The Scathing Atheist

by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons

(Note: Transcript contains some elements deleted from the final episode due to time constraints)

Sponsor

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of designer chainmail armor for children, Josh Kosh B’Gosh.  So when there’s an army of genocidal jews circling silently at the city gates, make sure your children are dressed in the coolest new sword-proof, fire-proof, hailstone-proof, machine washable armor.

Josh Kosh B’Gosh, because god hates you and you’re going to die.

And now, the Scathing Atheist

Intro

It’s Thursday, it’s August 29th, and atheists do it with larger, evolutionarily superior genitalia.

I’m your host Noah Lugeons, and from well-hung New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode:

• The Pope raises eyebrows with his “Don’t tell, don’t tell” policy on sex abuse,

• A high school in Indonesia will consider a new virgin-fingering policy,

• And Lucinda will join us to talk divine land reapportionment,

But first, the Diatribe

Diatribe

If you ever want to feel really old, take somebody who’s diaper you once changed and watch them change their kid’s diaper.

My wife had the opportunity to do just that last week when she flew down to Georgia to meet her niece’s brand new baby girl.  She doesn’t get to see her family often so our six year old nephew spent most of the week clinging to her leg in one manner or another.

So one night she’s hanging out with him and he’s looking for excuses to not go to bed.  He’s got a bunch of planets on his walls so he starts asking her “which planet is that?”, “which one is that?”  Before long she’s got her laptop fired up and she’s showing him Cassini pictures and Voyager images and closeups of coronal mass ejections and he’s eating it up.  She shows him the Hubble Deep Field image and his eyes just linger in unchecked amazement when she tells him that every point of light he sees is another galaxy with billions or even trillions of stars.

It takes him a second to even think how to respond.  And when he does, the question he chooses is heartbreaking.

“How many miles is it to heaven?”

If I had been there I might have accidentally ruined the next six Thanksgivings by saying something like “Heaven is from religion.  These pictures are from reality.”  But Lucinda is a bit more diplomatic than me so she answered it as well as it could be answered:

“We’ve seen billions of light years away from earth but we haven’t seen heaven.”

That’s a pretty good answer, I guess, if the goal is not alienating your family.  But it’s still a sad damn shame that she had to settle for that.  And it’s a damn shame that at the age of six this kid’s natural curiosity is already being stifled by a ridiculously antiquated view of the universe.  Even at six he’s encountering things that can’t be made to fit into the biblical worldview.  He has to work harder to get to the right answer because he has to weave his way through bullshit to get there.

But the world is already pretty damn hard to wrap your head around at six.  It’s a lot harder when you’ve got to reconcile the Adam and Eve myth with the existence of dinosaurs… and recessive genes; when you’ve got to develop a grand unified theory of history that’s two parts history and one part Jewish revenge porn; when you have to stop in the middle of an astronomy lesson to figure out where heaven is.

Think back to your own childhood and you can probably come up with a memory where you were trying to pound the square peg of religion into the round hole of reality.  Christians love to defend their little fairy tales by telling us they’re allegories.  But when they pull that shit, ask them if they make that clear to their children.  If they don’t start out the story by saying “Here’s a fairy tale about Jesus” when they’re telling it to their kids then it’s only an allegory when you get too smart to believe it’s true.  And that doesn’t fucking count.

The saddest thing is that this kid’s mother isn’t even particularly religious; she doesn’t go to church, I’ve never seen her pray and she’s certainly read less of the bible in her lifetime than I’ve read this week, but still she’s religious enough to hamstring her son’s education.  It’s not deliberate, of course; she just believes that religion is good for her kid because people with every reason to lie say so.

Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of more reprehensible forms of child abuse that take place in the name of religion.  Even if you set aside the sexual and physical abuse that religion is used to justify you still have the wide spectrum of psychological abuses from tormenting kids with images of hell to confusing the shit out of them with prehistoric notions of sexual morality.  But there’s something about taking a steaming shit on a child’s curiosity that really pisses me off.

Headlines

Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow tenable stance junky Heath Enwright.  Heath, are you ready to discuss several more ways religion was stupid and indefensible in the news this week?

When you live and die for a math textbook that says two plus two is five, you manage to get all sorts of other wrong answers too.  Sometimes your Big Brother is dumb, and shitty at math.   

Yeah, all that 1 equals 3 shit was a dead give away.

In our lead story tonight, the Vatican has finally taken a decisive move to ensure a radical decrease in allegations of sex crimes against the clergy: they made reporting those crimes illegal.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just give all the priests vasectomies? . . .

Cut off the DNA evidence problem at the source.  

Or just ban the word “No” in the Vatican so there’s never technically a consent issue . . .

Or like I’ve said before, Catholics could just stop having children . . .  

But to be fair, those altar boys are asking for it, the way they wear those robes.  

…all clingy and shit.  So there were already plenty of rumors swirling when word came down that Pope Frankie Valli was “bringing the Vatican legal system up to date” by criminalizing leaks of official information at the same time that he was formalizing the laws about sex crimes.  Turns out one law ensures that allegations of sex crimes are confidential and the other makes it illegal to disperse confidential information.

There’s no such thing as a private allegation.  That doesn’t exists.  That’s just a person thinking to themself, “I’m kinda mad about getting raped.”

Vatican foreign minister Monsignor Dominique Mamberti actually had the audacity to pretend that they were all really disheartened when they learned that they accidentally made it illegal to report sex abuse.  He said, and before reading the quote I think I should emphasize that this is actually a real quote (quote) “It’s quite a papal pickle that His Holiness has placed upon our heads.”

It’s time for “Tip of the Mitre, Wag of the Pickle.”

Wasn’t it placing pickles in people’s heads that started this whole problem?

Head scratching behavior, probably because of all the crabs.  

Look, if I wanted somebody to find that sausage, I wouldn’t have hidden it in the first place!

When in Rome . . . don’t be surprised to get an unsolicited Roman helmet.  

And for those listeners who aren’t familiar with this terminology, when I say Roman Helmet, I’m suggesting the Pope would straddle you backwards and rest his balls over your eyes, and the shaft over your nose, thus resembling a Roman helmet.  

They’re actually acting like this was an accident.  First of all, the pope’s infallible so you’re fucked right there.  But secondly what kind of bullshit 4-year-old-with-a-cookie defense is that?  “Whoops!  Did we just insulated ourselves against prosecution and international embarrassment? Shucks, I suppose we could undo it with the wave of a crosier, but we’re not.  Our bad.”

Pope criminalizes the reporting of sex crimes: http://www.newslo.com/pope-criminalizes-the-reporting-of-sex-crimes/

And from the “Unconsciously regulate your endocrine levels if you saw that coming” file tonight, a recent measles outbreak in Texas has been traced back to an anti-vaccination mega-church.

Pastor, faith-healer and sentient excrement Kenneth Copeland of the Eagle Mountain International Church in North Texas is a vocal proponent of the thoroughly debunked, discredited, disproven, disparaged and disgraced notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism, a theory so indefensible it might as well be biblical.

First of all, there’s absolutely nothing INTERNATIONAL about North Texas.  Absurd title for the church, or anything else in that region.    

So the church finally decided to base an opinion on a scientific study, and the doctor whose study they went with was Andrew FUCKING Wakefield?!?  Dr. Dre and Dr. Mario have more respect in the medical community.

When the inevitable outbreak of fully preventable childhood disease struck, the church sent out a rapid fire series of excuses ranging from “The CDC is secretly infecting people with measles to discredit us” to “measles aren’t that bad, now are they?”

“What had happened is . . . We sent out a pamphlet with the measles-preventing prayer, but there was a typo on one of the important magic words, so everyone was saying it wrong.  Plus there was a shortage of unicorn hair this year, so lot’s of people never even got their wands.”  

And as much as I’d love to say that anybody who gets measles after taking medical advice from a used-snakeoil salesman deserved it, the problem with the anti-vax crowd is that the victims are the communities that surround these idiots, not to mention their own children.

Someone needs to sneak into these people’s bedrooms and inject HIV into their stupid, deserving mouths.  

I hear you can pray that out just like measles.

Measles outbreak at anti-vaccination church: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/08/theres_a_measles_outbreak_at_v.php

And in “Criminal Possession of Reason” news tonight, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California atheist Barry Hazle Jr. is owed some compensatory damages after being sent to jail for not believing in god.  And yes, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

Dude’s name has too many syllables to become an atheist protest mantra.  

“FREE BARRY HAZLE JUNIOR!!!  FREE BARRY HAZLE JUNIOR!!!” … Doesn’t work.   

No it doesn’t.  So this unchantable assailant served a brief jail term for a minor drug offense and, upon release he’s ordered to participate in an addiction recovery program.  Of course, it’s one of those 12 step “put your faith in a higher power” programs.  Hazle, to his credit, actually attended the programs, but he requested a secular alternative.  The court told him to fuck off.

Yeah, god forbid you sober up through empirically tested means.  No, seriously, god forbids that.

Can’t kick the habit without bad metaphysics.

And judging from the estimates of AA’s success rate, you can’t kick the habit with ‘em either.  So anyway, after staff at the 12 step program reported that he was being disruptive in (quote) “a congenial way”, he was taken out of the program and sentenced to a further 100 days in jail.  In addition he was denied access to Go and the customary two hundred dollars.

Being disruptive in “a congenial way” ? . . . He was probably telling really good jokes, and even the staff started laughing when they shouldn’t.  Listen, if you send an atheist stoner to an NA meeting, he’s gonna make sarcastic comments.  It’s impossible not to.  Rehab for minor drug offenses … and God, are ridiculous notions.  If we don’t mock you there, we could actually burst into flame.  

Anything’s possible.  So of course he sued the state and of course he won, but he was awarded zero dollars in damages by a jury of his peers because apparently his peers are a bunch of Christian, blowhard assholes.  The judge threw out the non-award and set about empaneling a new jury with fewer weasle turds on it.

That’s how the awards process works?  Isn’t that … stupid?  Why not award him NEGATIVE TEN THOUSAND dollars?

Atheist parolee sent back to prison for complaining about the religiosity of Narc Anon: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/23/appeals-court-calif-atheist-parolee-entitled-to-compensation-for-constitutional/

And from the “They Meant Freedom of My Religion” file, some Christians in Kansas are going apeshit over a religious display in a school.  But not because it’s a religious display in a school.  That’s okay.  The problem here is that they used the wrong religion.

The display in question was a banner with five images of pillars that read “The Five Pillars of Islam” and that sounds pretty damning when you don’t know the details.

And Christians are all about not knowing the details.  But out of context, you’ve gotta admit, vertical pillar-like shapes are pretty offensive.  Those five pillars could be used to perform two and half crucifictions.  Kids are supposed to just ignore that fact?!?

The story began when somebody snapped a picture of the banner and posted it on Facebook with the caption “this is a school that has banned all forms of Christian prayer.  This cannot stand”.  And with the penchant for fact checking that we’ve come to expect from angry, meme-spreading Christians, this shit went as viral as Miley’s vagina.

She had to eventually get herpes.  Anyone sired by a grown man with 2 first names and a rat tail….  

I can’t imagine how herpes could survive in that thing.

Quick 2 point reality check: Number one, this school, along with all other schools in the fucking country, doesn’t “ban all forms of Christian prayer”, they just ban the ones where kids are forced to go along.  And number two, acknowledging that religion exists in a school isn’t against the law.  It’s the part where you start pushing it on kids as though it was true that we have laws against.

You might have lost their attention between the word reality and the word check.  These are people who are offended by visual reminders of “things that exist”.

Christians go apeshit over Islam display in a local school: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/08/22/kansas-school-surrenders-to-ignorance-removes-islam-display/

And finally tonight in “I guess you can’t just Saran Wrap your vagina, can you?” news, a school in Sumatra has proposed a virginity test for all their female students.

What a great job . . . virginity tester . . .

“Did she pass?”  “Nope.”  “Wait anal? . . . Hold on . . . Another minute . . . Also no.”

“What about her?”  “Nope.  Next!”

They pretty much never pass – I’m a tough grader.   

Education chief Muhammad Rasyid proposed the idea that he describes as (quote) “an accurate way to protect children from prostitution and free sex.”

Wait… prostitution and free sex?  If there’s one thing we don’t want, it’s paid sex.  And if there’s another thing we don’t want, it’s unpaid sex?  

Can’t prove your virginity without taking a cock . . . Can’t take a cock without losing your virginity.  Seems like a regular “Snatch 22”.  

So setting aside for a second the fact that there’s no actual way to test a woman for virginity, how fucked up does your brain have to be to think that the best way to protect women from prostitution is denying an education the sexually active teenage ones?

Indonesian school proposes virginity test: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/21/virginity-tests-female-students-indonesia

Well that’s gonna do it for headlines tonight.  Heath thanks as always.

And when we come back, we’ll recount a biblical massacre or thirty one.

Joshua, in Rhyme

Joshua, Oh Joshua, that genocidal idol,

The baddest motherfucker that we’ve met yet in the bible.

He’s like a biblical Batman, if Batman killed babies.

Imagine if you gave Wolverine adamantium rabies.

This badass says “chop off your foreskin” and people actually do.

He’s like a Jedi in that his story isn’t factually true,

Like Superman he’s invincible and he wins every battle;

But unlike the man of steel, he kills the women and cattle.

He’s like the Hulk but with Thor’s hammer and a magical ark.

The sun needs his permission before it’s allowed to get dark;

Like a bronze age Jackie-Chan, he even kicks ass with dumb shit,

Like his notorious chorus of nuclear trumpets.

He’s the Bible’s Bruce Lee but with triple the skill;

He never met an innocent bystander that he didn’t kill.

With a swipe of his sword he could knock the wings off a gnat;

He could take out all four ninja turtles and that mutated rat.

As you learn about this guys, it’s not hard to conclude;

That Chuck Norris impregnated the Dos Equis dude.

He’s admirable and loveable and strong and heroic,

As long as you haven’t updated your morals since the paleozoic.

Joshua, Oh Joshua, Moses finally died,

So you could have the position that so long you had eyed.

You served bravely as Vice Jew but the time’s come alas,

After too many decades of kissing god’s ass,

To take the baton and lead this army of Jews,

After all, there are Canaanites in need of abuse.

You served god well by scouting and then not being honest;

So you’ll lead the Hebrews to the land that god promised.

Your ambitions are grand, your intentions extortionate;

So with your god-given powers of land reapportionment;

You’ll be crossing a river but you won’t need a float;

When God’s done with that shit, you’d have to carry your boat.

Where to go? Jericho.  I hear they’ve got hookers.

You promised not to kill Rahab and she’s quite a looker.

You might as well since you’re killing all the gentile chicks,

And there’s no way those Jewish princesses are sucking your dick.

Joshua, Oh Joshua, how your legend ascends,

The way you massacre, exterminate and ethnically cleanse,

You’re the bravest, the strongest and usually the smartest,

Except when dealing with Gibeons… those fucking con-artists.

Hanging kings, burning villages, your army sets forth,

From Achan to Ai then continuing north.

Killing children to show what a shit you don’t give;

But showing occasional mercy by letting animals live.

With the slightest of setbacks, your conquest succeeds,

Ensuring that millions will boast of your deeds.

You’re a legend, a lion, a genuine stud;

They took your milk and your honey and you took their blood.

Babble

Ah, Joshua, the redundant geography lesson of the Old Testament.  Half exaltation of genocide, half property auction listing, this book has all the intrigue of GPS directions, all the civility of YouTube comments and all the morality of a Nuremberg indictment.

So to help me sort through the fallen bodies, I’m joined by my lovely wife Lucinda.  Lucinda, welcome back.

And of course, not having actually gone anywhere since we recorded the headlines segment is Heath.  Heath, thanks for not having left while you had the chance.

So basically the book of Joshua describes the glorious war crimes that Joshua committed in order to fulfill god’s belated promises of land.

Yeah because it’s not like god could just divinely create more land for the Jews that wasn’t full of people they’d need to kill.  What, did he run out of milk and honey or something?

Look, I already made you guys a promised land.  It’s right there.  Milk, honey, vineyards, the whole nine… you just need to fumigate.

And fumigate they do.  So let’s just dive in, shall we?

1. Upon Moses’ death, God passes the torch to Joshua, which is kind of like Lord Vader putting you in command of the fleet.

   1. God says “You are invincible.  Nobody can defeat you.  But don’t forget to be brave”… how brave can an invincible person really be?

• Good headline here: “Son of Nun Supports the Habit”

2. In chapter 2 Joshua sends a couple of spies across the Jordan.  They were just about to start scouting the land when they decided to fuck some whores instead.

• Joshua says to his spies, “Go check out Jericho.”

“Dude that’s perfect, that whorehouse is right on the way … In N Out Fur Burger.  We’re clearly stopping.  Jericho should be a pushover.”

Then the King of Jericho finds out Joshua sent spies … “Get that slut Rahab on the phone and tell her to be on the lookout for penises that are horribly mangled by primitive foreskin removal.”

Little did the king know, the crafty tribe had conveniently forgot about that rule for a few decades.  More on that later.

• Apparently everyone in Jericho keeps up with TV news, or saw “The Ten Commandments”, and they thought the Red Sea thing was badass, so they’re scared of the Jews and their apparent ties to a god with cool powers.

3. In chapter 3 Joshua feels like he has to prove himself to be truly Mosaic so he parts the Jordan.  Couldn’t come up with his own magic trick or anything.  Just totally ripped off Moses.

• And it’s a dick move when it’s a river.  When you part a river for that long, while an entire tribe and their army carries their shit across, you kill a town upstream by flooding them.

• Oregon trail would have been easier if you could be a Jewish prophet, in addition to Boston banker, Ohio carpenter, or Illinois farmer.  Never have to risk caulking the wagon or trying to ford the river.

4. We learn about the 12 magic Joshua stones… and is it me or does this thing occasionally read like a tourist guide?  All this “And they are there to this day” crap… it’s almost like the people writing this didn’t realize somebody would still be reading it 3000 years later.

   1. And wouldn’t that be the easiest way to fuck up the whole “biblical inerrancy” thing?  I mean, somebody plunks one of those rocks back into the river and the bible is suddenly full of shit.

• And now stupid people have another reason to selectively misinterpret mystical powers related to the number 12.

5. So the entire army crosses the Jordan into hostile territory and ten seconds after god fills the river back in he says, “Oh you know what… why don’t you guys do some cosmetic penis surgery before going to war?”

   1. And this has the feeling of a later addition.  Like somebody was reading through Joshua version 1 and said, “Yeah but when did these guys chop their foreskins off?  We better add that.  Don’t wanna glaze over the important stuff.”

• “I’m getting a lot of pleasure sensations from my upper penis area. Does anyone have a flint knife?”

• And then of course this chapter of the saga can’t end until god sends a messenger to tell Josh to take off his filthy fucking birkenstocks when he enters a promised land.

6. Then they do the divine conga line think with the trumpets.  For a week there’s a ring of Jews walking silently around town and all the people behind the walls are thinking, “This is the worst parade ever, but they seem friendly, at least.”  And then the trumpet blows, the walls come crashing down and they kill everybody but the whore and her family.

   1. And man do they.  Chapter 6, verse 21: Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of their sword all in the city; both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys. Even the talking ones.

7. So on to chapter 7 which reeks of revisionism.  After god says “go kick ass, you are invincible”, they lose the second fight they get into.  So Joshua is all “Hey bro, what happened to the invincible before my enemies thing?” And god’s all “Uh-uh-uh, somebody took some silver and hid it from me so all bets are off.”

   1. So they go and find the dude who did it.  He confesses.  So they mercifully set him and his family on fire and stone their burning bodies to death.  And that kind of shit makes god really happy.

• “I said you could rape, but only the Levites can pillage and plunder.  I specifically said raping only.  But the free non-consensual pussy wasn’t good enough, was it?!?  You’re in GOD’s fucking army! Act accordingly! There a line! And it’s somewhere between rape and stealing silver.”  Rape’s on the RIGHT side!!!!  Stealing the silver was the problem!!!

8. Then they go back to the town that had just kicked their asses because god was on their side again.  But interesting that they also sent 10 times as many men this time and worked out an elaborate ambush.

   1. And kill all the men, women and children.  But you can tell god is in a way better mood, because this time he lets the livestock live.

9. The residents of Gibeon heard about the approaching wave of genocide so they tricked Joshua into sparing them and just making them slaves by pretending to be from a far off country.

   1. Yeah, they were damn tricky.  They’re showing them moldy bread and saying “look, this was a fresh loaf when we left!  How could we possibly have moldy bread if we weren’t foreigners?”

   2. I love that Joshua asks them “Why did you trick me?”  You were going to kill them, you asshole.  Why the fuck wouldn’t they trick you?

• It’s the “Two For Flinching, Rodney King” conundrum.  When you swing a night stick, and then yell “STOP RESISTING ARREST!” when they hold up their hand to block it . . .

10. Chapter 10 probably contains the most ass-kicking of any chapter in the bible.  This is where Joshua pretty much wipes out the whole country.  Hell, god starts hurling stones at the opposing armies at one point and when they try to flee Joshua orders god to not let the sun set so they can pursue them better.

    1. I love the way they keep bragging about how thorough the genocide was.  It’s like bragging to your friend’s wife about how hot his mistress is.

• These guys wipe out innocent civilians better than a double-tap drone strike.  “Collateral Damage” is Joshua’s middle name … Joshua “Collateral Damage” . . . Jew … Nunson!!!

11. Then Joshua’s army kills more people.  Then they go back to the army-less towns, kill all the women and children, steal all the valuables and, on occasion, burn the city to the ground.

12. Chapter 12 is basically a scorecard that compares Moses and Joshua when it comes to the murdering of monarchs.  As it turns out, Joshua won by a long shot.

• For the record, if you present the information from a table with two columns, and the entry is the same for an entire column . . . you don’t need a fucking table!!!  And if you write it all out – which makes even less sense – you don’t have to repeat the number “one” over and over.

13. And then this book abruptly stops being remotely interesting.  Just when think you’re settling into a book full of merciless bloodshed we make a hard right into the minutes of a bronze age community re-zoning board.

• “Ok we murdered all the people.  I believe you PROMISED us some LAND.  It’s not like we weren’t CHOSEN over here.”

14. –

15. –

16. For four chapters we get poorly formed GPS directions and a few stories of slightly less thorough slaughters.

    1. Plus some incest.

17. –

18. –

19. As you’re reading this shit you can’t help but wonder how this book ever led to a land dispute.

20. They set up the cities of refuge, which are these lovely little towns full of unavenged murderers.

• If stupid shit in your holy book leads to a whole bunch of accidental murders, so much so that entire manslaughter cities were necessary . . . you might want to scrap the draft.

21. –

22. On the way home from the war, the Reubenites and the Gadites build a statue to commemorate their part in the genocidal mission from god, and that’s like talking about Fight Club.  Smite Club.  So all the Israelites decide it’s a reasonable time to go to war with them over it.

    1. Luckily they all sit down and talk and agree that they all still believe in the same magical sky man or all hell might have broken loose.

23. And then Josh is all old and crotchety and he gathers everybody together to send a very clear message: Just cause god’s been giving you a lot of cool stuff doesn’t mean he won’t still fuck your shit up.

24. And then Joshua reminds them one more time not to piss god off and he dies.  And they bury him.  And apparently they’d been carrying Joseph’s bones around this whole time and they bury those, too.

    1. And the very last verse in the whole thing is about Eleazer dying.  This is some super-minor, forgotten character and the whole things ends with “and Eleazer, son of Aaron?  He’s dead too.”

Now I have to admit that this book gave us some much needed closure.  It managed to tie the whole first six books together and make you feel like you’d just been reading one long story for a minute, so I was actually impressed by it from a literary perspective.

Not so much from a moral perspective.

No, it was probably the least moral thing we’ve come across yet and that’s saying something after Leviticus and Numbers.

And Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy.

True.  Well, we’ll be in biblical detox for a couple weeks but we’ll be tackling Judges in about three weeks so you have plenty of time to get caught up if you hate yourself.

Lucinda, Heath, thanks for joining me…

Outro

Before we count down the registers tonight, I wanted to give a quick shout out to all the participants in the Fantasy Football League of Sinister Secularists.  It’s a league that Carl from Post Rapture Looting and I cooked up made up entirely of secular podcasters and bloggers.

So to Carl, Thomas from Thomas and the Bible, Cecil from Cognitive Dissonance, Mark from Be Secular (dot) org, Bill and his son Sean from Bar Room Atheists, Evan from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, Jessye from wherever the heck Carl found her and of course, Heath from 84 seconds ago, I want to say good luck on the week’s when you’re not playing me and may you be humble in your inevitable defeat.

If you have even a passing interest in which podcaster and/or blogger reigns supreme, I’ll be keeping everybody posted on the blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.  And if you have no interest in that whatsoever, I’ll also be putting other stuff on the blog as well.

I need to thank Lucinda for lending us her wit, her insight and her angelic voice tonight, I need to thank Heath as always, but even more than usual this time for staying up til the crack of dawn after his birthday party to work on the headlines segment.  I also need to thank Michael Dunlap from mikedunlapphotography.com for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote.  You’ll find a link to his website on the shownotes for this episode.

But most of all tonight we need to extend our deepest gratitude to this week’s most irreplaceable corporeal forms; Pekka, Sherrill, Thomas, Steve, David, other Steve, Matt and Alden.  Pekka, Sherrill and Thomas, whose lightning quick fists seem sluggish compared to their wit; Steve, David and other Steve whose boundless generosity seems slight compared to their intellects; and Matt and Alden, whose humility is in constant conflict with their behemoth genitals.

These eight brave and valiant exemplars of godlessness have cemented their legends this week by giving us money.  Not everybody has the cunning, gallantry and expendable income required to give us money, but if you think you’re worthy to stand beside such virtuous individuals as Pekka, Sherrill, Thomas, Steve, David, other Steve, Matt and Alden, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you want to help but donating money is against your irreligion, you can also help us out by giving us a sterling review on iTunes or whatever you use.  You can also inflate our sense of self-worth by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter and subscribing to our YouTube channel and our aforementioned blog.

That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight but if you want more, there’s more.  Steve at the “A Matter of Doubt” podcast invited me on for a chat the other day.  No definitive word on when that episode will be up, but as soon as I know I’ll be sharing it on all those social media sites you were planning on liking, following and subscribing to us on.

If you have questions, comments 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.