Uncategorized | The Scathing Atheist

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Brain-O, the new home-chemical lobotomy system for Christians who are too smart for their own good?

Did some damn atheist point out one of the numerous logical contradictions in your doctrine? Did you suddenly realize that many of the traditional attributes of god are mutually exclusive? Did you make the mistake of actually reading the bible and now you can’t get the horror of it all out of your head? Well then try clearing your neuronal pathways with Brain-O.

Brain-O: Just like logical refutations of faith, it goes in one ear and out the other.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s July 31st,

And FOX channel’s famous doctor is named after a wizard imposter.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright, and from a city so fast-paced it has it’s own minute, New York, New York,

And one so slow-paced it has it’s own century, Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

Two more brisses go viral on the Jew tubes,
The FFRF will use its one initial advantage to defeat the IRS,
And Michele Bachman and Sarah Palin are never in the same room, are they? …

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe

I’m still kind of pissed at the world for not giving me super powers. Can’t fly… can’t summon fireballs, no telepathy, no invisibility. I mean, what the hell? I’d mostly use them for the forces of good. I’d fight crime… like especially parking violations and failure to yield. But no. No super powers.

Reality sucks. I want magic.

But not enough to pretend it exists when I know it doesn’t. And that’s the real difference between us and them, isn’t it? We all want eternal life in paradise and the ability to summon magical forces to come to our aid in times of distress. None of us actually have that shit, but we all want it. And some of us want it so bad that we’re willing to do anything to protect the illusion that it’s really there.

I’ve seen this up close and personal. When I was a younger man I was into all the spiritual witchcrafty tarot card nonsense and it amazed me how far people were willing to go to pretend they’d just witnessed something magical. I went to these gatherings, right? Couple dozen Wiccans all joining together in a rite to summon some thing or something. And invariably nothing would happen. And just as invariably, everybody would spend the rest of the night talking about what happened.

Now, we all knew nothing happened. We all just witnessed nothing happening. But for some reason, we would say stuff like, “I could really feel its presence,” or “I don’t know about you guys, but I really saw those pentagrams vividly.” Now, you can tell by the way it’s phrased that the dude saying it didn’t see shit. Right? Because if you actually saw something, you’d just say, “Remember when those magical pentagrams materialized in the air? That was pretty sweet.” You wouldn’t preempt it by saying, “I understand entirely if I was the only one who witnessed the thing that happened, since, you know, when everyone is looking at something sometimes only one person sees the thing, right? That makes sense, right? But I saw the thing that I’m not surprised if you didn’t see.”

Same thing with Tarot readings. I would make some vague predictions and some high-probability guesses. I would utter a few deepities and say stuff that everybody wants to believe about themselves and the whole time I knew I was just making shit up, and I figured it was pretty damn transparent. But people were always willing to bend over backwards to pretend they’d just witnessed something divine; something unexplainable; something that offers some vestige of hope that they themselves can still one day have super powers.

If you waste a piece of your life reading any of the neopagan books on magic and spiritualism, you’ll see the cognitive gymnastics right away. They’ll start by redefining magic down to the point where scratching your taint is an act of wizardry and then they’ll teach you how to scratch your taint. It’s amazing the kind of metrics these books offer. For some strange reason, every possible way to measure the success of your “magick” (and I spelled that with a K so it’s less bullshity now) are internal. They’re all things that you can’t measure objectively. “You’ll feel calmer,” or “You may feel a strange presence or the feeling that you’re being watched.” And it gets worse. “You’ll have greater luck,” or “You’ll avoid a calamity the next day,” or, and I swear this is real, “The world will be more peaceful.”

But just in case even these fluffy excuses for measurement are too specific, they also like to spend a lot of time pre-excusing your failures. You might have done it in the wrong phase of the moon. Perhaps there were some negative spiritual energies you hadn’t exorcised properly. Perhaps your personal chi flow was interrupted or your chakras were misaligned. So your unmeasurable success is also dependent on unmeasurable variables. That’s convenient.

Funny how this shit doesn’t happen with science. Funny how you never bring your phone in and the dude asks if your chakras were aligned last time you used it. The thing with the baking soda and the vinegar works in any lunar phase, negative spiritual entities be damned. Because science is real. And it’s actually happening.

Now, at the beginning of this whole thing, I lamented that I couldn’t fly or summon fireballs or communicate telepathically or turn invisible, but in truth science has already knocked out the first two, smart phones have alleviated the need for the third, and believe me, they’re working on that last one. And when you get in an airplane or turn on your cellphone, you don’t have to “truly believe” that it’ll work. You don’t have to utter a quick banishment or cast a circle of salt around it. Because it’s real and it really works.

And you don’t have to be brilliant to see that the things that are real are fundamentally different than the things that aren’t. I think we all more or less recognize the difference between magic and reality, it’s just that some of us don’t seem to care. Some of us think it’s perfectly okay to believe things that are absurdly wrong if we feel like it’s a good thing to believe. That’s the axiomatic difference between atheists and believers. Between rationalists and spiritualists.

I recently had a believer sum it up like this. She said, “If I thought I had a fatal disease and it prompted me to set things right in my life and cross a bunch of stuff off my bucket list, and then it turns out that I didn’t have that disease, ultimately I would have benefited from believing something was wrong.”

Seems like a strange example to use, in my mind. I mean, sure, you forgive and kiss your mom and go to Paris and go skydiving; that’s exactly what would happen in a novel with two white people almost kissing each other on the cover, but I’m not sure it would really play out like that. I mean, all the joys of mistakenly thinking you’re going to die may have been exaggerated.

But even if she’d chosen a better example, it wouldn’t change the fact that you’re always better off in the long run knowing the truth. Sure, it might be comforting for a while not to know your dog’s dead, but eventually you’re gonna start thinking about what a couple of dicks your parents are for sending your favorite dog to live on some farm without asking you first. And what the hell, can’t we at least go visit him? We go upstate sometimes.

But some people would rather lie to each other, lie to their children, and lie to themselves to protect this useless illusion that somehow we can bypass all the aerodynamics and stuff and just go all Superman. And they don’t seem to recognize that if everyone actually believed that we’d never have bothered to build an airplane. In other words, if you pretend your problems are solved, you’ve got no motivation to solve them.

And quite frankly, none of us should have to defend the proposition that believing true stuff matters.

Headlines

Joining me for headlines tonight is your sherpa up mount improbable, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to sherp?

Sure. All the upscale podcasts have personal sherping.

In our lead story tonight, American Atheist launched the Virgo Supercluster’s first ever all-atheism TV network on Tuesday, offering countless hours of archived programming including the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s entire video library as well as the more than fifty years of historical atheist videos in American Atheist’s vault.

Not sure if America is ready for reality shows with reality, but I’m glad they’re trying.

The network is available through Roku, a digital streaming service that’s kind of like cable except it generally works and the contract you enter into with them doesn’t give them the right to face rape your first born child. The channel offers the choice of on-demand or scheduled programming, including atheist speeches, stand-up comedy, documentaries, and science programming.

If they included the Patton Oswalt “Sky Cake” bit, I’d call the channel a success … Now normally my googling suggestions are much … pussy-er … more fluids … but this one is worthy nonetheless. Everyone google “Patton Oswalt Sky Cake” and watch the video. Hilarious!!! Or just get Roku and hopefully you can watch him on secular TV!!!

If you don’t have Roku, you can still check out the live-stream online. You’ll find the link to that site on the shownotes for this episode. And incidentally, if anybody from American Atheists is listening and they’re looking for somebody to anchor their eleven o’clock risque atheist news-satire comedy program, I know just the guy.

Stanhope?

Actually, now that you mention it, yeah.

American Atheist launches “Atheist TV” http://atheists.org/atheisttv

And from the “If they’re gonna keep blowing infants and giving them herpes, then we’re gonna keep mentioning it” file … mohels keep blowing infants and giving them herpes. Last week, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene – no doubt working closely with the SVU team – discovered two new cases of newborns getting herpes from the normally trustworthy dude, who goes around town mutilating baby dick for money.

You know, I’m sick and tired of a couple of bad baby-cocksuckers ruining the otherwise sterling reputation of the industry. What do people want? If you’re gonna mutilate a baby’s dick the least you could give him is a happy ending.

In case you’ve missed our coverage of this exact same problem happening before … And yes, that means babies getting herpes in the past, did not lead to any behavior changes … Here’s a little context for you. It’s standard practice in certain Jewish communities to welcome newborn boys into the world by cutting off a piece of their penis with a knife, at which point the mutilation specialist briefly fellates the baby – just the tip – sucking blood from the open wound.

But they aren’t pervs about it… they spit.

Doesn’t this seem like the type of situation where a baby’s right to his entire penis, and his right to choose a less slutty dude to blow him … Or no dudes at all??? … Don’t those basic human rights seem to outweigh the free exercise rights of herpes-enabling parents??? Somehow the answer in ‘No’. Unfortunately for babies dying of brain damage, Ultra-orthodox Jewish people have been corporations since long before Citizens United and Hobby Lobby.

And I think it’s important to stress that the “dying of brain damage” thing isn’t just an offensive joke about the mental faculties of Orthodox Jews; that’s actually a common result of this. There have been 16 reported cases of Rabbis giving babies herpes by sucking their bloody cocks in the last 14 years. Two of them resulted in death and two more in severe brain damage. And in case you’re curious, no, nobody believes for a second that the 16 reported cases represent even a majority of the actual incidents.

Can’t help but picture a mohel’s wife getting pissed at him … She finds a mysterious wad of cash in his laundry … “You bastard!!! Where’s all this from?!? … How many BABY DICKS did have to suck to get all this cash?!?” … Throws a handful of shekels in his face.

“I’m 37!?”

But not in a row …

Two more brisses go viral: https://www.vocativ.com/culture/health-culture/herpes-bris-new-york

And from the “If they didn’t have their dicks in your ass, they’d be the External Revenue Service” file tonight, the IRS has reached an agreement with the FFRF by which the FFRF will drop their pending lawsuit and the IRS will maybe start doing it’s job but not definitely. We hope this agreement puts a capstone on a story we’ve been covering since episode 17 of this show, known as Pulpit Freedom Sunday, in which pastors and preachers knowingly and blatantly break the law, videotape themselves doing it, send those videos to the IRS and dare them to do something about it.

Yeah, and as much as you’d think this means they get served with an audit, I guess there’s nothing the IRS can do but dance back, and send them the response video.

The law, of course, forbids a tax-free institution from publicly endorsing political candidates and telling their members how to vote. Religious leaders have ignored this provision for decades, and the IRS was happy to oblige their ignorance until the FFRF reminded them that the non-religious people were looking. After a failed attempt to get the lawsuit thrown out and an equally failed attempt to convince themselves they could win it, they eventually settled the suit by agreeing to do the job they exist to do.

But they’re not even doing that!!! They’re agreeing to maybe in the future finally abide by a 2009 ruling (based on a 1954 ruling) that said the IRS needs to have someone on staff to monitor illegal political actions by tax-exempt charities. But why the fuck is this person even necessary?!? Just use your regular staff, and TAX THEM!!! No more laws being broken, and preachers can keep endorsing whatever Tea-Bagging theocrat they want.

It’s worth noting that the agreement can’t be acted upon immediately because there’s a federal moratorium on IRS audits of 501(3)c organizations at the moment due to the ongoing Republican attempt to prove that Obama is a gay, Kenyan, Muslim, revolutionary, communist felon. This means that we won’t actually know if the IRS is going to abide by the agreement for some time, but we’ll be keeping an eye on the story and hopefully the next chapter will include a bunch of audited churches and uniformed rants about the first amendment.

IRS agrees to maybe do it’s job: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/18793-irs-agrees-to-atheist-group-s-demands-to-monitor-sermons

And in “Why do all these shiny gay kettles look like me?” news, Congressional Republican Michele Bachmann – during a recent appearance on conservative Christian radio show, Faith and Liberty – warned that homosexuals are pursuing legislation to legalize pedophilia and polygamy. Obviously, expanding this exemption to gays would pose a serious threat to the near-monopolies currently held by Catholics and Mormons respectively … And that’s a big problem for Bachmann and her constituency.

Yeah, this push for the right to enter into a legally recognized monogamous relationship is such a transparent ploy to have ever more sexual partners. It’s a good thing Michele is there to see through the bullshit for us.

So like a pitcher noticing a perfect game in the 3rd inning – except the exact opposite – Bachmann did her best to keep the precisely wrong streak rolling … by expressing fear of another legislative lobbying move by the gays … This time, to break into the “protected hate speech” and “tyranny” markets. Once again, Christian monopoly territory … toes … stepping.

“Afore you know it, them fudge-packing fagots will be insulting us!”

Then she addressed the marriage issue … (quote) “For all of the thousands of years of recorded human history, about 5,000 years, there is no instance of any culture, nation or tribe ever having as the established standard for marriage anything other than between man and woman. It may have been multiple women and a man, it may have been something like that, but it was always between men and women.” (end quote) … I can’t- … even … You wanna take this one???

If she was serious about this traditionalism she should have died during childbirth. “Throughout the whole 6000 year history of our universe, people have died from cholera! How dare you not die from cholera now!”

Ok – ninth inning … Does she have one more? Indeed. She didn’t forget to add that legalized gay marriage is (quote) “denial of equal protection to all Americans” (end quote) … Denial of equal protection … So the repeal of DOMA ruined the word “marriage” for straight couples, similar to the way the 13th Amendment ruined the word “people” for whites.

And in private, I’m sure she’d agree.

Michele Bachmann: Atheist gay liberals to abolish churches and monopolize pedophilia: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/michele-bachmann-gays-want-let-adults-freely-prey-little-children-sexually

And from the “No, Seriously, shit on my bible” file tonight, the scientarians over at “Forever Bible” are claiming that they’ve finally made the bible as hard to destroy as it is to read. They promise a “nearly indestructible” bible and boast that now the bible can resist stains, rips, water and fraying as well as it resists scientific advancement and logical extrapolation.

It’s about fucking time they made a two-ply version. I’m chafing like an idiot over here.

The impossible to distinguish from a parody Kickstarter video associated with the book shows a series of young, active bible readers camping, hiking and literally surfing while reading their bibles. This precedes my favorite shot, which is a bible being horribly desecrated with mud, ice cream, sprinkles and an enigmatic seashell before being lovingly hosed off. And while I’ll admit the easy clean pages probably help in Song of Solomon, I’m not sure how important they are the rest of the time.

At the very least, it lightens up the loads for the guy who cleans the confessionals. Quick, easy mop up.

Despite the fact that the Kickstarter campaign has yet to reach its goal for R&D, the finished product they hope to eventually invent is miraculously already for sale on their website. Equally miraculous is the claim that the bible is at once completely non-degradable and environmentally friendly. Because sure. future generations will be finding our plastics until the sun goes out, but at least when they examine the plastic it won’t endorse slavery.

Kickstarter campaign for “indestructible bible” actually making money: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/07/23/kickstarter-backed-indestructible-bible-uses-space-age-nanotechnology/

And in “Mathematics has an atheist bias” news, a recent article on conservative site Campus Reform reported angrily that a core class at Ohio State University teaches that Christians are dumber than atheists … which is only really true if you say it more tactfully. And, nobody at OSU even said that anyway.

Well, not as part of a class, anyway. I’m sure it’s been uttered by many a biology professor over the years.

But if someone did want to say “Christians are dumber than atheists” … here’s how they would support that claim with evidence … Recent studies (and common sense) show a positive correlation between lack of religiosity and higher IQ. So less god, more IQ. Statistical fact …

But if hearing that bothers you as a Christian, that’s totally understandable … Because you’re likely less intelligent, and therefore confused by numerical principles.

Right. What do you expect when you have a group of people who can’t quite pin down the concepts of “three” and “one?”

So the non-controversy centers specifically, around the following badly-written homework question from a psychology class: (quote) “Theo has an IQ of 100 and Aine has an IQ of 125. Which of the following statements [would] you expect to be true?”

A) Aine is an atheist, while Theo is a Christian.

B) Aine earns less money than Theo.

C) Theo is more liberal than Aine.

D) Theo is an atheist, while Aine is a Christian.

Can I answer (E) Theo misspells shit and uses the improper form of “your” when he bitches at people on Facebook? Or is that just a restatement of A?

So given existing data mentioned earlier, choice A) is the only reasonable assumption based on the very small amount of information you have about the two people. So yes, the question is a terribly constructed way to engage an extremely simple statistical concept. But regardless, a reasonable gambler would always bet on A). And that was the point of the question.

C’mon, they gave the Christian three digits and that’s already pretty generous.

According to an anonymous student in the class … let’s call her Alice … According to Alice: (quote) “I understand that colleges have a liberal spin on things so it didn’t surprise me to see the question […] But how can you really measure which religion has a higher IQ?” … (Probably IQ tests) … So based on what Alice just said, and the studies mentioned earlier … Is she more likely to be: A) a highly intelligent atheist … or B) a slow-witted creationist??? Or even simpler … same question, based on nothing but the choices.

Atheists are smarter than religious people, but it’s not a nice thing to say: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/07/24/no-an-ohio-state-class-did-not-teach-that-christians-are-dumber-than-atheists

And in “Pin Your Flatulence on the Demon” news tonight, founder of the Holy Fire Ministries and prolific consumer of Vaseline Bert Farias has finally cracked the age-old scientific question of what the demons that possess gay people to make them want to fuck the wrong gender smell like. And it turns out, it’s (quote) “bad” (end quote) In fact, gayness demons smell so bad that (and I swear this is a quote) “other demons don’t even like to hang around them.”

Well this is news! Most gay people think they’re possessed by potpourri and lilac demons … So this should turn some heads … “Demons are like mustaches … You can tell the gay ones by the smell.”

So how does Farias know what sodomy demons smell like? Well, as if his claimed source of a (quote) “genuine prophet of god” (end quote) wasn’t enough, he also offered additional evidence in the form of an unrelated excerpt from a third hand account of an Iron Age jewish fable. Particularly, the part in Mark where Jesus casts 2000 demons out of some dude and sends them into a bunch of pigs. And apparently the pigs didn’t want the demons in them so they drown themselves in the sea. And from this, Farias has made the logical extrapolation that, considering how much pigs hate smelly things like garbage, feces and themselves, it must have been the rancid stench of the demons that drove the pigs to mass suicide.

Pastor: Gay people are possessed by fart-demons: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/gays-are-possessed-putrid-smelling-demons-even-pigs-wont-tolerate

And finally tonight, from the “Top of the Republican Agenda” file, GOP candidate for the Colorado House Gordon Klingenschmitt announced on his televangelism show last week that post-op trannies should still have to use their pre-op public restroom … And if elected as a representative for District 15, he promises to fix this broken system.

When all I need to do to turn your name into the definition of a dingleberry is take away the M, avoid giving me shit-related headlines. Easy rule to live by. It’s probably in Leviticus somewhere.

So his logic goes something like this … In Deuteronomy 23, it says that men with severed penes cannot enter the assembly of the lord. Or if it’s crushed … like by a boulder … still there, but all flat … That’s also a no-go. Therefore, if I misinterpret “assembly of the lord” to mean “all churches and public restrooms ever”, I can make myself feel better about being a bigoted asshole by telling myself that God approves.

So… is he saying that transexuals should have to shit outside in little holes? I mean… what’s he proposing here?

As ridiculous as the GOP platform – and Bible – might be, this sounds a little too specific to be just towing the party line for Jesus. I’m guessing Klingenschmitt really had to go one day, and got stuck at one of those awkward “1-3-5” public urinal scenarios. So he breaks the rules, and takes urinal 2, but it’s next to a chick with a bigger dick, and he freaks out, and gets stage fright midstream. Been burning ever since …

He does have sort of a “I haven’t pissed without screaming since 1996” look to him.

Regardless of his asinine reasoning, let’s give him some Christian-friendly slogans to post on the door, so as to distinguish his godly shitter from the separate but equal ones he’s gonna build for gays, blacks, and mimes … So we’ll need about 30 seconds on the clock … “Religious Euphemisms for Taking a Shit” … GO!!!

I guess “Morning Mass” is the obvious one, huh?

“Spraying to the porcelain gods”

“The Second Going”

“Passages from Numbers 2″

“Emptying the Tomb”

“The Turdin’ of Job”

I know this one is for pissing, but “Paving a Walkway for Jesus”

Follow the yellow slick road … What about: “Showing the brown kids the way to the glory bowl” … “Doing some squish-ionary work” … “Assuming the squish-ionary position”

“Banishing the Golgothan”

“Chopping Cords for the Idealogue Cabin”

Based on our previous reports about fecal matter in baptismals, how about “Preparing the Holy Water?”

“Sacrificing the Black Bishop”

“Recycling the body of Christ”… That’s a Scatholic joke.

“Exports from Pope Bran-delay Industries” … “Bowly Trinity” … “Splatican City” …

Alright. The Catholic ones are just plopping right out… “Poop John Sprawl the Turd?”

“Delivering the Lord’s Prayer-rie Dog”

“Birthing More Creationists”

“Feeling the Pain of Jesus’s Corny Crown”

Nothing worse that a thorny brown. “Baptizing a Snake”

Feel like the Jews are getting left out … Maybe a Kosher Pareve restroom? … “How is this shite different from all other shites?” … “This too shall Passover”

And let’s not forget those Muslims. They have great senses of humor about their religion, so… “Shi’ite from where the Sunni don’t shine?”

“Christmas Mass on Jesus’s Bidet”

Jesus would so shit in the bidet. But if it was Jesus it would be “Burning the other cheek.”

Nicely done! … And this one works for Muslims or Jews … “The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game with No Pork”

Klingenschmitt says if you don’t go to church, you can’t use public restrooms: http://www.politicususa.com/2014/07/23/gordon-klingenschmitt-church-public-restroom.html

“There are well-heeled shitters everywhere___”

Alright. Probably the first and last time we ever close headlines on a “Guys and Dolls” reference, but everything has to happen eventually. Heath, thanks as always.

Pot luck eat a baby tonight!!!

And when we come back, god will get over all this Bruce Banner shit and get angry again.

This Week in Misogyny

Okay, so I’m in a bit of a quandary because I want to talk about international affairs this week, but I’m not sure if I’m smart enough to comment on those men problems. According to North Carolina congresswoman Renee Ellmers, women can’t understand complicated stuff like pie-charts and numbers with more than six zeroes, so I’m not sure if I can dumb this down enough for myself to understand.

Speaking at an RNC Women’s Conference (and you can just imagine the throngs of people lining up for that), Ellmers explained the secret to making women voters understand complicated stuff like economies and debtses and stuff saying (quote) “We need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level… that’s the way to go.” (end quote)

Politicians must “talk down to a woman’s level” to be understood: http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/_gop_congresswoman_men_must_talk_down_to_a_woman_s_level_if_they_want_to_be_understood

So we’re gonna talk briefly about how women are faring under the insane, bloodthirsty theocrats in Iraq, but afterwards, I’ll use dumbed-down woman words so that representative Ellmers can follow along.

We’ll start with their treatment of manufactured women. Store owners in the Iraqi city of Mosul were surprised last week when their new militant Islamic overlords demanded that they put face veils on their mannequins in an effort to keep the notoriously perverse Muslim men from having impure thoughts about inanimate objects.

Reports also indicate that tobacco and alcohol retailers are being intimidated out of business or outright killed. ISIS is also enforcing proper gender specific retail by forcing men who own women’s clothing stores to turn over their businesses to the appropriate gender.

Now, let me give you that same story again, but dumbed down to woman-level:

Those poor plastic girls who stand still at the mall all day have pantyhose on their heads!

ISIS forcing stores to put veils on mannequins: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101860481?__source=pd%7Coutbrain%7Ctopnews&par=pd

Of course, the treatment of Iraq’s artificial women is pretty damn lenient compared to their treatment of actual women. Reports of rapes, robberies and executions are rampant throughout ISIS controlled territory. A recent UN report warned that women trapped in Mosul will be forced to undergo female genital mutilation, but don’t worry ladies, it seems that report may be incorrect so your clit is way more likely to remain attached to your body than your head.

And again, same story, but dumbed down to woman-level, “Run for your fucking lives!”

Reports of ISIS call for female mutilation are probably false: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/isis-female-mutilation_n_5617833.html?utm_hp_ref=religion&ir=Religion

And finally tonight, we’ll make like any sane woman in Iraq who is able to and move north into Turkey, where Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc warned that proper Muslim women should be too modest to laugh in public.

Suggesting that the most important quality in a woman is chastity, Arinc said (quote) “She will not laugh in public. She will not be inviting in her attitudes and protect her chasteness” (end quote). Now, in Arinc’s defense, I’m sure that, for the sake of his ego, he has had to tell himself, “She must just be too chaste to have an inviting attitude and laugh at my jokes” at many a Turkish night club.

Turkish official: Women shouldn’t laugh: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2014/07/turkish-leader-tells-women-not-to-laugh-out-loud-in-public/

That’s all the time I’ve got for you this week, but don’t worry, if you want more misogyny, we’re only a couple of minutes away from breaking down another book of the bible.

Calendar

It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show, the monthly couple of minutes we set aside to keep you up to speed on all the great atheist, skeptical and secular conferences going on around the country and around the world.

We did all out August stuff last month, but I did want to throw a shout out for the Piedmont Humanists, who are holding their annual picnic on Saturday afternoon. If you’re in the Greenville, South Carolina area and you want to meet some local atheists there can’t possibly be a better opportunity this weekend.

http://www.piedmonthumanists.org/calendar/

Now we’ll slide into September, but we don’t worry, we won’t just ram our way into it quickly, as our first event starts on August 31st and runs through September 2nd and that event would be DragonCon. Admittedly, this certainly isn’t an atheist convention but draws a hell of a crowd of skeptics and if definitely an awesome place to spend a weekend.

http://www.dragoncon.org/

But far more to the point is ZetetiCon (and if you wanted me to pronounce it correctly, you should have named it something normaler) which kicks off on September 12th in Fargo, North Dakota of all places. Matt Dillahunty, Richard Carrier, PZ Myers, Aron Ra, David Silverman and more. And if that’s not enough, you’ll also have hundreds of people doing the ridiculous psuedo-Canadian accent from the otherwise flawless Coen Brothers film.

http://zeteticon.org/2014/

September 19th through the 21st we’ve got Apostocon in Omaha, Nebraska. Lawrence Krauss is their keynote this year; joined by Matt Dillahunty, friend of the show Dan Fincke, JT Eberhard, Margaret Downey, other friend of the show Darrel Ray, the ubiquitous David Silverman and more. So skip all the exciting Omaha nightlife for one weekend and try to make it out for that.

http://www.apostacon.org/

The Carolinas Secular Conference is taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina from the 26th to the 28th of September. They’re bringing in secular blogger and author Greta Christina, President of Black Nonbelievers, Inc. Mandisa Thomas, secular rapper Greydon Square, et cetera. Should be a lot of fun.

http://www.carolinassecularassociation.org/conference/

And of course, if you’d like more information on any of the events discussed, be sure to check the Transcript or Shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. And if you’re involved with an event you think our audience would like to know about, I’m happy to toss you a free plug. You’ll find all the contact info on our Contact Page.

WTFI

What the Fuck is… Eid al Fitr?

Eid al Fitr is an Islamic attempt to take that feeling you get when you finally come across a rest area and unload the forty-four ounces of piss you’ve been damming up for the last eighty miles and turn it into a profound, spiritual experience.

This feast marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan and the start of the inferiority complex ridden month of Shawwal. After a month of intermittently starving themselves, Muslims the world over celebrate by no longer intermittently starving themselves. After twenty nine or thirty days of abstaining from food, water, sex and incidentally, happiness, from sunup until sundown, Muslims prepare the three hundred and thirty five to three hundred and thirty seven day effort to convince themselves not to go with a less fast-based religion.

Eid al Fitr is a three day event that moves around the Gregorian calendar. This is a byproduct of the lunar calendar that Muslims are too stubborn to give up in favor of the vastly superior “thing that actually makes years happen” based calendar. This year Muslims were subjected to a summer fast, meaning far longer periods of misery for those living significantly north of the equator. Muslims are no doubt tempering their celebration this year with a solemn remembrance of all the Muslims that used to live north of the sixty sixth parallel before starving to death in this annual tradition.

The traditional Arabic greeting on Eid al Fitr is “Eid Mubarak,” which literally translates to “what the fuck were we thinking?” In addition to giving up the 19th century prison diet, Muslims also celebrate by reciting special magic spells and reminding their all knowing deity how awesome he is in case he forgot since they reminded him less than seven hours earlier.

The day is also marked with entertainment and merriment. In the Quran, Mohammad famously chastised a friend when he tried to make his daughters stop singing because on Eid al Fitr, everyone is allowed to sing. To Muslims this signifies a level of leniency on this important day and to everyone else it signifies the fact that on other days these assholes would make young girls stop singing just to be dicks.

In addition to these common practices, there are also regional variations of the holiday. In Saudi Arabia, they decorate their homes with lights. In Egypt, they celebrate by sexually assaulting women in startlingly large numbers. And in Iraq this year, Muslims celebrated Eid al Fitr by decapitating infidels and lining their dismembered heads along the streets in a macabre attempt to finally put that “religion of peace” nonsense to rest once and for all.

Of course, Eid al Fitr is also a time of charity, giving, hospitality, forgiveness and joy, which, let’s face it, all religions say about all of their holidays. But still, it’s worth noting once in a while that they’re not just about violent theocracy and forced cliterectomies. Sometimes they also cook food.

So to all our Muslim listeners, I wish you a belated Eid Mubarak and, while I’m at it, I’d like to wish our equally numerous dinosaur listeners and leprechaun listeners a cosmic orgasm.

Babble – Isaiah

Well, it’s happened. We’ve passed out of the “Wisdom” portion book altogether and reached the “verbose compared to Nostradamus” section known as the “Prophetic” books. And, like all prophets, these books have to be insanely long to fling enough shit against the wall to occasionally be kind-of right.

Does the fact that I prophesied that this book would suck before I read it give me the right to order around jews?

Apparently not, because your prophecy ended up being correct. Unacceptable condition for a Jewish prophet. So joining us to discuss the post-masturbatory portions of the Bible is my lovely wife Lucinda. Lucinda, welcome back.

Great to be here.

Alright, so enough with all this “Gettin’ to know us” shit, let’s get prophesying.

Right away you know this one’s gonna be a chore. It’s the fifth longest book in the Bible and right away you get Isaiah going off like an apocalyptic street preacher.
1. Yeah, Isaiah goes off like your rebound girlfriend’s racist stepdad. Bunch of “These kids these days with their fringe-cloth saddles and goat-hair cruppers and them filthy Akkadians takin’ our jobs, what don’t even speak Hebrew!”
And then it gets scary and violent. Isaiah explains how god wants the Jews to take over the world and steal all their neighbor’s silver and gold and horses.
It’s nice to have psychotic, vengeful god back. Haven’t seen him since Job, but he’s back in full force!!! In chapter three he explains what horrible shit he has in store for all the Jews that piss him off, in case you missed the entire Old Testament leading up to this book.
1. Yeah, among the torments listed is that the daughters of the unrighteous will have their heads covered in scabs and paraded naked through the streets.
– ???
And he’ll smash them and burn them and their corpses will litter the street like ashes because they’ve been drinking the wine and galavanting with the strange women.
Then we get this weird scene where Isaiah chats with god and he’s got these six-winged Seraphs all around him and, if I’m not mistaken, god tells him to make sure the people of Israel remain as stupid as possible.

But first, God had one of the magical pixies burn Isaiah’s tongue out with a piece of live coal, to get him ready to tell everyone about the future badly. So don’t worry, there’s no hole in the plot there. Don’t even check.

And then we get our first glimpse of pre-Jesus.

A little spotting before the first coming. The pre-coming of Jesus.

I think it’s worth noting that the KJV still has the mistranslated “virgin” in that verse. But they get Jesus’s name wrong.

And here’s how you know God’s not a particularly clever dude. Regardless of what name he chooses for the savior of humanity, if he’s got any sense of humor at all, it’s something difficult and awkward to yell during orgasms … “Almost there!!! Wait for it!!! … Nnnnnnebuchadnezzar!!!” … “Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz!!!”

Right. The messiah is supposed to be “Immanuel,” but worse than that, it’s really clear that the young woman Isaiah is talking about was somebody alive at that time. This book was written in the 8th century bce… not to mention his coming was supposed to coincide with a worldwide thorn epidemic. So yeah, all kinds of problems with basing your religion on this passage.

And I wouldn’t recommend any of the other passages we’ve seen yet either.

What’s more, his birth is supposed to usher in a full blown apocalypse. And I’m pretty sure that if the world ended in the 8th century bce, we’d know about it.
And then god’s going to raise an army of cannibals to kill all the wicked evildoers, including the orphans and babies who are evil by association.
“So you know the human trafficking, heathen mercenaries that I hired to enslave you guys most recently? … Yeah? Well I changed my mind about them, and now I don’t like them. So I might be back on board with you Jews again. But not right away. It’s gonna suck for a bunch longer. But then maybe better. Who’s comin’ with me?”
And honestly, Christianity would be way cooler if they stuck to this messiah Isaiah is talking about because this dude ejaculates fire demons and kills people with his lips, both of which would have made a much better image for the Sistine Chapel.
1. And also, this Jesus does a way better job because by the time he’s done with it bears start grazing and lions are friendly and you can safely get cunilingus from a poisonous asp.
2. He was also supposed to split the red sea into seven rivers with a land bridge.

And what about the land bridge connecting Brazil and Senegal in Risk?

–
It’s hard to stress what a truly fucked up book this is, though. Because what it’s saying is that god wants to kill basically everybody, but instead of doing it himself, he needs an army of true believers to give him a hand. Basically he says, “Wanted: Righteous believers to smash babies and ravish wives.”

Sounds like my profile on MormonMingle.com …

So let’s be perfectly clear about this. The very first prophecy in the prophetic books is that Jewish enslavement in Assyria would end when Emmanuel rose up with an army, the world turned to thorns, the sun became black and the Assyrians were all enslaved by the jews. And in case you’re not particularly a history buff, I should point out that that didn’t happen.

Not during observational history. Could have been during historical history, but no way to check.

And even the cities he correctly predicts the destruction of, he gets wrong. Like Moab. He says that Moab will be destroyed and I can’t find it on Google Maps, so there you go; but he also says the way it’ll go is that all the people will turn bald and the crops will dry up and that’s probably not how it happened at all.
Also, god will harp-fart. Isaiah 16:11 “Wherefore my bowels shall sound like a harp.”
Then we get to the one that has all the modern day reality-impaired lunatics up in arms, the prophecy about the destruction of Damascus.
1. Keeping in mind, of course that until now he’s clearly talking about a Jewish uprising that will destroy their oppressors in the near term. Like… within a generation… of 740 bce.
2. Yeah, this is the one you’ve gotta read if you want to get your bearings when Michelle Bachmann starts bringing up olive trees.

“Well Israel doesn’t seem to be having any trouble defending it’s current borders. And given all their ally neighbors, they should be able to take over Syria pretty soon. The demand for Judaism in the region just isn’t being met. Market solution.”

–
And it’s hilarious to actually read this shit in context. Because the “end is nigh” nutjobs point to this part of the bible and they say, “See, it predicts bad shit happening in Syria and in Egypt and if you look right now, what do you see?” But it’s not like it predicts just general, “Bad shit,” it predicts very precise droughts and floods and not a living human remaining and how the pharaohs of Egypt will respond. In other words, if he was talking about now, he really fucked it up.
1. Well and those are also sandwiched in between prophecies about Moab and Tyre, so seems like we’re being damn lenient on the chronology, too.
Right, and part of the specific Egyptian troubles is god marching them all out of Egypt in a single file line buck-naked. When that happens, call me.
1. One of my top 5 chapters right there. Chapter 20 … Isaiah spends three years with his dick out so that god will make a naked Egyptian parade. Priceless.
–
So essentially we’re reading Jewish revenge porn. It’s just one city after another that Jew god is gonna smite for fucking with the jews… complete with gory details of how it’s gonna go down.
1. My favorite, even though it isn’t all that gory, is the post-spinach popeye treatment Isaiah describes in Chapter 22, verses 17 and 18: “The lord is about to hurl you away violently, my fellow. He will seize firm hold of you, whirl you round and round and throw you like a ball into a wide land.”
And chapter 23 seems to be an homage to the slutty city of Tyre. Prostitutes will exist forever, all over the world, but they have to donate their trick money to churches. So whore and pastor pimp are indeed two of the oldest professions.
Then they get bored with individual cities and just prophecy the whole world coming down. And I can’t help but think, we’re 24 chapters into a 66 chapter book and the world is already destroyed? Is Isaiah gonna catch a ride with Zaphod and Trillian or something?
In chapter 25 we get Moabites swimming around in giant dung-pits.
And in 26 it warns you to lock your doors because god’s judgment is coming and apparently god’s judgment is as lame as the aliens in “Signs.”

And the casting. Rory Culkin?!? Really?!? They couldn’t spring for Macaulay.

And right when we’re in danger of dozing off, Leviathan shows back up and god starts killing sea-dragons.
1. And while we’re on the subject, what kind of pansy god stops in the middle of a dragon fight to sing a song about vineyards?
And whoever wrote this is so fucking racist. It’s all “Egyptians are stupid and Ephraimites are drunkards and those squinty-eyed Dedanites can’t park for shit.”
–
We’re also reminded to always listen to the voices in our head. They mean us no harm.
And perhaps seeing the weakness in using human armies all the time, he does promise to lop the Assyrians’ heads off with a magic sword at least.
In chapter 32 there’s a part where Isaiah commands all the women to strip naked and pummel their tits for the sake of a good harvest. Not sure how that works.

I’d do shit like that all the time if I was a prophet. If God tells you when it’s gonna finally start raining in the desert … “Ok ladies, this drought isn’t going away by itself. We’re gonna need a topless rain dance … while one of you blows me … (Thunder Crack!!!) … Don’t doubt me, bitches!!! What did you learn?!?”

But obviously, if you’re a monotheist who believes god is just, you need shit like Isaiah. Because you need to know that god is just biding his time letting all these other tribes fuck with the jews while he plots his vengeance
And then we continue with the “You just wait ‘til god gets home” theme by describing in gory detail the bloody vengeance god has in store for anybody who burns Isaiah’s toast.
And it’s not enough to tell all these gentiles how brutally murdered their children will be or how raped their wives will be; he also has to rub it in by talking about the awesome paradise god’s going to establish on earth once they’re dead.
And just when you’re thinking to yourself, “I sure miss Second Kings chapters 18 through 20,” we rehash them for no reason at all.
Which, in case you forgot, is the story of god defending Hezekiah, then condemning him to die, then deciding to let him live another fifteen years, then punishing him by destroying Judah and enslaving the jews after he dies.
And what the hell is up with that? Centuries of empire the Jews had and they only managed 9 different historical stories to repeat over and over again?

Yeah so far, God’s plan seems more and more like a Bond villain trying to slowly kill the Jews with a Rube Goldberg device. These assinine, overly-elaborate, century-long lessons … And then you’re all slaves … and then I free you, but kill 90% … and then MOUSE TRAP!!!”

And believe it or not, there’s even more of this damn book. So we’ll answer that question and many more after this important announcement.

Pitch

Since we started doing this show in January of last year, Heath, Lucinda and I have written over a third of a million words worth of blasphemous dick jokes.

That’s more words than the entire bible.

Actually it’s not quite half that.

…more words than War and Peace.

No, that’s more like half a million.

It’s like a Moby Dick, two Great Gatsbys and an Ethan Frome.

Yeah, that’s about right. A lot people have asked us how we manage to stay so prolific week after week. Is it passion? Divine inspiration? Adderall?

But the truth is far simpler than that. Our Adderall guy got busted, so we hired a group of Dickensian street-orphans in East London who were willing to write for nothing but a spot of porridge and a leaky roof.

In fact, let’s pop over to Hackney and see how they’re doing!

(Whoosh)

Listen up! The sixty minute format has been a big success and it’s going to be permanent.

(groans)

Get back to work, or I’ll give you something to moan about! You there, why aren’t you writing dick jokes?

My hands, hurt, sir.

Your hands hurt!? Do you think those dick jokes are just gonna write themselves?

No sir.

And you there! How many Pope Francis nicknames have you come up with today?

Um… I came up with Pope Fran-colostomy bag, sir.

That’s terrible! No good. And you, there, what have you got?

Pope Frant-Farm?

Pope What!?

Pope Frant-Farm, sir… like an ant farm, but with an F and an R.

Utter shit! Back to work the lot of you. And you there, what have you got.

Pope Frabble-Rouser, sir?

Alright, that’s actually not too bad. I need four more like that today.

(groans)

We’ve been working since sun up, sir. Can we break for some porridge?

You’ll get some porridge when the listeners pony up at Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist and not a moment before.

(Whoosh)

So if you’d like to help our orphans get some more porridge… or maybe get Noah a dialect coach, please make a donation today.

And remember, if we can reach our next milestone, Heath can quit his job and we can fire those orphans altogether and let them go back to work giving handjobs to bishops and sixpence a squirt.

That’s probably not the right way to go.

Yeah, probably not.

The best thing to do is make them seasonal so we don’t have to give them benefits.

Or… independent contractors.

Now you’re thinking…

Previously on the Holy Babble… (insert) … and now for the unexceptional conclusion of Isaiah.

When we left off, I believe we were being reminded at length how awesome god is and how feeble we are in comparison.
1. Something of a running theme in this book.
–
And you can tell that historical circumstances really fucked up the narrative here, because for the first half of the book Isaiah’s talking about how god’s gonna lay waste to all the other cities and establish a worldwide Jewish totalitarian state and while Isaiah’s explaining this, the Babylonians show up, level their city and enslave them.
1. Right and then Isaiah has to say, “Yeah, guys, this is all part of the plan.”

“Part of the trick … And still … where did the lighter fluid come from?!?”

It must suck being god’s biographer… “Put in another couple chapters about how awesome I am.”

“And remember those Babylonians that I’m having enslave you right now??? Well I think I know how to get you out of this. Gotta be smooth about this, or everyone’s gonna know I’m Jewish. Just shut up about it, and I’ll fucking choose you guys.”

And I want to photocopy chapter 44 of Isaiah and send it to everybody who ever found Jesus on a fucking pancake. The bible basically says, “Jesus ain’t on no motherfuckin’ pancake.”
But I think what betrays this book most as being useless crap is the amount of it they devote to god reminding us that he’s god. It would be like me stopping every five minutes of the show and saying, “And I am Noah and there is no other host of the Scathing Atheist before me; I am he who edits the show and uploadeth it; for no other compresses the sound-files and embeds the musical interludes.”
–
There’s such an odd mix of divine threat in here, too. Like, once you’ve said “Hey, I’m gonna smash your babies to death, burn your cities, rape your wives and feed your flesh to your brother,” there’s really no impact in later saying, “You’ll be chilly and settle for foods you don’t much care for.”

“And the towels will be a little scratchy!!! And you might need a long-sleeve tee!!!

–
Right. Two chapters after condemning the oppressors to be uncomfortably cold, he says, (quote) “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine.”
In chapter 50 we learn that Isaiah beat Jesus to the whole “turn the other cheek” thing by at least seven centuries.
–
And apparently Jesus was supposed to get burned to a crisp and come back all Freddy Krueger looking, according to chapter 52.
–
Then we get another prophecy about the Jews taking over the world.
1. Followed by an assurance that there will definitely never be a holocaust, so Isaiah’s sub-Padrean batting average continues.

Yeah, when the prophet of god is below the Mendoza line … it really show you how hard it is to go one for five against major league pitching.

But that’s just the thing. The fact that none of these prophecies have been fulfilled in the 27 centuries since he uttered them is just proof that this post-apocalyptic Jewish theocracy is yet to come.

Right … Just like 45-year-old pale, friendless virgins are just about due to get laid any minute. That’s like ten black numbers in a row on the roulette wheel. The next one pretty much has to be pink.

Then in 56 god suddenly gets nice for a minute, reminds us not to be ungood and offers to regrow the balls of eunuchs if they pray hard enough.

“Can’t promise anything about using public restrooms in Colorado … But I can get you those balls back.”

–
It’s such a weird contrast, too. Suddenly he starts talking about feeding the poor and clothing the naked… it’s like “We’re gonna boil their flesh and eat it, but don’t forget to brush and floss afterwards.”
But the hiatus doesn’t last long. Three chapters later, god’s putting on his “vengeance armor” and his “fury mantle” and setting out to kill people again.
And I’m sorry, but the prophecies that Isaiah is laying down are way more than just wrong. In chapter 60 he goes on and on about how there will be no more violence in Israel.

Well the maps are tricky … Maybe he meant a different part of the region, like Palestine.

–
–
Then in 63 God makes some people wine. Really weird chapter where the guy says, “Hey god, what’s all that crimson on your outfit… you been making wine?” And god answers back, “Na, just been crushing people to death beneath my mighty wrath and I guess I got a little on me.”
The last couple chapters have a sort of “any minute now” feel to them.
Yeah, a bit of Isaian ass-covering here where they’re basically saying, “Well sure, god’s gonna come and avenge all of our enemies, but how’s he supposed to do that if you assholes are still burning incense on bricks and slaughtering the wrong number of bulls?”

“And you definitely rubbed the lamp three times??? … And you reset the router? … That’s just fucking weird … Maybe you weren’t being Jewish hard enough.”

And then all the jews lived happily ever after.
1. And the non-jews had their flesh eaten by immortal worms. The end.

So we all know that Psalms was the longest book and we already got through that one. Anybody care to venture a guess what the second longest is?

Please let it be apocryphal.

Jeremiah. Next one on our list. And Ezekiel’s number three. But if it’s any comfort, all ten of the shortest books are ones we haven’t read yet…

It’s not.

Alright, so that does it for the Babble. Three weeks to go and another even worse one after that. Sorry. Not my fault. I didn’t write this crap.

When I read the “harp-farting” part I started to wonder.

Heath, Lucinda, thanks again.

Feedback

It’s time for the part of the show that comes next, Listener Feedback. This is the few minutes that come next and contain feedback from listeners.

Our first message comes in the form of a comment on the blog. Donovan rights us regarding our Wisdom books wrap up last week regarding Eli’s choice for the best passage in the section, Psalms 47:2

You bastards actually made me go look up to see if it actually said ‘the lord most high is terrible.’ I so fell for that shit, as ‘awesome’ as it was.

Yeah, so Donovan went to his bible, double checked the passage and read, “The Lord most High is Awesome,” and assumed we were just fucking with him. We weren’t. Now, I don’t think we’ve actually mentioned this since episode 10 when we launched the Holy Babble, but Heath, Lucinda and I are all reading different translations. Heath’s reading the King James, Lucinda has the NIV and I’m reading the New Revised Standard Edition. And they don’t always say the same shit.

Yeah and my copy of King James is by Dan Brown, and it’s got a lot of parts that are different.

So in this instance, most of the newer translations say, “The Lord most high is awesome,” but in the KJV and the many bibles based on that one, it reads, “The Lord most high is terrible.”

“Awesome” … “Terrible” … Are we splitting hairs?!?

We’ve also got an email correcting an actual mistake I made in that same segment. We were talking about “Song of Solomon” and I said it was the only book of the Old Testament that got cut from the Mormon Bible and apparently I was in error.

Sort of … technically … but it’s a moot point, because according to the Old Testament, everyone that’s not Jewish is about to be fucked any minute. You definitely can’t be changing stuff. If Old Testament God shows up, Mormons might as well be ass-raping angels … and that dude’s daughter … with a Baal figurine … on a high place.

But as is often the case, the more I looked into the error, the cooler it got. Joseph Smith had his out (scare quote) “Translation” of the bible, or at least, was working on one when he was killed. And in that version, he does omit Song of Solomon and claim that it is (quote) “not inspired writing” (end quote)

However, the LDS doesn’t actually use the Joseph Smith Translation (which they call the “Inspired Version”) as their official bible. While they’ve canonized parts of it, they still officially use the KJV. So there is no specific “Mormon Bible,” but if there was, it wouldn’t have Song of Solomon in it. Which is off, because I thought Joseph Smith was all about the pussy.

So Joey ‘Splatter Day Saints’ started his polygamist cult just for the tax breaks … Get your facts straight.

Our next email comes from Michael, who would like a little help with his bumper stickers. He prints these up himself in 100 point type and puts a new one on his car every week or two and was hoping we could come up with some slogans for him.

Right… he’s looking for slogans that (a) probably won’t get his car keyed, (b) promote atheism rather than demonize religion, and (c) might actually open someone’s mind.

Yeah, he offered some examples of stuff he’s used in the past. Stuff like “WWUD: Think for yourself”, “You pray for me; I’ll think for you”, “In Reason we Trust”, etc.

Yeah, he even went so far as to say he’d donate $10 to the show for each one we came up with that he decided to use. So… top ten?

Okay, so we’re looking for the top ten… non-derogatory, non-vandalism inspiring atheist slogans Michael can put on his car?

Not sure it’s exactly on our wheelhouse, but we’ll give it a try…

10 – Umm… I guess “fuck jesus in the wrist holes” would fall under “derogatory,” huh?
9 – “Atheism: If you can read this, you’re statistically more likely to agree with me.”
8 – Maybe… “Yo Savior’s Momma’s so fat…” no…
7 – “My atheist kid got your honor student pregnant … But only for about a week.”

Alright, obviously not our cup of tea here. But what we could do is crowdsource this shit. So if you have an idea for Michael’s bumper sticker and want to help us make ten bucks with it, tweet it (at) Noah (underscore) Lugeons, we’ll collect together the best ones and present them on next week’s feedback.

Yeah, but don’t tell Michael because we want him to think we made them up. And we’re obviously not very good at this … so make it believable.

Right. Good call.

And that’s all the feedback you get. If you want more, keep those Tweets, Facebook messages and emails coming. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Outro

Before we go quietly into the night tonight, I wanted to remind all of our listeners that Peter Boghossian is looking for volunteer artists to help with the app he’s developing to go with his book, “A Manual for Creating Atheists.” I happen to know we’ve got at least a couple of damn talented artists listening to this show, and as much as I understand the ridiculous rate at which artists get asked to work for free, this time it’s for a pretty beneficial product. It you’re interested, check the website for an email address or contact me and I’ll let you know who to get in touch with.

That’s all the blasphemy we’ve got for you this week, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with more. Between now and then you can find some bonus bits of Scatheism on our Facebook page, our Twitter Feed and our YouTube channel. And a big thanks to all the fine folks who have recently taken it upon themselves to share some of the diatribe videos.

And since I’ve already got a little gratitude momentum building up, I also need to thank Heath once more for the incredible amount of effort he puts into this show every week. I need to thank Lucinda for her willingness to take on an ever more demanding role as the show grows. I also need to thank Tucker from the “Atheist in the Trailer Park” podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth Quote. If his trailer park is anything like the ones down here, he had to hide in an interior room of his doublewide with all the doors locked and the windows shaded when he recorded that, so for that I thank him. If you’d like to check out his show, you’ll find it linked on the shownotes for this episode.

But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week’s most laudable listeners; Patrick, Monica, Warwick, Weston, Glen, Alex, Max, Wayne and Fred. Patrick, Monica and Warwick, who think so fast they could beat Professor X at Rock Paper Scissors; Weston, Glen and Alex, who turned down a Dos Equis ad campaign about their lives; and Max, Wayne and Fred, whose ejaculate is recommended by five out of five dentists. These nine inestimably estimable individuals have earned a small measure of immortality this week by giving us money; their praiseworthiness is now eternally archived that future generations will know of their great deeds.

If you, too, would like to earn the perpetual gratitude of future civilizations and the lifelong gratitude of Heath, Lucinda and me, you can make a per episode donation to the show at Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist, where you can also earn some bonus material and books and stuff. Or you can make a one time donation by clicking the “donate” button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you’d like to help but you’re allergic to donating, you can also help us a bunch by leaving us a five star review on iTunes, Stitcher or any other place that affords you an opportunity to tell everyone how many stars we’re worth.

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.

Categories: Show Transcripts, Uncategorized Tags: antitheist podcast, atheism podcast, atheist podcast, Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons, Noah Lugeons

Episode 74 – Partial Transcript

July 17, 2014 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Heath Enwright and Noah & Lucinda Lugeons

Note: Transcript contains elements that were removed from the episode due to time constraints.

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Warning: This episode is sexy.

Sponsor:

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Halal-iburton: Iraq’s favorite snackfood since the undisclosed year when we hatched our sinister plot.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s July 17th,

And kids in Cleveland want their jerseys back from the homeless people in Miami.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright, and from “America’s City of Light” New York, New York,

And “America’s City of Lite Beer” Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

Liberty University makes “God Particle Physics” a new pre-req for med students,
We’ll instigate a holy war,
And a Tennessee judge suggests a compromise, in which lesbians will be cured slowly – two weekends a month – by the National Guard.

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

You know, it would be easier to come up with a new diatribe every week if the theists didn’t just keep saying the same shit. But unfortunately, they’re stuck in their circular flowchart of debunked arguments and discredited assertions and we, as atheists, are doomed to spend our lives forever trying to drown the same rubber duckies.

Astute listener LeWayne shared a recent article from Slate last Tuesday, but I didn’t allow myself to read it right away. By Tuesday I’m so heavy in prep for the new episode that I couldn’t afford the three hours of rage the headline promised. The title of the piece was, “Atheists Used to Take the Idea of God Seriously… That’s Why They Mattered.” It a book review by a babbling urethra named Michael Robbins.

Now, ostensibly, it’s a review of Nick Spencer’s new history of atheism titled “Atheists: The Origin of the Species,” but one could be forgiven for reading the whole article without ever realizing that, as Robbins is far more focused on pining for the good old days when atheists would shut the fuck up and show religious people deference. In this, he’s really no different than the climate change denialists pissing and whining for equal air time with the people who know stuff and use facts.

His argument, in so much as he offers one, is that religion is more complicated than atheists give it credit for. He admits that religion is hard to define, so hard, in fact, that he makes no effort whatsoever, except to say that we have it wrong. But he rejects the claim that the god hypothesis should be treated as a scientific theory and here’s his justification: The primary purpose of religion isn’t to explain where the universe came from; it’s to tell people how to live their lives.

Yes, you stammering fuck-knob, we know that… we fully understand that the real purpose of religion is to control people’s lives and dictate their morals. That’s why we’re actively working against it. If religion was nothing more than a stupid way of explaining cosmic origins it would hardly be dangerous at all, would it? He references Dawkin’s assertion that religion is a competing explanation for facts about the universe and life and call it (quote) “bullshit”… because apparently telling people how to live their lives doesn’t count as a fact about… life?

He tries the “non-overlapping magisteria” gambit when he tells us that science and religion ask different questions about different things. But again, we already know that… science asks answerable questions about real things. That’s what makes it science. And while we’re on the subject, nobody in the atheist movement begrudges religious people for asking questions… it’s when they start offering answers that we tell them to shut up during grown up time.

But just in case that didn’t stick, he has a few more worn out apologetics to throw against the wall. He gives us the whole “How did something come from nothing?” nonsense and apparently he’s well aware of how science actually answers that question, but dismisses it because real nothing wouldn’t contain quantum fluctuations or laws of physics. So he imagines a state of being unobserved in the universe and unsupported by any scientific model… a space so empty it doesn’t even contain the laws of physics and demands that atheists explain why that state of being doesn’t exist. And no, by the way, he makes no effort at all to explain why the existence of quantum fluctuations is somehow harder to account for than the existence of omnipotent, conscious creative entities that care who we fuck.

He then points out that he’s not just “atheist-bashing” when he says we’re ignorant, unthinking automatons blindly swearing allegiance to Richard Dawkins by pointing out (I swear he really does this) that some of his best friends are atheists. Just the good kind that shuts the fuck up and takes him seriously.

And that’s the whole argument in a nutshell. “It okay if you know I’m wrong, but at least pretend like I’m reasonable! At least pretend like there’s some legitimate debate. The very least you could do is hold my claims to a different set of standards than all other claims. God damn it, I matter!”

But they don’t matter. No actual science is still hashing out the god thing. No physicists are losing sleep over the Kalam cosmological argument. No biologists are comparing their findings to the “god did it” model. No ethicists are proposing the “cause god’ll burn you in hell” approach. No doctors are prescribing prayer. No lawyers are invoking the “devil really did make him do it” defense. No financial planner is figuring in the “they’re about due for a miracle” variable. No meteorologists are factoring in god’s wrath.

The god hypothesis failed. The conversation is over. Religion lost. It’s only relevant in the imaginary academic disciplines they made up to talk about religion. And I’m sure that fact is really inconvenient for the Michael Robbins of the world and all, but nothing they’ve done in the last ten thousand years justifies wasting any more of our intellectual prowess seriously entertaining the “it’s all the whim of a magical Jew” paradigm.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/07/atheists_the_origin_of_the_species_by_nick_spencer_reviewed.single.html

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is every Jihadis dream target Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to earn your fatwa?

Are you kidding me? The tattoo of Mohammed on my stomach waves when I jiggle. What do I have to do? …

The truffle shuffle at a few more mosques, I suppose…

…Hey you guys!!! Fatwa!!!

In our lead story tonight, the pope didn’t say a goddamn thing, now look at the birdies… if you trust Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, but we don’t, so we’ll report it the other way, in which Pope Fran-Sybian said in an interview last week that about one of every fifty Catholic priests is a child-rapist. Though the pope said this should, for some reason, comfort him, he finds it almost disturbing enough to act upon.

“So if everyone just makes sure they only know about 40 or so priests – call it 49 max – we’ll all be fine … It’s like cutting the ace of spades … Pretty much impossible.”

Of course, the interview in question wasn’t on tape and the Vatican spokesman denies the pope said shit that was on tape, so no shock that they denied key elements of this report. His most vociferous protests revolved around reports that the pope said child-sex-abusers were prevalent even among Bishops and Cardinals. They also disputed the two percent number, though advocacy groups believe the actual percentage to be almost three times as high.

Sounds like the Pope didn’t say some pretty damning stuff. And how did he decide on “not saying” the 2% number, specifically??? He knows the minimum real number, and decided to deflate it by a “believable amount”???

Assuming Pope Frankle-Biter actually said this, I’m sure his hope was that we would all point out that experts estimate that as many as two percent of all adult males may be pedophiles. That being said, if his number is accurate, that would mean for every ten pedophiles that apply, they hire an average of ten. (But that means they can magically identify pedophiles with 100% accuracy!!! … And hire them!!! Exactly!!!) Lombardi’s focus on the percentage being way lower for Bishops and Cardinals is even harder to get a handle on, as this would mean that they know which ones are fucking kids and don’t promote them. And while that’s no doubt true, it’s nowhere near as bad as pretending the kid-rapers just keep slipping through the well-lubed cracks.

If they made it a “fire-able offense” … that would be a good first step. Then maybe focus on “not hiring” the rapists. Baby steps.

Of course, arguing over what percentage of priests fuck kids is a distraction from the real issue, which is the continued global cover up and active sheltering of the kiddie-diddlers. In other words, it’s probably best to get to the hospital before trying to decide how many of the snakes that just bit you were poisonous.

Pope: 2% of Catholic priests are pedophiles: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/14/pope-francis-priests-paedophiles-la-repubblica

And in “GI Jane Lynch” news, Tennessee magistrate Judge Joe Rehyansky recently suggested on conservative propaganda site, The Daily Caller, that lesbians (but not gays) should be allowed to join the military. Why?!? He believes the onslaught of unsolicited dick in the barracks would cure these women of their preference for consensual vagina … But unfortunately the existing straight female soldiers aren’t a bunch of rapists, so the plan wouldn’t also work for curing the gays.

Ah, the old “Banky Edwards” Good-deep-dicking theory of sexual reorientation. What does it say about religious conservatives that they’re suggestion for curing gay men is praying for them and for gay women it’s fucking them?

The “Private Pyle, Private Mound” idea was actually so stupid and offensive, that even Tucker Carlson’s The Daily Caller made retractions. But before they did, Judge Joe got out several pearls of wisdom to the world. Some of those pearls actually still remain on the site, because they’re really good at drawing lines.

This shit read like an anthropological love poem to rape. The dude literally talks about men swinging through trees to subdue and impregnate as many women as they could, then wiped down his keyboard and added, “It was a tough job, but someone had to do it.”

In another such example, he explains that the natural order during hunter/gatherer times was – by necessity – very rapey … and therefore marvels that women ever got to make vaginal choices before the times of Mace and rape whistles. But now that women have those protections – the judge laments – they’re free to choose “zero penises” … which is a big problem.

But in this assholes mind, being a woman is like being Harry Potter… you don’t choose the wand, the wand chooses you.

Ok so here’s Rehyansky’s since-retracted solution: (quote) “Get the distaff part of our homosexual population off our collective ‘Broke Back’, thus giving straight male GIs a fair shot at converting lesbians and bringing them into the mainstream.” (end quote) … And as much as I appreciate his feeble attempt at gay movie wordplay, he needs to be sodomized by lesbians with huge clits until he cries “Gay Aunt” and stops liking vagina.

As much as I love the visual, I think we’ll have to leave the 30 seconds on the clock for now… I don’t think I have enough Homophobic-Judge-Lesbian-Anal-Clit-Rape titles in me.

Judge: Lesbians can be cured by male soldiers: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/11/26/us-judge-says-lesbians-can-be-cured-by-male-soldiers/

And in “String Theory For Dummies” news tonight, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has challenged the right of Miami Jews to use public property to fool their notoriously stupid deity. This story involves what is known as an “Eruv”, which is ridiculous even compared to other Jewish god-baffles.

Is this the one where the Jewish guys – who are expecting a Siberian snowstorm in July at any moment – walk around Williamsburg, Brooklyn with enormous amounts of yarn, instead of carrying their wallet and keys in a backpack???

That’s the one, yes. So among the myriad arbitrary things jew god doesn’t let his chosen people do on the Sabbath is carry stuff in their pockets in public. But with a quick bit of spiritual MacGyvering, Jews can get around the rule by tying a string around their whole community, thus fooling god into thinking it’s not a public place, but a “private” community. The problem, of course, is that the FFRF is a little more observant than Jew-god and still realizes despite the string that those places are public property.

Honestly, I can see why the author made the Old Testament God character so pissed. God tells them to empty their pockets before they leave the house, and instead they tie a string to the front door and carry the spool around the city of Miami like a lunatic.

<<You go out with some scissors and you could take hostages.>>

The FFRF argues that as innocuous as the strings may be they’re still religious symbols that serve a purpose only for people of one religion and thus should be treated no different than a crucifix placed on public land. The local Jewish community has yet to respond, as they’re still trying to figure out how all us gentiles outwitted their magic string.

FFRF challenges public “Eruvs”: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/07/13/the-most-ridiculous-religious-loophole-youll-ever-hear-about-is-the-subject-of-an-ffrf-complaint/

And in “Educational Malpractice” news, Liberty University of Lynchburg, Tennessee – the Young Earth Creationist institution of lower learning founded by Jerry Falwell – is set to launch it’s own medical school next semester … Which makes about as much sense as the home of Jack Daniels being a dry county.

I wonder if their stance on evolution will require them to perpetually use the flu vaccine from 1938.

The school is only provisionally accredited at the moment, and won’t even be eligible for consideration to be fully accredited until it’s first class is about to graduate. And regardless, they won’t be granting actual MD degrees, but instead DO’s … which are kind of like the GoBot Mr. Pibb GED of the doctor world. So clearly, whoever’s in charge of that, doesn’t want to grant them anything until they demonstrate adherence to a proper curriculum that’s been shown to actually heal things.

And it doesn’t help that it’s a school of “Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine”, which, for those who aren’t familiar with the term, means “Magic bullshit doctor.” This is quackery to the second power here. Creationists creating Chiropractors?

Right so they’re not gonna be allowed to graduate creationist doctors unless, for example, they manage to catch two birds, kill one, dip the live one in the dead one’s blood, sprinkle the blood on a leper, add 8 more ridiculous procedures, and cure him … Barring that, the medical board’s gonna insist on antibiotics … from real doctors, instead of Leviticus remedies from insane people.

Hey, don’t knock it… my grandma had dead-bird, blood-sprinkled-altar therapy and it did wonders for her electromagnetic hypersensitivity and her Morgellons disease.

Creationist med school to open in August: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/07/15/liberty-university-will-soon-launch-its-own-medicine-school

And from the “We were gonna tell AIDS jokes anyway” file, Maryland pastor Kwabena Sarpong informed a despondent crowd at a fourth of July “Celebrate America” event that we’re only one religious revival away from curing HIV.

Then what the fuck are they waiting for?!? Have another revival and cure AIDS!!! Usefully predict one single good thing that happens!!! … Once!!!

Drawing on the church’s long tradition of knowing stuff and curing things, Sarpong explained that the deviantly secular America would turn to the church if science could just fail to cure HIV long enough, thus implying that everyone who died of AIDS was part of a divine “they’re not lookin’ at me” temper tantrum.

So this guy is saying: “There’s a disease that scientists haven’t cured yet, so atheists will soon assume the only explanation is an asshole god being ‘mysterious’.”

It’s also worth noting that according to Sarpong, provided gay rights don’t irreconcilably damage our nation first, we will turn to god when AIDS patients give up on medicine and let religious people lay hands on them at which time they will (quote) “start walking” (end quote). So yes, apparently god has the power to make people with AIDS walk, along with other miracles Sarpong has witnessed including giving earrings to the deaf and regrowing the beards of amputees.

Pastor says church will soon cure AIDS: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pastor-religious-right-event-predicts-church-will-soon-cure-hiv

Yeah it’s important to get plenty of walking and other exercise while you’re experiencing multiple organ failure … And in “Rubber Meets the Robe” news, the recent SCOTUS ruling on Hobby Lobby was so awful and backwards, that it created – against all odds – a progressive faction of Christianity that is now scrambling to distance itself from the fundamentalists, in one particular case by handing out condoms in front of an Illinois Hobby Lobby store earlier this month … Not that dudes buying paint for their Battlestar: Galactica figurines are largely at risk of needing birth control. But I like the effort, regardless.

No self respecting man would buy his Battlestar: Galactica figurine paint at Hobby Lobby. Hell, they don’t even carry “Cylon Silver”.

At the very least, the condom giveaway seems to have been more successful than the bigoted reverse campaign of West Virginia army wife, Holly Fisher … Being extremely well-read on the intricacies of political science, Amy Fisher tweeted a picture of herself outside a Hobby Lobby, with a “Pro-Life” T-shirt, and a Chic-Fil-A soda cup.

Over under eleven for the number of bumper stickers on her car? I’d take the over.

Feeling this was too subtle, she decided to up the ante with another picture, which has since landed her large amounts of social media attention, and made her look even dumber, if that was possible. Her second pic was a Fourth of July tribute, with an American flag in the background, a Bible in one hand, and an assault rifle in the other …

And the ashes of a bald eagle clenched between her ass cheeks…

When someone quickly juxtaposed this shot with one of every jihadist pic ever, it became clear the only difference was the Koran, and a different colored flag. And now she’s the butt of the joke in an internet meme, which refers to her as “Holly Hobby Lobby” and “The Face of the American Taliban”.

Shoulda learned it from Oswald. Those pictures of you sexually aroused by your firearm always come back to haunt you.

Clergy protest SCOTUS by handing out condoms at Hobby Lobby (Rubber meets the robe news?): http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/07/03/3456254/clergy-protest-scotus-decision-by-handing-out-condoms-at-illinois-hobby-lobby-store/<<AND>>Twat learns to tweet: http://www.ibtimes.com/who-holly-fisher-holly-hobby-lobby-now-internet-meme-called-american-taliban-1621310<<and>> http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/holly-fisher-army-mom-sets-off-twitter-firestorm-with-gun-flag-and-bible-photo-1.8744536

And in “I’ll Show You Where the Beef Is” news tonight, Christian radio host and stuttering homophobic Bryan Fischer is apoplectic this week over Burger King’s new “Proud Whopper”. In a commendable effort to embrace the current century and a less commendable effort to associate gay people with a restaurant known for shoving disappointingly small amounts of shriveled meat between dry, flaky buns; Burger King unveiled a new rainbow wrapped whopper with a message that read, “We’re all the same inside.”

“…Colon full of something called meat.” … This sounds like more of a “Five Guys Burgers and Fries” campaign … Or maybe In N Out Burger … Double Double Manimal Style!!!

The “Proud Whopper” was part of a limited time campaign in the San Francisco area that included an online video of customer’s reactions to the new packaging. One woman on the video said the message on the wrapper made her cry. She then revealed herself to be a first time Burger King customer by adding, (quote) “A burger’s never made me cry before.”

“Next on Doctor Oz … Where do Ass Burgers fall on the Autism Rainbow Spectrum???”

As touching as this inclusivity was to some, Fischer lamented over the decision saying (quote) “I think this is a marketing mistake… because I gotta guarantee you, when people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.” (end quote). Because how could one possibly be expected to look at a rainbow colored fast food wrapper and not visualize a dick being rammed into a man’s ass? Just suck a cock, Bryan! One cock… I promise you, you’re gonna love it. Just let go, step out of the closet and suck the first cock you find… you can use mine if you want to, just embrace your transparent desire to tongue-buff a hairy pair of testicles already.

Have you ever seen the people that walk into a Des Moines, Iowa Burger King??? The rainbow wrapper and the image of ‘dude on dude’ might not help, but they’re eating those 3 fucking Whoppers!!!

Christian Radio Host: “Burger King is gonna make us eat them Gay burgers!” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/11/christian-radio-host-fears-iowans-may-be-forced-to-eat-gay-pride-burger/

And finally tonight, from the “Gay Coffee Scalded My Balls” file: A slow-witted, overly-sensitive Christian named Joseph Parker got a job at a gay bar. So keeping in mind he deserves whatever he gets, here’s the rest of the story …

Except buttrape. Because we at the Scathing Atheist do not endorse butt-raping Christians.

So just get that out of your head … Parker wanted to find a pleasant Jesus-y work environment, so he decided the best place was an alcohol store for homosexuals called “Sidetrack”, in a neighborhood of Chicago called Boystown. He became offended by the hilarious anti-religious humor in clips shown on comedy night, such as South Park’s The Spirit of Christmas, and decided to sue the bar for religious harassment.

If you don’t want to be insulted, find a less stupid religion. It’s that easy. Jesus getting his ass kicked by Santa is funny. Nothing a court of law can do about that.

Exactly!!! Now the complaint about the videos is only one part of this litigious asshole’s case, but fortunately reason prevailed on this particular issue. Judge Amy St. Eve rejected the “cartoon is harassment” claim, pointing out that any reasonable person can see that what happens on the televisions … is NOT the offensive part of a gay bar to a Christian employee.

Right. What the hell was even claiming? “They didn’t just play South Park clips… they played South Park clips at me?”

At some point this story clearly needed to turn into … 30 seconds on the clock … “Offensive Cartoons to Scare Away Shitty Christian Busboys From Their Job at the Gay Bar” … GO!!!

Maybe we could count down all the sex acts Jesus hates in “101 Damnations”

“Erect it Ralph”

“A Gland Before Time”

Since we started with animal stuff anyway … “Booty and the Beastiality” ???

And for the gutsier bestial “The Lion Kink”

“Mo, Dwight, and the Seven Dwarfs”

What about a team of gender reassignment superheroes called “The Ex-Men?”

“Beavis and Butthead do an American Tail: Fievel Goes South”

“Grabba-Dees Balls”

“How to Drain Your Dragon”

“Inspect-his Gadget”

“Adopted Family Guys”

Reaching way back here… “The Last Eunuch Porn”

I don’t want to sound like a queer or nothin’, but eunuch porns are kick-ass … Okay done quoting that cinematic classic called “Orgazmo” …

What about “Sex Toy Story” ??? <Round 7 – Step it up!> … with Spuzz Lightyear

Now I’m imagining the Pixar logo, but with a fleshlight instead of the little desk lamp… what about “Captain More than 6000 year old Planet?” That’ll piss ‘em off.

“White and Cloudy with a Lance of Meat, … Balls”

“Phallus and Gromit: Curse of the Queer-Rabbit”

“The Litte Mermaid Money Shots” … AKA … “Under the Semen” … AKA … “Blinding Nemo”

“The Cocky and Ball-Wrinkle Show?”

“Manimaniacs” … And the lesbian one was “Shiny Poon Adventures”

“Chalice in Wonderland” and the sequel, of course, “Through the Hooking Ass”

Maybe a Lindsay Lohan lesbian jail porn? … cartoon? … Since that’s completely a propos right now … What about: “Li-Lo and Bitch” ???

And because you can never get enough Lindsay Lohan lesbian jail porn, how about “Hey There, It’s Li-Lo-gi Bare?” Just one of the many fine programs from Lindsay Lo-Hanna Bars-Bare-All productions.

“Sponge Bob’s Spare Pants” … Things got messy with Patrick’s starfish … And then again with the spare pants … It’s a jizz mopper joke.

Judge rejects claim that playing “South Park” at gay bar creates hostile work environment for religious employees: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/07/05/judge-rejects-claim-that-anti-christian-comedy-clips-played-at-gay-bar-created-a-hostile-work-environment

Well it’s kind of a universal sign that when the jizz mopper shows up, we’re done, so I guess that’s gonna do it for headlines tonight. Heath, thanks as always.

And when we come back the glass will be a little streaky.

This Week in Misogyny:

Okay, so I want to be careful because I don’t want to turn this segment into “This week in men saying dumb shit about rape”. But as I perused the headlines this week it became inevitable that this was gonna be another rape-week. So let’s take an international rape trip together and learn about all the new types of rapist the world has to offer. I’d ask your permission, but then it might end up being a consensual trip.

We’ll start in the rape cultural capital of the world, India, where we meet the “uncontrollable” rapist. These nomadic barbarians apparently wander on to Indian beaches and snap into frantic rape frenzies if they see female navels. Minister Sudin Diaper-Licker warns about these types while reminding women not to tempt them by publicly wearing bikinis.

Diaper-Licker head’s the public works department for India’s wealthiest state and his proposal for preventing the unending, statewide rape epidemic is for the women to dress less rapeably. But don’t worry, one-pieces aren’t the only suggestion he offers to improve the safety of India’s women. He also suggest not wearing short skirts.

Bikinis to blame for Indian rapes, says state minister: http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2014/jul/02/bikinis-blame-sex-crimes-goa-beaches-minister?CMP=fb_gu

The next stop on our tour lands us in the United Kingdom where we meet the “Classic Rapist”. I can’t tell you exactly what a “Classic Rapist” is, but I can tell you that convicted rapist Lee Setford isn’t one of them. After being found guilty of raping a woman who was asleep on his couch, the judge explained that Setford wasn’t “a classic rapist,” adding, (quote) “you’re not the type who goes searching for a woman to rape” (end quote).

Now before you go condemning this neo-rapist in your head, I should mention some of the other mitigating circumstances His Honor pointed out. First of all, the young woman was (quote) “a pretty girl who [he] fancied” but perhaps more importantly, he (quote) “simply couldn’t resist.”

No word on whether the victim was also guilty of bikini wearing, but I think we can all agree that any woman who loses consciousness without locking her iron panties is just asking for it.

Don’t worry, he wasn’t a “classical rapist”, he just lost control, says Judge: http://www.salon.com/2014/07/03/judge_says_man_who_raped_sleeping_woman_is_not_a_classic_rapist_just_lost_control/

And finally, we head back to the good old USA to a man so misogynistic he’s in the intro to this segment. You may recall Todd Akin as the man who introduced us to “Legitimate rape” while aborting his senatorial bid back in 2012. This led to several futile weeks of apologies and he’s back in the news again with another apology…. for the last apology.

Despite disavowing those statements repeatedly in the media aftermath, this week he revealed in an op-ed that he had his fingers crossed the whole time and was secretly “not sorry”.

Akins doubled down on the claim that the stress of rape kills sperm despite there being no actual evidence to support his bullshit. He invites those who doubt him to simply google “stress and fertilization” because the google never lies.

Todd Akin apologizes for apoligizing for rape comment: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/07/11/todd-akin-is-sorry-that-he-was-sorry/

That’s all I have for you this week and after spending the whole segment discussing patriarchal excuses for rape, I kind of wish we’d just had another bunny-punching story to talk about. I’ll be back next week unless we somehow rid the world of sexism between now and then.

Skit:

Hello, this is god.

Afternoon god, this is Sally with Facebook.

Sally. How the hell are you?

Be careful god, you know how nervous I get when you use my name and “hell” in the same sentence.

(chuckles) So what can I do for you today, Sally?

Just a couple prayer requests that met their “like” threshold. There’s the little girl in Racine with the heart valve issue; there’s the down syndrome kid in Mechanicsburg that got his penis caught in the tractor… there’s… let’s see… I’ve got a kid in Omaha with Leukemia that got his ten thousand likes… not the black kid, of course…

Listen, Sally… this was great the first couple of times, but if we’re gonna keep doing this, I think we need to up the limit a bit. Maybe a million likes?

I’ll pass that suggestion along, but I don’t see my supervisors acting on it, to be honest.

I’m serious. Last month I wasted a perfectly good miracle giving some kid in Phoenix a fully functional Iron Man suit. And I still haven’t gotten around to brimstoning Justin Bieber…

Well, we would advise you to budget your time better, god.

Hey, look, back when I agreed to this I never knew it was gonna get out of hand so quickly. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it up.

Look buddy, you’re omnipotent, but you’re not “Zuckerberg” omnipotent. You’ve got a contract with us through 2018 and we’ll raise the minimum if and when we decide to.

Yes ma’am.

Alright. So where was I…

Omaha.

Right. The old woman with the heart murmur in Springfield, Missouri only hit eight thousand so go ahead and kill her… oh, but her dog had a tumor and he got ten thousand likes so a miraculous remission there whenever you get a chance.

That kid with the two heads in India didn’t get ten thousand likes, did he?

Not even close.

Oh, good… cause I don’t know how the hell I was gonna fix that. Whoo… what a fuck up that was.

Not to worry, God, we specialize in affluent white children.

Oh, hey, do you talk to Satan at all?

Of course. I see him in the cafeteria all the time.

Is he… um… what’s he been up to?

He’s hard at work on the new page design.

Can you maybe… tell him I said hi?

Yeah, God… I’ll tell him… again.

Tell him I’m keeping pretty busy up here, though, you know? Those parking spaces aren’t just gonna find themselves. Yes, sirree, I’m still happy that we broke up and all… but still tell him I said hi.

Will do, God.

Thanks Sally. Oh, and sorry about the thing with the bus and your uncle Rick.

The what?

Oh, nevermind… sorry, that’s next week. My bad…

Wait… what thing?

Nothing… gotta run

God? <Dial Tone> God? God… Damn you…

Poem – Song of Solomon

When I decided to write a poem for each book of the bible, I didn’t realize how often that would leave me writing poems about bad poems. So when it came to “Song of Solomon” I figured we could just give it a modern reboot. “Song of Solomon” is a love poem in three parts, the man, the woman and a group of friends.

So joining me for the poem tonight is Lucinda, playing the part of the woman… sorry to typecast you, baby… and playing the part of the “friends” will be the intrepid Heath Enwright. You guys ready?

Alright… “Song of Solomon,” in rhyme:

Man: My lover, my lady, I think of you lately; every time that I pasture my sheep.

I think of you often in an effort to soften; if things get hard when I’m trying to sleep.

Woman: My lover, my suitor, I have a dripping wet cooter, which is a breed of American turtle,

And the land where I dwell, was as hard as his shell, but you left my soil soft, plowed and fertile.

Friends: My companions, my friends; I think we know how this ends; as your passions are sure to prevail.

I see you connected, as love is erected; In fact, I’ve pictured it in vivid detail.

Man: My cohort, my chum, I want her to come; Again to my chamber and linger;

Friends: It’s clear you’re enamored, so just get her hammered; and when you’re done, let me smell your fingers.

Woman: My acquaintance, my pal; he should grace my canal; but how should I offer this plea?

Friends: Hmm… In the midst of a chat; simply tell him all that, but when you say “canal”, maybe leave off the “C”?

Man: My beauty, my love, your eyes are like doves, and your teeth are like damp, naked goats.

Friends: That comparison’s shit.

Man: Yes, I’ll freely admit, that’s not the sexiest of biblical quotes.

Woman: My darling, my beau; I want you to know, that when I think of you I tingle inside.

I throb and I shiver, and tremble and quiver, or at least I did until the batteries died.

Man: But at last we’re united;

Friends: Squeeze her tits, dude,

Man: Be quiet;

Woman: Hey listen, that’s advice you should follow.

Man: My love, my divine, let me pour you some wine.

Woman: It won’t be the last thing tonight that I’ll swallow.

Man: You should lie on the bed,

Woman: This wine’s gone to my head, so have your way with me before I get sleepy.

Friends: Go ahead man, just kiss her.

Man:My lover, my sister…

Woman: Don’t call me that; it’s fucking creepy.

Man: My angel, my dear, you seem burdened, I fear;

Woman: I am love.

Man: By what?

Woman: All this clothing.

Man: I’ll see that undone.

Friends: Well you two have fun; I’ll be out here beating off to her moaning.

Woman: My suitor,

Man: My lover;

Woman: Below him,

Man: Above her;

Woman: With his sweat dripping down on my head. My lover,

Man: My lady,

Woman: My darling,

Man: My baby; I’m sorry, but that wasn’t sweat.

Man: My love, a proposal,

Woman: <Garbled>

Man:I suppose I’ll; wait to ask until you’re done sucking.

Woman: <swallows hard> Go ahead.

Man: I think we should wed.

Friends: I pronounce you man and wife, now get back to the fucking.

Feedback:

It’s time for the part of the show that comes next, Listener Feedback. This is the part of the show with a segment title that’s so self explanatory, it needs no additional explanation but I always feel the need to put a sentence here anyway.

Our first email comes from Sweden where Filip asks for a little clarification on the Hobby Lobby ruling we’ve been talking about the last couple of weeks. Specifically, he wondered if we could elaborate on the term “sincerely held religious belief” and what that means from a legal perspective.

Yeah, that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? As near as I can tell, the testicled members of the Supreme Court plan to use a combination of FMRIs and nanobots to determine the sincerity of one’s beliefs because if they couldn’t do that, it would be an impossible to apply legal standard that could only lead to the wealthier and more litigious believers gaining privileges the rest of us don’t have, huh?

Maybe they could make a list of all the laws we are allowed to break from now on. I’m drawing up the bible for my new religion …

But if we haven’t talked this thing to death yet, I do hope to get somebody on with a background in law that has enough familiarity with this case to answer Filip’s questions and several of my own.

We also got an email from Terry who is wondering when we’ll have the Diatribes collected as an audiobook for our visually impaired listeners. And I know that seems like it would be really easy to do… If only Noah had all the audio files of the individual diatribes already recorded to give him a head start…

Right, but finding the time to record all the intros, put it altogether and edit it so the sound levels are consistent has proven to be a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. I promise, I am working on it, though, and I hope to have it done by the end of the month unless some other unforeseen thing is hard.

And Noah’s old and married, so that would be unforeseen.

We also got a Tweet or three from @BangsNaughtyBit who thought we were a little hard on pastor Ricky Martin in last week’s lead story. You’ll recall he was the pastor that was running the refuge for sex offenders in Alabama. And to be honest, when you give Heath and me an Alabama trailer park full of sex offenders, that’s like our air.

Yeah this guy’s absolutely right … I’d like to issue a self-proclaimed completely genuine apology to the guy that made the perfectly reasonable decision to hoard convicted sex offenders in his backyard redneck terrarium … I’m so very sorry. You’re a gentleman and a biblical scholar.

That being said, after reading up a little more on the story I think Naughty Bits is probably right and while it does make for great dick joke fodder, I was a little harsh on the dude when I called him the “bad” Ricky Martin. I know they have laws that say that sex offenders aren’t allowed to live within a thousand miles of a thing at this point and as hard as it is to sympathize with sex offenders, they do have to actually live somewhere. And anybody with any sense knows to keep their kids away from churches so that’s as good a place for them as any, I suppose.

I thought convicted sex offenders were supposed to get murdered in jail … What’s up with the Alabama jail system???

Certainly not the first time those words were assembled in an incredulous inquiry. So anyway, Pastor Martin was reaching out to help and even if it was in a way that kind of screams “terrible idea”, it’s almost certainly not as bad as “Living La Vida Loca.”

And finally tonight, an email from Karen, whose daughter is going to her first bible study next week. She writes;

“… I was inclined to tell her she couldn’t go, but I don’t want to deny her time with her best friend and I don’t want to force my worldview on her the way my parents forced theirs on me. At the same time, I want to arm her against the type of indoctrination I know takes place at things like this. Any advice?”

So first of all, I want to take issue with the concept of not wanting to force your worldview on your kids. That’s a pretty common thing amongst atheists for exactly the reason Karen describes; my parents crammed their religion down my throat and I don’t want to cram my atheism down my kid’s throats.

Yeah atheists tend to be better about the … throat cramming kids stuff.

But I look at this as a false analogy. Cramming reason down somebody’s throat isn’t the same as brainwashing them. If your parents raised you to believe in Shamanic medicine and then you grew up and learned about Western medicine, you wouldn’t let your kid explore both and make up their mind. You would tell them about the one that’s real and warn them about the other one.

You can’t really “brainwash” the idea of: “Be flexible based on the data.” That’s not a crammable thing.

Exactly… but I guess one way or the other it makes for a good top ten list. So top ten warnings to give a non-religious kid going to their first bible study.

10 – Don’t worry, they’ll provide you with knee pads … Some of them are even built-in.
9 – The Bible isn’t the one with Voldemort in it.
8 – Don’t be female.
7 – Remember, if it has talking animals, it’s fantasy…
6 – It has talking animals.
5 – Ask yourself the whole time, “Is this more fun than Minecraft?”
4 – You know all those stupid kids in your class? They often become adults. Just keep that in mind.
3 – Just remember, if you decide to be religious, you’re not allowed to touch yourself.
2 – And no, not even the “Dutch Rudder” … or the “Israeli Jib Sheet”
1 – Don’t forget your rape-whistle.

And that’s all the feedback you get. If you want more, send us more emails, Tweets and smoke signals. You’ll find all the contact info on the Contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Outro:

Before we go quietly into the night I wanted to give everyone a quick update. You might recall a story we shared a couple of weeks back about a humanist couple that were killed in a car accident. We urged our listeners to check out a fundraiser that was set up for their two surviving daughters. Anyway, we got an email from Elena, who was coordinating all of this a couple days back and I wanted to pass her thanks along to our extremely generous listeners. The two girls are back home and doing much better, they send their gratitude, as does Elena, as do I.

I also wanted to remind you that you can catch more me on episodes 188 and 188.5 of the Imaginary Friends Show Dot Com Pode-cast with Jake-Farr Wharton. We were joined by Paul from the Quranify Me Podcast and the skit we just wrapped up as well as Twitter’s very own (at) Amanda the Ablaze. We had a lot of fun, made boob jokes, talked science. If you want to check it out, you’ll find links on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Also wanted to thank everyone who picked up a copy of our book, “Diatribes, Volume One: 50 Essays from a Godless Misanthrope” over the last couple of weeks. Big upsurge in sales this week so we’re glad to contribute to world literacy. Thanks to everyone who recommended the book, talked it up on Social Media or left us a review on Amazon. And remember, as of next week we’re already halfway through Volume Two, so be sure to pick up your copy of Volume One, quick before it’s old.

I can’t shut her down without thanking Heath once again for all the hats he wears in this operation. I want to thank one of the three or four wives on the planet that would agree to do all the crazy shit I ask Lucinda to do for this podcast.

Obviously I want to toss out a big thanks to Thomas from Thomas and the Bible and Atheistically Speaking; Paul from Quranify Me; and David from My Book of Mormon. Thomas may have won but the competition is damn stiff. I’ll invite you to see for yourself by checking out all of their shows, which you’ll find linked on this week’s shownotes as well.

Of course, I need to thank Terry from the Amateur Skeptics’ Podcast for both providing this week’s Farnsworth Quote and for providing me with the image of Homo Habilis women on bicycles wearing lycra. Terry also asked me to plug a charity bike ride coming up in Colorado. It’s a fundraiser to the American Diabetes Association, she’ll be riding a metric century, which is a really long time, I think. Anyway, I poked around a bit on the website and couldn’t find the date, but I did find a donate link, so if any of our fine and charitable listeners would like to help Terry help people with diabetes, you’ll find a link on the homepage of our website as well as on the shownotes for this episode.

But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week’s most adjectivey nouns; Jay, Tor, Danielle, Tim, Ryan, Chris, David, Benjamin and Erik. Jay, Tor and Danielle, whose tongues are so dextrous they can make an envelope come; Tim, Ryan and Chris, who are so sharp they can’t have any Bs or Es in their names; and David, Benjamin and Erik, who are the only non planetary objects that can affect the global climate when their poles shift.

These nine noble nonbelievers have nudged us that much closer to financial sustainability this week by giving us money. It takes guts to give us money, as well as a skeleton in which to put them. But if you have a skeleton and organs, you, too, can give us money. You can make a per episode donation at Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist, or you can make a one time donation by clicking the “Donate” button on the right side of our homepage.

And if you’d like to help but you’re still saving up for the cybernetic implants, you can also help us a ton by joining the more than 500 awesome people who have taken the time to leave us a five star review on iTunes… or the more than 42 awesome people who have done the same on Stitcher.

Categories: Show Transcripts, Uncategorized Tags: atheism podcast, atheist comedy, atheist podcast

Episode 69 – Partial Transcript

June 13, 2014 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Heath Enwright and Noah & Lucinda Lugeons

(Note: Transcript contains elements that were edited out of the episode due to time constraints)

LINK TO EPISODE

LINK TO SUPPORT US ON PATREON

LINK TO BUY THE BOOK

Warning: This podcast contains obscene gestures.

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new faith based tire sealant Cruci-fix-a-flat. Every twelve ounce can comes complete with no ingredients, because if god wanted you to get to work, he wouldn’t have put that nail in the road. Now get on your knees and thank him for not giving your children boils.

Cruci-fix-a-flat, because who needs a spare, when you’ve got a prayer?

And now, the Scathing Atheist

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s June 12th,

And this big soccer thing is already getting in the way of NFL training camp coverage.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright, and from modern day Gomorrah, New York, New York,

And almost as modern as Gomorrah, Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist

In this week’s episode,

The FFRF will make Iowa sit in the corner and stare at the wall for the rest of the period,
Catholics will buttfuck kids and lie about it… again…
And India still refuses to get down with the Sikhness.

But first, the diatribe.

Diatribe:

I saw one of the most epic beat downs in the history of theological debate last week and you may have seen it, too. If not, I’ll have a link for it on the shownotes and even though it’s long as fuck and your blood will boil every time the Christian sperm flake opens his mouth, it’s totally worth the two hours.

The title of the debate was “Is it reasonable to believe in god?”. Arguing in the negative was Matt Dillahunty of Atheist Experience fame. Arguing in the “La-la-la, I can’t hear you” was presuppositionalist testicle laceration Sye Ten Bruggencate. And his position was even more ridiculous than his name.

So after watching Bruce Lee fight the ensign in the red shirt for an hour and a half they do a Q&A in this overwhelmingly atheist audience. And the whole reason I bring this up is that one person sets up his question by asking, “Do you agree that democracy is the best system in a civilized society?” and Bizarro world Gandolfini shakes his head; “The best form of government is a theocracy”, and then he adds, of course, “A Christian theocracy.”

The whole audience gasped, but I doubt any of them were shocked that he believed that. I think they were just surprised he admitted it. Sure. I think democracy is the second best form of government behind a complete dictatorial monarchy that I’m in charge of. But I recognize that the latter isn’t practical so I settle for democracy.

And make no mistake, that exactly what the theocrats are proposing. When Sye Bruggencate says he thinks “God” should be in charge of our government, he’s obviously talking about his interpretation of his religion’s god, who conveniently feels exactly the same way that Sye Bruggencate does on every issue. We’re not electing Jimmy Stewart, we’re electing Harvey. We just need Jimmy Stewart to tell us what the invisible rabbit says.

Now, most Christians wouldn’t have been so honest, but you’re lying to yourself if you think they don’t agree. They love separation of church and state when it keeps them from having to pay taxes or provide comprehensive health care, but that’s where their love ends. They may pay lip service to it and if they’re part of a minority religion they might really believe in it, but when it comes down to it, they all want to put their god in charge of your country.

Everywhere you look in America, the Christians are fighting for their theocracy, and not just in honest ways. Can’t win the abortion issue through the courts or the ballot boxes? Well then just buy up all the hospitals and cut out the service. In the meantime, bullying, harassment and open calls for violence should suffice.

Your ideas don’t hold up to in academic fields? Well then just sneak them into classrooms every chance you get. And between now and then, just make your own schools and museums and seminars and colleges and peer-reviewed journals.

Can’t win in the court of public opinion? Well just make your own TV channels, radio stations, magazines, books and amusement parks and hide the real world from your children. With a little luck, you can just outbreed those socially responsible secularists one litter at a time.

You and I can disagree… hell, we probably do disagree on a lot of shit. But we can have a conversation about it and work out our differences and compromise. Hell, we can even change our minds. But if the person you’re debating thinks they’re a proxy for god then there’s no room for accommodation. Their opinion is infallible.

You can see this same MO in any number of issues… contraception, gay rights, science education, stem cell research, gender equality… doesn’t matter what the rest of the country has to say about it. Or the rest of the world. How could they possibly be swayed by the opinion of people who disagree with god? It doesn’t matter if it’s a small majority like it is with gay marriage or an overwhelming majority like we have with contraception. They will stand against demonstrable science, archaeological evidence and the laws of logic themselves! So why would we ever think something as insignificant as the majority will slow them down?

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is Turing Test Champion Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to mimic genuine human speech?

That’s very an interesting point. Perhaps I should, too.

Well, by the Facebook standard, I guess you nailed it.

Like Pontius Pilate … In our lead story tonight, House Majority Leader and “Worst Jew Ever” Eric Cantor was defeated in the Republican primary for Virginia’s 7th district by Tea Party prospect Dave Brat. This is extremely embarrassing for a few reasons: 1) Dave Brat is fucking awful … 2) It’s the first time a House Majority Leader has lost a party primary since the position was created in 1899 … And 3) The GOP just lost it’s “Token Congressional Jew”, so they’ll need to grow another one in the stem cell lab they just shut down. Awkward conversation …

Yeah, but if he rises again three days later, he gets his own religion. As far as consolation prizes go, that’s pretty solid.

Normally I’d be all about a conservative asshole like Cantor getting ousted in humiliation. But he lost because he wasn’t enough of a conservative asshole for Virginia 7. That’s right! … Eric Cantor – who supports legislative control of Fallopian tubes but not assault rifles – was too liberal for them. And “liberal” in this case, is Virginian for “killed Jesus”.

Of course, the main issue Brat exploited was Cantor’s inability to sufficiently hate Mexicans, but the Messiah-cide certainly didn’t help. He also took hits for raising the debt ceiling and eventually agreeing to end the government shut down, and that really played into Brat’s “Thunderdome 2014” platform.

Right … So Dave Brat – unlike Cantor – “unflinchingly” supports the Republican Creed, which includes the belief that: (quote) “Faith in God, as recognized by our Founding Fathers[,] is essential to the moral fiber of the Nation.” (end quote) …

And the last thing we need is moral constipation.

Not sure why it would matter what 18th century slave owners with wooden teeth thought, but just for the record, our founding fathers were secularists. Actually, that was the whole point. So faith in god as they recognized it, was – at best – something personal, that you shut the fuck up about when dealing with real-life things like organizing a society.

Eric Cantor not Republican enough: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/06/10/dave-brat-who-just-unseated-house-majority-leader-eric-cantor-believes-faith-in-god-is-essential-for-morality

And in this week’s installment of ridiculous bullshit excuses for Catholic child-fucking, we have Archbishop Robert J. Carlson, who claims there’s too much gray area about when you can and can’t legally stick your dick in a kid’s ass. <Yeah, it’s fuzzy…> Not at the age Catholic priests like them, but yeah, eventually they’re fuzzy. Now you’ll recall that last week we had the story of a lawyer arguing on behalf of the New Jersey diocese that priests are definitionally off the clock whilst diddling children. In a blatant display of one upmanship, Archbishop Carlson said during a deposition last week that he was unaware that there was a law against child-rape.

So as we often must qualify … This actually happened. Carlson was asked if he knew that pedophilia was illegal in the 70’s, and he responded: (quote) “I’m not sure whether I knew it was a crime or not. I understand today it’s a crime.” (end quote) … Then he was asked when he picked up this important nugget of wisdom, and he couldn’t recall … “They send out so many memos. We’re raping kids. Now we’re not. Now we’re catching, but not pitching. Now mouth stuff only. It’s impossible to keep track.”

Yeah, well the Memento guy of pedophelia probably questioned his lawyers advice on this one, to which his lawyer says, “Either you get some damn broad amnesia or you admit publicly that you knowingly allowed one of your priests to sexually torture children without exhibiting the slightest pang of humanity. So at that point sociopathic perjurer is actually the better option from a PR perspective.”

Archbishop not sure whether child-rape was a crime: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/06/10/catholic-archbishop-tells-lawyer-he-wasnt-sure-whether-raping-a-child-was-a-crime-back-in-the-1970s/

“Law?!? Child rape?!? Against?!? These are just meaningless mouth noises.” … Moving on … In “What if everyone carried a sword?” news, the Sikh relgion did the exact opposite of dispelling stereotypes, when an actual large-scale sword fight broke out during what appears from photographs to be a brightly-colored scarf-hat convention, at the Golden Temple in Amrisar, India.

But yeah, they should totally be allowed to carry those fuckers onto public transit. Because I’m sure Sikhs are way more respectful on buses than they are in the holiest shrine in their entire fucking religion.

From what I gather, the mustard yellow guys wanted to give their speech to the crowd first, but cornflower blue wasn’t having it. <No they weren’t> And since they were right there, on the set of Aladdin, with a staircase, a barrel, and an apple cart ready to go, they settled the dispute with a blatantly choreographed stage fighting sequence. Mustard yellow finally won after doing a backflip and yelling: “Haha!!! I’m not left handed either!!!”

Yeah, as cool as a group of elderly zealots swinging scimitars at each other sounds, this was the worst swordfight since the second Legend of Zelda.

So they were actually gathered to honor key martyrs for their now-booming religion, on the 30th anniversary of Operation Blue Star – a 1984 raid by Indian troops that killed over 400 Sikhs who were suspected armed separatists. They were at least armed, because part of the Sikh uniform for dudes, is one of those enormous curved bad guy swords.

But it makes you wonder if there’s some infinite regress of dead Sikhs going on here. You know, they make a holiday to mark this battle too, and then a swordfight breaks out at that one, so they make another holiday to mark that battle and so on… there’s gotta be a more efficient ways of ridding the world of Sikhism.

I’m sure we can think of something. In fact, 30 seconds on the…

Sorry, bro, there’s a line. No 30 seconds’ bits for genocide strategies.

You’re such a tease!

Swordfight breaks out in Sikh temple during ceremony: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/06/sikhs-clash-golden-temple-amritsar-india

And in “Iowa don’t owe-a you nothing” news tonight, the state of Iowa’s “Vision Iowa” program has seen the light and decided not to invest $140,000 of taxpayer money in the construction of a Christian themed park in Sioux City. “Shepherd’s Gardens” boasts $5000 worth of crosses, five designated “prayer spaces” and a website that loads up like AOL dialup.

What the fuck is a prayer space?!? When you’re talking to God, do the acoustics really matter?!?

Upon hearing of the state’s intent to partially fund a park intended to (and I quote) “[Counteract the] rise of secular influence in our culture”, the secular influence in our culture told them to fuck off. Specifically, the FFRF sent a letter explaining that this was (quote) “…one of the most egregious grants for a religious purpose FFRF has encountered” (end quote).

Yeah this seemed like a secret shopper testing the FFRF guy who’s in charge of Iowa … “We’d like to impose a tax on being Jewish, Muslim, and atheist to account for the terrible weather and school shootings they cause. And we want them to buy us a park. And a shrubbery.” No. We’re not doing that.

After first proposing that the state pay only for the non-Christian aspects of the entirely Christian park, a solution on par with pointing out that six out of seven orifices weren’t raped, legal counsel for the state and part time toilet paper tensile integrity guardian Timothy J. Whipple informed the FFRF that the board ultimately rescinded the grant.

Iowa capitulates on planned $140,000 grant for Christian themed park: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/06/07/christian-themed-park-will-no-longer-be-getting-a-140000-boost-from-iowan-taxpayers/

And in “Goldman Sacks Entire SEC” news, the financial watchdog agency that monitors the Vatican … is employed by the Vatican!!! And it seems Pope Fransparency felt the meaningless group of Italian people he hireld to ignore Nazi gold transactions, should be fired and replaced by an equally meaningless group of international people … that will ignore Nazi gold transactions.

The WWE referees of financial watchdogs. But as inept as these guy are at detecting fraud, I’ll do them the credit of saying that even they would have called that fucking goalie interference in game 2 of the Stanley Cup Finals. I mean… are you fucking kidding me!? He was butt-raping Lundqvist mid shot! For fuck’s sake…

So the Vatican has been blatantly and egregiously violating international anti-money-laundering standards for centuries. People just now realized this apparently, so to alleviate all the concern, Catholicism hired it’s own watchdog in 2010. Not surprisingly, this accomplished nothing. So in 2012, they put Swiss anti-money-laundering expert Rene Bruelhart in charge. Surprise twist … Turns out anti-money laundering experts are almost always also pro-money-laundering experts. And when the board members complained about being kept in the dark by the new transparency guru … they got fired.

In Pope Frandelay Industry’s defense, though, he’s already seen that the international media doesn’t see any difference between empaneling people to do something and doing something, and doing something is hard.

Pope Francis fires entire financial watchdog panel: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/pope-francis-bank-watchdog-board_n_5451637.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in “The only people who talk about ducks more than my autocorrect” news tonight, Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson has announced the imminent publication of a new bible that will focus on the core values of faith, family, fellowship and fag-hating. In addition to the regular bible, this version will include more than one hundred articles written by a man who thinks “Whoo hee hee” is a word and that the term “A real man” can precede the word “don’t”.

Do you wish poor people would just die already, but found that Atlas Shrugged was way too many pages??? Do you hate gay people, but couldn’t even get to Leviticus??? Then you’ll definitely be able to struggle through our new book … “I’m Borderline Illiterate, but God is my Ghost Writer” – by Phil Robertson

Publisher “Thomas Nelson Bible Group” is excited about the new project, pointing out that Wal-Mart just can’t keep the Duck Dynasty merch in stock. Vice President and Associate Publisher Robert Stanford told reporters, (quote) “We are honored and excited to be working with Phil and his son on this new Bible. Our demographic research shows that as long as the cover art contains these filthy rednecks and a cross, the rest can be Ipsum Lorem… it’s not like these fuckers can read.”

People who bought this book also bought “Mass Opiates for Dummies”, “Learn to Read”, and unreasonably large firearms … And a book by that same title.

Now, in case Robertson is listening, I think we should toss out some ideas for him, so 30 Seconds on the clock; proposed changes for the redneck bible. Go!

Like a more clear cut stance on homosexuality?

That would be a good start, but I was thinking about stuff like Jesus turning the water into Old Milwaukee.

The Book of John Deere

The lying down with beasts thing is more of a guideline than a rule.

As long as it’s a girl sheep …

I’m picturing The Last Supper at Cracker Barrel … And Jesus has the power mullet.

Say what you will about Cracker Barrel, but their gravy-fried gravy is awesome. Okay, so… Instead of Damascus, Paul was on the way to Dollywood.

When Jacob wrastles God, he wins by using a folding chair when the ref’s not looking.

They only have six commandments because they needed room in the ark for a couple beers and some bait.

For the Appalachian folk, God breathes life into the mouths, not the noses. They never learn the nose version, but now they know why.

Three words: Bandana of thorns

Twist ending: Jesus was dead the whole time. So was his dad. And the guy from Die Hard.

And of course, in this one Lot’s daughters don’t have to trick him.

Duck Dynasty stars to release their own redneck bible: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/duck-dynasty-bible_n_5452828.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

Jesus of NASCAReth … Awful!!! Who writes this fucking stuff?!? Puns aren’t funny!!! … And finally tonight, in a follow up to a story from last week, from the “Have your Cock, and your KKKake and Eat it Too” file, Richard Land – of the Southern Evangelical Seminary – has come to the defense of the homophobic Colorado bakery owner Jack Phillips, who refused to make a drag bundt cake for a gay wedding.

It’s about time somebody spoke up on behalf of the straights. And to be honest, I’ve been wondering where the Southern Evangelical Seminary falls on the “rights of gays to eat cakes” issue.

Well to help everyone understand his position, Land decided his thoughts would be best expressed with a hate group analogy … Because people get those. He claimed that laws against bigotry are unfair because they wouldn’t allow black bakery owners to refuse KKK pastry requests. Not sure if there’s any particular DNA sequences for hating blacks and Jews, but regardless, being gay … and Klanning … are at least slightly different.

They’re just two different ways of getting the sheets dirty if you ask me. Seriously. They both have parades, they both ride steeds, they both appreciate a well hung black man…

Earlier this year, Dick Land also dropped this science brilliant bomb: (quote) “A high percentage of adult male homosexuals in America were sexually molested when they were children […] Anybody who’s a counselor […] will tell you that.” (end quote) … So if kids would just avoid getting molested, and spend more time in church where that can’t happen … they wouldn’t keep catching the GAIDS, and we wouldn’t even have this cake problem.

Pastor: “Forcing a Christian to bake cake for gays is like forcing blacks to join the KKK”: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/05/pastor-gay-wedding-cake-kkk_n_5453277.html?utm_hp_ref=religion&ir=Religion

Well I guess that’s as close to an AIDS joke as we’re gonna get tonight, so we’ll close the headlines there. Heath, thanks as always.

Why is it so hard to cure AIDS?

Guess I begged for that. I don’t know, why is it so hard to cure AIDS?

It’s hard to get the mice to butt-fuck.

And when we come back you’ll pretend you didn’t miss us, but we’ll know you did.

Calendar:

It’s time for the Atheist Calendar portion of the show; this is the sporadic few minutes we set aside every 4 to 10 episodes or so to bring you up to speed on all the great secular, atheist and skeptical meetups going on around the country and around the world.

We’ll just assume it’s too late to talk you into hitting up a June conference and start off this week in Minneapolis on July 4th weekend, where SkepchickCon will be taking place within the larger umbrella of ConVergence. Debbie Goddard, Surly Amy, Rebecca Watson and PZ Myers to name a few and what the fuck else would you be doing in Minneapolis?

http://skepchickcon.com/

The following weekend we have an even cooler con in a much cooler place. The Amazing Meeting is the biggest annual skeptical conference in the country, they’re in their sixteenth year and it gets better every time. This year’s speakers include Daniel Dennett, Steven Novella, Julia Galef, Richard Wiseman, Eugenie Scott and if you haven’t been keeping up, they’ve recently added Bill Nye to the guest list. So yeah. Beg, borrow, steal, hitchhike, whatever.

http://www.amazingmeeting.com/

For our listeners in Brisbane, you’ve got a Skepticamp event coming up next month with friend of the show Jake Farr-Wharton from the Imaginary Friends show, Ross from Skeptically challenged and a host of other people I’ve never heard of that will probably still be awesome. That’s coming up on the 19th of July.

http://brisskepticamp.org/

The Atheist Alliance of America will be holding their annual convention in Seattle this year. That’s August 7th through the 10th and includes Sean Faircloth, Steven Pinker, Richard Carrier and more. I heard great things about their con last year and look forward to hearing great things about this one in the near future.

http://www.aaaseattle2014.com/speakers.html

As always, you can find more information about any of these events on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. And if you’re involved with an event that needs a little PR, I’m happy to plug it. You’ll find the contact info on that very same website I was just telling you about.

Poem – Proverbs

There’s a pamphlet’s worth of wisdom buried deep within the Bible.

Between condemning all this random shit and killing Jewish rivals,

Between the stoning and the genocide, and the fifty-shekel price,

One pays for raping women, there’s a bit of good advice.

Though the majority of what’s in this lengthy book is quite unsavory,

Like the sexist, racist, homophobic stuff and nods to slavery.

There’s a begrudging bit of decent stuff speckled here and there,

But it’s as hard to find as black people in films by Peter Weir.

So I forgive you if you give up in a state of disenchantment,

When they miss a moral statement with two thirds of their commandments.

But I assure you if you read enough, and keep an open mind,

You’ll be surprised by bits of noble stuff you’ll occasionally find.

Take Proverbs, for example; with it’s nine hundred fifteen lines,

Most of which are useless shit, that you could see if you were blind.

A couple more are awful, and some are quite misleading,

But the twelve or so left over are certainly worth reading.

Like Proverbs Fifteen One, for instance, which reminds us to ask nicely,

And despite the verbose shit so far, it says this one concisely.

Or Twenty Seven; Two, in which it tells you not to gloat…

Which makes you wonder if god ever even read the book he wrote.

In chapter fourteen it explains that to believe on faith makes you a fool

And at the end of twenty four it all but states the golden rule.

Or chapter thirty one, which says to drown your grief in wine

Or the nineteenth verse of chapter five which says that titty fucking’s fine.

It’s relative, of course, as this books filled with vile spite,

But after Joshua, Mein Kampf is only kind of impolite.

But compared to all the books that don’t approve of genocide,

Proverbs is a sorry choice for someone’s moral guide.

Take for instance chapter one, verses twenty six through twenty eight;

Which reminds us that the lord will mock your broken-hearted fate.

In two and five, six, seven, nine and twenty one through thirty;

We learn you can’t trust women, as they’re odious and dirty.

Those filthy floozy harlot sluts, maliciously malign;

So make sure to choose a modest girl for your two-hundredth concubine.

Owning slaves is fine as long as you, abuse them all to hell.

Just treat them like your kids whom you, I guess should beat as well.

Yes, even in this relatively good part of the book,

I’d forgive someone for thinking that the translator mistook

The Hebrew for pinata for the english word for child.

So even when it’s better, the Bible’s still to be reviled.

Outro:

Before we slip into our PJs tonight, we’ve got a big announcement to make. After only twelve weeks, we’ve reached our Patreon goal of five hundred dollars per episode which means that starting next week, this show is going to be an hour long.

Now, we recognize that that’s gonna take a lot more work and we don’t want to risk lowering the overall quality of the show, so if we find that we can’t record an hours worth of podcast for you every week without sacrificing the level of quality you’ve come to expect from us, we’ll rethink this thing and find another way to fulfill our obligation to our patrons. So over the next four weeks, bear with us as we make the transition and by all means, drop us a line and let us know what you think of the changes.

I also want to let everyone know that just because we reached that goal, it doesn’t mean you have to stop donating to us on Patreon. We’ve set up a new goal that will allow us to significantly improve the quality of the show and churn out a lot more content for you. If we can reach $850 an episode on Patreon, Heath has agreed to quit his job and join me in my sub-Bible-Beltian exile. So if you haven’t already signed up for a per episode donation at Patreon (dot) com, please do exactly that and help reunite Heath and me.

That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with more. If you can’t wait that long, you can always find little nuggets of Scatheism on our blog, our Twitter feed and our Facebook page… and I might as well say that there’s stuff on our Google Plus page too since nobody will ever know that there isn’t.

Can’t close things out without thanking Heath for begrudgingly succumbing to my relentless pressure to double the length of the show. I need to thank Lucinda for all the work she’s gone through to get back to fucking strength, of course I need to thank Pastor Roy of the Catfish Creek Trailer Park for begrudgingly providing this week’s Farnsworth Quote. He’s a regular guest on the Atheists On Air podcast which is absolutely phenomenal if you haven’t checked it out. You’ll find it linked on the shownotes for this episode, of course.

But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week’s most crucial chordates; Aaron, Bryce, Chad, Mike, Jason, Erik, Sakura, Jen, The Just, Kim, Crystal, Paul, Alex, Sonja, Jerry, Anne, Pascal, Henk, Raymond, Dan, other Mike, John, Kevin and Frank. Aaron, Bryce, Chad, Mike, Jason and Erik, whose tongues are ribbed for her pleasure; Sakura, Jen, The Just, Kim, Crystal and Paul, who have enough gravitas to bend light; Alex, Sonja, Jerry, Anne, Pascal and Henk, whose IQs have parentheses and greek letters in them; and Raymond, Dan, other Mike, John, Kevin and Frank, who have to schedule their erections with air traffic controllers.

These twenty-two selfless, soulless, sinless specimens of secularity have earned their way into my heart, my outro and my zombie bunker if that ever becomes necessary this week by giving us money. If you too would like to earn my love, my outrageous flattery and your share of those freeze dried legumes, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com, or you can make a per episode donation and that website, again, is Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist, which you’ll also find linked on our website.

Categories: Show Transcripts, Uncategorized Tags: atheism, atheism podcast, atheist, atheist podcast, belief, Christianity, faith, religion, science, skeptic, skeptical podcast

Heaven is for Real – An Atheist’s Review

June 6, 2014 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

You got about 13 minutes of it on episode 68, or, if you’re a per episode Patreon donor, you heard about 17 minutes. But if you can’t get enough, perhaps the full, virtually unedited 29 minute version will satiate you until we find another shitty movie to send Eli to.

For Full Version, Click Here.

Categories: Uncategorized

Episode 68 – Partial Transcript

June 5, 2014 Noah Lugeons 3 comments

by Heath Enwright and Noah Lugeons

(Note: Transcript contains elements that were removed due to time constraints)

LINK TO EPISODE

LINK TO DONATE TO THE SHOW ON PATREON

LINK TO BUY THE BOOK

Warning: Eli’s on this episode so you might want to pee before you listen.

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Christian Mingle (dot) com, because as far as we can tell, there’s no law against advertising for a company against their will. So try Christian Mingle (dot) com, because when I say “Fuck Christians”, it’s not always metaphorical.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s June 5th,

And there’s no such thing as “well done but juicy”.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright. And from “Ballgame over! Yankees win!” New York, New York,

And “Rebels Trail at Halftime” Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

We’ll wonder why Easter candy is being sold in Malaysia,
We’ll learn that Hitler’s not as bad when you compare him to god,
And Eli Bosnick will join us to discuss that guy who hosted Later With Greg Kinnear.

But first, the diatribe…

Diatribe

Ever since I moved to Georgia, I’ve been looking forward to the missionaries. I could hit the nearest church to my house with a frisbee and the next nearest with about a 3 wood. I see roving bands of Jesus proxies everywhere I go in this town so I knew it was only a matter of time.

And when it finally came it was like a perfect storm of anger and rage. It should have been a thing of beauty. After the surgery, my wife was up and down and tossing and turning so I slept on the couch for the first couple of post-op weeks and it’s pretty okay for a couch but it’s still a couch.

Right about that time the AC goes out in my house. So, of course, we get highs in the mid-nineties the whole time. And for our international listeners, ninety five fahrenheit is three hundred and eight point one five Kelvin. So it’s fucking hot.

Anyway, I wake up in the morning to a knock on the door that I hope is the repairman but instead it’s a couple of used afterlife salesman. I’m wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts and a sheen of sweat, the perspiration in my hair has congealed into this reverse pillow mold and at that point I’d have been pissed if it was the Publisher’s Clearing House guys unless one of them had a background in AC repair.

All the ingredients were there for an epic, heartless, misanthropic beat down, but there was one problem. The missionaries in question were three girls, ranging in age from fourteen down to nine. The eldest is muttering something about an island and a boat and she’s clearly forgetting the last half of her sales pitch midway through the first half, so after a bit of stammering she asks me if I’ve made room in my life for Jesus.

So I consider it for a second and I say, “I liked some of his early stuff.”

This clearly wasn’t in their flowchart so it earned me a few seconds of blank stares and I added, “but once he got into that ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ phase, I tuned out.”

And apparently preteen Baptist girls don’t watch Reservoir Dogs because it clearly didn’t ring a bell. But undeterred, Jesus’s groupies went on to the next line, which was something about some dead carpenter or another. But I was done making fun of them and it was too hot to try to explain the concept of “incorrect” at that point so I told them I had important Messiahs to ignore but they were free to come back some other time.

It’s hard for me to imagine how that was supposed to go in their minds. Do groups of socially awkward teenie-boppers have high conversion rates? Are they concerned that somebody in town missed the church signs and giant crosses and “Christian Owned Business” stickers and bible verses and Christian book stores and yard signs and the bumper stickers and t-shirts and the eleven religious channels on basic cable and hadn’t heard the news about his sins having been died for? Did the preacher think to himself, “If anything will subdue the skepticism of the wayward masses, it’s the wisdom of One Direction fans?” And did mom and dad think to themselves, “What a great time to send the girls out unsupervised to the homes of middle aged men that we’ve never met! I know it’s ninety five degree out, but it’s a wet heat.”

But, of course, I know that they know they’re not gonna convert me. I’m just a prop in this game. The preacher didn’t send them out to spread their faith, he sent them out to strengthen it. It’s all about cramming as much Jesus as he can into every nook and cranny of their lives. I’m a vaccine against all the people that might challenge their beliefs later in life. I’m an unwitting pawn in their indoctrination.

Nothing betrays the depravity of religious leaders like their willingness to exploit children, and I’m not just talking about the ones that molest them. I just don’t see how anyone can resolve this in their own heads. How can you believe that teaching kids that there really are monsters under their beds is anything but unconscionable?

Headlines

Joining me for headlines tonight is treif enthusiast, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to scare some swine-o-phobes?

So here’s what I’ve been doing … I carry a strip of bacon with me everywhere I go in New York City, and touch every surface I can. That includes every straw in every restaurant if possible. So if pig molecules irrationally frighten you, don’t come to New York any more.

In our lead story tonight, a Utah high school has taken decisive action against inappropriate shoulder-inspired erections this week by photoshopping modesty onto the floozies in their yearbook. Officials at “Watch Snatch” high school in South-Central Heber City, Utah enraged a number of their female students by adding sleeves to tank tops and camisoles to the pre-cleavage chest area.

I can understand where these girls are coming from. You’ve gotta look good when you’re 16-years-old, and have eight other younger wives to compete with.

Though they stopped short of going full hijab on these chicks, several of the students were outraged by the changes. To their credit, the school later apologized for not altering more of the photos! When this was brought to their attention, they were devastated by the fact that some of those little harlots got away with showing bare necks on their yearbook pictures after all.

Blasphemy!!! Might as well be the “Clavicle Fetish” section of a porn site!!!

I think it’s worth noting… and this is coming from a guy that grew up in the scrambled-porn whacking era… I can assure these school officials that no amount of digital remastery is gonna slow down a teenage boy looking to rub one out.

Yeah porn on dial-up was rough, but we certainly still made it work. The girl would show up in small horizontal bars, about once a minute, so by the time it got down to the upper shoulders, it was usually too late. I’d finally see some snatch while I was cleaning up.

“And we liked it!”

Utah High School modifies girl’s yearbook pics to look more modest: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/28/utah-high-schoolers-furious-over-selective-alteration-of-girls-yearbook-photos/

And from the “Still in Denial” file, Life Savers Ministries of Alabama recently put up – and then immediately had to take down in public embarrassment – a billboard in Auburn with the following two quotes … #1: “He alone, who owns the youth, owns the future.” … And #2: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” … These particular brainwashing tips were taken from two sources: Proverbs 22:6 and … wait for it … Adolph Hitler.

And it’s not like they just didn’t know who said that. They actually had the attribution on the billboard! It was written in red and it was bigger than the biblical attribution so there was no possible way you could drive by and not realize you were getting parenting advice from Hitler.

So let’s set aside the Holocaust thing … Who even knows whether- … Just ignore that for a moment … The message of the billboard is insane. First of all, it admits that Hitler and God use the same recruiting strategy. Not a selling point. And it also suggests that brainwashing people from birth to be religious zealots hasn’t lead to nearly every single genocide campaign in human history. Which it clearly has.

You’d think at least the ad company would have said something. The guy designing the thing? “Hey guys… I know it’s your ad and everything, but are you sure you want to associate yourself with the Nazis? I mean, I agree that at least it’s an ethos and all…”

So yes … Somehow, nobody foresaw any negative reaction to the name “Adolph Hitler” printed in huge letters, on an enormous highway poster. Turns out several people in Alabama know someone that’s seen a Jew, and they were – of course – mildly offended on their behalf.

“I seen me a jew once! Had one a ‘em little hats and everthang.”

Following the very subtle public outcry, Ministry founder James Anderegg admitted that – in retrospect – it might have been better to use a Herbert Hoover quote instead. Which clearly betrays his knowledge of “Anyone But Hitler”, and really only makes it worse.

“But Hitler’s mom let’s him do it”: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/06/03/christian-ministry-quotes-adolf-hitler-on-billboard-not-realizing-thats-a-bad-idea

And in “Don’t try this at home” news tonight, we have a fucked up story about a crazy person murdering a kid. Raging psychotic Kimberly Lee Lucas, after being told repeatedly by the sane people around her that Abraham was commendable for the whole “willingness to murder his kid for god” thing, decided to emulate this biblical hero. And it turns out that, no, killing children on the command of the voices in your head isn’t all the bible makes it out to be.

“Yeah I stabbed my 2-year-old with a knife. But I didn’t think it would work!!!” … Where are the censors now? At least Grand Theft Auto has you murdering hookers, not your own child. And by the way, the Bible also has you murdering hookers, just for the record.

Now, we generally try to avoid stories about baby murder and crazy people on this show because by and large you can’t blame religion for its adherents being mentally ill… and baby murder jokes stop being funny if you’re talking about actual murdered babies. But when you are arm crazy people with stories that glorify attempted infanticide you have to accept at least some of the blame.

Yeah to be fair, I’d say the blame is spread out evenly, across all the holy books that glorify attempted infanticide.

Now let me stave off a few emails right now by making it clear that I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to buy bibles or that all bibles should be banned. I’m just endorsing waiting periods and background checks. And maybe we should rethink our policies on assault bibles.

Woman kills child while reinacting Abraham and Isaac story: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/05/30/inspired-by-abraham-and-isaac-bible-story-woman-murders-two-year-old-girl-in-religious-test-god-didnt-stop-me/

And from the biggest file we have … Reverend Terence McAlinden – while employed as a youth group leader at the Diocese of Trenton in the 1980’s – sexually assaulted Chris Naples numerous times during church-sanctioned trips. Naples has filed suit, but according to the diocese lawyer, the church is not responsible because the rapist was technically “off the clock” during those particular incidents.

Yeah, well in their defense, the Catholic Church has had a long standing “Who you fuck on your own time is none of our business” policy, haven’t they?

Indeed they have … The ‘off duty’ excuse prompted one of the justices to ask: “How do we determine when a priest IS and IS NOT on duty?” … The defense lawyer replied: “You can determine a priest is not on duty when he is [abusing] a child, for example” … So they have a Pedophile Scotsman Policy. “Clock out if your cock’s out.”

I feel the need to point out that that was a real quote. The lawyer really said that. He wasn’t a priest at that time because, by definition, priests don’t have their dicks in kids. He was a priest between thrusts, sure…

Running out of clever titles for pedophile stories: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/06/03/church-deflects-blame-for-pedophile-priest-by-arguing-that-he-was-not-on-duty

And in “Spiritual Death by Chocolate” news tonight, several raging Muslim lunatics are left with creme egg on their faces this week when it turned out their fatwa against a candy bar may have been premature. The story began last month when the Malaysian Ministry of Health demanded a recall that led to a fatwa against Cadbury. At first I thought it was inspired by the fact that there’s no logical place to start eating those fucking creme eggs without splurting sugar sperm all over your chin, in which case I’d have been behind it entirely, but it turns out it was actually prompted by the detection of a few molecules of pork.

What I like to do for breakfast, is break two or three creme eggs over bacon and toast. That way you can wipe up the sugar sperm with the extra toast.

Every sperm is sacred… Now, I know it’s hard to imagine Muslims getting the science wrong, but it turns out they didn’t adequately control for contamination. Upon rectifying that oversight, the tests came back negative. So yes, Malaysia is safe from spiritually deficient demon swine once again. Now maybe the country that ranks between Libya and Syria on the human development index can move on to removing the piss from the tap water.

Or maybe they can spend a few days finding that fucking airplane!!! It’s not as if it’s a tiny packet of fucking peanuts.

These new data have done little to slow down boycotts and demonstrations against the company. When asked if the new findings were enough to exonerate the chocolatier, a spokesman for the Association of Islamic Consumers said (quote), “If we were the kind of people that changed our positions because of evidence, we wouldn’t be religious.”

Fatwa issued against Cadbury chocolate: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/02/cadbury-malaysia-pork-halal_n_5432136.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And finally tonight, in “Have Your Cock and Eat it too” news, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission has ruled that Jack Phillips – owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop – must stop discriminating against gay people by refusing to make wedding cakes for same-sex marriages. Incidentally, such marriages don’t technically exist in Colorado yet, despite their very liberal stance on what can and can’t be put into baked goods. And just to be clear, they draw the line after marijuana, but before a second cock. Jason Biggs would have been safe.

I bet he never thought fucking that pie would be the high point of his career.

Dude wouldn’t have lasted a day on The Creek … So let’s recap: Phillips puts flower-shaped dollops of pink icing on cakes for a living, but refuses to be involved with gay stuff in any way whatsoever. Sounds like the demand for homosexual food service isn’t being met in Colorado … So let’s put 30 seconds on the clock … “Ideas for a Gay Catering Business” … GO!!!

Circle Jerked Chicken

“Pie a la Mo”

Adam’s Apple Upside Down Cake? Made with fresh tranny apples?

Don’t mix up the tops and bottoms … What about: “Five Guys Sharing Ass…Burgers and Fries”?

I think you could have just stopped at “Five Guys”… how about “Squeals on Wheels: All the pillow you can bite for one low price”

Tossed Fruit Salad … Some people prefer jelly … Most likely “Felch’s Grape”

I only like it with Peanut Bugger.

Like those gay cream pies … What are they called? … FlufferNutters in the Butter

How about Santorum-balls?

Man on Manchester Tart??? … Queer-a-misu???

A little “Queef Brisket” for the Lesbian menu

BrownEye Rounds: Donut-Shaped Fudge-Packed Brownies

Chubway Footlongs? Or you can get the really big ones and circumcise a little bit at a time.

“Epstein’s Barbecue: Smokin’ Pole Food”

“Rusty Trombone Appetit”

“Two Guys, One Cupcake”

If I’m not mistaken, two girl-one cup references are to our headlines as fat ladies are to operas, so I guess that does it for tonight. Heath, thanks as always.

And when we come back, Eli Bosnick will be here to discuss the new film “Little Mister Monkeyshines”

Outro

Before we abdicate the throne tonight I wanted to let everyone know we’re getting damn close to our five hundred dollar an episode Patreon goal. For those who don’t know, when we hit $500 we’re gonna make a go at doubling the length of the show so if you want more us, we’re only about thirty three bucks shy now, you can get us closer by visiting Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist and making a per episode donation.

Also want to remind everybody that I was on the most recent episode of The Imaginary Friends Show podcast, that’s episode one eighty two of Jake’s fine show, which you’ll find linked on the shownotes for this episode. Had a blast with Pete Darwin and Ross from the Skeptically Challenged Podcast, and you’re invited to listen to that blast at your convenience.

I also wanted to remind everyone that every time somebody buys a copy of “Diatribes, Volume One: Fifty Essays from a Godless Misanthrope”, an angel gets his wings… and then gets them thumbtacked to a cork board for a fourth grade science project. You’ll find links to buy both the ebook and the paperback at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Can’t shut it down without thanking Heath for boldly going where no abortion joke has gone before; I need to thank Lucinda for inexplicably failing to divorce me by now, I want to thank Paul from the Quranify Me podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth Quote… and if you haven’t checked out his show yet, be sure to check the shownotes for a handy link.

But most of all, I need to thank this week’s most interesting persons of interest, Dave, Wayne, Derrick, Andrew, David, Mark, Allen, Matthew, Richard, Michael, Z and other Michael. Dave, Wayne and Derrick, whose strength would be the standard unit of measurement horses would use if horses built cars; Andrew, David and Mark, whose erections are engorged with enough blood to feed a family of vampires on Thanksgiving; Allen, Matthew and Richard, whose cocks are so big even Galactus just works the tip; and Michael, Z and other Michael, whose names god calls out when he comes.

These twelve well-meaning, well-endowed well-wishers have swelled our well-being this week by giving us money. Giving us money takes courage, dedication and two and a half to three minutes, but if you think you’ve got what it takes, you can make a per episode donation at Patreon (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist, or a one time donation by clicking the “donate” button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you want to help but you forgot the combination to your mattress, you can also help us out by leaving us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or other places as you see fit. Also, sharing our show on Facebook and Twitter and stuff is a great way to prune the humorless asshats.

Categories: Show Transcripts, Uncategorized Tags: agnostic podcast, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, Christianity, Eli Bosnick, Heath Enwright, Noah Lugeons, religion

First 50 Diatribes Now Available as an E-Book

March 21, 2014 Noah Lugeons 10 comments

by Noah Lugeons

I said I’d have it available on Thursday and I missed that deadline by 32 minutes. But at 12:32 EDT on Friday, the first collection of diatribes went up on the Kindle Store.

I should note that there’s a bit of an error in the appendices which will be updated and the cover art will be updated within the next few days. As it stands, the cover of the book looks an awful lot like a pack of cigarettes and we can’t have that. But the important thing is that the words are all there, they’re all in order and they’re spelled correctly.

You can find the book by clicking here. At the moment it’s exclusively available on the Kindle Store, but we should have it available in all the fine e-book retail locations shortly.

It’s worth pointing out that more than a third of the 247 page book is all new material. The first fifty diatribes are there, each of them with a brief introduction, and many of them have been greatly expanded since there was no longer a need to fit them into an allotted time. If you’d like to get a feel for what you’re going to get, you can “Look Inside” from the Amazon page and read the introduction and the first chapter.

I should also point out that if you’ve listened to a significant number of the first 50 episodes, in my opinion you’re qualified to leave us a glowing review on the Kindle Store as well.

Categories: Uncategorized

Diatribe E-Book Coming Soon

March 18, 2014 Noah Lugeons 4 comments

by Noah Lugeons

We’ve been talking it up on the show for weeks and you may even have heard an ad for it on another fine audio program. Rest assured, the Diatribe Collection will be available soon. We hope to have a link up by midnight tomorrow night and when we do, you’ll find it here first.

The title was a little tricky, I must admit. We wanted to make it clear to our audience what they were getting and we wanted to make it clear to people who’d never heard of the show what they were getting as well. After much discussion, we settled on:

“The Scathing Atheist Presents: DIATRIBES, Volume One: 50 Essays From a Godless Misanthrope”

I know that it’s a real mouth full, but on the plus side, it’s possible that a Scientologist will buy it after an insufficient scan of the title and with a little luck we can save their children from some very quiet psychological abuse.

Categories: Uncategorized

Episode 56 Partial Transcript

March 13, 2014 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Heath Enwright and Noah Lugeons

Link to Episode

Warning: This podcast contains all the words you can’t say on television except cocksucker.

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new all natural cure for Resurrectile Dysfunction, Holy Cialis. Do you have a savior who just can’t rise like he used to? Is your deity suffering from OmnImpotence?

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And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s March 13th

And we’re on the cusp of hot coffee and iced coffee season. Can’t decide!!!

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright, and from spontaneously explosive New York, New York,

And extraneously erosive Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

A Kenyan Pastor will half ass the nudist church thing,
We’ll step right up, step right up and learn all about the most unbelievable, inconceivable, incredible, inedible, stupendous and tremendous tonic this side of the Mississippi.
And Mark Nebo – from BeSecular – will show us the difference between a beard ride and a mustache ride.

But first, the diatribe…

Diatribe

“The lord works in mysterious ways.” It’s the first apologetic most of us ever heard. It’s the one they needed when you were seven years old and critically examining Noah’s Ark or Adam and Eve’s brood of sibling fuckers. It was the one they trotted out when you asked what kind of dick god would kill your turtle or your grandma. God has a plan and it’s mysterious and we petty humans with our mortal intellects can never begin to comprehend it.

It was also probably the first apologetic you ever debunked. If you were anything like me, you did so as soon as it occurred to you that that sentence could be used to justify and/or excuse exactly everything. There is no logical inconsistency too great, no direct contradiction too big, no genocide too horrible to refute with it: While we live on his planet, we live by his rules. And we don’t know what they are. Because he’s mysterious.

It may also have occurred to you that it makes god’s followers sound an awful lot like a battered spouse. Yes, sometimes he does things that are mean and sometimes they hurt but I know that deep down he really does love me. And he knows what’s best for me so I’m sure I had that typhoon coming.

But there’s way more wrong with the statement than it’s circular nature. For the longest time I just wrote it off as a meaningless, useless turn of phrase; a rhetorical tinfoil hat that represented the closest a believer was allowed to get to conceding in a religious discussion. But it came up again the other day and I started giving it another look. And it turns out that it was even stupider than I thought it was.

Okay, so you normally hear this when something horrible has happened, right? A bus full of kindergarteners explodes or an earthquake hits one of those flies-on-your-face countries and a bunch of people die. And the religious folks have this sudden pang of cognition and they say, “Hey wait a minute… a loving god wouldn’t do this! Either there’s no god or there is and he’s an asshole!”

And then they remember that the lord works in mysterious ways and they’re too feeble to understand them. It allows them to shut off that part of the brain that does the thinking and it works so fast that their brains shut down before they realize that no amount of intelligence makes an act stop being evil.

Hannibal Lecter was a fucking genius. I don’t have to ‘understand his ways’ to know that eating census takers with fava beans is evil. I don’t have to know why Hitler killed jews to know it’s evil. Sure, Hitler works in mysterious ways. But that doesn’t excuse anything he fucking did!.

When people excuse god’s ruthless savagery by appealing to his mysteriousness, I want to ask them exactly how much smarter than them I’d have to be before it would be moral for me to give them cancer… to invent cancer and then give it to them. Think about it. They’re saying that there’s a certain line of superior intelligence where suddenly every horrible atrocity ever committed in the history of humankind becomes okay. God let it happen and who am I to question his great wisdom? So logically speaking, there has to be a cut off.

And yet still there’s more wrong with this absurd excuse. Because when it comes down to it, god doesn’t work in mysterious ways. Reprehensible? Sure. Merciless? Certainly. But mysterious? If god worked in mysterious ways, I might believe he existed. If sometimes when I opened my back door it led to the Himalayas, I’d say, “well shit, there goes god again, working in his mysterious ways.” But it always leads to the backyard. Scientists and statisticians don’t have to work in a variable to account for the “mysteriousness” factor.

As it turns out, god behaves in an absolutely predictable manner. He works in the way that is precisely consistent with not existing. And there’s nothing mysterious about that at all.

Headlines

Joining me for headlines tonight is still misunderstood Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to re-clear the air?

I don’t know how many times I’ve gotta explain this sarcasm thing.

In the defense of your detractors, I think they know that you’re being sarcastic and still somehow think you’re sexist and/or racist..

I don’t get it … Plus, some of my closest N-words are female N-words.

Yeah, that should clear up the inbox.

With an ‘A’ … N-words with an ‘A’ !!!

Anyway, in our lead story tonight, Oklahoma doctor (slash) Ohio felon John Michael Lonergan has developed a magical Jesus-based lifelong cure for all ailments and would be happy to squirt some into your body for three hundred bucks. Known alternately as Dr. Lonergan, “Dr. Mike” and that felonious snakeoil salesman in Edmond, this quack claims to have co-created this magic potion while serving as a special forces doctor and calls it (I shit you not) “Jesus Juice”.

According to the data, this ‘Jesus Juice’ stuff is just as effective as the Catholic Mass hangover cure. So let’s not be too skeptical. Priests charge about 300 dollars for a backwashed public goblet of Jesus blood, right? Same deal.

Prayer, Jesus Juice, homeopathy… Now I think it’s worth noting that Lonergan had his medical license revoked by the state of Ohio in 2005 after he was convicted of, among other things, health care fraud. But it would seem that one of the things Oklahoma is OK with is allowing convicted felons straight out of prison to provide fraudulent medical treatments to its citizenry.

Whenever I hear Oklahoma, I can’t help but picture entire towns breaking out into choreographed redneck musical numbers. Oklahoma is to legitimate medical license … as Phoenix Degree is to PHD.

Doctor/Felon in OK injecting miracle “Jesus” shot for $300 per: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/05/oklahomas-dr-mike-allowed-to-continue-injecting-miraculous-jesus-shot-for-300-a-pop/#.Uxk0-maM0DU.facebook

And in “Just 15% of the bill, just for a second, just to see how it feels” news, Tennessee pastor Chad Roberts has launched a website called “SundaysAreTheWorst.com”, where he aims to help address the problem of Christians being bad tippers. The site gives angry waitstaff a place to vent about awful patrons, and Pastor Roberts hopes to have parishioners make apologies for each complaint. However, rather than also send an appropriate tip, they plan to reimburse with food stamps, because restaurant workers are all drug addicts.

Then why not reimburse them with rock?

Somehow it’s politically incorrect to point out the following self-evident truth … But that’s what I’m here for, so here it is … Unless every demographic group is equally pleasant and generous at restaurants, then certain groups are worse. Ask every single restaurant employee ever, and you can find out which groups. And their derogatory euphemism code names. Christians (aka Cross Trainers) will not fare well on this test. And the pamphlet-tips just make it worse.

Yeah. Because you can’t trade Chick Tracts for rock. Believe me, I’ve tried. “C’mon man, I’ve got four ‘The Only Hopes’ and a ‘Satan Comes to Salem’ for a crumb… alright then let me lick your pockets for a ‘Holy Joe’.”

A Cornell study from 2010 tried to claim that a false perception exists, but then quickly contradicted itself: (quote) “While it is statistically false to say that Christians are bad tippers, it is true that Christians are more likely to stiff their servers than people of other religious (or non-religious) bents.” Being more likely to stiff your server means bad tipper!!!

And they try to explain that away by saying “Christians aren’t abnormally bad tippers, it’s just that Jews and atheists are abnormally good tippers. I swear, that’s actually what they say in the published version of the study.

Public Food-Service Announcement: Restaurants are legally allowed to pay waiters and waitresses less than minimum wage, based on the assumption that they receive 15-20% tips on sales. These servers also have to pay out a percentage of their sales to busboys, food runners, etc, based on this same 15-20% assumption. If you tip less than that, your presence at the table can COST the server money … Not to mention the tips lost had there NOT been six cheap bastards in their real estate for two hours.

I’m Lucinda Lugeons and I approved this message.

Pastor starts website to make amends for bad-tipping Chrisitians: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/09/on-sundays-are-the-worst-website-a-pastor-tries-to-make-amends-for-poor-tipping-by-christians

And from the “turning off the bigot spigot” file tonight, the Kentucky Baptist Convention has cut off funds to a group called “Sunrise Children’s Services” after the group’s controversial pseudo-embrace of tolerance and human equality. Sunrise Children’s Services is the largest private child care agency in Kentucky and stands to lose over seven and a half million dollars annually because of god’s seething hatred for the gays.

So they’re diverting funds from a child care service that isn’t anti-gay enough … Based on reading several headlines a week over the last year on the subject, the church’s child care policies don’t seem to be anti-gay at all. In fact, the diverted funds will likely help pay for lawsuits confirming my suspicions.

Sunrise, formerly known as “Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children” is one of the many groups that are legally exempted from basic human decency because of their religious affiliation. Despite their divinely dictated and government protected right to discriminate against people they don’t like, they considered not summarily dismissing qualified employees on the grounds of who they fuck.

“We set this up on a silver platter for you. We all read the Bible. We all sincerely hate gays. You’re legally allowed to do that now, and we’ll pay you 7.5 million dollars to just keep doing that.” That happened, and the homophobic ploy didn’t work. When multi-million dollar bribes can’t keep your shitty platform going, it’s time to stop having a platform.

The important thing to keep in mind here is that the group didn’t start hiring gays. They just considered it. Briefly. And then rejected it. And then forced the guy who brought it up to resign in disgrace. And the Kentucky Baptist Convention is still withholding those funds.

Kentucky children’s group loses donations from Baptists because they hire the gays: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/08/sunrise-childrens-service-baptist-donations_n_4919227.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in “Meet Joe Blackface” news, Kentucky pastor Joe Pickens performed what would have been a terrible impression of Mr. T as Clubber Lang from “Rocky 3” … if it weren’t for the blackface … as a crowd of minor league zealots at the National Young Fundamentalist Conference laughed and applauded.

How the hell can anyone not know that blackface is offensive? Are you kidding me? That’s like not knowing that dinosaurs preceded mankind or that trees can’t be older… than the… planet they’re on… nevermind.

Apparently they decided to dress up as professional athletes for crowd appeal, but when someone suggested the New York basketball team, nobody made sure Pastor Pickens knew that it’s pronounced ‘Knicker’, and they’re not boxers. “I said we should all dress up as Knickerbockers! Knicker-bockers!!!”

And if I’m not mistaken, blackface is double racist if you wear it while you’re not fucking Whoopi Goldberg.

Ted Danson at the roast joke – nicely done! “No blackface” is a social NORM!!! So I’m thinking maybe we can give them some classier racist skit ideas for next year …

30 seconds on the clock for “Bigoted Sports Teams and Athletes” – GO!!!

Washington Redskins

Good start – It’s definitely a good thing that it’s not the Cleveland Brownskins …

But I mean like Pittsburgh Ass Pirates, Montreal Canadiens

Um… the Towel Head-menton Oilers

Phoenix Sons of the Confederacy … Really, anything in Arizona works.

Yeah, I was gonna go with the Diamond Wetbacks.

Anaheim Mighty Duck Dynasty

Los Klan-geles Angels… of Ku Klux Klaneheim

Dwayne Wades, but can’t swim???

Does he still play for the Miami Hebes?

Or the Miami Sheet … with eye-holes cut out.

What about … Kevin DurAnt Jemima

Do gays count as an oppressed minority? I mean… even if it’s based on a sincerely held religious belief? Cause if so I’ll go with the Brown Bay Packers.

Tar Babe Ruth …

“Jungle Fever Pitch: Curse of the Tar Babe”

Manchester Confederated

White people in blackface … AKA “Going Richie Incognito”

The U! …genics.

Hanging Chad Ocho Cinco- Move on quickly!!! Segue!!! Segue!!!

Kentucky pastor performs “comedy” bit in blackface: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/08/at-baptist-fundamentalist-conference-in-kentucky-a-white-pastor-just-performed-in-blackface/

And finally tonight, in “Heath definitely wasn’t suggesting hanging a black guy” news…

And just to clarify one more time, I was talking about the appalling disenfranchisement of black voters in the American South.

Of course you were. So in “changing the subject” news, Kenyan pastor Reverend Njohi explains that Jesus is yet another of the many things that can’t come until you take off your panties. After a recent meeting of the church’s elders, the good pervert passed an edict banning women from attending services at the church if they were wearing a bra or panties.

As for the Kenyan churgoing commandos, the fact that it’s only the women is suspicious. Something smells Jesus fishy. If they’re hangin’ Pinky, I’m hangin’ Brain.

Njohi defended his decision by explaining that people attending church need to be free in body and spirit to receive Christ. When it was pointed out to him that those are just a series of words that lack any meaning or explanatory power, he added that Jesus loves the pussy. No word yet on how panties effect intravenous injections of Jesus.

You think the women are allowed to wear gags and muzzles?

African Pastor: Women can’t receive the lord if they’re wearing panties: http://jezebel.com/pastor-bans-women-from-wearing-any-underwear-in-church-1535717901

I guess we should close out headlines before the inevitable strapon questions arise.

Too late.

Right. Well, Heath, thanks as always for joining me.

And when we come back, Mark Nebo will join us for a little secular innuendo.

Poems:

The Book of Ezra in Rhyme:

Yet another book of the bible devoted

To making it hard for a biblical poet.

They’ve built this damned temple three times before,

Complete with altars and censers and golden decor.

Then they stripped it and shipped it to Babylonian rulers,

Where the bankers and smithies and merchants and jewelers

Bought it all so the kingdom was able to get

More soldiers to take even more of their shit.

Their temple was ruined and a few were desirous,

To rebuild it so they went to see the noble king Cyrus.

He granted them audience and to their amazement,

When provoked he revoked their terms of enslavement.

So with a word from the sovereign, the exile was finished,

Their wealth and their health and their passion diminished,

But they went back to Judah with singers and priests,

And anointed the temple with bloodthirsty feasts.

Then they gathered up mortar and lumber and bricks,

But unfortunately Judah is surrounded by dicks.

For example, Rehum, looked on Jews with disdain,

So he started a vicious letter writing campaign.

He spread rumors and lies and showed them no mercy;

He slowed down so many Jews you’d think he governed New Jersey.

And just when their situation seemed most precarious,

They got a reprieve from another king, Darius.

So the temple was finished, rebuilt to its glory,

And if this wasn’t the bible, that’d be the end of the story.

Ezra’d reclaimed the most holy of places,

But you can’t be a biblical hero if you’re not also a racist.

So when he heard that some exiles took foreigner wives,

He laments and repents and threatens their lives.

And since god’s such a bigot, they do what’s humane,

And sent their wives and their children away in the rain.

Nehemiah in Rhyme:

And for the book of Nehemiah, I offer something a little more of the “short and sweet” variety:

Nehemiah sat on a wall,

After Jerusalem had a great fall.

All the king’s horses, and all the kings men,

Helped him put it together again.

Outro

Before we let the dogs out tonight, I wanted to remind everybody that we should have the first fifty diatribes available as an ebook by this time next week. So be on the look out for “Diatribes Volume One: 50 Essays from a Godless Misanthrope” coming soon to an Amazon store near you. We’ll obviously have more on that on next week’s episode.

We’ve also had a few listeners get in touch with us asking us to set up a Patreon account. If you’re not familiar with Patreon, it’s a new service that allows our fans another way to financially support the show. I’ll be setting that up this week as well. If you want more details be sure to keep up with our erratically published blog or just wait until next week’s show and I’ll fill you in on all the finer points of Patreon patronage.

And we can’t close it out without giving a big thanks to Heath for existing and having the decency to do so on this show. I need to thank Lucinda for opening the show and regularly having sex with me. I need to thank Dr. Professor Atheist for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote and for rerecording it for me in a different file type at the last possible second. Thanks for that.

I also want to thank Mark Nebo, and his incessant interview companions Leo and Vex one more time for joining me tonight, also wanted to encourage you to check them out at Be Secular (dot) com one more time. You can also find them on Facebook or on Twitter, (at) BeSecular. You can also follow Mark (at) Mark Nebo, you can also follow his wife Shannon, who is the president of Be Secular and, as I understand it, the more skilled arm wrestler (at) Secular Sunshine.

http://besecular.com/

@BeSecular @MarkNebo @SecularSunshine

But of course, most of all we need to thank this week’s most stellar derivatives of stardust; Robert, Steven, Mark, Jason, Graye, Robin, Braxton, Laura, Charles, Robives.com, Dee, James and Thomas. Robert and Steven, whose erections darken the skies; Mark and Jason, who are so brilliant the exponents on their IQs have exponents; Graye and Robin, who are so awesome superheroes read comics about them; Braxton and Laura, who are so attractive Insane Clown Posse can’t figure out how they work; Robives (dot) com which has some really cool videos if you ever have a few extra minutes; Charles and Dee, whose brilliance can only be measured because they were smart enough to figure out a way to measure it; and James and Thomas, who are so sexy Vladimir Putin was willing to invade Crimea just to get that much closer to them.

These thirteen noble humans and websites have banded together to ensure that god would get his requisite amount of shit this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the money that it takes to give us money, but if you have money, we’ll happily take it. You can give it to us by visiting the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com and looking for the donate button on the right side of the page. Because remember, if we starve to death, we can’t do the show anymore.

And if you’d like to help but you spent all your money on the finer amphetamines in life, you can also help us out by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes. Remember, every time we get a five star review, an angel gets debunked. You can also keep up with us on the Facebook, the Twitter, the YouTube and the Google Plus.

Categories: Uncategorized

The One Thing Atheists Should Stop Saying

February 21, 2014 Noah Lugeons 7 comments

by Noah Lugeons

It’s rare that I so profoundly disagree with Hemant Mehta. Anybody who reads this blog or listens to the show knows what a high regard I hold the man in; after all, he was my nominee for 2013 Atheist of the Year.

But in a recent video post, Hemant offered a list of “9 Things Atheists Should Stop Saying“, and without exception, I disagree with every single one. While I agree with some of the larger points he was fitting within this framework, he didn’t actually come up with anything I think atheists should stop saying.

Let me break his points down along with my objections.

#1) “I lost my faith”

This was the only one of his nine where I had trouble even seeing what point he was trying to make. He starts off by claiming that “lost” carries a negative connotation (ie I lost my keys, I lost my job, etc.), then points out that this is false by bringing up the counter-examples of “I lost my virginity” and “I lost weight”.

The point he appears to be making is that when an atheist says, “I lost my faith” it sounds sad to a believer. I’m not sure if this is true or if it is relevant, but either way I don’t think it belongs in any reasonable “banned phrase” list. It’s a minor semantic objection and if we disabuse ourselves of this phrase we’re hamstringing our ability to talk with theists in the language they understand. I’d like to believe that when reasonable theists here someone talk about “losing their faith” they will attach it to the context in which the statement is being said. If it’s uttered by a forlorn shell of a human, it’s depressing. When it’s offered as a preamble to an enthusiastic defense of atheism, one would have to be almost willfully naive to see it as a negative.

#2) “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

The point he’s making here is that when we say this in the context of a religious debate, it sounds like we’re setting an uneven criterion. The claim that prayer works is extraordinary to you and I, but might not be for a Christian. It almost sounds like we’re setting up a double standard that asks their claims to meet a higher standard of evidence that theirs.

But rather than chucking such an important rhetorical point under the bus, I say that when you encounter this misunderstanding you should explain what it meant by it. Offer up an extraordinary claim in science such as the big bang and explain the extraordinary amount of evidence that was needed for the scientific community to accept it. Explain the precept of Occam’s razor. Explain what makes a claim extraordinary.

He also makes the point that many theistic claims fail to meet even the lowest bar of evidence and I agree that this should be pointed out, but this can be offered as an addendum rather than a replacement point. This claim is also spectacularly useful when dealing with claims that do meet a very low bar of evidence (think ancient alien conspiracies, for example).

#3) “Everyone is born an atheist”

Hemant’s point against this statement makes perfect sense when he presents it without context. As a stand alone statement, this would be a ridiculous claim. All babies are atheists in the same way that all rocks and staplers are atheists. It confuses the difference between explicit and implicit atheism and might confuse people as to what, exactly, we mean by atheism.

That being said, I’ve never heard this offered by itself. Perhaps I’m less “in the know” that he, but when I hear atheists making this point, it’s usually in response to references to “Christian” babies or “Muslim” babies. Hemant compares the statement that atheists are babies to saying that babies are “political independents”. And this makes sense, except that their aren’t people claiming that babies are republicans or democrats. People do claim that babies are “Christian” or “Jewish” or what-have-you and go so far as to surgically alter them in accordance with that belief.

In this context, I think it is very important to point out that all babies are atheists, though I’ll admit that such a notion could easily me misapplied by a novice atheist debater.

#4) “We can be good without god”

Here he draws a very compelling parallel. Christians might take this the same way that one would take the statement, “I can drive home without wearing my seatbelt”. Well sure, you can and you’ll probably be fine this time, but wouldn’t it be better if you did wear the seatbelt? The theist will take this statement at face value, but might counter with the notion that you could be better with god.

And maybe this is true of some theists in some situations. But I’d reckon that the minority. As Matt Dillahunty points out in his response to this same post, morality continues to be the major sticking point with most people that have issues with atheists. The claim that we have no “absolute moral code” or that morals can only exist with a divine lawgiver is pervasive in the religious community and I don’t know that there’s a single message we could be sending that’s more important than “We can be good without god.”

#5) “I trust science, not some 2000 year old book”

I can’t fairly summarize his point here, because I didn’t honestly understand it. It was something about this statement lending a false legitimacy to the bible, but I really didn’t follow him. If his point had been not to use the word “trust”, I might be inclined to go along since we don’t “trust” science; we demand from it the same evidence that we would from any other claim or sets of claims; but that wasn’t the point he was making at all.

#6) “You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into in the first place”

This is the closest I come to agreeing with any of his points, but again, I think he sets aside context when he says this. If the statement above is offered as a reason not to engage with theists, it is profoundly incorrect. We should definitely employ logic and reason in our efforts to move people out of the “believer” column. We shouldn’t belittle their mental function by pretending that they don’t prop up their beliefs through reason.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t merit in this statement. I say it all the time and I’ll continue to say it, but when I do it isn’t to point out that reasoning with a religious person is impossible; it’s to point out that reasoning with them isn’t enough. Most atheists hold to their disbelief for logical reasons, but there is an emotional aspect to faith that can’t be ignored in debate. This statement serves as a constant reminder that reason might not be able to do the trick alone.

When I’ve successfully “deconverted” people, it’s been a long process that began with breaking down the logical walls, but ended when I helped them through the emotional hurdles of accepting a worldview without an afterlife or without a “divine plan”.

#7) “I don’t believe in god”

This one didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to be either, to be honest, though I did like the larger point he was making with it. He points out that when you say “I don’t believe in god”, a theist probably reacts the same way we do when people say, “I don’t believe in evolution”. It doesn’t matter if you believe in evolution; evolution doesn’t need you to believe in it to exist.

And this is a good point; one worth keeping in mind any time you engage with a believer. But I don’t understand why one would avoid saying it. I don’t believe in god. That’s an accurate statement. What’s more, the replacement he offers is all but a distinction without a difference: “I don’t believe that any god exists”. I’m not sure how this solves the perception issue, as I’d be no more impressed if a creationists said, “I don’t believe that any selective pressures that cause speciation exist”.

#8) “Religion doesn’t make any sense.”

Again, completely devoid of context, this is probably a useless statement. As Hemant points out, quantum mechanics don’t make any sense. But more than that, it offers the theists a mental refuge. When you say, “Religion doesn’t make any sense”, you’re saying that you don’t understand it and the theist can retreat to the comforting thought that if you understood religion, you’d be just as religious as them.

But again, it’s not like this statement is generally offered as a standalone. I would assume that the majority of atheists would follow this statement up with a few examples of why they don’t think that religion makes sense and, if done well, those supplementary points would aptly demonstrate that the atheist does know as much (or more) about the religion than the theist.

And if the theist counters with a point about quantum mechanics not making sense, the atheist can offer in response that quantum mechanics is able to demonstrate its claims. Cellphones work and we can prove that. There is no religious equivalent when it comes to demonstration.

#9) “You can’t just pick and choose what you believe”

This is a fairly common practice among atheists while I’m not ready to draw a circle and a line through this statement, I actually do agree with the larger point he’s making here… or at least I tangentially agree with it. He’s talking here about “cafeteria Christians” that believe in the good parts of the bible and disagree with the hating gay people and stoning adulteress parts. Atheists very often enter debate with an “all of nothing” attitude about the bible that doesn’t reflect a realistic understanding of their opponent’s position. After all, who is an atheist to tell a believer how to believe in their religion?

But again, this only makes sense when it’s divorced of context. I’ve used a variation of this in debate before but never when talking about religion in general. This is an excellent point when discussing the bible. If a theist offers a biblical justification for belief x or belief y, it’s perfectly acceptable to point out all the horrible shit in the bible and say, “You can’t just pick and choose the biblical passages that support your point and ignore the ones that refute it”. In other words, if they want to use the bible in their defense, their stuck with the whole thing, warts and all.

——

Nine for nine. I didn’t agree with a single point he made.

Now, to be fair to the Friendly Atheist, he was using this framework to make a series of larger points, many of them quite valid. But none of them justified the concept that atheists should “stop using” this phrase or the other. It’s important that we take time to reflect on what we’re saying and how it’s being interpreted, which is precisely what Hemant was doing with this blog entry, but it’s also important that we phrase it correctly. None of these are statements that atheists should, “stop saying”, but they’re all things atheists should think about and reflect on before using them in conversation.

In my opinion, there’s only one thing that atheists should stop saying, and that’s what other atheists should and should not say.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags: atheism, Hemant Mehta

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The One Thing Atheists Should Stop Saying

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