(LifeSiteNews) — In a major victory for transhumanism, the first British man has been implanted with a bank card microchip, enabling him to make purchases with only the tap of his hand.

The British daytime program This Morning shared last week that Arnie Szoke, 40, from West London, is the first British man to have his banking information surgically implanted in him via chip.

 

‘It’s like a normal card but you have to be more precise where you tap,” the NHS healthcare assistant told The Sun. “It means I don’t have to keep a wallet with me all the time.” He added that the last time he had used cash, “£40 went missing along with my work pass card.”

Like a normal bank card, his microchip will eventually expire, and will need a £130 replacement procedure in 2029, according to The Sun.

Former MP Gyles Brandreth, who regularly appears on This Morning, raved about the technology as “marvelous,” according to the Daily Mail, predicting, “’It’s going to be the future for all of us. I think when we’re babies, like a pet, our cat has got an implant so it can go through the cat flap and it identifies it.”

“I want that to happen,” Brandreth continued. “And even in my forehead, it would light up with my name.”

Reactions to This Morning’s coverage were mixed, with some celebrating the technology, and others wary of its potential consequences.

The chip reminded another viewer of the “Mark of the Beast” foretold in Scripture.

World record-holding U.K paralympic athlete Ellie Simpson, who has cerebral palsy, had no qualms about the device, by contrast.

Szoke bought the chip, which costs £220 ($249), from the British-­Polish start-up ­Walletmor. The product’s website explains that the chip is used together with an “independent digital wallet” called Purewrist, and that it can be surgically implanted in a “medical aesthetics clinic.”

While it remains to be seen how bank microchip implants will catch on in the U.K. and other countries, thousands of people in Sweden have already been implanted with microchips to replace traditional forms of payment information, boarding passes, government identification, and key cards.

Implanted microchips are a major feature of, and step towards transhumanism, which is an effort to “transcend biology through technology,” as Dr. Joseph Mercola has explained.

Privacy advocates have noted that microchip implants, if widely adopted, could usher in unprecedented levels of totalitarianism by which governments could track and control a spectrum of human behaviors.

Edwin Black, investigative journalist and author of War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, has pointed to China as an example of this kind of authoritarianism, as it already punishes and rewards its citizens through a social credit system programmed into their smartphones.

For example, during COVID, China used a color-coded system to restrict its citizens’ freedom of movement according to their “vaccination” status. A number of Chinese citizens reported this summer that the government turned their health codes to “red” to prevent their travel to banks to protest the freezing of their funds.

Many Christian commentators have noted that implanted bank microchips bear an eerie resemblance to the “Mark of the Beast” from the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

As stated in the Bible: “And he shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”

In Revelation, St. John writes about a “second beast” of the Apocalypse who would force people to be branded and make it illegal for anyone to participate in commerce without the brand.

In a 2016 talk given at the Rome Life Forum, LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John Henry Westen said that having “some mark which allows buying and selling is not evil in and of itself,” only if there are some strings attached to getting such a mark that “makes receiving it worthy of eternal damnation.”

 

Westen speculated that in a not too distant future, law-abiding citizens will only be able to engage in commerce by means of such a chip. He speculated that citizens will eventually only be able to receive such a chip if they first agree to “sign on to some statement” of so-called human rights that would include an acceptance of homosexual ideology, abortion, and other immoral positions. In this way, signing such a statement to receive such a chip would mean a turn toward Satan and away from God.