A widely-shared conspiracy theory on Facebook alleges that Obamacare requires the installation of microchips in every American by, well, last March.
Sometimes I fear for our country. Other times I just laugh.
The conspiracy, with photos to “prove” it, has been shared over 355,000 times. And while many of the shares are people laughing at the gullibility of others, I’d say at least half of the comments on the post are from people who seriously believe this.
Even weirder, the people who believe it are seriously conservative Christians who are convinced that the faux Obamacare implants are actually marks of The Beast that will herald the end of times.
Facebook user Arnold Davis, whose Facebook page is its own trip, appears to have shared a post from the Facebook page “Police State USA: Land of the Checkpoints.” The post includes a photo of someone getting a chip implanted, along with a photo of a skeleton who appears to have bursitis. The caption reads:
This is the New World Order Obama health reform
The reform includes a microchip implant to citizens in 2013
if you are against this system Share this photo and give notice to your friends this echo Next
The comments are something else. And it’s not just a few people. There’s an entire contingent of “end of times” folks – who believe the end of the world is upon us, and that Jesus is preparing to return for his two thousand year reign – chiming in, and they’re just awfully weird.
And here’s a mom who isn’t going to let Obama’s stinking doctors anywhere near her kids:
Then there’s Sharon Ball:
Actually, there’s a 3rd reason you won’t be getting the microchip, Sharon. BECAUSE IT ISN’T TRUE.
And like most conservative Christians, they’ve got an answer for everything:
One of my favorite comments is from this woman, who explains why “just because Snopes.com says that it (sic) false doesn’t mean they are right!!!”
Yes, because you can trust Snopes, a trusted Web site for debunking urban myths, or you can trust some guy on Facebook you don’t know, who claims something a bit wacky with no attribution whatsoever. So who do you believe? Yeah, figures.
Just for yucks, here is Snopes’ entry on this, starting with one of the conspiracy theory emails going around:
Obamacare law requires an RFID chip implanted in all of us.
Are you ready to have your RFID Chip Implanted? 3/23/2013 is your date!
This new Health Care (Obamacare) law requires an RFID chip implanted in all of us. This chip will not only contain your personal information with tracking capability but it will also be linked to your bank account. And get this,Page 1004 of the new law (dictating the timing of this chip), reads, and I quote: “Not later than 36 months after the date of the enactment”. It is now the law of the land that by March 23rd 2013 we will all be required to have an RFID chip underneath our skin and this chip will be link to our bank accounts as well as have our personal records and tracking capability built into it…”
Snopes calls the rumor “false,” and says the alleged photo of the microchip is in fact a new diabetes monitoring chip.
And this man raises a rather good point about all the privacy nuts using Facebook to express their concerns:
Though my favorite comment has to be from this guy:
Finally, let’s close with the wisdom of Kelly:
Oh, but they are, Kelly, they really are.
I was more or less an accident too. :-)
Best explanation *I’ve* heard…
“(…B)ut since I grew up in rural Indiana(…)”
Hey, a fellow Hoosier! (I’m not actually a native, I’m here more-or-less by accident…)
Here in Indianapolis (I live near the Downtown area) it’s probably not *quite* as bad as it is out in the hinterlands; but, yeah, every once in a while you’ll see or hear a hint of the batshit crazy that reminds us that the JBS has strong connections here.
I thought that was my lottery number.
Thank you. I’m not all that interested but since I grew up in rural Indiana, I’m thoroughly, even painfully aware of the Birchers and their particular brand of crazy. That they’ve got tangled up with the TPers isn’t surprising. It’s interesting to learn that a critique of the ‘Left Behind’ books is surfacing.
“Breed” or “spawn” are also acceptable terms within this particular context.
Fred Clark, a.k.a. “The Slacktivist“, is currently blogging a long-running deconstruction of the Left Behind books and movies from a Progressive Evangelical perspective. (In fact, the latest article links to this site.) It’s well worth a look if your interested in an informal history of how the Bircher and Teabagger ideologies have gotten mixed together.
“How on earth is it possible to penetrate a mind like that?”
“You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into.” – Mark Twain
Chips or nor chips, Obamacare is a conspiracy by itself. There are many facts and a lot of information available. Here is a very small sample. In 1970, the CPUSA published “A New Model Constitution for America”. It was recently updated. I don’t remember the year, but I think it was 2011. In the 90’s, the CPUSA and the CPGB joined forces for the destruction of both continents. In the 90’s (I think 1997), the CPUSA claimed to have control of a third of our congress (Yes, changes have been mad since then, but the influence is still there). In 2008, the CPUSA opened a new office in Manhattan, NY. Amid the accolades of the Party’s growth and their youth movement on their website, the following comment was made: “The Party should be optimistic because we now have a Marxist headed for the White House.”
Remember: there were at least three different recordings of Obama claiming he will always stand by his Muslim brothers. It was the radical Muslims that fought along side the Nazis in WW11.
um I thought the mark of the beast was your #SS Number, your phone number, your drives license number, your bank account number, ect, but hey thats just me LOL
People need to stop chasing snipes and look at the true issues.
I had a friend post this on my page recently….I told her it was not true. LOL needless to say she has not spoken to me since. Told her she actually needed to read the ACA, it would confirm that it was a lie. She too said it was the mark of the beast.
Personally, if someone wants to kill themselves with a venomous snake, that’s all fine and well. But if you’re going to torture your child, and then allow him to die, by refusing him medical care, that should be a punishable offense. I don’t care what your religion believes. If you’re not doing everything possible to make sure your child lives a healthy life, you shouldn’t be permitted to reproduce.
Ah, Facebook. Willing surveillance. Why bother with extensive covert operations when people will willingly tell you everything you want to know?
Revelations may well be a bad trip from a heavy overdose of “Magic Mushrooms”, for all we know. It certainly reads like it.
I suspect that it might have been included because it sounds so fantastical that the people responsible for biblical canon thought it had to be divinely inspired. I mean there’s enough other unbelievable stuff in other books of the Bible that is attributed to God, why not all of this other wacky shit?
What’s really scary is the far-right religious types who actually want to cause trouble in the Middle East in order to bring about the end-times prophecy as depicted in Revelations. They don’t want peace, that would work against the end-times crap that they want to see happen. To my way of thinking, that is inhuman.
The discussion of the various books in the bible is really arcane and far less important when you look at the real problems that these people want to cause. Intellectually it may be interesting for a time, but not for a very long time. At least not for me any more.
I used to read a lot more about biblical history years ago in an effort to learn just why it is not to be believed. Once I determined that it wasn’t believable, I gave up studying it and worrying about it. I worry more about the people who do believe it and what they want to do, and are capable of doing. As a literary collection, the bible is a waste of my time.
Or the faith healers whose kids die from a lack of medical attention. “We didn’t pray hard enough, and didn’t have enough faith in Jesus”.
No, they didn’t take the kid to the freakin’ doctor.
This just further lends credence to the fact how dumb and gullible some people are. I think the only solution would be to let them all move to Texas and they can then secede from the Union.
This reminds me of the people who are gravely concerned that the jets flying above us are dumping super-secret chemicals into the atmosphere. They wrongly think that jet contrails are the result of that chemical spraying. When they see the contrails, they stand out on their lawns spraying vinegar at them.
Yes. They actually think that spraying vinegar at a contrail tens of thousands of feet above them makes them go away and neutralizes the supposed chemical vapor.
The only thing it does is mess up their lawns, of course. But you can’t convince crazy people that they’ve been acting crazy until you at least medicate them. And they’d never go along with that, they have a conspiracy theory for that, too!
Take heart people. Dumbasses like this do breed but they are prone to losing their progeny to common sense. When I talk with the young I am always amazed by their no non-sense attitudes. The more these people insist on the stupid the more likely it is that their children will conclude that they are unacceptable and unreliable as a guide to life. Stupid will always be a problem and will always make a spectacle of itself but all they will achieve is to be rejected by their children.
I think you have a misunderstanding of what the technology you cite does.
These devices are for measuring various medical parameters, such as blood glucose levels, radiation doses for radiation therapy, and various other medical parameters. They do not have the capability to track your location, driving record, your meals or even your complete medical history. That is ridiculous – the capability to analyze what you ate for breakfast would require a small laboratory in addition to the ability to store that data.
They do not have the capability to have a GPS receiver in them. In order to transmit location data, it would require an even bigger power source. There’s no room for that, and that capability would require a battery that would need recharging or replacing on a regular basis. Think of what a prisoner who is under house arrest has to wear in order for the authorities to track them. Yes, it’s a cumbersome “ankle bracelet”. With technology the way it is now and in the forseeable future, we won’t have the capability to power such a thing. It is also not possible to power it from a person’s biological processes now or in the forseeable future.
The readers are using “RFID” technology. That means that in order to transmit data, the chip has to be in the presence of a nearby strong radio-frequency field, which supplies power to the device so it can transmit that data. Which is why you have to go to a hospital to get them read. It can’t be read in out in the open in a field somewhere unless someone has a portable RFID device right next to you.
And I repeat, these have limited capability to do limited medical measurements. Data storage technology at this stage will not allow the storage of a person’s complete medical record in such a small area.
Agnostic or not, you are falling for a ridiculous rumor based on incomplete information propagated by people with little-to-no technical knowledge. I’m an electronic technical professional and have been for 45 years, so I know what I’m talking about. In short, this is bullshit.
Wow that page seems to have disappeared!
What’s the Onion going to do now that real headlines are as crazy as the stuff they think up?
Mark of the Beast? I’m agnostic, so I don’t know about all that. What I do know is that the chips are real, and they are coming. Research “Digital Angel”, a company under the corporate umbrella of Verisign. I first learned of them in late ’99 via Reuters. At that time, their whole business plan was available at the Digital Angel website (complete with diagram of little stick man, cell tower in the distance, satellite, and black GMC triangulating the location of the stickman, etc.). They stated that their major investor was to be the US government (this was before the company went public – now NASDAQ “DIGAD”) for the promised sum of $10 BILLION worth of their implantable chips. A little about the chips themselves… they are self powered – that is as long as the implanted is alive and kicking, so is the chip (side note – the technology for powering the chips was developed by another Verisign company). These chips have the capability of storing every bit of data about you – full medical history, driving record, tax records, what you ate for breakfast on any given day of your life, etc. The “readers” for these chips, also another Verisign/Verichip product, are already being installed in hospitals in my area and probably in yours as well.
Forget the keys, I need something to help me find my phone!
I like the guy who said he won’t be here because he will be swept up in the rapture, because he is a Christian. Don’t know about you but the rapture can’t come soon enough for me, all these Christian assholes will be gone for good. Sounds like paradise to me!
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that some of those commenters are my relatives. I grew up with it, and there’s no persuading them that they’re wrong. It’s a mix of stubbornness and complete lack of critical thinking, which is very puzzling considering how curious they are about the world in terms of how things work and the universe at large (in my family, at least). Hmm — maybe I should change that to “selective critical thinking,” now that I think about it a little bit. My relatives are all very good at observing and connecting dots until you reach the area of belief — and it’s true, the Bible is the final authority. (Yes, the only book my grandmother had in the house was the Bible, although that side of the family are all voracious readers.)
When you consider some of the people who have been elected to office in this country — and not only local, but national office — you’re right to point out the dangers of dismissing these loons.
But wouldn’t those who are truly devout Christians welcome the end of times and the Rapture? They should be welcoming the ObamacareChip ™.
ridiculous
adj.
Deserving or inspiring ridicule; absurd, preposterous, or silly.
_________________________________________________
Non compos mentis is a term meaning “not of sound mind”. Non compos mentis derives from the Latin non meaning “not”, compos meaning “having (command of)”, and mentis (genitive singular of mens), meaning “mind”. It is the direct opposite of Compos mentis (of a composed mind).
Have I told you lately how much I love you?
:)
… Uh-Oh … now you’ve gone and done it. What if they turn their cell phones off? Oh, that’s right … we can turn them on … remotely, I almost forgot!
Wow! Once again I’ve run out of popcorn. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the American population, on average, as a whole, reads, writes and comprehends at an 8th Grade Level. This is the same as a 14 year old with an IQ of 98.
I’M OUTTA HERE …
What, no nacho cheese?
:-P
I wish I could not say that I giggle snorted at this.
The ones who complain the loudest use Facebook, Cell phones, twitter, etc. The NSA already knows everything.
;-)
And that’s where you make your mistake. I don’t. I’ve read it, front to back, and find it largely worthless and contradictory. Your mileage may vary.
L. Ron Hubbard. It’s a business.
We know how accurate the John Birch Society’s predictions have been, I mean, after all the Communist plot to poison all Americans with fluoridated water was so wildly successful.
That’s the spirit!
Naturally, we need to take this to the next step and get some Halloween makeup, and do a YouTube video of someone having a chip cut out of them. :)
Haha I decided to join the fun and just made this comment:
[name redacted] What
if you WANT one of these chips? Where can you go to get one? I read
somewhere that the government’s health care website only works for those
that have the chip installed.
Like · Reply · 18:45 (A few seconds ago)Reply
What a bunch of freaks. Look, RWNJs, all you lemmings already have a tracking chip on you, It’s called your cellphone. :p
I’m not gonna get one a them thar Satan chips until they offer ’em in mint chocolate flavor!
That’s not before Noah, that’s before the Fall, when the physics and biology of the world were apparently completely bonkers.
This story keeps making me think of this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yteMugRAc0
That’s actually the most interesting aspect of Rapture Ready thinking to me, the contradiction between their conviction that any day now they’ll be assumed into Heaven and their fear and anger about every event that they cite as proof of the imminence of the End Times. Is it as close as they come to self-doubt?
If you believe that the Bible is the inspired word of the living God , read it for yourself.
Genesis 2:4-6.
It’s just too stupid to care anymore.
You’re being redundant… again.
It’s simple… flee!
“…marks of The Beast that will herald the end of times.”
Well…. hello, ain’t this their collective wet dream; what the hell is their problem now?
They actually believe this. I live in East Texas, about as conservative as it gets. The people here believe all of this nonsense. It is pervasive and drives me batty. I try to dispel the myths where I can but wow I am only one person and usually I get discounted because I am “liberal”. The conservative media bubble is powerful. They have managed to convince people if it isn’t from a conservative source its a lie and to not be trusted. Facts don’t matter. I don’t know how to break through that.
They worry about some mysterious chip affecting their bodies but don’t give a shit about global warming, radiation or GMO’s. The mark of the beast is the ATM card…the beast being predatory capitalism.
Yeah, possibly not the brightest thing I’ve ever done, but I just couldn’t resist the experiment.
I remember “The Late Great Planet Earth” from the early ’70s. It was full of all these “signs”, “proving” the end times were at hand and all this Mark of the Beast, Antichrist, rapture crap was just around the corner.
All the events of the day were squeezed into this narrative that the culmination of this would be the Soviet Union attacking Israel at Armageddon, Jesus shows up, converts the Jews and all is happy for 1000 years. When that didn’t work out, they said it was Saddam. Oops.
When Obama doesn’t pan out, they will keep searching in their blind idiocy.
It’s amazing what religion can do to people especially the very ignorant.
Good luck, but be careful, it’s actually National Nut Day. That’s why they’re all out. :)
OK, I did something very stupid. Down below I came up with the following comical speculation:
Pfft. The website works poorly only for persons who haven’t got the beastly chip yet. But if you’re already marked the website works fine. It’s an attempt to force people to get the implants, sort of like an E-ZPass only for health care.
Then I suggested that if I posted this to the nutty Facebook page I’d see the claim repeated elsewhere.
Well, I went ahead and did it. I created a new Hotmail account, used it to create a new Facebook account, and I posted the following (the top comment from “Nomen Nescio” is mine:)
http://imgur.com/VC94lPq
http://i.imgur.com/VC94lPq.png
Wish Mr. Nescio luck.
I wish these people were insane. First, that would explain it. Second, we could write them off. The problem is that these people aren’t insane. They’re perfectly rational — assuming you start from the premise that their religious beliefs make sense, which they don’t. These people are people you run into every day and could be doctors, lawyers, nurses, the lunch lady in the cafeteria, a stenographer in the House of Representatives — whatever.
The problem with “faith-based” religion is that faith is the main virtue. And you can’t have faith about ordinary things. You can’t “believe” that water flows downhill. You get no points for that. You have to believe something — anything — weird and unprovable: talking snakes, people coming back from the dead, virgin births, a place called heaven, people floating up into heaven.
So, the weirder the belief — and the more you believe in it — the more “faith” you have, and the better person you are.
I have this feeling that there is a bunch of evangelicals who sit around once a week, smoke a few joints, and then get into a contest to see what bullshit they can dream up and how many people they can get to believe it.
He’s in Boise.
I’m tempted. I’m truly tempted, trollish an act as it’d be, to try to prove myself correct. Maybe I could post something to Free Republic.
If the Xtianist nutcases avoid having the dreaded microchip implanted in them, then nothing will interfere with The Rapture, in which the fundie Xtians will be caught up in the clouds (their entire bodies, that is) to meet the Lord in the air. Someone should tell them that this Bible verse was mistranslated. The actual event is The Partial Rapture. Rather than their entire bodies, it will be only their big mouths that are spirited off to heaven. The divine plan was really to give their secular neighbors a little peace and quiet.
If you have the SS number tattooed to your head, if it comes off, you wouldn’t need the number, right?
Simple. ;o)
Echo echo echo echo echo echo echo echo echo echo!
That’s FACEBOOK! ;o)
We need to track down the conspiracy sources. Could it be Fundie/Thumper churches, or does it go beyond that, using church as a front?
Reflecting on events in the early 1930s in Germany, that’s exactly what was said about the National Socialists and offered as a rationale for why they would never actually be elected to office. Subsequent events back then make what you say about today’s American know-nothings even scarier.
So the whole thing is a mess. You can’t take them at face value anymore than you can any historical documents.
And that’s the long and short of it, really.
I have a slight interest in the New Testament as a product of classical antiquity and I translated little bits of it back when I was studying classical language–fifteen years ago now…damn. Most of it has evaporated completely from my memory.
Anyhow I wish more people would take it for what it is: a composite document written by ordinary men and subject to just the same doubt and criticism as any other human document, vulnerable to the same defects of translation as any other document. “Translator, traitor,” after all.
Well, yeah, there is that. :)
Or go find Sarah Connor to help ensure that Skynet isn’t turned on.
You know what’s really scary to consider? If I posted this very same idea to that Facebook page or some other Internet cesspool, I’m certain it’d be repeated as fact in a dozen other places by the end of the week.
Ah, so that’s why my application has remained in ‘identity verification under review’ for the last week and a half: I need to go get that chip implanted. D’oh!
In a way, I appreciate it, because their incredibly mind-boggling remarks helps make it clear what we’re dealing with: Utterly and completely irrational people who will deny sense, logic, and objective reality itself if it in any way contradicts their beliefs.
There is no reasoning with them, because facts simply don’t matter.
that is the real rapture. all the painfully stupid asses get shipped to Mars and they wander around looking for the pearly gates wow that is ethnic cleansing at its finest.
Pfft. The website works poorly only for persons who haven’t got the beastly chip yet. But if you’re already marked the website works fine. It’s an attempt to force people to get the implants, sort of like an E-ZPass only for health care.
Apropos of nothing, I was absurdly pleased to see that when NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory successfully landed its rover a number of Internet wags actually said, “Curiosity got its ass to Mars.”
I’m still boggling at the “It never rained before Noah” comment….
The day when crazy Islam gets a firm grip on a major American political party and runs candidates for high offices who are actually taken seriously by a large fraction of voters, we’ll let you know.
I have had people tell me that it’s all divine dictation. God whispered it directly into their little ears and they just wrote it down.
Or . . . the fate of the Affordable Care Act website could have put the Microchip Americans program on hold. There’s nothing we can say that will help the fundie mind set change course. Whatever is suggested, it can be somehow twisted to support the crazy.
One consolation is that if the “Obamacare chip” works as well as the Obamacare website, no one has anything to worry about.
The books were also mostly written in Greek as that was the lingua franca for that area and pretty much was until the end of the Byzantine Empire. So they were relayed in Aramaic or Hebrew and then translated into Greek, then other languages. So the whole thing is a mess. You can’t take them at face value anymore than you can any historical documents. They need to be looked at and scrutinized heavily. One Roman’s accounts of the Germanic tribes was a reaction to the decadence that was taking place in Rome and ended up being interpreted by the Nazis as proof that they were the pure race. So we go from a Roman (I think it was Tacitus) to white power in one swoop. Don’t these people understand how history works or do they literally think that god wrote this stuff down????
59 million people believed that Sarah Palin would make a good president.
Much of the contemporary fan fiction around apocalyptic thinking springs from a pulp fiction series written by Tim LaHaye called ‘Left Behind.’ There were even movies and some TV shows made based on the series. While the series made quite an impact among the knee-jerk know-nothing fundies, fundamentalist bible students with whom I am acquainted complained that the ‘Left Behind’ series was scripturally inadequate, even misleading. To my way of thinking, it’s all fan fiction down to and including the Revelation of St. John or whatever they’re calling it in this millenium.
The microchip thing not dissimilar to how the right-wingers opposed Social Security when it was first proposed. When Col. McCormick ran the Chicago Tribune as the Fox News of its day, they ran articles claiming that the law would require you to have your Social Security number tattooed to both arms (in case one gets cut off in an accident). This same idea was proposed by the John Birch Society in the 1960s involving use of your Social Security number in filing for Medicare when that was first proposed. Right-wingers are so unimaginative.
In fact, when we bought a new phone, it came with a little brochure that offered a ‘key-finder’ fob. Attach it to the keys, then any of the wireless handsets can be used as a directional range-finder to locate said keys.
I’m saying that to 20 million people, the scenario you describe is a distinct possibility. I’m also saying that relatively speaking, the number of people subscribing to the “Obama wants to implant a chip in my body” conspiracy theory is miniscule.
The ones that particularly give me the giggles are the snake handling cults… and how many of their leaders have committed suicide with venomous snakes, yet people continue to “believe”.
Too late…
Nice attempt at diversion, Mr. Troll.
My two Chows both had chips embedded in their necks that, should they become lost and are picked up by animal control people, a person can move a wand over the dog to produce a number that directs them to my veterinarian to facilitate the dog’s return to the owner. Such chips might prove useful to religious zealots as after they wander off they can be returned swiftly to their church before they become a nuisance to the public.
I am so stealing that graphic.
I understand what you’re saying and I have a similar reaction because the actuarial tables give me another 10 to 15 years in this lifetime at the most. Even so, it’s all so fascinating, I’m not sorry I won’t be here to share the misery of the terrible but inevitable defeat our nation will come to but secretly (between you and me and whoever reads this), I’d love to be here to say “I told you so!” Nyeh-heh-heh!
That’s the interesting part. Obviously they haven’t got a clue how intensive the surveillance is, not just in theory but in application.
I would believe it. I have a whole family tree full of Boomhauers who actually talk that way an’ all . . .
Then I have one thing to say to them: Get your ass to Mars.
I gather you’re saying that Elvis is not living in a trailer court in Michigan with Marilyn Monroe after all?
I think a medical chip is a very good idea but my doctor hasn’t recommended it. As for the government conspiracy to micro-chip us all, I hadn’t heard that one before. Maybe it’s on a Looney-Bird Conspiracy website that I don’t know about.
Unfortunately, I probably would believe it. Some of my wife’s relatives are Fox watching fundamentalist idiots.
No the ones Obamacare implant are the ones up the nose like in the 1st Total Recall. the size of a huge walnut and requires a special tool which you shove in and grab the chip with. Hurts like hell but you can finally breath easier.
These stupid, stupid people will go to their graves believing this and a hundred other bullshit stories. Like they believe wrestling is real and they don’t write scripts for reality shows and Obama is a muslim and there are thousands collecting two and three checks a month on welfare, and can live in a hole in the ground and survive a nuclear attack. The problem we have is they reproduce at record levels and produce more stupid, stupid people who are home schooled by other morons and the cycle is repeated.
That’s your takeaway from this? My guess I people make fun of you incessantly.
I stand corrected.
I have only one thing to say:
I think that if someone replaced their brain with a cow chip, it would raise their IQ by at least 30 to 40 points.
a cave practicing sensory deprivation
Or with Fox News on in your house from morning to night. In my sister’s house, Fox goes on before they make coffee in the morning and is the last thing off at night. It is at such a volume that when I am on the phone with my sister, I have to ask her to turn it down so I can hear her.
Who ever said it wasn’t ok to make fun of crazy anybody?
I don’t think there is a chip anywhere in the word that can raise their IQ.
Crazy people believe crazy things. Over 20 million people believe Elvis is still alive, for crying out loud.
I’ve long wondered why Revelations ended up in the canon in the first place. It’s definitely the odd book out: you have the rather dry and reportorial style of the Gospels themselves, a great heaping helping of apologetics from Paul…and then this whacked-out “vision”. That it was thrown in as a sop to popular taste in apocalyptic fiction makes some sense. But the canon was condensing into its current form long, long before the days of Gutenberg. The choice of the current four Gospels goes back at least as far as Irenaeus. And, if I remember rightly, surviving texts of Paul’s epistles actually go back further than texts of the Gospels.
I have heard the same thing about Social Security numbers. Although I’m am surprised that I have yet to hear any body claim that your credit score numbers are the mark of the beast.
I think it is perfectly fair to do so, and when they say crazy shit like this we do.
why is it ok to make fun of crazy christians but not crazy muslims :P
What can we expect in a country where no critical thinking skills are taught anymore. The US is the laughingstock of the rest of the educated world. Some of these folks should just go back to their teevees and sleep, just like the sheeple in Them.
Sounds to me like you hit the nail on the head… evangelical Christianity in its totality is sort of like Jesus fan fiction. Written by someone who only half perused the source material for a few key words to use to dupe people out of their money.
I think the mark of the beast is a symbol of the elephant.
Well, I do have a Bible here (New Catholic Edition, very handsomely bound actually) and I know what the “mark of the beast” passage says. Also I’m an Iron Maiden fan. But that’s not really what I’m curious about. What I understand (incorrectly perhaps) is that in the U.S. a complicated system of apocalyptic belief has arisen in the past few decades that, while derivative from Revelations, goes far beyond its literal words–a sort of “fanon” with its own fixed tenets and beliefs. Am I wrong about this?
Likely wouldn’t even need a scanner. RFID chips are inserted just under the skin, but not under the muscle. So connective tissue forms around it and holds it in place. In animals, you can feel the chip as a small lump just under the skin, and it generally isn’t too hard to find if you know what you are looking, for without a scanner. They don’t take much effort to remove, if you don’t mind a little blood.
Except they’re trying to drag those of us in red states down with them.
Stupid is as stupid does.
There have been sects throughout history who have gone off and practiced some strange belief or another. Usually, they were quite small and short lived. The age of radio and television made this phenomena a huge success in America. Some have become exceedingly wealthy scaring people. It’s true.
I firmly believe that these people are proof that the Rapture has already happened. The good Christianists have all already been taken away, and this is what we’re left with.
And they probably shouldn’t be using Facebook either.
And get off the Internet. There really isn’t an easier way to track exactly where someone is than an IP and MAC address. Couple that with a GPS tracker… and they might as well just be checking in with the NSA every half-hour.
They use passages from throughout the New Testament to make their case, based around Revelations. It is actually quite amazing how they manage to carefully twist specific passages, entirely out of context, to have a current meaning. Of course, each time technology or politics change, they have to reinterpret and reissue their dire predictions. I mean, it just doesn’t work to part the ignorant from t heir money if people aren’t afraid.
Back in the first century or so, there were a lot of apocalyptic books floating around. Remember, there was no such thing as a bible — just a lot of individual books purportedly by different people and taking different approaches and pushing certain myths. But apocalyptic books were popular and were the vampire or zombie books of that time. People loved to be scared. When it came time to publish the bible — after the printing press was invented — they grabbed a bunch of books that had been placed into “the canon” of scripture. Someone decided they needed an apocalyptic book to round out the anthology and so they just grabbed one that had survived and was handy. That’s the only reason it’s in the bible.
Making it a relatively modern interpretation of the Bible, and is really only part of evangelical Zionist faiths, not the countless other Christian denominations. More accurately, it is a way of scaring the ignorant out of their money.
I, for one, am happy to see this. Every minute or dollar that these loonie birds are spending on this is a minute or dollar that they’re not spending on bashing gays. So, it’s a good thing. If they don’t want affordable health care, good.
If you spend enough time in a cave practicing sensory deprivation, you’ll eventually start seeing some real spooky shit.
These people just need to buy a scanner to find out where the chip is located and then cut it out themselves, or have a friend cut it out. It’s hardly an inconvenient work around.
Warning! Revelations is fucking bat shit crazy and scary. Even our Catholic school more or less said skip it and stuck to a few passages about the second coming.
This is quite old, actually. Years ago, I was visiting friends in Florida. I was bored one day and was channel surfing. I came across this preacher who “proved” — very successfully, unless you had more than a second-grade education — that bar codes, which were new at the time — we the mark of the beast. His conclusion was that pretty soon we would all be required to have bar codes put on us too and we would not be allowed to buy or sell anything unless we had the mark of the beast on us. Of course, you had to send him money to fend off this evil.
The car key thing has already been solved. You can get a chip for them for under $20.
The term “rapture” was coined in the 19th century, incidentally.
From Revelations in the Bible, just google it.
Can they also microchip my car keys?
That at least would be worthwhile, when I’m trying to find the damn things.
Love that one comment from the idiot convinced he’ll be raptured, therefore doesn’t have to worry about anything.
An easy way to make a rapture believer’s head spin, ask why God would give them a free pass from being tested for their faith.
Of course, the logical inconsistency abounds, the same Administration who’s health care website is plagued by snafus is somehow at the top of its game with these microchips, which do what, exactly?
It’s past bizarre for so-called “believers” and “faithful” to shun using the greatest gift their God could bestow upon them, their minds.
Could someone who’s knowledgeable of contemporary Rapture theology tell me just this “mark of the Beast” stuff is about? I’m reading (with some difficulty) the Facebook comments quoted above and it’s not the least bit clear to me how the Bible is supposed to have predicted RFID chips and what the consequences are supposed to be for getting “marked”.
I have long perceived, by the way, a curious schism in the thoughts of the Rapture Ready types. They make a great show of exulting in the imminence of the Rapture, so should not they welcome the omens they claim to see in current events? Shouldn’t they be happy that Obama is the anti-Christ? But instead they greet these omens with overwhelming fear and anger. I just don’t get it.
Time was when the crackpots in this country were small in number, pretty much limited to flying saucer nuts and bigfoot hunters. Now, they’re everywhere. In their mindset (if that’s the word), nothing, absolutely nothing, is what it seems; everything is a cover for some insidious agenda or other. The Christian right and the Tea Party are only the most visible offenders; these nuts are everywhere, and as near as I can tell their numbers are growing all the time. Climate change deniers, evolution doubters, vaccination rebels, and on and on. And it’s not just skepticism they voice, it’s absolute certainty that some mysterious “they” are behind everything in the world and that all we see and hear is a clever ruse deigned to cover up the fact. And needless to say, there is absolutely no way to talk sense to them; if you doubt their various creeds, that is in their minds simply proof that you are either a dupe or an active member of the villainous conspiracy.
My ex’s late father was a prime case in point. The man never met a crackpot theory he wouldn’t eagerly subscribe to–as long as it came cloaked in the suspicion that conventional wisdom is totally wrong and that “they” are hiding the truth from us. Facts don’t matter; logic is beside the point. He once produced a tape recording of (he claimed) Karl Marx laying out the plans for a Jewish takeover of the world. (These tapes are promoted by a number of right-wing newspapers and websites.) This tape recording was purportedly made by some guy (I forget the name) when he interviewed Marx in 1912. When I pointed out that 1) Marx had died a couple of decades before that, and 2) tape recording hadn’t been invented yet in 1912, he sat back, smiled a beatific smile, and told me I had been duped like everybody else.
How on earth is it possible to penetrate a mind like that? And that way of looking at the world is more and more widespread here in The Greatest Country in the World(TM). It’s one more reason why I think the country is royally screwed and won’t be around a century from now. I’m old enough that I won’t live to see the worst that’s coming, and I have to tell you I’m very glad of it.
If they’re worried about the Government tracking them, they ought to abandon their cell phones immediately.
Sounds like a valuable service to me. What better way to immediately cull ‘friends’ who are actually idiots than to simply wait to see if anyone posts this to your FB wall.
this is true obama care is installing micro chips in the religious zealots, its to balance the chips their religions already implanted so they will believe the propaganda they get fed and increase their IQ’s to at least double digits, science is amazing after all.