First, thank you for sharing your point of view, I find the parallels between religious prophecy, and specifically eschatology, with actually existing global realities related to economics and technological evolution to be very interesting.

when the end time came (somewhere around the year 2000), a new world order would occur, illuminati, secret upper eschelon groups ruling the world

As an anthropologist I view this belief as "folk knowledge", in the sense that, yes, there is a (so-called) "new world order" (i.e. post-"second world"-communist world order) that is being controlled by a wealthy financial elite that is more and more able to direct the contours of the global economy away from transparent democratic decision-making processes. However, as I noted above, it is not being coordinated by some "illuminati" or whatever, it is just the unconscious tendencies of a capitalist super-organism, which is indeed very real, even if it is not conscious.

we'd have identity chips encoded into our skin to mark us as loyal citizens, there'd no longer be money, it'd be electronic, that the world would be slaves crushed by an authoritarian elite.

This is another example of folk knowledge, in the sense that, yes, money will eventually disappear, and eventually we will have some type of system which is hopefully far more ethical and socially moral, ideally based around mechanisms of universal access, trust, and reputation (things that help online social media sites self-organize for example, i.e. on Hubski we have universal access to the site (no money changes hands), and there are sophisticated mechanisms based trust and reputation in regards to the pre-programmed value system of Hubski, which is "thoughtfulness" of commentary, etc. We need to be innovative about the future of socioeconomics, and, in my opinion, that innovation away from capitalism and money, and towards a more social and ethical system, should be based in universality, trust, reputation, etc.

In short, what the particular example of folk knowledge represents, to me, is a classic example where a group of people make the common sense extrapolation of technological advancement (i.e. money disappearing and electronic devices merging with human biology, etc.) and do not realize that such advancement will necessarily require a concomitant social revolution in the way we structure the world. Of course, such social revolution is always the true singularity, which is why, in this particular example, we get a dystopian scenario where we are all controlled by authoritarian elites.

That only those who rejected the Mark of the Beast would be saved--these people would be swept up in the The Rapture, whisked away to Heaven, and all the weak, godless people who'd taken the Mark of the Beast would then live 100, 1000 (can't quite remember) years in the reign of the Antichrist, Satan reborn on the face of the earth, and those would be terrible, terrible times.

This is classic Christian anti-Singultarianism (there is also Christian pro-Singultarianism). I think it comes down to whether or not you take the central warning of Christianity seriously or not (i.e. do not eat from the tree of knowledge). If you take it seriously than the singularity, i.e. using human knowledge to become God-like and live indefinitely, is indeed the mark of the Antichrist. But what is obvious, at least to me, is that this central warning of Christianity is at best ambiguous, and possibly even a joke (i.e. why in the world would God create an infinitely inquisitive and curious species and place them within a world where they are ignorant of the natural processes around them, if He didn't want them to explore that world and learn how to better live in symbiosis with it?).

But it's scary, how close the description of the Rapture--apocalypse, end times I grew up with--mirrors what is happening in the world around me. Messes with my mind.

I can sympathise. What I would recommend, if my recommendation is worth anything, is that you look for the synergies between knowledge structures. This is basically the Kurzweilian approach to singularity, in the sense that Kurzweil, on the first page of The Singularity Is Near (2005) reveals that he was raised in a Unitarian church where he was encouraged to explore all of the overlapping commonalities between world religions under the basic principle of "many paths to the truth". Of course, we do know, from a scientific perspective, that objective knowledge is illusory, and that our models are not objective reality, and our perceptions are not objective reality (or Kant's we do not see the "Thing In Itself", etc.). So, in the end, all we have is our historically contingent, subjectively constructed knowledge structures, created with imperfect perception, and imperfect tools, to explore a world we all share, but at the same time, to explore a world we all have an irreducibly unique perspective and understanding of, etc.