A Satanic School Bus?

Here's another story that stands as a testament to the power of human stupidity. A Christian mom in Tennessee is outraged after she spotted a brake light on a school bus that (sort of) looks (a little) like a pentagram. The offending light is shown above.

“Anyone who fears a God, if not God and Jesus Christ, should be outraged,” said the mother, who was not identified because she is reportedly receiving death threats after sharing the photo on social media.

The mother says it’s appalling the brake lights are shaped like a pentagram. “If you can’t put a cross on there, you can’t put a pentagram on it,” she said.

The woman pointed to Walgreen’s decision last year to remove wrapping paper from its shelves because images on the paper appeared to be those of swastikas.

“Would we allow a swastika, for instance, to be on the back of the bus?” said the mother.

Before I go any further, whoever is sending this woman death threats needs to cut it out, right now. I am so tired of that bullshit that a proper metaphor escapes me. On this blog I poke fun at a lot of people who post dumb stuff on the Internet, but anybody who thinks threatening a person's life over an online comment or photograph or whatever is an okay thing to do is a far worse human being than any of those folks. Any of them.

Now it is true that the stupid is pretty strong here. Look at the picture. The light is a circle filled with a small ring of five lights and a bigger ring of five around that. So you can trace lines between the lights on the outer ring and get a pentagram, but what else could you do? Using four as the base number for the lights wouldn't fill the circle as well, and anyway it would look kind of like a cross. Six would suggest a Star of David. Seven would suggest the Thelemic Star of Babalon. And so forth.

Just about every lineal figure can be construed to mean something. Safety features like lights go through rigorous testing, and my guess is that the base-five pattern was selected because it was most visible or worked the best in some fashion. I'm hoping that this woman is not trying to say that Satanists have infiltrated the bus company and are making pentagram-shaped brake lights to corrupt the youth of America, because that's total tinfoil hat nonsense. That's beyond dumb; it's straight-up delusional.

I also think that the comparison to the swastika is pretty ignorant. Satanists have never engaged in the systematic murder of millions of Christians. When they do, maybe she'll have a point - but I highly doubt such a day will ever come.