"Globalisation," by Juan Daniel Perrotta < http://www.oocities.org/mx/p_t_live/ >

The Beast and his mark

by Mark Glenn

We can imagine that it in the end it may look something like this:

 They stood before him on Judgment Day, expecting a "king's reward" in Heaven. They had spent their lives professing his name, driving out demons and performing many miracles, and therefore, should, in their estimation, be first in line for their heavenly inheritance. We can only imagine their surprise when they heard the following:

"Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in. I needed clothes, and you did not clothe me. I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me." They responded with "Lord, when did we not do any of these things?" And he replied to them "Whatever you did not do for the least of these, my brethren, you did not do for me," at which point the faces of all the victims that had suffered and perished due to the callousness of those who now stood judged were brought as witnesses against them.

And those who stood there before Him on Judgment Day, having received the Mark of the Beast on the right hand or forehead, were cast into the fire that was prepared for them from the beginning.

Although brought here as a very short story, this scenario is not hard to imagine taking place at some time in the near future. The spirit of the day, at least in America, is one of viciousness and support for wanton brutality against innocent people, and what is worse is that its prominence can be found in that community of people who consider themselves to be "believing Christians."

There is a lot of talk these days about the endtimes and with all that it portends, particularly on the fundamentalist Christian talk shows. What with the war in the Middle East and the Palestinian situation, as well as the real possibility that the world could be wiped out by some megalomaniac with an arsenal at his disposal, people who heretofore were uninterested and unbothered with the prophetic warnings in the last book of the Bible, the Apocalypse, now are beginning to pay better attention. And one of those items found in the last book, the Mark of the Beast, has of late received special notice for its dramatic and important place that it occupies in the Christian faith.

The end times, according to the last book [Revelation], are supposed to be a period wherein evil will run rampantly under the direction of an individual or system that is the embodiment of wickedness, known in the Apocalypse as the Beast.   He will wage war against the innocent, spilling their blood over all the earth, repeating on a grand scale the first human act of brutality committed by Cain in the slaying of his brother Abel.   He will have along with him a legion of followers and supporters, who will be talked into following him by a group of false prophets who praise his deeds and actions, masking the inherent evil in these actions from the rest of the masses.   These followers of the Beast will bear his mark, a mark that on Judgment Day will cause them to be cast into Hell forever.   Turn on the radio at just about any time of the night or day, and you will unavoidably run into someone who is talking about the Mark of the Beast and what they think it all means...

In one of St. Paul's books [2 Timothy], he describes these marked individuals as people who will be "lovers of themselves, boastful, abusive, without love, slanderous, brutal, always learning but never acknowledging the truth, men of depraved minds."  Christ also had his own thing to say about those people bearing the mark in the last days by describing them as individuals who would be led by false prophets, and as those whose "love will have grown cold."

For the rest of the article: http://www.marchforjustice.com/8.22.03.beast.php