Yesterday was a beautiful day today in Massachusetts- it actually cracked 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So I went jogging and I saw not one but two cars with those annoying “Coexist” bumper stickers.
You’ve almost certainly seen them before:
I did a little digging to see what some of the symbols stand for.
Every letter has a symbol that represents a system of thought: The crescent and star for Islam; the pentagram for Wicca; the relativity formula for science; the star of David for Judaism; the Karma Wheel dotting the i for Buddhism; the Tao symbol for Taoism; the cross for Chrisitianity.
To better assess how well the belief systems do in fact “coexist” I put together a “coexistence matrix”. A red cell in entry (i,j) indicates that the belief system from row “i” fails to peacefully coexist with the belief system from column “j”. A green cell indicates that the same two belief systems succeed in peacefully “coexisting”.
I find the bumper stickers to be irritating because everyone knows that all of the worlds belief systems peacefully “coexist” except for Islam. The rest of us hardly need lectures and smug bumper stickers about tolerance and the like from self-righteous folks.