Have a read of this article posted on the Religion Dispatches blog yesterday about how the Virginia House of Delegates has just voted to prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips into human beings – not only as a protection of civil liberties but also because of religious paranoia and fear of “the mark of the beast”.
But Virginia is not alone since state legislators in Wisconsin, California, and North Dakota have already passed similar legislation to protect their citizens from “unwanted subdermal implants”. A similar bill has also just passed the house in Tennessee, and the Georgia State Senate also passed an anti-microchip bill last month.
As the article explains:
“The sponsors of these bills, all of them Republicans and outspoken conservative Christians, claim that preventing the forced implantation of microchips is a civil rights issue: they seek to protect citizens from unwanted bodily intrusions by employers and especially what they depict as a big brother-esque government. Yet the technology to embed radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips into animals and people has existed since the early nineties, and so far no one has attempted a forced implantation of the populace.There are, of course, purely secular reasons against forced implantation of RFID chips and in favor of policies that particularly protect the truly vulnerable. But the true impetus behind these laws…….appears to lie squarely in Christian dispensationalism and speculation about “the mark of the beast” described in the Book of Revelation.”
What do you think? Paranoid dispensationalist clap-trap or reasonable protection of civil liberties?
Deliberate Disciple 