I’m thinking that those far out religious sects see any number attached to anything you need or use is the MOTB .....
That sounds about right.
I remember many years ago I was watching Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s show out of morbid fascination — sometimes those giant fake eyelashes and tear-soaked mascara streaks just grabbed me as I was flipping channels :-) Anyway, they had some kooky guest on who was peddling his conclusion (these people always seem to have firm conclusions, never theories) about the bar codes which were beginning to proliferate on retail packages. He could PROVE that they were the mark of the Beast because if you looked closely, you could see the same pair of lines repeated at the beginning, middle, and end of every bar code, and if you looked even closer, you’d notice that these were mysteriously the only pairs of lines that didn’t have a number printed under them, AND that these pairs of lines looked just like the ones that had a “6” printed under them. So Christians should fight the use of these bar codes, refuse to buy things that have bar codes on them, yadda yadda. Uh huh. To this day, the “secret”, unmarked pairs of lines are still there — because they’re the start/stop codes that enable the scanner to know when to start/stop recording the actual number associated with the item, and confirm that what it’s registering is an actual bar code and not some random marks.