* Original Area: POLITICS
* Original To  : Steve Asher (1:396/45)
* Original Subj: (1)The Mark of the Beast

Steve,

This is the first part of the article by Rod Dreher of the
Dallas Morning News.  I thought I'd attempted to post this
part previously, but upon checking, it wasn't there.
So, here it is:

 Left-Behinders, libertarians right to fear VeriChip

 By Rod Dreher / The Dallas Morning News

 "Holy Hal Lindsey!" I said to my wife over the morning paper
 last week.  No matter how far away I get from that 1970s summer
 that I spent obsessed with The Late Great Planet Earth, some
 stories never fail to send a chill down my spine.

 The paper reported Food and Drug Administration approval for
 human use of the VeriChip, a microchip injected under one's skin.
 This version sends out a radio signal allowing doctors access to
 your medical history.  Even The New York Times grasped the
 pop-culture ramifications of this development, noting that "some
 fundamentalist religious groups ... contend that the tags may be
 the 'mark of the beast' referred to in the Book of Revelation."

 Techno-totalitarianism   ( Don't worry! Be Happy! )

 As a teenager, I left behind - ahem - dispensationalist
 eschatology, but if you've ever had the bejabbers scared out of
 you by the more lurid expressions of that religious vision, you
 never quite get over it.  I don't believe in the Rapture anymore,
 but I still harbor a healthy fear of techno-totalitarianism.

 So when I hear about things like the VeriChip, I am genuinely
 grateful for the fundamentalists and evangelicals who believe
 that stuff.  If we are going to be spared the Orwellian society
 portended by this technology, it will be in large part due to the
 political efforts of a strange-bedfellow coalition of hard-core
 civil libertarians and the "Left Behind" crowd, nonconformists
 who will not stand meekly by while the rest of us cud chewers
 amble into the corral for our VeriChip injection.

 Sure, most of us are suspicious of a microchip implanted in our
 bodies - now.  But as the CEO of VeriChip maker Applied Digital
 Systems said, the company hopes FDA approval will ease "the
 creepy factor."  It's easy to foresee the circumstances that
 would make accepting the VeriChip seem like the most reasonable
 thing in the world.



This article continues in "(2) The Mark of the Beast?"

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