On the other hand, afaik the mark of the beast is something placed/written on you by the antichrist. Whereas your fingerprints, are, like, part of your body. So even if you grant that the mark of the beast is a thing people believe in this doesn’t make much sense.

> something placed/written on you

That is a reasonable and mainstream interpretation, but one has to wonder how someone living in the first century AD would conceptualise a system of biometric surveillance and control, so that they could write about it using the language of the day.

If someone uses their thumbprint to register their identity with their phone, and uses that biometric to unlock a digital copy of a government-issued ID, for example, then it seems almost pedantic to quibble about whether the "mark" is placed or stored on their body, or on their device, or in "the cloud".

Also, the book of Revelation equates "the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name", suggesting that taking a "name" can be equivalently bad to taking a "mark", and that there is a system of assigning numeric (perhaps digital) values to human-readable names.

It is hard to say precisely what constitutes taking a number separately from taking a mark, but I think that a reasonable analogy (even if not a correct interpretation) is a system where people's digital identities are stored under the control of a single global database. The "number" could refer to the digital value of the entire database, or there could be a hierarchical system with a central key exercising authority over regional keys, which exercise authority over per-person keys, like the web PKI only more centralised at the top.

omg stop. This is just sophistry.

There are lots of good arguments against the surveillance state or the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, reverse-engineering 2000 year old religious visions to mean something opposite of their plainly stated text (notwithstanding translation) is neither necessary nor helpful.

Need I remind you that the events of the New Testament start around the time of a Roman census, so the idea of individuals' own names being catalogued by the state was not an unfamiliar concept even back then.

I wasn't trying to suggest that the book of Revelation is the only reason to support the idea of privacy as a fundamental right. It is of course possible for people to support that right for many other good reasons.

However, I'm not sure if the "plainly stated text" of Revelation really has such a clear and unambiguous interpretation. Compare Revelation 19:16 which also talks about someone having a name written on them, which I don't think anyone would take literally, and they certainly wouldn't the previous verse where a sharp sword comes out of someone's mouth to strike down nations.

You may not find these interpretations helpful, but others do, and it's fine to see things differently. Also, you're right that Roman censuses would be well known to individuals living in the first century AD, as was the practice of branding slaves, so these would be natural analogies for the writer to use to convey spiritual truths, and perhaps more complicated as-yet-uninvented systems.

> one has to wonder how someone living in the first century AD would conceptualise a system of biometric surveillance and control

I submit that one does not, in fact, have to wonder that.

Okay, let me rephrase that.

If one believes that the events described in Revelation are events which are destined to occur in our future, and they were written about from the perspective of a man who lived in the first century AD, then it is worth considering the possibility that the events described would involve systems that would be difficult for him to understand and describe in the way that we see them.

Under such a set of assumptions, someone who is interested in interpreting the prophecy should wonder whether biometric surveillance is the sort of system that would be expressed by such a first century writer in the way that the beast system is expressed in Revelation.

I suppose that means that a sincerely held religious belief need not actually be a tenet of the religion you follow, so long as you believe it, and believe it is related to your religion. Personally this seems like a gray area that is ripe for abuse. But I guess until such abuse becomes much more commonplace, we will not see a reform in the degree to which religious beliefs are favored by the courts.

On the other hand, if such abuse becomes more prominent and causes more interference with how business gets done, then you could imagine a scenario where one-off beliefs are much less favored, and the state has to get involved in figuring out whether the belief is actually religious, or if it's just some random thing you believe that you attach religious significance to. (Distinguishing minority religious views from this will be extremely difficult.)

Generally the courts in their wisdom have decided its not the States interest to be pontificating on which religious beliefs are valid and sanctioned and which are not. That would be putting the cart before the horse. If the State gets to decide, then you might as well throw out all religious beliefs. The state is the Church.

Hence the standard that the belief just needs to be deeply held. I know that the knee jerk reaction is to give government more power. But you know, in America the power is with the people still.

If the State and corporations gets to decide what you put in your body, and what God you get to believe in, then the foundational promise of America is dead.

I have my own opinions about the wisdom of the courts. There are plenty of countries where religious beliefs are given far less leeway to interfere with secular contracts and associations, and many of those countries are still fine places to live. IMO, that's the proper place for religion, but there would have to be much abuse before we countenanced going in that direction in the US.

> secular contracts and associations, and many of those countries are still fine places to live.

Sure, that’s a great answer for people who aren’t religious or whose religious practices happen to line up well with secular “contracts and associations”. Not good for devout people though.

Hard to design a policy that is beneficial to all possible folks affected by that policy, especially when the interests of some stakeholders are in conflict.