Late last month, a Wisconsin company made headlines for its decision to begin offering employees the option to get microchips implanted in their hands. Three Square Market, a firm that develops the software used in vending machines, is offering to compensate workers who choose to get the chip that will allow them to pay for things in the break room, log into their computers, gain access to the office, and more.
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So far, the company claims it has had 50 volunteers for the chip. According to CBN News, it is about the size of a grain of rice and will be implanted between the thumb and forefinger. The implant costs $300, with fees being covered by Three Square Market, and employees who opted in will undergo the procedure this month.
“It’s the next thing that’s inevitably gonna happen and we want to be a part of it,” said Three Square Market CEO Todd Westby in a blog post. “Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.”
While the decision has sparked controversy, experts seem to agree that, like it or not, microchipping is the way of the future. It’s not a matter of if you will be chipped but when.
“It will happen to everybody,” Noelle Chesley, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told USA Today. “But not this year, and not in 2018. Maybe not my generation, but certainly that of my kids.”
Critics, meanwhile, were quick to draw associations between the rise of the chip and the “mark of the Beast” passage in the book of Revelation. The verse about the end times in Revelation 13:16-17 reads:
“It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.”
As CBN reported, the comparisons between the Bible and the rise of microchips first began a few years ago when Apple introduced it’s Apple Pay technology.
“We’re kind of moving closer and closer to that ‘right hand’ and closer and closer to the fulfillment of biblical prophecy about the mark of the Beast,” consumer privacy expert and bestselling author Dr. Katherine Albrecht told CBN News at the time.
In the aftermath of the Three Square Market announcement, many religious leaders issued similar warnings about what a chip-tracked future could mean for freedom.
“When Jesus was raised, he was raised body and soul, and it was him, not zombie, not a ghost and we are raised up in the same way,” Amy Cosari, a minister in Hager City, Wisconsin, wrote on the company’s Google page. ”Employees of 32Market, you are not a walking debit card.”
(H/T: CBN News)