I understand that cars are necessary for modern human life. We need them to move goods around. We need them to get to and from work. We need them to go shopping. We need them for every aspect of life, and I would never ask people to stop driving entirely.
But our culture is in a slow decline. People are driving for all kinds of reasons, not just for those that are necessary, not just for simple necessary transportation, the purpose for which our cars were made.
People are driving to visit friends and family. People are driving to go to movies, to games, to restaurants. Some people, appalling as it may sound, treat these wonderful vehicles with such contempt that they think it appropriate to go driving simply for the pleasure of driving.
We can see the effects of such degeneracy. Tremendous numbers of vehicle deaths every year. These deaths are avoidable: if people listened to my message (drive only when absolutely necessary), these deaths would be avoided. Worse than that, the social fabric is falling apart: because people treat driving so casually, they don’t feel like they need to know their neighbors, and crime rates rise, and people live far away from family, and divorce rates rise. You can trace it all back to folks’ casual attitude toward the sacred act of driving.
For this reason, I am absolutely opposed to seat belts in cars. Seat belts make the driver spend longer in the car than is necessary, they encourage people to linger in the car. Worse, they create a false sense of security in the car: people end up driving for frivolous reasons because they do not associate frivolous driving with danger.
Yes, some people say that seat belts decrease deaths. They say that a lack of seat belts in cars would lead to an epidemic of traffic deaths.
I have conveniently formulated an argument so I do not need to reconcile myself to the increased deaths that they say would result from the lack of seat belts. You see, the false sense of security people develop by using the seat belt leads to so much more driving that even more people die in crashes. You cannot solve the epidemic of road deaths by increasing the use of seat belts: on the contrary, seat belts exacerbate the problem of frivolous driving and therefore of traffic death.
My Church, the Holy Car (Holy C for short), has the following programs:
-We work with governments to minimize the availability of seat belts in their countries.
-We tell members of the church that it is a sin to drive frivolously; we also tell them it is a sin to use a seat belt, even when someone else is doing the frivolous driving and they’re forced to go along for the drive.
-We run driver’s ed schools in which we tell people it’s a bad idea to use seat belts.
Who’s with me?
I confess that the idea is not original to me. I got the idea from another group.
Daniel
