I didn't notice the bolding in the quote, so I wasn't sure what was unclear. Sorry. Also though, I'm glad for the clarification you gave because I probably would not have given you a good answer if I did notice it.

First, I was being as tongue in cheek with that line as I was about about Catholicism - the supernatural = Lutheranism.

What the "mark of the beast" means is open to a lot of debate and interpretation, as the whole book it is from. Some find it all so tough to understand that they skip it. Some seem very obsessed with it, and a criticism of such a strong focus on that book is that it leads people to ignore the world and our role as "our brother's keepers" while preparing for an end times that may actually be an internal individual-by-individual process. I used to be strongly in that camp: ignore the book as it is tough to understand, feed the hungry, love thy neighbor, let the end times handle themselves. I now see the two competing positions as: it's both, and both 100% each, not 50-50.

The idea that people can't do a lot of things we used to take for granted in some countries without some proof of being "current" (no longer "fully") in their covid jabs is undeniably like the "used to identify those allowed to buy or sell" on the link you shared. Selling here can mean working in a retail place or selling your labor, not selling on ebay. That's not a conspiracy theory or any end-times biblical obsession, it simply is what is going on.

I don't know how the jabs can be a mark of the beast, but there are two kinds for covid: the mrna ones (Moderna, Pfizer), and the (J&J, Russia's "sputnik" vax, and a couple of others not in the US) old fashioned inject a 'dead' biological pathogen (or partical, or some specific protein, I'm fuzzy on the matching of these to our immune response. Allison Morrow interviewed a professor of biology in a school in San Francisco recently and she shared a lot of great information. The interview starts slowly, the professor dances around a couple of questions deftly (not addressing the specific context of one question, and creating a false equivalence in another) but finding it on Morrow's Odysee page is well worth it).

So I can't, and would not want to, call the jabs a mark of the beast like thing, but ignoring the similarity to it with the restrictions against the unwilling seems like being intentionally obtuse about it.

But, I never liked any interpretation of The Apocalypse (which I think best translates as "the unveiling", very much less sinister or scary sounding, and I quite like that idea actually) aka The Book of Revelation until recently. Now though I like two. If you are interested in what that book might mean, there is no short cut. I haven't gone through them well enough to know where the align or where they conflict, but I should. Especially since both involve Marian apparitions, their shared coherence or lack thereof should matter to me. It does matter to me, but I have to carve out the time to go through it all.

One of the sets of interpretations were given by Our Lady to Father Gobi who is the founder of the Marian Movement of Priests. It took years for her to reveal it all to him, and it was all meticulously written down. Another set involve a very interesting character named Bruno Cornacchiola and Our Lady of Revelation. More than suggesting you dig deep into either of those, I do suggest checking out his life and what a crazy character he was before Our Lady confronted him.

I think though, getting back to your reply, corruption is at the heart of all of this. Also competition, and collusion. For example, this may seem mundane but OSHA had a lawyer recently presenting arguments before the Supreme Court about their jab mandate. That lawyer made very simple and clear claims about the effectiveness of the jabs. Was the lawyer speaking as a lawyer? Was the lawyer speaking as OSHA's representative? If the former, the lawyer does not have that expertise. This is not a point to gloss over. For very simple things, a lawyer who may have demonstrable expertise on something has to have an expert and some outside sources present such claims because the role of being the lawyer is separate from making substantive claims about things other than the law. So, the lawyer could not be speaking from their own authority. Then what about the latter? My first question would be "Is this a claim OSHA is making?", because the matter was a litigant against OSHA. A follow up would be to ask if OSHA has reviewed the data or conducted their own research into the matter. I doubt they have. OSHA mostly likely is repeating what they've been told. In essence, OSHA is ceding authority to another body (CDC? NIH? I don't know). So, there is a kind of collusion that seems reasonable, but shirks due diligence. Bobby Kennedy Jr has done a great job showing how corrupt NIH and Fauci are, so this puts OSHA's actions in question-- maybe not all their actions but the unilateral nature of it I think for sure.

I think it comes down to authoritarianism and "technocracy" which will probably not get debated before it not only wins but long after it cashed its prize and spent the winnings. We used to refer to some politicians, Democrats generally, as "technocrats". That mayor of Baltimore who briefly ran for president is a clear example. Elsewhere I've talked about "corporate medicine" (not like corporate rock, but the idea that some body makes broad medical decisions instead of a specific licensed professional in each specific instance for each specific patient), but corporate medicine and any one-size-fits-all solutions lend themselves to a technocrat's approach to policy. It only follows from that to say a society run that way would be a technocracy where the "blame" for policy is placed on data (crime data was the traditional way I saw it talked about) and "the science".

I view the big evil in the world as authoritarianism, or it uses authoritarianism to achieve its goals. Attempts to train or retrain, or continually train via boosters, our immune system instead of trusting it and nurturing it with good nutrition and a clean environment and healthy living, seems anti-human to me. I see transhumanism and all the weird identity crisis things that lead people to take sex hormones in an incomplete imitation of the hormones of the opposite sex, and the surgeries, I see that as taking advantage of hurting and desperate people in a way that is also anti-human. Organizing society in such a way that local communities do not grow all the food they need, do not produce the things they need, all so a small few can skim profits from a system modeled on a factory, replacing tangible communities with abstract markets, is anti-human. The disdain of the ruling class for the working class, the all to frequent animosity between men and women, the new kind of "left" that has a disdain for the working class, it comes from somewhere. It's not just a misunderstanding of nature, but a disdain for it. Too many people got far too far in life, generation after generation, that dirty callused hands are feared by those who would rule over us. I think, regardless of what the specifics of the "end times" or of any revelation, those very anti-human factors are the most salient features of "the mark of the beast" and all that comes along with it when ever it comes along.

Sorry for typing so much and drifting into a rant. I don't see this in a simple way though, and I think there is a fundamentally flawed paradigm that took centuries to arise and thus is tough to see beyond the veil. We live too short. Pope Leo XIII, Pope Pius X, and others were surprisingly accurate in their critic of changes in the world around them and the results they would gain. Rudolph Steiner predicted the decline of bees a hundred years before it began. For that, his works on nature deserve a look. He is tough to understand though. Similarly, Pope Leo XIII and all the various anti-modern writings of popes long ago now look accurate and worthy of reading.