Woman outraged at satanic symbol on school bus

[TheFeniX]

Of course it is rather silly that this would be entirely a nonissue if said light had been installed even slightly askew than it happened to be in the first place. But it would be a reasonably cheap and simple fix I imagine, if it really is that big a deal to some people.

The thing is, no matter how easy of a "fix" it is: you're still wasting time and money to placate morons. Time and money that would be better spent making sure the buses are in working order. If they want to slowly phase out that particular series of lights or ensure future lights are all mounted to Delicate Christian Sensibility Standards to prevent future snafus of "OMG please think of the children!:" sure, why not. It's dumb, but it won't cost anything extra.

But if I had to chose between asking that mechanic to pull off and reset a light or doing another physical inspection of the bus's working order: I'll take the working order part because I want even those poor souls brainwashed by LEDs lights to grow into adults.

A right side up star within a circle is also a religious symbol, so they'd need to somehow be skewed so that no point is directly up or directly pointed down and even then somebody with an agenda could still pattern match that position with a religious symbol. Plus you'd still have to pay the labor costs for having a maintenance person rotate every light to a precisely non-religious angle and keep them on retainer in case any lights shift during normal operation of the bus fleet.

Many school districts I worked for back when I was in IT had dedicated maintenance mechanics (or contracted it out) for their vehicle fleet and it was a set/salaried rate. So, at least from my perspective, any time dedicated to checking lights for Christian Approved Status means less time making sure the buses actually function. Or they cough up money/comp time pay extra.

[General Zod]

Zod: Oh sorry, did I say they should ban it? I mean I'm not exactly careful with how I word things. Maybe you can find where I said that.

Well, I think this counts as being dogpiled. I think it's allowed in Off-Topic though so okay.

Then what the fuck are you even arguing?

[Napoleon the Clown]

Zod, you're arguing opinion to attack opinion and then saying my argument has fallen apart because who cares. I care enough to post, so I guess I do. A little bit.

I just don't see how putting something that can offend someone (edit: for religious reasons) on a publicly funded vehicle is acceptable. But who cares, it's Christianity, fuck it, right?

So, what? Replace every light on every bus?

Why? Does every school bus have that design on it?

Any bus that has the five LED set-up would need checked. And if you rotate it a little, then the Satanic symbol is still there, you're just hiding it. It would be akin to putting a star and crescent - common symbol of Islam - and mirroring it. It's still there, you just kind of moved it around a little. Or taking a cross and turning it on its side. It totally isn't a cross anymore, then. Right?

School mascots wouldn't be able to be an animal of any religious significance. Lions are right out, as they're used in Christianity.

Ah fuck it, let's go for broke. We shouldn't have any names that are derived from religious figures displayed on government signage. Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Mary... Any name that was used for a significant figure in the Bible is now off limits. Joshua is a closer Romanization of the historically accurate name for Jesus (Yeshua). More going for broke, there are religions that find a circle to be of significance, a symbol of the cyclic nature of time their religion believes in. Hindu and Buddhism don't have "end of the world" prophecies, when it comes down to it. They hold time to be cyclic, something that goes on eternally. So, no more wheels on those buses. They're round and could maybe imply something religious like that.

We've got the phrase "In God We Trust" on our fucking money. If money can have religious messages on it, an accidental maybe religious-like symbol on a school bus isn't something worth even paying heed to. The Pledge of Allegiance? It makes explicit reference to God. Oh, you're a Buddhist belonging to one of the sects that doesn't espouse belief in dieties? Go to hell, you're not a REAL American! Religious bullshit is all over the place in the government right now. A pentagon of lights isn't a fucking Satanic symbol unless you actively want it to be.

The points are not connected, there isn't a fucking ram's head in there. This person is actively seeking to be offended and can kindly fuck off. A reasonable person isn't going to see this as something that's some religious symbol, and a "reasonable person" is generally the standard for the law in cases like this.

[HeadCreeps]

Zod: Oh sorry, did I say they should ban it? I mean I'm not exactly careful with how I word things. Maybe you can find where I said that.

Well, I think this counts as being dogpiled. I think it's allowed in Off-Topic though so okay.

Then what the fuck are you even arguing?

Well they faux pas'd. They dun goofed. Shouldn't have done it. Makes them look like dicks unintentionally.

They should say, "Oh wow, oops, didn't realize it was seen that way" and make a minor adjustment.

The rest is you guys (but not everyone) slippery sloping the argument to feed your desire to argue with a strawman that isn't even there.

And @NtC: no shit the "In God We Trust" should be removed from our currency. We shouldn't have "after God" in our Pledge of Allegiance, either.

[Jub]

Well they faux pas'd. They dun goofed. Shouldn't have done it. Makes them look like dicks unintentionally.

They should say, "Oh wow, oops, didn't realize it was seen that way" and make a minor adjustment.

The rest is you guys (but not everyone) slippery sloping the argument to feed your desire to argue with a strawman that isn't even there.

And @NtC: no shit the "In God We Trust" should be removed from our currency. We shouldn't have "after God" in our Pledge of Allegiance, either.

It is better to tell her to sit down, shut up, and keep her views to herself than to open the door to more and more ridiculous claims in the future. You've been asked several times where you would see the line drawn and have yet to answer, I'm going to now demand that you clearly define the cut off point for where we should kowtow to the crazies and where we should tell them to fuck off and be offended elsewhere.

[HeadCreeps]

Slippery slope.

[Jub]

Slippery slope.

Wall of ignorance. It's against the rules to repeatedly dodge a direct question, so put up an answer or fuck off.

[HeadCreeps]

You're asking me what they should do because x will lead to y event in the future and I have to map out hypothetical scenarios to meet your arbitrary requirements of what policies should exist just because I'm trying to say putting pentacle looking lights on a school bus is a mistake and makes them look dickish to people who care.

[Jub]

You're asking me what they should do because x will lead to y event in the future and I have to map out hypothetical scenarios to meet your arbitrary requirements of what policies should exist just because I'm trying to say putting pentacle looking lights on a school bus is a mistake and makes them look dickish to people who care.

You clearly care very deeply about this lights and the plight of this poor woman, but the fact of the matter is that by catering to her you do open the door for more crazies to demand other things be changed to suit their whims. In fact the US even has laws about this exact sort of thing precisely because the slop is so very slippery.

Now, even somebody as simple as you must have some idea of where the line between worth changing and not worth changing lies, so please kindly define this point or concede that this woman is bitching over nothing.

[Borgholio]

I'm trying to say putting pentacle looking lights on a school bus is a mistake and makes them look dickish to people who care.

Yeah we get what you're saying, the problem is that the people who care are fucking idiots. It's not like they made the lights in the shape of a swastika or something when it is obvious that such a shape would offend a great many people. It's a fucking star, not even a proper pentagram. If someone is bothered by that, then you will find yourself going to unreasonable lengths to try and make a handful of lunatics happy. So your idea that they should change the tail-lights to make this one troglodyte happy leads to an actual slippery slope where any random shape would have to be changed at the behest of a single dickhead with too much time on their hands. Make a bus too rounded and aerodynamic, it could look like a phallus. Offensive! Make it square! Replace the tail-lights with the LEDs in a circle? Whoops...looks too much like Jesus' crown of thorns! CHANGE IT!

See how stupid it can get? You have to draw a line where you don't make something look blatantly offensive and keep most people happy, but where random blowholes are ignored as being too costly.

[aerius]

I get where she is coming from but please, these are break lights. It isn't as if the bus is blaring "worship Satan" from all loudspeakers. The lights aren't even on most of the time.

Seriously. If someone did up a school bus with artwork from Slayer album covers then yeah, I can see how some people would be upset.

But crying about brake lights which might sorta look like pentacles is about as sad as this:

[Darth Holbytlan]

If you can't see the upside down pentagram with a circle around it, you're being dishonest. And more to the point, a Christian did see a pentagram and did get offended.

I can't see a pentagram there because there isn't one—I'm not the only person here to point that out. A pentagram has an actual definition requiring connecting lines between the tips that pass through the body, and those lights don't fit it. Yeah, it looks kind of like a pentagram, but it also looks just as much like a star (where the lines don't pass through the body) or a pair of staggered pentagons.

You can find someone that would be offended for religious reasons about almost anything, so such offense is not, in general, a justification to avoid doing something. These star-shaped lights are not that big of a deal, but even they are probably on a pile of buses in the area. Changing them all would at least be an expense that would be better spent elsewhere.

No, this is something very specifically that Christians see as a satanic symbol since some nutter back in the day decided it was one and raised propaganda about it. I think the problem here is that a lot of people in this thread weren't even aware of pentacles as being offensive to some Christians, so they underestimate its significance.

Way to miss the point. Some Christians having problems with inverted pentacles is well known—I doubt anyone in this thread was unaware of it. The point is that almost anything can offend someone so we need real criteria to decide what offenses actually need to be addressed—having someone who is offended, or even knowing that Christians might be offended (if someone manages to notice that the lights look vaguely pentagram-like), is not enough.

Do you have any actual reason to think this particular issue needs to be addressed, besides your incredibly vague and unjustified claim that it is "dickish"?

Any bus that has the five LED set-up would need checked.

Nitpick: That would be a ten-LED setup. Five LEDs just makes a pentagon shape, which wouldn't look much like a star/pentagram even if we are being as generous as HeadCreeps.

[Simon_Jester]

Someone should take the time to remind this woman that Satanism enjoys the same protections of religion as Christianity does under the constitution.

To be fair, she points out that if Christian symbols cannot be placed on buses due to separation of church and state, neither can Satanist symbols... and she's right, strictly speaking.

The problem is that this is like asserting that any instance of the lower-case letter 't' is a cross and therefore a Christian symbol, so we're not allowed to use lower-case 't.' Or that we have to carefully choose a font in which the 't' has extra curlicues to make it not look like a cross.

At a certain point, it's sheer absurdity, and I agree with the people saying that this woman should be laughed out of any office she enters to 'protest' this.

[biostem]

The lights are not a pentagram or pentacle - they are vaguely star-shaped, and they are not properly aligned to have 1 point actually pointing down, either. *If* the person that filed the complaint could demonstrate that said lights were actually intended to be cleverly disguised pentagrams/pentacles, then they would have a leg to stand on. My guess - the law requires a certain luminosity for the tail lights, and the pattern that was chosen was the easiest to implement while attaining the required brightness...

[Cykeisme]

What about Captain America?!