Shots from The Battery

‘Respect atheists’, says Cardinal

The Archbishop of Westminster has urged Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with “deep esteem”.

Believers may be partly responsible for the decline in faith by losing sense of the mystery and treating God as a “fact in the world”, he said in a lecture.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers.

God is not a “fact in the world” as though God could be treated as “one thing among other things to be empirically investigated” and affirmed or denied on the “basis of observation”, said Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor.

“If Christians really believed in the mystery of God, we would realise that proper talk about God is always difficult, always tentative.

So we were channel surfing on DirecTV last weekend and happened upon this program called “I Don’t Have Enough Faith To be an Atheist” on channel 378. Channel 378 is a christian network called NRB, which could stand for Not Real Bright or Non-Reality Broadcasters, but I have a good feeling it’s an acronym for National Religious Broadcasting.

We watched the whole hour, but had to keep pausing the DVR to let our laughter subside. Besides the fact that the name of his TV series makes absolutely no sense, the host, Frank Turek, presented piles of provably incorrect information along with enough straw-man arguments to feed several enormous herds of horses for quite some time. But the content of the episode we watched is not my sole focus today.

What really caught my attention was his relative honesty about what leads many young adults from christianity. On Frank’s website, he lists the following reasons for why 3 of 4 christian teens walk away from the church when we leave home:

* 75% of Christian youth leave the church after high school.
* Intellectual skepticism is one of the major reasons they walk away.
* Most Christian students are unequipped to resist rabidly anti-Christian college professors who
are intent on converting their students to atheism.
* College professors are five times more likely to identify themselves as atheists than the general public.
* More than half of all college professors view evangelical Christian students unfavorably.
* The “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—are writing books and are growing in popularity.

Now I’ll buy that intellectual skepticism, education, and reasoned books are fairly effective faith killers, but that doesn’t necessarily make any of those things wrong. The whole college “evangelical persecution” complex is total nonsense, too. It’s none of the professor’s business what religion to which a student subscribes, but how do they generally find out? Probably because the student announces it. That’s a great idea in theology class, but not really relevant elsewhere in academia. Perhaps some professors view some evangelicals negatively because they question the validity of some perfectly reasonable ideas while refusing to examine evidence. Such students aren’t being persecuted against. They deserve to fail.

Atheism requires no faith, and to suggest otherwise implies a total misunderstanding of the idea.

Atheists do hold a variety of beliefs, but why do religious people constantly compare a belief in evolution with their faith in god?

I’ll admit issues of faith and doubt are incredibly more complicated than meets-the-eye, but I also think more often than not, christians confuse the terms belief and faith - or at least equate the definitions - when conversing with or about Atheists. Like many words in the English language that are taken as synonyms, these two words actually express quite different concepts.

Beliefs are our mental constructs based on observation, or conclusions about reality from evidence. That doesn’t necessarily mean a belief is correct, though. If we examine our beliefs, we realize that they continuously change over time. Santa Clause is a good example of a belief I once held. At age 8 or 9, after discovering the stash of gifts in their closet, I reasoned that my parents were providing the presents, and my belief in Santa changed forever. At no time, however, did I have faith in St. Nick. As we gain ever more practical knowledge validated by observation, our beliefs come closer to describing reality.

Faith is something much more abstract, and requires blind submission without observable evidence. In fact, the Bible describes faith exactly that way. Hebrews chapter eleven, verse one reads: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Beliefs can undoubtedly usurp faith, especially when we make logical observations and conclusions once outside the evangelical bubble within which many of us are raised, and I think that is the core motivation behind the “I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be an Atheist” series.

Anyhow, despite our obvious feelings of disdain for Mr. Turek’s message and ministry, we do recognize him as one of the few evangelicals who seem to be aware that they are losing the battle of flock retention due to a pesky thing called logic.

One of the apartment properties our company owns and manages has had an unbelievably enormous water bill for a few months now, but we had a hard time determining who exactly was using $1500 - $2000 of extra water each billing cycle. The water is an included utility for tenants at this property, and each building of several apartments is metered together, so it was difficult to figure out exactly which tenant was responsible. At first, we thought perhaps one of the tenants was running a home laundromat, or maybe a construction project next door was swiping tankfuls when no one was watching.

Yesterday, after receiving another $1600 bill, one of the property managers and our maintenance guy found the meter spinning nonstop, so they knocked on each apartment door to check with the tenants about the source of the usage. They couldn’t get an answer at this one door, and having eliminated everyone else, they entered the apartment suspecting there was a possible water leak inside. The apartment was apparently fairly trashed from what they could see from the door and it strongly reeked of ganja. So, fearful there was a pot farm or meth lab inside, they called the authorities. The tenant was apparently already under investigation, so the narc-squad immediately saddled up.

When SLED and local narcotics agents arrived with a search warrant, they quickly found the cause of our water woes:

The idiot was storing bricks of coke and weed in the toilet tanks, and had propped up the flappers to keep his stash dry!

Dude must’ve been too baked, snorted, or stupid to notice the handy shutoff valves just 6 inches away.

So now, besides being arrested and obviously evicted, this genius is gonna be responsible for like over $5000 of his water usage in the past 3 months.

138

I fights dirty.

Shot to Uncle Z.

I was too buzzy by the time it finally happened to live-blog it, but if you saw Hillary’s Indiana “victory” speech last night, you may have noticed the looks on Bill’s red face as he stood behind her with Chelsea. Between all the fake smiles and obligatory head noddery, there were a number of emotions he was telegraphing: sadness, pain, defeat, anguish, disappointment… it was pretty obvious he was not happy He seemed to have a hard time standing still, kept contorting his face and pursing his lips and looked as if he’d just had a tearful breakdown before coming out.

It could be that he was just tired and sunburned after the past week of furious campaigning in the boonies of NC, but I detected something more. As his wife made that delusional speech, I wonder what he was really thinking. The man even teared up at a point. He surely knows what’s coming, and it must feel alien because they haven’t lost an election since the 80’s.

It’s over.

Let’s hope she saves a scrap of dignity and packs it in sometime in the coming weeks.

Update 05/07/08 @ 7:55AM: Just as I posted this, Dante, David Gregory and Joe Scarborough began discussing the look on Bill’s face on Morning Joe. I’ll see if I can find a video to embed, as the whole panel basically echoed my observations.

Check him out on MSNBC right now. He changed his name, though.

Also, I gotta mention that Brokaw made us guffaw by crackin’ on Chris Matthews a few minutes ago.
Olbermann even lost composure for a sec… haha!

OK, Obama’s speaking to North Carolina - back to the TV.

So Di’s Mitsubishi Lancer started peeing on the floor again last week.

It’s actually the 2nd time we’ve had the honor of experiencing that car piss buckets of water from under that dash onto the passenger floorboard - or passenger, if one is present. Oh, and to add to the annoyance, the blower fan completely stopped working. It’s only May, but it’s already too hot in Charleston to be driving around sans air conditioning.(Postal and UPS drivers totally have our sympathy) Mitsubishi knows the ‘02 and ‘03 lancers are prone to relieving themselves in the passenger compartment, and has issued several technical service bulletins to their mechanics about the issue. See, the little hidden evaporator drain line was originally installed in such a way as to allow bugs and small debris to climb in and block the thing, thus creating the same floor squirtin’ symptom for us and thousands of other Lancer drivers. Oh, and newer models have had this problem addressed with the addition of a .15 cent mesh filter.

No problem, we paid massively for an extended warranty we’ve only used once(for the same prob in ‘06), so we’ll take it in and they’ll fix it.

WRONG.

Turns out, our extended warranty just expired on the 29th of April… mere days before the friggin’ thing developed this serious bladder-control issue. And we just made the last stinkin’ payment, too. Figures.

Minus the warranty, Mitsubishi wanted over $800 to stop the deluge and replace the fan and a little doohickey called a fan motor resistor. I told the mulleted service dude to keep f’in dreaming.

So, after establishing that Mitsubishi deserved exactly $0.00 of our hard earned funds to repair their own gaddamned mistake, I downloaded a bootlegged copy of the actual Lancer service manual to find this mystical evaporator drain line and try to attack it myself. I’m not a car guy… or particularly mechanical, but when properly motivated I can generally stumble through such tasks. The drain line was fairly well hidden, but with the help of the pict-o-grams in the manual I finally located it and cleaned a gooey 2″ obstruction from the tube. Then I removed the fan from the housing under the dash and cleaned and re-lubricated it.

It works now! No more pissy a/c, although the fan works only on setting 4 due to the blown resistor, which is on the way. The best part is that it only cost about 1 hour and the litany of foul language my neighbor had to endure while I contorted myself under the dash.(that part was totally free) The resistor cost us $60 and will take about 15 minutes labor to install. So, as soon as that comes in we should have her car completely functioning properly on all settings for the summer for less than a tenth of the cost of what a certain shitty car dealership wanted to extort from us.

I’m not really sure if there’s a moral to this story, or even a point… but I do feel better after getting it all out here.

Anyhow, we will be shopping for a new car this fall, and I’m positive we’ll just avoid Mitsupissi altogether.

Backyard fencepost is as good a place as any, I suppose:

These two carried on like this for half an hour last weekend. When it was over, he released her and scurried away; she promptly fell off the fence and hasn’t been seen since.

This is my Ultimate Big Deal meal from The Kicken’ Chicken:

Actually, ordering that was a mistake… a post-4:20 error in judgement, if you will.
WTF were we thinking? Hell, what are THEY thinking? Roast beef, ham, turkey, fried chicken tenders, cheese, bacon bits… you’re guaranteed to feel that combo for a while after ingestion. At least I got to embarrass Di with the goofy sound-effects from kickenchicken.com while she called in the order… “I’d like to order*cluck*two ultimate big deal*cluck*meals *Cluck-cluuuuuck* and 2 *cluck* Cokes.” *cluck cluuuck!* She claims the delivery guy clucked at her because my little game.

Di snapped this one yesterday:

What’s up with that house with all the funny black jesus art and those rambling hand-painted billboards on the corner of President St. and the Crosstown? Something about 9/11 and leviticus… we think. One day, we’re gonna cause a wreck trying to decipher that nonsense.

Puppy George in bed with her mommy:

She’s taken to stealing my place if I get out of bed for anything.

Most of the time George is fairly cute:

But she can also be 3 and 1/2 pounds of ferocious:

Especially if I don’t give her any of my Kicken’ Chicken sandwich…

I just saw that new Aciphex commercial again, it seems to be on heavy rotation over @ MSNBC.
I hope there was a nice bonus for the marketing team that came up with that name.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, you probably don’t own a TV, but someone of comparable maturity has been kind enough to upload it to youtube:

Anyhow, I hereby proclaim it the most immature hilarious pharmaceutical product homophone EVER!

I can’t help but snicker uncontrollably each time I hear that voice-over guy urging me to ‘ask my doctor if Aciphex could be right for me.’

You got it, man. I already have to visit the dentist Friday anyway.

I walked out on the porch a few minutes ago to discover the air filled with thousands millions of them. It’s a goddamn sporestorm out there. I can see them touching down on my newly-seeded lawn; countless numbers of various sizes and unknown origin landing to infect my beautiful new grass with the same affliction that ultimately killed the last one. Noooo! It took untold hours and at least 2 bottles of weed-b-gon a month last year to keep the clover and dandelion spawn at bay, and I am not about to allow a repeat that crap if I can help it.

I need a dome. A giant plastic dome to protect my hard work.

Or… our trusty shop-vac. Thats it!

The rotten fuckers will never stand a chance if I collect ‘em before they implant.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be vacuuming my yard until the weedstorm subsides…

It’s been a weird few days here and the bloggy-time has been limited since the weekend, but here are three randomish vids from our recently played list:

He said that water contained dirt, bacteria worms, and viruses. Tasty!
We’d pay to see the off camera reaction - he totally swished and swallowed.

An oldie, but we will always have a soft spot for The Gourds’ cover of Gin and Juice:

We miss Steve Dupont and the Obtuse Angle… good times.

And finally, here’s Flight of the Conchords performing live in Canada:

Does anyone know when the new Conchords season starts? Should be soon.

Not a lot of people understand or even care about such things as Fair Use doctrine, but a few years ago, back in our podcasting days, the issue had the community a twitter. We even attended a couple of seminars on this specific subject at the 1st PME and Podcastercon. Rob Walch from Podcast411 covered this issue a number of times on his show early on. He also made it a mission to clear up a fairly common misconception amongst podcasters; which was that as long as a song clip was less than 30 seconds long, it was considered “Fair use.” Not true. And for obvious reasons. You simply can’t claim free speech as an end-all to copyright lawsuits.

Anyhow, this afternoon when I saw the press release from the Expelled crew responding to the lawsuit filed by Yoko Ono for the illegal use of Lennon’s “Imagine” in the film, I literally needed a moment to step outside and calm down before starting this post:

Yoko Ono and others have filed lawsuits against Ben Stein’s
EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, challenging the film’s use
and critique of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.” One of the suits
seeks to ban free speech through preliminary injunctive relief
which essentially means that they are trying to expel EXPELLED
as it is now being shown in theaters.

The Producers of EXPELLED reject the lawsuits and state that
Premise Media did not pursue a license for the song and had no
obligation to do so. Unbiased viewers of the film will see that
the “Imagine” clip was used as part of a social commentary in
the exercise of free speech. The brief clip — consisting of a
mere 10 words — was used to contrast the messages in the
documentary and was not used as an endorsement of EXPELLED…

So now they’ve officially laid the fact that don’t even understand the law on the table.

Section 107 of the copyright act contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered “fair,” such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair.

Let’s see how Premise Media’s argument passes the factors for Fair Use test:

1.the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Fail. It’s a commercial for-profit documentary.

2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
Fail. Many consider the song “Imagine” synonymous with Lennon, so the nature of the work has been historically significant to both the author and his legacy. A 26 second clip of a specific portion of the copyrighted song with specifically selected lyrics was used in this commercial documentary to accompany the filmmakers assertion that belief in science leads to genocide. The filmmakers did not even attempt to seek permission from the author’s estate, despite doing just that for all other copyrighted music on the film. This leads one to believe that they did not seek permission because they either could not afford it, or knew it would not be granted.Updated 4/27, thanks to Jay.

3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
Fail. Although premise’s main argument is that they only used 25 seconds of the song, the copyright law is clear: There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Fail. Seeing as the lawsuit was spurred by bloggers accusing Yoko of selling John out… the use was obviously damaging to his image and legacy.

Oh, and you can’t mix and match those(a common tactic of christians in a number of situations)… if one factor excludes the usage, then it cannot be protected by Fair Use. In this case, Expelled doesn’t appear to meet a single requirement.

So, if these filmmakers can’t even grasp basic copyright law, who in their right mind would think they understand the biological processes or complex scientific theory they attempt to discredit in the film?

Way to go, guys… keep flying that ignorance flag real high.