Could It Be ... Satan?

Is June 6, 2006 Just Another Day Or An Ominous Warning From The Bible?

(CBS/AP) 
"I don't think the devil has much more to do today than on any other day of the year. He causes discord and celebrates some victory just about every day," Piet said.

But Tuesday "is an unusual day" because of the date, he said.

"It's a day where a lot of people, groups may use to accomplish everything that has to do with evil and the devil. What we want to do is set down a large amount of Christian prayer as a kind of counterweight," he said.

On the other hand, marketers are embracing the superstition. A remake of the 1976 film "The Omen," in which the devil's child Damion was marked with the number, is being released Tuesday.

And Anne Coulter is releasing a new book, titled "Godless: The Church of Liberalism."

"It's my little tribute to liberals having it come out on 666," she said.

It's a cultural phenomenon, says media watcher Robert Thompson.

"I think right now it is one big, huge marketing ploy," the Syracuse University professor told CBS News. "However, I've got to say, I'm still, as a perfectly rational person, not comfortable when this number comes up. If my license plates showed up in the mail and it was three letters and the number 666, it still gives us the creeps."

It's a number that Nancy and Ronald Reagan didn't want as an address when they moved out of the White House in 1989 to the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bel-Air. So they changed their address from 666 St. Cloud Road to 668.

"People are afraid of it. What we are doing is capitalizing on their irrationality to mock it and point it out," said Magus Peter Gilmour of the Church of Satan, which is holding a high mass at a Hollywood theater Tuesday.

"We think it's quaint that people are afraid of that number, and since we are iconoclasts we are happy to embrace that to show people there is nothing to be afraid of," Gilmour said.

While the fear of 666 is Christian, "these kinds of beliefs are universal. For a person of one faith to say that we have these magical numbers, these dangerous numbers, that kind of information will find parallels other faiths," said Stevens.

It's a number that is part of every UPC barcode on groceries (a coincidence according to the code's inventor). With biblical coding, 666 also is the number for the WWW of the World Wide Web.

Many scholars, such as Just, say the beast is really a coded reference — using Hebrew letters for numbers — for the despotic Roman emperor Nero and 616 appears instead of 666 in some ancient manuscripts. The Book of Revelation isn't prophesying a specific end of times but "is about the overall cosmic struggle of good versus evil," Just said.

But for some more apocalyptic theologians, the end of times is coming, even if not specifically on Tuesday. The evangelical Raptureready.com Web site puts its "rapture index" at 156, calling that "fasten your seatbelts" time.

It's not the date June 6 that's worrisome, but the signs in our society of the approach of the 666 antichrist, said the Rev. Tim LaHaye, founder of a self-named ministry and co-author of the best-selling "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic novels. And even though LaHaye said Tuesday isn't the date of the apocalypse, his Left Behind Web site promotes his new book "The Rapture" with an ominous "06.06.06 Will You Be Ready."

"I don't think that people understand that 666 is not a good time," LaHaye said. He said he sees signs of an upcoming "tribulation period" that leads to the Antichrist's arrival in a movement toward one-world government, a single economic system and single religion.