SemiConscious Dot Org

Perhaps it’s just a product of the sheer amount of recent headlines involving religion, but somehow, this little item got lost in the shuffle: last week, Biblical scholars discovered that 666 is not actually the Number of The Beast:

The main researcher promoting the 616 claim is David Parker, professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Paleography at the University of Birmingham in England.

“This is an example of gematria, where numbers are based on the numerical values of letters in people’s names,” Parker told the UK’s Independent. “Early Christians would use numbers to hide the identity of people who they were attacking: 616 refers to the Emperor Caligula.”

Upon receiving this news, my mind set to reeling, and I struggled with my faith, imploring Nixon to reveal to me the meaning, and to make sense of it all. After all, if man could be wrong for so long in his interpretation of one Biblical passage, could that not mean he might have wrongly interpreted other ones? And what of those good Christian legislators in New Mexico who voted to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars renaming Route 666 on the entirely logical premise that a number can cause an inanimate object like a stretch of asphalt to be damned? It turns out that the money spent may have wasted, because it was the wrong number all along!

Finally, after many days of fasting and prayer, Nixon spoke to me, and revealed the meaning of 616: it is, in fact, a telephone area code. Thousands of years ago, the Bible’s authors anticipated the invention of the telephone, and using their copy of Area Code Directory, endeavored to warn us where the Antichrist would be appearing. Glory!

After consulting the internets, I discovered that the 616 area code corresponds to Kent County, Michigan. Now I had a general geographic area to search, but I still didn’t know which town the Great Deceiver would appear in. However, like any good Christian conservative, I know that the liberals (Satan’s natural allies) like to congregate in large cities, and the largest city in Kent County is Grand Rapids. By virtue of this infallible logic, the meaning of formerly cryptic Biblical passages was finally made clear:

And I stood upon the sand of Lake Michigan, and saw a beast rise up out of Lake Michigan, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. – Revelation 13:1

To arms, my flock! The location of the Prince Of Lies has been revealed to us at last. Our task is clear: we must make a mass pilgrimage to Grand Rapids, and employ the Pastor Ted Prayer Walker Method to smoke Satan out of his hidey hole. Sure, many people will complain that we are “bunch of loonies” committing “harassment” or some such nonsense, but such is the price one pays for saving the world. Onward, Nixon Soldiers!