There’s a lot of hype about today being 6/6/06. Scary, huh?

Might be a good time to remember this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That’s right. We should have been all frantic and paranoid last Thursday, and we missed it! Dang!

At the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, after he introduced the band who had come from all around the world to perform for free, George Harrison stopped suddenly and shouted, “We’ve forgotten Billy Preston!”

No, we haven’t. In 2004 I saw Eric Clapton in concert. The keyboard player looked like a middle-aged minister, but man, could he play. Midway through the show, Clapton introduced his band, and the crowd let out a roar when he came to the great Billy Preston.

I was sorry to hear that Billy Preston died today, and that he had been in a coma since November.

I saw Preston in concert early in the 1970s. At that time, I wouldn’t stand up and clap my hands to the music at a concert. I wouldn’t sing along. But somehow, Billy Preston got me on my feet, clapping my hands and singing along to “That’s the Way God Planned It,” and I’ve never been quite the same since.

He sure could dance. I think you had to see him in person to understand just how amazing his dancing was. In the film of Concert for Bangladesh, the cameramen lost track of Billy when he stepped out from behind the keyboards during “That’s the Way God Planned It.” You can hear the crowd roar, but the cameras miss almost all of Billy’s amazing footwork.

I saw him again in 1976, at a Rolling Stones concert, where he sang one of his own songs and danced across the stage to the cheers of the stadium-sized crowd. At one point he went to the side of the stage and pulled out someone to dance alongside him. I felt sorry for the poor victim, who seemed awkward and fumbling next to Preston’s fancy footwork. It took a moment to recognize the poor victim was Mick Jagger.

I’m going to be playing a lot of Billy Preston songs tonight.

From last night’s NewsHour on PBS, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla talked with economics reporter Paul Solman about global warming and the choice of doing nothing:

Khosla: I won’t contend that I can prove with 100% certainty, but 98% of the scientists, maybe more, believe that we have a serious climate problem. … You can’t prove that your house is gonna burn down.

Solman: No, I don’t think my house is gonna burn down.

Khosla: No, you don’t. But you still pay — every year, year after year — your insurance premiums, to make sure, just in case. Are we willing to take that kind of risk at the planetary level, for earth, and not buy any insurance?

The PBS program Frontline recently observed 25 years of AIDS by airing a 2-part, 4-hour program on the subject. Very enlightening. I especially liked this, from Rev. W. Franklin Richardson of Grace Baptist Church, about churches that turned their backs on AIDS and AIDS sufferers:

“Bad Bible” is what I called it. We used to do Bad Bible, and make HIV some kind of plague that God had sent upon homosexuals. It was a terrible time for the church.

In his book God’s Politics, Jim Wallis tells how he and several fellow seminary students “scoured the Old and New Testaments for every single reference to poor people, to wealth and poverty, to injustice and opression, and to what the response to all those subjects was to be for the people of God.” They found thousands of verses.

After we completed our study, we all sat in a circle to discuss how the subject had been treated in the various churches in which we had grown up. Astoundingly, but also tellingly, not one of us could remember even one sermon on the poor from the pulpit of our home churches. In the Bible, the poor were everywhere; yet the subject was not to be found in our churches.

Then we decided to try what became a famous experiment. One member of our group took an old Bible and a new pair of scissors and began the long process of literally cutting out every single biblical text about the poor. It took him a long time.

…

When the zealous seminarian was done with all his editorial cuts, that old Bible would hardly hold together, it was so sliced up. It was literally falling apart in our hands. What we had done was to create a Bible full of holes.

I began taking that damaged and fragile Bible out with me when I preached. I’d hold it up high above American congregations and say, “Brothers and sisters, this is our American Bible; it is full of holes.”

It seems to me there’s a lot of Bad Bible going around these days, and the proponents of Bad Bible seem awfully quick to call down condemnation on those who resist.

Susan B. Anthony was onto something:

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.