Well as promised, here it is... my 666th post. So, is it the number of the beast?

According to http://www.666man.net, this is what we should know about this number...

"The number 666 comes directly from the worship practices of the city of Babylon about the time of the Bible prophet Daniel. The people of Babylon worshipped gods that were associated with the sun, moon, visible planets of our solar system, and certain of the stars involved with the practice of astrology. The Babylonians were the principal developers of astrology, as we know it today. In their worship system, they had 37 supreme gods, and one of these, the god associated with the sun, was supreme over all the other gods. These people believed that numbers in some way had power over the gods they worshipped. However, they had to create numbers that they could assign to the gods so that they could have power over them. To do this, they counted their gods and assigned a count number to each of the 36 lesser supreme gods, and then added up all of these numbers (from one to 36) and assigned the sum to the sun god. The first god they counted got the number one assigned to it, and the second god they counted got the number two assigned to it, and so on up to all 36 lesser supreme gods. Now, if you have not guessed it by now, the sum of the numbers from one to 36 totals 666, which they assigned to the god associated with the sun. They did the calculation like this:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + ... + 33 + 34 + 35 + 36 = 666

However, they went further. They feared these gods and worried that one of them might strike them down sometime, so they made amulets with a 6 x 6 matrix of the numbers one through 36 on them. The practice of creating amulets with this arrangement of numbers as part of astrology appears to have continued well past the time of Jesus. Archeologists have found amulets with Latin Inscriptions, so we know that the Romans were indulging in this practice.

Therefore, the 666 number came about because of the pagan worship practices of the Babylonians and their practice of astrology."

The weirdest thing about all of this is that 36 is my lucky number! I never knew of the association until today, and I'd not added the numbers up to 36 together either. Odd.