Group Fears RFID Chips Could Herald 'Mark of the Beast'
by Jim Brown
March 29, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Christian group is calling for a nationwide boycott against the use of radio frequency identification devices, or RFID, to track students in schools.AgapePress recently reported on a California school that not long ago used RFID technology in a test of an experimental attendance monitoring system (see related story). While the company that introduced the system is continuing to develop and market the technology, one religious group is denouncing RFID as a dangerous herald of the advance of a demonic "new world order."
RFID and similar technologies are already in use, and their incursion into everyday life is a rapidly growing trend. For instance, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has already announced its intention to make use of "contactless chips" or "proximity chips" or "contactless integrated circuits" in passports and identifying documents in the coming years.
A recent Wired News article suggests these various terms for RFID tags in identification documents may indicate that the federal government is engaging in semantic acrobatics in order to call the technology anything but what it actually is. According to Wired News, "The Homeland Security Department is playing word games to dodge the privacy debate raging over RFID tags, which will eventually replace barcode labels on consumer goods."
John Conner is a spokesman for "The Resistance for Christ," a group that opposes the formation of the so-called new world order. He believes one day every student in the world as well as the population at large will be forced to wear tracking devices under the premise of security.
"What these devices are going to do is just, ultimately, turn over ever last bit of privacy that we have to this global system," Conner says. Potentially, he warns, RFID will become a form of technological oppression that "dehumanizes every student and every person who is forced -- mind you, forced -- to take these beastly tracking devices, and this opens the door for limitless abuse."
The Resistance for Christ spokesman contends that RFID tracking technology is a predecessor to the universal sign that will be mandated by the anti-Christ during the period of history described by end-times scholars as the tribulation.
"This is the precursor to the 'mark of the beast' -- the 666 Satanic mark that the Bible talked about," Conner says, "and [the proponents of the RFID technology are] implementing this system under the guise of security and [saying] it's going to keep your children safe." But, ultimately, the San Diego activist warns, "what it's going to do is it's going to turn every single one of us into a piece of inventory -- not a human being -- a piece of inventory, a number."
Conner says even though born-again Christians will be "raptured" from the Earth before the tribulation reign of the anti-Christ, they should resist the use of RFIDs and other Orwellian influences in society. He is urging people everywhere to boycott RFID technology and to oppose its incorporation into schools or other aspects of daily life in America.
