"People get uptight about the most bizarre things," Jeff said, nodding, as I showed him the pictures. I agreed.

I'd been zeroing in on a sweet little parking space at the store when the battered blue Dodge had caught my eye. I tossed my car into 'park' after whipping around the row, and had my camera ready before I walked by the car.

While I'm legally allowed to photograph cars, I prefer to do it as inobtrusively as possible.

I had the lens cap removed and the camera turned on before I even came in view of the car. Thus prepared, the actual process of taking two photos took less than four seconds. There was plenty of light; I didn't even bother to check the photos to see if they were acceptable. I just shoved the camera back in its little bag, turned, and went into the store to do my errands.

You can determine a lot of things about a person from what bumper stickers they place on a car. Most folk don't take bumper stickers lightly; the sayings and emblems they place on a car are likely to represent their most strongly-held beliefs. Owners don't put "I like ice cream" or "Blue is my favorite color" stickers on cars. They put things like "Re-Elect Gore in 2004" or "One Nation Under GOD."

Bumper stickers are our casual way of stating beliefs too forceful to be bandied about in most polite conversation. (For those of you who ask, the sticker on my car is "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.")

I'm thinking that Mr. Blue Dodge is a wee bit wrapped up in semantics. Anyone whose most strongly held beliefs end up leading him to put up a bumper sticker that says "W.W.J.D.? He'd Use His Own Name - YAHSHUA!" (and another that says "HalleluYAH Means Praise His Name")....I'm thinking we've got some semantics issues at work here.

I mean, shoot me if I'm wrong here, but if you're going to get real cranky about how a name is spelled or written, shouldn't you just go back to the original Hebrew letters and be done with it? Isn't there a certain amount lost in the transliteration from Hebrew letters (which, if I remember correctly, don't indicate vowels) to Latin ones (which do)? Yikes.

Call me theist, but I've always favored the idea of a Creator intelligent enough to know when it's being talked to, no matter what name we call it. I have trouble getting terribly upset about such things, but, at the same time, I know a lot of other people take this sort of thing with a deadly seriousness that leaves me just bewildered.

Take, for instance, the Pledge of Allegiance. Granted, I dislike the actual concept of a Pledge of Allegiance; it always had the distinct odor of Heil Jackboot about it, what with requiring kids to stand up in rows in class to recite words they don't understand while staring at a flag, and all. To me, civilian acts of informed voting and governmental criticism speak more of appreciating one's citizenship than any recited pledge ever could.

- but, in the midst of that pledge, is a sticky little two-word phrase that riles up a good bit of folk, and I'm not so certain that I blame them. I like a rollicking argument over semantics as much as the next guy, but I draw the line at dropping phrases like that into laws (or on money). Cementing specific religious phrases like that one into law will do nothing but hurt those whose beliefs fall outside those whose particular version won the day.

The standard Christian response I've seen to complaints about the "under God" phrase is, "But everyone knows what the phrase means! No one should be offended by a reference to God!"

Hate to break it to them, but that phrase, no matter how trivial, is an endorsement of a religion - Christianity. If we're all talking about the same God, and it doesn't matter how it gets referred to, perhaps we Americans could change to a slightly more inclusive version of the Pledge that would alienate different religious groups on different days of the week.

(See this page, the section marked 'the stand taken', for far better thoughts on this subject than my tired brain is likely to craft tonight.)

Perhaps on Mondays we could say "under Goddess," and on Fridays "under Allah." After all, it shouldn't matter - it's just semantics, right?

I'm guessing the guy driving the blue Dodge wouldn't agree.

Aren't the freedoms of religion and expression just ... grand?

Those who want to see firsthand evidence of the American love for alternately-spelled words have to look no further than the myriad Southern spellings of the word "barbecue," or the vast creativity that goes into Southern church names.

I'm not much for proselytizing. Nor much, outside my close circle of friends, for expounding upon my spiritual beliefs. I tend to draw the line at random strangers publicly announcing religious beliefs, especially with intent to convert. (We should so make that a tort.) For me, there's a vast (and only rarely blurry) difference between two friends talking about the things that matter over coffee, and some random, unknown person trying to take a few minutes to convince me that their belief system is the right way to go.

This, from the person who still takes a quick look up at the sky every time she sets foot outside. "Yep, still blue," I catch myself saying, before carrying on with whatever life-fulfilling activity I was doing in the first place. (Trying to convert me is like trying to talk to a cat. Expend as much effort as you want, but all you'll do is wear out your voice and annoy the cat.)

It's hard to explain my resulting dumbfoundedness and general surprise, then, when I see signs like this one we saw today on I-65 southbound:

SATURDAY the TRUE LORD'S DAY
Avoid the Mark of the Beast!
Anti-Christ "will think to change times and laws."
Free Book 1-866-7TH-DAY-A
Advertising paid for by Eternal Gospel Church

Had to do a little bit of digging, but apparently the Eternal Gospel Church is an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, with a bit more of a penchant for attack ads that would make even Alabama politicians envious.

Apparently, some of their newspaper ads have been even more…ahh, impressive - somehow I think naming the Catholic Church as the biblical "whore of babylon" isn't going to go down well in this country…

Quoting a bit from one of their tracts, available here in PDF form…

"By the decree enforcing the institution of the papacy in violation of the law of God, our nation will disconnect herself fully from righteousness. When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this three-fold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its constitution as a protestant and republican government, and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near…"

Now. I'd just like to take a quick moment here.

I realize that, in the years of domesticat.net's existence, I have taken the usage of em-dashes, ellipses, and compound-complex sentences to dizzying heights heretofore unimagined by rational, grammatical humans. I realize that I tend to let my modifiers dangle, my parenthetical statements confuse, and my extraneous clauses flap about in whatever breeze is handy….

…but please, please, promise me that if I ever write sentences that bad, that one of you will come over to the house to shoot me.

Out of pity.

I have to say, though; signs like these are starting to make me want to proselytize. I'm thinking that perhaps my true calling was right under my nose: the protection of innocent billboards from religious splinter groups. Not just the billboards - the graphic design programs, too. Think of how much safer the world would be if we could just keep billboards and graphic design programs from falling into the wrong hands.

It's harder for them to find the time to go out and piss off drivers on I-65 if they're forced to spend all their time hand-writing three thousand leaflets. Not only would they create fewer leaflets, they'd actually spend a bit more time making sure that they gave them only to people who were actually interested.

Now, personally, I found it funny that I saw such a sign while I and two of my friends were driving down to Birmingham to work in a bit of housewares-shopping and to catch a screening of Secretary.

Yep, that one - the little S&M-themed movie that's actually a little love story at heart.

I fear the Eternal Gospel folks would be interested in putting up a billboard about that, too.

We really should look into that proselytization idea. Might not be a bad idea.