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RFID, Sign of the (End) Times?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sky-is-falling dept.

andy753421 writes "Wired is running an article featuring Katherine Albrecht who, with her new book 'The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance', is warning that RFID tags may in fact be the "mark of the beast". Among her arguments are that in a futuristic world anyone who wishes to buy and sell goods would be compelled "to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads," as is foretold in the book Revelation. Others are skeptical saying that many new technologies, such as the printing press, bar-codes, and several others, have also created fears about the beginning of the end."

5 of 843 comments (clear)

  1. Last post by saltydogdesign · · Score: 5, Funny

    Get it? Huh? Huh?

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  2. So... by 313373_bot · · Score: 5, Funny

    you may defeat the beast by wearing a tinfoil hat (or glove)?

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    ^[:q!
  3. Re:So.. its RFID today is it? by Hiro+Antagonist · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's just Ashcroft; he forgot to put his make-up on this morning.

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    I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy .sig.
  4. Re:Religion is being replaced, not just displaced by TallMatthew · · Score: 5, Funny
    In this respect, America and the west at large is definitely losing its religion.

    Yeah, that's us in the corner.

  5. "Rapture loans" by Animats · · Score: 5, Funny
    Back around 1997, I came up with the concept of "rapture loans". The idea was to sell balloon-payment second mortgages to fundamentalist Christians. If the Rapture came before the end of 2001, they owed nothing. They could thus enjoy "abundance" until the Rapture. At the end of 2001, interest payments started, and if they couldn't pay, foreclosure would follow.

    Marketing would be on Christian TV and radio stations, in the form of infomercials. "Quit your job now! Don't work again! Jesus is coming soon!", along with pictures of happy people with consumer goods. We considered finding some Christian figure to promote the product. Enough people were talking about the Rapture and the "Jubilee" back then that a modest market for the product clearly existed.

    (For those of you interested in financial mechanics, the money for the mortgages would be obtained by creating a derivative security that could be resold in the secondary mortgage market. The "rapture" contingency would be taken care of by obtaining an insurance policy against the "rapture" for each mortgage (probably from Lloyds or Swiss Re), using exactly the same definition of "rapture" as in the loan. The combination of the insurance policy and the loan would constitute a resellable security without a "rapture" contingency that could be packaged up and sold in the mortgage-based security market. So we wouldn't have to finance the deal, just broker it.)

    We didn't go through with it. It just seemed too evil.

    Nevertheless, when there are people running around claiming that Jesus is coming back soon, it's quite feasible to make money taking the other side of that bet.