The SoSA Perspective

The Dog and the Car

So what does your dog do when he actually catches the car? I used to stop my car from time to time, just to watch the expression on the dog’s face when he realized, “good Lord, I’ve caught it, now what do I do with it?” Before he caught the car he was a dog with a mission. Now that he’d caught it, everything he did to make his capture, (and presumably everything he thought he was going to do after the capture) was suddenly irrelevant.

It strikes me that religion is like that a lot of the time. The function of any religion is to lead you to God. I’m convinced that all big time religions do that, if well and properly practiced. But once you’re there, what’s the religion for? Doctrines, dogmas, and sacred writings pale more than just a little when put alongside an ongoing relationship with the creator and sustainer of all there is.

That being the case, you’d think religious types would get along a lot better than they do. After all, they all claim to bring their practitioners into a vital relationship with God, the gods, ultimate reality or whatever they conceive of as “all there is”. Since there can only be one “ultimate reality,” you’d think most religions would be “on the same page,” so to speak.

Apparently not. Here in Christendom, the Protestants don’t get along that well with the Catholics. Come to think of it, the Protestants don’t get along that well with each other, or much of anybody. Let’s not even think about relations with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. (To be fair, they don’t get along all that well with us either) So what’s going on?

I think that most of these religious practitioners have never “caught the car.” Those that have (we generally call them mystics) get along with each other just fine, no matter what religion they spring from. Here’s the thing. Our religions – all their doctrines, laws, taboos, practices, metaphysics and theologies are only sign posts on the way to God. They are not God. My advice when confronted with the fundamentalist type who insists you’ve got to believe one from column A and at least two from column B in order to get to heaven is to smile benignly and wish him good luck in his chase. Please God, let more of them catch the car before they blow us all away.

Urban Mobility???????

I was recently perusing the 2007 urban mobility report issued by the transportation researchers at Texas A and M University. Yes, I know that’s pretty weird, but I travel a lot and have a lot of time to read. Like when I’m trying to drive through Richmond, or Nashville, or anywhere in or near Washington DC. I used to get mad at the congestion, but now I have achieved enough enlightenment to recognize a chance to catch up on reading when I see one. Which brings me back to the mobility report.

According to the report we spend 4.2 billion hours of travel time each year “stalled in traffic”. This delay, sitting idling, or creeping along at a furlong per fortnight, burns up 2.9 billion gallons of gas each year. The cost of all this in wasted gas and lost time at work is about 78 billion dollars a year! I’m just guessing here but it seems to me that with gas as expensive as it is, maybe we ought to take the train, or the bus….. and if our illustrious “leaders” had any sense they’d be advocating building more public transit instead of trying to pave us out of our transportation problems.

The point of this tirade is that we’ve got an “oil shortage”, an ongoing “oil crisis” in this country and everybody knows it’s going to get worse. We can’t afford to feed our poor people, fix our broken schools or even maintain the bridges on our existing interstate highway system, and yet we can throw away nearly 80 billion dollars a year sitting in traffic, watching incontrovertible evidence that we’ve just got too *#^* many cars on the road! In response to all this our fearless leaders advocate building more highways. What solution suggests itself to you? My humble suggestion is that we begin by throwing these halfwits off the train so we can build more tracks.