Rebel Yell

Woman Calls Orem Police To Free Her From Her Locked Car

A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.

When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.

Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.

I laughed so hard that I almost choked! In all seriousness, though, don’t people know how to work a lock anymore? Surely she’s had to work a lock to get in and out of her home, as none but the richest in the world have anything like an automatic door in their house. (And if they don’t, you know it’s coming, and it’ll be on some gadget show on HGTV.) The article doesn’t mention how old she was, but presumably she’s been in a car that doesn’t have automatic door locks. Couldn’t she have easily deduced how to unlock her door based on that? Alas, it seems she may just be an idiot.

Still, I love what the local news station did with the article:

It’s priceless! Way to make a stupid situation sound deadly! I think they should get some sort of award for making the most idiotic person look like a hapless victim of technology gone awry. “Police heroically rescued a woman trapped in her car after the locks failed and the battery died!” Genius!

Gary Trudeau examines the logical conclusion of Creationism versus Evolution.

Verminators is my new favorite TV show. If you’ve ever watched Dirty Jobs, you know that dealing with bugs can be really dirty, as can cleaning homes after a major disaster. Verminators is a dirty job that pretty much just focuses on dealing with filthy conditions, dead things, and more bugs than I’ve ever seen in any place at one time.

It reminds me of the first apartments of some of my high school friends. You walk in and there are dirty dishes piled everywhere, clothes not washed, kitchen never cleaned, everything dirty…. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what I see on Verminators. It’s like a horror movie, seeing how some of these people live! Whatever kind of horrible living conditions I can imagine, this show beats that by miles. Holy crap, man. I wonder how people can live like that? Roaches everywhere, bed bugs, spiders; all manner of bugs just crawling around everywhere, living off of rotting food and trash. I think what surprised me was how one infested apartment can cause infestation in any connected apartment. Your pack-rat downstairs neighbor can bring roaches to your apartment just by being adjacent to your unit. Kind of like how your neighbor’s flea-ridden dog can give your own dog fleas just by running around in your back yard and hanging out with your dog. (Thanks, neighbors–it’s super-fun dipping your cat with pyrethrins every week and treating them with flea treatment and fogging your entire house just because you can’t be bothered to put some damn flea treatment on your own pets. LAME!!!)

It makes me incredibly glad that I was brought up by neat freaks who taught me how to clean up after myself. Even so, I can’t help but watch with a horrified glee as the guys in this pest control squad kill off these bugs. It’s like watching a traffic accident, only moreso. Tee hee. ;D

My internet connection has been practically nonexistent lately. First, because Comcast has provided us with spectacularly shitty service (just like Time Warner), and second because Windows Vista regularly refuses to acknowledge the wireless connection on my laptop. This means that I have to disable and then enable my wireless connection several times to “force” Vista to acknowledge that there are wireless connections available.

Switching to a macbook is looking more and more appealing lately.

So the other day I was driving from work to school (which is about two miles, probably less) and I nearly hit a pedestrian. Regardless of the situation, it’s almost ALWAYS the driver’s fault by default. You’re in a huge car, they’re protected by air and flimsy clothing. The car always wins. Which is why I always assume that it’s in your best interest to be ultra-careful whether you’re the pedestrian or the driver.

Imagine my surprise when, as I was driving to school, a guy steps off the curb directly in front of my car. Luckily, it was right at an intersection where I was making a left turn, so I was already going slow and had time to stop before I hit the guy. He was on his cell phone. He was in the middle of a conversation. He neglected to look both ways before crossing the street. He assumed that he had the right of way, even though I had nearly cleared the intersection. HE DIDN’T EVEN STOP TO CHECK FOR TRAFFIC! I guess he just assumed that the entire world stopped for him.

Yet, despite the fact that this guy was clearly not watching, didn’t care what was going on around him, and completely failed to follow any kind of pedestrian safety protocol (stop, look both ways, cross when traffic has stopped), as he was crossing in front of my car the guy turns to me and yells, “ASSHOLE!” and walks off. He was on his cell phone the whole time, and didn’t even stop his conversation to yell at me.

This guy was totally focused on his cell phone conversation and wasn’t paying attention to traffic at all. Had he been on Montrose or Westheimer, and not one of the empty side streets, this guy would probably be a bloody smear on the pavement right now. What the hell is wrong with people in this town? Sadly, this is exactly what I see drivers doing all the time; I never expect to see pedestrians on their phones, totally inattentive to traffic around them. Is your cell phone conversation so important that you’re willing to risk your life for it? I don’t know about everyone else, but when I was a kid we were taught never to walk into traffic without stopping to make sure it was safe to cross the street. Why? Because you could get hit by a car! When did people stop caring about safety?

“Oh hey, Tim. What’s up? Not much here. Just crossing the street. Yeah, I’m walking to the grocery store. So what are you up to? Hold on– HEY ASSHOLE! WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!! Oh, sorry. I almost got hit by a car. Yeah, what a douchebag! People should watch where they’re going. Don’t they know pedestrians automatically get the right of way?”

Apparently, being aware of your surroundings is no longer necessary–you can just foist that responsibility onto the people around you! But what happens when everyone else is just as inattentive as you are? I see cyclists dart across busy intersections, cut across three lanes of traffic, ride in the middle of the road–completely oblivious to the traffic around them. Pedestrians just walk into the street without even watching for traffic. Drivers act like they’re the only ones on the road. How are more people not killed on the streets every day? It boggles my mind that I don’t see more people being hit by cars–pedestrians AND drivers are both paying more attention to their phone conversations than to the traffic around them. It’s like they think they’re invincible. “I’m in a huge car! Everyone can see me! I’m totally safe in my Suburban Mommy Tank!” Or worse: “I’m a pedestrian! People HAVE to yield right of way to me! I can do what I want!”

Please, for the love of god, pay attention to what’s going on around you. I don’t care if you think you have the right of way–if you’re on your phone and you walk into traffic without looking, as far as I’m concerned you deserve your Darwin Award.

I’m always searching for ways to describe how I see the world, and I think this comes as close as anything. Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve been reading his books with great interest for the past fifteen years or so. They tend to match up fairly well with the way that I think about things, and I find myself saying, quite often, “AHA! This is exactly what I was thinking!” So when I read this article, I had another moment where I said to myself, “Aha! This is exactly how I’ve been feeling all along!”

I had a discussion with my mother a few weeks ago, and she asked me about my (non)belief in God. I told her, “I don’t think I’ve ever believed in God. I never feel any kind of divine presence, and I only rarely have that feeling that someone is out there, watching over me and telling me everything is going to be just fine.” My mother, of course, has always felt God’s presence, ever since she was five and accepted Jesus Christ into her heart as her Lord and Savior. I never had that moment, and I suppose my mother and I could, together, make an argument that religious experiences are dependent on your upbringing. I wasn’t overly religious when I was a kid (I remember gluing the pages of my mom’s Bible together with Benadryl when I was very young; she cried, I didn’t understand what the big deal was–it was just like any other book), but my mother was very religious. Even now, her entire life is shaped by her religious beliefs, every day is experiences through the lens of religion. I’ve never been like that, and so I’ve never had the experience of saying, “This is God’s work! God’s hand shaped this moment!”

So it was with great interest that I read this article. The last bit in particular (which I’ve quoted here) struck me as particularly relevant to my life experiences. I don’t believe in God, but I do think I know where gods originate. It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist.

I don’t have much truck with the ‘ religion is the cause of most of our wars’ school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.

I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I’m happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.

So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?

More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis’s Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it’s what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It’s that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn’t require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don’t think I’ve found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.

George Carlin has died.

Here are hundreds of proofs of God’s existence, compiled from arguments with evangelicals and other wing-nut religious types. The first six are actual proofs of God’s existence as posited by actual intellectuals, and after that it gets into the absurd and yet humorous intellectual atrocities that pass for “proofs of God’s existence” these days.

It frustrates me to no end when I meet people who treat God as some sort of magic genie who is there to solve all of their problems, and bestow upon them a fabulous life of ease and wealth. I’m sure you know the types: you meet an old acquaintance at Target and start talking to them, only to get sucked into a conversation where they spend forty-five minutes whining and complaining that God isn’t giving them a new car/girlfriend/college education/better job/etc. This happened to me this weekend, and I normally enjoy religious discussions of the theological sort, where I get a chance to flex my intellectual muscles. (This is why I fit so well with the Catholic church; they really embrace the idea of intellect and reason applied to religion. Theology wins over blind faith any day.) Unfortunately, the conversation in which I ended up was far from a theological debate. It was almost an hour of me listening to this guy complain that God is not the magic genie that he expected.

The complaint centered around this guy’s long-standing desire for a girlfriend/wife, and God’s failure to provide. My first problem with the conversation was the guy’s attitude that God is merely some great invisible genie who is there to grant his every wish. All he has to do is go to church, pray a few prayers, go to “Bible study,” and God will grant his every wish. He doesn’t have to do anything–God does everything for him. Now, this guy attends one of those feel-good non-denominational churches; specifically, the huge “community church” off of I-45 that’s done up conspicuously like a mosque straight out of Mecca. (I’m sure the architects thought they were getting a synagogue or Jewish temple, but unfortunately for them the church looks nothing of the sort. My dad keeps calling it Mecca, which makes me laugh. A lot.) I can’t speak for ALL of those kinds of churches, but they seem to be a breeding ground for exactly this kind of feel-good, Genie-Jesus pseudo-theology. Joel Osteen is particularly fond of this kind of tripe, but I digress.

My second problem was the guy’s obvious religious illiteracy. If you read the Bible, and you really apply Christian theology to your life, God is not some sort of mysterious genie who answers all of your prayers and gives you a perfect life. Certainly, you shouldn’t be getting off so easily that all you have to do is go to church, say a few prayers, and pretend to study the Bible. The New Testament certainly doesn’t imply any kind of easy road to Heaven, so it boggles my mind that people can reduce the Bible to a magic lamp. What made the conversation more frustrating was the guy’s insistence that it was a combination of God failing to answer his prayers and society’s rejection of Christian morals that prevented him from having his prayers answered. God was somehow punishing him for not being good enough, for being too enmeshed in society, for not praying hard enough, and for a number of other imaginary sins.

Throughout the entire conversation, he never made any mention that he might have to change his lifestyle, his way of thinking, his relationship with God, before his prayers might be answered. So it didn’t matter that he was still living with his mom, had no car, no job skills, and his only job was sacking groceries part-time at Kroger’s. That didn’t matter at all–God’s failure to miraculously drop a girlfriend in his lap was God’s fault, either a punishment for his failure to be a good Christian, or God’s inability to answer his prayers in a timely manner. All he had to do was show up–God did the rest.

The worst part about this guy was when he asked me which church I attend. Yes, even though I’m a Godless Sinner, I still enjoy sitting in during mass at the Chapel of St. Basil on campus. I enjoy the beauty and simplicity of the mass given by the Basilian fathers. When I told him that I attend a Catholic church, he was taken aback and got visibly upset. “You’re a CATHOLIC!? But . . . they worship Mary! and the saints! They don’t even believe in God and Jesus! How can you believe that?” He was more concerned about that than the fact that his brother, who was “just a dirty atheist,” seemed to have a better life than he did. I wonder about that. He was obviously convinced that I was somehow less of a human because I was Catholic (which is technically true–I’m more of a Catholic-sympathizing atheist, if you want to get really technical), and that his particular brand of pseudo-theology was somehow vastly superior to nearly 2000 years of Biblical scholarship in the Catholic church. (Yeah, that gets misguided at times, but the Church itself generally promotes theological research.)

I really can’t respect this kind of religious thinking. If you’re serious about your religion, why do you treat it as some sort of simplistic wish-granting machine? I just can’t believe that people could take something that’s supposed to be a serious spiritual relationship and reduce it to the stuff of late-night info-mercials. “It slices, it dices, makes Julienne fries! It also smites your enemies, improves your sex life, and grants your every wish! Pray now and get a free gift! Make all checks payable to First Church of Genie-Jesus. No refunds!”

It’s very disconcerting, to say the least, despite the fact that I myself don’t believe. It’s one thing to embrace a spiritual faith and be happy with the eternal reward, but it’s quite another to embrace a faith simply because you expect a return, not just in the next life, but in this one as well. From my understanding, Christian life isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not supposed to be just a wish-granting machine that makes your life easy without any effort. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, but that’s what people are expecting, and it upsets me greatly.

Of course, most of that frustration comes from the fact that it’s becoming more and more difficult to get a decent theological debate out of people because so many alleged Christians are embracing this kind of feel-good Genie-Jesus tripe. Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. And as far as I’m concerned, this guy I ran into, and many others, are just standing in their garages waiting for God to wave a magic wand and make everything better. It doesn’t work that way.

Southern Baptists fret over decline as annual meeting begins

For most of four decades, Southern Baptists could boast of rising membership even as more moderate and liberal Protestant denominations lost members in droves.

But with membership slightly down last year, and flat for the past five, Southern Baptists face a growing anxiety about their future as they gather for their annual meeting Tuesday in Indianapolis.

“We have peaked,” Southern Baptist statistician Ed Stetzer wrote in an online commentary on the latest statistics from 2007. “…For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline.”

What worries Southern Baptist leaders even more than the membership numbers is a steady decline in the conversion ritual that gave their denomination its name — baptisms.

Annual rates of baptisms have steadily declined not only in recent years, but also during the past 35 years. In 2007, Southern Baptist churches reported 345,941 baptisms. That’s down 12% from 2002 and 22% from 1972.

In a word: HA HA!

After giving me, and numerous others, grief for so long, I can’t say that I’m not happy to see Southern Baptists on the decline. They were, after all, supporters of slavery in the South. In my book, they’ll always be the Church of Crazy White Rednecks, and not the funny Jeff Foxworthy kind.