Moms-to-be fret over 6/6/06

FORT WORTH, Texas — It's 2006. And June 6 is near.

You got it: 6/6/06 — 666, the mark of the beast, the Antichrist.

Are expectant parents aware of the evil implications?

Carrie McFarland of Dallas is.

"I'm going to be induced on the 4th or 5th," McFarland said. "If my doctor had offered to induce me on the 6th, I wouldn't have done it."

Her trepidation over her son's birthday isn't religious.

"To avoid teasing," she said.

No doubt, the 6/6/06 babies — and their parents — are in for some ribbing.

"I refuse to give birth on that date," said Bethany Morian of Weatherford, Texas. "I'll cross my legs and watch the clock."

Christian Burton of Fort Worth is awaiting his first child, a boy.

"I'm a God-fearing man, and I would prefer him not to have a 666 date," Burton said. But he will not opt for his wife to induce labor to prevent birth on that date.

"I'll only be concerned if he has a 666 birthmark on his head," he said.

June 6 will be the 21st 6/6/06 A.D. — and we're still here.

More importantly for parents, many people, some famous, were born on that date and turned out fine.

French dramatist Pierre Corneille, who wrote "Le Cid," was born on 6/6/06. In 1606. There's no evidence he was the Antichrist, although his work wasn't universally loved.

Mathematician Max August Zorn was born on 6/6/06 in 1906. Thanks in part to him, we have this theorem: Every nonempty partially ordered set in which every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound contains at least one maximal element.

Good thing Zorny figured that one out.

If, however, your impending arrival still has you worried, here are words of reason from the Church of Satan's high priest, Magus Peter Gilmore: "For we Satanists, numbers are just numbers, and June 6 is just a day like any other. We are amused by Christians superstitiously being afraid of this number, as well as the date."

And Satan, according to his church, would be a metaphor and not a supernatural being?

"We are Epicurean, skeptical atheists who see Satan as a symbol of pride, individualism, and the quality of questioning all dogmas," Gilmore said.

That's a yes.

Or, as Robert Langdon, the fictitious Harvard professor of symbology from "The Da Vinci Code," griped: "We've been dragged into a world of people who think this stuff is real."