I'm with the Bible on this one. Same as the other verse that tells never to build your house on sand. It's good advice.

A local, sandwich shop charges $6.66 for a specific sub after tax if you don't get the full meal. Owner or corporate office probably never thought about it. The locals regularly change the amount, often subtracting, because so many people don't want to pay that specific number. I always try to do some dark, comedy routine the second I see it if it's a new employee in case they're superstitious. At least one looked like the apocalypse was happening before I said, "Nah, I'm just messing with you." The coworkers always get a laugh out of those.

Outside that, I've heard mark of the beast from so many people about so many things over the decades that I'm sure it factors into a lot of political decisions where popular vote counts. The wording is kind of catch-all given mark is so ambiguous, it mentions a name, and it has a number. A person can project it on anything.

You can look at how people treat numbers in general. The story of 13 (Triskaidekaphobia) and 4 (Tetraphobia) are pretty interesting. We like to watch the odometer roll over and make words on calculators.

I still wish we had all followed the Yuki (base 8), it would have made computing so much easier.

> Granted, but even broken clocks are right twice a day.

I doubt most Christians think the bible is a broken clock

> Just because someone wrote a pre-scientific text which, today, supports antiauthoritarianism ... does not mean that antiauthoritarianism lacks its many other merits.

Most of our culture and philosophy comes from pre-scientific texts. Authoritarianism didn't need science and the ability to stop certain people from participating in commerce doesn't require computers.

> (Not to mention how even some Christians think that Revelation is the writings of a hallucinating madman.)

A small number, while other groups have different interpretations of what the text means or how literal it is.

For an example without religious polarization, you can look at Nostradamus' ramblings

They are completely useless until misattributed in hindsight, until further reattributed in hindsight to something slightly more coincidentally relevant. 500 years of this so far.

Truthfully, my original point was that this was a worry of people before technology made it quite a bit easier to govern. I am unaware of any Nostradamus that talks about restrictions of commerce, nor am I talking about the nature of prophecy of Revelations other than restrictions on commerce seemed to be important enough in the ancient mind to specifically call out.