You know there are some pretty sad people out there who have very little else to do but do stupid little calculations on the numbers given in the book of Revelation, like they're of any importance.
These people are sort of like numerologists and what they do is Gematria, applying weights to each letter of a name to come up with the desired end result, but nobody has yet informed them that the numbers in the book of Revelation are purely symbolical and are most probably Pythagorean in origin.
They spend ages working out just whose names fit the number of the Beast; that is, whose names, when weighted to specific criteria, come to the sum of 666 - six hundred and sixty six - or the number of the Beast.
So far we've had the full gamut of people they want to arraign, like for instance, Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Kennedy, Gorvachev, Clinton, Al Gore, Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Kissinger, Mussolini, Nero, Reagan, Saddam Hussein, Caligula, King Juan Carlos of Spain, Emperor Frederick II of Germany, King George II of England, Emperor Justinian, Nikita Khrushchev, Napoleon Bonaparte, Czar Peter the Great, Josef Stalin, Kaiser Wilhelm, Boris Yeltsin, and so on.
I'm still waiting for someone to come up with George W. Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Arnie, and Billy Graham.
What really amuses me is the fact that if they can't get the names to add up with one method of calculation, they do a spot of juggling with the weights, like using the Greek or Hebrew alphabets, or even just throwing in an arbitrary figure here and there. It's a pretty safe bet that finding the right arbitrary figure will almost certainly lead to the right result.
The book of Revelation contains lots of fuel to throw on the fires of discord, but the principle element which everyone knows about is AntiChrist, and his/her lesser known cohort the Beast. There is, in fact, a Satanic Trinity made up of AntiChrist, the False Prophet, and the Beast.
Largely because of his success, in recent years Bill Gates and Microsoft have become the target of such malicious attacks, but I don't think so personally. Bill Gates just looks too gormless, and Microsoft are just too crap - I mean take Windows ME - to be in league with the Devil for my liking.
My personal choice for AntiChrist's Satanic corporation is a certain online retailer of books, music, films, cameras, VCRs, kitchen stuff, and so on, ad infinitum. I'm sure you know who I'm implying. Doesn't that little arrow underneath the logo strike you as remarkably similar to the devils' tails so often depicted in pre-Renaissance Western art? Uncanny no less.
Okay, just to prove my point, let's see how it adds up using ASCII conversion, where A=65, B=66, and so on, up to Z=90. AMAZONCOM is the actual user ID that Amazon uses for its domain name registrations, so we'll give it a go on that one.
AMAZONCOM = 65 + 77 + 65 + 90 + 79 + 78 + 67 + 78 + 77 = 677
That is pretty fucking close. Sure it's 11 off, but hell, I'm no math major. And besides, the old prophet of doom may have got his sums wrong somewhere down the line. Let's face it: It's pretty easy to do when you're tripping.
Now, if I were to subtract 1 from each letter, because ASCII zero is a null character, the sum adds up to 668. All I need to do now is apply some arbitrary figure, like minus two, and we've hit the jackpot - 666. The number of the Beast.
And there you have it. I rest my case.
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