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But I Was Just Debating Evolution!
by Noah Lugeons
I have to admit that on some levels, I like trolls. I appreciate the effort it takes to engage in one losing effort after the next, hoping to chip away at an armor you know you can’t penetrate. It takes endurance and dedication to push your way into a room full of people aligned against you and then antagonize them ceaselessly, knowing the whole time that you’re ultimately going to lose the fight and probably get banned or blocked or whatever. I also like the way they maintain bridges and come up with clever riddles.
But what I don’t like is when they try to paint a veneer of intellectualism over their self-congratulatory, masturbatory hobby obsession. At least have the courage to admit that what you’re engaged in is impotent antagonism. Hell, my entire show is dedicated to the proposition of impotent antagonism and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But you’ll never hear me pretending that my show is an ‘intellectual’ endeavor. It’s a string of frustrated, powerless, antagonistic ramblings that may or may not make you laugh depending on the depravity of your sense of humor. There’s nothing intellectual about that.
Unfortunately, too few trolls are willing to be that honest with themselves. They like to pretend that their mom’s basement is a fortress; a lone citadel in fallen empire and that they are the final guardian of truth that shall persevere against the hordes of minds too broken to agree with what they themselves simply know to be true. Take as an example some sub-dermal infection that showed up here yesterday to point out what a bunch of homophobes atheists are.
In response to my post yesterday about whether or not atheists are “angry at god”, he left a seemingly innocuous comment asking what, precisely, atheists were so angry about.
I thought I’d made it clear in the post, but I’d also made it clear how bad theists are at understanding what “I don’t believe in your fairy tale” actually means, so I distilled the essence of the argument to a single sentence for him/her:
The implications of a group asserting social jurisdiction on the perceived authority of an imaginary being.
And while I already suspected something rotten under the bridge, it was not until then that the inquisitor revealed their troll-like nature. The response was to link to a blogpost so stupid it forces spontaneous neuronal suicide. I won’t be linking to it here (that jackass already has one undeserved link on my blog), but I can distill the point that this fucktard was trying to make in a quick syllogism:
- When I argue with atheists, sometimes they get upset and call me names.
- Sometimes these names include anti-gay slurs and implications that I love the cock.
- Ergo, all atheists are homophobes.
It may seem like a strange assertion to say that atheists, a group that is all but universally in favor of gay rights against an opposition that is all but universally religious in origin are somehow “anti-gay”. But don’t worry, this human-shaped pile of nut-butter wouldn’t make such an allegation without rock-solid evidence. Why, he/she presented several cherry-picked, out-of-context, unverifiable comments from a blog. Talk about incontrovertible! As we all know, if a person says something in the comments section of a website, clearly their statement is indicative of the larger feelings of whatever group you have chosen to associate them with.
So I politely pointed out that trolling is a dangerous game and that when you engage in it, you should know that at any point, you might get accused of taking it up the ass. And then this monkey-spunk-gargling scrotum wart offers a defense so stupid I had to blog about it:
I wasn’t trolling, I was debating evolution.
Oh, well in that case…
Look, if you want my intellectual sympathy, don’t start off by admitting that you were engaged in something that is almost criminally stupid. If you start the story with something like, “So I’m debating the theory of gravity…”, “So I’m trying to convince this guy that the moon really is made of green cheese…”, “So I’m arguing with this idiot who thinks water is somehow wet…” or, “I was debating evolution…” you’ve already revealed yourself to be a horribly misguided, intentionally ignorant promoter of wanton stupidity. And you think somehow that will shield you from the accusation of being a troll?
You can pretend that you’re “debating” evolution if you want to, but you’re lying and nobody believes the lie but you. The science is in, the data is conclusive, the proof is in the pudding: evolution is true. There is nothing to ‘debate’. Sure, there’s still plenty to learn and there is a healthy scholarly debate about the mechanisms and specifics of evolution, but if you’re trying to pretend that there’s an intellectually defensible way to debate the very fact that evolution happened, is happening and is responsible for the biodiversity we see on earth, you are not engaged in “debating”, it’s “denying”.
Oh… and trolling.
Are Atheists Angry at God?
by Noah Lugeons
There are plenty of stereotypes about atheists that piss me off, but among my least favorite is this notion that atheists were driven to disbelief by their “anger at god”. Screenwriters and religious bigots would love for you to believe that atheists became atheists because god wasn’t there for them in their time of need. They’d love for you to believe that atheism is the byproduct of trauma that we’re all still working through.
But on this subject and many others, Carlin said it best. I became an atheist right around the age of reason. The same can be said of most atheists. Some of us have great stories about our deconversion, but most of us can’t pinpoint a single time or date or significant precursor. We just slowly came to realize that religion was bullshit.
That’s not to say that nobody becomes an atheist after a traumatic event. I’m sure there are plenty of stories of devoutly religious people abandoning their faith after personal tragedies, but to be fair there are also plenty of stories of nominally religious or non-religious people embracing faith after similar events. Either way, these anecdotes are in the minority. Most atheists are atheists because they correctly employ logic.
But if you cut the sentence short and put the question mark two words sooner, the answer is very different, and I think that’s why theists have such an easy time believing the cliche. Atheists are angry. We’re not angry at god, we’re angry at religion, but I can see how it’s difficult for a theist to draw a distinction there. It has to be hard to step completely outside the religious worldview, but if they did, I think they could see fairly easily why pretending to speak for god would piss off people who don’t believe in god.
I don’t know that this is an understanding that some theists can reach, but I offer the Venn-diagram anyway. It’s not as much for them as it is for all the other atheists that are sick and fucking tired of pretentious religious fuck-munches who, upon hearing that they are atheists, respond with a condescendingly ostentatious display of pity and the words, “what happened?”
No Longer New or No Longer Noteworthy?
by Noah Lugeons
I apologize in advance for what promises to be a self-pitying, egocentric kind of blogpost. If that’s not your flavor of Gatorade, feel free to skip this one and return tomorrow when I’ll get back to being a caustic, anti-theistic personified rage comic. But today I’m kind of in the dumps and what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to bitch when you’re in the dumps?
I’ve joked that I’m a “new daddy” when it comes to my podcast. I’ve only been doing it a couple of months now and it’s still so novel to me that I feel like I have to sneak into its room at night and check to see if it’s still breathing. That’s hardly an exaggeration. If I get up to pee in the middle of the night, I’ll often log on really quick and see how my overnight downloads are going. Every time the podcast reaches a new milestone, I feel like a proud father.
So you can imagine how depressed and horrified I was when I checked the crib two nights ago to find that my baby was sick.
In the podcasting world, everything starts and ends with iTunes. Sure, Stitcher is out there and there are more and more alternatives for podcast listeners, but iTunes is still the first, second and third name in podcast aggregating. It’s where the overwhelming majority of podcast listeners go to get their favorite shows and, more importantly, where people go to find new ones. And luckily for us new podcasters, iTunes is set up to give everyone a chance to get noticed. It’s as close to a true meritocracy as I’ve encountered. When I uploaded my first episode, I obviously couldn’t compete with the people who have been doing it for years, so iTunes helped me find an audience by promoting my show in the “New & Noteworthy” section.
It was really something. The podcast went from getting a dozen downloads a day on a good day to getting over a hundred. We moved onto New & Noteworthy in both the Religious and Science categories so anyone who clicked on either of those options was going to see the Scathing Atheist logo right there at the top left of the screen, right where your eyes go first.
We were up there for a total of seven weeks and during that time the downloads continued to grow. By the time I released episode 5 we were garnering nearly 500 downloads a day. We shot up the ranks of religious podcasts and in our subcategory (other) we even took the number one spot a few times. All 5 episodes were showing up in the top 100 most downloaded episodes in our subcategory and the numbers just kept on growing. And even though I know that I shouldn’t, I started counting the shit out of those chickens. I started extrapolating from the growth we were seeing and I made predictions about when we would cross 10,000 total downloads and 100,000 and even a million.
And then the fairy tale ended. iTunes demoted us.
I guess in a sense I could consider it a promotion. We moved off of page 1 of the “New & Noteworthy” section and on to page 4 of the “What’s Hot” section. As much as this seems like a step forward, the actual result is that our podcast is no longer prominently displayed anywhere on iTunes. If you happen across it, it will be because you’re scrolling deep into the “What’s Hot” list on the “other” section of the “religious” section. In other words, the odds that you’re going to happen upon it have dropped to near zero. And it shows in the numbers. Our downloads over the last 2 days have been cut by more than half… and my baby is crying.
I suppose that on some level my arrogance blinded me to just how significant that endorsement from iTunes really was. I guess that I thought we were just so incredibly awesome that we were fast-tracked to outpace all of NPR’s shows combined. I stroked my ego and told it that it was simply the high quality of the program and the soothing mellifluence of my voice that was garnering all these downloads. The kids on the streets were shouting about it, deviants were plastering the underside of bridges with coded graffiti messages, businessmen were talking about it in hushed tones around the water-cooler, socialites were gabbing about it, learned men and women were analyzing it, Hollywood writers were listening to it with jealous reverence, the entire podcasting community was abuzz about it and they all recognized that soon it would grow to eclipse even the most established shows on iTunes.
But no, it was just the “New & Noteworthy” thing.
That’s not to say that we haven’t made some serious gains. During our brief stint of promotion we did pick up more than a thousand subscribers, more than 9000 total downloads and enough buzz that we should be able to continue to grow an audience even when pitted against far more experienced podcasters with far more established shows. That being said, there’s something painfully sisyphean about watching that fucking stone roll all the way down from 498 downloads one day to 147 the next.
Clearly, if I didn’t care enough about the show to be depressed about this, I don’t think I’d care enough to produce something worthy of our fine listeners. I know that we can continue to grow our audience even without that advantage. I know that by crossing that threshold into the “What’s Hot” category, iTunes is pushing us out of the nest a bit and that should be seen as a vote of confidence rather than an abandonment. It certainly wasn’t fair to all these shows that have been producing high quality content for years that I was able to rise above them in the ranks on the merit of having a really prominent position on the page. I recognize that it’s fair and it’s just and it’s part of the process of growing our show.
And I also recognize that there’s nothing to be gained by looking at all the shows that are still on the “New & Noteworthy” section and pointing out that fully eighty-fucking-percent of them are older than our show, some of them by more than a year. I know there’s nothing to be gained from checking every hour or two just to see if iTunes rethought their algorithm based solely on my depression. I know that there’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that a show with only 5 episodes can’t really compete on the “What’s Hot” section against shows with 100+. I know there’s nothing to be gained from writing meandering, self-indulgent blogposts about how we should really still be New & Noteworthy and our baby bird isn’t quite ready to fly just yet, but I’m gonna do all that shit anyway. After all, I’m a new daddy and that’s what new daddies do.
Obviously, if you want to help, you can help. After all, when iTunes closes a door, Stitcher opens a window so there’s still hope. If you listen to the show and you dig it, I need your help to spread the word. We can’t count on iTunes to do all the work for us anymore. I know ours isn’t exactly a show everyone can just share on Facebook, but if you have a friend that is an anti-theist or a completely areligious person who enjoys caustic humor, let them know that we kick ass. If you haven’t left a review on iTunes, please take a few minutes to do so. And if you haven’t listened to us on Stitcher, give that a try to. It’s a great way to get your podcasts and they have a New & Noteworthy section we haven’t cracked just yet.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a navel to gaze at.
Why Do You Believe?
by Noah Lugeons
One of my least favorite questions is, “Why are you an atheist?” and it’s nearly identical but more frequent form, “Why don’t you believe in God?”
It’s very tempting to answer “Because he doesn’t exist” and depending on my mood and the identity of the inquisitor, that’s often exactly how I answer. When somebody accosts me at a subway station to hand me some silly pamphlet I’ll usually say, “No thanks, I’m an atheist.” And if they pursue it any further, I’ll give them the short, testy answer.
But that’s not always appropriate. Like everyone else out there, I have a lot of friends, coworkers, family members and acquaintances that are religious and when they ask me why I’m an atheist, it’s usually out of a genuine curiosity and I feel like they deserve more than, “Because there is no Tooth Fairy.”
That is the honest answer, of course. I can dress it up in the language of politic and say, “Because there is no convincing evidence of the existence of a higher power, nor is there any logical reason to assume one exists in an absence of evidence”, but that doesn’t do much to soften the blow. The fact is, there is no way (that I’m aware of) to explain it without insulting the believer. What I’m saying, regardless of what words I choose, is, “I’m an atheist because I’m better at thinking than you.”
I honestly believe that this is why atheists have earned the stereotype of intellectual arrogance. The reason that one is an atheist is because one properly applied logic to the question of religion. Atheists are atheists because they thought correctly. Now how the hell does one explain that to a person who thought incorrectly without sounding pretentious?
The problem, as we all know, is that the question is facing the wrong way. It’s not for me to explain why I believe the negative proposition. We both claim A-Y, you just add Z. If you’re the one adding something, you’re the one with the burden of proof. But Google-forbid you flip the question on its head and ask them why they believe in God. You’ll get a laundry list of nonsense that goes on for an hour. You’ll hear about their personal relationship with Jesus and you’ll hear about the value of faith and tradition and the meaning that religion gives their lives and you’ll want to take a trowel to your eardrums by the time it’s all over.
So how does one tackle this question without coming off as scornful? More importantly, how does one tackle this question with any persuasive power?
The truth is that I have no idea. Tact is not one of my strong suits (you may have noticed) and usually I respond with something like, “So how ’bout them Yankees, huh?” But if somebody is insistent and I can’t avoid delving into it, I usually find something that we can both disagree with. I’ll ask them if they believe in Bigfoot or Alien abductions or Atlantis or Astrology or the giant diamond in Sam Harris’s backyard until I find something that we can both agree is bullshit. Then I’ll ask them why they don’t believe in it and let them make the argument against god for me.
And then, of course, I’ll play devil’s advocate by trying to convince them with all the arguments that are typically offered for religion; “But hunting sasquatches gives meaning to so many people’s lives”, “But how can you discount all those anecdotal accounts?”, “What about people who feel Bigfoot’s presence?”, “What about all the written accounts of Bigfoot over the many decades?”
Granted, I suppose I come off every bit as arrogant and scornful in this tactic, but it redirects the question and at the same time, it deflates all the worst arguments they can offer. When I then say, “So why do you believe in god?” they have to at least filter their answers through the “would-this-convince-me-there’s-a-bigfoot?” filter. Even things like “How do you explain the ‘order’ and ‘design’ of the universe?” can easily be answered with “Bigfoot makes noises in the night and there are noises in the night.” This is the intellectual equivalent of “God makes universes and there’s a universe” and is every bit as convincing if you strip away the veneer of intellectual honesty.
But in the end, as I said, I don’t spend too much time concerned with tactful answers to questions like that. It’s the question that is pretentious, assuming and arrogant so if I inadvertently insult the person who asks it, perhaps they’ll think twice about asking it next time.
And if it’s somebody that I really don’t want to offend; my mother, for example; I’ll just throw out this caveat: “You’re asking me why I think one of your most cherished beliefs is misguided and silly. Do you really want me to answer that question?”
An Amusing Story
by Noah Lugeons
I live in New York City, which means that if you don’t live in New York City, I pay more for everything than you do. I pay more for milk, more for movie tickets, more for takeout and, most of all, more for rent. And like many New Yorkers, when faced with the “you can afford a studio apartment on the seventh floor of a walk up if you don’t mind the well-armed cockroaches” dilemma, I chose instead to go with the “really nice place that I share with half a dozen other people” option.
My roommates have been very supportive of the podcast, which is fortunate. My wife and I have the basement apartment which means that from time to time I have to say stuff like, “nobody walk in the living room for the next half hour, I’ve got an interview”. And while they’ve largely been supportive, I can’t say that they’ve been “understanding” exactly. They’re very accommodating and they clearly realize this is something that is very important to me, but I don’t think any of them have the blindest clue why I’m doing it.
Basically, they don’t understand why I would work so often and so hard on something that I’m not getting paid to do. Sure, they all have passions and hobbies that they do without compensation, but I guess something about putting together a “show” that strikes them as the kind of thing one gets paid for. Why provide people with entertainment if there’s no financial reward?
Well, I’m sure that you know the answer to that already. Financial isn’t the only type of reward. Becoming a part of a community that I care passionately about, meeting and interviewing people I admire and respect, having a creative outlet, the knowledge that I’m doing a small part to correct a large injustice, the knowledge that at any given moment I might be making someone in the world laugh, the pride that I take when I see the podcast climb up the iTunes ranks, the ability to say things that I have to hold in through the majority of my day; any one of those things would probably be enough to keep me doing this, but the fact that I get all of them makes it a real no-brainer.
Despite my ready list of reasons, I’ve still been unable to sufficiently explain my motivation to my roommates. I’ll tell them all that good stuff and they’ll nod understandingly, but then they’ll still say, “you should be getting paid for it, though.”
Well, over the weekend I finally got an answer that explained it to at least one of them. I got an email from a listener named Jeff with the heading ‘An Amusing Story’. I hope he doesn’t mind me reprinting it here (and I can’t imagine that he does), but here’s the email in it’s entirety:
Just a story I thought I’d share. I was playing a game of Hearts with some guys during lunch, 2 Italian ,1 Irish, all Catholic. During the game I was leading and being annoyingly cocky. As it turned out I ended up losing, one of the guys turns to me and says, ”See? God don’t like cocky!!”
I replied,”I know, if God liked cocky he would have been sucking Joseph’s dick instead of fucking Mary, and you would have never gotten you little Savior”. The faces were priceless, I’m sure lightning was expected.
One of my roommates was there when I opened my inbox and, of course, asked me what I was laughing at. I read him the email and he had a laugh as well. Then he asks, “Is that a friend of yours from Georgia?”
“No, it’s somebody who listens to the show.”
“Well… wait, a perfect stranger sent you that?”
As much as I don’t like thinking of our listeners as ‘perfect strangers’ I didn’t want to nitpick so I simply said, “Yeah.”
“Why would a perfect stranger send you that story?” he asked.
“Because he knew I would appreciate it.”
He didn’t respond, but I could tell by the look on his face that for the first time, it clicked with him. He finally understood why I would invest a part-time job’s worth of time to produce a show that I then give it away for free.
Papal Media Cock-Slobber-Fest
by Noah Lugeons
Wow, what a successful first 48 hours Pope Francine has had. He’s already transformed the image of the Catholic church, righted centuries of racial bigotry, cured global poverty, refocused the Catholic religion on the core of Christ’s message and made everyone completely forget about the child rape and torture thing.
What’s that you say? He hasn’t done any of that? Oh, sorry, I was getting all my information from the American television media.
I’m already sick of hearing about what a transformative figure Pope Franky is. It’s not just the fallacious notion that anybody can be considered “transformative” after two days on the job (much of that spent sleeping). We went from a sexist, scandal-plagued, geriatric, mentally-antiquated man of European decent to a sexist, scandal-plagued, geriatric, mentally-antiquated man of different European ancestry and this was a transformation? We went from a backwards thinking jackass to a backward looking jack-off and that was a transformation?
But you’d never doubt it if you were just listening to the mainstream media. They just can’t seem to get a big enough mouthful of papal cock. He’s going to rededicate the church, you see, to dealing with global poverty. The guy that’s moving into the golden palace built on crusade booty, confiscated Jewish fortunes and the tears of tortured children is going to rededicate the church to global poverty.
Well, I suppose the first step in that direction would be to lift the nonsensical, anti-scientific contraception ban that even the vast majority of Catholics think is stupid right? No? Not going to move on that one, huh? Despite the fact that it would be the single most significant thing you could possibly do to combat global poverty and it would be free, easy and instantaneous. Still not going to do it, eh?
Well don’t worry, I’m sure that in the absence of action the hard-hitting media will continue to pretend you’re transforming something despite the fact that you head the most static, moth-eaten, obsolete, perpetually pertinacious institution in the history of the world. After all, we’re all getting bored with the whole “kid fucking” narrative and as long as the media isn’t talking about that, I suppose Pope Francesca is transforming something.
Hey Look! Something Stupid on HuffPo!
by Noah Lugeons
Most of the labor that goes into putting the podcast together every fortnight is a labor of love. I really enjoy writing, recording and editing the skits. I love composing the music for each episode. I get to hang out with fun, like-minded people for interviews and panel discussions. I get to answer emails and feedback from intelligent and often appreciative listeners. I’ve even started to enjoy the sound-processing and all the related crap.
But I don’t enjoy the research. It’s not that I don’t like reading up on the news articles or investing my time in knowing what’s going on in the world. Hell, one of the reasons I started the podcast was in hopes of forcing myself to keep up with all the atheist news. But there’s a downside to it as well. As I’m checking my usual slate of sources, once in a while I see a headline so insanely stupid that I can’t help but click on it. And then I have to read some babbling neuronal flatulence like:
Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, The New Theists?
Now I warn you before you click that crap that it’s some “deep down the rabbit hole” nonsense and even though the piece is short, you almost have to reread it to prove to yourself that it actually means nothing whatsoever. To save you the trouble, I’ll break it down paragraph by paragraph below:
- Paragraphs 1-4: A word-salad attempt to redefine the word “sacred” to mean practically everything (as well as nothing).
- Paragraph 5: The revelation that if you simply ignore the actual definition of sacred you can call anything sacred.
- Paragraph 6: A biblical quote to prove that the author knows how to use quotes.
- Paragraph 7: The conclusion that because sacred can mean anything, atheists are really theists because they’re involved in a sacred mission to rid the world of notions like “sacred”.
It really is that stupid. He says things like:
when someone rejects the notion of God because of the wars that have been fought over that name, as well as the abuse, the fundamentalism and the ecological destruction that is bound to so much religion, they are demonstrating a profound concern for both people and the planet.
And since we established earlier that being concerned about the planet is “sacred”, that means people who viscerally reject god because of all that crap are on a mission from god. The author doesn’t waste any time explaining what it means when someone viscerally rejects god because he doesn’t exist.
As for connecting the body of the work to the title, well, he makes no attempt at that whatsoever. There’s no attempt to connect the lines between “sacred” (which has been clearly defined as meaning what-ever-the-fuck Peter Rollins is talking about in that particular paragraph) somehow automatically equates with “theist”. Probably by using the same “are-you-still-paying-attention” tactic he uses to bleach “sacred” of any precise meaning.
He also clearly employs the old headline trick where you just pose the most ridiculous claim possible and then toss a question mark on the end. As long as you phrase it as a question you’re never wrong.
Religious Debates on Twitter
by Noah Lugeons
There are two memes that sum up most people’s opinion of a religious argument on Twitter. One is the cartoon where the guy can’t come to bed yet because someone is wrong on the internet. The other one is offensive to the mentally disabled and you already know it anyway.
The basic message is that arguing on the internet is a waste of time. You’re not changing anyone’s mind, you’re not solving any problems and you’re never going to win. But I’d like to challenge that stereotype. I suppose if I wanted I could dig around for some anecdote about somebody being converted through a Twitter debate, but I trust our loyal readers to be too smart to be taken in by an anecdote and besides, I think I can argue for the value of a Twitter debate even if I concede that you’re not changing anyone’s mind, you’re not solving any problems and you’re never going to win.
I justify most religious debate by the audience. The people who watch William Lane Craig debate anyone with enough brain power to keep their saliva inside their head will probably walk away realizing that Craig is a jack-off who talks in circles and hopes his audience doesn’t know the difference between truth and truthiness. But you can’t really invoke that when it comes to Twitter. Sure, there’s an audience, but they’re just as partisan as the participants.
So you can’t win, solve problems, change minds or influence an audience. What does that leave? Well, (here come s the anecdote) you can hone your skills, refine your opinions, learn more about the debate tactics of the apologists, learn the various standard rebuttals, find whole new arguments that you never thought of before and be a counter-apologetic mental-ninja the next time you run into a condescending theist in the real world. I’ve watched my wife do exactly that over the last few days. She’s been locked in a debate with some absurd dingle-berry that is trotting out one tired, easily refuted fallacy after the next. And along the way she’s learning to refute all these stupid arguments in 140 characters or less (minus all the @so-and-so shit).
Think about how handy a skill that is to have in the real world. Once you’ve got it mastered you can shut down any religious assertion in about 5 seconds. And if you never take the time to jump into some of these asinine debates, you may never bother thinking of ways to refute some of the dumber ones.
So all hail the Atheist Twitter Trolls. And next time you hear that Special Olympics line, feel free to send this post to whatever retard said it.
The Crappy Music
by Noah Lugeons
I might just be too sensitive for this line of work. I’d like to think I’m pretty thick-skinned, but that would be contrary to all the evidence I’ve seen so far. I take a lot of pride in the Podcast we produce and I take the feedback personally.
That’s not always the case, of course. I get occasional feedback from true believers and I look upon that with amusement. But when I get feedback from an objective person who takes issues with the technical stuff, I really take it to heart. The upside of that is that if I didn’t, it would be really hard to improve the quality of our show. The downside, of course, is that a bad review in iTunes sends me into a multiple-day binge of hopeless alcoholism, drug use and self-flagellation.
Take, for example, a recent 3 star review we got that summed up their feelings in 7 words:
Get rid of the crappy music please.
That was the extent of the review, so I don’t know if there were additional unspoken issues that cost me stars, but the review seemed a bit harsh. I mean, if it was a music podcast, crappy music would be a pretty serious issue, but for the 15 second clips I use in episode transitions (and the music bed behind the calendar segment), I honestly didn’t think the quality of the music mattered much. I mean, I wasn’t gonna use Rebecca Black or anything, but I certainly didn’t think anyone would ever base 2/5ths of a review on it.
Exacerbating the depression that negative reviews of the podcast naturally give me is the fact that I compose and record all the music for the show myself. I guess ‘compose’ is a bit strong of a word, as what I actually do is improvise 2 or 3 minutes worth of stuff once every two weeks and take a few 15 second clips from it to plug in to the space between poop jokes. So this review was attacking both the podcast and my musical acumen.
To be fair, attacking my musical acumen shouldn’t bother me. I’ll readily admit that I’m an amateur musician without much will to advance beyond that amateur status. I enjoy writing music, but I have no illusions that I’m particularly good at it. I certainly envy the much cooler themes that shows like “Reasonable Doubts” and “Post Rapture Looting have. And don’t even get me started on the king of atheist podcast theme songs, “Won’t You Listen to Reason” from the Atheist Experience (and if that’s not the name of the song, it should be).
But I still dig the notion that I built the show from the ground up, including recording the theme, the music beds and the filler. I’m not married to it as a concept, but I also don’t want to comb the internet for better podsafe music that I’m only going to use 15 second clips of. I would be recording these little improvised jam sessions anyway. So with a high quality file of some original music at the ready, it seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass to add to all the work that goes into creating a podcast.
Of course, the most important thing is the quality of the podcast and I’ll readily cop to the fact that people are usually pretty bad at assessing the product of their own creative efforts. Upon reading the review, I had to open my mind to the possibility that the music is way shittier than I ever imagined and I’m just blinded to it by the same process that makes ones own fart smell rather better than those of others.
Up to that point, this review was the only comment anyone had made about the music specifically, so it weighed on my mind quite heavily until last night. And then someone said they thought the music on the podcast was really cool. That evened the pro and anti-columns up and I’m fine with that. I suppose that I’m also saying that the price of the free entertainment I provide is listening to a collective 84 seconds of crappy music once every two weeks, but I do want to produce the best podcast possible, and if the majority opinion is that I need better music, I’ll get better music.
But until more data can be collected, I’ll invoke confirmation bias and assume that ‘PiggyCop’ on iTunes just has bad taste in crappy music.
Post Rapture Looting Podcast Interview
by Noah Lugeons
I think the thing that has amazed me most since we started doing this podcast is how incredibly friendly and welcoming the atheist community has been. I’ve gotten encouraging emails and tweets from prominent atheists that I greatly admire, help from other atheist podcasters from around the globe, audio clips from complete strangers eager to help, listeners going above and beyond to assist with the research and heartwarming messages from complete strangers that urge us on. And that’s after only 4 episodes.
Case in point is an email I got the other day from Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast. It’s a podcast two friends started almost two years ago amid the hubbub of Harold Kamping’s famed doomed-day kerfuffle. It’s a biweekly podcast where they discuss news items of interest to atheists, bring on guests and go on occasional vulgar tirades about the frustrating side-effects of religion. But it’s nothing like our show. It’s a completely different length and everything.
Apparently Carl had happened upon our show on iTunes and liked it. In a friendly effort to help promote our podcast, he invited Heath and I to appear on his show to do an interview about the Scathing Atheist. We were understandably excited for the opportunity but, I have to admit, a little nervous as well. This would be the first time I’ve ever been interviewed, and even though I appear on an atheist podcast quite regularly of late, we script our show pretty extensively so the interview format was something totally new to me.
Luckily, Carl and his co-host Ben are old pros at it by this point and within minutes we were conversing like old friends. It was a lot of fun, we laughed a lot and we managed to sneak a few important topics in amid a morass of really off color jokes about eating babies, penetrating sheep, multiple-penis-fellatio and bear rape. I shit you not, those are all in the interview. And if that doesn’t have you ready to download it, I can’t imagine what would.
No word yet on when the interview will air, but as soon as we have a date, we’ll tweet the shit out of it.
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Update [3/11]: Spoke with Carl the other day. He told me the interview should be available on Saturday the 16th. Between now and then you can hear Carl and Ben interviewing David Silverman about the American Atheists 50th Anniversary Convention in Austin. That’s available at their feed now.
The Scathing Atheist 