I need to do a better job of keeping up with local news. Until today I did not realize that local activists are fighting for slower speed limits in Ann Arbor.
One of them is a public school teacher who makes a fascinating comparison between driving and ritual human sacrifice:
Jeff Gaynor, a teacher at Clague Middle School and a member of the Safe Routes to School Coalition, said he recently showed his students a video about the ancient Aztecs.
“The students were quite horrified by the idea of ritual sacrifice,” he said. “And when we look at our priorities in America, we sacrifice over 40,000 people a year to our god the automobile.”
Like I say, I should do a better job of keeping up with the news, for I can’t believe it took me until now to learn about the true nature of the awful carnage inflicted by our religious death machine. As an insensitive, desensitized older person, I should probably be grateful that the truth about our murderous and polluting car culture is finally being imparted to our children with my tax dollars. They need to know that not only are we destroying the planet, but what we do is morally no different at all from dragging people to the tops of pyramids, chopping out their beating hearts, and feasting on their corpses.
And by owning a car, I am imposing my wicked morality on my victims!
If I were my child, I should really hate me.
I should be glad I’m not.
Because if I were my dad I’d probably want my kid to build a model of the monster god.
Comments
4 responses to “lessons in comparative religion for children”
There’s a commercial on here with kids writing letters saying, “Please make it so that puppy has a place to sleep tonight” and stuff like that as we see abused animals, all filthy and shivering and mangled.
Global warmmongering is another example, kids think they need to recycle every piece of plastic they see or WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!
People are scaring the crap out of their kids, making them feel guilty for all sorts of stuff. It’s just not right. Let them get to be 16 and trying to get into that eco-girl’s or guy’s pants before they care about the environment.
Reading through the links, it seems that — happily and to my surprise — the A2 City Council seems much more sane than that ridiculous teacher and his stupid analogy.
The city might be raising speed limits mostly, as they should in many places. I always figured the low limits were mostly a revenue generating scheme.
As for the teacher, Mr Gaynor, perhaps he should take a critical thinking class to learn the difference between good and bad arguments by analogy. At least he should be forced to answer this question: How many lives are saved by our “god,” the automobile, every year? And how many lives were saved by the Aztec gods, thanks to ritual sacrifice? I’d be interested to hear his answer. Our god kicks their gods’ butt.
I worship a butt-kicking god!
Scare the kids?? When I was a kid some 60 years ago we had our teachers telling us another ice age would be here in our life times, but we probably would not see it because the world would end in nuclear war.
What has changed?
Hugh, the teachers weren’t saying it was your fault or that you had to do certain things in order to stop the coming ice age or the coming nukular winter.