In 1979, Australian rock band AC/DC released its 5th international studio album, called Highway to Hell. The album has been certified 7x Platinum for selling more than 7 million copies, and Rolling Stone included the album in their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
However when the album was released, things were not so rosy. The album’s title provoked outrage among the U.S.’s so-called “moral majority.” The group’s guitarist Angus Young said,
As soon as we called the album Highway To Hell, the American record company immediately went into a panic. With religious things, I thought everywhere was like Australia. There, they call them Bible-thumpers, and it’s a limited species, very limited!
Christianity was never a popular movement. It’s that convict background! But in America, you had guys in bed sheets and placards with prayers on, picketing the gigs. I said, ‘Who are they here for?’ And they said, ‘You!’ And we had that thing – that if you play the record backwards you get these Satanic messages.
Well travel friends, it’s been over 45 years and conservative Christians are still up in arms about such things.
Case in point…
Hel is a seaside Resort city in northern Poland. Surrounded by the waters of the Baltic Sea on three sides, it is a unique town in Poland and attracts thousands of tourists every summer.
The bus to the town of Hel on Poland’s Baltic coast is Route #666 and, not surprisingly, it’s been popular with tourists for years. The line had operated with that route number since 2006. It had originally been assigned that number as a local joke, but over the years non-Polish tourists began riding the line too, so they could say they had taken the 666 bus to Hel.
However Fronda.pl, a conservative Catholic website, started calling for a change in the route number about 5 years ago. They said they understood some people thought it was “an innocent joke” but it was “hard not to consider it a malicious inspiration”.
“Hell is the negation of humanity. It is eternal death and suffering. You can only laugh at this reality if you simply don’t understand what it is,” the website wrote in a 2008 article. They blasted the bus route as “scandalous anti-Christian propaganda,” and warned that it was, “just the tip of the iceberg of a much greater problem.”
Over time, other Christian groups have added their voices to the outcry of having a bus that they say “spreads satanism.”
The complaints have apparently become too much to bear. So the local bus operator, PKS Gdynia, announced the route is being changed from #666 to #669. Without elaborating, they announced on social media that, “This year, we’re turning the last 6 upside down!”
The new route number will go into effect on June 24th.
“The management board buckled under the weight of letters and requests that were sent to us, maybe not in large numbers, but cyclically for many years with a request to change the line number,” said Marcin Szwaczyk, spokesperson for PKS Gdynia.
However Szwaczyk hinted that Route 666 could return if enough people demanded it.
“If in fact the response is large and strong enough to restore the line 666, it seems to me that we will listen to our passengers and change this number,” he said.
So there ya go.
Want to comment on this post? Great! Read this first to help ensure it gets approved.
Want to sponsor a post, write something for Your Mileage May Vary, or put ads on our site? Click here for more info.
Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and sign up to get emailed notifications of when we post.
Whether you’ve read our articles before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!
This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
4 comments
How about three different bus numbers? 333 for Christians, 666 for fun lovers, and 888 for Chinese.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHA!
If the extremists didn’t like it they could simply have avoided it themselves. Sigh.
What, and not inflict their views on the rest of us? Where’s the fun in that!