What I wish other drivers knew

You've heard about the TFM's. This isn't about them.

This is about your standard, government issue morons (GIM's). This is about the things they used to teach us back in high school drivers education, when you had to take a drivers test with a DPS officer in the seat beside you. Back when there was pressure. Back when they made sure you understood some basic concepts, even if you were going to forget them soon, in the excitement of having wheels to ride around town in, looking cool in your five year old Chevy.

This blog was inspired the other day by a few GIMs on Highway 6 in Fort Bend county. Maybe a couple of them on highway 288, Brazoria county. It doesn't matter - the point is that GA and I saw other drivers doing things that were dangerous and yet didn't really gain them any appreciable advantage, and it got me thinking about... why. And I realized this could be a public service. Why, if only three drivers see something they've been doing, and stop doing it, the world will be a better place.

So here are some things I wish other drivers would not do, in no particular order.

Weaving in Traffic.  The most commonly enforced law is "speeding." That's not because it's the most dangerous thing you can do (unless you're doing 120 mph or something). It's what you have to do that allows you to speed, that's so dangerous. Sure, it's the easiest ticket to give out, so it's a great source of revenue, but let's face it: if the highway is nearly empty, and the curves are banked, and your tires are good, you can roar along at 80 mph and usually get by with it. (Of course, I never do). But often the highway you're using has lots of other people on it, so that to go 80 mph in a 65 zone, you have to weave in and out of the traffic. And every time you change lanes, you're risking a collision because you didn't quite clear the car in the other lane, or maybe the other guy is in your blind spot. And no matter how careful he is, sometimes he can just decide to change lanes at the same moment you do. More importantly, when you weave, you are passing people on the right - which is dangerous in itself.

Passing on the Right. When you do this, you necessarily put yourself in the blind spot of the car you're passing. There is a moment when you are completely invisible to him. Suppose he decides to pull over on the shoulder. Or change lanes. He is perfectly within his rights to do so, and if he cannot see you in the instant he decides to do that, there will be an accident. And it will be your fault.

Tailgating. Oh, most drivers know this is a dangerous thing to do, but there is the occasional driver (usually female - sorry, girls) who doesn't understand the Law of Inertia. That law states that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. More to the point, if your car is moving at 70 mph, it will tend to keep moving at 70 mph, and will fight your brakes to do that. If the car in front of you encounters any problem and has to even slow down, you could be in trouble. You are putting both of you in danger, because now he cannot safely slow down or stop should the need arise - he is now quite uncomfortable, because he knows that if something does go wrong, anything at all, he is going to have to make a split second decision whether to be hit from behind or avoid the problem in front. Be assured that he is not smiling upon you as you ride on his bumper. He is rather saying very rude things about you and possibly your mother.

Back in Drivers Ed they told you to put a car length between you and the car in front of you for every 10 mph you're moving, for exactly this reason. The theory is that if you're going 70 mph, it will take you 7 car lengths to be able to slow down your car enough to avoid a serious accident, after allowing for your reaction time and the time it takes your brakes to overcome the inertia of the car using the friction of the brake pads and the friction of your tires on the pavement. In practice, nobody does that, but to put it so that anyone can understand it, if your car is 3 feet behind the other one, and he has to slam on his brakes, you will hit him before you can even move your foot to the brake pedal. And inertia doesn't just apply to your car, though it sort of feels that way to your perception - you, too, are moving at 70 mph, and when your car suddenly slows to zero because of the crushing impact, your body is still traveling. It will only slow when it encounters your seat belt at that same 70 mph! It will hurt. If you have your arms braced on your steering wheel, which is likely, they may be broken.
I used to have a diesel rabbit back in the day. When somebody tailgated me, I pushed the pedal all the way down, because then my car spewed a cloud of black smoke on the moron behind me. Very satisfying.

Failing to slow down on a gravel road. Here's a news flash. When you see a sign that says "Slow down to prevent damage to windshields," they don't mean to prevent damage to your windshield. They're talking about the other cars, which are being pelted with the rocks your car is throwing if you go more than 20 mph on a gravel road. When you are driving on a newly graveled road, SLOW DOWN!





Dinging the other car in a parking lot. When you open your door in a parking lot, please don't just fling the door open as if there is nothing else in its arc. Open it slowly, and be mindful of the possibility of making a dent in somebody's door. It really isn't that much trouble.


Leaving your shopping cart right where it is. Come on, people. Just look around and see the places they've reserved for the carts. Nobody is asking you to roll it all the way back to the store, but I see people leaving a cart right on the line so that two spaces are blocked, when there is a return aisle less than ten steps away. This is especially bad here in the Houston area. OK, if you have a baby in the car seat, you don't want to leave him to push the cart very far from the car, and we all understand that. But ten paces? Come on.

Texting while driving. People, this is an insane thing to do. It is impossible to focus on the traffic around you, or stay in your lane, or maintain a consistent speed, or be aware of hazards - in short, to drive safely - if your attention is on the next letter your thumb needs to press so you can send your "LOL C U @ lunch" text. Do NOT do this. If you do, you deserve the accident you are going to have, and I hereby declare you to be a certified moron.

Stopping past the white line at an intersection. Back in the day, my driving instructor called this "running over a pedestrian." Sure, you don't actually run over a pedestrian when you stop over the white line, we hope, but what you are doing is parking your car on the crosswalk so that pedestrians have to step out into traffic to cross the road. You gain nothing by pulling your car into that area at a red light, unless you're in the right lane hoping to make a free right turn. Which brings me to the one thing that makes me want to get out of the car and knock on a car window...


Pulling up to be even with the car in the other lane for no @#%&^!! reason. OK, I'm planning to turn right after stopping at the red light. I stop at the white line. The other car does, too. I look both ways, and there are no pedestrians approaching. So I pull up to the second white line to see if it is clear on the left. When I do... the car to my left pulls up, too, though he cannot go until the light turns green. I sigh in frustration, and pull up a little more to see around him (he will usually be in a huge SUV). He pulls up to match me. Now I can pull up no further, and I cannot see if it's clear to go. So I have to sit there and wait for the green light, all because this moron in a huge gas guzzling SUV with three "My Kid is an Honor Student" bumper stickers is... yup, talking on his cell phone and letting his subconscious do the driving.

 So think about it. Do you do any of these things? Are you a danger to yourself and to others? Please drive safely, because I love you and want you to be able to come to my funeral when I die of old age.

UTB - Rich men in heaven?

There is a well known concept in scripture, spoken by Jesus himself, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get into heaven.

Now this tends to give the Bible student pause, because it's not really a parable, but more of a statement. So people have tried to explain this away in sermons and studies and Sunday School lessons, as best they can. It's a hard one.

One explanation is that the eye of the needle is actually the name of one of the gates entering Jerusalem. It's a rather small gate, so that a camel must kneel to get through it. Now that carries a good lesson in itself, because it means that the rich man must also kneel to get into heaven. But there are a couple of problems with this interpretation. One problem is that I can find no reliable source that says that one of the gates is named the eye of the needle. The other is that it makes the "rich man" element irrelevant, because all of us must kneel in that sense - the sense that we must submit to Christ and become spiritually humble, whether rich or poor. We're all in the same boat, there. Oh, you could argue that rich men will find it harder to humble themselves and kneel, but it doesn't really wash. It has more to do with pride than with wealth. So I can't accept this idea.

Another explanation: Jesus was saying that it is impossible for rich men to get into heaven. There is one very large problem with this interpretation. And happily, this problem also leads to the correct understanding of the verse.

"Rich" is a relative term. I first understood this on a trip to Mexico back in my younger days. My friends and I came across a man sitting on a horse. His family was with him, and they were all living in a shelter in the forest (yeah, we were caving). The horse was not his; he worked on the land, and his employer provided the horse. He was very nice, and in our conversation with him he mentioned that we were "rich."

"Oh, we aren't rich," we replied, and he smiled and said "You're here, aren't you?" And he was right. If we could afford to travel in our leisure time and visit caves in Mexico, then by his standards, we were indeed quite rich.

I pondered this concept for days afterward, and realized that "rich" is completely relative, like hot or cold. Richer than who, poorer than who else? To me, the doctor or dentist is rich. To him, the politicians are rich. To them, the successful actors in Hollywood are rich. To them... and so on.

I was considered rich by anyone who could not afford a car less than five years old, because I had a car that new. That person in turn is considered rich by someone who can't even afford the used car. Next down the ladder is the person who can't even afford the gas for it if he had that car. Then you have the homeless. Though that guy, living in a cardboard box, thinks he's at the very bottom of the food chain, he might be considered rich in the eyes of the child in India who picks over the garbage heaps trying to find food to eat.

So... who is rich, in the objective, absolute sense?

Well... there are now, and there have been for many centuries, a group of people, a class of people, who are so rich that they can't spend their money, or give it away, in quantities large enough to make any difference in their lifestyles. They have international wealth, they own banks, they are banks. No, I'm not going to address conspiracy theories or the Bildergergers, or the secret Federal Reserve people. But you and I know that there are international bankers who control most governments in the world. They control elections all over the world. Not conspiratorially, necessarily... but they do.

It was once said that controlling armies is not as powerful as controlling purse strings. There is truth in that. Much truth. And those people have some mighty big purses.

These people own our politicians partly by making money available to them for campaigning, but mostly by controlling what is said in the mass media. They own the newspapers, they own the TV networks, they own it all. You've seen it: somebody who would take his oath of office seriously is made to look like a fool the minute he gets any traction with the voters. Totally incompetent morons are made to look dignified. Scandals are simply ignored. And each of those politicians knows that his career, his wealth, his "power" can disappear overnight if he fails to please the people who can make or break him.

These rich - let's say Rich™ in order to distinguish from the merely rich - these Rich™ men have kept the wars of the world going, so that those countries will have no choice but to borrow from them the money needed to buy weapons and finance their defense. They buy the weapons from who? The Rich™ of course. So money is made from war, by selling better and better weapons, and earning interest on the loans made to buy those weapons. The research for designing those new weapons? We pay for it. People die, and die, and die - and poverty is kept as the natural state of things - in order to make the Rich™ richer.

They pour nasties into the rivers and spew poisons into the air to make themselves more money, then they tell you to vote for their political party - either one - to put a stop to it. When you do, nothing stops. They provoke hatred for the USA by setting a foreign policy in place that interferes with other nations and peoples, keeps vicious dictators and regimes in place, violates our own Constitution, and all to force a situation where they have a better environment to do "business" - and they leave us to pay for it in blood and a bloated military budget. They give us two parties to choose from, one promising war, the other peace, but what we get is what they want, every time. They don't just own the banks, they own us.

With every day that goes by, our system of limited self government becomes less limited and more out of reach of our control. The Constitutional Republic that was originally given to us by God becomes more godless with every legislative session.

In return we get jobs. We get taxes. We get enough to keep us satisfied, so we won't rise up. We stay asleep.

I'm not saying all this to inspire you to rise up, or vote differently. You won't anyway. I'm saying it to lead to this: if you were God, filled with love and mercy for your children, and you were now about to hand out justice with that mercy... would you let the Rich™ into heaven?

It is, indeed, harder for a rich man to get into heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.

UtB: the warning - flee if you will

I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but I kept putting it off because I couldn't decide whether to create a whole new blog for it or not. I've decided to blend it in with this one, and leave it to you, the reader to skip the posts with this topic.

The danger is that some of you may be so intolerant as to abandon this entire blog (or me personally) for taking a direction that offends you. So I'm going to trust you to be at least open minded enough to stay with me, but to just avoid the posts with UtB in the headline.

So from time to time, I will take that risk, and if you leave me, that's OK. I won't leave you... I will still read your posts as I have before.

So... the topic is Understanding the Bible, or UtB. Now, if you are intractably opposed to Christianity, monotheism, Biblical literalism or any branch of Gospel doctrine - read no further in this post, but please read the other posts just to make me feel good. If you believe that Fundamentalists are a scourge unto the earth - though I am personally not a fundamentalist in the normally understood sense - then you can stick around if you want to, but you've been warned.

Not that you have to share my beliefs to be reading this. But it would help if you are at least sort of agnostic. Or maybe firmly in the camp of atheism, but tolerant of others' spirituality. Thing is, you won't get squat out of any of this if you don't at least have some curiosity about what's actually in the Bible, other than the stuff they tell you in Sunday School.

Bottom line: don't give me any grief about what I say here if it's just "You Christians are idiots, and only fools can fall for that crap." If you want to point out something I missed in my reasoning, sure, go for it. But I'm not doing this so I can argue with you.

My guidelines for understanding scripture are fairly simple.

I start with the assumption that all scripture is true in its originally written context, either literally or metaphorically. By that, I mean that scribal errors happen, and holes in the papyrus happen, and translation is often woefully inadequate. Here are some examples:

• Scribal errors: There are two history books in the Old Testament which Chronicle the history of some Kings of Israel, covering the same information. The numbers do not exactly agree. It is as if the equivalent of a decimal point had been shifted. But to me, the exact number of men in an army is not all that important.
  
• Holes: There is a letter in the New Testament in which a sentence makes no sense at all in its context (1 Peter 3:19). The narrative seems to jump to a bizarre utterance and then go back to the topic at hand. Reading it literally, the writer, in the middle of discussing something normally and intelligently, suddenly suggests that Jesus went to hell to preach to the dead and give them another chance (in conflict with the plain meaning of other passages), in a way that jars the reader if he's paying any attention to what he's reading. But if two adjacent words in the original language were to have added a letter to the end of one word, and another letter to the beginning of the next word, it would suddenly make sense, and the flow of the narrative would be normal. This suggests to me that there was a hole in the paper.
• Translation inadequacies: The English word "love," tragically for our understanding, is forced to take on duties for the Greek words philos, eros, and agape, which mean respectively "close, loving friendship" and "sexual or romantic love," and "sacrificial unconditional love." Most of the New Testament is translated from Greek, which is an astoundingly rich language, with many terms that simply do not translate easily. This comes into play when trying to choke down the Revelation of the Apocalypse, as an example.
  

I also make the radical assumption that since the Word of God is truth, either metaphorically or literally, that when I see a contradiction between two passages in the Bible, it is because I don't yet understand one or both of the passages.

I also make the assumption that my five senses, as flawed as they are, are given to me as a set of tools to make sense of the world. If what I experience in my world conflicts with the Word of God, then I have misunderstood the word of God, and I reconsider what I thought was the truth in it. Note that I do not reject the word itself - I reject my flawed understanding of it.

These assumptions have served me well. Remember that logic is a tool, and requires that you begin with some assumptions that you consider to be reliable. If your assumptions prove false, then logic requires that you abandon them rather than following a chain of reason based on bad data.

And it's OK to make leaps of logic, and consider theories that you cannot prove, and follow them to a conclusion of some kind. The important thing to remember is that if you base your conclusions on them, they are not necessarily true either. You have to keep in mind which things are assumed, which are proven, and which are merely hypothetical. This is not always easy to do. What is possible, what is proven, what is likely, what is unlikely? Confuse these and your logic will take you to nonsense. (Nonsense can be fun, and often is, but you can't plan your life around it, and you can't find truth in it. If you do find truth in nonsense, then it isn't really nonsense by definition).

So bear with me, don't worry about agreeing with me, and feel free to contradict me as long as you're respectful about it.

The first installment of UtB may not follow immediately. That will give you time to insulate yourselves against the horrors of anything I might say.