Archive
Episode 39: Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Noah Lugeons
Warning: The explicit language used in this show has been known to cause incontinence. Will you shit yourself? Depends.
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by…
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And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday,
It’s November 14th,
And the date-rapist mustache is a weird choice for prostate cancer awareness.
I’m Noah Lugeons,
I’m Heath Enwright,
And from home of the nation’s tallest phallic structure, New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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Christians build an enormous airplane, to carry a smaller airplane full of bibles to Korea.
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We’ll say “put 30 seconds on the clock” and then do 53 seconds worth of shit,
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And due to sheer volume, disgraced clergy are no longer considered ironic.
But first, the diatribe.
Diatribe:
I know I shouldn’t but sometimes I feel sorry for the theists that argue with me… or any well read atheist for that matter. Jeremey Bien from Reasonable Doubts offered up a great analogy once. He said that if you want to know what it feels like to be the theist in a religious debate, go find a well read vegan and argue with them about eating meat. The facts are all on their side, they’ll beat you in the argument, you’ll eventually realize that you’re wrong and then you’ll go home and have a burger.
I always try to keep that in mind when I reach that point in a debate where my opponent is clearly intentionally misunderstanding me. If you’ve taken part in any of these debates, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s the point where you actually see the wall come down and that fearful glaze appears and quickly disappears in their eyes and they mentally erase the point you just made and come back with, “But Jesus said Jesus Jesus!”
This reaction leads a lot of atheists to believe that there’s just no point in arguing with Christians. You never win, right? Well, if by “win” you mean that you actually get to watch them lose their faith in god and and admit that they were wrong, yeah, you never win. But if you define “winning” as forcing them into the “Jesus said Jesus Jesus” phase of the argument, you never lose.
Greta Christina gives a great talk where she addresses this perceived futility. She starts off by reminding everybody how pointless it is to debate with religious people. They never listen, right? And then she asks for a show of hands from everybody who was “reasoned” out of their faith. And at least half the hands in the room go up.
When we debate, we’re planting seeds and it doesn’t matter that we never get to pick the fruits. The seeds are there and if there’s one thing a religious brain has plenty of, it’s fertilizer.
I only point this out because it’s easy to miss the impact that we’re having. Those of us with devangelical bent can look at our day to day success rate and get really depressed. But if we take a long view, it’s damn encouraging.
We’ve talked plenty on this show about the statistical spike in atheism and that’s obviously the most important metric in this discussion so clearly we as a community are doing something right, but you don’t need pollsters and statisticians to see the difference we’re making. If you want to know how far we’ve come, just look at the way the debate itself has evolved.
A hundred years ago people were still offering up positive examples in their argument for god. They would point to things in the world and say, “therefore god”. But as evolution, genetics, cosmology and physics have come into clearer focus, those arguments have been relegated to circle-jerks of stupidity. The learned theists abandoned those positive examples and shifted to negative examples. Instead of offering a case for god, they piss away their intellectual efforts poking holes in the alternatives.
Think about what a massive step backwards that really is. You’ve gone from trying to prove that your god exists to trying to prove that the guy who says your god doesn’t exist is wrong on a topic that is only tangentially related. Instead of “the human eye is awesome, therefore god” it’s become “the human eye could be less awesome, therefore possibly not un-god.”
Now, I don’t have to point out that if evolution were somehow proved to be incorrect, god doesn’t win by default. If somehow it were proved that there’s no absolute secular moral standard that prohibits murder, god doesn’t somehow get promoted. But the theists act like god is some kind of beauty pageant runner up or something. Like he’s the vice-answer that gets to step in and take over if the real answer is ever unable to fulfill its duties.
And what’s worse is that they know that’s incorrect. Sure, there are some ignorant jackasses defending Jesus that don’t recognize concepts like false-dichotomy, but there are plenty of damn smart theists arguing for god and they know good and damn well that knocking down evolution would really be step negative 26 toward proving god, but they still feel compelled to do it. They know that before they can even get to their pathetic proofs they have to dig all that science and logic out of your brain to make room for Jesus.
Hell, I’m sure you’re as sick of hearing religiots saying “atheism is just another religion” as I am, but if you set aside how ridiculously wrong that is for a second you can’t help but admire what a huge win this is for us. If their best argument is a false analogy that desperately hopes to prove that we suck as bad as they do, we’re clearly winning.
Every argument counts. Every debate matters. Every chip off that stone adds up. Never lose sight of this important fact; everybody who has ever given up their faith, everybody who has ever set aside the prison of superstition and embraced reality did so because of one point; one question; one analogy Sure, other people may have stacked a lot of hay on that camel before, but every time you put another straw on there, know that it might be the last one.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines is “guy who sounds like Randall from Clerks”, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to wrangle out the door for everyone?
There I go, and I am a bersker. And speaking of Jersey, congrats to the Red Bank Humanists, who put up an atheist billboard that hasn’t been righteously vandalized yet.
Give them time…
In our lead story tonight, Hasidic rabbis are estimated to body rape about 50 percent of the young boys they are divinely tasked with mind raping. Victim activist – Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg – believes (quote) “around half of young males in Brooklyn, New York’s Hasidic community […] have been victims of sexual assault perpetrated by their elders.” (rear end quote) Ben Hirsch, director of victim advocacy group Survivors For Justice, suggests the number to be EVEN WORSE!!!
I’ve been saying it for years. Why do you think they make the boys grow their hair out like that? Fuckin’ rape handles.
These numbers are only estimates, admittedly based on anecdotal evidence, so let’s say these experts are WAY OFF this time. Give them a terrible margin of error: say 60 percent (or 30 percentage points) . . . That means as many as 80 percent of young boys were sexually abused!!! With a floor of 20 percent!!! In this extremely generous expert mistake scenario, a minimum of ONE IN FIVE young boys gets raped!!!
Yeah, but I’m sure there was some kind of rape four, get the fifth one free going on.
When asked about how these numbers stack up against Catholics, I imagine one Hasidic Jewish victim responded: (quote) “Altar boy? I should be so lucky. Over there, they roll dice, so you only lose one in six. Here they just flip a coin.” (end quote) This was confirmed by one boldly honest hypothetical rabbi: (quote) “How do we decide who to rape and how? We flip a shekel. Heads and tails should be self-explanatory.” (rear end quote)
Yeah, the bell curve keeps skewing the Catholic’s way. I swear, Pope Franks for Nothin’ gives a few more handjobs to people with boils on the Twitter and the secular community might just forget all about the institutionalized child rape thing.
As a reward for whistle blowing all the whistle blowing, Rabbi Rosenberg has been shunned by the Hasidic community and attacked with bleach. Muslims throw acid, Jews throw strong base. They really are the Yankees and Red Sox of monotheism. Before we wrap up this wonderful story, I’d like to applaud us for omitting the graphic details of the pedophilia witnessed in 2005 by Rabbi Rosenberg in Jerusalem’s holiest bath house. At least atheists call a brothel a brothel.
Hasidic rabbis rape about half the available little boys: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/13/can-this-number-be-credible-jewish-anti-abuse-activists-say-half-of-hasidic-boys-are-raped-by-elders/
And in “Turn the Other Cheek my Ass” news tonight, Texas congressmen Sam Johnson is livid over an infringement on his freedom to tell other people what to do. The cataclysmic affront to American values began early last month when the Air Force Academy chose to make the “under god” portion of it’s service oath optional.
What’s his complaint exactly? . . . The earth science section of the bible puts god at 30,000 feet. They routinely fly above that altitude.
Coupling his outrage over the service-oath adjustment with the ever-present fury over being named after a cock and bearing a striking resemblance to the pedophile character in Family Guy, Johnson lashed out with a proposed bill that would require congressional approval before any changes could be made to the administration of the uniformed service oath.
What the fuck?!? Nobody’s suggesting radical, overtly atheist language anywhere. This is the mildest change ever, and he’s complaining. All that’s happening, is we’re no longer specifying the thing under which we are. We’re not even saying whether that thing is or isn’t. We’re just not addressing the prepositional concept of “under”. So we’ve offensively ignored the ever-latent above/below duality in the oath?!? Really?!?
I’m guessing his justification won’t placate you much. He said that (quote) “There are no atheists in foxholes. We are the land of the free because of the brave” (end quote). So setting aside the brazen douche-baggery it takes to act like brave and atheist are mutually exclusive, I think it’s important to note that this move was made to accommodate atheists in the military. If, as Representative Circumcised Salami claims, there are no atheists in the military, what is he so pissed off about?
Airforce makes “Under God” pledge optional, Texas congressman is livid: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/09/texas-congressman-is-on-the-warpath-to-make-atheist-military-cadets-swear-an-oath-containing-so-help-me-god/
In “Darwin Awards Talent Search” news, Tennessee pastor and aspiring Indiana Jones villain – Andrew Hamblin – vows to continue handing deadly serpents to local stupid people, despite a raid by wildlife authorities that emptied his Temple-of-Doom-style snake pit.
Sorry, but my inner-geek has to point out that in Temple of Doom it was bugs, not snakes. The snakes were in the first one.
Indiana Jones minutia notwithstanding, the atheist community is buzzing, as we may have finally discovered a stupid thing caused by dogmatic adherence to wrongness books.
See, I think you might be letting your personal biases color your appraisal of this situation. After all, who are you to say that giving deadly serpents to inbred Christians is a bad thing. I mean, we all agree that genocide is a bad thing when it isn’t voluntary, but this is new ground on the moral landscape here.
The level of stupidity does make it tricky. Hamblin was asked: (quote) “Using the word ‘snakes’ three times, and a dumb redneck speech pattern, please tell us your opinion on the raid.” He responded (quote) “It doesn’t bother me that they took the snakes, because I can always get more snakes. There can always be more snakes that can be found.”
Someone yelled “Not enough dumb redneck speech pattern!” . . .
At which point Hamblin added, “And that don’t deter me . . . [Go wait in the truck!]”
I’m disappointed. I was hoping for him to put up more of a fight. Something like, “You can have my snakes when you pry them from my cold, necrotic stumps.”
When asked for a final quote that betrays his untenable stance, accidentally making the atheist point for us, he said: (quote) “What bothers me is that this is not a place of business. This is not a home. Had this been a home or a business, yes, raid it. But this is a church. This is a place of worship.” (end quote) We pray here. This is GOD’S stash of heroin and dirty bombs. This is GOD’S frenzied pack of herpetic wolverines.
Knoxville Preacher busted with illegal snakes: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/08/tennessee-wildlife-resources-agency-has-had-it-with-these-mothering-snakes-in-this-mothering-church/
And in part two of our weekly denigration of Texas tonight, polyamorous pastor Doug Phillips has stepped down as the head of the Texas-based “Vision Forum Ministries” after admitting to an extramarital platonic affair. That’s right, when faced with overwhelming evidence that the married father of eight was fuckin’ the baby sitter, he admitted to having an inappropriate, but not sexual relationship. I shit you not, (quote) “While we did not ‘know’ each other in a Biblical sense, [the relationship] was nevertheless inappropriately romantic and affectionate”
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Worst clergy excuse since: “There’s nothing about the neighbor’s husband.”
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“I didn’t know her BIBLICALLY because we did it Muslim style. I knew her Kor-Anally.”
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“There might be some creationism in her uterus, but it’s not mine. It’s one of God’s children. My DNA test was immaculate.”
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“I didn’t know her BIBLICALLY, but I poked my nose between her pages a little, if you know what I’m sayin’.”
Phillips is an outspoken proponent of male “dominion” over women and preaches a notoriously sexist, arrogant and antiquated view of marriage. Needless to say. news of his adultery left his congregants expressing shock that there were multiple women that would fuck him.
Well the baby sitter didn’t fuck him. At most, she gave him a “know job”. She knew him like a mohel knows a bloody, mutilated, infant penis.
While Phillips has stepped down as the public face of the for-profit ministry, he still maintains ownership and control in every way that matters. He’s cancelled all his speaking engagements for the foreseeable future and intends to spend his time, (quote), “focusing on counting the 3 million dollars a year I rake in telling women to go make me a sandwich, motherfuckers!!!”
Patriarchy priest resigns because of extramarital affair: http://www.religionnews.com/2013/11/06/homeschooling-leader-doug-phillips-resigns-amidst-extramarital-relationship-keeps-business/
And in “Felix and Oscars” news, the coveted homophobic “Bigot of the Year” at the Stonewall Awards goes to Pat Robertson, for being the person who most “gratuitously caused hurt and offense to gay people” over the last twelve months of the hate season.
In our wildest dreams, we’ll never be as powerful a force for atheism as that frothing lunatic.
Seems to me like Robertson is the Meryl Streep of the Stonewall Awards, and deserves more of a lifetime achievement presentation. But they couldn’t fit all that queer-hate into a single video montage, so they had to settle on highlights from this year only.
And keep in mind that he’s a multi-instrumentalist in the bigotry orchestra. He managed to squeeze award winning amounts of queer-hatin’ in while still hating atheists, Muslims, jews, actors, blacks, latinos, asians, Ukrainians… that guy is a machine.
So if you’re wondering how to gratuitously hurt and offend gays, here’s a few examples from a positive role model. Start by comparing transgender people as a group, to your castrated horse. Evidently, they hate that. Then maybe suggest that laws against anti-gay discrimination are unconsitutional because Christians could go to jail. Follow this up by pointing out that gays are just straight people who (quote) “had the god fucked out of them.” Then round out your homophobic rant by asking for a “vomit button” for disliking gay shit on Facebook. And finally close it with a line about the secret “GAIDS Handshake” dirty needle rings.
Pat Robertson wins “Bigot of the Year” award: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/08/pat-robertson-bigot-of-the-year_n_4240117.html
And in “What, no Manna?” news tonight, American pastor Eric Foley became the latest in a long and proud line of Christian missionaries who have gone to great lengths and expense to give bibles to starving people.
“I’m about to die of malnutrition, so thanks for this . . . I’d wipe my ass with the pages, but I don’t shit, because I don’t eat, so . . . I guess it’ll be nice to have something unreadable to look at until I die tomorrow. You’re sure this is gonna work? I skim the first and last sentence of each chapter, and I’ll be able to BS my way into heaven? Apparently St. Peter is a shitty middle school English teacher.”
This latest misguided attempt at a high-fiber diet took place along the border of North Korea, where Christian mission group and sad attempt at cleverness “Seoul USA” has been surreptitiously dropping balloon-loads of bibles on the malnourished populace of one of the world’s most oppressive governments for months.
I’ve got a suggestion for where those bullshit-smugglers can put the balloons full of bibles. Clergy experiment with “religion via suppository” all the time. Doesn’t usually get them in trouble.
When asked why they chose to sneak bibles into the country instead of useful stuff like food, medicine or anything other than a bible, Reverend Foley chewed on his cellphone or barked or something because you’d have to be a drooling fucking retard not to realize what an insultingly stupid waste of resources this is.
Korean Bible Drop: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/11/08/bible-drop-christian-group-takes-to-sky-to-sneak-gospel-into-north-korea/
And from the expansive “Christian Forcing Captive Kids to Do Stuff” file, school bus driver, Minnesota pastor, and asshole with roman numerals after his name – George Nathaniel EyeEyeEye – was fired from his more gainful employment for refusing to stop evangelizing to public school children stuck in his prayer bus.
That’s gotta make it damn hard to maintain the “back and forth jostling bus stiffy”.
After complaints of unsolicited religious advances, he was assigned to a different group of children, much like a disgraced priest. Finally, after failing to heed repeated warnings to stop violating district policy and the First Amendment, EyeEyeEye was terminated. The district of Burnsville will have to quickly find someone qualified to … silently drive a bus.
Okay, question one; the wheels on the bus go round and… what? Okay good. Question two; it is acceptable to theologically brain rape the kids (a) occasionally or (b) never?
This week’s set of headlines seem to have established a theme of mental rape more than usual, so I guess I’ll roll with it . . . Put in the worst possible words, kids do need to be brain raped to some extent. Gotta learn. But let’s keep it to a minimum. Maybe just true things, if we’re making a rule about minimizing the brain rape.
Bus driver refuses to stop praying to captive children, gets fired: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/praying-bus-driver-fired_n_4234315.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
And finally tonight, in part three of our weekly denigration of Texas, Pastor Phillip Heinze of the Calvary Lutheran Church in Fort Worth has learned that raping people’s brains is a lot like raping people’s assholes… it helps if they’re drunk. This inspiration led him to start an outreach program called, “Church-in-a-pub”.
Fort Worth WalMart is installing a pub? Texans can finally get drunk, buy guns, hate queers, and love Jesus, all under one roof. Used to be two roofs.
Firmly supplanting karaoke as the most annoying thing in a bar, the unconventional location for the ministry helps spread the word of Jesus to the segment of society most likely to be dealing with perpetually damaged brain cells while simultaneously sparing the congregation the expense of rent.
So at the risk of overplaying this bit, 30 seconds on the clock, Jesus themed booze:
Killed By Jews Booze . . . Gotta explain something here. The reason we go after the Jews so much is primarily because “Jew” is a single syllable that works easily into puns. It’s nothing personal except when it is. Anyway. . . Holy Spirits – Game On! . . .
Jesus of Nazar-Ethanol
One Samuel Adams?
Glenn Beck’s? No, fuck him . . . King James-eson?
Burning Busch
Remy Martin Luther . . . Origin and Tonic
Absolution Vodka
Well he probably didn’t like Rusty Nails . . . Screwdriver Up Against the Cross With a Twist?
Fort Worth congregation starts “Church-in-a-pub”: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/12/texas-church-attracts-new-followers-with-beer/
And on that long list of reasons to take a quick break from recording, we’ll wrap the headlines. Heath, thanks for your biting wit and insight.
And when we come back, we’ll be drunker.
Skit:
Mark: C’mon in guys.
Matthew: Sup Mark?
Mark: Nothin’ much. Appreciate you guys coming out. Is um… where’s John?
Luke: He had a date.
Mark: A date?
Matthew: Yeah… he said he would just copy off our notes later.
Mark: Really? I mean, we’re transcribing the life of god’s only begotten son. Pretty important that he… you know, show up.
Luke: You got any beers?
Mark: No, Luke, this is serious stuff. I figured we would stay sober for it.
Luke: (mockingly) I figured we’d stay sober…
Mark: So go ahead and grab a quill and some parchment there. I figured we could just jot down a few notes before we got started.
Matthew: What notes? We were all there. Can’t we just tell the story the way we saw it?
Mark: Sure, Luke, that’s the plan, but this is possibly the most important story ever recorded. It’s vital that we present a unified account of the events. You know, for posterity.
Matthew: Sure, why not?
Mark: Okay, so let’s start with Jesus’s birth. Jesus was born in Nazareth…
Luke & Matthew (simultaneously): Bethlehem. Galilee.
Mark: What?
Luke & Matthew (simultaneously): Bethlehem. Galilee.
Mark: No, Nazareth.
Luke & Matthew (simultaneously): No, Bethlehem. No, Galilee
Mark: His last name is “Of Nazareth”.
Luke: Yeah, but they moved to Nazareth later. He was born in Bethlehem.
Matthew: In a manger.
Mark: What?
Matthew: Yeah, because of the census.
Mark: What census?
Luke: Oooh… and his mom was a virgin.
Matthew: Nice.
Mark: Guys, that doesn’t even make sense. Look, we need to take this seriously.
Luke: Oh, and check this out; how about three wise men showed up when he was born and crowned him the king of earth while he was still a baby.
Matthew: I don’t know about all that, but I like the virgin birth bit.
Mark: But that didn’t happen! Guys, I think it’s important that we don’t exaggerate.
Luke: Who’s exaggerating? If he hadn’t been crowned king, how else would he have escaped king Herod’s order to execute all the children under two years of age.
Mark: The what?
Matthew: And he had laser vision!
Mark: No laser vision.
Matthew: Aw, c’mon…
Mark: Look, I’m writing down Nazareth. Jesus was born in Nazareth.
Luke: Fine. I’m writing down he was born in Bethlehem to a virgin during a Roman census under the threat of Herod’s infanticidal dictum.
Matthew: And I’m giving him laser vision.
Mark: No laser vision!
Matthew: No beer, no laser vision… you suck, Mark.
Mark: You know what, let’s just… let’s just put the birth stuff on the back burner for a minute. I mean, this story is more about his death than his birth anyway, right?
Luke: Couldn’t agree more.
Mark: So we do all agree that he was crucified, right?
Luke: Of course.
Mark: So they stick him on the cross, he cries out for god and then he dies.
Luke: Right.
Matthew: I think it would be better if… and just hear me out on this one, but wouldn’t it be better if he forgave his killers? And then reassured the good thief and then like… offered himself up to god. That would be way cooler.
Mark: Yeah, maybe, but that’s not how it happened.
Matthew: Well, maybe that’s how I remember it.
Mark: Guys, this is getting out of hand here. Jesus gets crucified, he cries out to god and he dies. They stick him in the tomb.
Luke: Right. And then his mom and his lady friend went back to the tomb…
Mark: …wasn’t Salome there as well?
Matthew: …and Joanna.
Mark: And when they get there, they find…
Luke & Matthew (simultaneously): Two men in dazzling apparel The angel of the lord
Mark: See, this is what I’m talking about. It was a dude in a white robe. It ends with them finding the empty tomb and a dude in a white robe. The end, roll credits.
Matthew: Well, what about when he came back to life?
Mark: When he what!?
Matthew: Yeah, he appeared in a room in Jerusalem…
Luke: …a mountain in Galilee you mean…
Matthew: …to his disciples…
Luke: …and everybody else…
Matthew: …and he assured them that he would come again.
Luke: …and he had an army of zombies.
Mark: Guys, this just happened. If you we write that he had an army of zombies and laser vision everybody’s gonna know you’re full of shit.
Matthew: Okay fine, no laser vision.
Luke: But we’re keeping the zombies.
Mark: We’re not keeping the zombies.
Luke: In my gospel, there’s gonna be zombies.
Mark: What do you mean your gospel? There’s just gonna be one gospel.
Luke: I thought we’d each write our own.
Yeah, that sounds way better.
Mark: Well… fine, but we at least have to get the details right, then. I mean, how can we each throw out a gospel that tells a different story about the guy? Who would ever believe that?
Luke: You’d be surprised.
Outro
Before we lick the plate tonight I wanted to thank everybody who checked out our CafePress site at CafePress (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist and picked up some of the fine logoed merchandise there. I’m sure a lot of little faces are gonna be really happy when they unwrap that Scathing Atheist logo beer stein on Christmas morning.
I also wanted to let everyone who hasn’t checked out the site know that we have a special going on Scathing Atheist Christmas Tree ornaments so if you have one of those trees at the local mall that let’s people put up their own ornaments or anything, it’s six dollars and sixty-six cents well spent. Also a great one to sneak onto grandma’s tree to get an awkward conversation started.
Also need to thank John and JD from the Rational Talk podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. They’re podcast is a new one, but it’s fun, it’s raunchy and it’s got a lot of promise; definitely one worth checking out. The name makes it hard to Google so be sure to check the shownotes on this week’s episode for a link or check them out at THE Rational Talk (dot) com.
Also need to thank Lucinda as always for molding me into the human being that I am today through boundless reserves of patience and tolerance. Oh, and also for providing the explicit language warning this week. And also for that thing she does with her tongue and she knows exactly what I’m talking about.
I also need to thank Heath for that thing he does with his tongue; and for all you know, I’m referring to all the talking and being funny he does on this show every week. And while we’re doling out appreciation, I also want to thank Tony Romo and Dez Bryant for sucking balls against the Saints last week leading to an improbable and narrow victory for my Fantasy Team over Bill and Suzy from Bar Room Atheists, thus ending a three game slide and putting me back into third place as we approach the postseason.
But most of all I need to thank this week’s distressingly short list of the world’s best people, Robert and Thomas. Robert, whose penis is rivalled in size and power only by the high water mark of the Mongolian empire and Thomas, whose evolutionary perfection would make his genetic code an international best-seller. These two pillars of humanity have improved the lives of countless rational beings across the Virgo Cluster this week by giving us money. Our donation system is, of course, highly selective in who it will allow to give us money, but if you think you share the pansophical cunning of Robert and Thomas, feel free to find out by clicking the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. And remember, the more money it allows you to give, the better a human being you are.
Oh, and a quick note. Up to now I’ve done a song on every tenth episode. I’ve got one written for episode 40 but with the Holy Babble segment and the poem and everything we won’t have room for it next week so you’ll have to wait an extra week to hear me sing about priests raping children.
That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight. Remember people who give us a five star reviews on iTunes, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on YouTube, follow the blog and like us on Facebook get eternal oral sex after they die, and if you don’t believe me, I can write it down in a book and then quote that book to prove it.
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.
Episode 38 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Lucinda & Noah Lugeons
Note: Transcript contains some portions edited from the completed episode due to time constraints
Warning: This podcast contains explicit language like shit and fuck.
Sponsor: Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new television network ESPN Jew; featuring hall of fame sportscasters Marv Albert, Chris Berman, Howard Cosell, Marty Glickman and Al Michaels, narrating an endless loop of Sandy Koufax highlights with occasional snippets of disgraced steroid-abusing Brewer outfielder Ryan Braun.
ESPN Jew, because seriously, it’s Koufax and Bears punter Adam Podlesh.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday,
It’s November 7th,
And Brandon Lee died because someone filled in the (blank).
I’m Noah Lugeons,
I’m Heath Enwright,
And from post-Bloombergian New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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We’ll refresh you with some thinking-man’s abortion jokes.
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The Jews will continue to have not murdered Jesus,
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And we do an entire segment on Pennsylvania schools, without a single Sandusky joke.
But first, the diatribe.
Diatribe:
Normally I do retractions at the end of the show, but this week we’ve got one I want to put right up front. The atheist blogosphere was abuzz all week last week with stories about a Polish girl who committed suicide to be with her father in heaven. It was all over social media all week complete with vigilant Jesus-defenders trying to theologically justify it.
Heath and I reported on it as well and the day that episode was released we immediately started seeing the retractions. It turns out the original story came from a tabloid paper and the more vigilant reporters were unable to confirm any of the details of the story. It almost certainly never happened.
But even before that news came out, there was a bit of internal conflict about running with this news item. Even when I didn’t doubt the veracity of the story, I was still hesitant to include it. Part of my resistance stems from the fact that I’m nowhere near as comfortable as my co-host with the prospect of making jokes about a suicidal elementary schooler, but part of it was simply the extreme nature of the story. I mean, it’s not like there was a rash of theologically inspired preteen suicides or anything. Even if this happened it was an extreme, isolated incident.
So when Heath brought up the story I originally objected to it. I explained my objection and he reasoned me out of them. And what’s more, the reasons that convinced me are still valid even if the story is bullshit.
This story was so appealing to atheists not because they believed that this was some inevitable consequence of religion, but because it offered a case study in one of the many theological pretzels that comes with the whole afterlife concept. Whether or not some little girl really killed herself to get to heaven, the questions that it prompted from atheists is no less valid.
As near as I can tell, this whole afterlife thing is the only real feature religion has left to sell. That and intermittent divine key-location. And as much as people seem to love the concept of an afterlife, it’s a sex-in-the-shower kind of thing; it sounds good until you start thinking about it.
The Facebook arguments bore this out. Most of them went like this:
The atheist would say, “Well if she got to be with her dad, wasn’t suicide the right choice?”
And the theist would counter with theological minutia; “No, because suicide is a mortal sin.”
To which the atheist would say, “So god sent the little girl to hell for eternity for missing her dad?”
To which the theist would change the subject, commit a gross logical fallacy or criticize the atheist’s spelling and/or punctuation.
Of course none of this matters because there was no little girl, there is no god and there is no heaven, but that doesn’t spackle over the logic gap at all.
Some of the debates were more utilitarian, of course. Some people argued for the value of simply believing in heaven whether it existed or not and thus avoided the delicate little-girl-roasting-in-hellfire problem by framing it as a question of proper theological education.
“If somebody told her that suicide was a mortal sin beforehand, she’d never have considered it.”
Okay, maybe that’s true, but how comforting is that to the little girl whose dad shot himself? What do you tell her? “Don’t worry, sweetheart, someday you’ll get bicurious and then you’ll get to burn in hell with him.”
I’m sick and tired of listening to people argue the merits of a belief in the afterlife. It’s an absurd concept no matter how you try to spin it and what’s more, it makes it harder to deal with the reality that dead people are just dead. That’s usually the hardest thing anyone will ever have to deal with so you’re probably better off trying to deal with it right away rather than cheese-clothing over it with fairy tales until it actually happens.
One way or the other, death is hard to deal with and like most things, rampant illogical bullshit doesn’t make it any easier. The cold comfort of thinking about grandma looking down from heaven dries up really quick when you’re lubing a dildo. And the cold comfort of your own immortality dries up when you think about a heaven run by some dude that has a perfectly good paradise elsewhere and put us here instead.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is the third member of our two man triumvirate Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to virate?
Sure, why not? The ladies love things that virate.
In our lead story tonight, an Egyptian atheist was arrested this week for existing. According to a report from “Ahram Online”, a 20 year old student in the Suez city of Ismailia was arrested after allegedly starting an atheist group on Facebook.
I thought the CIA installed an Atheist Jewish government after causing Arab Spring.
Yeah, that’s what the NSA transcripts say, but apparently not. This would not mark the first time the Egyptian judicial system has responded to illegal use of emoticons. In December of last year atheist activist Alber Saber was sentenced to three years in jail for sharing a link to an online film critical of Islam.
They wanted him to post links to all the pro-Islam movies currently dominating world cinema?
Like… Obama’s home movies?
Rama-Donnie Brasco?
Water-boardwalk Empire.
Halal-most Famous.
Anyway, in their continuing effort to make sure the days of the pharaohs remains the highpoint in Egyptian civilization, the nation boasts draconian blasphemy laws that make (quote) “offending religion in any form” punishable by as many as six years in prison or two years service against the legionnaires.
Egyptians arrested for starting atheist Facebook page: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/84968/Egypt/Politics-/Egypt-security-investigates-student-for-forming-at.aspx
And from the “Saviors NOT Murdered By Jews” file … Jesus: the Jews did NOT murder Jesus. However, according to a 2013 survey, only 75% of Americans are willing to believe the Jewish alibi on this, which says (quote) “None of us are 2000-year-old former citizens of ancient Rome.” Strangely enough, the remaining 25% tend to be anti-Semitic, despite the fact that – as far as they know – the Jews killed Jesus for their sins. I think a modicum of gratitude is in order…
That’s a too often overlooked part of this thing. Sure, Jesus died for the sins, but everybody involved was playing a necessary role in god’s divine plan. Where’s the love for the guy who made the crown of thorns? Or the carpenter that put together the cross? After all, that cat o nine tails didn’t just clean the chunks of flesh out of itself.
Historians and other literate people point out that the Jewish people were slaves in Rome at the time of Jesus’s death, and generally slave populations had little control over government execution policy, as evidenced by the fact that Jewish slaves were getting executed all the time. Despite this, and several other instances of the Jews NOT murdering people, and one huge instance of the opposite, many Americans still carry anti-Semitic attitudes.
In preparation for this news story I made the mistake of typing “25% of Americans think…” into the Google search bar. Possibly the most depressing autocomplete you will ever see.
For example, about 25% believe (quote) “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” (end quote) . . .
Six million little cases of murder and they’re bitching for a century… Jews.
Gotta figure lots of these anti-Semites are Bible Belters . . .
Do you really get a lot of 90-year-old German Jews jogging up next to you in rural Arkansas, you’re just trying to do some cardio, and they won’t stop blabbing on about surviving genocide?
“You working up a good sweat? I’m auschvitzing like a pig over here.”
“Shut up Saul- actually that’s pretty funny. You can say that because you’re Jewi- Look I don’t have time to make holocaust puns with you again!” …
Guess we should put 30 seconds on the cl-
We will not be putting 30 seconds on the clock for a holocaust pun segment. Moving on.
25% of Americans believe the Jews killed Jesus: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/01/jews-killed-jesus-adl-survey_n_4191568.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
And from the “What’s the motto with you?” file tonight, a bill that would put the words “In God We Trust” in every public school in the state has passed through Pennsylvania’s Education committee, reminding atheists and secularists everywhere that rednecks don’t only live in the south.
Those rednecks do spread quickly. They fuck like rabbits. Like ignorant, incestuous rabbits.
Hell, some of them just fuck rabbits. Anyway, the bill’s sponsor and amputated-testicle joke on a tee Rick Saccone points out that the measure would promote patriotism by reminding school kids that America was founded by the same oppressively religious assholes they had in the rest of the world back then. Nine of the twenty three members of the committee opposed the bill on the grounds that would cost money and is stupid, but supporters point out that (quote) “them motherfuckers are a bunch of godless commies”.
Yeah it’s the lack of creationist visual aids that’s leading to all the rampant atheism. Kids don’t trust things unless they have lots of posters with vague, unexplained platitudes.
Saccone also points out that this will help draw attention to the little known fact that the red-scare inspired change in the nation’s motto wasn’t proposed by just any irrational, divisive, nugatory, reactionary, hysterical, twaddling tit… it was a Pennsylvanian one.
And speaking of propaganda mongers with semi-amputated testicles, Richard Sack-One, aka Dick Half-Sack, aka Only One Kenobi started his political career at the Ministry of Truth in Oceania during the mid-eighties.
Bill to put “In God We Trust” in every classroom passes PA Education committee: http://www.abc27.com/story/23782955/pa-house-gets-bill-to-post-in-god-we-trust-in-schools
And in “Found My Soul Mate” news: Area woman celebrates Halloween dressed as a bloodied Boston Marathon runner . . . According my research, and her twitter handle, I just need to look for (quote) “Some Skank in Michigan” named Alicia Ann Lynch.
As a native born Michigander I can tell you, we’ve got the best skanks.
She’s perfect for me, right? Female, 22, self-proclaimed skank … check check check. And she might just have the best cringe-worthy sense of humor ever. Close second place in the cringe-worthy humor contest goes to the accidentally hilarious Lisa in Dallas, who tried to angrily respond to Lynch by saying: (quote) “Wow. If she has kids, would she put them in bloodied Sandy Hook shirts?” (end quote)
Inadvertently giving Heath a reason to procreate.
Alicia Lynch (and/or Lisa in Dallas for that matter), I hereby offer to impregnate you, have those kids, and dress them up like Lisa suggests, just so we could take the most offensive and also hilarious family photo of all time. I’m not suggesting the events themselves are funny, but when combined with a holiday about death juxtaposed with children in costumes, I can’t avoid a chuckle. And hand on a Bible, most people in Boston would trade a minor explosion at the marathon for a Red Sox world series all day.
Isn’t it a little too soon for World Series jokes?
Funniest Female Ever: http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/woman-s-boston-marathon-bombing-costume–what-it-says-about-everyone-205502002.html
And in “Abstain-o-lantern” news tonight, a Christian assholes took it upon herself to ruin Halloween for some neighborhood kids when she chose to augment the traditional candy by stapling it to graphic anti-abortion propaganda.
Nothing goes together like halloween candy, staples, and dead kids.
While nothing would appetize an atheist like pictures of aborted fetuses, a number of the parents in the New Mexico neighborhood were shocked. The woman who handed out the dead baby menus defended her actions by reminding people that it’s okay to be a bitch as long as Jesus.
Okay, 30 seconds on the clock; Baby-based Halloween candies:
Fetus Pieces- no Sugar Baby Killers
Embryo Ruth Bars
And the miniatures are called Test Tube Baby Ruth?
Kid-Kats
SteM&M Cells
Spree-mies?
Cadbury Ova? Cadbury Fertilized Eggs? Cadbury Egg Drop Soup – and if you weren’t listening last week, that’s describing candied euphemisms for abortion.
It’s not a candy, but you could have some infanti-cider to drink.
Ok nice, atheist beverages … Swiss Miscarriage Hot Chocolate
Christians give out graphic anti-abortion propaganda at Halloween: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/03/new-mexico-trick-or-treaters-given-graphic-anti-abortion-propaganda-with-candy/
In “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” news, several drunken rednecks went wandering in the woods at night with rifles, hoping to murder a mythical yeti. When they saw a what appeared to be a large, bearded human with a blaze orange jacket, they did what any former vice president would do, and shot him.
“What could that human shaped thing in the dark be, if not a bigfoot?”
Yeah, apparently they initially told the 911 dispatcher that he’d been gored by a unicorn in combat but when she expressed doubt, they were forced to tell the truth. They needed a replacement cryptozoological hair for the core of their magic wands.
I also love that the news report ends with the sentence, “It is not yet known if drugs or alcohol played any part in the accident.” For the sake of my faith in humanity, both drugs and alcohol better have played a fucking role in it.
Unfortunately this story does not have a happy ending. In what can only be described as a Darwin Award snub, the wounded sasquatch wrangler is expected to survive.
Man accidentally shot while “hunting bigfoot” with friends: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/03/three-men-arrested-after-accidental-shooting-during-bigfoot-hunt/
In “Them-merry-gentlemen-are-probably-fags-too” news tonight, greeting card behemoth and indefatigable generator of trivial holidays Hallmark is dodging accusations of homophobia this week after releasing a Christmas ornament that rewrites the lyrics to “Deck the Halls” to take out that offensive reference to assless chaps.
What happened? Did Hallmark find out that “Yuletide Carol” is the name of a trans-gender holiday-themed prostitute on my block? Oh no, obviously … It’s the line before that. It’s gonna say “Don we now our HOMOSEXUAL apparel” to be politically correct.
Close, but actually the sweater shaped ornament has, “Don we now our FUN apparel” written across it, but in Hallmark’s defense, it’s the gayest fucking sweater you can imagine so clearly they don’t hate the gays across the board.
Right and it’s only for the one holiday. It’s like how white people are allowed to use the N-word on Christmas morning. And then Christians are allowed to use homophobic slurs that afternoon. There’s a holiday hate schedule, and it generally works.
A representative for the company explained that the song dates back to the 1880s, way before gay meant having butt sex, adding (quote) “today it has multiple meanings, which we thought could leave out intent open to misinterpretation”. So apparently the representatives for Hallmark think that many of their customers have assumed this whole time that those carollers are singing about anal-beads and strapons.
Certain apparel – gay or straight – was really put in there to be removed.
Hallmark edits Deck the Hall to remove references to butt-sex: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/10/31/hallmark-nixes-gay-from-christmas-carol-on-ornament/
In “Hexa-kosioi-hexe-konta-hexa-phobia” news, the Christianity brainwash process caused a high school cross country runner to drop out of a race. The satanic cult that runs the Whitley County Kentucky school system, insisted that she wear Anti-Christ propaganda in the form of a bib with the # 666, also known as a Beelze-Bib.
Student and amateur biblical numerologist Gina Croley explained her decision by saying (quote), “I didn’t want to risk my relationship with god”
Helped the poor… check.
Kept my commandments… check.
Didn’t mix fibers… check.
Never randomly fell to number six hundred and sixty six in a numerical set… hold on a second!
When asked why she didn’t just flip it to 999, or pencil in a “point one” or a “negative sign”, her church spokesman I made up replied: (quote) “Satan’s not that stupid. And it’s not like this is arbitrary. We hate any homo-digital number that’s equal to the summation of the integers from 1 to the square of that digit.” (end quote) … Fun way to scare Christians away I guess: “Don’t make me add up the numbers on this roulette wheel. I’ll fucking do it. 1010011010 in binary!!! Stay back!!!”
Satan Almost Gets Soul at High School Cross Country Race: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/11/05/high-school-runner-drops-out-of-regional-race-after-being-assigned-number-666/
Well that’s gonna do it for headlines tonight. Heath, thanks as always for being a part of it.
And when we come back, Lucinda will join us to reluctantly say penises three times in a single sentence.
Merch Plug:
http://www.cafepress.com/scathingatheist
Welcome back to the Scathing Atheist home-shopping network, America’s number one source for Scathing Atheist logo merchandise. Heath, what’s our next item?
Next up is this lovely Scathing Atheist logo Men’s V-Neck T-Shirt. This 100% soft cotton tee is perfect for beaches, parks, outdoor sporting events… anywhere you normally wear clothes, really. And it’s available in five sizes so you can collect ‘em all!
Because having only clothes that fit you is narrow minded. Now, if I’m not mistaken this T-shirt has been scientifically proven to increase your balance, sexual stamina and white blood cell count, isn’t that right?
Yes, if you’re not mistaken, those things are true.
And how much are we selling these T-shirts for today, Heath?
That’s a great question because I’m sure our listeners have seen similar shirts in Fifth Avenue boutiques selling for hundreds if not millions of dollars, but we have a special indefinite-day-offer where our listeners can get them for one easy payment of only $23.99.
Obviously you misspoke, as the price you quoted is clearly less than a tenth of the value of this amazing upper body garment. I’m sure you didn’t mean “only $23.99”.
No, you heard me right. We’re practically giving these shirts away right now.
That price is far too low for me to believe anything you have to say about this T-shirt so let’s move on to our next item.
Sure. Next up we’ve got a rugged and durable hard plastic Scathing Atheist logo iPhone case with a polished finish.
I have to tell you, that’s so beautiful I’m erect. I’m literally having trouble not dry humping it at this very moment.
I have one inside me right now. This iPhone case has been clinically tested to improve weight loss, regrow hair, improve athletic performance, and nestle comfortably in your duodenum.
And how did those clinical tests come out?
They were brought to completion, as was I, via prostate.
Excellent. You know, that’s such an aesthetically pleasing iPhone case I couldn’t help myself and I bought three of them this morning. And I don’t even own an iPhone.
Well that’s not a problem. We also have them available for iPads, iPad minis, Galaxy phones, Kindles and more.
Yeah, but they don’t all have that beautiful Scathing Atheist logo design on the back do they?
They do.
Wow. That must cost at least $355.
Actually, believe it or not, these phone covers start as low as $20.39.
Holy shit! That’s under $20.40! I’m starting to doubt your integrity.
I get that a lot at these ridiculous prices.
So you’re telling me I can protect my phone from scratches…
That’s right.
Dings…
Mm-hmm.
Scuffs,
Yep.
And drops,
That’s correct.
AND I can proudly display my filthy monkey heritage at the same time?
I know, I know, it sounds too good to be true, but because of a once in a lifetime astronomical convergence, we’re able to offer these state of the art phone and tablet covers for a steal. Like many an eponymous retailer, we’ve gone crazy and started slashing prices!!!
Wow. Who’d have ever thought I could finish all my holiday shopping so quickly. But as amazing as that deal is, I see one problem with it.
What’s that, Noah?
Well, I can already hear listeners at home saying, “I really want that lovely iPhone cover, but I don’t want to cover an iPhone with it so much as I want to cover myself with it. And I don’t want it to be made of hard plastic so much as a poly/cotton blend. And I wish it had a hood.” It’s a shame we don’t have anything for those listeners.
We do.
We do?
Well how about this lovely Scathing Atheist logo pullover hoodie for only $41.99? Or this fitted ladies zipper hoodie for only $32.39?
But what if they don’t have a gym bag to put all this lovely Scathing Atheist logo merchandise in?
Well, I suppose they could add this Scathing Atheist logo water resistant, nylon gym bag to their shopping cart for only $16.19.
Is that the correct price or are you suffering from some rare form of mathematical insanity?
I know, I know, these prices are far too low to be accepted on faith, but you can verify them all by going to cafepress (dot) com (slash) Scathing Atheist and you’ll see that my mental faculties are still in working order.
Wow, I suppose I’ll have to log on to that website or check the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com for a handy link immediately.
So will everyone listening, I’m sure.
Well, assuming that all of our listeners are discerning shoppers with a keen sense of value. Oh, and weren’t you saying something about free shipping earlier?
No, I wasn’t.
Bible Story:
“Run gather the young ‘uns, folks! It’s time for Lucinda Lugeons’ Bible Stories for kids!”
(Judges 19)
Gather round boys and girls, today we’re going to open up our bibles to the book of Judges and learn about one of the most important women in the whole bible. She was so important that the whole nation of Israel went to war over her and all she had to do was get raped to death and dismembered.
We don’t know her name, but we’ll call her Terry. She was a concubine, which is kind of like a combination between a wife and a slave, and one day the man that owned her made her mad so she went home to her parents. After a few months of trying unsuccessfully to lick his own balls, he decided to go get her, because after all, he did own her.
So he went and got her but on the way back to his house they found themselves in a town called Gibeah. They’d never been there before, it was getting dark and they didn’t have anywhere to sleep so they were really scared. But luckily a nice old man came across them and let them stay at his house.
He gave them food and something to drink, but right before they were about to put on their pajamas, there was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” the old man asked.
A voice on the other side of the door answered, “A violent rape gang”
Now suddenly everyone got very scared because violent rape gangs like to force their penises into places where you’d rather not have penises and nobody in the house wanted any penises in them.
“What do you want?” the old man asked.
And the violent rape gang answered back, “You brought some man into your house tonight. Send him outside so that we may know him.”
And when they said, “know him”, they meant “fuck him”, and when I say “fuck him”, I mean forcibly penetrate his rectum with their engorged, throbbing cocks. And when I say rectum, I mean butthole.
But the man inside didn’t want to have his butthole forcibly penetrated so he turned to the old man and asked what they could do.
“I don’t know”, the old man said, “They’re not going to go away until they have somebody to violently rape.”
And the man gave a big sigh of relief. He was afraid he would have to be raped, but luckily he had Terri there to get raped for him. So he and the old man pushed her out the door and the violent rape gang went to work violently gang raping her. And that was very rude because the sounds of her being brutally violated to death made it really hard for the other two men to sleep.
Eventually the gang got bored and stopped raping her, so she tried to crawl back to the house, but her intervaginal hemmoraging was too severe so she only made it to the porch before she died.
The next morning her husband (slash) owner got up and rubbed his eyes, ready to finish his journey home. He thanked the old man and then went outside to get his fuck-slave. He saw her laying on the porch and thought that she must be really lazy to still be asleep so late in the morning, so he kicked her a few times to wake her up.
And when he realized she was actually dead, he was extremely annoyed. How was he supposed to fuck her now? So he did the logical thing, he chopped her into little pieces and mailed the bleeding hunks of her body all over the nation so that people could see how mean the people in Gibeah were.
So all the people in Israel decided to end the violence by massacring all the men, women and children that lived in Gibeah, even the ones that didn’t have anything to do with gang-raping Terri.
And pretty much nobody lived happily ever after.
The end.
Outro:
Before we cash the bowl tonight I wanted to congratulate friend of the show Thomas from “Thomas and the Bible” on reaching the 100 episode milestone. If you haven’t checked out his show yet you have to go ahead and do that and when you do, you’ll be happy to know that there are 99 archival episodes to keep you entertained.
I also wanted to remind everyone that I’m always looking for more Farnsworth quotes to open the show. I’ve got a few stockpiled, but I can never have enough so if you have a blog, a podcast or a convention you want to plug, check out the contact page on Scathing Atheist (dot) com and send me some Farnsworth.
Oh, and huge thanks to everybody who listens to the show on Stitcher. We actually cracked the top 10 in our category last week and it’s worth noting that they don’t have an “atheism” category. We’re top ten in all religion and inspirational shows over there so we’re competing with the likes of Joel O’Steen, Joyce Meyers and my archnemesis Creflo Dollar. So thanks again for making that happen and if you haven’t checked us out on Stitcher yet, download the free app, check us out and help push us a little higher. After all, if Joel O’Steen’s prosperity gospel is correct and we succeed, that’s proof that god is an atheist.
I need to thank Lucinda for opening and closing the show this week, I need to thank Heath for all the stuff in the middle and, of course, I’ve gotta thank Remy G and yeah, I know that’s a repeat, but the last time we played his Farnsworth quote Facebook shut him down the next day. His Facebook page is back now and better than ever so I figured I should toss him a plug again now that it matters. So once again, the name of the Facebook Page is “Fuck your fucking god, you ignorant blinded dumb fuck” and that really says it all. If you don’t want to type all that shit into the searchbar but you still want to like his page, fear not, there’ll be a link on the shownotes for this episode.
https://www.facebook.com/nooneaboveu
But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week’s most intellectually sound arguments for the continued existence of our species; Vinnie, Karen, Laura, Gregory, April, Emily, Bryan, BCD and Cat. Vinnie, whose brilliance shines so brightly it can only be viewed by poking a hole in a piece of paper and then observing it’s shadow; Karen, whose strength of will is measured in horsepower per second squared; Laura, whose very name strikes fear in the hearts of pirates across the seven seas; Gregory, whose return was prophesied centuries ago by the great seers; April, whose praiseworthiness should really just be a weekly segment on this show; Emily, whose NSA transcripts inspired the Dos Equis ad campaign; Bryan, whose gravitas makes people rethink that long standing “no worldwide imperial dictators” rule; BCD, who kept beta through psi and only let god have those fringe letters and Cat who is a ninja-decimating genius with a giant penis and everything, but would much rather I spent this time wishing a happy belated birthday to his friend and friend of the show Bruce; so Bruce, happy birthday, may there be many more and I hope you celebrated with the traditional baby shaped atheist cake.
These nine noble, soulless individuals have improved the plight of impoverished peoples around the world this week by supporting a message of reason, secularism and fart jokes, also known as giving us money. Not everybody has the deeply forged passion for human excellence required to give us money, but if you think you share Vinnie, Karen, Laura, Gregory, April, Emily, Bryan, BCD and Cat’s commitment to hominid longevity, or just want to hear me make a joke about how many ninjas you can kill with your dick, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
And if that’s too much to ask, we humbly request that you take a few seconds to leave us a glowing review on iTunes, share our stuff wherever you can do that without getting stoned to death and telling your pastor about the show.
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.
Episode 35 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Noah Lugeons
(Note: Transcript contains portions that were edited out due to time constraints)
Warning:
Warning, this podcast contains explicit language. And we’re talking really explicit. In fact, I’m gonna use the F word at the end of this sentence and if you don’t like it, go tell someone who gives a fuck.
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Ivory Tower Atheist Soap
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Well try Ivory Tower Atheist Soap, because bullshit stains on the just and the unjust alike. Now available in an extra strength anti-Bapterial formula.
And now, the Scathing Atheist
Intro:
It’s Thursday,
It’s October 17th,
And Oprah’s a fat whore, even for a white woman.
I’m Noah Lugeons,
I’m Heath Enwright,
And from perpetually parading New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
In this week’s episode:
-
We’ll praise Lesus, our Jord and savior,
-
A homeopath will commit suicide by cutting off his pinky toe,
-
And what’s-his-name from Thomas and the Bible will join us to talk scripture.
But first, the diatribe…
Diatribe
It seems like atheists can point out how silly Christians are all day and we just get called assholes. But as soon as you call out Muslims, you’re an “Islamaphobic”. It’s not that you think a murderous, child raping, illiterate warlord isn’t worth adulation. It’s not that you think stories about flying horses should be reserved for kids and bronies. It’s not that you think people worshipping a meteorite is insane. Hell, if you read the Guardian you could be forgiven for thinking “Islamaphobic” was Richard Dawkins’ official title.
So let’s examine that word. As my spellcheck will readily tell you, it’s not a really a word, but even if it was, it would have no practical application. Because the suffix “phobia” refers to an irrational fear. If you’re swimming through shark infested waters and there’s a fin and an ominous two-note theme song following behind you, you’re not selachophobic, you’re rational… and edible.
And before anybody goes accusing me of equating Muslims with terrorists, I should point out that you don’t have to be a de facto terrorist for your Muslimness to scare the fuck out of me. Is the Saudi judge that sentenced the rape victim to 200 lashes for getting raped a “terrorist”? Is the Yemeni guy who raped his 8 year old bride to death on their wedding night a “terrorist”? Is every member of the government in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, the UAE and Mauritania a terrorist? Because they all terrify the fuck out of me.
Now I’ll readily admit that Islam isn’t the only major world religion that calls for the ultimate extermination of everybody who worships a different god. It’s a common theme so it’s not fair to single Muslims out for that one. It’s okay to point out that it’s batshit crazy, but it’s not batshit crazy for a religion. That being said, I think it’s fair to point out that they have the best infidel massacring infrastructure. And if you doubt that, draw a few cartoons of Jesus sucking off Moses while Buddha takes him in the ass and then watch nobody kill you.
So what’s irrational about being scared? Keep in mind that I live in New York City. If you average it out over the last fifteen years, New Yorkers are statistically more likely to be killed by Muslim terrorists flying airplanes into skyscrapers than car accidents or firearms. So how the hell is Islamaphobia a phobia?
The only thing irrational about it is restricting your fear to Muslims. Right now Scientologists are just a bunch of goofy alien worshipping nut-tards, but I’m willing to bet if Scientologists took over a nation’s government, they’d suddenly become damn scary.
See, it’s not Muslims that scare me, it’s religious people with armies. And Christians aren’t immune to this crazy shit, they’re just generally confined to countries that won’t put them in charge of the nuclear arsenal.
But consider the blathering schizophrenic homeless subway dweller tirade Michele Bachmann went on last week where she stammered about leaves on fig trees and the end being nigh and then capped off the incoherent blubbering by talking about how awesome it was that the world was about to end because it means her magical hippy-Jew can’t be far behind.
This isn’t some crazy guy waving a posterboard sign scrawled with his own feces on 146th street. This is a member of congress. This is a person who, at one point, led the goddamn polls for the Republican nomination for president AFTER a debate! This is a person who gets to vote on whether or not we go to war. A sane person wouldn’t trust this woman to keep the cat out of their macaroni while they took a shit, but religious people are okay with her writing their laws! Our laws!
Look, I’m no more terrified by a country controlled by a crazy ayatollah than I am by a country controlled by a crazy evangelical. And their are plenty of crazy American evangelicals pushing for a theocracy… many from inside the elected government.
There is no greater threat to liberty, peace and progress than theocracy. And right now the Muslims just happen to leading the leading the race when it comes to dismantling rational governments and replacing them with genocidal scripture. There’s nothing at all irrational about fearing that.
Headlines
Joining me for headlines tonight is a guy who is at least slightly less hateful than he often sounds, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to moderately exaggerate your distaste for humanity?
Well considering the subject of the first story, I won’t be exaggerating.
Ooh… nice tease.
In our lead story tonight, Supreme Court justice – and Stephen Colbert whipping boy – Antonin Scalia revealed in a recent interview that he believes Beelzebub the Prince of Darkness is a real person.
It’s Alito, isn’t it?
When asked about the complete lack of evidence to justify this assinine-itude, he responded, (quote) “Well if you’re gonna go by evidence…” He then went on to point out that the whole thing with being the devil, is appearing NOT to exist. The same logic applies to asserting the existence of everything that doesn’t exist, but Catholics like Scalia don’t let being blatantly wrong, stand in their way of being right.
A quality that also comes in handy when you’re a conservative Supreme Court justice.
Basically, this guy’s opinion comes from Usual Suspects movie character, Keyser Soze, who was actually quoting a character in a poem by Charles Baudelaire. Granted, basing one’s worldview on 19th century French poetry is much more reasonable and up-to-date than using the bible . . . But it’s still not quite as realistic as we’d hope from one of the nine most powerful legal decision-makers in the country.
Let’s take a quick look at the line of logic here . . .
Premise 1: A fictional character from a fictional movie universe, quoted a fictional character from a fictional poetry universe, who said: “You guys don’t see that imperceptible demon guy?”
Premise 2: Satan is real.
So working backwards, Satan is real, and it occurs to me we don’t even need premise one.
And perhaps most frightening of all is the fact that he apparently had no idea that this was an insane thing to say. When the flabbergasted reporter says something to the tune of “fucking what?” Justice the Hutt gets all incredulous and asks her “What ivory tower do you live in where you can’t comprehend a grown, educated human being believing in a bedtime story meant to dissuade kids from stroking their junk.
What he was saying would have been ridiculous, if he didn’t at least throw us that compliment when he pointed out that we atheists probably aren’t Satan’s minions. So that was nice. I can finally check off “Justice Scalia’s approval” from my bucket list.
Yeah, it’s nice to probably not be Satan’s minion. Thanks for throwing us a bone. You’re probably not Satan’s minion either, your honor.
But then he ruins the tender moment by going on to say that disbelief in God (quote) “certainly favors the devil’s desires.” So you can see why I pity drafted this guy in my celebrity death pool. There’s nobody else I’d rather see die before January 20, 2017, but I know he’s gonna fucking live. It was like drafting Aaron Hernandez for fantasy football, just cause you’re a big Patriots fan.
Scalia says atheism “favors the devil’s desires”: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/07/scalia-says-satan-is-a-real-person/
And in the “Everybody was Kung Jew Fighting” file tonight, we turn to a story that wouldn’t be funny at all if the people involved didn’t have curly sideburns and goofy little hatlets. Two ass-kicking rabbis face charges of kidnapping and assault after allegedly starting a business kidnapping and assaulting.
I’m sure it was kosher assault . . . But seriously, the Jewish people won’t be able to continue being loved the world over, if they keep this shit up. America is no place for absurd religious beliefs that lead to insane criminal acts, unless you have a note from Jesus. Did these rabbis, by any chance, have a note from the savior their tribe murdered? No?
No, but give them two days and I’m sure they can beat one out of him. But up to this point, they’ve been restricting their attacks to Orthodox men who refused to give their wives a “get”, which is basically a human bill of sale that grants a woman a divorce. And despite the fact that divorcing an orthodox Jewish woman should be its own reward, some Jewish men are sexist, vindictive assholes. Which is where Shlomo and the Chhhhammer come in.
So the rabbi could declare the divorce and stop having the congregation shame the whore-wife… Or he could torture the husband into giving the “get”? And he goes with the torture?!?
So the “get rule” is set in stone, but rules about whether it’s bad to kidnap and torture . . . Those are gray areas with lots of midrash?!? (Which sounds like a diagnosis by a geriatric gynecologist.)
According to the FBI, the two would cover the victim’s heads in a plastic bag and torture them with a cattle prod and karate until they would agree to grant the get. And as fucked up as that is, I find myself siding with the cattleprod wielding ninja jews. Because, first of all, it’s a hilarious mental image; but more importantly, the stupid, fucked up, prehistoric morality these asswipes cling to makes it all but impossible for a divorced woman to lead a normal life in the community until her ex-husband says so.
Rabbis planned to kidnap husbands and force divorces: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/10/rabbis-plotted-to-kidnap-husbands-force-divorces-fbi-says/
In “justified filicide” news, a Hindu man murdered his infant son by striking him twice on the neck with an axe. Which just goes to show you, Hindu men are not very coordinated. His defense lawyer plans to argue that conviction would be a violation of the free exercise of murderous religious beliefs clause.
Yeah, just in case you thought making jokes about torturing jews with cattleprods was the lowest we were going tonight, here’s a story about a man murdering an 8 month old with an axe. I wonder if we can somehow parlay this into an abortion joke…
Nobody pivots to abortion better than Noah Lugeons . . .
Speaking of which, while crafting a response to this horrific event, one atheist podcaster wrote, “Fuck – At least we’re just killing fetuses . . . I’m not comparing the Hindu goddess Kali’s stance on murdering children, to my atheist stance on murdering bundles of undifferentiated cells that nobody loves . . . But Hinduism is clearly worse here. My abortions can beat up your infant sacrifices.”
Hindu man sacrifices 8 month old to god: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/12/hindu-man-brutally-murders-8-month-old-son-as-a-sacrifice-to-goddess-kali/
And in “The Father, the Son and That Other Fella” news tonight, the Vatican has recalled more than 6000 medals that were issued to commemorate the pontificate of Pope Fransylvania six-five thousand.
As if selling indulgences isn’t enough, now the Vatican’s literally minting their own money?!? Why not just give the gold straight to the rape victims, right away … on the nightstand like a proper gospel John.
The medal contained an image of the new muppet-pope on the front and an image of St. Matthew talking to some dude named Lesus. Or at least, that’s how he’s identified on the misspelled inscription that prompted the recall.
“Does the name of our lord and savior look right to you? Will you have the intern go check on JexisNexis if it’s Jesus, or Lesus. Tell him not to fuck it up this time, or we’ll keep treating him exactly how you’d imagine a Vatican intern gets treated.”
“Yo soy- Ego sum Lay-Zeus! All other gods must bow before, Lay-Zeus! For those of you who don’t Joquar Jatine, Lay-Zeus is Jatin for . . . The Zeus.”
While I can think of no more appropriate way to commemorate the current pontificate than issuing something that has to immediately be retracted, the Vatican is acting like they got caught with their hand in a kid with his hand in the cookie jar.
Vatican misspells Jesus: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/10/vatican-jesus-medal_n_4080403.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Moving on to “pork-free telecom” news . . . Israel has sanctioned a kosher-certifed cell phone service. The new product is obviously called the Adonai-Phone, and will be sold at Adam’s Apple Stores Jewish-nationwide. However, one of what must be many, conservative theocratic governing bodies in Israel, the Rabbinical Committee for Communications, mandated that subscribers be blocked from using the normal pre-installed rape and mental crisis hotlines.
Before we move on, allow me to restate exactly what you just said in my “you’ve-gotta-be-fucking-kidding-me” voice: “They mandated that subscribers be blocked from using pre-installed rape and mental crisis hotlines!”
When you block stuff that helps with rape and insanity, it’s really hard not to jump straight to the allegation that Judaism is fully aware of being an unsolicited mind fuck . . . with some real rape built in somewhere too. When asked for a response to this accusation, Judaism texted me back, saying: “Well we wouldn’t use those exact words, but we certainly can’t have those numbers on speed dial. We’re trying to run a business here!”
“Do you have a phone that will also tell my wife she’s a useless bitch and nobody loves her? How about one that smacks her if she tries to think?”
So I read this story several times over, and I’m still trying to figure out the kosher stance here . . . Maybe some obscure torah verse that technically makes Microsoft bloatware and other built-ins against the rules? But even then, it’s just the rape and mental illness lines they targeted. What good intentions could be behind blocking those two things only?
Yeah, equally disturbing is the guy in some boardroom who said, “So you’ll buy the phones as long as we disable the rape hotline? Both the male and female rape hotlines? Sounds reasonable to me, sure.”
“What’s that you’re buying? Candy, KY jelly, and a van? . . . And some bullets? . . . Isn’t Walmart great?!? I’m sure there’s a perfectly good, unrapey reason for those purchases.”
“You know, I’m just curious, of course, not that I’m gonna do it or anything, but does this Pez Dispenser work with roofies?”
Kosher phones block emergency numbers for sexual assault victims: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4431017,00.html
That’ll do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always.
Catchphrase, exclamation mark.
And when we come back, Thomas from Thomas and the Bible will join us to explain how he managed to get top billing over the inerrant word of god.
Outro
Before we put it in park for the night I want to take a second to congratulate our friends Frank and Dan over at the “Thank God I’m Atheist” podcast for reaching the 100 episode milestone. I’m only now starting to comprehend exactly how much work goes into hitting that mark so a very well-deserved shout out to two guys fighting the good fight in the belly of the beast.
And just so that none of the math-geeks email us to tell me that the number 100 is ultimately meaningless, I’m also gonna congratulate our friend George Hrab from the Geologic podcast on his 334th episode as well.
Oh… and we’ve got the finalized logo, the correct file sizes and the whole nine at this point so if I don’t have some merch available for you by Saturday night I’ve got nobody to blame for it but myself. We’re really, really close to having T-shirts and other as-yet-undetermined shwag so look for that in the coming days. We’ll be shouting ceaselessly about it on the Facebook page, the Twitter feed and, of course, the blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. But don’t worry, there will still be plenty of time to get grandma a Scathing Atheist T-Shirt for Christmas.
I gotta toss out one more quick thanks to Thomas for hanging out tonight. I wasn’t kidding about his podcast kicking ass but if you don’t believe me, you’ll find proof in the form of a link to his website on the shownotes for this episode.
http://www.thomasandthebible.com/
I also need to thank Heath, of course, for somehow continuing to be that damn funny every week, I need to thank Lucinda for lending us a snippet of her lovely voice, I need to thank Cameron from the Cam’s world (dot) de podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. His is a newer podcast that promotes scientific skepticism in the world of sports, so definitely a mission I can get behind 100% and don’t let the (dot) DE fool you, it’s in English. You’ll find it linked on the shownotes as well.
http://camsworldde.libsyn.com/
But most of all, of course, we need to thank this week’s most essential anthropoids; William, David, Richard and Crouchy. William, whose intellectual strength is too great to measure in anything but raw horsepower; David, whose ninja reflexes are the envy of photons everywhere; Richard, whose illustriousness will almost certainly lead to his first name being the only one to ever be officially retired and Crouchy, whose behemoth genitals have to be factored into meteorological equations.
These four exemplary individuals have proved themselves to probably not be the minions of Satan this week by giving us money. Only the most heroic, high-minded, Herculean and harmonious heathens have the heart to give us money, but if you think you share William, David, Richard and Crouchy’s commitment to complimentary adjectives that start with H, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
And if you’d like to help us out but you spent all your money on the finer hookers in life, you can always help us out a ton by leaving us a glowing 5-star review on iTunes and/or telling somebody about the show and nagging them until they listen to it.
That’s all the blasphemy we’ve got for you next week, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with more. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to pop over to the website, look for the “extras” tab on the top of the page and get your required dose of bonus scatheism. And of course, check us out on all those social media sites and stuff and listen to us on Stitcher just in case.
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.
Episode 34 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Lucinda & Noah Lugeons
Note: Transcript contains portions that were edited from the final episode due to time constraints
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Warning: This podcast contains explicit language in pretty much every sentence except this one.
Sponsor
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by End Timex Doomsday Clocks and Watches
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End Timex: Because you all have down counter syndrome.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro
It’s Thursday,
It’s October 10th,
and there’s a Broadway Bomb in Manhattan on Saturday that has nothing to do with Islam.
I’m Noah Lugeons
I’m Heath Enwright
And from ignorantly Christopher Columbus friendly New York, New York
This is the Scathing Atheist
In this week’s episode…
-
We’ll learn that people who really love America work to overthrow it,
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We examine a new humane, cage-free breed of rape joke.
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And we’ll finger bang for Jesus
But first, the soothing tones of Noah Lugeons apologizing for being right. Let’s go to the diatribe.
Diatribe
There are plenty of bullshit explanations for it, but the primary reason religion persists is because people would rather not think about dying. Religion doesn’t really solve the problem, but it has proven to be a great way to delay the problem.
I’ve gone on record before in saying that only the slimmest minority of religious people believe in an afterlife. Anybody who has ever exhibited self-preservation or mourned a loved one is full of shit if they tell you they honestly believe in heaven everlasting. Or they think they and all their loved ones are evil and hellbound.
My favorite analogy is a soldier that took a fatal wound and he’s lying on the battlefield. Religion comes up and hands him two band-aids and says “Here, put these over your eyes so you don’t see the wound. It’ll go numb eventually. Sure, it’ll still hurt if you move it and you’ll still die from it, but it’s better this way.”
And from what I’ve seen, when people cut their ties to religion, the rope marked “afterlife” is the last one to go and the hardest one to cut. I know plenty of atheists that still try to cling to any suspect pseudo-science that claims to provide evidence for a soul.
I also know plenty of lenient atheists that are willing to excuse religion from any wrongdoing based solely on this dubious assumption: Religion helps people deal with loss. Sure, you and I can handle confronting our mortality and the mortality of the people around us, but those dumbasses? They need a fairy tale to cling to. They need their security blanket and who are we to deny them their soul-snuggie?
Setting aside for a second that obviously their fairy tale doesn’t work, there are still some serious problems that arise when you try to spackle over the inevitable. One way or the other, the wound is still bleeding and eventually you’re going to have to come to grips with it. And who’s better suited for the task? The person who spent their lives boldly facing their fragility or the person who spent the last few decades pretending they thought they got to go to the super-happy-world dimension?
I was listening to the Atheist Experience the other day, and for the eleven people that somehow heard of our show without hearing about theirs first, it’s a live, public access call-in show where they take calls from atheists and believers alike. And even though 80% of their callers annoy the shit out of me, I still enjoy the show enough to listen to it every Monday morning.
Anyway, so a woman calls in and she’s clearly wavering in her faith. She’s clearly made the mistake of critically examining her religious beliefs and they’re fast a-crumblin’. But she’s holding out. She’s having trouble letting go and it’s because she doesn’t want to take the band-aids off her eyes.
And it’s not a self-serving thing… or, at least not a directly self serving thing. She seemed almost embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t her own death she was fearing. It was her cats. She was a cat person. She’d lost a lot of cats over her life and she wanted above all things to know that someday she would be reunited with them.
I’m a cat person. And as silly as this might seem to some, I understood one hundred percent. I was lucky enough to be raised without a strong religious influence, so I came to grips with the “I’m gonna outlive my pets” thing a long time ago, but I can imagine how hard it would be to abandon such a pleasant fiction if you’d been using it to delay confronting the emotions.
So when I heard this, because I’m me, I got pissed. That’s pretty much always my reaction when it comes to religion… you might have noticed.
See, here’s the cruel, if unintentional, consequence of believing in Heaven. It’s not there. And unless you’ve got some kind of serious mental dysfunction you eventually realize that it’s not there. You eventually realize that you’ve been lied to the whole time and somehow you feel robbed of something you never even had to begin with.
What’s worse is that a lot of people only discover the net was an illusion when they jump into it. It’s only when they have to face their own mortality or the mortality of someone they love that they realize the whole thing was a house of cards. They’re counting on god to make sense of it all; they’re counting on heaven to make the loss easier to bear; they’re counting on religion to finally pay them back for all those tithes.
But there was never anything there. And in the end they eventually have to deal with their loss the same way we secularists deal with it. But we secularists get a bonus. A realistic outlook on life and death leaves the finality in the forefront of your mind rather than trying to hide in the basement. Every time I think about the people I love I temper it with their transience and it reminds me to forgive, to indulge, to embrace. And it reminds me to pet my cats whenever the hell they tell me to because someday I won’t be able to anymore.
They said that religion would make it easier, but it doesn’t. It’s in times like those that religion is at it’s weakest. And mourning a loved one is hard enough if you don’t have to mourn your god alongside them.
Headlines
Re- joining me for headlines tonight is rejoiner Heath Enwright. Heath, do you have a rejoinder?
No. Can’t you just go straight to an improvised rhyming headline?
In our lead story tonight, Hobby Lobby lobs a snobby, snow job-by, daub of copy in a sloppy attempt to seem less lynch mob-by. The half-assed apology came after New Jersey blogger Ken Berwitz complained to an employee that he couldn’t find any Hanukkah decorations only to be told that the jews should have thought about that before they killed Jesus.
I don’t agree with anyone involved, about anything. I don’t like Christianity, I don’t like Judaism, and I don’t like holiday decorations of any kind. That being said, why would a Jewish person be angry that a “bigoted” Christian store chain has stupid business practices?!? Plus if you’re Jewish, you can’t transact on Saturday, it’s closed on Sunday, and you’re conspiring against Palestine all week, so when are you going there anyway?
The corporation, which until now seemed to be operating under the “alienate-every-heathen-we-can” marketing strategy, surprised onlookers by taking any action whatsoever that failed to reinforce the “Christian-fuck-monkey” reputation they’ve worked so hard to earn.
I don’t think a business owned by religious fundamentalists should be allowed to use the word ‘hobby’. Wouldn’t it be great if religious people just made little figurines and dioramas, AND THAT’S IT?! Fly some model airplanes into the side of a building – that’s fine. Just know that the actual Boba Fett isn’t going to descend from heaven with angellic jet pack wings and save humanity from sin.
Hey, you can’t prove there’s no Boba Fett… and speaking of not being able to prove, Berwitz cites the irrefutable source of “some woman my wife knows”, who claims that upon asking where the Hanukkah merchandise was, the aforementioned friend of a friend was told (pseudo-quote) “We don’t cater to your people” (end quote), though I’m damn tempted to add “your droids will have to wait outside”.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We suggest that all Jews proceed to the ‘lobby’ section of the store. Try out the ‘oxygen’ bar. But there’s nothing for you in the ‘hobby’ section. And yes those Golem droids will have to wait outside.”
In Hobby Lobby’s defense, a number of the company’s stores do carry a limited selection of Jewy stuff and have for years. Plus, how the hell were they supposed to know there were Jews in a city less than fifty miles from Manhattan?
Hobby Lobby reluctantly agrees to carry Jewish holiday stuff: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/hobby-lobby-jewish-holiday_n_4046481.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
In “pedophile scandal oversight bell curve” news, the Vatican grade has improved from a lazy F, to an equally lazy D minus by default, after an expert in the field admits his own evangelicals are even worse than Catholics. Regardless, the existence of an “expert in the field” and also the existence of “the field” are god’s fault.
You know that the Catholics are celebrating this publicly, but behind the scenes Pope Frannie Mae has everybody down to the Vatican lunch ladies raping kids overtime. They don’t like being number two in anything and they especially hate number two when they’re butt-raping kids.
The expert in question is named Boz Tchividjian– … The expert in question has a name, and his initials are BT. Mr. T gained his expertise as executive director of Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment, or GRACE. They investigate sex abuse allegations, and are exactly the type of organization that should have a clever, playful acronym.
They considered going with Butt and Lip Intrusion Survivors Society, or BLISS and I hear they also rejected Bureau of Rampant Accusations of Clergy Encroaching on Young Or Underage Rectums, Sometimes Evoking Legal Fees; or BRACE-YOURSELF.
Mr T. says, “Protestants can be very arrogant when pointing to Catholics.” . . .
Apparently decades of being relatively less bad than their rival sect at handling pedophile scandals, was a big point of pride. Rapist Clergy Handling is their Army-Navy game. Even though both teams often enter the game winless, the season is a big success for the winner that ends up with a 1 – 11 record.
I hear that Pentecostals rape children in tongues.
The takeaway here, is that eating babies is way less egregious than raping altar boys. But when Richard Dawkins finally gets caught eating “tar baby tartare”, you won’t see atheists smuggling him out of England to avoid prosecution. Why is he eating dark meat? It sounded better.
Pedophile expert declares Protestants worse than Catholics: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2013/10/tchividjian-protestants-worse-than-catholics/
And moving on to “beep beep, mm- beep beep No” news, this week’s ridiculous example of Muslim misogyny comes to us from Saudi cleric and person whose name is clearly compensating for something, Sheikh Saleh bin Saad al-Lohaidan. In an interview with sabq.org, this vacuous dingleberry warned that women who drive cars risk damage to their ovaries that will likely lead to mutant babies.
I’d say regardless of driving – women risk damaging their ovaries by continuing to live in Saudi Arabia. Do women who drive, birth mutants every time? Yes. Should women be driving in general? No. But move out of Arapia first, and then worry about vehicular rights you don’t deserve. Arguing about it while you’re still living under sharia law, is like a heroin addict giving up chocolate for lent.
Appealing to Saudi women’s sense of maternal duty and utter lack of reproductive education, al-Lohaidan offered his bloviations in response to a growing social movement among Saudi women who want the right to drive for reasons including but not limited to running over assholes like this cleric.
Maybe a little genetic mutation in Saudi Arabia isn’t the worst thing in the world? Bunch of pregnant muslims sneaking into cars, turning out jews and atheists. Might teach ’em a lesson.
Muslim Clerics warn women who drive will damage their ovaries and have mutant babies: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2013/09/29/top-saudi-cleric-says-women-who-drive-risk-damaging-their-ovaries/
And in “Anti-Arab Autumn” news, the same lawyer who thinks President Obama was birthed by a lion in Kenya, is now calling for a takeover of the executive branch, in order to halt the nearly-completed installation of an Islamic theocracy in Washington.
Oh right, you Arab-spring ahead and Arab-fall back…
Larry Klayman, the asshole who tried to claim Kenyans can’t run, said this about the POTUS . . . and I’m paraphrasing . . .
Wait, I’m sorry, did you say this dude’s name was “Larry Klansmen?”
(quote) “[Don’t quote me on this, but… I don’t like] his Muslim, socialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-white, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-radical gay and lesbian agenda [face!].” (end quote)
Few things . . . First, I quoted you. Suck it. Next, Mexicans are all Catholic, so you can’t be pro-illegal immigrant, and anti-Christian at the same time in this country. Also, what the fuck is the “radical” gay agenda?!? . . . “Must ask, must tell… in graphic detail”? Are there super-mutant gay people, suggesting us inferior hetero-breeders will be weeded out by evolution?!? XXX Men?
Klayman goes on to suggest the President deserves prison time, and actually uses the phrase “leave town”, like he’s fucking Wyatt Earp, and Obama – being yellow bellied and lilly livered – would decide it’s best to take his family back to Chicago, or the savannah outside Nairobi, or wherever they’re from.
Obama’s Muslims agenda gone too far – Klayman calls for military coup: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/klayman-sets-date-revolution-end-obamas-reign-terror
And in “Would You Like to Fry in Hell With That?” news, a Chicago area restaurant is enraging Catholics all over the country by disrespecting their magic cracker. Kuma’s Corner, a “heavy metal” themed burger joint is offering a sacrilegious special in October called the “Ghost” burger, which looks kind of crappy even if you take off the controversial communion wafer garnish that has the papists so pissy.
What are we supposed to eat the body of Christ raw and unseasoned like the bloody savage Catholics?!? Can you imagine a butcher selling filet mignon, as patrons walk up in line and french kiss the steak out of his mouth. If religion isn’t stupid enough yet, in this analogy, they would all sit down and eat the bloody steak right there in the shop, while the butcher gave a speech about holy cows.
With brazen disregard for the sanctity of unleavened biscuits, the restaurant’s management is offering the tasteless treat (along with a red wine reduction) in conjunction with the release of a new album from the band “Ghost”. Apparently the band is known for dressing in clerical garb onstage, or rather, that’s what they were known for before they were known for being that band that inspired that burger joint to fuck with pope-crackers.
Well as long as the band isn’t being ironic, the “sin and out” burger should be protected under the free exercise clause. However, if they are being ironic, it’s protected under “you can do what you want”. So as long as they aren’t being ironic or genuine, the Catholics have a legitimate gripe.
Well only some reactionary Catholics have expressed outrage over this publicity stunt, more level headed papists urge a rational response. After all, it’s just a cracker. It’s not like a Cardinal has already performed the magic spell that turns it into divine jewish god-flesh or anything.
Chicago restaurant offers “Communion Burger”, Catholics lose their shit: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/03/is-the-communion-burger-in-poor-taste/
And from the “Who said British parties are boring” file, Students from the “Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society” at London School of Economics were forced to leave the university’s first-year student fair, because of T-shirts with cartoons that offended religious people. In a rare twist, it was the normally thick-skinned followers of Islam that took umbrage with free speech.
Next thing you’re gonna tell me people are chopping off pieces of their babies’ dicks.
The next day, despite the hilarious solution of putting tape over the “offensive” parts, reading “Censored” and “Nothing to see here”, the atheists were once again ejected. Maybe the tape was a little insensitive . . . Can’t believe they didn’t wear burkas over the shirts on day two.
What if we just said we were offended by offense. Would it send the politically correct fucktards into a self-reinforcing feedback loop of inevitable destruction? And if we try that and it fails, can we just kick them in the nuts?
One atheist, always the diplomatic problem solver, suggested Muslims could just close their eye-slit as they walked past the atheist table. Then a pedantic onlooker who doesn’t understand sarcasm, pointed out that only women have the eye-slit thing, and eye-slit-clad women clearly aren’t allowed to study economics. Then he added, “I don’t want to be pedantic, but the eye-slit thing is called a niqab.”
Bottom line, getting offended by British nerds is YOUR fault.
Jesus and Mo T-shirts censored at LSE: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/06/wearing-jesus-mo-shirts-doesnt-mean-youre-discriminating-against-christians-and-muslims/
And finally tonight, in “I don’t care how straight you are, you wish this was a video of two dudes going full anal” news, we bring you the latest in creative and awesome “fuck you”s directed at Fred Phelps and the notorious Westboro Baptist church.
What do you mean, “wish”? That “Phelps on Phelps Backstroke” video you sent me isn’t the one we’re talking about?
No, by court order I can’t admit to having that one. This is a different one. But there’s a set-up. Previously on the Scathing Atheist we brought you the story of Aaron Jackson who bought the house across the street from the church and painted it all gay and rainbowy. More recently we brought you the story of members of the Satanic Temple turning Phelps’ dead mom gay by beating off on her tombstone. But in an impressive display of one upmanship the punk band “Get Shot” offered the WBC the most literal “go fuck yourself” yet by going to the church and fucking themselves.
Gotta love this country. The American version of “Pussy Riot” features actual free market pussy.
Bass player and autoerotic-engineer Laura Lush decided that the lawn of the church would make an ideal backdrop for a video of her pleasuring herself dressed in nothing but nail polish.
Bass player for California punk band does some fingering below the staff.
Although she didn’t really need a porn alias, Laura Lush is also known by her porn alias, Flora Bush. When asked for a statement, she could have but didn’t say, (quote) “My bow and my staff, I come for them.”
According to the band’s press release they contacted the church in hopes of obtaining any surveillance footage that might have had a good up-vag angle, though there’s no word on whether Phelps and friends are done jacking off to it yet.
Or spanking the bass . . .
They were worried police might arrive, and they would have a real mess on their hands, so they got in and out, and got the shot quickly. She wanted to take it a second time, but the guys with the equipment were tired and ready to leave . . .
OK, as usual we’ll put 30 seconds on the clock . . . Titles for the new porn, Go!!!
Vaginal DJ in B-Cup Minor
The band’s called, Get Shot! . . . the porn’s gotta be called, “Get Money Shot!” . . . Hopefully she’s a squirter, or at least willing to get her feet wet.
Um… The Mighty Fist of God?
“The Girl with the Bass Cleft Asshole” . . . Perfect if Stieg Larsson starts writing atheist porn scripts along with the Coen Brothers.
What about just “Spunk Rock”?
Those Spunk Rockers do like to DIY.
Or just DY.
With KY.
And of course, I don’t want to close this segment before pointing out that I, too, believe that god hates fags, just in case there were any punk bands in the New York area whose hot, exhibitionist bass players were looking for a lawn on which to strip naked and masturbate.
Punk Band shoots porn video on lawn of Westboro Baptist Church: https://www.facebook.com/getshotkicksass/posts/519319074820814
And on that string of below the belt jokes we’ll close the headlines. Heath, thanks as always.
Yeah, whatever.
And when we come back Lucinda will be here so don’t tell her about all the pussy jokes.
Poem
Okay so yeah, I read Ruth and to tell you the truth,
You sneeze and you’re through it, so screw it, I can’t write an ode to it.
I mean shit, ya’ll a poem? I don’t know, um…
Roses are red and violets are blue;
Ruth wants to fuck Boaz and he wants it too.
So they do, that’s the end, hallelujah, amen.
Cause that’s it. Holy shit, I don’t get where to go,
And I know that for seven shows in a row,
I’ve put something mildly clever together, but that can’t last forever…
Sure, I know some were ho-hum but at least they were poems,
And now it’s expected, you’d feel disrespected, dejected;
Our poor audience who saw me once as a dependable dude, it would be rude.
So I’m screwed.
Hell, I really start bumming when I look at what’s coming.
What, I’m gonna write two poems about Samuel and two about Kings?
By Chronicles we’re all gonna be sick of these things.
And I know that you’d say it’s okay, it’s not like you pay
for this shit, so a day off is fit, I can lay off for a bit and omit that skit.
But if I should neglect what our fanbase expects, what comes next?
A show with no sponsor? Or no diatribe in it?
Or one that comes out late on Friday and is 32 minutes?
So I read and reread and see that indeed;
There’s nothing worth rhyming in this whole boring screed.
Why does it bore me? No story. That’s hard to ignore, we
Just came off seven books that were horrid and gory,
And now this load of piss? No armies, no slaughter,
No tossing a rape mob your viriginal daughter,
Sure, I guess if I’m pressed, I’ll confess there’s some sex to address,
But I’m no less stressed,
Because as much innuendo I find buried just underneath,
And knowing that blowjob jokes always have teeth,
I know that there isn’t much humor this book can bequeath
And I can’t steal all the dick jokes from Lucinda and Heath…
So a thousand apologies, but I’ve written poems for all of these (of varying qualities),
But writing a poem for Ruth is like pulling a tooth.
And I’m on a deadline, still gotta write headlines and I’m crossing my redline,
So with all due respect, I’m vexed and perplexed and I can’t make this text rhyme,
So no poem for this episode, but I’ll do better the next time,
Babble
Logging in at a whopping 4 books, Ruth is one of the shortest books in the bible and is so short, in fact, that you could read it quicker than we can finish this segment, but you wouldn’t want to because it still sucks.
So joining Heath and me to take on this biblical pamphlet is my lovely wife Lucinda. Lucinda, welcome to the show.
Before we get started, it’s probably worth noting that the book of Ruth was a late edition to the Historical Books and was written by an unknown author who really, really wanted to fuck a Moabite chick and didn’t want to be stoned to death for it.
And with that let’s dive in.
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First we meet Naomi who has a really shitty turn of luck. Her husband dies and both of her adult sons die, leaving her with nothing but two daughter-in-laws, and since women are worse than worthless in the bible, that’s like having less than nothing.
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Sure you hear about famine in the news. But when you’re living in a safe nomadic religious desert tribe, you never think it can happen to your family. Even if your book needs a minor plot impetus.
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So barren and hapless, Naomi decides to return from the land of the Moabites to her people, who are the Jews, and both of her daughter-in-laws want to come with her. She talks Orpah into fucking off, but the infatuated lesbian daughter-in-law Ruth goes off on a stalkers monologue that makes the lyrics to “I’ll Be Watching You” seem like a healthy relationship.
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So they get back to Naomi’s hometown of Bethlehem and everybody runs out and says, “Hey Naomi”, but she’s changed her name because Naomi means “pleasant” and since god hated her enough to kill her family, she asks them to call her “Mara”, which means “bitter”. Because we all love these mid-book name changes.
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Yeah I could do without all the”Ocho Cinco” bullshit in the bible. It’s not like she wrastled god near a directional body of water or something.
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So they get back to Bethlehem and Ruth figures they gotta eat so she goes out to scrounge some leftover grain, which is what the destitute did back then. While she’s out there busting her ass, the wealthy and available Boaz takes notice of her and lays on the flirt.
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And Boaz is every Jewish-stepmother-of-a-Moabite-lesbian-widow’s dream son in law. He’s in the tribe, he owns land. He’s one classy Jew. He put the Lacoste back in Holocaust before it even existed.
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And it’s so hard not to sexualize the hell out of the conversation. Especially when he starts telling her to dip her morsel in his sour wine.
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Or when she (quote) “fell prostrate with her face to the ground before him”
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“Oops I fell over . . . I’m just a poor, clumsy shixa, trying to break into Judaism. How will I ever pay you for these free scraps of grain?”
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So she gathers all the grain she can hold and brings it back to town to show Naomi cum Mara how much she got. Naomi tells her “good job. Now whoever’s dick you sucked to get this, go back and swallow next time”. Cause mom knows a good thing when she sucks it.
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So Naomi hatches a plan for Ruth to win Boaz’s heart and I dare say that it’s an effective man-seducing strategy. She tells Ruth to get all dolled up, wait until Boaz gets drunk and passes out, and crawl into bed with him. And then when he wakes up, do whatever he tells you to do.
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“What if he thinks I’m ugly?”
“You are ugly, Ruth. You’re an ugly race traitor whore. But beauty is in the eyes of the money shot beholder.”
Now, this is important to point out. In the book it says that mom told her to “uncover his feet” while he’s sleeping. And, of course, as we noted when we did Exodus, foot is often a biblical euphemism for the cock.
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Astute listener, Will, actually emailed us to make sure we got that. “I know you guys don’t have trouble fitting dick jokes into your segments, but foot is DaVinci code for dick.”
And he was smart about it, too. He left the message in the note-line of a donation to the show, which is always the best place to leave messages for us.
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So she does exactly that and when he wakes up he’s says, “Hey, chick sleeping at my feet. Cool. Who the hell are you?” So she tells him that she’s there to suck him off or whatever he prefers.
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Just put your cloak over my head, like I’m a subway prostitute, so nobody will see me blowing you.
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And Boaz must be a little hungover because he says, “Let me see if I can find somebody else that can fuck you tomorrow, but if not, I’ll take care of you.”
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“Yeah listen . . . I know you’re new and everything, so you probably didn’t read all the stuff in the manual, but I can’t just fuck you myself when there’s a closer relative that might want to fuck you . . . I see the look on your face right now, but I swear we’re not crazy.”
-
And proving that he totally doesn’t know how the hooker thing works, he pays her for not fucking him and sends her on her way.
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“I’m sure waking up to you technically already blowing me had nothing to do with the grain thing. Unless you’re running some sort of ageless long con . . . Nah – I’m paying you anyway.”
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So then Boaz tries to pawn Ruth off on one of his relatives but when his cousin realizes that it would fuck up his inheritance, Boaz agrees to marry Ruth and take all of her dead husband’s shit and make babies with her.
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Right, but he agrees to that with ten of the city elders. He doesn’t agree with her.
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Hebrew woman is like altar-boy: consent is assumed.
-
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Personal consent is too subjective. Immaculate consent is much more objective.
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So yeah, after this hugely romantic gesture the book ends and we realize that no, there was no fucking point whatsoever. Except maybe to point out that King David was so awesome that even his great grandmother gets a whole book of the bible.
And yeah, that’s it. It’s a love-story with no conflict. It literally is “boy meets girl, they get married and have kids”. Nothing to resolve. It’s like a rom-com where two co-workers that get along just fine go on a business trip together and continue to get along just fine. And then they fuck.
I’m okay with that. We didn’t splash any blood or rape anybody or anything. It’s a nice change of pace. And it was the shortest book so it was also the best one.
Yeah, but it’s tempting to say that even this short-ass book was way too long considering how little it had to say, but when you consider what a bunch of raging fucking bigots biblical era jews were, the very fact that Ruth is a foreigner is plenty of conflict. According to the introductory essay in the NSRV (which is almost as long as the book in this instance), this was a post-facto addition to the Historical books meant to soften the “no boning foreigners” rule.
You can fuck them, but only flaccid. So god made women called Ruth forever ugly, as a reminder.
Except the one that donated to our show. So before we accidentally insult anymore of our financial supporters we’ll wrap this edition of the Holy Babble. Lucinda, Heath, thanks for ignoring your gag reflex long enough to keep doing this.
And remember, if you’re reading along at home, stop doing that. We’re reading it so you don’t have to.
Outro
Before we blow our load tonight I want to offer another piss-poor excuse for not having merch available yet, but I don’t have one so I’m just going to sheepishly admit that it’ll be at least one more week.
Of course I can’t end this thing without thanking Heath and Lucinda for being a collective two thirds of why this thing works and, of course, I also need to thank Shujin Tribble from the Feline Conspiracies Wednesday Night 80s Bash in Second Life for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote, I’m not sure exactly what that even is, but thanks bro, very fun one.
I also want to thank everybody who took the time this week, or any week for that matter, to leave us a five star review on iTunes. We all really appreciate that and it’s one of the best ways we know of to help us spread the word so thanks to everybody who has and to everybody who hasn’t, also known as 97% or our audience, c’mon folks, it’s free and I’m practically begging here.
I also want to thank everyone who shares the show on Facebook or Twitter or tells their friends about it or recites it aloud at the grocery store. But most of all, of course, we need to thank this week’s wittiest, prettiest and most fastidious people; Richard, Brian, Roger, Stephen, Alison, Timothy, Geoff, April, Parminder, Elena, Mike, Eric, Stephen, Will and Duncan. Known throughout the galaxy as the dirty dozen and one quarter, these fifteen heroic, resolute, dashing, daring and stouthearted adventurers have earned praise both limitless and eternal by giving us money.
Only the most valiant, valorous and venturesome vanquishers have the verisimilitude required to give us money, but if you think you measure up to the noblesse of Richard, Brian, Roger, Stephen, Alison, Timothy, Geoff, April, Parminder, Elena, Mike, Eric, Stephen, Will and Duncan, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
And a quick note to those cyclically awesome few who have tried to set up recurring monthly donations on Paypal for us, thanks a ton, for whatever reason those don’t seem to be going through, but I’m on it from my end and we’ll try to get that worked out, I promise. Believe me, nobody wants to make it easier for you to give us money than we do.
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.
Episode 33 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Lucinda & Noah Lugeons
(Note: Transcript contains some material that was edited out of the final episode due to time constraints)
Sponsor
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And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s October 3rd, and Congressional Republicans just threw the Risk board off the table in a tantrum, took their ball, and went home.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from NFL-level football teamless New York, New York this is the Scathing Atheist
In this week’s episode…
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We’ll learn that Muslim culture, as portrayed in 90’s action movies, is entirely accurate.
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A Kansas teacher will be accused of mandatory atheist prayer, after assigning students to write a letter to the President.
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Russia finally gets Coke, Betamax and de facto anti-Muslim legislation.
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And CWebb from CWebb’s Sunday School will join us to give the Scathing Atheist a little hip-hop cred.
But first, the diatribe.
Diatribe
You know, I might have been the only person walking out of the Eugene O’Neil theater on Saturday night saying, “Don’t get me wrong, Book of Mormon was hilarious, but I wish it had been a little less pro-religion.”
Lucinda and I finally got around to seeing it this past weekend and yes, it’s every bit as good as everybody says it is. The dialogue was hilarious, the songs were phenomenal, the dance numbers were spectacular, the story was solid and they spent essentially the entire two hours mercilessly lampooning one of the most ridiculous cults America has yet to produce.
And still, I’m gonna bitch at that show for being too damn nice to religion.
I’m not gonna fault Matt and Trey. They had a message they wanted to send and they expressed it brilliantly. I just profoundly disagree with the message. See, like most pop-refutations of religiosity, they toss religion a huge bone at the end of this thing. After we spend ninety minutes learning how insane a person would have to be to take Mormon dogma seriously, we learn that it’s okay to believe patently absurd things, as long as they inspire us to do good and work together.
Ultimately, that’s the moral of the story.
It reminds me of another one of my favorite comedic excoriations of religion, Kevin Smith’s 99 dick and fart joke classic Dogma. We spend the whole movie lambasting Catholic mythology, but Chris Rock’s character encapsulates this same ridiculous cop out about halfway through the film when he says, “It’s not important what you have faith in, just that you have faith.”
Now, when you break it down like that, it’s pretty clearly that we’re dealing with batshit lunacy. That statement could be used to justify any psychotic delusion you could imagine and yet it’s presented within the movie as the soft-pedaling endorsement of religion. In Book of Mormon the main character overcomes his crisis of faith by realizing that it doesn’t matter if the stories are bullshit as long as they help people to live a better life.
I don’t know if Trey Parker, Matt Stone or Kevin Smith actually believe that. I suppose it’s possible that they’re just trying to make their story a bit more palatable to a majority religious audience. It might be that a hard atheist message is tantamount to killing the dog in American entertainment. After all, you can’t have 80% of your audience walking out knowing that they were the ones you’d been making fun of the whole time.
But ultimately it’s a profoundly stupid concept. It’s like saying “I’d love the forest if it weren’t for all the damn trees”. It’s like saying the gun had nothing to do with the bullet.
Sure, the specific tenets of any religion are stupid. I think even religious people admit that at this point. But they cling to that misguided notion that it doesn’t matter because the results are positive. Sure, they’re not universally positive… but their religion is positive right now in their lives. How can that be a bad thing?
Of course, our cream-of-the-crop atheist listeners already know the answer to this question, but I’m gonna spell it out anyway:
Thinking is important.
Thinking isn’t as easy as some people seem to think it is. The very fact that we use the term “common sense” as anything but an example of an oxymoron is plenty of proof of that. Critically examining a question isn’t something that comes to us innately. You have to learn how to do it.
And of course, a religious worldview stand in the way of all of that. It’s not enough to have the right answer if you got there the wrong way. If you think the only reason it isn’t okay to murder people and take their shit is because god said so, you’re a dangerous motherfucker. To use an example from Book of Mormon, if you think the only reason not to fuck a baby is because Joseph Smith might turn you into a lesbian, that’s not enough.
The problem isn’t this silly belief or that one. It’s the method they use to get there. You can believe any insane, detrimental shit you want, but if you used reason to get there, I can reason you back out. I can show you where you fucked up your chain of logic. But there’s no way to faith you back from the ledge.
Religion forces you to relinquish critical thought. It can’t be arrived at through empirical means and it can’t stand up to logical evaluation so it has to. That’s a prerequisite to faith. Hell, that’s the definition of faith. It’s a damn shame this doesn’t go without saying, but anything that forces us to stop using our brains is a bad thing but especially when the thing that’s asking us not to use our brains is trying to tell us right from wrong.
Headlines
Joining me for headlines tonight is equal opportunity scather, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to offend a new demographic right here in the opening of the segment?
How the fuck are the Mayans keeping their appointments organized, these last nine months? My friend from Belize is always confused. Talking about, “the thing, with the guy, in the place, on the day”
Okay, mildly offensive…
Don’t worry, it gets worse.
In our lead story tonight, a Kansas anti-evolution group is suing the state board of education on the grounds that teaching evolution promotes a religious belief. Yes, they’re suing because evolution is too religious.
So the church . . . is trying to tell the state . . . that they aren’t maintaining a proper separation of church and state?!? There’s a solid headline in there somewhere . . .
“Church not in Kansas anymore, after accidentally invoking First Amendment and getting separated from state.”
The lobbyists in question go by the bullshit flavored moniker “Citizens for Objective Public Education” and they’re suing to block the board from implementing a uniform science curriculum called “Next Generation Science”, but this group would be pissed if it was “Eight generations ago science”, as we’ve had this evolution thing for a while now.
Do they want a state-by-state thing?
“Evolution is real, and cigarettes cause cancer, but so far only in California.”
What if we compromise, and split it right down the middle? Science gets to determine the science curriculum in this life, and the church can decide on the curriculum for the afterlife.
Sounds fair to me. They get way more time that way, right? But according to John Calvert, the attorney defending perpetual stupidity, (quote) “The state’s job is simply to say to students, ‘How life arises continues to be a scientific mystery and there are competing ideas about it’ (end quote and theoretical in-quote quote).
That’s why all gynecologists are trained in human birth, but also stork wrangling . . .
Just in case the stork thing doesn’t continue never happening.
Yeah… who the hell are teachers to teach students stuff about things?
Also, evolution isn’t a wild stab by Darwin at how life arises. It’s a proven explanation of how living things that existed, reproduced other new living things that existed. It has nothing to do with cosmic life origins. If everyone would please turn to page zero, also known as the cover, we can all see that it’s not called Origin of Life, it’s called Origin of Species.
Au contraire, according to the lawsuit learning about evolution (quote) “…cause[s] students to embrace a non-theistic worldview” Now, this is something of an undercurrent to everything we say on this show, but I think from time to time we have to just stop and bask in the stupidity of the war they’re fighting. When Christians realize that learning about reality makes you stop believing in Christianity, their solution is to stop people from learning about reality.
Kansas Christian group sues to remove evolution from curriculum on the grounds that it is a religious belief: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/kansas-evolution-lawsuit_n_4005717.html
Moving on to inter-national thought crime news, Sudan’s Top 10 Most Wanted list has a new number one. The dangerous fugitive is implicated in a crime spree during which she turned in her library card, got a new license, and stopped being Muslim. Nahla Mamoud – a Sudanese woman and naturally also a Muslim apostate – had her life threatened by UK politician and big Islam fan, Salah al Bandar.
I think the most fucked up thing about this story was the response from the Metropolitan Police Department, which basically said, “oh, death threats never hurt anyone” and even suggested that investigating Al Bandar might anger him further and lead to more passionate fatwa activity. So apparently they’re willing to overlook an occasional death threat from an Islamist because you know Muslims and their silly fatwas…
Crazy old scalawags … hair tussle, shoulder punch …
Being Muslim and therefore having no choice in the matter, Bandar led something known as a ‘takfir’ campaign against Mahmoud. Takfir is an Arabic word that means something similar to “excommunication” plus “we-have-to-kill-you-now”.
Oh. So then what does Allah Akbar mean then?
Well I was watching Air Force One, and it seemed like “Allah Akbar” means “I’m a Muslim evil henchman, and my bosses are hijacking this plane.”
… Oh I get it… people watching Air Force One… that’s good. How many more times the Muslims are gonna make it this easy on us? “What? She said Muslims were intolerant of the opinions of women!? Kill that bitch!”
The “bitch they wish to kill” has been advised by police that her best legal recourse would be to stop existing, because it angers Muslims, and would help avoid a murder, including a bunch of annoying paperwork.
Well, she does have a vagina…
Obviously Muslims aren’t all terrorists, but . . . traditional sharia law really does call for execution of apostates. Sure, the sloppier progressive Muslim theocracies have eased that back to mere amputation. But they don’t specify amputation of what, so I imagine they have a spinning wheel like The Price is Right. The Slice is Right.
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“BEEP, BOP, BOOP–Clitoris.”
New article on Sudanese Apostate cut from last week: http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/09/28/statement-on-the-takfir-campaign-against-activist-nahla-mahmoud/
And in the “Goddamn Blasphemy Laws” file tonight, a Russian judge has ruled that a popular translation of the Koran should be banned for violation of the nation’s law against extremist materials. Muslim leaders are predictably outraged by the notion that a book that calls for the murder of 76.8% of the world’s population and endorses child rape is extreme and vow to brutally murder anybody who says it is.
These outraged religious leaders of which you speak . . . I can’t picture it . . .
They’re usually all about “gray areas” and “reasonable compromise” . . . Weird . . .
But these angry outliers are saying extremist literature is okay, because of some sort of free exercise, “Belief in Santa” clause.
Well, I guess that’s what they get for having the one holy book that endorses horrible shit.
Their argument is that extremist messages are only safe in the hands of brainwashed masses of fanatically faithful idiots? It’s the disorganized secular jihobbyists that can’t be trusted with understanding allegory? Really?!?
Now I think it’s important to note that basically every Russian official except this one redneck judge is backing away from the ruling and there’s no way that it’ll stick, but Russia’s bigot-class was quick to embrace the ruling. Guy-with-unpronounceable-Russian-name, who was speaking on behalf of political-party-with-equally-unpronounceable-name applauded the decision and even extended the entirely non-racist offer to pay for the deportation of Muslims who didn’t like it.
And the Muslims who did like it, get a paid vacation. So it’s not bigoted at all . . . All the Muslims are being treated equally different.
Obviously, we here at the Scathing Atheist would never support the banning of any book, but we’d especially oppose the banning of a book as insane as the Koran. If the Holy Babble segment has taught us anything it’s this: the most powerful weapon against a religion is its own holy book.
Russian court bans the Koran for being extremist: http://freethinker.co.uk/2013/09/27/russian-court-rules-that-a-translation-of-the-koran-is-extremist-and-orders-its-destruction/
In “South Asian Buddhist Redneck Islander” news, a Sri Lankan exorcist almost survived a botched evil spirit removal at a house outside Colombo. It should be noted that the only way to botch the removal of a spirit that doesn’t exist, is to die during the process, in which case you can’t proclaim success at the end . . . So that’s what this guy did.
I’m dying to hear how a person goes up against a figment of imagination and fails to a fatal degree. And by the way, full disclosure and all, it’s written on the script in front of me and I know exactly how it happened and I’m still dying to hear it out loud.
This particular magical spell called for, among other things, the exorcist to bury himself alive and then trust the onlookers to dig him out when he signalled them by thrusting a sword through the dirt.
Hard to imagine how this could go wrong…
Apparently he misread the recipe … it said sacrifice a whore, and he sacrificed a cat. And of course, when he buried himself alive, the dead cat didn’t prevent his suffocation the way the dead whore would have. After three hours, during which he was dying, and therefore unable to stab his sword up through the ground like he planned, the audience dug up his dead body. Classic blunder. Atheists get in trouble with dead whore scenarios all the time too, and let me tell you, it isn’t . . . something I know anything about.
So what you have here are a bunch of villagers watching this lump of sand saying “You know, don’t get me wrong, this is a solid trick, but it’s kind of boring. He could… you know, maybe stick his hands out of the dirt and juggle or something.” And after three fucking hours somebody says, “You know, not breathing for those first two hours and fifty nine minutes was impressive and all, but he can’t possibly hold it for three hours.”
I heard they attempted to bring him to the hospital, but the exorcist and the cat were pronounced dead by Schroedinger before they even started the ritual.
Sri Lankan exorcist kills cat, self: http://www.nst.com.my/latest/sri-lankan-man-dies-in-failed-exorcism-ritual-1.350008
And in “Stop in the Name of the Lord!” news tonight a police department in Montgomery, Alabama thinks they might have pinpointed the reason their murder rate is so high: Too few Alabamans know about that Jesus guy.
“Montgomery just aint been the same since that godless MLK guy started a-causin’ trouble.”
Because a high tech security system prevents him from physically rubbing his nut sack all over the Constitution, Corporal David Hicks of the Montgomery PD had to settle for the next best thing.
Lots of other Hicks would love to rub out their Hand-cock on the First Amendment too . . .
What was “next best” to that?
Under his direction, the department has instituted an official constabulary proselytization program that gives ministers express access to crime scenes so that they can evangelize to victims and perpetrators and people who are in otherwise vulnerable states of mind. And the best part is, it doesn’t cost a dime unless you’re an Alabama taxpayer.
I’ve said this before . . . They should really have their own schools. I know that phrase doesn’t go over well in Alabama, but religions really need to have their own schools, so that creationist kids can get a separate, but inferior education, like god intended.
In their defense, everyone in Alabama gets an inferior education.
Anyway, the program in question is modeled after similar programs in Ohio and perpetual Scathing Atheist whipping state Texas and is so insanely illegal that the Supreme Court should get to piss on the people who started it at some point. Not only is it clearly a state endorsement of a particular religion (and religion in general), but the costs of training and certifying the ministers is actually paid for out of the public coffers.
Alabama town fights crime with Jesus: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/using-christianity-to-fight-crime/280038/
Our government may be getting too entangled with misogynistic major religions, but at least our legal system still guarantees something vaguely resembling gender equality. Our women can boast proudly that the United States is one of the world’s best places to be raped. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Saudi Arabia . . . It’s a bad place to get raped.
Like… the back seat of a Volkswagen?
Except for the mustache rides . . .
Seriously though, just a single count of ‘rape victim-ing’ can get you in big trouble, beyond just the evil spawn gestating inside of you. Sharia law seems to understand rape in the Hegelian dialectic sense, and therefore the victims are philosophically aiding and abetting the consent-impaired.
I know that I both should and shouldn’t make a transitional joke here or something…
One particular Saudi woman – a “convicted rape victim” – had her sentence of 90 lashings increased to 200 lashings plus six months in jail, because her lawyer told the world media that he was representing something called a “convicted rape victim”. Saudi Arabia points out . . . “Listen – we also convicted the seven rapists, and added to their sentence too. It’s not like we only punished the victim.”
Fuck… What do you say to another one of those preemptive wars we Americans seem to like so much? Fucking seriously. I feel like any group of human beings who can enforce a law that would punish a nineteen year old girl for being gang raped has rescinded their right to sovereignty. These backward-ass, prehistoric, sociopathic, misogynistic bastards aren’t qualified to judge an episode of Cupcake Wars.
Saudi Arabia is not a good place to get raped: http://freethinker.co.uk/2013/09/27/rape-victims-lashes-increased-because-her-lawyer-publicised-her-barbaric-sentence/
And from the “Sikh of Being Ignored” department, the American Sikh community was…
Wait, fuck that, I’ve gotta go back to that goddamn Saudi Arabian story… Seriously, if you asked me to just make up the worst, most horrible example of injustice I possibly could, I’d have fallen short of this shit. I mean, it’s plenty fucked up that they would whip a woman for willingly having sex outside of wedlock but for getting fucking raped!?
It just teaches the wrong lesson . . . Be slutty . . . Enjoy the gang rape. You don’t want women enjoying this horrific ordeal. What kind of message does that send?
Exactly. Because as fucked up as a law against being raped is, this is even worse in practice because what it amounts to is a law against reporting rape. It’s a disincentive for women to exercise even the insignificant fraction of rights they have in these anencephalous theocracies. Seriously. And think about how few rapes get reported even here where it’s legal. I mean, what rationale can they possibly use? Is the judge really walking away going, “Well that slut’ll think twice about getting brutally assaulted next time”?
One more unsolicited joke?
No.
And that means “NO” . . . not “yes, and bring six friends”.
Seriously, just hold off on the rape jokes for a second. I need two paragraphs to get this shit off my chest.
So you’re gonna say “get the shit off my chest” and I’m supposed to not make a Cleveland Steamer joke?
Yeah. Look, I know you have the whole complete lack of a moral compass thing to your sense of humor and I love it as much as the next guy, but I just need you to pump the brakes on it for a minute. Because this story is so demonically fucked up it’s important that we actually stop and reflect what exactly we’re talking about here.
I don’t want to pile on the gang rapejokes, but I really only get the occasional opportunity to-
Whoa! Think about it, we’re talking about a barely adult girl is brutally raped and then gets whipped bloody. As a punishment. 200 lashes? What the fuck!? Are we in the goddamn middle ages or something?
The funny thing about gang raping a girl with six buddies is that-
Shh…. save me the edit dude, there’s nothing funny about that.
Well if I never get to the punchline there’s no way to know how funny…
Sharia law my ass… it’s not fucking law. And this is not… it’s important to say, this is not a Muslim thing. This is a theocracy thing. Go watch the fucking fundie Christian preachers on YouTube and tell me these misogynistic asstards wouldn’t be sentencing rape victims to lashes if they could. “Well she wers wearing pants so she was askin’ for god to make her get raped.”
Okay, now can I tell one last rape joke?
Yeah, I’m done…
Would you rather be raped once by six buddies, or six times by one guy?
Ok that’s it, I’m ending the segment-
Six one, half dozen the other.
Sikhs demand (and get) removal of offensive Bin Laden Halloween costume: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/osama-bin-laden-halloween-costume_n_4005862.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Alright, well now that I’m too pissed to be funny I guess that does it for the headlines. Now where’s my fucking bong? Fucking neanderthals… Anyway, Heath, thanks for joining me.
And when we come back we’ll do a bit that we recorded before I got so pissed off.
Pitch
Each year, nearly one hundred million children are inflicted with religion.
That’s more than three hundred thousand a day,
Fifteen thousand an hour,
Two hundred and fifty a minute,
Four a second,
Pi every 0.785 seconds.
This horrible mental disorder affects a child’s ability to reason, to interact socially… to experience guilt free orgasms.
In it’s early stages, religion can cause sweating, confusion, night terrors, cognitive dissonance, social anxiety and anal leakage.
And if left untreated, it can even lead to complete loss of cognitive function and sphincter function.
You won’t believe the shit that will come out of your ass, and your mouth.
Many victims end up needing an entire crock to store all the shit. But there is a way you can help alleviate this epidemic of oral defecation.
For the cost of just one bottle of single malt scotch a day, you can donate about fifty dollars a day. Or you could just donate the bottle each day.
And every dollar you donate to the Scathing Atheist goes directly toward fighting this horrible disease. Except the part that goes toward pizza.
…and single malt scotch.
The Scathing Atheist is one of the world’s oldest and most trusted New York based, anti-theistic, thirty minute, weekly, amateur, explicit, english language podcasts.
For almost years, we’ve been fighting against this dreadful affliction but we can’t do it without your financial support.
…well, I don’t know if “can’t” is the right word…
We’d rather not do it without your financial support.
And donating to the Scathing Atheist doesn’t just help us, it also helps you. Because if you don’t give the money to us, you’ll probably spend it on crack. Or maybe not, but you never know.
If they’ve got a crack guy, that’s where the money’s going.
So go to Scathing Atheist dot com, look for the donate button on the right side of the page and give until it hurts. Because I’m using my sad voice.
Outro
Huge thanks to C-Webb for letting us use the song there. The dude is as intelligent as he is talented and in addition to arranging biblical poems for rap, he also does a really well presented, well reasoned counter-apologetics podcast. If you want to check it out, and you almost certainly do, you’ll find a link to his homepage on the shownotes for this episode.
http://cwebbssundayschool.com/
And speaking of awesome podcasters whose podcasts you would almost certainly enjoy, I also need to thank Thomas from Thomas and the Bible for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. He’s been doing a really funny podcast for years now where he’s breaking the bible down verse by verse from an atheist perspective so if you like our Holy Babble segment but want a little more detail, you’ll find a link to his show on the shownotes as well. Can’t recommend it enough.
http://www.thomasandthebible.com/
I also want to thank everybody who responded to my call last week for more Farnsworth quotes. I have quite a stockpile now so if you sent me a soundclip, thank you. I will definitely use it, but it might take a minute to get through the backlog now.
I also wanted to toss out a quick plug for an atheist meet and mingle going on in Vegas on the weekend of October 18th. We don’t have enough time to spell out the details, but if you’re going to be in or around Vegas that weekend and it looks like a debaucherously good time. We’ll have a link to their Facebook page on the shownotes as well.
https://www.facebook.com/events/157814217717033/
One additional and important note; nominations for the People’s Choice Podcast Awards are going on right now and I’ve gotten several messages from people who wanted to let us know that they nominated us. We are, of course, absolutely flattered, but we’re actually not eligible for a Podcast Award this year. For whatever reason their rules stipulate that a podcast has to have started on or before January first of this year to be eligible so as much as we appreciate it, use your nomination wisely.
And before we power down tonight, I also need to thank Heath for being a really funny bastard and doing it on this show. I also need to thank Lucinda for helping us out with the little donation pitch this week, for putting up with all the time I spend on this podcast and for regularly having sex with me.
But most of all, we need to thank this week’s most important accumulations of molecules, Forrest, Ward, Shane, Tom, Ryan, Daniel and Marcel. Forrest, mighty slayer of dragons; Ward, tamer of beasts and women; Shane, friend to all the woodland critters; Tom, masked nunchaku master; Ryan, bain of the villainous; Daniel, grand and legendary conqueror; and Marcel, assassin of the gods.
Together these seven valiant warriors have earned their way into legend, myth and our archives by giving us money. And of course, if you’d like to join their illustrious ranks, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
And if you’re looking for a way to help but you work for the Federal Government and thus have no income at present, you can also help us out by leaving us a five star review on iTunes or wherever you found us. And if you need a little more Scatheism in your life, you can check us out on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and our erratically published blog.
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 except the awesome Joshua rap that was used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission. And I also had CWebb’s permission to use his awesome Joshua rap.
Episode 32 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright and Lucinda & Noah Lugeons
Sponsor
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new chain of confessional restaurants, Plenary Hollywood, where there’s truth in every booth and respite in every bite. Come in Tuesdays for half priced Absolution Vodka Martinis because drinking your problems away is every bit as effective as Catholicism.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s September 26th and we don’t fuck with Hindus enough.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from generally assembled New York, New York this is the Scathing Atheist
In this week’s episode…
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We discover that the Lone Star State was graded on a scale of 5 stars,
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We’ll learn that you can’t say ‘bomb’ on an airplane, ‘fire’ in a theater or ‘atheist’ on a bus.
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And we’ll manage to make abortion jokes and anal sex jokes at the same time.
But first, the diatribe.
Diatribe
It doesn’t surprise me at all that most Christians haven’t read the bible. It’s long, it’s repetitive, it’s boring, it’s pointless and it’s stupid. Why would anyone read that fucking thing? But what does surprise me is how few of them even know what it’s about. You couldn’t bother even reading the cliff’s notes, guys?
You constantly hear Christians attributing shit to the bible that isn’t there. A lot of them will tell you that the bible says, “God helps those who help themselves”. But not only does that never appear anywhere in the bible, it’s completely antipodal to the bible’s core message.
They’ll tell you the bible says to “Love the sinner, hate the sin”, but, surprise, surprise, that doesn’t come from the bible either. It comes from St. Augustine’s desperate attempts to dial the bible back a bit.
How about “spare the rod, spoil the child”? Nope. Not in the bible. Don’t get me wrong, the bible certainly endorses the fuck out of beating your children with rods, but somehow god wasn’t able to come up with the pithy pro-child abuse slogan that stuck.
Hell, the other day I was walking by a conversation and heard a guy saying, “Well the bible says, ‘Know Thyself’…” No, buddy, that was the facade at the temple of Apollo you were thinking of. But what the hell, it’s good advice, right? It should be in the bible, right? So why not attribute it to the bible?
The big problem here is that these jackasses have convinced themselves that the bible is some… book or virtues or something. They actually think it’s some collection of ethical parables that provides moral guidance. And who can blame them right? That’s what everybody told them it was. That’s what the assholes who know better told them. It’s not like they’re ever gonna read it and prove them wrong, right?
So instead they bumble around misquoting their own holy book and talking about living their lives by the bible as though that would be desirable… or even legal.
But seriously, the fucking bible!? It’s the most horrible book on earth. To pretend that thing’s moral you have to pick cherries like a recently martyred Muslim. Go open a bible to a random page. Read a random passage. I’m willing to bet the vast majority of my penis that you didn’t find anything moral there. Hell, you’re lucky if you found something morally ambiguous.
You follow the bible do you? Well how many Amalekites have you killed this month? How many bulls have you sacrificed at the altar? How many armed Jewish land conquests have you participated in this year? Because that’s what this fucking book is about. I’m reading the damn thing. You can’t fool me into thinking this is a book about morals. It’s like if I finally got around to reading the Harry Potter books and found out that there weren’t any wizards in them.
Now, a talented preacher can spin this thing so that it sounds good. Of course they can, that’s their job. And that’s fine if you’re in the studio audience, but what about people who are playing the home game? You’re actually handing people a book that explicitly endorses genocide. It plainly justifies indiscriminately murdering people that are different than you, that worship different gods than you, that ascribe to different sexual mores than you, that live in different countries than you, that have different genetalia than you… and you’re telling them it’s the be-all, end-all of morality handed down from the all-knowing forger of the universe. Hard to imagine how that could go wrong.
It’s like replacing the gum in baseball cards with plutonium and saying, “It’s okay, nobody eats the gum.”
A commenter on our Facebook page recently applauded us for our holistic reading of the bible. He said he felt like it should be required reading for atheists. Well, I don’t know if I agree with that, but I’d love it if it was at least required reading for Christians.
I don’t honestly think that being an atheist means you have to read the bible, but I do think that honestly reading the bible means you have to be an atheist.
Headlines
Joining me for headlines tonight is a man who loves both head and lines, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to make Reuters your crack whore?
Not that I need another crack whore, but sure.
In our lead story tonight, from the “Can you quantify delusional?” file. . . Yes you can. According to a study by LifeWay Research, “[one] third of Americans – and nearly half of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians – believe prayer and Bible study alone can overcome serious mental illness.”
Wait a second… they’re deluded into thinking delusions can cure delusions? This is like a Christopher Nolan script that isn’t a horrible cheat rushed to the theater to cap a trilogy.
Granted praying and reading the Bible should quickly turn a person atheist, but there ‘s lots of other ways to cure mental afflictions like Christianity.
I assume you’re referring to crusades.
Here’s some more stupidity by the numbers. The church-funded LifeWay Research group accidentally found and presented the following: More than two thirds of Americans would feel welcome in church . . . if they were mentally ill . . .
Well if they’re gonna write their own punchlines about themselves, then what the fuck are we doing here?!? That’s just selfish.
So two thirds of Americans sit in churches thinking to themselves, “you know what make me fit right in here? Brain damage”.
Right … just as a general strategy point, the church might want to consider NOT sponsoring studies that in any way juxtapose religion and mental institutions. And also probably not advisable to poll your flock of inmates on what pills they should take in the asylum.
One third of Americans believe prayer can cure mental illness: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/21/prayer-heal-mental-illness_n_3963949.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Our next story takes us to the “Lone IQ Point State”, where Texas creationists are asking, “If humans evolved from less intelligent primates, why are there still Texas creationists?”
Give us miscegenated liberals a couple more decades, and we’ll breed them out.
Can’t wait to watch creationism win a Darwin Award.
Yeah, but between now and then we have to suffer through the oxymoron that is the Texas state Board of Education. They’re already synonymous with gerrymandering the cerebellums of America’s youth in an effort to rewrite biology, cosmology, physics, anthropology and American history to conform to their narrow, misguided worldview so it should come as no surprise that they’re at it again.
Every house in Texas already has a creationist textbook, where kids can read all about what science would eventually get wrong. It’s a bestseller. It’s the best seller ever, literally for Christ’s sake!!!
But what’s the point in having bibles if you don’t have any throats to cram them down? So the alarmingly ubiquitary “anti-reality” wing of the Texas electorate is cloaking their efforts to dismantle scientific literacy in the clever but familiar “analyze and evaluate” guise. Unfortunately for them, Governor Rick Perry doesn’t do “clever” and spilled the beans when he boasted that (quote) “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools” during his abbreviated presidential run, which, incidentally, was abbreviated because he thought teaching creationism was brag-worthy.
As long as old white Christian men are legislating the content of Texan education, why not add the widely-held belief in Texas that slavery is a “complicated issue . . . Way I rememmerit, the coloreds was enslavin’ us sometimes too.”
Well, they pretty much already did that! This is only the latest skirmish in a long war. As many of our listeners are aware, the Texas state Board of Education wields inordinate influence over textbook standards throughout the country. Unlike every other state in the union, Texas adopts a K-12 curriculum on a statewide rather than district by district basis, which means the Texas state Board of Education is the only single textbook purchaser tossing around twenty billion dollars at a time. And apparently a dollar sign, a 2 and ten zeroes invariably trumps whatever commitment to educational excellence inspires one to be a textbook publisher.
Texas School Board trying to get more creationism in the school books: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/texas_science_textbooks_creationists_try_to_remove_evolution_from_classrooms.html
And in “Malcolm X Machina” news, just when you thought the atheist movement would never find its Black Panthers, enter the radical militant godless group known as the Northeastern Pennsylvania Freethought Society.
Or the N.P. Frees, as they’re known on the street.
Normally they spend their time planting righteous irony bombs under the cars of abortion clinic bombers, but this time the NPFS really crossed the line. They recently proposed an advertisement for buses in Lackawanna County, that would show the unadulterated image of the word ‘atheism’, followed . . . by a period.
In addition to the opprobrious noun, the ad also contained a conspicuous blank space where the crucifix and the benediction should have been.
One deeply offended religious person argued, (quote) “The poster might as well show Dawkins, Hitchens, and Nietzsche forcing Jesus to watch them run the train on his dad.” (end quote)
I smell T-shirt…
In an unrelated coincidence, a new policy was immediately approved by the county transit board, pre-emptively banning any future bus ads containing religious beliefs, including but not limited to belief in the existence of the word atheism. In Pennsylvania, the mere subject of atheism is too controversial already, so they certainly won’t allow entire atheist sentences with verbs and stuff. Atheist podcasts are right out.
We should start a betting pool on which bible belt state will be the first to avoid atheist bus ads by doing away with public transit altogether.
Pennsylvania bus company changes ad policy over lowest-key atheist ad in history: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/18/least-offensive-atheist-ad-ever-leads-to-new-advertising-policy-in-pennsylvania-county/
And in “Chicken Chuckin’” news tonight, human beings with brains and central nervous systems and stuff think they can transfer their asomatous demerits to farm fowl. I’m talking, of course, about the Jewish ritual of Kapparot, in which people appease Jew god in some kind of centrifugal transmission of sin by swinging live chickens above their heads.
Well the chickens aren’t live for the entire process.
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“Listen Shmuel . . . You can’t learn physics without murdering chickens. It’s all right here in the text book. So like I was saying . . . Centripetal force is what your arm exerts on the chicken. Centifugal force is a “faux force” that causes the sin to slide down to its beak.”
Well they better choke their chickens quick while they still can, as radically reasonable Rabbi Adam Frank wants to put an end to this barbaric practice and yes, not wanting to swing chickens to death in the street apparently can qualify a person as radical.
Nothing new here . . . Jews swinging their cock around, and then chopping its head off. I’m not saying the Kaparot chicken thing and circumcision are equally ridiculous, but they’re certainly sitting in the same enormous ballpark with fifty thousand other stupid antiquated religious rituals.
And by stupid, antiquated religious rituals, you mean… religious rituals.
And let’s not forget … the rationale is the chickens go to feed the poor.
But now picture the scene: an orthodox Jewish man swinging a chicken to death over his head as he approaches a homeless Brooklyn man to hand him the carcass.
Might lead to confusion at times . . . that’s all.
“Vhat, it’s a perfectly good chicken.”
Rabbi Frank warns that in addition to being sadistic, obscene and moronic, it also causes the rest of the world to lose respect for Jewish culture, adding, “look at these fucking hats and tell me we’ve got respect we can afford to lose”.
Do they hide their expendable respect in the overgrown sideburns of their eight translucent sons, who all appear to have leukemia? Is that where they hide it? All the respect?
Jews perform the annual chicken-baton sin-absorption ritual: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/17/rabbi-is-embarrassed-by-religious-jews-using-swinging-chickens-as-sin-absorbers/
In ‘assaulted by a salted meat’ news, Wayne Stilwel of Scotland has been sentenced to ten months in jail for stealing my idea about using bacon at airport security and Gitmo, but taking it a little too far.
…or not far enough if you’re me.
The obviously hilarious Edinburgh prankster rendered an entire mosque doubly useless by attaching bacon to the door handles, and throwing bacon into the building. And when I say ‘doubly’ useless, I mean useless in general reality, and also useless to porkophobes that day.
Yeah, they said the sentence was meant to (quote) “…act as a lesson to show people that all religions need to be respected.” I’m sorry, but the fact that these nincompoops are calling out the hazmat team to remove the satanic bacon from their magical house fails to earn them any respect with me… And the fact that UK courts sent a dude to jail for illegal use of pancetta doesn’t make me start respecting Muslims, it just makes me stop respecting the UK courts.
The . . . uh . . . head Muslim guy was not reachable for comment, however this would have been his official statement: (quote) “We routinely feast on American infidels, so we don’t have any interest in the other white meat.”
I’m not saying that what the dude did wasn’t bigoted, but it was hilarious so it doesn’t count. It’s like all the stuff we say on this show.
Yeah if funny doesn’t cancel out racist, we’re out of business.
And in related “eschewing the fat-wa” news, we learn later in the same story that while a bacon attack will get you ten months, death threats against apostates are just fine, because apostates that don’t wear a burqa anymore, are usually asking for it.
Yeah, what the fuck was that? After calling for the death of a Sudanese woman, Liberal Democrat councillor Salah al Bandar was cleared of any wrongdoing, cause you know those Muslims and their fatwas…
Nahla Mahmoud – the fatwa victim – has been advised by police that her best legal recourse would be to stop existing, because it angers Muslims.
Well, she does have a vagina…
Man sentenced to 10 months for vicious bacon attack: http://freethinker.co.uk/2013/09/18/mosque-attacked-with-bacon-scottish-man-receives-a-10-month-jail-sentence-for-offending-muslims/
In left-wing conspiracy news, our teams of gay stoner fetus killers have successfully altered global thermodynamics as planned . . . but Pastor Kevin Swanson of Colorado is onto us.
Drats!
He cites marijuana, abortion, and (quote) “decadent homosexual activity” – I guess dudes are eating dark chocolate mousse while they fuck – Those things are the underlying cause of Colorado’s worst year for fire and floods.
Man… if I’d known there was dark chocolate mousse I might have been gay.
Liberals in his state are indeed conducting a powerful new dark ritual, involving marijuana, gay sex, and fetal sacrifice. Our operatives get high, have extraordinarily decadent butt sex, and then murder the resulting embryo . . . (A butt embryo, no less) And because of a weird loophole in cosmic law (other than butt sex leading to embryos), this magically forces God to flood wealthy conservative enclaves like Colorado Springs and John Galt’s impossible valley.
Yeah… butt sex causes forest fires. I love that this vision of climatology is perfectly acceptable but the idea that CO2 is causing a greenhouse effect is ludicrous .
But despite his stint as a climate change denier, it looks like the ignorant hate theory isn’t so ignorant this time. It’s just a well-informed hate theory. It’s just hate. Which means on this particular day, Swanson will not gain any ground on Jerry Falwell in the prestigious ignorant hate speech standings.
Nobody beats the king… except Pat Robertson.
Denver is the new Sodom: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/kevin-swanson-blames-colorado-floods-decadent-homosexual-activity-marijuana-and-abortion-rig and also… http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18209-decadent-homosexual-activity-marijuana-and-abortion-caused-colorado-floods-talk-radio-minister-charges-denying-global-warming
And finally tonight, in “Hey, it’s German… You’re lucky nobody’s shitting on anybody” news tonight, a group of German churches have teamed up to offer “erotic” sermons. In an effort to combat the sexually repressive reputation the church was unfairly saddled with after millenia of repressing sex, two Protestant churches in Dresden, Germany have announced a series of sexually charged sermons in the coming months.
And you’re positive nobody’s shitting on anybody? Not even a bronze shower in some shit-laden holy water?
Program organizer Rudolf Renner hopes that the program can help people see that homosexuality isn’t a sin, because it’s in the bible. Because being in the bible makes something okay. So basically they’re conceding that homosexuality is at least as moral as things like slavery, rape, incest, bestiality, genocide, infanticide and animal sacrifice.
Alright, 30 seconds on the clock: Titles for the new Spermin’ German sermons.
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Dong of Solomon
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Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Humps… or no, wait… valley of the wet bones.
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The Burden of Blow Job: Carrying the Load
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Moses Parting the Pink C
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Jonah and the Sperm Whale – What? That’s technically a jizz joke.
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Noah’s Arcing Ropes of Jism
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Okay that’s a better jizz joke . . . I’m coming from behind now . . . Titus: Tying up Loose Ends
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The Cautionary Tale: Moses and his burning bush.
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The Roman Bondage Sermon: Nailing Jesus.
German churches to offer “erotic” sermons: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/german-churches-erotic-sermons-sexuality-gay_n_3956958.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
Sexualizing the death of their savior. Now that’s what I call ending on a high note. Heath, thanks as always for joining me.
And when we come back we’ll ask what the fuck all those orthodox jews in the corner are doing.
Calendar
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. This is the time we set aside once a month to bring you up to speed on all the great atheist, secular and skeptical events going on around the country and around the world.
And damn do we have a full slate in October. We’re gonna start in Charlotte, North Carolina when the “Carolina Secular Conference” is going to be welcoming Margaret Downey, author and activist Katherine Stewart, Shelley Segal, and a lot more. That’s going on over the weekend of October 4th, it’s reasonably priced and should be a blast.
http://www.carolinassecularconference.org/
A week and a coast away we’ve got Sacramento’s 12th annual Freethought Day on October 12th. Huge festival featuring Richard Carrier, Greta Christina, Annie Laurie Gaylor, friend of the show Tom Beasley and a ton of others. One day, great lineup, damn I wish I was gonna be there, hopefully you can go in my stead.
But not all great conferences happen is awesome states. Some of them also happen in Ohio. For example, the 2013 “Sexy Secular” Conference in Akron on the 19th of October. This one has practically every awesome speaker I just mentioned with the addition of Aron Ra and the incomparable Dr. Darrel Ray http://sexysecularconference.com/
And three quickies to round things off. On the weekend of October 26th we’ve got the Kentucky Freethought Convention with Annie Laurie Gaylor, Hemant Mehta, Jamila Bey and more. http://www.kyfreethoughtconvention.com/ A little further south we’ve got “Reason in the Rock” in Little Rock, Arkansas with Dan Barker, Matt Dillahunty, Jerry DeWitt, Zack Kopplin and friends. http://reasonintherock.org/
And finally because I know we’ve got at least a couple of listeners in the Netherlands, the 26th of October is also the start of the Skeptic’s Congress in… a city. Sorry, don’t speak Dutch so I couldn’t figure out anything except the country where it’s taking place and the date. But if you’re interested, you’ll find a link to this event and all the others we’ve discussed on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
10/26 Skeptic’s Congress in the Netherlands: http://www.skepsis.nl/congres2013.html
And of course, if you’re involved with a conference that needs a free plug, you’ll find all the contact info on that very same website.
Top Ten
In a religion renowned for pointless and crappy holidays, Sukkot stands out as possibly the single most baffling celebration on the Jewish calendar. This is a holiday celebrated by sitting in booths, shaking palm fronds at god and being generally miserable.
So to help our listeners and ourselves better understand this ancestral absurdity, Noah and I will be answering the top ten most asked questions about Sukkot in a segment we like to call…
“How the Hell is this a Holiday?”
1) What does Sukkot mean?
Sukkot is the plural form of Sukkah.
2) Okay, smart-ass, so what the hell does Sukkah mean?
It means a shitty little temporary hut. So literally translated, the holiday is called, “Shitty Little Huts”.
3) How do Jews celebrate Sukkot?
The same way toll booth operators celebrate Tuesday. They sit in little booths all day. They erect a little shed and then spend time in that shed. Because god. Or something.
And they wave palm fronds. That part is apparently really important, otherwise passersby might forget to reflect on how stupid their religion is.
4) Why the hell would anyone do that?
When you’re chosen by god, for the sweet-ass life of a Jewish person, you don’t ask questions. Since I clearly wasn’t chosen, I looked it up. Following a labor dispute, Jewish people spent 40 years living in makeshift desert dwellings northeast of Egypt. Not sure what makes anyone think that ever stopped after 40 years though.
5) But desert dwellers didn’t live in booths. They lived in tents. So what the fuck?
Well, like all things described in the bible, Sukkot predates the bible. Not sure why people have so much trouble with the “if the bible describes it, it didn’t inspire it” rule, but they do. Despite later attempts to shoehorn Sukkot into the Exodus narrative, it’s widely believed that it originated with farmers sleeping in booths in their fields during the harvest.
6) Do all Jews live in booths during Sukkot?
No. Sukkot was once considered the holiest of all celebrations, but it lost some of it’s luster when humans invented heat and the humane treatment of animals.
And Judaism in general lost some luster when humans invented scientific explanations for stuff.
These days most jews don’t bother with the booths, though some families eat their meals in their rickety hovels and some hardcore Hebrews still sleep in them overnight.
7) So how did they celebrate back when they lived in booths?
They killed a lot of animals. And that’s a lot of animals for templic Jews. Back in the Jews’ animal slaughtering heyday this was the bloodiest of all Hebrew celebrations and all Hebrew celebrations were pretty damn bloody back then.
8) What’s up with the palm fronds?
Fucked if I know.
9) Why do Jewish holidays always suck?
Pretty much every event in Judaism’s history is bloodier than Edward Scissorhands botching an octo-mom abortion, but you’ve gotta celebrate something, right?
10) Can non-Jews celebrate Sukkot?
Yes, but not according to the Torah you have to wait until after the end of the world. Scripture says that after the apocalypse, even the Goyim will celebrate Sukkot and get their very own booths.
And you thought the apocalypse was gonna suck.
Bible Story
“Run get the young ‘uns folks! It’s time for Lucinda Lugeons Bible Stories for kids”
Today we’re gonna open our bibles up and meet one of the few women in the bible important enough to have names, Miriam. In this story we’re going to learn all about why we should love god and the pitiless vengeance that’s in store for us if we don’t.
Once upon a time there was a Cushite named Miriam and she married a nice Jewish boy named Aaron. They lived a happy simple life until one day Aaron’s brother Moses showed up and told her husband that they had to go to Egypt to rescue all the Hebrews.
Miriam and Aaron were skeptical but they did what Moses said because Moses was an unhinged murderer. And because they were loyal to god.
So they packed up all their stuff and grabbed their kids and left with Moses so that god could mercilessly torture Egyptians after rescinding their free will. So after god got finished turning all their water to blood, covering them with festering sores, filling their towns with bugs and frogs and murdering the oldest kid in every family, he lets the pharaoh let the Jews go so that they could all wander miserably through a desert for decades.
And Miriam and Aaron didn’t like the plan at all because wandering around in the wilderness and eating flavorless crap for years and years wasn’t very fun. But they did what they were told because they didn’t want to die. And because they were loyal to god.
Now, because their sons were related to Moses, god liked them more than he liked everyone else, so he decided to make her sons priests. That meant that they didn’t have to do any work and everyone else had to pay for their food and all they had to do was kill animals, slit open their stomachs, take out all their guts, drain their blood, splash it around and set them on fire.
But one day her sons tried to see what god looked like, so he burned all their skin off their bones and killed them. And Miriam and Aaron were very sad, but they didn’t say anything because they didn’t want their flesh burned away. And because they were loyal to god.
So they spent most of their lives wandering in the wilderness, not having a home or a comfortable bed or pets or any of their favorite foods or the ability to decide for themselves what to do. It was so bad that practically all the Jews wished that they were still Egyptian slaves because at least then they weren’t always starving and thirsty.
And then one day Aaron and Miriam complained and said, “hey, maybe wandering in the wilderness until we all die isn’t a very good idea at all.”
Now, this made god very, very angry. So angry that he gave Miriam a horrible disease called leprosy that caused her skin to rot and fall off so that you could see her guts and bones. And Moses and Aaron begged god to take away the horrible disease but he wouldn’t. And because being in horrible pain and having to watch your own flesh rot away isn’t bad enough, god also made all the other Jews shun her so nobody would talk to her or take care of her or bring her food and water for seven days. Because after blindly devoting her life to Moses’ every whim, she was disloyal for a few minutes once.
And nobody lived happily ever after.
The end.
Outro
Before we drop anchor tonight I wanted to give everybody a quick update on the perpetually postponed merch I keep promising. We’re still making a few minor tweaks to the new logo. Hopefully that’ll all be done this weekend so we’ve got our fingers crossed that by episode 33 we’ll have some shwag available for you.
I also wanted to let everybody know that I’m pretty much constantly looking for Farnsworth quotes at the last minute, so if you’ve got a blog, a Facebook page, a podcast or any other atheist outreach vehicle that you want us to plug, let me know. I’d be happy to give you some on-air love in exchange for a brief audio clip of you quoting everybody’s favorite 31st century scientist.
I also wanted to congratulate Cecil from Cognitive Dissonance for being the first team to best me this year in the Fantasy Football League of Sinister Secularists. I want to congratulate him not so much on the win, which he clearly doesn’t deserve, but rather in finding a way to successfully cheat at Fantasy Football in a league that I commission, as my team is far too awesome to be defeated by normal human means. Well played, Cecil.
As always, I can’t close this thing out without thanking Heath for everything he does, which is a lot; I need to thank the lovely Lucinda for gracing us with her dulcet tones tonight, I need to thank Shane from Calgary for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote and while we’re at it, I want to thank all those filthy monkey men we evolved from. Way to naturally select.
But most of all I need to thank this week’s best people, Beth, Russell and Robert. Beth, whose resourcefulness, brilliance and cunning will be recognized by our would-be alien overlord a little too late; Russell who boasts both the strength to arm-wrestle lions and the compassion to occasionally let them win and Robert who has never demolished a building with his gargantuan and mighty penis, only because he’s never needed to.
These three brave, gracious and genetically superior examples of humanity have distinguished themselves this week by giving us money. Only the most discerning, respectable and attractive people have what it takes to give us money, but if you think you belong in the pantheon, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. And remember, we make a lot of jokes about it, but all kidding aside, giving us money really does cure cancer.
And if you want to help us out but not if it costs money, you can also help us out by leaving us a review on iTunes or telling a friend or 6 about the show. And if 30 minutes a week of blasphemy just isn’t enough, be sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on You-Tube and favorite us on Stitcher.
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.
Episode 23 – Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons
(Transcript may contain material edited out of the final version)
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Fox’s new reality talent show, American False Idol. Watch as cult-leader contestants from around the country compete against each other and against god in feats of talent and existence.
The last prophet standing wins their own religion and a lifelong tax exemption. American False Idol, because even when Fox puts the name of the sin in the title, Christians still watch it.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s July 25th and it’s not too late to wave some popcorn under a Muslim’s nose tomorrow afternoon.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from statistically more rational New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
In this week’s episode;
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Former celebrity Kirk Cameron is told by Facebook to cease and desist the fuck up,
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A new law in Louisiana won’t not make it not not legal to obey the law.
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And we’ll make fun of Fred Phelps’ dead mother,
But first, the diatribe.
Diatribe:
Boy, this new pope sure is awesome. He’s a reformer. He’s a radical. He’s a beacon of light illuminating the dimmest hour of Catholic decline. He’s beloved by all, Catholic and otherwise. He’s approachable, off-the-cuff and lovable. He’s the antithesis to Pope Palpatine the second. He’s a game-changer.
Except for all the places that matter.
The major-media outlets are suffering from a bit or “Protestant Guilt” after spending two decades covering stories about Catholics butt-raping children so I guess I understand why they’ve been so quick to cram into the papal-fellatio waiting room, but in their eagerness to finally have something good to say about the Vatican, I think they’ve forgotten that balanced doesn’t equal honest.
So let me make something clear about Pope Franks-but-no-Franks: He hasn’t done a fucking thing.
Despite the publicity juggernaut to the contrary, carrying your own bags and posing for a photo-op in a jalopy doesn’t count as reform. Living in a palatial guest house instead of a palatial palace doesn’t count as reform. Washing feet and ad libbing shit about atheists going to heaven doesn’t count as reform. To reform something, you have to actually do something.
Let’s face it, during the reign of Pope Bene-dickhead we had some pretty legitimate complaints about the papacy. And none of them were, “That old fucker won’t even carry his own luggage!”
So where does Pope Frankly-my-dear-I-don’t-give-a-damn stand on the big issues?
He’s against condoms. He fully endorses the genocidal opposition to contraception that exacerbates the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It would take nothing but waving his magic pope wand to halt these detrimental policies, and yet he’s done nothing.
He’s against ordaining women. Not only has he made no moves on that, but he also left a long line of politically motivated misogyny behind him on the way to the Vatican… not to mention a few allegations of war crimes.
He’s staunchly homophobic. He’s actually described the move in Argentina to legalize gay marriage as “a war against god” and shows no signs whatsoever that he’ll be moving the Vatican into the twenty-first century with regard to gays.
He staunchly supports celibacy for priests despite the fact that it isn’t biblical (and actually directly contradicts the biblical prescription for priests and their sex lives) and could give a damn less if it’s harmful psychologically.
Come meet the new pope, same as the old pope. In all the ways that matter, he hasn’t done a fucking thing. And yet everyday I hop onto a religious news site and read about all these great “symbolic” reforms he’s making. Symbolic actions are great unless they’re coming from somebody who has the authority to make real change.
But the media is so desperate to paint him as a reformer that I’ve seen him extolled for coming out “strongly against the financial misdealings of the Vatican bank.” Like there was some other pope who was all about publicly endorsing money laundering for the mafia?
Look, maybe the media is right and I’m wrong. Maybe Pope Franky-Doodle-Dandy really is planning on reforming the Vatican from the ground up. But he hasn’t started yet. And when you take over as the head of the most corrupt institution on the planet you don’t get any extra credit for dressing less flamboyantly than the last guy.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow expositor Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to exposit?
I’m all about exposition. Whenever I need extra cash, I make an exposit at the sperm bank. That’s what that means, right?
In the interest of getting the sperm jokes started early, we’ll say yes.
Sperm gags are all about coming early.
The Spanish Inquisition of sexual events.
In our lead story tonight the state of California is considering a bill that would help child abuse victims receive compensation if they were otherwise unable to file suit because of time or age restrictions. Obviously, this bill enjoys wide, bipartisan support because who on earth would actually oppose allowing victims of child sexual abuse to pursue long overdue justice?
Catholics.
That’s right. The Los Angeles archdiocese made the mistake of taking the high road on justice for sex abuse victims back in 2002 and the bill California passed back then almost wiped them out. So this time they’re fighting against justice for abused children with everything they’ve got.
So a whole bunch of those tax-deductible donations to churches, are going to pay for pedophile advocacy experts. There’s a positive social externality in there somewhere.
Yeah, one has to imagine the lobbyists are all hoping not to get the “maintain strict statutes of limitations on child rape” assignment.
They’re trying to argue that “A certain day needs to exist, on which these people wake up, and they’re no longer a rape victim.”
Usually it’s the other way around in Christianity … Fall asleep a virgin, and wake up a rape victim. That’s how it went for Jesus’s mom, and lots of slutty altar boys, I imagine.
The archdiocese recognizes the public relations tightrope one must walk when vociferously siding with pedophilic rapists, so they’re hard at work trying to sell this bill as a prejudicial witch-hunt against Catholics.
If the tightrope represents the right way to side with pedophilic rapists, then I wouldn’t say the church is walking it. I don’t think they can see the tightrope from where they’re standing. I’m not impressed by “The lord rapes kids in mysterious ways.”
Well, they point out that the bill would not allow victims to sue public schools for abuse that had passed the statute of limitations, so clearly they’re just going after Catholic child rapists. After all, allowing victims to sue for tax dollars is directly analogous to allowing them to sue a private institution that is still largely governed by people who were and are actively involved in covering up the details of child rape and torture, isn’t it?
I don’t think the public school system could have pulled the same moves to cover for pedophile teachers . . .
“What?!? We sent the rapiest ones to teach Nazi grandchildren in Argentina.”
Catholic Church fighting child abuse bill in California: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/catholic-church-private-schools-lobby-against-california-childhood-sex-abuse/
On now to the ever-burning question “Could we have freed the slaves but not kept the South?”, we turn to Louisiana where Democratic state senator Mary Landrieu has introduced a piece of legislation called the “Freedom to Pray” bill, which would, in her words, “protect American’s right to pray.”
Was that part of the larger, “Right to Being and Nothingness Bill”?
This might mean the end of the atheist psychic nanobot thought police.
And as we long ago learned, making legal shit legal is a favored strategy for sneaking bullshit religious laws through the legislature and this one is no different. If you dig even a little, you’ll find that the intent of the bill is clearly to allow state and federal funds to go to programs that are explicitly religious in nature.
Does the legislation explain exactly how The Bill of Rights no longer applies in Louisiana? And if the church needs more money, they should just pray for it, hold their breath, and die.
Amen. Anyway, this all comes as a response to a recent hullabaloo about a quasi-military religious indoctrination camp being run by a Louisiana Sheriff’s department. The program was denied $15,000 in federal funding due to the ubiquity of prayer within the program along with pledges to “attend the church of my faith” and to “Love god”.
Bible Camp for redneck cops makes me nervous. Like ‘venerated obsoivances and rituals’, ‘Waco, Texas’ nervous.
Well hopefully you’ll be reassured by the evangelists running the program, who insist that the prayers are voluntary and a whole room full of people praying around you isn’t coercive at all. And that’s enough for senator Landrieu, who would clearly have no problem with a state run, federally funded program encouraging her children to bow to Mecca, as long as it was voluntary.
In theory, this would create an awkward, alienating situation for any Jewish or Muslim officers. But Jews and Muslims certainly don’t get hired by police departments – or sold property – in Louisiana, so in practice, it’s a moot point.
Louisiana Senator proposes bill to protect religious groups that receive federal funding: https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/prayer-posturing-la-officials-seek-taxpayer-support-for-religious-program
And in satanic lesbian news tonight, Fred Phelps’ dead mother is now gay thanks to the efforts of the New York based Satanic Temple. Person whose name left him no career options except arch-villain or spokesman for the Satanic Temple Lucien Greaves explained that the action was meant to convey (quote) “a message of love in the face of hate”.
Like a money shot all over hate’s face. Chicken fried hate smothered in white country gravy. Phelps needs a Chia Pet, so people everywhere can put sticky seed all over his face.
6 sperm jokes already. He’s going for the record!
Anyway, the ceremony, which the Satanic Temple refers to as a “Pink Mass” was performed by Greaves and two same-sex couples and took place at the Mississippi grave of Phelps’ mother. The goal of the ritual was to turn the mother of the notoriously sodomy-obsessed preacher’s spirit into a posthumous lesbian.
This strategy makes sense, given the way shit works in the bible. This can even get her expelled from heaven. Jesus stops having pre-emptively died for your sins if you posthumously witness gay sex near your gravesite. Plus, that bitch natured and nurtured her bile duct of a son.
The ceremony was, of course, tongue in cheek, as in some dude’s tongue in some other dude’s cheek.
Jelly? Syrup? Rusty Trombone? What does a party like that cost? I guess if I have to ask, I probably can’t afford it.
Apparently the ritual called for two prolonged homosexual makeout session over the headstone along with some divine cock-stroking. Phelps’ mother, who died as the result of god’s retribution over our butt-sex loving culture, could not be reached for comment.
Satanic church holds same-sex ceremony at Fred Phelps’ mom’s grave: http://www.thegauntlet.com/article/28311/The-Satanic-Temple-Performs-Same-Sex-Ceremony-At-Westboro-Baptist-Church-Leaders-Family-Gravesite
And in “Apparently there’s a snooze button on your 15 minutes of fame” news tonight, Kirk Cameron, who you’ll remember from trying to remember where you remember him from, is in a tizzy because people can tell the difference between him being earnest and spam.
Who could forget about Mike Seaver and his best friend Boner? Classic member of the shitty 80’s sitcom canon. And let’s not ignore Cameron’s illustrious film career, including “The Growing Pains Movie” in 2000, and of course the Godfather 2 of sitcom movie sequels, “Growing Pains: Return of the Seavers” in 2004.
Cameron, who has used his post-C-list celebrity decline to promote creationism, has a new movie coming out and he’s been having a bit of trouble promoting it on social media. It began when Facebook blocked promos for his movie and called them “abusive”, “unsafe” and “spammy”.
It’s good to hear that Facebook is using algorithms that can sniff out abusive, unsafe, spammy shit like religion. Software that can process content, and then quantify its level of malignant wrongness – love it. Or maybe they just noticed Kirk Cameron’s name on it.
Facebook later apologized when almost dozens of Cameron’s fans made a fuss but just as Facebook unblocked him, YouTube gave him the boot calling promos for his film, “spam”, “scam” and “deceptive”. This block was later lifted as well, though promos for his film are still “spam”, “scam” and “deceptive”.
Spoiler alert: God did it. He was the rapist in the end.
Which end?
I was impressed by Cameron’s unflinching optimism when he boldly used the plural form of theater in describing the film’s upcoming release.
Further proof that you were never really a celebrity if people could say of your solitary known vehicle, “The star of that show was really Alan Thicke”
Kirk Cameron’s movie blocked on Facebook: http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/facebook-blocks-kirk-camerons-new-movie.html & http://www.examiner.com/article/facebook-apologizes-to-kirk-cameron-for-blocking-new-movie
And in this week’s papal back-walking report, the Vatican is offering time off from purgatory for his Twitter followers, unless you ask Catholic pundits, in which case they definitely aren’t, because that would be stupid.
And if you retweet a papal bull in the next 10 minutes, the Pope will personally murder you, and send you directly to the good part of heaven with the comfy chairs for all the rape victims.
The latest in an illustrious Catholic tradition of trading imaginary favors for real ones, this story reminds us all that Catholics still kind of endorse the antiquated notion that you can earn perdition vouchers for climbing certain stairs and attending certain parties in Rio.
Also, if you duck for 3 seconds while standing on a white platform, you can fall into a 3rd dimension, and get a whistle that takes you to a warp zone that bypasses purgatory altogether.
The story begins when the Apostolic Penitentiary issued a document offering a plenary indulgence for those who attend the upcoming World Youth Day in Brazil. And because the Apostolic Penitentiary is known for being cutting edge and hip, they extended the indulgence to those who follow the event on Twitter.
For those who don’t want to be kidnapped by a dance-fighting cocaine cartel, they decided to allow the Twitter exception to participate without actually entering Brazil. . . I’m okay with that. But why not just go all the way, and put up some indulgence buy-it-nows on eBay?
That sentence may very well have contained earth’s first capoeira joke. Well done.
Recognizing that everyone loves a good “Damn is Catholic theology stupid” story, headlines like “Follow Pope online and reach heaven sooner” started popping up all over the place. Because, you know, that’s exactly what they said. But the accuracy of these mocking headlines didn’t stop Catholics from getting pissed off about them.
When your group is regularly offended by things that are true, it’s your group’s fault, not truth’s.
Try explaining that to Reverend James Martin who wrote a lengthy blog for CNN where he explained that you can’t get time off from purgatory for following Tweets, as that would be silly. It doesn’t count unless you follow those Tweets contritely.
Pope offers indulgences for following him on Twitter: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/17/sorry-you-cant-get-out-of-hell-by-retweeting-the-pope/
And finally tonight, in lubricated jew dick news, we bring you the story of Trigg laboratories where a congregation of rabbis from the Rabbinical Council of California have recently declared their “Wet” brand of personal lubricants to be Kosher, making it the first sex lube that is approved for orthodox jews.
Unless you count the fact that “Moses parting the Red Sea” was code for using menstrual blood as a lubricant.
Check out the mid-rash on that one . . . is what they would say about an unkosher vagina.
It’s important to note the implications of this move. Kosher laws are dietary laws. There is no requirement that suppositories, cosmetics or vaginal cleansers be approved by rabbis unless somebody plans on eating them. So this sex lube hasn’t been cleared for use as a sex lube, it’s been cleared for use as a condiment.
Yeah I could see marinating a chicken in that . . . and then shoving it up a Jewish girl’s ass, if she was into that sort of thing. I mean I wouldn’t suggest it, but if she asked, I’d step up.
And this is great for the Jews . . . They can finally go ass to mouth without worrying about the dietary repercussions.
You never go ass to mouth!
Ass to mouth notwithstanding, this does open up a wide range of new orifice/object permutations for Jews.
Yeah, just what are the rules about sucking orthodox cocks?
In other words, is it okay for women to kneel before the wailing balls?
Can Hassi chicks suck Hassi dicks?
This new lube opens the door to some easier Schindler’s fisting.
Maybe now they can finally put a glory hole in the wailing wall.
Gives new meaning to “Torah new one”
I guess it’s just the latest in the ongoing rabbinical debate on whether or not it’s okay to suck a dick that isn’t eight days old and recently mutilated.
To be fair, when CAN YOU suck an eight day old dick, if not right after you mutilate it?
Also to be fair, whose recently mutilated dick CAN YOU suck, if not that an eight day old boy?
Kosher lube opens orthodox jews to oral sex? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/jul/17/kosher-lube-oral-sex-jews-lubricant
That does it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always for joining me.
You’re not gonna trim the end of those circumcision jokes off in post are you?
And unlike Jesus, we’ll be back soon.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. This is the time we set aside once a month to talk up some of the great atheist, secular and skeptical events going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start in Toledo, Ohio on the weekend of August 18th where the Great Lakes Atheist Convention is welcoming JT Eberhard, Zack Kopplin, Jerry DeWitt and many more, including the Mayor of Toledo, which I find encouraging. And let’s face it, if a speaker lineup can get me thinking “I wish I was in Toledo”, it’s gotta be pretty damn impressive.
http://lanyrd.com/2013/great-lakes-atheist-convention/
Moving 7 days ahead and 7 thousand kilometers away, we’ve got the 15th European Skeptics’ Congress in Stockholm, Sweden on the weekend of the 23rd. Even though parts of the website are in Swedish, the conference itself will be in English
The speakers list includes DJ Grothe, Max Maven and a bunch of Europeans I’ve never heard of that have really interesting topic lines for their talks.
We talked up the Atheist Alliance of America’s upcoming National Convention in Boston last week, but it seems like every time I look at their website they’ve added more awesome speakers. Aron-Ra, Ed Buckner, Seth Andrews, Steven Pinker, Greg Epstein, Sean Faircloth and the list keeps going.
That one’s taking place in Boston over Labor Day weekend.
Lastly, of course, over that same weekend in Atlanta you’ve got DragonCon, which isn’t an atheist or humanist convention, but it’s awesome and it has a hell of a skeptical track so definitely worth checking out if you’re going to be anywhere near Atlanta. Michael Shermer, David Silverman, Rebecca Watson, Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage.
If you want to know more you’ll find links to the homepages for all these events on the shownotes for this episode. And, of course, if you’re involved with or aware of an atheist or secular event that needs a plug, you’ll find all the contact info at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Top Ten:
Ah, Ramadan, the only holiday that could also be considered a war-crime. It’s that desultory time of year when Muslims gather together in misery so that they can be reminded that sometimes being a Muslim really sucks. Considered to be one of the five pillars of Islam, Muslims work hard to ensure that Ramadan will never be commercialized like Christmas by making it as miserable as possible.
But knowing that our listenership might not be as familiar with the Muslim customs as they are with the Christian ones, we decided to dedicate a few minutes to answering the top ten most often-asked questions about Ramadan.
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Number ten: How do you celebrate Ramadan?
You don’t. This isn’t the kind of holiday you celebrate exactly. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of celebrating. During Ramadan, all post-pubescent Muslims are required to observe a month long daylight fast. From sunrise to sunset, they aren’t allowed to eat, drink or smoke and are also expected to refrain from sex and foul language throughout. This is in addition, of course, to the lifelong Islamic prohibitions against alcohol, pork and critical thinking.
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Number nine: Does everyone have to fast during Ramadan?
Not everyone. Pregnant women, people who are ill, women who are breast feeding and people who are travelling are allowed to forego the fast as long as they make up the days later in divine detention.
…writing “I will not comprehend” on the chalkboard.
And while Muslims are quick to point out that little kids aren’t required to fast, because in most of the world that would be considered child-abuse, they are certainly encouraged to as practice for later in life.
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Number eight: Why?
Because the month of Ramadan is believed to be the month that Allah first revealed himself to Mohammed so Muslims mark the occasion by hating life.
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Number seven: When is Ramadan?
Easier asked than answered. Because Muslims use a lunar calendar, Ramadan moves around in the year. Each year it begins 11 days earlier than the year before, so sometimes they fast in the short days of the winter when you need food the most, and sometimes it falls in the summer when not drinking water is borderline suicidal in most of the Muslim world.
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Number six: What does the word “Ramadan” mean?
Yeah, even the word itself foretells of the general shittiness of this custom. It comes from the Arabic word ‘Ramida’ or ‘ar-radam’, and while there is no direct English translation, the gist of the word is “Heat and scorching dryness”.
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Number five: Why the hell would anyone do this?
Because religion makes people do dumb shit. Muslims justify it by pointing out that it helps them focus on the spirit rather than worldly things, as though ignoring reality in favor of imagination was a virtue. They also claim that it helps them master self-control without recognizing the irony that by doing it they’ve explicitly surrendered control of themselves to a fictitious autocrat.
But most of all, they say it helps them empathize with the less fortunate
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Number four: Well what about the sex part? Are they also trying to empathize with ugly fuckers?
Yeah, they never really address the fact that even people who are starving and thirsty are still allowed to jerk off.
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Number three: Is fasting like that unhealthy?
No… how could foregoing all the life giving sustenance for absurd amounts of time possibly harm you? And what’s more, how could believing that failing in this Herculean task would offend god himself damage a 14 year old psychologically?
Of fucking course it’s unhealthy.
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Which leads us to the Number two most often asked question about Ramadan: Seriously?
You bet your ass seriously. And we’re talking about Mulsim seriously. They’ve got levels of seriously we can scarcely comprehend. In fact, it’s even encoded in the laws of many Muslim countries.
The ones that have laws, that is.
Right, like Kuwait, where publicly eating, drinking or smoking during the day carries a heavy fine during Ramadan. Or the UAE, where it’s punishable by hundreds of hours of community service and in Algeria daylight mastication during Ramadan can land you in jail for years.
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And finally, the number one question asked about Ramadan…
How the hell do they get away with calling this a holiday?
It’s only a holiday in the technical sense of being an annual observance. In all other ways, it’s a punishment for being religious. The only real “holiday” part comes at the end of the month with a celebration called Eid al-Fitr, which means “festivity of breaking the fast”. It’s a day when Muslims reflect on the fact that if you hit your testicles with a hammer over and over again for long enough, the act of not hitting yourself in the testicles with a hammer seems like a reward.
Bible Story:
Gather ‘round boys and girls. Today we’re going to open our Bibles to Exodus and read about Moses’ wife, Zipporah.
Now Zipporah was a very important person in the bible. She was so important that we know her name, even though she was a woman.
She grew up in a desert with her six sisters and spent all day doing whatever her father told her to do or getting beaten because that’s what women do in the bible. One day her and her sisters took their sheep to a well so that they could drink, but a bunch of mean men told them to go away so that they could water their sheep first.
Zipporah was sad and angry, but there was nothing she could do because she didn’t have a penis. But luckily, there was somebody around who did: Moses.
Moses was sitting by the well wondering if the corpse of the man he’d recently murdered was starting to stink yet when the bad shepherds shooed Zipporah and her sisters away. Moses decided to step in and help Zipporah water her sheep.
“How can I ever repay you?” she asked.
“A hand job?” Moses suggested.
So she invited him back to her tent so she could tug on his cock for a while, but when they got there her dad was home so she married him instead.
(Hooray!)
Moses loved Zipporah so much that he didn’t marry any other women even though he could have because that was okay back then. He took a job tending her father’s flocks, but one day he came home and told her that God had spoken to him and ordered him to free all the Jews in Egypt.
His eyes were red and he wreaked of burning bush, but Zipporah was a woman so she had no choice but to do what her husband said. So she grabbed their newborn son and left for decades of aimless wandering and random smitings.
But one night, on the way to Egypt, god decided to come to earth in human form and wrestle Moses to death at an inn. God was winning because he was god, so Zipporah decided she would have to help her husband out. But she couldn’t out-wrestle god, so what could she do?
Luckily, there was a baby weiner nearby, so she chopped a little piece of it off and touched it to Moses’ foot so that he could wrestle better. Then Moses suplexed god and everyone lived happily ever after. The end.
Outro:
Before we call it quits for the night, I have a very important apology to make to one of the most adept, admirable, altruistic, adroit, awesome, amazing, accommodating, astonishing, astounding, awe-inspiring anthropoids in the animal kingdom, April. April, I am so sorry that I neglected to thank you last week for your generous donation. Because of the extreme level of your magnificence, I had originally thanked you separately from the rest of last week’s best people, and then in a hasty, late night edit I cut it out without realizing it.
And to those of you who aren’t April, I should note that April told me she and her husband were competing to see who could get more mentions on the podcast through their extraordinary generosity and because of my mistake, April spent a week unjustly occupying the lower portion of the leaderboard in that noble competition. So to make up for that, I’d like to point out to April’s husband that I’ve now mentioned her 6 times in the last 33 seconds.
And in keeping with the “A” themed opening to this outro, I’d also like to thank two more prime examples of human DNA in action whose names also begin with A. Andrew, whose transcontinental philanthropy serves as a shining example of godless morality and another person who would rather remain anonymous but is also a biological exemplification of wit, wisdom and selfless magnanimity.
And while we’re on the topic of apologies to people whose names start with A, I’d also like to apologize to Ann who sent us a very eloquent and well-reasoned email a few weeks ago that deserves an on-air answer. And unfortunately I don’t have time to give it the response it deserves so for the time being I’ll simply say sorry about not making more pimp jokes. We’ll work on that.
That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight, but if you want more, there’s more. Tom and Cecil over at Cognitive Dissonance invited me on to chat with them and while it’s not available yet because it hasn’t actually even happened yet, I have reason to believe that you’ll find our conversation on episode 109 of their program, which I have reason to believe will be out on Monday.
And if you can’t make it until Monday, you can find occasional nuggets of Scatheism on our erratically published blog, our Twitter feed @Noah (underscore) Lugeons or our Facebook page at (slash) Scathing Atheist. And people who leave us 5 star reviews on iTunes are better than people that don’t. I also have it on good authority that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will give them mansions closer to the beer volcanos in the afterlife so Pascal’s Wager guys, might as well leave us a 5 star review.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information 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.
Episode 22: Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Deuteromino’s Pizza. Try some of our angelic wings, our cheese’s crust, or a delicious salad with all the cruci-fixins. Every pie is sliced by Christ, just for you.
Deuteromino’s: Delivering you from evil in 30 generations or less.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s July 18th and during Ramadan, Muslims are like Mogwais in reverse.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from sweltering New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
In this week’s episode;
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We’ll learn that Deuteronomy is really repetitive,
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We’ll learn that Deuteronomy is really repetitive,
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And we’ll have to turn off the window unit while we record
But first, the Diatribe…
Diatribe:
This past Saturday, Heath and I were invited to emcee a roast for a mutual friend that was moving out of town.
We were delighted to do it, but the guy we were roasting is exactly the kind of guy you hate to roast: He has no flaws. He’s in good shape, he’s good looking, he’s confident, he’s talented, he’s intelligent and he seems to have a new woman on his arm every weekend. Not exactly the cornucopia of personal defects that you hope for in a roast victim. So most of us were forced to make jokes about the number of different women he’d slept with in the time we knew him.
Now, it’s a roast and in a roast the guest of honor isn’t the only one that gets ripped on. Everybody rips on everybody and that’s the fun of it. We make fat jokes about the fat guy, we make bald jokes about the bald guy, we make timid jokes about the black guy. And I’m the atheist guy so they make atheist jokes about me.
It’s a roast. I’m a good sport about this stuff so I smile and I laugh along. Hell, I started making jokes about god early on so I wasn’t about to take anything said about me or my beliefs personally. But there was one brief exchange in the roast that I thought was worth reflecting on.
Before we get to the exchange, I need to play a clip to set it up. It’s a skit I wrote that revolved around a mock-scrapbook of memorabilia that I was leafing through:
(First Sound Clip)
A little later, the dude that we all knew was gonna bomb was up. It was an awkward four minutes of him trying to figure out why he’d volunteered for this and as he wrapped up, he closed by turning to me and making corrections regarding two things I’d said that evening:
(Second Sound Clip)
Like I said, it’s a roast. I definitely didn’t take his little “believe in god” aside personally. Earlier in the night one guy did a mock dialogue where I tried to explain the intellectual justification for my atheism to Saint Peter (which was actually fucking hilarious) and another guy thanked me for providing an example of atheism that would lead so many people to Christ. It’s a roast. That’s the point.
And if the only time a Christian had ever said to me “You should try believing in god” was during a roast, I wouldn’t have bothered to reflect on it at all. But I think we’ve all heard this or the equivalent of this plenty of times before. You say “I’m an atheist” and somebody just stares at you wide-eyed and jaw agape and offers an incredulous, “Really!?”
It’s hard to imagine this kind of reaction to other groups. It’s hard to imagine a person saying, “Have you tried not being a Jew?” or, “Muslim, huh? How the fuck did that happen?” or “Did you become a Christian because Buddha disappointed you?” but in at least most of this country, when you meet an atheist it’s socially acceptable to throw holy water at them and yell “The power of Christ compels you!”
In the interest of fairness, there are also plenty of places in this country where you’d get the same blank-faced stare if you said you were Christian. Places like institutions of higher learning, science labs and the East Village. And in the parts of this country where I grew up you could earn such a stare for any answer to the faith question other than “Baptist”, so we’re not the only ones who face this kind of shit.
That being said, I think it’s fair to say that through most of America, atheist is the only religious choice that people feel no social qualms about trying to talk you out of. And I think it says a lot about religious people that they’re more comfortable with you having a religion that is irreconcilable with their own than they are with you having no religion at all.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is a man who needs an introduction, Heath Enwright. Heath, you’ve been introduced. Say something to all the listeners.
I’d like to apologize for a Sarah Palin joke last week that mentioned her son Trig, who happens to have Down’s Syndrome. He’s actually a lot brighter than you might think. He’s only 5 years old, and he’s already reading as many newspapers as his mother.
All of them?
In our lead story tonight, it turns out that despite rumors to the contrary, atheists are normal humans. And apparently a lot of people were waiting for some hard data before they were willing to make this call.
Well, not quite normal. Apparently we do have a normal ‘personality distribution’ . . .
But our atheist group has statistically better IQ test-taking ability, or IQ.
We’re also – by definition – better at ontology, and that’s really the crux of the whole argument, isn’t it?
Yes, but the study was not without its flaws. It sloppily categorized nonbelievers into 6 groups and the divisions prejudiced the fuck out of their conclusions. Some of the categories made sense; they separate out “Seeker Agnostic” and “Non-Theist”, which they define as a person who is completely apathetic to religion. But after that shit gets pretty wonky.
Like Gene-Wilder-as-Willy Wonky . . .
The whole study seems like a confused attempt at examining a superior race of aliens.
Were they hoping to use atheist stem cells to help cure faith cancer? Like real faith healing?
Not sure where they were going, but I don’t think they got there. Here are three separate categories of non-believer, according to University of Tennessee researchers: “The kind of atheist that reads books and learns stuff”, “the kind of atheist who is an activist” and “The kind of atheist who thinks religion is harmful to society”. They actually treat those three characteristics as though they were mutually exclusive.
Doesn’t it seem like the study was conceived by the characters from Lord of the Flies?
One of the kids says “Hey I think I should explain what a Venn Diagram is.”
“Put that nerd’s head on a stick!!!”
Right, and because they ignored Piggy,they were able to make some insanely stupid statements like “activist atheists are the least narcissistic” and “anti-theists are the most angry and dogmatic”, without bothering to point out that since these two qualities almost always co-exist in a single human, they’re using shit like dogmatism and narcissism to define the fucking categories in the first place.
These guys love them some Juicy Juice logic.
“But it says what I’m saying on the tele-prompter, and in the fictional book about which we’re arguing.”
In all, I suppose I have to be happy that they’re not treating “thinks god is bullshit” as an abhorrent monolith.
Study shows that nonbelievers are as diverse in personality as any other group: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/02/atheism-study-authors-congratulations-non-believers-youre-just-like-everybody-else/
And in a transparent attempt to force Heath and I to make testicle jokes tonight, Ball State made waves this week by hiring one Guillermo Gonzalez as a new professor of astronomy despite his 2004 authorship of a book that pretends that intelligent design is valid science.
When he gets fired for lying on his resume about being a scientist, the headline will surely read: “Ball Sacks Nutty Professor”
Heath Enwright, king of the ball joke.
Apparently “The Privileged Planet” was bad enough to prompt 120 faculty members at Iowa State to sign a petition renouncing it when it was rumored he would be working there. Gonzalez claims this was a political move and that a single blogger who isn’t even an astronomer was responsible for it. So yeah, not only does he believe god made shingles on purpose, but he also believes that one blogger can be responsible for a petition of 120 people.
And why would the blogger (or anyone else) need to be an astronomer to know that intelligent design is complete nonsense?
Is he suggesting we should go check with the astronomy community, and they’ll back him up on the intelligent design thing?!?
What’s worse, this news comes on the heels of another non-testicular reason to make fun of Ball State. There’s also an ongoing investigation into Ball State assistant professor of physics Eric Hedin who is accused of essentially teaching a Creationism class in the science department.
Shouldn’t teaching wrong things – in any class anywhere – be considered a bad thing?
Also, gotta squeeze more testicle headline jokes in here while we can . . .
It’d be a slap in the face not to. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit.
Facing Hairy Situation, Ball Trims Staff.
More of a sticky situation.
There’s a new wrinkle everywhere you look.
Now Ball clearly has two dicks.
Feeling His Taint, Ball Gives Hedin Shaft.
What can I say, you’re the king.
Ball State hires creationist professor: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/09/ball-state-comes-under-scrutiny-for-hiring-professor-who-wrote-book-on/
And in this week’s child-fucking report, the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child has posed a list of tough questions to the Vatican in preparation for the stern talking to they’ll be giving them next January over the systematic child rape, child torture and consequent global cover up that has come to define the papacy in recent years.
Define is a strong word . . .
But “Rape Scandal Blues” is definitely track 1 side 1 of the Vatican’s greatest hits.
I like the older stuff, but they seem to prefer the younger stuff, and that’s illegal.
As insubstantial as a voluntary meeting with a group that has no enforcement powers may seem, this will actually represent the first time that any international panel has had the chance to publicly question the Holy See about the scandal.
“Did you guys rape those kids?”
“No, no, no, . . . a bit . . . we did do the nose . . .” — “Many of them had headaches!”
The Vatican, for its part, is quick to ensure the UN that they are doing everything necessary to keep pedophiles away from kids, they’ve weeded out the bad seeds, they’ve definitely stopped running slave-laundries in Ireland and they can totally prove it. But they can also totally pull out of the treaty on the Rights of the Child, so they’re gonna definitely do one or the other.
Too bad they didn’t pull out of those kids assholes when asked nicely the first time.
I think I understand part of the confusion though.
In the Bible, know means begat, but in the real world, No means No.
So these weren’t rapes as much as homo-phone issues. Just a little case of consent getting lost in translation.
UN probes Vatican child abuse scandal: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/10/uk-vatican-abuse-un-idUKBRE9690LK20130710
And in “How the fuck are we even discussing this?” news, the Senate may soon consider a revision to FEMA policy that would allow untaxed houses of worship to collect federal disaster relief money.
FEMA doesn’t have time for this.
They’re just barely started with fishing te black people out of New Orleans harbor.
Also, I thought those houses of worship were designed more intelligently, to withstand even the most catastrophic acts of intelligent design.
Under current law, federal disaster relief can only be used to rebuild and repair homes, businesses and infrastructure. And since churches aren’t necessary, should be insured and can go fuck themselves, they’re left to fend for themselves with hopes that the combination of not being taxed and selling a product that doesn’t exist for money that does will be enough to keep them through hard times.
Yeah what’s the overhead on selling indulgences? Not getting a good enough markup on those lies? They manage to get people to pay today for an impossible hamburger they won’t get until after they die on Tuesday. How fucking dumb do you have to be?!
But thanks to the bi-partisan pandering of Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Democratic bitch that I actually voted for Kirsten Gillibrand, all of that could change. Both our tax dollars and our potential future disaster relief might be diverted to characters from Jew-sop’s fables.
How are churches going to learn to compete in the free market economy?
You know the competitive marketplace loved so dearly by the political party they hijacked?
But don’t worry, the bill does stipulate that the federal money could only be used to cover the costs of the building itself, the doors, the windows, the building envelope, physical plant support spaces, electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, sprinkler systems and related site improvements. So apparently they’re not allowed to use federal money to buy bibles or pay off sex abuse victims but everything else would be okay.
Didn’t think this would need mentioning or repeating, but money is fungible. The $10,000 FEMA check stolen from secular taxpayers, is very similar in value to 10,000 different dollars.
By the same token, giving the church 40,000 taxpayer quarters, or 100,000 taxpayer dimes would also clearly violate the First Amendment.
Senate may lift House of Worship ban on FEMA: http://www.christianpost.com/news/us-senate-may-take-up-bill-to-lift-fema-ban-on-aid-to-churches-100094/
And finally tonight, we bring you the story of the this month’s greatest sleight against god. Montage of crazy YouTube preachers, would you care to guess what it was?
(Soundclip)
No, I’m sorry, while I’m sure that all those things pissed him off, he also got snubbed from a Sam Adams commercial this month.
Snubbing God in your beer commercial . . . Always a good decision.
This might be the best God snubbing decision since Roe v. Wade.
The ad in question uses a brief appended quote from the Declaration of Independence, with the spokesman saying that people were (quote) “endowed with certain unalienable rights” while conspicuously leaving out the part about those certain unalienable rights coming from a magical man-fairy.
You said “coming from a magical man-fairy” . . .
Sounds like a Joseph on Joseph version of the immaculate conception.
Those type of conceptions do tend to be immaculate.
Imagine how much better the world would be if abortion had been legal when God went all Roethlisberger on Mary?
Yeah, even the conservatives tend to make exceptions in the case of incest and rape and that was both.
Was that God’s first time too, by the way? Did God lose his virginity during a magical rape when he was over 1000 years old?
And proving once more that there is no rung of pettiness under which religious people can’t limbo, the Sam Adams facebook page was bombarded by Christian jizz-rinsers demanding that the company love and fear the lord, our god, and threatening to boycott the brand if they don’t issue an apology to Jesus.
The beer is named after Sam Adams so why didn’t they just use the founding father’s actual, documented opinions on religion?
Tell me this wouldn’t move some brew: “Sam Adams’ Beer; because Catholicism ‘leads directly to the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed’. Please drink responsibly.”
Idiots pissed about beer commercial not paying homage to god: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/07/samuel-adams-defends-ad-omitting-god-reference/
Poem:
“Deuteronomy in Rhyme”
by Noah Lugeons
Deuteronomy’s on to me, I’ve got say, honestly;
I’m not paying the bible the attention I wanna be.
It’s long and it’s dull and it’s so full of bull,
that the stress of the process is hurting my skull.
I’m plodding through and I’m human; I’ve got shit to do, man.
I can’t study each verse like a Hassidic Jew can,
So I skim and I skip, and I flip through and scan,
I glance at the footnotes here and there when I can.
But I’ll admit I hit bits I don’t get and I’m split,
Should I study it further or not give a shit?
After all, we’re not scholars and I got no white collar;
I’d trade biblical knowledge for Liberian dollars.
Besides, most verses are worthless like the begats and the curses,
That god intersperses with no discernable purpose.
What’s worse is the verses they don’t read in the churches
I’m not sure why they skip ‘em, though, it be a hell of a service.
But I digress. And I guess what I mean to express,
Is that no one who reads this thing knows what it says.
How could you? Why would you? It’d do you no good, you’d
be mem’rizing words that no one understood. True,
I guess there’s a few who have nothing to do,
that obsess over passages and pretend that they’re true.
But what about the incredulous rest of us who stopped listening at Exodus
We’re bored and it’s nebulous and among the effects of this,
Are low comprehension and even lower retention
So in hopes of prevention and to hold your attention.
Moses proposes verboseness, he know us;
He rightly supposes we’ll be losing our focus.
So Deuteronomy’s a colloquy that repeats all the policies,
God laid down earlier about sex and idolatry,
A dishonest anthology that restates the chronology,
And explains the pathology of Jewish theology.
So the gist, if you missed it, is that when god gets pissed
It’ll likely consist of him swinging his fist.
He insists he exists and if his laws are dismissed,
You’ll be reaping his vengeance and he offers a list:
And it goes like this…
He’ll curse your cities and your countries and your basket and your bowl,
He’ll curse your womb and curse your vineyard and your cattle and your soul.
He’ll cause your enemies to rise before you, sword in bloody hand,
He’ll curse you coming, curse you going, drive you screaming from your land.
The lord will send to you disaster, and frustrate your every whim,
He’ll cover you in leprosy from limb to fucking limb.
He’ll inflict you with consumption, inflammation, heat and drought,
He’ll turn the ground below to iron so no sustenance can sprout.
Your corpse will be a meal for every creature on the earth,
And your wife will eat your children and her bloody afterbirth.
The lord will give you boils, ulcers, scurvy and the itch,
You’ll be abused and robbed and helpless and your home will be a ditch.
Begrudging food to your own brother and to the wife that you embrace,
You’ll be a pariah to your people and he’ll remove you from his grace.
You’ll starve and want for water and screw up everything you touch.
Because the lord is wonderful and he loves you very much.
The Holy Babble:
Ah, Deuteronomy, the rewrite notes of the Pentateuch. It’s repetitive, immoral, disgusting and verbose, but beyond that, it manages to simultaneously shock and bore you in a way the other books could only dream of. So joining me to discuss this chore of a book is my lovely wife Lucinda. Lucinda, welcome to the show.
And of course, triangling out this trifecta is Heath Enwright who you’ll remember from 3 and a half minutes ago. Heath, welcome back, it’s been a lonely few minutes.
So where does Deuteronomy rank so far in terms of boring?
You get Moses telling us what god told him that he already told us that we already read. So pretty fucking boring.
It was like reading about somebody being bored by the book they’re reading.
Yeah, the word Deuteronomy literally means “second law”. It consists of three speeches that Moses gives before he dies and almost no new information comes out. Sure, there’s an odd testicle-grabbing rule here and a revision to meat slaughtering custom there, but basically he’s just repeating shit. It’s like getting to the first big battle scene in Braveheart and then listening to Mel Gibson deliver the “They’ll never take our freedom” speech over and over again for an hour and a half.
Except it comes off less like William Wallace, and more like Woody Allen complaining. It seems like they got Ridley Scott to direct Genesis and Exodus, but by the time they get around to producing Deuteronomy, they’re stuck hiring his suicidal brother.
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We spend the first three chapter listening to Moses brag about his greatest hits. It basically recaps the bloodiest highlights of Exodus through Numbers.
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Then we spend chapter 4 rehashing all the crap that just happened in the first three. We rehash the rehash.
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And reinforce the message that only god is god, god damn it.
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And since we’re clearly dealing with Moses’ farewell concert here, you knew he was gonna do “The Ten Commandments”, and he gives us the long version with the full blown sax solo and everything.
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“Play Exodus: 20!” “No – Play Exodus: 34!”
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And of course the asshole musician has to do it all new and different, so nobody really likes it. “It’s called Deuteronomy: 5 now, man! No more of that tired Exodus crap!” Wouldn’t want to play it like it sounds on the fucking album that brought everyone to the concert in the first place.
-
–
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Then in chapter 7 God spells out the importance of a good, thorough genocide.
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If you’re a Jew, you gotta be worried about running into some sort of genocidal backlash one day. Although their strategy of concentrating themselves all in a safe place like Israel seems to be working.
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–
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By chapter 9 Moses has completed his transformation to Chris Farley; “You remember that time when I went up on that mountain and talked to god for a month? That was awesome.”
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More rehashing, but an interesting phrase in my translation at 10:16 “Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer.” So let’s hope the biblical literalists never make it this far…
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We don’t want those dicks or hearts getting hard, now do we?
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–
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By chapter 12, Moses’ Alzheimer’s has turned into full blown dementia. Now he’s telling the Jews they can eat meat in the same way you would eat gazelle or deer, which are, of course, vegetables.
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And we’re reminded that you can only be Jewish with the help of union rabbis at the union temple.
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Then we learn that if you should ever have tangible evidence that god is bullshit, it’s just god testing you.
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Oh, and kill the person with the evidence.
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–
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–
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–
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We rehash the rules about diet then slavery, then holidays, then judges. I swear this fucking book reads like a filibuster.
-
Reads like a James Joyce filibuster
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Reads like a Dan Dennett analysis of a James Joyce filibuster.
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-
Give your shit to the priests when they tell you to, kill sorcerers and if anything in this book later proves to be untrue, we know it isn’t the word of god. Because it says so.
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Moses repeats himself some more and throws out the “eye for an eye” line.
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And then in 20, Moses spells out the rules of engagement:
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Before making war with a city, at least offer to enslave all the citizens.
-
-
So you start by offering them a Billy Martin. “Listen, we’re willing to overlook the whole thing where you stole our land while we spent 40 years over there in the woods . . . Just submit to slavery, we takes the women you have on you, and we calls it even.”
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Yeah, we’re awesome slaveowners. Tell you what, I poke out your eye, I’ll let you go. Promise.
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Be sure to kill all the men.
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Steal the women, children, livestock and riches.
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Unless the women and children are Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites or Jebusites. In that case, kill them, too.
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And whatever you do, don’t cut down the fruit trees like a barbarian.
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In chapter 21 we get CSI: Promised Land. If you find a dead body in the street, just break a cow’s neck, wash your hands over it… you know, the usual stuff.
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Also, marrying captive women is okay if they’re bald and naked.
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-
Slave harem etiquette is important. We’re not savages.
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And if you’re into government sponsored murder, don’t hang the victim on a pole for more than a day. In the sequel, we’ll get into using 2 poles to form a T-shape that’s useful for public murder of Jew-traitors.
-
Then we get the chapter where Glenn Beck gets his morality from:
-
Here we finally learn that god hates trannies, though we were suspecting it the whole time.
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-
“Bitches shalt not steal my boxers and favorite T-shirts after sex, and then wear them home.”
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We learn the etiquette of when you can and can’t stone someone to death for having a vagina.
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Oh I missed something – when can’t you do that?
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The Sabbath?
-
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And don’t forget to bleed profusely when your husband fucks you.
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We learn that if a woman is raped in town she gets killed along with her rapist, but if she’s raped in the country, she gets to just be a rape victim.
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Being female, in a town, and out of earshot – that’s basically asking for it.
-
And again with the fucking tassels…
-
Chapter 23 starts with the words, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the lord.”
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More on nocturnal emissions
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God actually gives proper instructions for taking a shit.
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No shit, cum, or atheists allowed in a foxhole.
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There’s a chapter that’s almost moral…
-
And then we’re back to crazy, random shit. This is the chapter where we get gems like:
-
If your brother dies you have to fuck his wife and if you refuse, she gets one of your sandals and she spits in your face.
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If a woman grabs a guy’s nut-sack when he’s fighting her husband, you should cut off her hand.
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Kill every Amalekite on the fucking planet.
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–
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–
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–
-
This book is a sign that says “Read this sign”. I swear, half the book is spent saying “obey this book or I’ll fuck your skull”.
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And I think it’s worth mentioning that In three chapters of curses, there’s no mention of an afterlife, no mention of postmortem retribution, no concept of heaven or hell.
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Now, follow me on this one. This book tells the story of the writing of this book. And then in chapter 31 it starts talking about shit that happened once the book that I’m reading was done being written. So the Deuteronomy explains the aftermath of the writing of Deuteronomy… and the death of it’s author, but that’s later.
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Even back then they had to know that they weren’t gonna get away with having Moses say the exact same fucking things he’s repeated half a dozen times again.
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Yeah, so in chapter 32 he sings them! He actually sings about how skull-raped you’ll be if you piss god off.
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-
And apparently the Israelites were holding up their lighters, so he breaks into another song in chapter 33. One for each tribe for fuck’s sake.
-
By now it’s clear that God said, “Go say your last words and then I’m gonna kill you, Moe” and Moses is obviously just milking it at this point.
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And then Moses dies on a mountain and according to the book it’s a pretty spectacular death, but you know how it is when people tell you about their own deaths; they always exaggerate.
It was frustrating to learn that we could have just skipped from Genesis to Deuteronomy and not missed anything but Moses’ origin story and some Tabernacle details.
In all honesty, though, I’m actually kind of looking forward to Joshua now… it’s like I’m done jerking off but I’m still watching for the money shot. You know, like, I don’t care about anything that’s going on in the story, but I’ve made it so far I want to see these bitchy jews inherit the holy land already.
Or at the very least, see some jizz on somebody’s face, so I can get up and wipe my hands on the cat already.
Seems like exactly the right note to close on, so Heath, Lucinda, thanks again for joining me.
We’re gonna take a few weeks off of this book, but the Holy Babble will be back in three weeks to wrap up the Pentateuch in an hour long “5 down, 61 to go” special.
Outro:
Before we shut down the oven for the night, I wanted to take a minute to thank this week’s most unabashedly, flagrantly, shamelessly awesome humans, Rob, Richard, Andrew and Ann, who affirmed their high-minded beneficence this week by giving us money. In addition to providing all the stuff that makes this show possible, giving us money has been clinically tested to improve lung function or something. Seriously, because advertisers now say shit has been “clinically tested” for stuff and hope you hear “clinically proven”.
Remember, if you’d like to be slathered in praise by someone who knows nothing about your discriminating taste if podcast financing, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
I also need to throw a big thanks and a big shout out to President of the Atheist Alliance of America, Chuck Vonderahe for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. It’s a great organization, they do great work and they also have a great convention coming up next month in Boston.
The Atheist Alliance of America’s 2013 National Convention is stacked. Host of the Thinking Atheist Seth Andrews will Emcee and the speaker list includes Dr. Steven Pinker, Ed Buckner, Aron Ra and the keynote speaker Paula Apsell, Senior Executive Producer of NOVA. They’ve got early-bird pricing still going so check out the link on our shownotes for the complete list of speakers and events and do it with great haste.
Oh yeah, and follow us on FaceTube and subscribe to us Twicher Plus and don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you found us in the first place.
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.



Episode 28: Partial Transcript
by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons
(Note: Transcript contains some elements deleted from the final episode due to time constraints)
Sponsor
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of designer chainmail armor for children, Josh Kosh B’Gosh. So when there’s an army of genocidal jews circling silently at the city gates, make sure your children are dressed in the coolest new sword-proof, fire-proof, hailstone-proof, machine washable armor.
Josh Kosh B’Gosh, because god hates you and you’re going to die.
And now, the Scathing Atheist
Intro
It’s Thursday, it’s August 29th, and atheists do it with larger, evolutionarily superior genitalia.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons, and from well-hung New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode:
The Pope raises eyebrows with his “Don’t tell, don’t tell” policy on sex abuse,
A high school in Indonesia will consider a new virgin-fingering policy,
And Lucinda will join us to talk divine land reapportionment,
But first, the Diatribe
Diatribe
If you ever want to feel really old, take somebody who’s diaper you once changed and watch them change their kid’s diaper.
My wife had the opportunity to do just that last week when she flew down to Georgia to meet her niece’s brand new baby girl. She doesn’t get to see her family often so our six year old nephew spent most of the week clinging to her leg in one manner or another.
So one night she’s hanging out with him and he’s looking for excuses to not go to bed. He’s got a bunch of planets on his walls so he starts asking her “which planet is that?”, “which one is that?” Before long she’s got her laptop fired up and she’s showing him Cassini pictures and Voyager images and closeups of coronal mass ejections and he’s eating it up. She shows him the Hubble Deep Field image and his eyes just linger in unchecked amazement when she tells him that every point of light he sees is another galaxy with billions or even trillions of stars.
It takes him a second to even think how to respond. And when he does, the question he chooses is heartbreaking.
“How many miles is it to heaven?”
If I had been there I might have accidentally ruined the next six Thanksgivings by saying something like “Heaven is from religion. These pictures are from reality.” But Lucinda is a bit more diplomatic than me so she answered it as well as it could be answered:
“We’ve seen billions of light years away from earth but we haven’t seen heaven.”
That’s a pretty good answer, I guess, if the goal is not alienating your family. But it’s still a sad damn shame that she had to settle for that. And it’s a damn shame that at the age of six this kid’s natural curiosity is already being stifled by a ridiculously antiquated view of the universe. Even at six he’s encountering things that can’t be made to fit into the biblical worldview. He has to work harder to get to the right answer because he has to weave his way through bullshit to get there.
But the world is already pretty damn hard to wrap your head around at six. It’s a lot harder when you’ve got to reconcile the Adam and Eve myth with the existence of dinosaurs… and recessive genes; when you’ve got to develop a grand unified theory of history that’s two parts history and one part Jewish revenge porn; when you have to stop in the middle of an astronomy lesson to figure out where heaven is.
Think back to your own childhood and you can probably come up with a memory where you were trying to pound the square peg of religion into the round hole of reality. Christians love to defend their little fairy tales by telling us they’re allegories. But when they pull that shit, ask them if they make that clear to their children. If they don’t start out the story by saying “Here’s a fairy tale about Jesus” when they’re telling it to their kids then it’s only an allegory when you get too smart to believe it’s true. And that doesn’t fucking count.
The saddest thing is that this kid’s mother isn’t even particularly religious; she doesn’t go to church, I’ve never seen her pray and she’s certainly read less of the bible in her lifetime than I’ve read this week, but still she’s religious enough to hamstring her son’s education. It’s not deliberate, of course; she just believes that religion is good for her kid because people with every reason to lie say so.
Don’t get me wrong; there are plenty of more reprehensible forms of child abuse that take place in the name of religion. Even if you set aside the sexual and physical abuse that religion is used to justify you still have the wide spectrum of psychological abuses from tormenting kids with images of hell to confusing the shit out of them with prehistoric notions of sexual morality. But there’s something about taking a steaming shit on a child’s curiosity that really pisses me off.
Headlines
Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow tenable stance junky Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to discuss several more ways religion was stupid and indefensible in the news this week?
When you live and die for a math textbook that says two plus two is five, you manage to get all sorts of other wrong answers too. Sometimes your Big Brother is dumb, and shitty at math.
Yeah, all that 1 equals 3 shit was a dead give away.
In our lead story tonight, the Vatican has finally taken a decisive move to ensure a radical decrease in allegations of sex crimes against the clergy: they made reporting those crimes illegal.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just give all the priests vasectomies? . . .
Cut off the DNA evidence problem at the source.
Or just ban the word “No” in the Vatican so there’s never technically a consent issue . . .
Or like I’ve said before, Catholics could just stop having children . . .
But to be fair, those altar boys are asking for it, the way they wear those robes.
…all clingy and shit. So there were already plenty of rumors swirling when word came down that Pope Frankie Valli was “bringing the Vatican legal system up to date” by criminalizing leaks of official information at the same time that he was formalizing the laws about sex crimes. Turns out one law ensures that allegations of sex crimes are confidential and the other makes it illegal to disperse confidential information.
There’s no such thing as a private allegation. That doesn’t exists. That’s just a person thinking to themself, “I’m kinda mad about getting raped.”
Vatican foreign minister Monsignor Dominique Mamberti actually had the audacity to pretend that they were all really disheartened when they learned that they accidentally made it illegal to report sex abuse. He said, and before reading the quote I think I should emphasize that this is actually a real quote (quote) “It’s quite a papal pickle that His Holiness has placed upon our heads.”
It’s time for “Tip of the Mitre, Wag of the Pickle.”
Wasn’t it placing pickles in people’s heads that started this whole problem?
Head scratching behavior, probably because of all the crabs.
Look, if I wanted somebody to find that sausage, I wouldn’t have hidden it in the first place!
When in Rome . . . don’t be surprised to get an unsolicited Roman helmet.
And for those listeners who aren’t familiar with this terminology, when I say Roman Helmet, I’m suggesting the Pope would straddle you backwards and rest his balls over your eyes, and the shaft over your nose, thus resembling a Roman helmet.
They’re actually acting like this was an accident. First of all, the pope’s infallible so you’re fucked right there. But secondly what kind of bullshit 4-year-old-with-a-cookie defense is that? “Whoops! Did we just insulated ourselves against prosecution and international embarrassment? Shucks, I suppose we could undo it with the wave of a crosier, but we’re not. Our bad.”
Pope criminalizes the reporting of sex crimes: http://www.newslo.com/pope-criminalizes-the-reporting-of-sex-crimes/
And from the “Unconsciously regulate your endocrine levels if you saw that coming” file tonight, a recent measles outbreak in Texas has been traced back to an anti-vaccination mega-church.
Pastor, faith-healer and sentient excrement Kenneth Copeland of the Eagle Mountain International Church in North Texas is a vocal proponent of the thoroughly debunked, discredited, disproven, disparaged and disgraced notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism, a theory so indefensible it might as well be biblical.
First of all, there’s absolutely nothing INTERNATIONAL about North Texas. Absurd title for the church, or anything else in that region.
So the church finally decided to base an opinion on a scientific study, and the doctor whose study they went with was Andrew FUCKING Wakefield?!? Dr. Dre and Dr. Mario have more respect in the medical community.
When the inevitable outbreak of fully preventable childhood disease struck, the church sent out a rapid fire series of excuses ranging from “The CDC is secretly infecting people with measles to discredit us” to “measles aren’t that bad, now are they?”
“What had happened is . . . We sent out a pamphlet with the measles-preventing prayer, but there was a typo on one of the important magic words, so everyone was saying it wrong. Plus there was a shortage of unicorn hair this year, so lot’s of people never even got their wands.”
And as much as I’d love to say that anybody who gets measles after taking medical advice from a used-snakeoil salesman deserved it, the problem with the anti-vax crowd is that the victims are the communities that surround these idiots, not to mention their own children.
Someone needs to sneak into these people’s bedrooms and inject HIV into their stupid, deserving mouths.
I hear you can pray that out just like measles.
Measles outbreak at anti-vaccination church: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/08/theres_a_measles_outbreak_at_v.php
And in “Criminal Possession of Reason” news tonight, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that California atheist Barry Hazle Jr. is owed some compensatory damages after being sent to jail for not believing in god. And yes, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.
Dude’s name has too many syllables to become an atheist protest mantra.
“FREE BARRY HAZLE JUNIOR!!! FREE BARRY HAZLE JUNIOR!!!” … Doesn’t work.
No it doesn’t. So this unchantable assailant served a brief jail term for a minor drug offense and, upon release he’s ordered to participate in an addiction recovery program. Of course, it’s one of those 12 step “put your faith in a higher power” programs. Hazle, to his credit, actually attended the programs, but he requested a secular alternative. The court told him to fuck off.
Yeah, god forbid you sober up through empirically tested means. No, seriously, god forbids that.
Can’t kick the habit without bad metaphysics.
And judging from the estimates of AA’s success rate, you can’t kick the habit with ‘em either. So anyway, after staff at the 12 step program reported that he was being disruptive in (quote) “a congenial way”, he was taken out of the program and sentenced to a further 100 days in jail. In addition he was denied access to Go and the customary two hundred dollars.
Being disruptive in “a congenial way” ? . . . He was probably telling really good jokes, and even the staff started laughing when they shouldn’t. Listen, if you send an atheist stoner to an NA meeting, he’s gonna make sarcastic comments. It’s impossible not to. Rehab for minor drug offenses … and God, are ridiculous notions. If we don’t mock you there, we could actually burst into flame.
Anything’s possible. So of course he sued the state and of course he won, but he was awarded zero dollars in damages by a jury of his peers because apparently his peers are a bunch of Christian, blowhard assholes. The judge threw out the non-award and set about empaneling a new jury with fewer weasle turds on it.
That’s how the awards process works? Isn’t that … stupid? Why not award him NEGATIVE TEN THOUSAND dollars?
Atheist parolee sent back to prison for complaining about the religiosity of Narc Anon: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/23/appeals-court-calif-atheist-parolee-entitled-to-compensation-for-constitutional/
And from the “They Meant Freedom of My Religion” file, some Christians in Kansas are going apeshit over a religious display in a school. But not because it’s a religious display in a school. That’s okay. The problem here is that they used the wrong religion.
The display in question was a banner with five images of pillars that read “The Five Pillars of Islam” and that sounds pretty damning when you don’t know the details.
And Christians are all about not knowing the details. But out of context, you’ve gotta admit, vertical pillar-like shapes are pretty offensive. Those five pillars could be used to perform two and half crucifictions. Kids are supposed to just ignore that fact?!?
The story began when somebody snapped a picture of the banner and posted it on Facebook with the caption “this is a school that has banned all forms of Christian prayer. This cannot stand”. And with the penchant for fact checking that we’ve come to expect from angry, meme-spreading Christians, this shit went as viral as Miley’s vagina.
She had to eventually get herpes. Anyone sired by a grown man with 2 first names and a rat tail….
I can’t imagine how herpes could survive in that thing.
Quick 2 point reality check: Number one, this school, along with all other schools in the fucking country, doesn’t “ban all forms of Christian prayer”, they just ban the ones where kids are forced to go along. And number two, acknowledging that religion exists in a school isn’t against the law. It’s the part where you start pushing it on kids as though it was true that we have laws against.
You might have lost their attention between the word reality and the word check. These are people who are offended by visual reminders of “things that exist”.
Christians go apeshit over Islam display in a local school: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/wp/2013/08/22/kansas-school-surrenders-to-ignorance-removes-islam-display/
And finally tonight in “I guess you can’t just Saran Wrap your vagina, can you?” news, a school in Sumatra has proposed a virginity test for all their female students.
What a great job . . . virginity tester . . .
“Did she pass?” “Nope.” “Wait anal? . . . Hold on . . . Another minute . . . Also no.”
“What about her?” “Nope. Next!”
They pretty much never pass – I’m a tough grader.
Education chief Muhammad Rasyid proposed the idea that he describes as (quote) “an accurate way to protect children from prostitution and free sex.”
Wait… prostitution and free sex? If there’s one thing we don’t want, it’s paid sex. And if there’s another thing we don’t want, it’s unpaid sex?
Can’t prove your virginity without taking a cock . . . Can’t take a cock without losing your virginity. Seems like a regular “Snatch 22”.
So setting aside for a second the fact that there’s no actual way to test a woman for virginity, how fucked up does your brain have to be to think that the best way to protect women from prostitution is denying an education the sexually active teenage ones?
Indonesian school proposes virginity test: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/21/virginity-tests-female-students-indonesia
Well that’s gonna do it for headlines tonight. Heath thanks as always.
And when we come back, we’ll recount a biblical massacre or thirty one.
Joshua, in Rhyme
Joshua, Oh Joshua, that genocidal idol,
The baddest motherfucker that we’ve met yet in the bible.
He’s like a biblical Batman, if Batman killed babies.
Imagine if you gave Wolverine adamantium rabies.
This badass says “chop off your foreskin” and people actually do.
He’s like a Jedi in that his story isn’t factually true,
Like Superman he’s invincible and he wins every battle;
But unlike the man of steel, he kills the women and cattle.
He’s like the Hulk but with Thor’s hammer and a magical ark.
The sun needs his permission before it’s allowed to get dark;
Like a bronze age Jackie-Chan, he even kicks ass with dumb shit,
Like his notorious chorus of nuclear trumpets.
He’s the Bible’s Bruce Lee but with triple the skill;
He never met an innocent bystander that he didn’t kill.
With a swipe of his sword he could knock the wings off a gnat;
He could take out all four ninja turtles and that mutated rat.
As you learn about this guys, it’s not hard to conclude;
That Chuck Norris impregnated the Dos Equis dude.
He’s admirable and loveable and strong and heroic,
As long as you haven’t updated your morals since the paleozoic.
Joshua, Oh Joshua, Moses finally died,
So you could have the position that so long you had eyed.
You served bravely as Vice Jew but the time’s come alas,
After too many decades of kissing god’s ass,
To take the baton and lead this army of Jews,
After all, there are Canaanites in need of abuse.
You served god well by scouting and then not being honest;
So you’ll lead the Hebrews to the land that god promised.
Your ambitions are grand, your intentions extortionate;
So with your god-given powers of land reapportionment;
You’ll be crossing a river but you won’t need a float;
When God’s done with that shit, you’d have to carry your boat.
Where to go? Jericho. I hear they’ve got hookers.
You promised not to kill Rahab and she’s quite a looker.
You might as well since you’re killing all the gentile chicks,
And there’s no way those Jewish princesses are sucking your dick.
Joshua, Oh Joshua, how your legend ascends,
The way you massacre, exterminate and ethnically cleanse,
You’re the bravest, the strongest and usually the smartest,
Except when dealing with Gibeons… those fucking con-artists.
Hanging kings, burning villages, your army sets forth,
From Achan to Ai then continuing north.
Killing children to show what a shit you don’t give;
But showing occasional mercy by letting animals live.
With the slightest of setbacks, your conquest succeeds,
Ensuring that millions will boast of your deeds.
You’re a legend, a lion, a genuine stud;
They took your milk and your honey and you took their blood.
Babble
Ah, Joshua, the redundant geography lesson of the Old Testament. Half exaltation of genocide, half property auction listing, this book has all the intrigue of GPS directions, all the civility of YouTube comments and all the morality of a Nuremberg indictment.
So to help me sort through the fallen bodies, I’m joined by my lovely wife Lucinda. Lucinda, welcome back.
And of course, not having actually gone anywhere since we recorded the headlines segment is Heath. Heath, thanks for not having left while you had the chance.
So basically the book of Joshua describes the glorious war crimes that Joshua committed in order to fulfill god’s belated promises of land.
Yeah because it’s not like god could just divinely create more land for the Jews that wasn’t full of people they’d need to kill. What, did he run out of milk and honey or something?
Look, I already made you guys a promised land. It’s right there. Milk, honey, vineyards, the whole nine… you just need to fumigate.
And fumigate they do. So let’s just dive in, shall we?
Upon Moses’ death, God passes the torch to Joshua, which is kind of like Lord Vader putting you in command of the fleet.
God says “You are invincible. Nobody can defeat you. But don’t forget to be brave”… how brave can an invincible person really be?
Good headline here: “Son of Nun Supports the Habit”
In chapter 2 Joshua sends a couple of spies across the Jordan. They were just about to start scouting the land when they decided to fuck some whores instead.
Joshua says to his spies, “Go check out Jericho.”
“Dude that’s perfect, that whorehouse is right on the way … In N Out Fur Burger. We’re clearly stopping. Jericho should be a pushover.”
Then the King of Jericho finds out Joshua sent spies … “Get that slut Rahab on the phone and tell her to be on the lookout for penises that are horribly mangled by primitive foreskin removal.”
Little did the king know, the crafty tribe had conveniently forgot about that rule for a few decades. More on that later.
Apparently everyone in Jericho keeps up with TV news, or saw “The Ten Commandments”, and they thought the Red Sea thing was badass, so they’re scared of the Jews and their apparent ties to a god with cool powers.
In chapter 3 Joshua feels like he has to prove himself to be truly Mosaic so he parts the Jordan. Couldn’t come up with his own magic trick or anything. Just totally ripped off Moses.
And it’s a dick move when it’s a river. When you part a river for that long, while an entire tribe and their army carries their shit across, you kill a town upstream by flooding them.
Oregon trail would have been easier if you could be a Jewish prophet, in addition to Boston banker, Ohio carpenter, or Illinois farmer. Never have to risk caulking the wagon or trying to ford the river.
We learn about the 12 magic Joshua stones… and is it me or does this thing occasionally read like a tourist guide? All this “And they are there to this day” crap… it’s almost like the people writing this didn’t realize somebody would still be reading it 3000 years later.
And wouldn’t that be the easiest way to fuck up the whole “biblical inerrancy” thing? I mean, somebody plunks one of those rocks back into the river and the bible is suddenly full of shit.
And now stupid people have another reason to selectively misinterpret mystical powers related to the number 12.
So the entire army crosses the Jordan into hostile territory and ten seconds after god fills the river back in he says, “Oh you know what… why don’t you guys do some cosmetic penis surgery before going to war?”
And this has the feeling of a later addition. Like somebody was reading through Joshua version 1 and said, “Yeah but when did these guys chop their foreskins off? We better add that. Don’t wanna glaze over the important stuff.”
“I’m getting a lot of pleasure sensations from my upper penis area. Does anyone have a flint knife?”
And then of course this chapter of the saga can’t end until god sends a messenger to tell Josh to take off his filthy fucking birkenstocks when he enters a promised land.
Then they do the divine conga line think with the trumpets. For a week there’s a ring of Jews walking silently around town and all the people behind the walls are thinking, “This is the worst parade ever, but they seem friendly, at least.” And then the trumpet blows, the walls come crashing down and they kill everybody but the whore and her family.
And man do they. Chapter 6, verse 21: Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of their sword all in the city; both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys. Even the talking ones.
So on to chapter 7 which reeks of revisionism. After god says “go kick ass, you are invincible”, they lose the second fight they get into. So Joshua is all “Hey bro, what happened to the invincible before my enemies thing?” And god’s all “Uh-uh-uh, somebody took some silver and hid it from me so all bets are off.”
So they go and find the dude who did it. He confesses. So they mercifully set him and his family on fire and stone their burning bodies to death. And that kind of shit makes god really happy.
“I said you could rape, but only the Levites can pillage and plunder. I specifically said raping only. But the free non-consensual pussy wasn’t good enough, was it?!? You’re in GOD’s fucking army! Act accordingly! There a line! And it’s somewhere between rape and stealing silver.” Rape’s on the RIGHT side!!!! Stealing the silver was the problem!!!
Then they go back to the town that had just kicked their asses because god was on their side again. But interesting that they also sent 10 times as many men this time and worked out an elaborate ambush.
And kill all the men, women and children. But you can tell god is in a way better mood, because this time he lets the livestock live.
The residents of Gibeon heard about the approaching wave of genocide so they tricked Joshua into sparing them and just making them slaves by pretending to be from a far off country.
Yeah, they were damn tricky. They’re showing them moldy bread and saying “look, this was a fresh loaf when we left! How could we possibly have moldy bread if we weren’t foreigners?”
I love that Joshua asks them “Why did you trick me?” You were going to kill them, you asshole. Why the fuck wouldn’t they trick you?
It’s the “Two For Flinching, Rodney King” conundrum. When you swing a night stick, and then yell “STOP RESISTING ARREST!” when they hold up their hand to block it . . .
Chapter 10 probably contains the most ass-kicking of any chapter in the bible. This is where Joshua pretty much wipes out the whole country. Hell, god starts hurling stones at the opposing armies at one point and when they try to flee Joshua orders god to not let the sun set so they can pursue them better.
I love the way they keep bragging about how thorough the genocide was. It’s like bragging to your friend’s wife about how hot his mistress is.
These guys wipe out innocent civilians better than a double-tap drone strike. “Collateral Damage” is Joshua’s middle name … Joshua “Collateral Damage” . . . Jew … Nunson!!!
Then Joshua’s army kills more people. Then they go back to the army-less towns, kill all the women and children, steal all the valuables and, on occasion, burn the city to the ground.
Chapter 12 is basically a scorecard that compares Moses and Joshua when it comes to the murdering of monarchs. As it turns out, Joshua won by a long shot.
For the record, if you present the information from a table with two columns, and the entry is the same for an entire column . . . you don’t need a fucking table!!! And if you write it all out – which makes even less sense – you don’t have to repeat the number “one” over and over.
And then this book abruptly stops being remotely interesting. Just when think you’re settling into a book full of merciless bloodshed we make a hard right into the minutes of a bronze age community re-zoning board.
“Ok we murdered all the people. I believe you PROMISED us some LAND. It’s not like we weren’t CHOSEN over here.”
–
–
For four chapters we get poorly formed GPS directions and a few stories of slightly less thorough slaughters.
Plus some incest.
–
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As you’re reading this shit you can’t help but wonder how this book ever led to a land dispute.
They set up the cities of refuge, which are these lovely little towns full of unavenged murderers.
If stupid shit in your holy book leads to a whole bunch of accidental murders, so much so that entire manslaughter cities were necessary . . . you might want to scrap the draft.
–
On the way home from the war, the Reubenites and the Gadites build a statue to commemorate their part in the genocidal mission from god, and that’s like talking about Fight Club. Smite Club. So all the Israelites decide it’s a reasonable time to go to war with them over it.
Luckily they all sit down and talk and agree that they all still believe in the same magical sky man or all hell might have broken loose.
And then Josh is all old and crotchety and he gathers everybody together to send a very clear message: Just cause god’s been giving you a lot of cool stuff doesn’t mean he won’t still fuck your shit up.
And then Joshua reminds them one more time not to piss god off and he dies. And they bury him. And apparently they’d been carrying Joseph’s bones around this whole time and they bury those, too.
And the very last verse in the whole thing is about Eleazer dying. This is some super-minor, forgotten character and the whole things ends with “and Eleazer, son of Aaron? He’s dead too.”
Now I have to admit that this book gave us some much needed closure. It managed to tie the whole first six books together and make you feel like you’d just been reading one long story for a minute, so I was actually impressed by it from a literary perspective.
Not so much from a moral perspective.
No, it was probably the least moral thing we’ve come across yet and that’s saying something after Leviticus and Numbers.
And Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy.
True. Well, we’ll be in biblical detox for a couple weeks but we’ll be tackling Judges in about three weeks so you have plenty of time to get caught up if you hate yourself.
Lucinda, Heath, thanks for joining me…
Outro
Before we count down the registers tonight, I wanted to give a quick shout out to all the participants in the Fantasy Football League of Sinister Secularists. It’s a league that Carl from Post Rapture Looting and I cooked up made up entirely of secular podcasters and bloggers.
So to Carl, Thomas from Thomas and the Bible, Cecil from Cognitive Dissonance, Mark from Be Secular (dot) org, Bill and his son Sean from Bar Room Atheists, Evan from The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, Jessye from wherever the heck Carl found her and of course, Heath from 84 seconds ago, I want to say good luck on the week’s when you’re not playing me and may you be humble in your inevitable defeat.
If you have even a passing interest in which podcaster and/or blogger reigns supreme, I’ll be keeping everybody posted on the blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. And if you have no interest in that whatsoever, I’ll also be putting other stuff on the blog as well.
I need to thank Lucinda for lending us her wit, her insight and her angelic voice tonight, I need to thank Heath as always, but even more than usual this time for staying up til the crack of dawn after his birthday party to work on the headlines segment. I also need to thank Michael Dunlap from mikedunlapphotography.com for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. You’ll find a link to his website on the shownotes for this episode.
But most of all tonight we need to extend our deepest gratitude to this week’s most irreplaceable corporeal forms; Pekka, Sherrill, Thomas, Steve, David, other Steve, Matt and Alden. Pekka, Sherrill and Thomas, whose lightning quick fists seem sluggish compared to their wit; Steve, David and other Steve whose boundless generosity seems slight compared to their intellects; and Matt and Alden, whose humility is in constant conflict with their behemoth genitals.
These eight brave and valiant exemplars of godlessness have cemented their legends this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the cunning, gallantry and expendable income required to give us money, but if you think you’re worthy to stand beside such virtuous individuals as Pekka, Sherrill, Thomas, Steve, David, other Steve, Matt and Alden, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
And if you want to help but donating money is against your irreligion, you can also help us out by giving us a sterling review on iTunes or whatever you use. You can also inflate our sense of self-worth by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter and subscribing to our YouTube channel and our aforementioned blog.
That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight but if you want more, there’s more. Steve at the “A Matter of Doubt” podcast invited me on for a chat the other day. No definitive word on when that episode will be up, but as soon as I know I’ll be sharing it on all those social media sites you were planning on liking, following and subscribing to us on.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact Page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.