Gratuitous Fear Of 666

Offending the evangelical world intentionally or unintentionally can be quite an easy thing to accomplish.  All it takes to genuinely frighten or disturb some Christians is a joking mention of the number 666, as if the number is a conscious demon waiting to lunge at anyone who makes a joke about the unbiblical anxiety around the mere combination of three sixes!  Many Christians who would react with internal fright at such a thing inevitably fall into the evangelical camp of legalistic, irrationalistic "thinkers" who have not actually reflected on Revelation 13, the only book of the Bible that addresses the number 666 as something associated with a vile eschatological figure, very thoroughly.

Revelation 13 does not even provide much information about the association between the number and the best.  In fact, only a single verse mentions it at all.  At most, the chapter says that the figure referred to as the beast has the number 666 tied to it.  Since there is no verse in Revelation or other parts of the Bible detailing how to calculate the number of the beast using some elaborate system, one of the only likely meanings of this is that the beast's name, when the letters are interchanged for specific numbers, will have a total numeric value of 666.  If this is the case, several things would follow.

Depending on which number-letter system is used, a very large number of people throughout history could have had names that would "equal" 666 even if they did not in any way resemble the intensified depravity of the beast of Revelation 13.  On some such systems, my own name could be substituted for numbers that add up to 666!  The very process of attaching numbers to letters in any language is an arbitrary one that only tells someone the mostly unspectacular fact that some names could have certain numbers substituted for them.  If the number-letter system was switched, the beast's name could yield a completely different number.

Were it not for Revelation 13's brief references to the "number of a man" that the text identifies as 666, there would not even be any reason to reflect on 666 as a number in an eschatological context.  The only true connection between numbers, morality, and theism is that some things do or do not logically follow from them because logic governs all things.  Numbers pertain to quantities on a conceptual level when reduced down to their very foundation, and morality pertains to whether an action, motivation, or desire is or is not evil.  Numbers therefore have no inherent association with certain moral stances.

The number 666 and its Biblical link to the "beast" of Revelation can be referenced, joked about, and sarcastically or seriously alluded to without sinning (Deuteronomy 4:2).  Gratuitous fear of 666 is simply born from assumptions and fallacies, the same things many other theologically irrelevant fears come from.  Unless a person is literally identifying with a demonic entity or sincerely calling themselves the "beast," there is nothing to Biblically object to.  Evangelicals simply need to shed their legalistic inclinations in favor of a rationalistic understanding of Biblical concepts.  Only then will they truly understand what does and does not follow from something like the Bible's very limited reference to 666.