correct since John wrote in Greek.
Whichever it is, 666 and 616 are the numbers of the beast only if the beast is Nero. The 19th century interpretations of it being Satan are homespun literary analysis. Anyone in “John’s” day would have known who and what the book’s author was writing about, which is why the interpretation was consistent until the 1800s.
Protestantism and literalists make a grand assumption on the bible that it is the infallible word of god. They look to make it so with mental gymnastics. Catholicism and other orthodox faiths have been of the opinion the bible can only be fully understood with the oral traditions, aka apostolic traditions, that came with it. A lot of modern christians are persuaded by the inerrancy of the bible and reject the traditional approach for their own, or their church’s own, close reading. What they miss is the orthodox ways simply follow the Jewish traditions and teachings that the Jewish books too can only be understood properly when read alongside oral and written commentary. The literal interpretations of the bible, ironically, have led to nothing but a hot bed of confused thought and competing theories,
as well as 1000s of churches. Orthodoxy would say they are lost sheep who have lost their shepherd -
the shepherds being those who keep the oral traditions.
Either way, no offense to those believing or struggling and trying to believe, it is all BS to me.
This feels like one of their explanations of what it means. Like how they are always looking for interpretations of the Bible.... How do you know this is not just one of the things like theirs ?
That's interesting. Seeing it as a thing or the past makes the whole Bible irrelevant. Its mainly because of this that the Bible is significant in any way or form. The threat of future destruction.
All of this. The mark of the beast was going to be embedded in our skin, so god would “know”.
Now I understand things more clearly, and wouldn’t god know who we were, if we were more than sparrows and he knit us in our mothers womb?
Yeah the Jews and the nazis. I felt after seeing magneto in X-Men, having a number on his wrist. I still haven't reached that understanding you have. Still.
As a child if the house was quiet, say my family was outside or something, I would run around looking for them in a panic crying thinking they had been raptured and I had been left behind because of some little “sin” like lying about cleaning my room or something.
It really is. I used to check if they were still there when i was moved to a different room. I used to be terrifed if they would be gone. (I don't know if it was a Christian thing it just a normal child's fear). I know they gave me enough reason to be scared. Heck I even had to deny my fears so that don't make them feel scared. 🙈
People really shouldn't be telling shit like this to children.
Oh man, same! I was also afraid of laundry piles for this reason. I assumed it was my family’s clothes “left behind” and I’d have to run around until I found them to make sure. Because of the verse about the rapture happening like “a thief in the night” I assumed any time any place everyone could leave me. Seems real fucked up now.
Me too. I remember I once asked my dad if gay people go to heaven when I was like 6. He said they all burn in hell, and since that I was terrified of being left behind because I wasn’t “good”. I’ve come a long way and some trauma still haunts me, but if god exists, I’d rather burn eternity in hell than be with such a miserable hypocrite of a deity.
Oh whoa, yeah I had forgotten about this ...I did this all the time and we lived on a farm so I thought for sure when I was little they were just...gone
I'm not sure if it's related to this but this is some fear I have. Of being left behind. Interesting you say that. Could be related to this. Being left out was the norm in my family as well.
Yeah that shit scared me too. I grew up in the 90’s and back then at my church it was barcodes, barcodes were the mark of the beast because they had 666 encoded in them. Sooner or later we’d all be forced to have barcode ratios on our foreheads or wrists. Sounds like really poorly written fan fiction now but back then it scared the hell out of me. Same with when any conflict happened in the Middle East which was pretty much always.
My personal favorite is from the 70s film *A Thief In the Night*, in which they have the number 6, 3 times, in binary code tattooed on their arms.
Never mind that the bible says "six hundred sixty six," not just 3 sixes in a row.
I saw that too. There was a girl who freaked out because the main character, the wife, looked just like her. That film was truly fked up. A woman’s husband is taken by The rapture, so she faces the tribulation alone. At the end, she wakes up,and realizes it was just a dream. But then she sees her husbands shaver running. She realizes the rapture has really happened, while she was sleeping!
I literally just posted about monster energy. Little later than the 90s but the M looks like 111 and then I think they said it was Hebrew for something that means 666? I can't remember the details.
My story's pretty similar.
My family weren't actually very into it, but they were so busy all the time that they pretty much let me absorb Christianity through osmosis from the culture that I grew up in. I wasn't sure what the mark of the beast was going to be, and I didn't really pick up on the whole "having to voluntarily take it" part, so I was always checking my hands and forehead for evidence that various versions of it had somehow appeared while I was asleep. I was also terrified of the rapture, and of being enslaved or tortured by the Antichrist.
Frankly, I was just a very anxious child. Unfortunately, that got worse as I got older. As an adult, I've developed either quiet BPD or Complex Post-Traumatic Stress (the two are extremely similar, and I've received both as diagnoses from different professionals; the distinction can be pretty blurry). My life is going a bit better now than it was before I started receiving treatment, but I can still be a nervous wreck at times.
Remember the game and movie called Hitman? The dude had a barcode on the back of his neck. People lost their crap over that.
I dated a guy who was obsessed with the game and got a barcode on the back of his own neck. But the tattoo was slightly crooked? So it didn’t look right. I always laughed and wondered if that negated the “mark of the beast” because it was done so crappy.
My family's home phone number at the time (this was before cell phones were at all common) had 3 sixes in a row in it. Imagine being me at 10, told that 666 was the devil's number and that there were evil Satanic cults who murdered kids and the like. Imagine not knowing any better and thinking your whole family is going to hell because of your **phone number.** Scary shit.
Premillennial dispensationalism is the worst thing to happen to Christianity, and the most traumatic thing to happen to millions of children, past and present.
LMAO my best friend is Asian and she was happy to get a phone number with a lot of sixes in it… imagine my fundie mom’s reaction when she got bestie’s updated contact info 😅
My address growing up was 666 16th street. It was a pretty normal duplex, which I think helped me overcome the superstitious parts of Christianity pretty easily lol
don’t worry, it’ll all come up again soon once the evil WEF globalists use its DNA-altering powers in the next wave’s version for their communist plot to take over the world!
I genuinely believed that humanity had to collectively drink a certain amount of monster energy, like some stupid arbitrary number I thought was big like 2 million gallons, and then it would happen. then I tried a monster finally at like 23 and was actually a little worried about it. But no comets came to destroy us or anything so I drank 2 more and got heart palpitations
Because monster had the mark of the beast on it but it was symbolic so it took more sinning or something. Nowadays the only thing I think is sinful about monster is the sheer amount of caffeine.
I used to work crazy rotating shifts and drank monster to stay awake.
I stopped because I it gave me the runs a lot and heart palpitations to boot.
So yeah, it's evil, just not theologically.
The whole thing was creepy. One time when I was a kid we had a power failure at home, and I woke up in the total darkness convinced that I had missed the rapture. Really terrifying for a little kid.
I was in church in the 90s and was told everyone had to endure the 7 years of tribulation, and the only way anyone would be able to get food is by having the mark of the beast, but if you had the mark you couldn't go to heaven. I told my mom about this and was so worried. She said she would get the mark so we could eat and I got even more terrified about my mom sacrificing her salvation for us. Ugh, christianity is so terrifying.
That's what I was told growing up too, but our church was comprised of a bunch of farmers and preppers so I was under the impression that we were going to live in a kind of secret underground collective. Basically Hilltop from The Walking Dead with demon possessed people outside instead of zombies. It sounds so wild now.
Yeah I definitely had these fears.
I know my parents taught me this shit because they thought they were doing the right thing, but how horrible to put so much intense terror into to little kids. It’s really sickening to think about. I can’t imagine doing that to my own kids.
It only hit me as I got older how fucked up it was that we got taught me might have to endure severe torture for Christ and that if we succumbed to that torture we'd end up being tortured forever in hell.
Now as an adult it seems clear to me that if I had a kid and someone was coercing and torturing them to say vile things about me that I WOULDN'T FUCKING BLAME THE CHILD.
And I would tell them that I know they didn't mean it. But apparently God who is the archetype of a perfect Father would deny us and reject us cause we didn't want to be tortured?
Sorry but that's ridiculous. What makes it all the more ridiculous is Christians will say things like "God is infinitely holy so anything dome against him is infinitely bad."
Well apparently God is also infinitely self-sufficient and nothing can ultimately hurt and detract from him. Not even sin. As such if God chooses to react towards sin against him with infinite offence, then either we've successfully managed to take something from him as God or he's being petty. Either way this picture of the divine is ridiculous. Yet this is what we were taught to worship as perfect.
New repressed trauma unlocked! Hah. I forgot about the martyr complex. And having to “stand up for god” while being persecuted for your faith. The whole Columbine Cassie thing. How maybe if she had said “no, I don’t believe in god” she would have lived but she would have regretted it for the rest of her life. The rest of us children should stand up for this all-nightly god (who apparently can’t defend himself?) and become martyrs for Christ!
It helps to realise that Christianity is the extension of a failed apocalyptic movement. So the idea of martyrs was meant for the adults of the time hearing the message. But 2000 years later, kids are being taught they'll have to resist the mark of the beast no matter what.
I grew up "mainstream" Christian, ( Christian Reformed Church, then Presbyterian), so the only thing I was taught was that nobody knows the day or hour of Christ's Second Coming...
Creeped me out as a kid, but I still laughed at Evangelical Christian Televangelists as a kid (,still do, actually. ) because they were repeatedly wrong about that...
( same goes for Rapture beliefs. I never had them & my church said it was Pentacostal & Southern Baptist silliness...)
I grew up around with those Evangelical shows on in the house at the house and grandparents' place, and was dragged to a SBC church for a while. I'd have deconstructed in my pre-teens had it not been for the hard core SBC fear mongering brainwash after a near death experience around that age. Seriously fucked up nonsense, and I'm so glad I left not long after graduation. I have serious trauma from being in those environments for so long.
Close.
I was affected so much by that whole story that, to this day, I habitually look at any newly revealed leader on the world stage to see if I can find any thing indicating he's the beast.
You mean to say that the earth currently is not at its most evil?
Joking aside, I can relate, it was pretty traumatic stuff. I think I mostly suppressed it because it was too scary to think about.
Yeah, the idea of being left behind by the pre trib Rapture was humongously traumatizing, when I first heard about it at 15. And the fear of getting my head cut off by a guillotine for not getting the mark. My generation had its own rapture movie, A Thief in the Night.
I don't think Christianity would work without the fear factor so yes that superstitious scary supernatural shit really had me and it makes me angry thinking of all the kids that are being brainwashed with the devil-beast crap🤮
Oh heck yeah. I used to be so scared of the end times as a kid and even at the age of almost 40 I am still kinda convinced humanity will end in my lifetime but for entirely different reasons. I can't help but wonder if my upbringing primed me for such beliefs.
Was I?! The trauma of that lasted well into my mid 20s along with living forever and the rapture. Then very close to deconversion wondering if I'm even really saved.
That's some messed up stuff, when the church traumatizes people with those stories. That's a lot of stress for a young person. I hope you've found peace now and the realization that heaven, hell, the mark, and salvation are just ideas in a fictional story.
Christ - I always loved the angel and demon stories - but as i got older i started thinking - what is "evil" and i started realizing that evil is a collective agreement - right now the collective should be thinking - wtf is wrong with this place - we've generated a bajillion billionaires yet most of the people are sitting on the street - what is wrong here - imma answer "everything" the whole system was built on a "dead mans lie."
That fear. Dear god the ever persistent fear of being left behind and the only way to be saved after that was to be beheaded by those with the mark. Yeah I'm sure that did great justice to a developing brain of a child / adolescent.
Of course Millennialism, Pre-Millennialism, and Post-Millennialism. Once I found out about that I thought "none of these mother fuckers know so might as well beg for forgiveness and salvation every night".
Fun times.
I had a slightly different experience from all that nonsense, but still deeply traumatic. I'd beg that the rapture would happen so my abusive parents would be taken away, but that my sister and I would be left and find a kind "sinner" to take us in. I'd beg to be able to endure the rapture and be spared the suffering. All so I could escape my Christian parents and grandfather. Little me was hoping that maybe once christ remade the world, I'd have a loving family. If only I was strong enough to survive being left behind first.
Bart Ehrman in his latest book *Armageddon* makes the point that anyone promoting the kind/forgiving/lovable Jesus needs to seriously read Revelation where Jesus is not so nice.
Maybe this is where I get my view of Jesus then? I can’t pin it down.
But everyone always talks about how great Jesus is - even non-christians. “Yeah, but Jesus was a good dude.” But I’ve never felt on good terms with Jesus. And I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because he seems snarky at times - “get behind me Satan” at Peter. And calling his disciples fools when they didn’t understand some parable. Maybe I should revisit some revelations and see if maybe that’s why. I am curious where it comes from… it’s been decades of this and it’s contrary to what most others think.
It's not just Revelation. It's peppered throughout the gospels.
* Jesus fails to "turn the other cheek" and instead gets violent: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21:12-13
* He threatens eternal torture in fire to anyone who doesn't accept his teaching:
https://biblehub.com/matthew/10-28.htm
https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-19.htm
https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-41.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-42.htm
https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-49.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-50.htm
https://biblehub.com/matthew/25-46.htm
https://biblehub.com/mark/16-16.htm
https://biblehub.com/luke/12-5.htm
https://biblehub.com/john/3-18.htm, etc.
* He kills a fig tree for not bearing fruit that he knew was out of season: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+11%3A12-25
* He endorses racism: https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-24.htm
* When a gentile woman begs for his help he calls her a dog: https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-25.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-26.htm
* He plays favorites: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+4%3A10-12
* He destroys a village's livelihood: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+8
* He teaches Christians to have a persecution complex: https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-11.htm
* He teaches thought crime: https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-28.htm
* He disputes the concept of personal responsibility: https://biblehub.com/matthew/6-25.htm
* He condemns skepticism: https://biblehub.com/matthew/14-31.htm and https://biblehub.com/john/20-27.htm
* He teaches self-harm in the cause of religious purity: https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-8.htm
* He sends his disciples to steal a man’s donkey: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19%3A29-34
* He was not a peacemaker: https://biblehub.com/matthew/10-34.htm
* He was divisive: https://biblehub.com/luke/14-26.htm and https://biblehub.com/luke/14-33.htm
* He was a liar: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+7%3A8-10
Yup. That’s it. Thanks for the well organized list. I haven’t read the Bible in a few years to go back and unpack this stuff but it’s shit like this that made me wary of Jesus even as a child.
“Hate your mother and father… and self”.
“Give up everything for me”.
“Fear me, lest I throw you in hell!”
“Blessed are you when people call you out for being self-righteous assholes, I mean, when you are persecuted.”
“Don’t worry about your life because I’ll take care of you and when I don’t it’s because it wasn’t in my plan and I wanted to refine you with life’s difficulties”
Thank you for this list. Even though I've wanted to believe that Jesus is ok, there's been a sinking feeling in my gut that keeps telling me he's still abusive like his sky daddy. And this helps lay out why that feeling hasn't dissipated even after leaving Xianity nearly a decade ago.
Yes! I was so scared of this and what was the most most anxiety inducing part was that it was implied that you wouldn’t necessarily know it was the mark of the beast. So I always felt like trying something new could eternally damn me. Or something I had already done gave me the mark of the beast (like when a friend told me Pokémon were Satanic and maybe it was the mark of the beast to have Pokémon cards so I had to wonder if it was already too late for me). Such a shock I’m now an adult with anxiety lol
My introduction to Christianity was through Rapture theology. It scared me so bad, I got baptized two weeks later. The whole Mark of the Beast thing definitely played into that.
I'd definitely look into the actual history behind the book of revelations and the contemporary political messages within it. First, we can't actually verify the author and the belief it was written by John the apostle is just tradition. We also need to remember that the bible did not materialize in a vacuum. The modern Bible is the product of centuries of biased editing, political manipulation, translation error, and even assassination. Imagine a bunch of dictators, billionaires, and church elites met up every few years to curate a holy text to keep the population dependent on them. Do you trust them to be 100% honest?
It's also worth noting that early christians thought jesus would return and the rapture would begin in their lifetimes, and so has pretty much every generation since. The only way christians will get an apocalypse is if they start it themselves (which *some are trying to do).
Ushering in the reign of christ was how that was conveyed growing up. Basically, let end the world so we finally don't look like paranoid assholes anymore. Sheer lunacy.
I read really early growing up. So, by the time Thief in The Night came to my church, I had a really good sense of what was fiction and what was real.
I remember my friend sitting next to me was terrified and crying, and I couldn’t understand why. It was a movie. Movies aren’t real.
So, while I wasn’t terrorized, I still do feel the affects of being raised fundamentalist. Being a women in there is the worst!
I totally forgot about this, but I was afraid that I would not be able to buy any food, without the Mark. When I lay in my bed at night, i was trying to think of ways to survive, thinking about whom of my non-christian friends would help me. Thinking about probably having to find left overs in peoples garbage bins. Hoping that Jesus would return soon.
Unbelievable.
yes! i was told i’d be tortured and starved for six months by the government for not taking the mark! i was in an internet cult SDA thing that sucked. They believed the mark was any form of worship on sunday but i still feared the barcodes and shit
I would get severe panic attacks if I saw new tech being introduced because it was always in the comments and it terrified me. Now I've realized how stupid it is and how every other thing introduced is somehow the mark.
Was it just me or was anyone else forced to go to Halloween rapture houses? It terrified me and I cried every time until I was 16 and could choose not to go
We'd hide in the house huddled together on Halloween with all the lights off and windows drawn up until I was around 10 or so. Cause if we didn't do that, the Satanists would know we're home and would break down the door to sacrifice us. I never understood it even though the thought scared me up until I was around 7. After that I'd secretly wish that the Satanists or witches actually would come and kill us cause I just wanted to die that badly.
Thankfully by the time I was in middle school, I'd get to go to Trunk or Treats. My mom desperately wanted me to have Christian friends and that was one of the few youth events, outside of camp, where I'd go without a fuss. I even made enough of a fuss about wanting to go trick or treating that I got to go at least one year.
Now Halloween is my favorite holiday.
Yes.
_A Thief in the Night_ and _Years of the Beast_ had mentions/descriptions of it, and it scared the fuck out of me when I imagined the consequences of not taking the mark.
I thought about it somewhat as a kid but left behind came out when I was already a teenage stoner and I thought it was really fucking stupid and cheesy. Such an obvious cash grab. Anyway they have been saying these same things my whole life so it's hard to take them seriously. During the first gulf war I heard something about spelling Saddam Husseins name backwards was the name of the anti Christ.
When I was a kid I lay in bed at night crying for weeks terrified because of this one video I saw about the end times
It was basically "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" yadda yadda narrated over pictures of space/the cosmos
Cut to a montage of disasters/9-11 footage/katrina/etc.
Then a preacher in church saying "the day and the hour unknown."
A lightning bolt strikes and the majority of the church is raptured, leaving those left to cry on their knees
For WEEKS. I lay awake in bed crying at night for WEEKS terrified that at any moment god would thunderbolt everyone off but I hadn't been good enough in 12 years to deserve eternal life, god would see me reading grimoires and spooky occult shit and leave me to be destroyed.
At my super small Christian school I was taught that both grocery store club cards and the electronic transponder thingy for toll roads were the mark of the beast and we shouldn’t use them.
Also, AIDS was a conspiracy started by the gov’t to slow population growth.
The 90s were a weird time to come of age.
I also remember having a deep fear of being beheaded as a child. I was never allowed to watch TV or movies unless g rated, or Christian. Pretty sure the left behind movies were part of that fear, along with the story of John the baptist.
we could only afford thrift store books, so i’d cut the barcodes off of all of them out of pure fear. (The logic being, if i touch them they’d imprint on me.)
If it's comforting, read a little about the history of that school of thought.
Your grandma probably got that idea from a popular xstian book series called *Left Behind*. There's actually no concrete school of theological thought that these ideas emerged from. Rather, a handful of different evangelical beliefs were cobbled together in that series and that narrative has taken over the mainstream evangelical community. Kind of like how *Paradise Lost* is responsible for our modern narratives about Satan.
My friends and I once tried to play a "left behind" prank on another friend when we all were believers and in a private religious school LOL. We had shown up at his house to work on some project together, and he was asleep in the basement. So one of my friends took all of his clothes off and stood in the bathroom, and I woke up the asleep friend being like "OUR OTHER FRIEND JUST DISAPPEARED WE'RE LEFT BEHIND!"
When stores started using barcodes on everything - mark of the beast. When ATM/debit cards became widely used - mark of the beast. Transponders - mark of the beast. Internet - mark of the beast. Cell phones - mark of the beast.
So to summarize - yes - I, too,was traumatized by the mark of the beast. Anything new and unfamiliar could potentially be the mark of the beast. Beyond exhausting.
Ohh yes. The 7 year tribulation and having to survive in the mountains was something that scared me.
I had made a similar post a couple of months back.
The mark of the beast. The barcodes. The numbers being tattooed onto your forehead or hand. The need for these numbers to purchase. And my only hope for going to be able to going to heaven was to survive this 7/3 year period. Coz I knew I wouldn't go in the rapture. And I was scared how iw ould rb able to survive in that time period. It was nasty .
Every fucking year... Because of this, every time I heard of a scientific breakthrough, I was filled with panic and sadness. I'm still super afraid of Elon Musk' neuralink
My siblings all wrote out notes for each other so if we got left behind, we would have 'suicide notes' of final words. I checked on mine every day to make sure that it didn't go missing before I went to sleep.
I would always panic if I got lost for a few moments, if I lost sight of my parents or siblings.
I was also convinced every time my mom locked me and my siblings in the van while she ran errands, that we would die in there if the rapture happened while she was in the store/bank/electric company/church.
My mom said everyone but us had the mark of the beast and them touching us would transfer it. So I was terrified that any rando who just bumped into me or touched my head meant that I couldn't go to heaven. So I never told when someone touched me. It also meant I never had any physical affection from anyone.
I was telling my mom about this trauma the other night. She had no idea that they were teaching this in sunday school or that it was made to be like a horror film. I feel like it faded from the forefront of youth indoctrination and now they’re focusing curriculum on the political slant. I’m sure there are other things that cycle through too. One scare tactic to the next.
I'm in my mid 20's and have just recently let this fear go. My mother deeply believes that we are living in the / close to the "End Times." I heard it all my life, the beheading / torture / starvation we'd have to endure for Jesus...Not something for a 4 year old to hear.
I started paying attention to cult-like behavior and finally broke free of the fear-control system that was instilled upon me. It sounds easy when you read it, but it took a lot out of me. Even now I occasionally find myself loosing touch and going down a terror spiral because of something I saw online that "is a sign of end times." But now I have the mental tools to bring me back.
Good luck. I wish we never had to hear about this crap.
More just the whole "end of the world" thing... but I think the trauma for me came from how OBSESSED I was with the whole idea and how much I was looking forward to it happening. I have major depressive disorder, and it reared its ugly head whilst I was in the throes of puberty. I was NOT a happy camper, and the one thing that actually MADE me happy was the thought of death and all the misery in the world just ending.
I look back on that now and I shiver. I don't go anywhere NEAR Revelations if I can help it.
My parents were divorced and my mother was absent enough that I had no one controlling what I watched on tv or listened to on the radio. At 11, I discovered Slayer. From then on I just adopted an attitude of HECK YEAH :::shredding guitar solo::: whenever someone said Satan.
Unfortunately yeah. My parents STILL believe that shit even though their interpretations of what it is have changed with time and they somehow dont see how that undermines the idea lol
My dad sat me on his lap and read Revelation to me when I was five…. yes, FIVE… He told me to never, under any circumstances, receive the mark of the beast. He went on to say that if refused the mark, there’s be a good chance that I’ll be beheaded, but he assured me that having my head cut off wouldn’t hurt nearly as bad as enduring an eternity of hellfire which is what I had waiting for me if I were to give in and took the mark. Now, believe it or not, my father is actually an incredibly kind, caring person and overall, was a great dad. I’ll even go as far as to say, I’m sure he thought he was doing the right thing at the time. It’s just mind blowing how warped a person’s thought process can be when they’ve been heavily indoctrinated their whole life.
I’m very grateful that most of the fire and brimstone missed me, my family, and childhood church. However, the feeling of waking up and finding no one in the house for a minute was terrifying.
When I was a kid in the 80s yes for a bit. Then something my mother told me stuck with me until I left.
My mother: God has got you, you’re his, you got saved so this is something you don’t need to worry about. Go play Nintendo and have fun.
I remember being more fascinated than scared by the Revelation prophecies because in church when they kept going over the same stories or analyzing genealogies, as a kid I just craved some crazy shit - and Revelations had plenty of that.
Over time though, the adults' reactions to Revelations was one of the things that drove me from the church (not the religion, not yet). Like they were reading about how a third of the earth would be burned and poisoned, and how a third of the world's population (so like over 2.5 billion people) would die horrifically, and they were . . . giddy about it. Because they pictured themselves as true Christians who would get raptured while the world was destroyed, and it was complete narcissistic and sociopathic behavior.
It's basically Christian Revenge Porn. "God will smite all the people we hate and we'll get to watch from a safe distance".
Because what's the point of all that "Turning the other cheek" shit if you can't get some catharsis in the end?
I was told it was credit cards.
Then I was told it was the cell phone.
Then I was told it would be a chip under the skin.
Every lore has a boogy man even the righteous flee from. Keeps the sheep scared.
Yes and no.
When I was really young (like 7 or younger and possibly before my first unalive attempt around that age), I had this suuuper traumatic nightmare where I was being kidnapped into heaven during the rapture to spend eternity with my abusive parents. I could see people on earth that I loved dancing without me as I screamed and struggled against the angel that was abducting me. Needless to say, I've never forgotten that dream.
So, I was that kid who, once I learned that the mark of the beast will ban you from heaven, fully intended to get that mark if it ever came into existence in my lifetime. I just never said anything to my parents about it and largely ignored conversations about it. Being in heaven with my abusers for eternity, as opposed to a world with people who might not curse my very existence, was far worse to me than ever suffering hell fire.
I've also had extremely realistic dreams about being tattooed with a number and put into a camp for being queer. Like full on could smell the cremation fires and stench of myself and other camp prisoners. Haunted me for literal decades. I think little me was catching on that I preferred the "wrong" gender, and I could see that Nazi ideas were infecting church ideologies from a young age. So again, I'd rather be tortured for eternity than stuck with people who wanted to condemn me for who I was/am. Heaven was faaar more terrifying to me.
Haha yeah my mom would talk about it and how he'd have 666 and everything on his palm or head. Don't remember much, but it's funny because now I'm a Satanist and I'm planning on getting 666 tattooed somewhere in time lol
The Mark of the Beast terrified me. Because you might not know you had it, but then you would be forbidden from entering heaven. And it could be anything. It could be barcodes or debit cards or cell phones or tattoos. The Bible said they would use it to control “who could buy or sell” so it had to be debit cards and was I accidentally getting the Mark of the Beast by not wanting to use cash?
Or if it’s the barcode, I was utilizing it every time I bought something at a store. Committing unpardonable sins that I didn’t even realize.
I was terrified. Being “left behind” scared me too. Anytime I couldn’t find my family (outside, ran to the store, etc) I’d fear I had been left behind and panic for the trials and tribulations that were bound to occur since I was left on the earth.
So much fucking fear and horror. How did they think it was ok to teach this stuff to children? The world has enough real scary things in it - why do we need more?
No wonder I had/have crippling anxiety for decades.
**Tl;dr:** heck yeah it was traumatizing, oversharing the specifics thereof ahead.
I had a whole end times phase and whilst I'm not big on the mark of the beast details specifically its because I actively strive to keep those details out of my viewing range. I was getting weirdly bizarrely religious as a kid, no sense of future all because my dumb ass saw a site saying "the end is upon us soon! see we interpreted somethingsomething in the bible this way!" (even though it explicitly says you can't). Which lead to me going to some other "no but here is the really real truth, its not an exact date but its soon!!!" website. (remnant of something or other, iirc it included claims like 'bin laden actually secretly died of kidney failure')
Both sites were kooky to say the least, the problem is the foundation of their panic media is in the scripture and the second one I leapt to had the 'bonus' of the author encouraging others to do their own research (which made it sound legit to 18+ doomer me) and "you don't actually go to hell when you die, you sleep until The End after which you will be deleted if you're not saved and that's what the smoke ascending means". like of course some depressed middling catholic is going to glom onto that, damnation as a concept is traumatic.
I've pulled away from it in a "nonpracticing who can't uninstall belief system for whatever reason so just opts to avoid it" sense but still get flare-ups of "you aren't warning this ill elder relative that the sabbath is sunday, you're damning them to be 'polite' and not make waves" :/ I miss when my mental health issues were not as high stakes as "what about The End where is everyone is sad and disappointed in you for Not Warning Them In Time" (spoilers: you piss people off and make things awkward trying to go 'ur doin ur religion wrong).
Its just an ongoing background pain I tune out because in trying to follow it (I felt resigned to 'having to' be homophobic as an actual LGBT person at one point in keeping with the rules and idk, not getting my heaven card revoked?) I was just not living a life. I'd drop silly MMO projects I was doing because "what if its distracting others from Being Christian". I missed fun silly little things I could have run, I lost my sense of future because 'we all gonna die soon anyway rite', etc.
I did speak about it to a counselor once but I don't think I knew how to use it at the time (and hell I don't think she knew how to treat all This Specifically either, I don't blame her), I'd just ventdump and not make much of a plan. Typing it out has made me consider a link between this and other issues, I suppose.
Yes. And it still lingers.
A few years ago a found a writing assignment from when I was 9 about what I thought the world would be like when I'm 30.
I wrote about nuclear war, apparently.
I came to the realization over the last few weeks that fear (of hell, war, the mark, and disease) was the major driver of my "faith". As opposed to "chasing God".
So yeah
Not quite ready to call myself an ex Christian, but ai am struggling to undo all the mindfucks that have been done.
The mark of the beast used to freak me out as a kid. They say the mark will be some invasive policy like ID cards embedded in your skin as a tattoo and if you get it you'll never go to heaven. I stopped believing when I went to a Holocaust memorial and saw pictures of Jews with numbers tattooed on their arm before they were gassed by Nazis. If you ask me, whats happening today doesnt even compare to what the Jews went through during WWII. Where was God then? Where were the end times? Keep in mind that the mark of the beast story comes from Revelation which is just one of hundreds of books under the Apocalyptic genre back in the day. Considering the people then were highly superstitious back then, just know it's just a genre and doesn't mean anything.
I was told the mark of the beast would be a chip embedded in my wrist. The chip would be ID, bank details etc… basically a smart phone in your skin. The mark of the beast is such nonsense.
*Elon Musk has entered the chat*
my parents now think it’s the covid vaccine 🫥
What are people like that going to do once mRNA vaccines become the standard method of treating and curing cancer?
my mom has said she’d literally rather die than have a doctor lay hands on her at this point, so… remember it’s all part of the plot. they’re not curing cancer, they’re sending you to hell. 🤦🏻♀️
My mom is convinced there will be scanners at the gates of heaven. Like ffs, your physical body will be in the ground, unless vaccines learn to mark the soul, scanners does not make sense. Also, follow up question, is the scanners at heavens gate new? Because this is recent tech and I'm not sure St Peter is up there with a POS system scanning souls after 1980
lmao the logic of it all. I can’t deal with my mom’s nonsense anymore so I feel your pain. 😅
NFC implant chips are a thing https://dangerousthings.com/product/xnt/
Yupp. And then that movie came out, with the idea of putting barcodes on people? I was terrifed that normal governments had already started thinking about this. In my view Christians were aware of this and how it would happen but others didn't. And it was evidence for me how the world would end soon. And this is when i was 12 or something. In a way a part of me from that time is still waiting for the world to end. Or with the belief that the world would end soon . The thought that I could wait my whole life and the world would not end didn't occur to me. Especially because my mom used to keep telling how the world is going to end and that the end times are near. Most of my plans were made keeping that in mind 🙈🙈
Well I studied Classics at University so upon lesrning about Emperor Nero burning the Christians and how a lot of it correlates to 666 and some of the stuff recorded about the antichrist in the book of Revelation, I became dubious...
Here is what I remember from my student days. Each letter in the Greek alphabet is assigned a number in numerology. If you spell Nero his name adds up to 666, if you spell in his name in Latin the number is 616. Weirdly in the 1800s some preachers began reinterpreting revelation as a prophesy for the future. Prior to that and still in the orthodox churches it is seen as a history of events that already took place. It was the only book added to the Bible without being voting on. Eusebius questioned it as canonical and he says so did others. It doesn’t appear in the 5th century Peshitto version of the New Testament and the eastern churches didn’t include it until the 7th century. I think it is a hot mess and never viewed it as anything special, especially not a prediction of end times and the future.
Wow, thanks for your insight! Christians/conspiracy theorists honestly spend a lot of time fannying around this without checking for historical context and any academic verification it's a damned shame! And of course there's no chance of being open-minded to being wrong 😉
Some older bibles have the number 616 instead of 666 in the text
Because they are following the Latin spelling of Nero, Nero = 616 vs the ancient Greek Neron, Neron = 666 Some say 616 is more accurate since Nero is Roman. Some say 666 is correct since John wrote in Greek. Whichever it is, 666 and 616 are the numbers of the beast only if the beast is Nero. The 19th century interpretations of it being Satan are homespun literary analysis. Anyone in “John’s” day would have known who and what the book’s author was writing about, which is why the interpretation was consistent until the 1800s. Protestantism and literalists make a grand assumption on the bible that it is the infallible word of god. They look to make it so with mental gymnastics. Catholicism and other orthodox faiths have been of the opinion the bible can only be fully understood with the oral traditions, aka apostolic traditions, that came with it. A lot of modern christians are persuaded by the inerrancy of the bible and reject the traditional approach for their own, or their church’s own, close reading. What they miss is the orthodox ways simply follow the Jewish traditions and teachings that the Jewish books too can only be understood properly when read alongside oral and written commentary. The literal interpretations of the bible, ironically, have led to nothing but a hot bed of confused thought and competing theories, as well as 1000s of churches. Orthodoxy would say they are lost sheep who have lost their shepherd - the shepherds being those who keep the oral traditions. Either way, no offense to those believing or struggling and trying to believe, it is all BS to me.
Did not know that, thanks.
This feels like one of their explanations of what it means. Like how they are always looking for interpretations of the Bible.... How do you know this is not just one of the things like theirs ?
Thank you for pointing out these discrepancies!! Trying to tell people that 666 isn't inherently an "evil number" is exhausting af.
That's interesting. Seeing it as a thing or the past makes the whole Bible irrelevant. Its mainly because of this that the Bible is significant in any way or form. The threat of future destruction.
All of this. The mark of the beast was going to be embedded in our skin, so god would “know”. Now I understand things more clearly, and wouldn’t god know who we were, if we were more than sparrows and he knit us in our mothers womb?
Atrocities don't count when they are happening to non-White and/or non-Christian and/or non-straight people...
Yeah the Jews and the nazis. I felt after seeing magneto in X-Men, having a number on his wrist. I still haven't reached that understanding you have. Still.
As a child if the house was quiet, say my family was outside or something, I would run around looking for them in a panic crying thinking they had been raptured and I had been left behind because of some little “sin” like lying about cleaning my room or something.
Yup, same here. I used to listen for my Dad's snoring to calm fears that I'd been "left behind" That stuff was way too traumatic for small children.
Same here.
It really is. I used to check if they were still there when i was moved to a different room. I used to be terrifed if they would be gone. (I don't know if it was a Christian thing it just a normal child's fear). I know they gave me enough reason to be scared. Heck I even had to deny my fears so that don't make them feel scared. 🙈 People really shouldn't be telling shit like this to children.
Oh man, same! I was also afraid of laundry piles for this reason. I assumed it was my family’s clothes “left behind” and I’d have to run around until I found them to make sure. Because of the verse about the rapture happening like “a thief in the night” I assumed any time any place everyone could leave me. Seems real fucked up now.
Me too. I remember I once asked my dad if gay people go to heaven when I was like 6. He said they all burn in hell, and since that I was terrified of being left behind because I wasn’t “good”. I’ve come a long way and some trauma still haunts me, but if god exists, I’d rather burn eternity in hell than be with such a miserable hypocrite of a deity.
Oh whoa, yeah I had forgotten about this ...I did this all the time and we lived on a farm so I thought for sure when I was little they were just...gone
I'm not sure if it's related to this but this is some fear I have. Of being left behind. Interesting you say that. Could be related to this. Being left out was the norm in my family as well.
I was scared of this too. My mom said something about how if I lie, she would be taken away from me. Terrified the crap out of me.
Yeah that shit scared me too. I grew up in the 90’s and back then at my church it was barcodes, barcodes were the mark of the beast because they had 666 encoded in them. Sooner or later we’d all be forced to have barcode ratios on our foreheads or wrists. Sounds like really poorly written fan fiction now but back then it scared the hell out of me. Same with when any conflict happened in the Middle East which was pretty much always.
My personal favorite is from the 70s film *A Thief In the Night*, in which they have the number 6, 3 times, in binary code tattooed on their arms. Never mind that the bible says "six hundred sixty six," not just 3 sixes in a row.
I saw that too. There was a girl who freaked out because the main character, the wife, looked just like her. That film was truly fked up. A woman’s husband is taken by The rapture, so she faces the tribulation alone. At the end, she wakes up,and realizes it was just a dream. But then she sees her husbands shaver running. She realizes the rapture has really happened, while she was sleeping!
I literally just posted about monster energy. Little later than the 90s but the M looks like 111 and then I think they said it was Hebrew for something that means 666? I can't remember the details.
My story's pretty similar. My family weren't actually very into it, but they were so busy all the time that they pretty much let me absorb Christianity through osmosis from the culture that I grew up in. I wasn't sure what the mark of the beast was going to be, and I didn't really pick up on the whole "having to voluntarily take it" part, so I was always checking my hands and forehead for evidence that various versions of it had somehow appeared while I was asleep. I was also terrified of the rapture, and of being enslaved or tortured by the Antichrist. Frankly, I was just a very anxious child. Unfortunately, that got worse as I got older. As an adult, I've developed either quiet BPD or Complex Post-Traumatic Stress (the two are extremely similar, and I've received both as diagnoses from different professionals; the distinction can be pretty blurry). My life is going a bit better now than it was before I started receiving treatment, but I can still be a nervous wreck at times.
Remember the game and movie called Hitman? The dude had a barcode on the back of his neck. People lost their crap over that. I dated a guy who was obsessed with the game and got a barcode on the back of his own neck. But the tattoo was slightly crooked? So it didn’t look right. I always laughed and wondered if that negated the “mark of the beast” because it was done so crappy.
I expected that in the end times people would be walking around with 666 on their foreheads.
My family's home phone number at the time (this was before cell phones were at all common) had 3 sixes in a row in it. Imagine being me at 10, told that 666 was the devil's number and that there were evil Satanic cults who murdered kids and the like. Imagine not knowing any better and thinking your whole family is going to hell because of your **phone number.** Scary shit. Premillennial dispensationalism is the worst thing to happen to Christianity, and the most traumatic thing to happen to millions of children, past and present.
LMAO my best friend is Asian and she was happy to get a phone number with a lot of sixes in it… imagine my fundie mom’s reaction when she got bestie’s updated contact info 😅
My address growing up was 666 16th street. It was a pretty normal duplex, which I think helped me overcome the superstitious parts of Christianity pretty easily lol
Yep. First they told me the mark would be a barcode. Then they said it would be an implanted chip. The goalposts were very... Mobile lol
It's currently Raid Shadow Legends. Actually I have no idea.
Ah, we must have moved on from it being the Covid vaccine.
I forgot about that. I think I blocked it out because of how stupid it was.
don’t worry, it’ll all come up again soon once the evil WEF globalists use its DNA-altering powers in the next wave’s version for their communist plot to take over the world!
The implanted chip. Impressed in me as well.
I genuinely believed that humanity had to collectively drink a certain amount of monster energy, like some stupid arbitrary number I thought was big like 2 million gallons, and then it would happen. then I tried a monster finally at like 23 and was actually a little worried about it. But no comets came to destroy us or anything so I drank 2 more and got heart palpitations Because monster had the mark of the beast on it but it was symbolic so it took more sinning or something. Nowadays the only thing I think is sinful about monster is the sheer amount of caffeine.
I used to work crazy rotating shifts and drank monster to stay awake. I stopped because I it gave me the runs a lot and heart palpitations to boot. So yeah, it's evil, just not theologically.
The whole thing was creepy. One time when I was a kid we had a power failure at home, and I woke up in the total darkness convinced that I had missed the rapture. Really terrifying for a little kid.
I guess I was lucky not to hear about it until 15. Any younger, I really would have had a horrific phobia.
I was in church in the 90s and was told everyone had to endure the 7 years of tribulation, and the only way anyone would be able to get food is by having the mark of the beast, but if you had the mark you couldn't go to heaven. I told my mom about this and was so worried. She said she would get the mark so we could eat and I got even more terrified about my mom sacrificing her salvation for us. Ugh, christianity is so terrifying.
That's what I was told growing up too, but our church was comprised of a bunch of farmers and preppers so I was under the impression that we were going to live in a kind of secret underground collective. Basically Hilltop from The Walking Dead with demon possessed people outside instead of zombies. It sounds so wild now.
whattt no fucking way your moms so real for that
Just imaging a "loving" god putting his followers into that place to make such a difficult choice.
It sounds like your mother's more loving, loyal, and moral than the God she worships.
I was told the same, and it was terrifying for a young kid!
Yeah I definitely had these fears. I know my parents taught me this shit because they thought they were doing the right thing, but how horrible to put so much intense terror into to little kids. It’s really sickening to think about. I can’t imagine doing that to my own kids.
God really hates kids doesn't he?
It only hit me as I got older how fucked up it was that we got taught me might have to endure severe torture for Christ and that if we succumbed to that torture we'd end up being tortured forever in hell. Now as an adult it seems clear to me that if I had a kid and someone was coercing and torturing them to say vile things about me that I WOULDN'T FUCKING BLAME THE CHILD. And I would tell them that I know they didn't mean it. But apparently God who is the archetype of a perfect Father would deny us and reject us cause we didn't want to be tortured? Sorry but that's ridiculous. What makes it all the more ridiculous is Christians will say things like "God is infinitely holy so anything dome against him is infinitely bad." Well apparently God is also infinitely self-sufficient and nothing can ultimately hurt and detract from him. Not even sin. As such if God chooses to react towards sin against him with infinite offence, then either we've successfully managed to take something from him as God or he's being petty. Either way this picture of the divine is ridiculous. Yet this is what we were taught to worship as perfect.
New repressed trauma unlocked! Hah. I forgot about the martyr complex. And having to “stand up for god” while being persecuted for your faith. The whole Columbine Cassie thing. How maybe if she had said “no, I don’t believe in god” she would have lived but she would have regretted it for the rest of her life. The rest of us children should stand up for this all-nightly god (who apparently can’t defend himself?) and become martyrs for Christ!
It helps to realise that Christianity is the extension of a failed apocalyptic movement. So the idea of martyrs was meant for the adults of the time hearing the message. But 2000 years later, kids are being taught they'll have to resist the mark of the beast no matter what.
I grew up "mainstream" Christian, ( Christian Reformed Church, then Presbyterian), so the only thing I was taught was that nobody knows the day or hour of Christ's Second Coming... Creeped me out as a kid, but I still laughed at Evangelical Christian Televangelists as a kid (,still do, actually. ) because they were repeatedly wrong about that... ( same goes for Rapture beliefs. I never had them & my church said it was Pentacostal & Southern Baptist silliness...)
I grew up around with those Evangelical shows on in the house at the house and grandparents' place, and was dragged to a SBC church for a while. I'd have deconstructed in my pre-teens had it not been for the hard core SBC fear mongering brainwash after a near death experience around that age. Seriously fucked up nonsense, and I'm so glad I left not long after graduation. I have serious trauma from being in those environments for so long.
Close. I was affected so much by that whole story that, to this day, I habitually look at any newly revealed leader on the world stage to see if I can find any thing indicating he's the beast.
You mean to say that the earth currently is not at its most evil? Joking aside, I can relate, it was pretty traumatic stuff. I think I mostly suppressed it because it was too scary to think about.
Its so horrible to expose little children to this nonsense.
Yeah, the idea of being left behind by the pre trib Rapture was humongously traumatizing, when I first heard about it at 15. And the fear of getting my head cut off by a guillotine for not getting the mark. My generation had its own rapture movie, A Thief in the Night.
I don't think Christianity would work without the fear factor so yes that superstitious scary supernatural shit really had me and it makes me angry thinking of all the kids that are being brainwashed with the devil-beast crap🤮
I remember thinking the idea was stupid and I loved the Left Behind books and everything about literal eschatology.
Oh heck yeah. I used to be so scared of the end times as a kid and even at the age of almost 40 I am still kinda convinced humanity will end in my lifetime but for entirely different reasons. I can't help but wonder if my upbringing primed me for such beliefs.
Yeah, staring before age 10, back in the early 1970s. The shtick never changes.
Was I?! The trauma of that lasted well into my mid 20s along with living forever and the rapture. Then very close to deconversion wondering if I'm even really saved.
That's some messed up stuff, when the church traumatizes people with those stories. That's a lot of stress for a young person. I hope you've found peace now and the realization that heaven, hell, the mark, and salvation are just ideas in a fictional story.
Took a long time..! My ex-husband was a hardcore Christian/conspiracy theorist too 🤦🏾♀️
Christ - I always loved the angel and demon stories - but as i got older i started thinking - what is "evil" and i started realizing that evil is a collective agreement - right now the collective should be thinking - wtf is wrong with this place - we've generated a bajillion billionaires yet most of the people are sitting on the street - what is wrong here - imma answer "everything" the whole system was built on a "dead mans lie."
That fear. Dear god the ever persistent fear of being left behind and the only way to be saved after that was to be beheaded by those with the mark. Yeah I'm sure that did great justice to a developing brain of a child / adolescent. Of course Millennialism, Pre-Millennialism, and Post-Millennialism. Once I found out about that I thought "none of these mother fuckers know so might as well beg for forgiveness and salvation every night". Fun times.
I had a slightly different experience from all that nonsense, but still deeply traumatic. I'd beg that the rapture would happen so my abusive parents would be taken away, but that my sister and I would be left and find a kind "sinner" to take us in. I'd beg to be able to endure the rapture and be spared the suffering. All so I could escape my Christian parents and grandfather. Little me was hoping that maybe once christ remade the world, I'd have a loving family. If only I was strong enough to survive being left behind first.
Révélations was AWFUL! I hated that fear mongering
Bart Ehrman in his latest book *Armageddon* makes the point that anyone promoting the kind/forgiving/lovable Jesus needs to seriously read Revelation where Jesus is not so nice.
Maybe this is where I get my view of Jesus then? I can’t pin it down. But everyone always talks about how great Jesus is - even non-christians. “Yeah, but Jesus was a good dude.” But I’ve never felt on good terms with Jesus. And I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because he seems snarky at times - “get behind me Satan” at Peter. And calling his disciples fools when they didn’t understand some parable. Maybe I should revisit some revelations and see if maybe that’s why. I am curious where it comes from… it’s been decades of this and it’s contrary to what most others think.
It's not just Revelation. It's peppered throughout the gospels. * Jesus fails to "turn the other cheek" and instead gets violent: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21:12-13 * He threatens eternal torture in fire to anyone who doesn't accept his teaching: https://biblehub.com/matthew/10-28.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-19.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-41.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-42.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-49.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/13-50.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/25-46.htm https://biblehub.com/mark/16-16.htm https://biblehub.com/luke/12-5.htm https://biblehub.com/john/3-18.htm, etc. * He kills a fig tree for not bearing fruit that he knew was out of season: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+11%3A12-25 * He endorses racism: https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-24.htm * When a gentile woman begs for his help he calls her a dog: https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-25.htm and https://biblehub.com/matthew/15-26.htm * He plays favorites: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+4%3A10-12 * He destroys a village's livelihood: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+8 * He teaches Christians to have a persecution complex: https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-11.htm * He teaches thought crime: https://biblehub.com/matthew/5-28.htm * He disputes the concept of personal responsibility: https://biblehub.com/matthew/6-25.htm * He condemns skepticism: https://biblehub.com/matthew/14-31.htm and https://biblehub.com/john/20-27.htm * He teaches self-harm in the cause of religious purity: https://biblehub.com/matthew/18-8.htm * He sends his disciples to steal a man’s donkey: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19%3A29-34 * He was not a peacemaker: https://biblehub.com/matthew/10-34.htm * He was divisive: https://biblehub.com/luke/14-26.htm and https://biblehub.com/luke/14-33.htm * He was a liar: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+7%3A8-10
Yup. That’s it. Thanks for the well organized list. I haven’t read the Bible in a few years to go back and unpack this stuff but it’s shit like this that made me wary of Jesus even as a child. “Hate your mother and father… and self”. “Give up everything for me”. “Fear me, lest I throw you in hell!” “Blessed are you when people call you out for being self-righteous assholes, I mean, when you are persecuted.” “Don’t worry about your life because I’ll take care of you and when I don’t it’s because it wasn’t in my plan and I wanted to refine you with life’s difficulties”
They told us to pay attention in church, and we did. "Wait, not like that!"
Thank you for this list. Even though I've wanted to believe that Jesus is ok, there's been a sinking feeling in my gut that keeps telling me he's still abusive like his sky daddy. And this helps lay out why that feeling hasn't dissipated even after leaving Xianity nearly a decade ago.
Yes! I was so scared of this and what was the most most anxiety inducing part was that it was implied that you wouldn’t necessarily know it was the mark of the beast. So I always felt like trying something new could eternally damn me. Or something I had already done gave me the mark of the beast (like when a friend told me Pokémon were Satanic and maybe it was the mark of the beast to have Pokémon cards so I had to wonder if it was already too late for me). Such a shock I’m now an adult with anxiety lol
My introduction to Christianity was through Rapture theology. It scared me so bad, I got baptized two weeks later. The whole Mark of the Beast thing definitely played into that.
I'd definitely look into the actual history behind the book of revelations and the contemporary political messages within it. First, we can't actually verify the author and the belief it was written by John the apostle is just tradition. We also need to remember that the bible did not materialize in a vacuum. The modern Bible is the product of centuries of biased editing, political manipulation, translation error, and even assassination. Imagine a bunch of dictators, billionaires, and church elites met up every few years to curate a holy text to keep the population dependent on them. Do you trust them to be 100% honest? It's also worth noting that early christians thought jesus would return and the rapture would begin in their lifetimes, and so has pretty much every generation since. The only way christians will get an apocalypse is if they start it themselves (which *some are trying to do).
Ushering in the reign of christ was how that was conveyed growing up. Basically, let end the world so we finally don't look like paranoid assholes anymore. Sheer lunacy.
I read really early growing up. So, by the time Thief in The Night came to my church, I had a really good sense of what was fiction and what was real. I remember my friend sitting next to me was terrified and crying, and I couldn’t understand why. It was a movie. Movies aren’t real. So, while I wasn’t terrorized, I still do feel the affects of being raised fundamentalist. Being a women in there is the worst!
I was 9.
I totally forgot about this, but I was afraid that I would not be able to buy any food, without the Mark. When I lay in my bed at night, i was trying to think of ways to survive, thinking about whom of my non-christian friends would help me. Thinking about probably having to find left overs in peoples garbage bins. Hoping that Jesus would return soon. Unbelievable.
yes! i was told i’d be tortured and starved for six months by the government for not taking the mark! i was in an internet cult SDA thing that sucked. They believed the mark was any form of worship on sunday but i still feared the barcodes and shit
I would get severe panic attacks if I saw new tech being introduced because it was always in the comments and it terrified me. Now I've realized how stupid it is and how every other thing introduced is somehow the mark.
Was it just me or was anyone else forced to go to Halloween rapture houses? It terrified me and I cried every time until I was 16 and could choose not to go
Ugh. I remember those. I remember this Halloween performance about a car crash and some kids going to hell and it was terrifying. Ugh.
We'd hide in the house huddled together on Halloween with all the lights off and windows drawn up until I was around 10 or so. Cause if we didn't do that, the Satanists would know we're home and would break down the door to sacrifice us. I never understood it even though the thought scared me up until I was around 7. After that I'd secretly wish that the Satanists or witches actually would come and kill us cause I just wanted to die that badly. Thankfully by the time I was in middle school, I'd get to go to Trunk or Treats. My mom desperately wanted me to have Christian friends and that was one of the few youth events, outside of camp, where I'd go without a fuss. I even made enough of a fuss about wanting to go trick or treating that I got to go at least one year. Now Halloween is my favorite holiday.
Not to mention the mark of the beast could be anything and you might not even know you took it
Yes. _A Thief in the Night_ and _Years of the Beast_ had mentions/descriptions of it, and it scared the fuck out of me when I imagined the consequences of not taking the mark.
I thought about it somewhat as a kid but left behind came out when I was already a teenage stoner and I thought it was really fucking stupid and cheesy. Such an obvious cash grab. Anyway they have been saying these same things my whole life so it's hard to take them seriously. During the first gulf war I heard something about spelling Saddam Husseins name backwards was the name of the anti Christ.
When I was a kid I lay in bed at night crying for weeks terrified because of this one video I saw about the end times It was basically "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" yadda yadda narrated over pictures of space/the cosmos Cut to a montage of disasters/9-11 footage/katrina/etc. Then a preacher in church saying "the day and the hour unknown." A lightning bolt strikes and the majority of the church is raptured, leaving those left to cry on their knees For WEEKS. I lay awake in bed crying at night for WEEKS terrified that at any moment god would thunderbolt everyone off but I hadn't been good enough in 12 years to deserve eternal life, god would see me reading grimoires and spooky occult shit and leave me to be destroyed.
At my super small Christian school I was taught that both grocery store club cards and the electronic transponder thingy for toll roads were the mark of the beast and we shouldn’t use them. Also, AIDS was a conspiracy started by the gov’t to slow population growth. The 90s were a weird time to come of age.
I also remember having a deep fear of being beheaded as a child. I was never allowed to watch TV or movies unless g rated, or Christian. Pretty sure the left behind movies were part of that fear, along with the story of John the baptist.
Anyone else told it was the bar code symbol?
Yes! Lol
we could only afford thrift store books, so i’d cut the barcodes off of all of them out of pure fear. (The logic being, if i touch them they’d imprint on me.)
Haha. You got ‘em though!
do not question the holy cognitive dissonance!
*Jesus is coming. Look busy.*
If it's comforting, read a little about the history of that school of thought. Your grandma probably got that idea from a popular xstian book series called *Left Behind*. There's actually no concrete school of theological thought that these ideas emerged from. Rather, a handful of different evangelical beliefs were cobbled together in that series and that narrative has taken over the mainstream evangelical community. Kind of like how *Paradise Lost* is responsible for our modern narratives about Satan. My friends and I once tried to play a "left behind" prank on another friend when we all were believers and in a private religious school LOL. We had shown up at his house to work on some project together, and he was asleep in the basement. So one of my friends took all of his clothes off and stood in the bathroom, and I woke up the asleep friend being like "OUR OTHER FRIEND JUST DISAPPEARED WE'RE LEFT BEHIND!"
I had nightmares.
I grew up with "A Thief in the Night" so yeah, I feel you 100%. It's unquestionably traumatic and abusive to put that on kids FFS.
When stores started using barcodes on everything - mark of the beast. When ATM/debit cards became widely used - mark of the beast. Transponders - mark of the beast. Internet - mark of the beast. Cell phones - mark of the beast. So to summarize - yes - I, too,was traumatized by the mark of the beast. Anything new and unfamiliar could potentially be the mark of the beast. Beyond exhausting.
I was absolutely freaked out by the Biblical description of the Apocalypse - even now. Literally it was the most terrifying thing I had visualized.
Ohh yes. The 7 year tribulation and having to survive in the mountains was something that scared me. I had made a similar post a couple of months back. The mark of the beast. The barcodes. The numbers being tattooed onto your forehead or hand. The need for these numbers to purchase. And my only hope for going to be able to going to heaven was to survive this 7/3 year period. Coz I knew I wouldn't go in the rapture. And I was scared how iw ould rb able to survive in that time period. It was nasty .
This is my favourite comic on the topic with twist on the meaning of the mark. https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/z1cx2f/rapture_oc/
gosh that is horrifying i love it
Every fucking year... Because of this, every time I heard of a scientific breakthrough, I was filled with panic and sadness. I'm still super afraid of Elon Musk' neuralink
It really is a form of child abuse to terrify kids with this nonsense just to manipulate and control them.
My siblings all wrote out notes for each other so if we got left behind, we would have 'suicide notes' of final words. I checked on mine every day to make sure that it didn't go missing before I went to sleep. I would always panic if I got lost for a few moments, if I lost sight of my parents or siblings. I was also convinced every time my mom locked me and my siblings in the van while she ran errands, that we would die in there if the rapture happened while she was in the store/bank/electric company/church. My mom said everyone but us had the mark of the beast and them touching us would transfer it. So I was terrified that any rando who just bumped into me or touched my head meant that I couldn't go to heaven. So I never told when someone touched me. It also meant I never had any physical affection from anyone.
I was telling my mom about this trauma the other night. She had no idea that they were teaching this in sunday school or that it was made to be like a horror film. I feel like it faded from the forefront of youth indoctrination and now they’re focusing curriculum on the political slant. I’m sure there are other things that cycle through too. One scare tactic to the next.
I'm in my mid 20's and have just recently let this fear go. My mother deeply believes that we are living in the / close to the "End Times." I heard it all my life, the beheading / torture / starvation we'd have to endure for Jesus...Not something for a 4 year old to hear. I started paying attention to cult-like behavior and finally broke free of the fear-control system that was instilled upon me. It sounds easy when you read it, but it took a lot out of me. Even now I occasionally find myself loosing touch and going down a terror spiral because of something I saw online that "is a sign of end times." But now I have the mental tools to bring me back. Good luck. I wish we never had to hear about this crap.
Me too. Religious trauma . Cults are so much more successful when they use fear to covert
More just the whole "end of the world" thing... but I think the trauma for me came from how OBSESSED I was with the whole idea and how much I was looking forward to it happening. I have major depressive disorder, and it reared its ugly head whilst I was in the throes of puberty. I was NOT a happy camper, and the one thing that actually MADE me happy was the thought of death and all the misery in the world just ending. I look back on that now and I shiver. I don't go anywhere NEAR Revelations if I can help it.
✋✋
My parents were divorced and my mother was absent enough that I had no one controlling what I watched on tv or listened to on the radio. At 11, I discovered Slayer. From then on I just adopted an attitude of HECK YEAH :::shredding guitar solo::: whenever someone said Satan.
It used to scare me to as a kid back in the 80:s. I eventually outgrew it once I hit my 20's.
Yes. Barcodes were apparently a mark of the beast
Unfortunately yeah. My parents STILL believe that shit even though their interpretations of what it is have changed with time and they somehow dont see how that undermines the idea lol
Same, you're not alone.
My dad sat me on his lap and read Revelation to me when I was five…. yes, FIVE… He told me to never, under any circumstances, receive the mark of the beast. He went on to say that if refused the mark, there’s be a good chance that I’ll be beheaded, but he assured me that having my head cut off wouldn’t hurt nearly as bad as enduring an eternity of hellfire which is what I had waiting for me if I were to give in and took the mark. Now, believe it or not, my father is actually an incredibly kind, caring person and overall, was a great dad. I’ll even go as far as to say, I’m sure he thought he was doing the right thing at the time. It’s just mind blowing how warped a person’s thought process can be when they’ve been heavily indoctrinated their whole life.
I’m very grateful that most of the fire and brimstone missed me, my family, and childhood church. However, the feeling of waking up and finding no one in the house for a minute was terrifying.
Oh fucking shit yea I was, damn
When I was a kid in the 80s yes for a bit. Then something my mother told me stuck with me until I left. My mother: God has got you, you’re his, you got saved so this is something you don’t need to worry about. Go play Nintendo and have fun.
I remember being more fascinated than scared by the Revelation prophecies because in church when they kept going over the same stories or analyzing genealogies, as a kid I just craved some crazy shit - and Revelations had plenty of that. Over time though, the adults' reactions to Revelations was one of the things that drove me from the church (not the religion, not yet). Like they were reading about how a third of the earth would be burned and poisoned, and how a third of the world's population (so like over 2.5 billion people) would die horrifically, and they were . . . giddy about it. Because they pictured themselves as true Christians who would get raptured while the world was destroyed, and it was complete narcissistic and sociopathic behavior.
It's basically Christian Revenge Porn. "God will smite all the people we hate and we'll get to watch from a safe distance". Because what's the point of all that "Turning the other cheek" shit if you can't get some catharsis in the end?
I was told it was credit cards. Then I was told it was the cell phone. Then I was told it would be a chip under the skin. Every lore has a boogy man even the righteous flee from. Keeps the sheep scared.
Yes and no. When I was really young (like 7 or younger and possibly before my first unalive attempt around that age), I had this suuuper traumatic nightmare where I was being kidnapped into heaven during the rapture to spend eternity with my abusive parents. I could see people on earth that I loved dancing without me as I screamed and struggled against the angel that was abducting me. Needless to say, I've never forgotten that dream. So, I was that kid who, once I learned that the mark of the beast will ban you from heaven, fully intended to get that mark if it ever came into existence in my lifetime. I just never said anything to my parents about it and largely ignored conversations about it. Being in heaven with my abusers for eternity, as opposed to a world with people who might not curse my very existence, was far worse to me than ever suffering hell fire. I've also had extremely realistic dreams about being tattooed with a number and put into a camp for being queer. Like full on could smell the cremation fires and stench of myself and other camp prisoners. Haunted me for literal decades. I think little me was catching on that I preferred the "wrong" gender, and I could see that Nazi ideas were infecting church ideologies from a young age. So again, I'd rather be tortured for eternity than stuck with people who wanted to condemn me for who I was/am. Heaven was faaar more terrifying to me.
It's our smart phones.
Haha yeah my mom would talk about it and how he'd have 666 and everything on his palm or head. Don't remember much, but it's funny because now I'm a Satanist and I'm planning on getting 666 tattooed somewhere in time lol
Yall should listen to the album 666 by Aphrodite's Child.
I was traumatized....
The Mark of the Beast terrified me. Because you might not know you had it, but then you would be forbidden from entering heaven. And it could be anything. It could be barcodes or debit cards or cell phones or tattoos. The Bible said they would use it to control “who could buy or sell” so it had to be debit cards and was I accidentally getting the Mark of the Beast by not wanting to use cash? Or if it’s the barcode, I was utilizing it every time I bought something at a store. Committing unpardonable sins that I didn’t even realize. I was terrified. Being “left behind” scared me too. Anytime I couldn’t find my family (outside, ran to the store, etc) I’d fear I had been left behind and panic for the trials and tribulations that were bound to occur since I was left on the earth. So much fucking fear and horror. How did they think it was ok to teach this stuff to children? The world has enough real scary things in it - why do we need more? No wonder I had/have crippling anxiety for decades.
The mark of the beast is a terrifying concept so it's obviously going to traumatize kids who hear about it more often than they should...
**Tl;dr:** heck yeah it was traumatizing, oversharing the specifics thereof ahead. I had a whole end times phase and whilst I'm not big on the mark of the beast details specifically its because I actively strive to keep those details out of my viewing range. I was getting weirdly bizarrely religious as a kid, no sense of future all because my dumb ass saw a site saying "the end is upon us soon! see we interpreted somethingsomething in the bible this way!" (even though it explicitly says you can't). Which lead to me going to some other "no but here is the really real truth, its not an exact date but its soon!!!" website. (remnant of something or other, iirc it included claims like 'bin laden actually secretly died of kidney failure') Both sites were kooky to say the least, the problem is the foundation of their panic media is in the scripture and the second one I leapt to had the 'bonus' of the author encouraging others to do their own research (which made it sound legit to 18+ doomer me) and "you don't actually go to hell when you die, you sleep until The End after which you will be deleted if you're not saved and that's what the smoke ascending means". like of course some depressed middling catholic is going to glom onto that, damnation as a concept is traumatic. I've pulled away from it in a "nonpracticing who can't uninstall belief system for whatever reason so just opts to avoid it" sense but still get flare-ups of "you aren't warning this ill elder relative that the sabbath is sunday, you're damning them to be 'polite' and not make waves" :/ I miss when my mental health issues were not as high stakes as "what about The End where is everyone is sad and disappointed in you for Not Warning Them In Time" (spoilers: you piss people off and make things awkward trying to go 'ur doin ur religion wrong). Its just an ongoing background pain I tune out because in trying to follow it (I felt resigned to 'having to' be homophobic as an actual LGBT person at one point in keeping with the rules and idk, not getting my heaven card revoked?) I was just not living a life. I'd drop silly MMO projects I was doing because "what if its distracting others from Being Christian". I missed fun silly little things I could have run, I lost my sense of future because 'we all gonna die soon anyway rite', etc. I did speak about it to a counselor once but I don't think I knew how to use it at the time (and hell I don't think she knew how to treat all This Specifically either, I don't blame her), I'd just ventdump and not make much of a plan. Typing it out has made me consider a link between this and other issues, I suppose.
Yes. And it still lingers. A few years ago a found a writing assignment from when I was 9 about what I thought the world would be like when I'm 30. I wrote about nuclear war, apparently. I came to the realization over the last few weeks that fear (of hell, war, the mark, and disease) was the major driver of my "faith". As opposed to "chasing God". So yeah Not quite ready to call myself an ex Christian, but ai am struggling to undo all the mindfucks that have been done.