Recently, the San Antonio, Texas school district has become embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the family of a student who is refusing to wear a mandatory student ID card embedded with a RFID tracking chip on the grounds that such chips are a "Mark of the Beast."
Yesterday on the "Hagee Hotline," John Hagee sought to reassure his audience that these sorts of ID cards are not the Mark of the Beast ... because that won't come until after the Rapture and the chips will be directly implanted in people's bodies. So it's not until the government starts forcing people to get implanted with such chips and "to keep laws that you don't want to keep," Hagee explained, "that you're in trouble":
33 comments
Yesterday on the "Hagee Hotline," John Hagee sought to reassure his audience that these sorts of ID cards are not the Mark of the Beast
OK, good, a fundie preacher using reason when talking to his followers.
because that won't come until after the Rapture and the chips will be directly implanted in people's bodies.
Aww crap. I knew it was too good to be true.
@ Sheridan- That explains a lot. My dog is chipped and Satan surely dwells within his butt.
So, if all the good guys disappear into the troposphere, who's going to be inserting the computerised chip of Lucifer? After all, there's no advantage in helping the christian god with his plan if you're not included.
Or, could it even possibly be that this is all complete idiocy?
So, basically... "This thing you believe is wrong and crazy. Here, believe this other completely wrong and crazy thing, instead!"
These people are already in trouble. A real bad sort of trouble...
To Hagee's credit, at least his deranged idea will hopefully help those parents to relax & accept that ID thingy.
That said this situation & pure weirdsville. You've heard of "Evil vs. Evil"? Well, THIS is "Delusion vs. Delusion".
At a glance, I read this as "Sun Chips are the Mark of the Beast"... and if you ever tried to quietly snack from one of those biodegradable bags at 2am, you know for a fact that shit was designed by the devil.
Well, wrong reasonings for the right result.
"To keep laws that you don't want to keep" seems anarchist, to be honest. I don't want to keep a lot of laws, like speeding, because they are dumb. But I do anyways because civil disobedience is not worth my time and I'm not going to change it with speeding tickets.
Ever sent your child to camp, Mr Hagee? When you drop him or her off, your child is issued a little wristband, which serves as their meal ticket for the duration of their stay. It shows the staff that the child belongs there and that his or her meals are paid for.
Same thing. As in, not at all different from what the school district is doing. How you can possibly think that this is a sign of evil confounds me. You want your child to eat a healthy lunch, right?
...and you wonder why embracing one of the Abrahamic religions is considered intellectual suicide. It's because you check your brain at the door of your church then forget to reclaim it on your way back out.
Uhh, it sounds a little like verging on totalitarian surveillance to be forced to wear a tracking device. I'd be fighting that too.
@Mattiedef: Anarchists are far from having a monopoly on civil disobedience, although the more extreme form of "illegalism" tends to be an anarchist trend. But disagreeing with the state doesn't make you an anarchist; that requires disagreeing with the state's claim that it has the right to exist and to enforce a monopoly on violence. This guy seems to be of the unusual view that all current laws are fine and dandy, and it will be the literal end of the world should a law he disagrees with be passed. I guess that means he supports keeping religion out of science classes and anti-discrimination legislation. It surely makes him the furthest thing from an anarchist though.
@KittyKaboom: those bracelets don't have RFID chips in them, so it's not exactly the same. If the camp was covered in CCTV cameras it might get similar.
First Pat Robertson shows some sense in saying the earth isn't 6,000 years old and now John Hagee shows some as well.
What's the world coming to when the fundies start to be too wacko for Robertson and Hagee?
What this guy is saying is rather stupid taken at face value, but he is trying to limit stupid behavior by appealing to the sensibilities of idiots that believe in this sort of thing. I'd say the approach is perfectly sensible. Sometimes playing along and nodding your head gives you better results than an outright confrontation.
Though, I really don't like the idea of tagging a student body like cattle. An ID card that happens to have RFID; fine, okay, it's hardly worse than a barcode, and it's useful for things like checking out books or paying for lunch at the canteen. Using said badges as a means to track students, and forcing them to carry those badges in plain sight, as if they were employees working in a restricted area, well, that's where I take issue.
"student ID card embedded with a RFID tracking chip"
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the card does nothing but unlock certain areas of the school. Does no one actually understand the limitations of RFID chips? >___>
@Felix Wilde
It's not a tracking device. People are far too alarmist about these things. It is no different than a smart card that holds your information. Or bar codes on your drivers license. Or smart tags for tolls.
It is very hard, if not impossible, to track a person with very low powered radio frequencies.
@muchael3ov
You can have checkpoints that log who passes through and when. I doubt that's what's happening, but it's doable.
There's also the issue of being made to wear the ID. Visual tracking is still tracking.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register . Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.