It's like this...a little while ago I made mention of the number 666 in my first fear blog, then someone else brought it up again in another 666 blog. I tried to play it off, but then some people made reference to the “discovery” that on an old Greek scroll that was included with the New Testament that the number 666 might actually be the number 616.

Well, let's look at the Greek numbers for a sec. As you probably know, in the United States we use the Arabic numeral system (read into that what you want, you paranoids) and the Vulgate (the first fully scribed Bible) was written using the Latin numeral system. So what's the difference?

Well the Greek number 666 looks like this.

And the number 616 looks like this.

So as you can see there's only three small straight lines difference between the two, on a document researchers admit is “badly damaged”. So what can three lined getting rubbed off mean? Well, for example, it could mean the difference between the sentence “HE SHOWED HIM HIS FEST.” and “HE SHOWED HIM HIS FIST.” In other words, it opens up to a whole lot of misinterpretation.

But I say fuck that. Have you ever actually read the book of Revelations? How about studied it? The whole thing reads more like a drug trip or some old man's fever dream than some sort of reliable fact. It's the book that is most widely debated in the Bible, and even at the time that it was put into the New Testament there were thoughts that it should be left out with the rest of the Apocrypha.

The only thing that the whole 666/616 discovery and debate proves is that people are good at misreading and misinterpreting things.

And for those who can remember that far back, there was a huge uproar during the New Millennium  when large numbers of churchgoers swore that Jesus was returning at the start of the year 2000. People went into a near panic that the world might end and built shelters and bought army rations. However what most people in the year 2000 didn't know is that the same thing happened in the year 1000. And the year 666. And the year 1212. And the day June Sixth, 2006. And it will probably happen again in the year 2112. Ad nauseum.

On January First, 2001, everybody woke up and...the world was fine. So much effort wasted. So much yelling and fighting. Over what? A book that even Bible scholars claim could very well be a fiction.

One of my favorite quotes is from the series Red Dwarf: “You people are just using religion as an excuse to be crappy to each other.”

That about sums it up. Doesn't it?