u/PlotterGoblin

I bike on Market Street at night pretty regularly, and I’ve been noticing a pattern that creates some unsafe situations for cyclists. I wanted to share this in case it helps drivers understand what it looks like from our side of things.

I stay off the sidewalks because I don’t want to put pedestrians at risk, but the far edge of the road has a lot of cracks and potholes that can be dangerous at higher speeds. Because of that, I try to ride in a predictable, visible way so everyone knows what I’m doing.

One issue I run into a lot is drivers who slow down as if they’re letting me go, but don’t actually come to a full stop. When a car slow‑rolls like that, it blocks the gap in traffic I could have used, and by the time they roll through, the oncoming lane is full again. It leaves me stuck waiting on the side of the road with fewer safe options.

I also don’t feel comfortable pulling out in front of a car that’s still moving, even slowly. I’ve had enough close calls that I don’t assume a driver will stay slow once I’m in front of them. A full stop is the clearest signal that it’s actually safe for me to go.

If you’re trying to give a cyclist the right of way, the safest thing you can do is come to a complete stop. It removes the guesswork and makes it easier for both of us to move through the intersection safely.

Just putting this out there in case it helps drivers understand how their actions come across from a cyclist’s perspective. I’d also be interested in hearing how other people in Salem handle this situation — cyclists and drivers both.

I’ve been reflecting on my upbringing again, and it’s wild how I can feel two opposite things at once: pity for how deeply I was indoctrinated in Roman Catholicism, and a weird nostalgia for the simplicity that came with it. There really is a kind of comfort in not questioning anything — even if that comfort came from living in a tiny mental box.

Now that I’m out of that world, I feel freer, but also way more aware of how religions spread and how similar so many of them are. And honestly, that awareness sometimes makes me feel more antisocial, because once you start seeing the patterns, you can’t unsee them.

One thing that keeps hitting me is how differently various parts of the world developed. Huge regions in Asia built entire philosophical and religious systems without any influence from Christianity or Judaism until much later. It makes me wonder: if a god were universally real and actively involved, why would entire civilizations go thousands of years without ever hearing about them until outside forces arrived?

And the more I think about it, the more I realize how violently Christianity spread in a lot of places — crusades, forced conversions, colonial expansion, suppression of Indigenous beliefs, witch trials, the whole package. And it’s not just Europe or the Middle East. The Americas had countless Indigenous religions before Europeans arrived, and a lot of those belief systems were wiped out or pushed underground through conquest, disease, and forced assimilation.

To be fair, Christianity isn’t the only religion with a history of conquest or coercion. Plenty of belief systems — across different eras and regions — have expanded through political power, empire-building, or force. But I honestly struggle to think of many peaceful mass conversions anywhere in history.

I’m not trying to attack individuals or say every believer is responsible for what happened centuries ago. I’m just trying to make sense of my own experience and the bigger picture of how belief systems move across the world.

If anyone knows examples of peaceful and successful large‑scale conversions, or has their own observations about how religions spread, I’d genuinely like to hear them.