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Why Atheists Always Win at Twitter
by Noah Lugeons
I just reached the satisfying conclusion of a five day flame war on Twitter. My wife’s kind of new to the whole Twitter thing, so I’ve been explaining my technique a bit as I go. It’s been educational for both of us, as it’s forced me to think a lot more about it than I normally do. And over that period, I’ve developed a theory to help explain why I always kick so much ass in Twitter fights.
Now, it’s too broad a generalization to say that atheists always win on Twitter, unless you define winning as being the person who turns out to be correct in the end. I’ve seen a few atheists get their asses handed to them by clever apologists on Twitter, forums, Facebook threads, Reddit, blog comments… you name it. But it seems that the vast majority of the time, I see the atheist beating the religious clod into the ground until they’re pounding their keyboards randomly with shaking fists.
So before I lay out my theory, we have to define two things. One is what I consider “winning” in a flame war. The second is, strangely enough, the word “faith”. We’ll start with the easy one.
The old trope about somebody being wrong on the internet is used to justify a lot of losses in online arguments. I’m not saying there isn’t something to the notion that arguing online is often unproductive, but I think one goes to far when one says it’s “useless”. As I’ve said before on this blog, it helps you hone your skills in live debate, it helps you reinforce your understanding of your own position and it helps you build a community of online support. But there’s also another benefit; it can be really fun.
Debates online are okay. I usually let somebody else takeover when the philosophical arguments get too far in the weeds because that shit bores me eventually. I don’t have the patience to walk theist after theist through all the errors in “irreducible complexity” or “Pascal’s Wager”. But I never back down from a good old fashioned flame war. Hell, I’ve been doing that shit since CompuServe.
In all that time, the enemy hasn’t changed, the wars haven’t changed and thus my tactics haven’t had to change much. Once an argument moves beyond any exchange of rational ideas and turns into a name-calling, juvenile insult war, there’s only one way to win. You have to be the one who maintains your cool longest. Eventually, if you do it right, you’ll get a response like:
You’re a pathetic, tragic, stupid, evil waste of breath. FUCK YOU!!!!1!!!
And then you can break out the champagne because you’ve won. When you’ve reduced a person to something like that, they’ve admitted that they’re through being clever or even intelligent. You’ve cracked their facade of confidence and revealed them to be your intellectual inferior. What’s more, you can pile on all you want at this point because they’ve gotten emotional and you haven’t. You can make them drool if you try hard enough.
For my purposes, this is the only measure of victory in a flame war. Being the last person to lose their cool says that you’re the one presenting the rational argument and they’re the one presenting the emotional one. It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not because all participants have long abandoned the logical standing of their position anyway. It’s simply about who can piss who off first.
And it is in this way that I see atheists win over and over and over again.
Part of this is certainly the fact that we’ve just got the better arguments. There can be little doubt, especially in the mind of a non-believer, who is approaching this question logically and who is approaching it emotionally. It also helps that we are forced into positions where we have to justify our worldview far more often than theists (and, of course, I’m speaking only to the culture I’m familiar with. Can’t say how true that is for my readers outside the US).
And that ultimately brings us to the role “faith” plays in all of this. Religious people love to talk about “faith”, but when they use it, it has a special meaning. If I were to use faith, it would be to describe a near-certainty: I have faith that the porch will hold my weight; I have faith that Heath will show up to record on Tuesday; I have faith that I will win Twitter wars with theists. But that type of faith is entirely different than the “faith” that believers talk about. So much so that they should really have to use a different word. It’s almost the polar opposite of what I mean.
Me: Faith is the expectation that something will behave exactly like it always does.
Them: Faith is the expectation that everything will eventually behave in a way I’ve never observed it behaving.
Ask an atheist and virtually all of them will tell you that they’d be willing to change their minds on the “god” question if compelling new evidence appeared. Ask a theist and virtually all of them would tell you the opposite. Theists look at that and see doubt in the atheists, while we look at it and see doubt in them. After all, I’m confident that my porch will hold my weight, but it would only take one time of me falling through it to change my mind on the subject. It’s a belief I’m so confident about that I don’t have to worry about changing my mind on it.
But consider the religious type of faith in that analogy. They would have to keep walking out on that porch every day, even after it collapsed. They’d have to walk out the back door, fall into the pile of broken lumber below, pluck splinters from their limbs and tell themselves that the porch was still holding their weight. No amount of evidence would sway them from their “faith”. But our kind of faith breeds a certain kind of apathy. If you’re confident enough about a belief, you don’t care. You’re not emotionally invested in the belief that the porch will hold your weight. You don’t bother justifying the belief to yourself with logic puzzles and wagers from long dead mathematicians. I need invoke no syllogism to prove to myself that the porch will hold my weight.
Which brings us back to the flame wars. I won’t deny that I’m emotionally invested in the atheist movement. I’m as emotional about fighting against religious intrusion as I am about any subject. I passionately donate my time, money, creativity and effort to furthering this cause and that is all fueled by an emotional investment. But what I’m emotional about isn’t the fact that god doesn’t exist. I have faith in that the same way I have faith in my porch. I might need a fancy analogy or two to justify it to a believer, but I don’t need anything but the evidence (or overwhelming lack thereof) to settle that question to my own satisfaction.
So when I’m battling with a believer, they keep expecting to find that emotional trigger. They fire blindly because they think there’s something about my atheism that has spurred my activism. In reality, it’s actually something about their religion. Meanwhile, it’s kind of easy to find their trigger. They want to tear down your intelligence because it irks them to think that a smart person would look at the data and conclude that there is no god. So simply being intelligent with your responses is enough to eventually bring out the worst in them.
Sure, we can be disrespectful, scathing and vulgar (hell, that’s kind of my niche), but we never abandon reason. Even in the filthiest of flame wars, I’m always in the realm of logic. And eventually that leaves them in the realm of ad hominem Fuck-Yous.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make someone drool.
An Interview With Carl
by Noah Lugeons
I woke up early this morning to do an interview with Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast (my podcast this time). Okay, so “early” is a relative term. It’s my day off and I normally don’t wake up until there are two digits in the hour on my day off, so waking up at 9:00 seemed a bit excessive. Carl’s the one who actually had to wake up early, as we started things off at 7:30 am his time.
I should note that this was his choice. I’d have been happy to do it a bit later, but as he explained, he has kids and they don’t care how much you drink, they wake up at the same damn time.
Carl had the good taste to invite Heath and me on his show when we were still only 3 episodes into our little experiment, so I definitely felt that I owed him some reciprocal promotion, but that wasn’t why I interviewed him. That lucky bastard got to go to the American Atheists’ 50th Anniversary Convention in Austin. What’s more, he lost his atheist convention virginity there.
I, of course, lost my atheist convention virginity a long time ago. It was to a convention that you don’t know and it moved out of state a while back, but it was a really good one. But Carl had never been to something like this before and I knew I was curious what his first impressions were. My hope was that our listeners would share that curiosity.
Like all my interviews, it went on way longer than I intended so I cut a 15 minute version for the website and an 8 minute version for the show. We’ll be airing it on this week’s show (hooray! I don’t have to read Genesis yet!) and after listening to the show-edit, I can assure you that even if you didn’t share my curiosity about the convention experience, you’ll enjoy the hell out of the interview. Carl’s a pretty funny dude and when you pack 15 minutes of his wit into an 8 minute package, it explodes with hilarity. Hell, it might even be dangerous to pack so much funny into such a short space, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Episode 8: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Mitt Romney’s new brand of baking soda, Mormon Hammer. Guaranteed to keep your fridge as free of odor as it is of alcohol, caffeine and gender-equality. So send one of your wives to the store and tell them to look for the whitest baking soda on the shelf: Mormon Hammer.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 11th and bananas are my worst nightmare.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from climatically-schizophrenic New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- A Louisiana legislator tries to teach kids about religious freedom by taking it away,
- We’ll use the word “fuck” more times than there’s any real need to and
- My wife and my best friend will join me for the most disappointing threesome of all time.
But first, the Diatribe…
Diatribe:
“How Hubble Saved My Soul”
I rejected religion at an early age. My parents were religious but they weren’t church-goers and they only made a half-ass attempt to brainwash me. I can’t tell you exactly when I out-logiced religion, but my earliest atheist memory is at the age of 8 when my 3rd grade teacher settled an argument between me and some other kid by affirming that there was too a god.
Now, I’d say I was proud of that fact, but atheism is nothing to be proud of. Outsmarting a book that starts contradicting itself in the second chapter isn’t very hard. And, as I proved for many years after rejecting my parent’s faith, you can be both an atheist and a gullible dipshit simultaneously.
See, I didn’t do the whole religion thing, but I was every bit as irrational in my puerile new-age hippy tie-dye, goatee, anything goes, neo-pagan spiritualism. I dismissed all the doctrines, but I still had a soft spot in my brain for ancient wisdom. What’s more, I wanted magic and eternal life. I just wasn’t willing to get them from a church.
So I alternately identified myself as a Wiccan, a spiritualist, a Thelemite or, my personal favorite, a Pangeantheologist. I read books on witchcraft and Kabbalah and chakras and high magick and low magick and herbal magick and color magick and chaos magick and shamanic magick and Enochian magick. And I read the I Ching and I read Tarot cards and I read runes and I read palms. And I read Aleister Crowley and Raymond Buckland and Donald Kraig and Israel Regardie and Peter Carroll. And I went to pagan communes and I met gurus and I went on silence retreats and I danced naked around bonfires and I called upon ancient spirits and I invoked undines and deep down I knew the whole time that it was a load of shit.
The cognitive dissonance wasn’t that hard at first, because I was getting laid. But it got harder and harder as I learned more and more about this stuff. There was never any substance. It never made any more sense. There were never any deeper secrets and there were never any results.
My friends would all say, “Oh, you’ve gotta meet this guru” and when I do, I figure out five minutes in that he knows less about what he’s talking about than I do after reading three books on the subject. I would get together with some coven for a big communal spell and I would happen to catch them on one of those rare nights when nothing happened at all. Or worse yet, you would know the ceremony was over when the most gullible jackass in the room says, “Did you feel that?!”
And as I’m going through this whole five year acid trip of the soul, something else was happening too. And even though I wouldn’t realize it for a quite a while, it was steadily eroding the foundation of my bullshit; I started to see the images being returned from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like practically everyone, I fell in love with these images as soon as I saw them. I was fascinated and I couldn’t possibly see enough. I wanted to know more about what they were and the incredible universe they revealed. But more than that I wanted to know how we got them and what they meant. It was slow and sometimes painful, but that was the origin of my love for science.
Somehow underpaid, uninspired public school teachers had failed to instill any real appreciation for something as fascinating as everything in my developing mind and it took seeing the universe in this scale for me to truly appreciate the wonders of human curiosity.
But it sure made that cognitive dissonance harder. After all, if science said what I believed was bullshit and they could back it up with pictures of the entire fucking universe, who was I to disagree? How could I cocoon myself in some arrogant worldview that places humanity in the center of it all when there were things like the Hubble Deep Field Image to contradict me?
Even the young religions had a multi-century head start on science when it came to this whole “heaven” thing and they were happy to tell you what it was like and who was in charge and how you could get there, but they never managed to take pictures. We never glimpsed the earliest stars through the power of herbal supplements. We never saw a cloud of dust four light years across through proper breathing techniques. We never saw galaxies forming with color-infused water. The methods and practiced that all my hippy gurus promoted had been around for centuries and sometimes millenia, and yet knowledge of their deep and mystical secrets had never managed something as stupefying and eye-opening as even the lowliest of Hubble’s observations. And yes, I’m talking about the blurry shit before they fixed it.
Sure, you eat enough mushrooms and get in a sweat lodge, you’ll see all the bright lights and pretty colors Hubble has to offer, but there’s nothing there. Just like every other silly little spiritual distraction, there’s nothing there. It’s all empty, hollow, meaningless, unsatisfying, Chicken Soup for the Brain drivel. It demands that you suspend your disbelief even to the point of suspending your own senses. It demands that you practice for years at something you can’t actually get better at. It demands that you nod along with every stupid post-modernist notion some yoga instructor blurts out because you don’t want to be the only one at the party wearing incredulity.
But science, as Carl Sagan said, brings the goods. The appeal of all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo was rooted in my desire to be part of something larger, but when I glanced at the universe through the eyes of a space telescope, I saw that science was offering me something larger than any new-age guru could dream of. And what’s more is that it was real; tangible; provable. Unlike the “truth” offered by faith, science demands nothing in return.
And that’s how Hubble saved my soul.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is my fidus Achates, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to, um… I don’t know, feed us?
In our lead story tonight, the state of North Carolina decided to declare a state religion last week, then the ether wore off and they wondered who that lump in the bed was and where that tattoo came from and what the fuck they were thinking.
This story starts in Rowan County, North Carolina (go Mustangs!) where a lawsuit threatened to stop county commissioners from opening their meetings with a prayer. They had two choices, one was concede, give up the prayer and not look like stupid assholes. The other was to try to rewrite the constitution.
- They were trying to invoke a silly little idea that I remember my 10th grade history teacher asserting. The idea is that the constitution only forbids congress from establishing a religion, not the individual states.
- I’m not sure if there’s any real constitutional ground for that argument but I’m skeptical and so is North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, who killed the bill once the national media started to make a stink about this. Which suggests to me that somehow North Carolina legislators didn’t realize that people were gonna make a stink about this.
- And that’s why we need watchdog groups.
LEAD STORY: The North Carolina State Religion: http://news.yahoo.com/could-north-carolina-actually-declare-state-religion-130700725.html Follow Up : http://www.goddiscussion.com/108691/north-carolina-house-speaker-kills-bill-that-would-have-allowed-the-state-to-create-a-state-sponsored-religion-in-violation-of-first-amendment-to-the-constitution/
And in “I’ll see your state religion and raise you twelve pounds of raw bat-shit” news, Louisiana State Representative Katrina R. Jackson has proposed a new bill that would force students to recite the Lord’s Prayer along with the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
With an inspiring effort to yet be the most destructive Katrina in Louisiana’s history, Representative Jackson attempts to justify the bill with some of the most Orwellian language since Orwell. She actually says:
- “Students shall be informed that these exercises are not meant to influence an individual’s personal religious beliefs in any manner.”
- The recitations shall be conducted so that students learn of America’s great freedoms, including the freedom of religion symbolized by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Louisiana state rep proposes a prayer-in-school law: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/05/louisiana-state-representative-students-should-learn-freedom-of-religion-by-reciting-the-lords-prayer-every-morning/
And following up on a story we covered back in episode 4, the big Jesus picture in Jackson, Ohio is coming down. You’ll recall a flurry of defensive posturing by the school board, who insisted that nothing on heaven or earth was going to make them take down their beloved Jesus pitcher.
Well, it turned out that all it took was an insurance company deciding that Jesus was a liability. And this goes to show you how heartless we atheists are. They tried to compromise. They offered to take the picture down from the Middle School and put it up in the High School but that wasn’t good enough for those secular humanist jackoffs.
But I do think it’s worth pointing out what a signpost this really is. It doesn’t take too many successful lawsuits by atheists to convince insurance companies to pull the plug on shit like this before it ends up wasting a truckload of taxpayer money.
Follow Up: School in Jackson Ohio agrees to remove Jesus painting: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/the-giant-portrait-of-jesus-is-finally-coming-down/
And in more shameful news, a new poll finds that 13% of Americans think that Obama is the anti-Christ. Many of our listeners will have already heard about this survey, as we’re not the only media outlet that found that number interesting. In addition to that statistic, the study also found that:
- 20% of Americans believe that childhood vaccines are linked to autism,
- 9% believe that fluoride is added to the water to control our minds,
- And 4% believe that shape-shifting lizards secretly control our government.
I find some of those numbers hard to believe and I hope that there was a lot of the “these questions have gotten so stupid I’m gonna start fucking with the interviewer” effect in it, but the fact that David Icke’s lizard theory is even well known enough to be included on the survey is plenty of evidence of some horrible failures in public education.
– I’d still be ashamed if only 13% of people believed that there would be an anti-christ.
Studies show that 13% of Americans think Obama is the anti-Christ: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf
And sometimes you’re combing through news sources and you see a headline so promising you know it’s gonna make the show even before you read the article. A headline on the Christian Newswire caught my attention the other day. It said, and I quote, “Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate”.
And basically what we’ve got here is every bit as stupid as what you expect when you read it. This apologist Paul Hutchins is trying to employ one of the Muslim apologist’s favorite tactics, the one where you say, “look at all the science that my book of bullshit predicts.”
This is kind of a dubious tactic in my mind, since all but eight words of the bible are contradicted by science, but nevertheless, he’s trying to say that the creation account in Genesis is in keeping with our current beliefs about how the planet formed.
Now, I’ll give him the credit of saying that he does get there, but he asks for a few huge favors when it comes to interpretation, including but not limited to:
– When the bible talks about 6 days they just mean “6 unequal periods of indeterminate time”
– When the bible says “Let there be light” what they clearly meant was “Let the sun transition from a protostar to a main sequence star.”
– When it talks about god making the sun 4 days after making day and night, they meant that he made the sun visible through the cloud of pre-solar system planetary fragments.
- He keeps talking about how these things “correspond exactly” to the Genesis account.
Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate (I shit you not, that’s what the headline says): http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2911771800.html
And finally tonight, The Foundation Beyond Belief has announced is 2nd quarter beneficiaries. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Foundation Beyond Belief, it is a most excellent secular charity that gathers donations in the name of atheism and then distributes them to a number of deserving charities.
Basically, they do all the hard work of confirming that none of your charitable dollars are going to support one of these half-charity/half-proselytizing funds. Which is helpful if you’ve ever wondered exactly how much of the money you gave to the Salvation Army was spent opposing gay rights.
The five charities selected for this quarter are:
- The One Acre Fund
- The Innocence Project of Texas
- T’ruah
- Bernie’s Book Bank
- And Trees, Water & People
To learn more about these charities and all the news items discussed on this episode, be sure to check out the shownotes at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Foundation Beyond Belief Announces its 2nd quarter beneficiaries. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/foundation-beyond-belief-announces-q2-2013-slate-of-charities/
That does it for headlines tonight. Heath, appreciate your help as always.
And Heath, please stick around. When we come back, Lucinda Lugeons will join Heath and me for a little Bible study.
Skit:
Writer: Hey chief – Did you get a chance to look at the draft I sent you of “The Bible”?
Editor: Oh yeah the fictional allegory book . . . I looked it over . . . Why don’t you have a seat.
W: Sure, how did you like it?
E: (Sigh) I didn’t love it. I’m just a little worried people might take some of it literally.
W: Come on, seriously? The stories are absurd. How could someone take them literally?
E: Well… whenever the scripture department releases something, readers tend to get a little too carried away. Remember the shit show after we printed the Torah? Which actually brings me to my next concern . . . and if I’m way off base here, I’m sorry . . . But it seems like you pretty much plagiarized the entire Hebrew Bible for this first half. Is that what you did?
W: Listen, the Jews are not a very litigious people, so it’s not look they’re gonna sue us. But maybe I’ll add a few footnotes to properly cite the direct quotes.
E: Don’t get me wrong, that thing’s way overdue for a sequel, but do we really have to reprint the whole first book with it? That’s gonna cost a pretty shekel.
W: I’ll be honest, I had a little bit of writer’s block, and I couldn’t seem to get the ball rolling. I added some stuff though. Judith, Wisdom… um… Maccabees…
E: Yeah, we might have to trim that part.
W: Are you sure?
E: Not really no. Look, I understand borrowing from it, that’s not a huge problem. It’s not like a religious text is just going to pop into your head, divinely inspired, ready to print.
W: Right, I’m not just gonna find a bunch of golden plates with the words of god etched into them. So I did some research, and the Torah had a lot of stuff very similar to what I was looking to write myself. One god, omnipotent vengeance scenarios, get really mad at any future religion that also likes the Middle East. It just made sense as a jumping off point.
E: Okay let’s circle back to that. Open up your copy to the Leviticus section.
W: I’ve gotta stop you right there. I know what you’re gonna say. That was a really weird time for me. I had to stone my 4th concubine AND 3 slaves to death that month. Lots of mixed emotions. And my normal guy was out of town, so I had to call this delivery service I never used before, and I’m pretty sure they laced the frankincense with something crazy.
E: Listen, it’s understandable. I’m thinking maybe just a little disclaimer at the beginning. Novelty purposes only, or something.
W: I really think you’re underestimating the intelligence of our readership. It’s not like a giant population the world over is going to get swept up in some sort of crusade to make sure everyone agrees – word for word – with my little book here.
E: I guess you’re right. I’m probably being paranoid. I just had one other concern . . . Why all the hate against gays?
W: What?
E: All the anti-homosexual passages.
W: Where are there any anti-homosexual passages?
E: Right here in Leviticus. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” Then later in Romans and again in Jude. It seems like you’re at least tacitly allowing the lesbian stuff, but still…
W: I thought it was clear that this section was tongue in cheek. I guess I really didn’t sell the sarcasm. And I wasn’t even talking about the sex part, just the lying in bed after. Nobody wants to see 2 men cuddling. That’s just faggoty.
E: And what’s with all the Yoda talk, and the weird numbering. You really think people are going to refer back to this one book, line by line, and need reference numbers? Normal page numbers, like every other book, should be just fine.
W: That was a software issue. I wrote the thing in Aramaic, and when the word processor translated the characters over to Times Old Roman Latin, a bunch of random numbers showed up by accident.
E: Okay, let’s skip ahead to this “New Testament” part. I get what you’re going for here and I like the idea of god having a kid in the sequel, but that whole part seemed way off to me. The first four chapters just seem to be telling the same story over and over and none of them agree on the details. It’s just weird.
W: Yeah, I started off with a “choose your own adventure” concept in mind but eventually I just slapped everything together in that opening chunk.
E: (Big Sigh) Look, I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you. Religious texts are hot right now and the epic poetry division hasn’t had a best seller in centuries. There’s a lot of problems here, but we’re probably gonna roll with it anyway.
W: Good to hear.
E: Do you have anything in mind for the sequel?
W: I’m thinking illiterate, child raping warlord on a flying horse.
E: Not bad.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show where we set aside a few minutes to talk up some of the great atheist and secular meet-ups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start off with a Skepticamp event in Essex County, Massachusetts on April 13th. Runs from 9:30 to 4, has some really interesting topics lined up and ends out with a Skeptical Trivia event that should be a lot of fun.
http://skepticamp.capeannskeptics.com/?page_id=45
On April 20th we have the South Dakota Conference of Reason in Sioux Falls. And I know that people who live in and around South Dakota have a lot of choices when it comes to atheist conferences, but this one should be worth the drive.
Facebook Page for conference: https://www.facebook.com/events/214700748667522/?fref=ts
On the 27th of April there’ll be another Skepticamp event in Denver with an equally impressive slate of topics including a pretty promising talk on pseudo-astronomy, woo in women’s health and teen atheist outreach.
http://skepticamp.org/wiki/Skepticamp_Denver_2013
And finally in Atlanta we’ve got a three day skepticamp conference starting on the 3rd of May and running through the weekend.
http://www.atlantaskeptics.com/skepticamp/
And how could I not mention the fact that the Brisbane Atheists are hosting a Pirate Party for their monthly meet up on April 30th. I’d love to go just to find out what pirate-speak sounds like with an Australian accent. And incidentally, if any of my Australian listeners want to settle that mystery for me, feel free to send an audio clip.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/pirate-party-australia-brisbane-monthly-meetup-2013-04-30/
That’ll do it for the calendar this week, but I want to remind everybody listening that if you’re involved with an atheist, skeptical or secular event that could use some publicity, let me know. Also if you’re aware of any good online resources for such events, let me know about those as well. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at ScathingAtheist (dot) com. And remember, we’re weekly now so I need all the help I can get filling this segment.
Outro:
I had a couple of quick announcements before we close out the show. We’ve been putting a few segments of the show on You-Tube so if you want to share one part of the show with somebody who might not be able to make it through the whole show, check out our You-Tube channel for some bite-sized pieces of The Scathing Atheist.
We’ve also added a donation button to the website so if you were anxious to give us money, you could do that. Those donations are tax-deductible, but unfortunately that’s only for residents of Tatooine, Mordor and the magical land of Hyrule. The rest of you still have to pay your taxes.
We’ll have the long version of the Holy Babble segment up on the extras page on the website soon so be sure to check that out. Wanted to thank everyone who’s made their way over to iTunes to leave us a five star review. Gotta thank Lucinda and Heath for helping out tonight.
And I want to give a big thanks to George Hrab for both providing the Farnsworth quote to start us out and for entertaining the shit out of my wife and I last Friday night. The guys an incredible musician so if you’re a fan of the music, find an opportunity to watch him live. It’s an incredible experience and I’ll have links to all his upcoming events on the shownotes for the page. He also has a really fun podcast that I’ll link to as well.
http://www.geologicpodcast.com/
That does it for tonight, but if you want more be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons, like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on You-Tube, listen to us on Stitcher and give us money.
If you want to learn more about the news items and events discussed on this program, check out the shownotes for this episode. If you have any comments, questions or death threats you’ll find all the contact info on the “Contact” page at Scathing Atheist (dot) Com. All the music used in this program was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Learning to Podcast From the Best
by Noah Lugeons
My first podcasting love was “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe”. My wife bought me the iPod for Christmas and I got bored listening to music with it after about three days. I figured I might as well learn something on my commute so I tried to put a college curriculum in there. I downloaded one history podcast, one philosophy podcast, a psychology one, a podcast about literature, a podcast about film technique and, of course, one on general science.
The last one is the only one of that original batch that I still listen to and it’s the show that I credit with changing podcasting from a way to kill time on a commute to my primary form of entertainment (and eventually my primary hobby). I’ve said before that I’ve been an atheist as long as I can remember, but I haven’t always been a skeptic and I largely credit that program with cementing a transformation that made me both a skeptic and a passionate lover of science. In my mid-thirties no less.
So when I heard that Dr. Steven Novella was going to be teaming up with George Hrab (also a podcaster of some repute) to conduct a podcasting workshop in NYC this year, I couldn’t get to a computer fast enough. To be honest, I think I’d have paid $25 just to eavesdrop on these two guys having conversation over lunch, so the workshop seemed like a steal.
Well, I went yesterday afternoon and I can say that it did not disappoint. The two presenters boast more than 700 episodes combined and have more combined years podcasting than there are total years in the history of podcasting. They’ve seen the entire medium change several times over and have managed to stay consistently relevant throughout, even when the world of podcasting started drawing the multi-billion dollar entertainment conglomerates.
My only complaint was that the workshop wasn’t long enough. I’m sure that I could have teased 35 hours of good advice out of those guys so an hour and forty-five minutes seemed like a tease. To be fair, I should note that it was only scheduled to go an hour and fifteen, so we did get some bonus-workshop.
Upon reflection, I really wish that I’d attended this thing about 7 episodes ago, as they covered a lot of the things I’ve already learned the hard way. But they also helped to alert me to some issues that I’ve got coming down the road and a few mistakes I just haven’t made yet.
I was also delighted to see that Dr. Novella and I use the same type of mixer. I’m not sure why I’m so tickled by that, but I am.
Anyway, not much to share here, but I wanted to make sure everyone knows that even when I’m on vacation, I’m still hard at work finding ways to make the show better.
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Scathing Atheist on You-Tube
by Noah Lugeons
By popular request, we’re putting select segments from the show on You-Tube. We’ll be adding full episodes at a future date and Lucinda and I have been kicking around all kinds of weird ideas about adding puppets, animation, stop-motion and a bunch of other stuff that will probably prove more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, first things first. We’ve uploaded a couple of the diatribes already. You can check out our channel here and be sure to subscribe. We’ll be adding all kinds of cool shit eventually and you’ll definitely want to be in on the ground floor of that.
And if you don’t have time to subscribe just yet, that’s fine. You can get a sample here, too:
Episode 7: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by all the awesome people who sent encouraging emails and tweets, left complimentary comments on the blog, gave us positive reviews on iTunes and otherwise helped convince us to start doing this thing on a weekly basis.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 4th, and I’m already tired of changing my fantasy baseball lineup.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from decadent New York, New York, This is the Scathing Atheist
On this week’s episode,
- A Riyadh woman has consensual sex despite overt bicycle riding,
- God blames his mysterious ways on the lack of a father figure in his life,
- And Tom Beasley of an American Atheist join us to explain how he gets off naming his atheist podcast after a country that was clearly founded as a Christian nation.
But first, Heath Enwright with the diatribe…
Diatribe:
Many religions believe that the universe is created by an intelligent designer. Existence is an experimental game and god is the initial inventor of the game and is now an all-knowing spectator watching as we humans misuse the power of choice he gave us. This notion is fucking absurd, but let’s explore it anyway.
If god’s a sports fan, his model sport for humankind is definitely NASCAR. The world he built is a very similar, ridiculously dangerous situation . . . A bunch of crazy rednecks, competitively wasting fossil fuels and god’s just watching from the stands waiting to see the really good wrecks.
The takeaway here, is that if god is a NASCAR fan, he’s can’t be that intelligent.
So if he even exists, intelligent design is not the preferred nomenclature. I’d call it Military intelligent design at best. Even GOD didn’t think through his exit strategy. Intelligently designed games end elegantly, like checkmate in chess. For this game of existence on earth, his exit strategy seems to be nuclear holocaust.
I’m just saying, if religion were to dial back their stance on the intelligence, and just go for the design claim I’d still think they were silly but noticeably less so. But they don’t do dialing back very well. Admitting fault isn’t exactly in the church’s wheelhouse. Granted the faults they’d need to admit are often unspeakable, but I’m pretty sure that actually makes it worse.
The point . . . is that god’s clearly not that smart, and it looks like devoutly religious people agree. Everyone I’ve ever met who takes a religion really seriously, is always trying to justify absurd ways to bend the rules. Like god didn’t read his own fine print.
Great example . . . take butt sex. If you’re willing to bend over the rules a little, anal sex is the #1 virginity preservation method. I like to call this the poop-hole loophole . . . Like this somehow softens the blow later when you’re married, and trying to make your sexual history sound less bad; “No I’m a legit virgin. I’ve had huge amounts of cock in the hole right next to it, but that vagina is clean virgin territory.”
Bullshit . . . Even then, you know they’ve played, ‘just the tip’, a few times.
Speaking of just the tip, my circumcised friend from college, named Israel, also a firm believer in the validity of the poop hole loophole, was excellent at finding ways to just barely avoid directly breaking all these detailed Orthodox Jew-y rules he had to deal with.
For example, he’s not allowed to use any fire, electricity, or machinery of any kind on Shabas, which is sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. So if we were all hanging out smoking pot on Friday night, he couldn’t partake. Unless of course somebody drew a bong hit into the tube without inhaling it, and then happened by chance to leave that random, glass, smoke-filled column sitting on the table with a coaster over it, and then Israel happened to randomly choose to take one of his normal breaths of air while that coaster was quickly removed and that glass tube was on his face.
This would just be a chain of unrelated events. The fire used to burn the pot to make the smoke to fill the tube was wielded by someone else and the bong water acted as a mystical justification barrier, completely separating the fire from whoever might have, by chance, been breathing too close to the bong afterward.
Like Jew God is up there going, “Shit, yeah that bong water really ties my hands on this one. My boss – “God God” – will be up my ass about this if I smite this crafty stoner.” And as far as I know, Israel’s never been smote, so clearly the loophole worked. And this encourages further abuse of the rules.
So why are we so surprised about priests raping kids? Bunch of priests sitting around – trying to figure out loopholes:
“God says we can’t have sex, and can’t masturbate. What option does that leave us? Roll with me on this, keeping in mind, the lord works in mysterious ways. What if a kid gave me a Dutch Rudder?
“We’re not touching dicks. I’m touching my dick, and he’s just working my arm. So I’m not jerking it, and he’s not jerking it, and everybody wins.”
I guess not that many priests are big Kevin Smith fans. All I’m saying . . . it seems like nobody is telling the priests’ side of the story. Maybe the rape thing was a little extreme, but clearly the current rules aren’t sustainable. If I were a priest, I’d be lobbying for glory holes in the confessional booth. At least slutty sinners could try to buy indulgences with happy endings .
There is another solution. It’s nowhere near as fun as my glory hole idea, but probably more reasonable. The church could always just acknowledge that celibacy is ridiculous and goes against the biological instinct to reproduce, or at least the instinct to get laid. But this solution would never happen, because the church would end up having to reconcile its absurd universe view with contradictory things like evidence.
Church’s just don’t do epistemology. Figuring things out with reason is a giant hassle compared to faith.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is the Tango to my Cash, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to tango?
Alright, in our lead story tonight, Pennsylvania State Representative Tim Krieger has introduced legislation designed to act as an impediment to the first amendment. There’s a lot going on here, but the important thing to take away from it is that Representative Krieger is willing to boldly stand up to a beleaguered minority, as long as they’re kids.
Our story begins with Moses wandering down a mountain with a couple of tablets and placing them, in a roundabout way, in front of a school near Pittsburgh. A few secular students pointed out that a giant copy of the Ten Commandments shouldn’t be there. Officials refused to voluntarily remove it so the students got together with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and sued the school.
Well the judge in the case is trying to let them sue anonymously, but that’s reasonable so the Christians are against it.
Enter Tim Krieger, fanatical Christian blowhard and guy who looks like he would be second-in-command for a plot to take over the world, but not the main bad guy. He calls bullshit on that and proposes a law that would make it illegal for a plaintiff to sue anonymously regardless of the ruling of the judge in the case. But don’t worry; this would only apply to cases where religious monuments were being challenged on a Constitutional basis, so at least they’re not trying to pretend it’s fair.
Pennsylvania representative proposes law that would force atheist students to sue publicly: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/03/29/pennsylvania-rep-tim-krieger-doesnt-care-if-atheists-get-harassed-by-christians/
And in other centuries, the morality of Catholicism is in the news again, despite not having changed in generations. The latest incarnation of their pre-scientific ethics comes to us from Boston, home of the nation’s oldest public park, numerous substandard sports franchises and Boston College where officials have threatened disciplinary action against students for the unspeakable crime of promoting safe sex.
Yes, it’s the fucking condom thing again.
The group BC Students for Sexual Health was hit with a “cease and desist” order saying that the group’s goal of promoting common sense was (quote) “not in concert with the mission of Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit University”
Boston College stops students from handing out condoms: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/27/us/boston-college-condoms-dispute/index.html
In other news, our whirlwind tour of bat-shit crazy states makes a long-overdue stop in Utah where the Mormons look to cement their reputation as backwards even compared to other religions. The Christian Newswire alerts us to a new service offered by a Salt Lake City based Mormon pseudo-clinic that brings cyber-homophobia into the 21st century.
This is another one of those “pray the gay out” type of things where some callous charlatan takes money from a conflicted person whose preacher tells them they’re identity is offensive to god. In the press release they refer to homosexuality as “same-sex attraction”, which I thought was a nice touch.
Anti-gay web resource for Mormon homophobes: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/8297071798.html
And from the “Somebody-Had-To-Say-It” department, a new study warns parents that extreme religiosity in a child could be a warning sign of insanity. Every article I saw on the study was really careful to point out all the beneficial corollaries of faith in kids, such as lower incidence of criminal behavior, higher self-esteem, better academic performance and less trouble fucking the preppy chicks, but the association between religion and crazy is pretty hard to ignore.
The study warns that extreme devotion to a religion could be emblematic of anxiety, unaddressed trauma or stress, obsessive compulsive disorder, bi-polar disorder, scrupulosity, schizophrenia, manic depressive or early onset of being-an-insufferable-dick.
Now, we make a lot of jokes about this, but this is pretty serious because one of the really pervasive side effects of religion is that it gives crazy people something to cloak themselves in. Everybody has to be at least a little “crazy” to profess some of the beliefs that organized religion demands, so it’s easy to imagine somebody delaying psychological treatment for a child because they don’t want to say, “he’s so religious it’s crazy”. Faith has been mislabeled a virtue so if something that would be clearly nuts in any other context pops up in the context of religion, people are way less likely to go, “that motherfucker’s crazy.”
Study warns that children who are “too religious” may be crazy: http://news.yahoo.com/child-too-religious-094552602.html
Moving on to some “Other-Countries-Are-Laughing-At-Us” news, an atheist shoe company in Berlin is charging that the US Post Office deliberately discriminates against them and backs up the allegation with an informal study that showed that identical packages with their abominable “Atheist” logo took an average of 3 days longer to arrive at their destination.
To be fair, this wasn’t exactly a scientific study and it wasn’t exactly published in a peer review journal, but the results look pretty damning for the USPS, especially since the whole experiment was prompted when US customers starting asking the company to leave off the telltale tape that said “Atheist-Atheist-Atheist” across it.
The take away, though, is that there’s a company that makes pretty cool looking shoes that say “Ich Bin Atheist” on them and they’re getting some free advertising on our show courtesy of the Post Office being a bunch of miserable dicks.
Atheist shoe company accuses US Post Office of discrimination: http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
And in this week’s living, breathing evidence against intelligent design, Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo has announced that he will impotently wave $10,000 around in the air in a vainglorious, insincere, meaningless publicity stunt.
Mastropaolo, a grown adult with an advanced degree who believes in Noah’s Ark is pretending to offer $10,000 to anyone who can “scientifically disprove” the literal creation account described in Genesis. And yes, that’s the one where they say god created night and day a full three days before creating the sun.
People with competent navigation of their own brains point out that “scientifically disproving” something is a meaningless term and thus an impossible standard to meet. They also point out that if Mastropaolo was so confident, he wouldn’t be insisting that anyone trying to claim the prize also put up $10,000. And of course, they also point out that the generally accepted foundations of biology, astronomy, geology, chemistry, cosmology, anthropology, literature and philosophy all “disprove” a literal interpretation of the bible to any reasonable standard.
Creationist offers $10,000 to anyone who can scientifically “disprove” creationism: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/joseph-mastropaolo-creationist-10000-disprove-genesis_n_2964801.html
And finally, in international news, Saudi Arabia makes a bold move to counteract the baseless stereotype that women are mistreated in majority Muslim countries. In a valiant and unprecedented move that would have made Elizabeth Cady Stanton look like Archie Bunker’s wife, the religious police in Saudi Arabia have lifted the ban on women riding bicycles.
Now, obviously you can’t do this all at once or you’d risk utter chaos, so they’ll be limiting this to specific parks and recreational areas, and, of course, the women will have to be chaperoned by a male relative and covered from head to toe in a potato sack, but I think it’s safe to say that sexism in Saudi Arabia is pretty much over.
Saudi authorities lift ban on women in bikes: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-religious-police-lift-ban-women-bikes-111923001.html
That’s all we’ve got for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for hanging out.
When we come back, Tom Beasley will join me to circle religion like a hungry buzzard.
Skit:
Occasionally we get feedback from listeners that really enjoy the show, but think that we sometimes get a little carried away. For example, in last week’s episode, when discussing the Westboro Baptist Church, my co-host Heath Enwright expressed a desire to savagely penetrate Fred Phelps’ rectum.
We received several comments about the segment but I chose two that represented what I’ve come to think of as the two distinct audiences that this program appeals to.
Jon on Facebook said he really enjoyed parts of the show, but felt that the anally penetrating Fred Phelps portion went (quote) “beyond edgy and made me squeamish”. On the other hand, we also got an email from Daniel in Plano who said, “Love it! I almost pissed myself when Heath started talking about butt-fucking Phelps!”
So in our ceaseless quest to push the envelope of podcasting, I’d like to offer two explanations of the Fred Phelps comments. And because the show is only 30 minutes, I’d like to offer both explanations at the same time.
So if you find yourself in the “Jon” camp that feared that segment might make them vomit, please remove your right earphone for the remainder of this segment. If you’re more in “Daniel’s” spontaneous urination camp, please remove your left earphone. And if you’re not generally inspired to exude any bodily secretions over our skits, feel free to leave both earphones in and get twice as much podcast for the next few minutes.
*
We live in a world where the walls of censorship are fast falling away. Where once some government (censor/ cock-stain) stood between your ears and the vulgarities of less (cultured/ prudish) (individuals/ motherfuckers), in the 21st century, you’re no longer protected from words like (George Carlin’s notorious seven/ shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits).
There is, of course, one (negative/ positive) consequences (While/…) it expands the scope of the first amendment to previously unimagined heights, we also (have/ get) to (endure/ enjoy) a lot more (off-color/ dick and fart) jokes and (lewd/ hilarious) social commentary. As a result, some (refined/ uptight) consumers of new media with little (tolerance/ appreciation) for vulgarity get (offended/ fucked).
As a producer of such content, one must act as one’s own censor and must thus strike a (delicate/ frustrating) balance between being too (vulgar/ boring) and being too (academic/ vulgar). While I respect and appreciate the concerns of the people who wish I would be (vulgar/ myself) less often, I’m naturally inclined to side with the group that most mirrors my own sense of (propriety/ humor). The unfortunate result is that I must occasionally ask some members of my audience to (endure in good humor/ go fuck themselves).
Take, for example, our recent headline segment about the (detestable bigots/ spunk-garglers) at the Westboro Baptist Church. During that segment, our mutual dislike for the group was obvious and my co-host made some (untoward/ hysterical) comments about their leader, Fred Phelps, and things that might be hatefully inserted into his (anus/ asshole), including Heath’s (hateful /throbbing) (member/ dick).
While some (people/ prudes) found this offensive, I think it’s important to keep in mind that Fred Phelps is (despicable/ an ass nugget) and deserves to be (mocked/ gay hate fucked) mercilessly. What’s more, we should do so with (unapologetic/ un-lubricated), (spite-filled/ splinter-filled) (voracity/ broom handles) in the deepest, most (scornful/ painful) way.
And when we, here at the Scathing Atheist, (comment publicly/ blow our juice) on Fred Phelps, we hope that we can hit him (where it hurts/ in the eyes) and really make it sting. A gifted few can do so by way of intellectual criticisms, but those of us without the (education/ desire) or the (verbal dexterity/ words and shit) to express such scathing distaste without resorting to (obscenity/ fuck) filled tirades (have/ get) to resort to the (basest/ funniest) type of humor.
The important thing to remember is that regardless of what words we choose, we all agree that if any target is deserving of our foulest utterings, it is the kind of (visceral/ass-brained) (animosity/ fucktardary) and (lunacy/ bullshit) promoted by the Westboro Baptist Church.
Okay, this (segment/ shit) is really hard to edit, so please put your (right/ left) earphone back in now.
Calendar:
It’s time for the Atheist Calendar portion of the show. This week we’ll be highlighting some of the great secular meet-ups and conventions coming up in April.
We’ll start in Lawrence, Kansas where “Reasonfest 3” will be taking place over the weekend of April 20th. The lineup is fantastic, led by Seth Andrews, JT Eberhard, Jerry DeWitt plus Matt Dillahunty in a debate called “Moral Combat” and something with the enticing title “The Godless Pervert Story Hour” featuring notable godless perverts Greta Christina, David Fitzgerald and more.
http://kusoma.org/2013/01/reasonfest-2013/
A lot of action the following week in the nation’s capital: The Secular Coalition for America will be hosting a Secular Summit from April 24th to the 26th that’ll include some great instruction on effective secular lobbying.
http://secular.org/lobbyday2013
Also in DC on the 27th of April the Center For Inquiry will be hosting “Why Tolerate Religion”, a day long symposium tackling the contentious issue of religion’s role in our supposedly secular government.
http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/Calendar?id=103301&view=Detail
And for our West Coast heathens, CFI on Campus will be hosting a Leadership Conference in the City of Angels on the same weekend.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/oncampus/slcla2013
Of course, wherever you are in the world, don’t forget that according to the Secular Students Alliance, Thursday, April 18th is National Ask an Atheist Day, so check your local listings to see if there’s any way you can get involved.
http://www.secularstudents.org/askanatheistday
If you want to learn more about this or any of the other events discussed on this episode, check the shownotes for episode 7 at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
That’ll do it for this week’s calendar. As always, if you’re involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. And if you’re not involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event, what the hell are you waiting for?
Interview Links:
An American Atheist Blog: http://anamericanatheist.org/
Outro:
So that’s about all the time we’ve got for tonight. I want to thank Tom Beasley for hanging out with us, I want to thank Alan Blumlein for inventing stereo sound and also want to give a big thanks for Cecil & Tom from Cognitive Dissonance for providing this week’s circuitous Farnsworth quote. Those guys put on a really fun podcast, so you should definitely check them out at Dissonance Pod (dot) com.
I also want to thank the lovely Lucinda Lugeons for everything she does behind the scenes, Heath Enwright for everything he does in front of the scenes. But mostly I want to thank god for making this podcast possible by not existing.
Be sure to check back with us in 168 hours for the “Holy Babble” edition, in which Heath, my wife and I will do something that at least two of us will regret almost immediately. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow me on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons and like us on Facebook because apparently people still use Facebook.
If you enjoy the show, please help us spread the word by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes or whatever you use. Don’t forget to help drive up our Stitcher ranking by listening to us there and if you don’t have the Stitcher app yet, don’t worry, I’m not judging you for it the way all the attractive members of the opposite sex are.
If you have comments, questions or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Religion as Child Abuse
by Noah Lugeons
Yeah, a lot has been said about this already so I’m not going to devote too much time to it here. The four horsemen have long since established what I feel to be a compelling and nigh undeniable argument that religion is often a guise for child abuse. And we’re not talking about the sexual abuse that has become so synonymous with religious leaders, we’re talking about the actual practice of teaching religion to children.
The apologists like to sweep this under the rug. When they address a crowd of hostile atheists, they downplay the literalism of the bible. They pretend that religious people all look at it like a divinely inspired-Aesop’s Fables. They like to pretend that Christians don’t treat the bible as being 100% accurate. But when we’re not looking, that’s exactly what they’re teaching their kids.
I recall a field trip I took in 3rd grade where my class was presented with a human skeleton and asked if we could determine whether it was the skeleton of a man or a woman. Without exception, every kid in my class immediately took to counting the ribs. Until then, there was no difference between the authority of a religious figure and a secular teacher. They were both grown-ups who told us things with authority. They were both people who our parents told us we should listen to and respect. How were we to know that one source was sound and the other bullshit?
But when all the little Christian Twitter trolls pop up to give us atheists the smack-down we so richly deserve, they have to answer for shit like this. When a kid gets really, really interested in science she or he might learn something that will aid them for the rest of their lives. But when a kid gets really, really interested in religion, she or he might do this:
Belittling Christians
by Noah Lugeons
Sometimes people say, “Noah, you belittle Christians a lot.”
And I respond, “Yeah, I do my best.”
So no, I’ll be offering no apology for it here or anywhere else in the foreseeable future. When people point out that I belittle Christians, I respond the same way that an Olympic sprinter would respond if somebody asked her why she was in such a hurry… After all, that’s kind of the point.
Now, there are those that would say that this is counterproductive. They say that the caustic brand of atheism I subscribe to is antithetical to the goals of minimizing the role of religion in society. They present a “circle-the-wagons” mentality that I might inspire if I’m too insulting. They point out that the more attainable goals of keeping religion out of science class and the courtroom can be hamstrung by the more grandiose goal of stamping out organized religion altogether.
And what’s more, they might be right. I still don’t care.
My goal as an atheist activist is to marginalize religion. I work toward a world where anybody who believes in something without evidence is embarrassed to admit it in public. I want reason by way of shame.
I think it’s a sad commentary on our culture that my unwavering belief that all truth-claims should be subjected to the same scrutiny puts me in the extreme wing of a minority. That shouldn’t be a bold stance. It should be nearly unthinkable to take any other stance and that’s precisely what I seek.
To be fair, I’ll concede that it’s entirely possible to take that stance without belittling anyone. A lot of skeptics do yeoman’s work by patiently walking sasquatch hunters, UFOlogists and homeopaths through the ladder of logic without a hint of condescension. I admire that ability but I do not share it.
And of course, many skeptics are crass and dismissive of nonsense like sasquatch hunters, UFOs and homeopathy. They don’t bother to spare anyone’s feelings and simply treat it like the demonstrable bullshit that it is. In the skeptical movement the battle between “soft” and “hard” is a hell of a lot more muted than the one in the atheist movement, but it’s still there. Some people just insist that the “kill-them-with-kindness” approach is the only valid one.
Many much wiser observers than me have pointed out that there probably isn’t one “valid” approach, so I’m not going to spend any time retreading that ground, but there is something I’d like to offer to the kindness camp. Sure, it’s an anecdote and can thus be easily dismissed, but I think it’s illustrative of the justification behind the approach that I share with a number of other scathing atheists.
Arrogance is a powerful force. Those of us who like to think or ourselves as intelligent don’t like to be told we’re stupid. It’s the only insult that really gets under the skin of some people. Now, when somebody says, “you disagree with me so you’re stupid” it’s meaningless, but if someone you respect intellectually lumps your beliefs in with a bunch of the other “stupid” ones, that has an impact.
I’m not saying there’s anyone out there that respects me intellectually, but there are a number of learned men and women in both the atheist and skeptical movements who sport intellects that are beyond reproach. An intellectually arrogant person hearing that his beliefs are stupid from those people will have an effect.
Now sure, some people are arrogant enough to just toss off the insult and say, “what does that ivy-league professor know?”, but those people are all-but unreachable. But for many if not most intellectually arrogant people, the root of the arrogance was real intelligence. And there are plenty of intelligent, arrogant people out there that still believe in some really silly stuff.
Those people are vulnerable to the caustic attack. I know because that’s how I arrived here. I got to atheism through simple observation and the correct application of logic, but I became a skeptic and (more importantly) a skeptical activist because somebody with an intellect I admire told me I was a dumb-ass. And what’s more, he didn’t try to cater to my ego by telling me how okay it was to still believe this dumb-ass belief.
Now I know that the research shows that most people are far more inclined to listen to and consider your viewpoint if you’re non-confrontational and I recognize that, generally speaking, this is the optimum approach. Hell, it’s the one I usually employ when I’m talking to someone in person. But just because it’s the most widely applicable approach doesn’t mean it’s the only correct one. A person like myself would never be swayed by it, as they would take the agreeable demeanor as a sign of intellectual uncertainty. They would toss off anything you said that didn’t crack the armor of their intellectual arrogance and the only way to do that is to be caustic.
My mother told me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything. And a lot of people have told me the same thing since. I get it. I disagree. I feel that it would be intellectually dishonest to say anything nice and it would be socially irresponsible to stay silent.
And if you disagree with my approach, that’s fine. I strongly encourage you to get involved and run as far in the opposite direction as possible. We need all the help we can get. And I believe that we also need all the types of help we can get.
How Religion Makes You an Asshole
by Noah Lugeons
So I was just listening to episode #108 of the Ardent Atheist podcast. The episode’s title was “Why Would God Make Cripples” and the exchange that led to that title had me so furious that I had before I even made it home, I was already composing this blog in my head.
First, a bit of background. The Ardent Atheist is an interview show that brings on a variety of guests, but mostly comedians. They talk about an array of subjects, but as the name suggests, religion is always on the table.
In this episode, they had two guests, Roy Wood, Jr. and Anthony Ramos, both comedians and both of the wishy-washy, pseudo-religious variety. Roy confessed to being a Southern Baptist by merit of being born into it and never bothering to discard it once he realized it was bullshit. Ramos was a little closer to the agnostic camp, though still held out for an afterlife and a higher power.
But during the discussion of his religion, Ramos noted that if/when he got a chance to meet god, he looked forward to punching him/her/it in the face for giving him a degenerative muscle condition that leaves him unable to run and scarcely able to walk at this point in his life.
This led to the obvious question of why a loving god would create crippled people. You would think this would be a really tough question for a theist to answer, but only if you weren’t familiar with the kind of ramshackle bullshit that counts as an “answer” in the minds of a religious person.
Roy Wood, Jr., who to that point had presented himself as a perfectly reasonable, moral, amiable and funny guy let his religious side out for just a minute to defend his god and did so with a statement that was so deceptively demonic that I’m sure he walked away from it with no idea what an asshole he had been when he uttered it.
“You know, people would make the argument that you’re here to inspire others”
And what’s more, he manages to deliver it with a smug, condescending tone that says, “how dare you question god’s plan for you?”
Consider just how awful a thing to say that really is. Perhaps god has chosen to torture you for your entire life by teasing you with physical abilities that he knows he will soon rip away from you. He’s chosen to close doors to you while saddling you with lifelong pain, inconvenience and depression. He’s chosen to punish you unduly compared to his other children, and what’s more, he did so to inspire others.
He’s god, of course, so he could have reached deep into his infinite quiver of miracles to inspire anybody he cared to inspire, but instead of a subtle miracle or a divine whisper, he chose to condemn you to a life-altering disability. Your very existence is an afterthought to god, who could miraculously cure you from your degenerative condition at any time, but chooses not to every minute of every day because he needs you to act as a personified Chicken Soup for the Soul.
I doubt that Roy Wood, Jr. is anywhere near the asshole he came across in that brief moment. In fact, judging by most of the rest of the interview, I’m almost certain that he isn’t. But it doesn’t matter what kind of person you are. When you take it upon yourself to defend a notion as logically incoherent as an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity, you almost have no choice but to be a jackass about it.
The frightening thing is that faith blinds you to it entirely. You could hear Roy getting angry every time someone would start applying logic to his pet superstition and at some point he was psychologically bound to lash out. At a crippled dude. Like an asshole.
Granted, this is quite low on the totem pole of what’s wrong with religion, but it’s one of those minor infractions that’s so common that even many atheists don’t notice it. In fact, I would imagine that many religious folks won’t understand what was wrong with that statement even after reading this post.
And that, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with religion. It has the power to blind you to the problems with itself. And once you’ve crossed that line, it’s pretty hard to tell when you’ve crossed another.
The Scathing Atheist 