WorldWide Religious News-W.Va. offers licenses for those who fear ‘beast’.
“W.Va. offers licenses for those who fear ‘beast’”
(AP, August 8, 2008)
Charleston, USA – West Virginia started Friday keeping driver’s license photos out of a computer database for members of a small religious group who believe digital storage is a “mark of the beast” that evokes biblical prophecy.
State Division of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Joseph Cicchirillo said the group of about 50 or 60 Christians, who are not affiliated with a particular church, contacted the agency two or three years ago to object to their pictures “being on a database that can be exchanged throughout the world or hacked into.”
One of the group members is Phil Hudok, who made headlines in 1999 when he was fired as a Randolph County school teacher for refusing to require his students to wear bar-coded identification badges. Hudok was later reinstated after a circuit judge said the school board had made no attempt to accommodate his religious beliefs.
Hudok and other members of his group have said bar codes and digital storage of photos are a way of numbering people, which they liken to a warning in the Bible’s book of Revelation about a “mark of the beast” indicating the arrival of the Antichrist.
To accommodate their beliefs, state officials decided to issue driver’s licenses to the group members that are exactly like other West Virginia licenses except that the individual photos will be removed from the computer immediately after they are taken by a digital camera.
Instead of being stored digitally, an 8-by-11-inch hard copy of each picture will be printed out and kept in a file. All other information, including birth dates and driving records, will be in the computer system, Cicchirillo said.
Without this accommodation, group members wouldn’t get their driver’s licenses, which the commissioner said would hamper their ability to get everyday services from insurance coverage to check cashing.
West Virginia adopted digital photo storage several years ago, in advance of the federal Real ID Act. The law, which has an implementation date of 2010, would establish national standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and ID cards and enable the sharing of information about licensed drivers among all states.
August 16th, 2008 12:59 pm
There are many key elements that direct a person to what and who the beast and its mark is. One element is an image is made that people bow down to and worship and another is it has a name. Bio-chips, social security numbers, government brandings, and other concoctions do not fit. If you take the number 666 and write it in the Hebrew numbering system using letters you come up with vstr, or vav samech tav resh. Vav is a prefix while the root str means secret or hidden. If you then look up the symbols of the letters they are nail, prop, cross, and head, and mean nail, prop, mark or sign, and head or leader. If you put these together it is the crucifix, the image of the beast. If you then take the name of the image, jesus, and add it up it comes to 616. The True Messiah warned that if another came in his own name he would be accepted, and he said many will come saying they are him. He gave us the tools to figure out who this deceiver would be and said that he would sit in the temple of God making himself out to be God and that the whole world would be deceived.