Hi, I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I have a question.
As you can see I'm an atheist. That tag doesn't really do much service to what I am, though. I'm more of a nihilist, as you might guess, but more importantly I'm a former Christian.
After talking to some of you folks here and seeing the vast amount of shapes that Christianity can take and seeing so little of what I knew of as Christianity, I want to know if I was in a non-Christian Christ-based cult or if I was in a legitimate branch of Christianity (why are there even branches at all?).
I was a nondenominational Christian who believed in the imminent, literal, physical apocalypse in which Jesus would return. I believed that the antichrist would rise (possibly from the Roman Catholic Church?) and compel everyone to receive a computer chip in the right hand or forehead for the purpose of being able to participate in buying or selling. My stance on pre-trib/mid-trib/post-trib was noncommittal because I didn't think there was enough information. It didn't occur to me that there was such a thing as a non-trib Christian.
I was unsure of how it was supposed to work on a grand scale because if there are really over a billion Christians who surely all interpreted the book of Revelation in the same way as me, how would the antichrist pass this proposition? How could you pass something in the Western World if the majority of those people will refuse it outright?
I didn't think about it too much because I had the crutch of faith to lean on. But in high school when I was in a backslidden state (I would come back to Christianity from there) I was assigned a project in my economy class. I suppose the point of this project was to show us all how efficient our current monetary system is because we were tasked with completely reinventing money and we couldn't use a system anywhere near the current model of paper and coins. Each student would present his/her idea to the class, provide a visual aid, and the class would vote on the best idea. So I proposed the antichrist's mark, simply renaming it and presenting it as a subdermal computer chip, saying how great it would be to never have to worry about money, credit cards or even your driver's license since it will all be with you at all times. The teacher chuckled and asked if I got this from the Bible, but I didn't notice anyone in the class that seemed to recognize what I was doing at all. They all loved the idea and, if I recall correctly, I won overwhelmingly.
At the time I took this to be an indication that the mark could indeed be implemented on a grand scale, but now after reading these forums I'm starting to wonder if the majority of the class was simply Christians who had never heard of this interpretation of Revelation. Was I in a cult?