The Scathing Atheist

by Heath Enwright and Noah & Lucinda Lugeons

Note: Transcript contains portions that were edited from the final production due to time constraints.

Warning: This podcast contains language that would make the baby Jesus cry.

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Mention this ad and get half off those big red digital countdown displays Hollywood directors seem to think people actually put on bombs.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s Halloween,

And it looks like a whole bunch of chickens had abortions last night.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright,

And from scantily clad New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

• We’ll remind you in advance that deaf people can’t hear the jokes we make about them,

• We’ll be one of six programs released today that don’t use any crappy halloween puns,

• And we’ll delve elbow deep into the gayest book of the bible so far.

But first, the diatribe…

Diatribe

I really like to argue online.  It’s a largely pointless guilty pleasure and I know that people who post Answers In Genesis inspired memes aren’t doing so in hopes of opening an earnest discussion about faith and philosophy, but I love to do it.

I should point out right up front that I’m talking about arguing, not debating.  If somebody wants to have a genuine discussion about their beliefs that’s great, but I’m not your man.  Debate is important and I believe that it’s a vital form of atheist outreach and I entrust it to people with more experience and patience than myself.

But when it comes to knock down, drag out, fuck you, no fuck you arguing… not to pat my own back or anything, but that’s kind of where I shine.  I don’t think it serves much of a purpose, but damn it if I don’t enjoy the hell out of it.

So the other day I’m surfing through a number of atheism pages on Facebook looking for a troll to crush and I come upon one of the stupidest syllogisms ever offered in this or any other debate.  As I marvelled at the stupidity it took to construct this heresy against reason I tried to catalog everything that made it wrong but it seemed like a formula would be needed… or a calculator and a three dimensional chart or something.

So here it is in all it’s stupid glory:

1. Any position which is unfalsifiable is unscientific

2. Atheism is unfalsifiable.

3. Therefore atheism is unscientific.

Where to start, right?  So before we get to the reason I’m bringing this up, let me just take care of a few of the fatal flaws here.  First of all, atheism isn’t a claim, it’s the rejection of a claim.  Egg salad isn’t falsifiable and yet it exists.  Atheism doesn’t make any claims, it just rejects really stupid ones with insufficient supporting evidence.  So there’s that.

But the far more glaring error here is this inability of theist debaters to recognize the whole meaning of the term “falsifiability”.  So let’s pretend for the moment that atheism is me saying “there definitely isn’t a god”.  It’s not, but for the moment let’s pretend it is.  If you substitute almost any other word for god, it becomes painfully obvious how incredibly “falsifiable” this statement is.  “There definitely isn’t Cinnamon Toast Crunch.”

You see them make this same stupid mistake when they talk about evolution.  Of course, you and I know all about rabbits in the Cambrian and what-not, but you’ll still hear these foaming-at-the-mouth intellectual bodyguards for Jesus claiming that evolution isn’t falsifiable.

The problem is a complete recognition of what science means about “falsifiability”.  We’re talking about the intrinsic quality of falsifiability; theoretical falsifiability.  They’re talking about the ability to prove it wrong.  They’re actually saying, “Evolution isn’t scientific because I can’t prove it wrong.”  They don’t seem to realize that the inability to falsify a theoretically falsifiable statement is the closest damn thing there can possibly be to proof that it is correct.  They’re mistaking falsifiable with falsified.

Yes, you can’t falsify evolution… because it’s fucking correct!  You can’t falsify atheism… because there’s no fucking god!  People have been looking for that elusive bastard for tens of thousands of years at least and still not one shred of credible evidence has arisen to help them out.  And yet they’re trying to act like this fatal flaw somehow bolsters their claim.

And as asinine as it seems to me, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the people in the “invisible-man-in-another-dimension-whose-ways-are-too-mysterious-for-you-to-comprehend” camp are fuzzy on the concept of falsifiability.

Headlines

Joining me for Headlines tonight is racist satire aficionado, Heath Enwright.  Heath, which do you prefer; Asians or whites?

I’m glad you asked . . . I’m going with Asians.  I’m uncomfortable with anyone who has “Lee” in their name that isn’t Asian.  Lee Iococca, Lee Harvey Oswald, Robert E. Lee … Nothing but trouble.

I don’t know if I agree with that.  Ang Lee pisses me off and he’s Asian.

In our lead story tonight, the good old boy network that runs the lucrative South Carlonia Christian soup kitchen sector, continues to thwart the existence of secular morality by refusing to employ volunteer atheist ladlers.  And in Onion Headline Form- French Onion Headline Form . . .

“Stewish Mafia Godfather Refuses Atheist Request, Even at Daughter’s Italian Wedding.”

Yeah, so they won’t allow atheists to ladle soup and then they fault them for not doing enough charity work.  It’s like justifying an invasion because the country had weapons of mass destruction after spending decades selling them weapons of mass destruction.  And you’d have to be an idiot to do that… or vote for somebody who had already done that.

Let’s get straight to it.  Lightning Round.  15 seconds on the clock . . .  

Religion Brand Soups, GO!

Jew-cumber soup?… no fuck, wait… that’s just Matzah ball soup.

“Schismed Pea with Ham” … or “Crock of Shit, Pee with Ham”  

Well we can’t do beans and pasta because God Hates Fagioli…

Shark of the Covenant Fin

Cream of Altar Boy.  (known to our Scottish listeners as “Cock-a-leekie”)

Maybe some atheist brands … Manhattan Scam Doubter … Nietzsche-Soise.  

Maybe Bouillabaisse-ic logic?

Christianity: Bouillabaissed on a Jew story . . .

Not sure if this fits, but atheist stem cell researchers call their inputs “Egg Drop Soup”

No Soup for you: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/23/south-carolina-soup-kitchen-director-bans-atheist-volunteers-saying-they-would-be-a-disservice-to-this-community/

And in “Did I mention I’m a Monday through Friday Adventist?” news tonight, Christian egotist and person whose name is too goofy for a character in Hunger Games Celestina Mba is suing for the right of all religious people to have days off when god tells them too.

Rabbis work every Saturday, and Priests work every Sunday.  Religion’s entire corporate structure breaks that rule every week.  What the fuck?!?  

And yet she was fired from her job after refusing to work Sundays.  After extreme poverty left her apparently unable to buy a vowel, Mba sued.

Not too many black women with MBA at the end of their name.

Ouch… The court ruled on the side of fucking off.  Pointing out that fucking off was also against her religion, she appealed the verdict and now seeks to take it to a higher court.

Then she plans on suing the NFL for refusing to hire Christians.  I hope they schedule all her court appearances on Sundays for secular spite.  

Invoking the bafflingly common Christian mantra of “treating everyone the same discriminates against Christians”, an attorney working on Mba’s behalf points out that the courts allow people to wear religious bracelets and have religious haircuts, so how is that any different than this almost completely unrelated issue?

That’s literally part of their argument.  If black people get corn rows, we get Sundays off.

Christian sues for right not to work on Sunday: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/24/christian-employee-seeks-appeal-for-refusing-to-work-on-sundays/

And from the “Ears In Heaven, Hell in Keller” file, Pat Robertson explains that being deaf is your mother’s fault, faith healing is like Santa Claus, and only God can heal people.  Also, Pat Robertson can heal people.  

And barring that, he can say shit that will make you not mind being deaf.

This particular tribute to religion and senility began when the mother of a deaf person asked why prayer wasn’t restoring function to the axons and dendrites in her son’s ears.  Robertson – chief auditory neurologist of “The 700 Club” – explained that deaf people’s prayers tend to be badly enunciated.  But if the speech-capable mother was praying too, she must be holding the wand wrong or something.

Or perhaps she hadn’t properly arranged the entrails before the bloody altar.  Or maybe she forgot to click her heels together three times.

My first instinct tells me she forgot to rebuke the spirit of deafness.  Robertson agreed, saying (quote) “I have dealt with people who are deaf and you rebuke the spirit of deafness and they get healed and so I don’t know what you’re doing wrong.” (end quote)  You gotta really rebuke it nice and loud.  She probably didn’t rebuke loud enough.  

This animated cadaver is an endless pipeline of crazy.  Every week it’s something even more insultingly stupid than the last.  Now he’s claiming that not only can he heal deaf people with a magical incantation but that it has such a high success rate that he’s literally baffled that someone else is unable to do it.  We’re talking about a Jesus-level miracle and he’s acting like she can’t reset the time on her phone.

He continued: “Listen up, deaf listeners.  Faith healing is just like Santa Claus.  He’s got a pack on his back and he has gifts and he’s passing these gifts out but they come from God.  Only God can heal people … and also me.  And if you really need those ears right away, there’s always a letter to the north pole, or a journey down the yellow brick road to see the wizard.”       

Pat Robertson and Jesus could have cured Helen Keller: http://www.christianpost.com/news/pat-robertson-tells-mother-i-dont-know-what-youre-doing-wrong-he-can-cure-deafness-107454/

And in the Pubic Defender file tonight, I was ecstatic this week to find that the following headline and subsequent news item was not from a satire site, “British taxpayers foot three hundred and fifty thousand pound legal bill for Muslim Pubic hair battle”.

350,000 pounds – That’s a lot of pubes.  

The story centers around a mentally disabled 30 year old woman and her parent’s two year battle to shave her pubes.

Well we Americans wasted a lot more money than that on our retarded bush problems.         

Way better than my stab at ‘W’… well done.  So apparently Muslim tradition requires that women shave their pubes, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about Muhammad’s child-fucking proclivities.  But since their severely handicapped daughter isn’t under their care and the person who is caring for her is a bit uncomfortable about the idea of two adults she doesn’t know making aesthetic changes to her genital region, they took it to court.

Isn’t this just a simple case of what man owns her?

Well we’ll never know because days before the scheduled hearing, after hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent preparing for the case, the parents unexpectedly dropped the suit leading to one of the greatest understatements in legal history.  Justice Roderic Wood who pointed out that (quote) “…there are many competing cases of equal if not greater urgency than this one.”

Yeah, there’s an Orthodox Jew with Tourette’s who wants to bleach her asshole.

Muslim parents sue for right to shave their retarded daughter’s pubes: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10396170/Taxpayers-foot-350k-legal-bill-for-Muslim-pubic-hair-battle.html

And in “What’s the worst that could… How did we do an entire story about religious people and their pubes, without an Occam’s Razor joke?!?

We’re losing our… edge?  Shit… I guess that lame joke is exhibit B.

And in “What’s the worst that could happen?” news, a twelve-year-old girl hanged herself to be with her dead father in heaven, only to find out she forgot to read the fine print about suicide, and now she’s either in hell, or just normal secular dead.

True story: Friend of the show Eli Bosnick posted this story on his Facebook wall and some Christian asshat comes back and says, “Well if somebody had told her suicide was a mortal sin, this never would have happened.”  Yeah… that’s the metaphysical fuck up here.  But Eli posed the right question.  If you honestly think she’s in Heaven now, didn’t she do the right thing?  And if you honestly think that your god would stick this little girl in hell, why would you praise him?

Every parent needs to know about an important principle.  It’s bad to kill your child with lies … AND … it’s also bad to kill them with truths.  Lacsap’s Wager tells us that even if you believe in the afterlife, you might as well teach your children about reality, just to be sure they don’t hang themselves.  Decomposing in a box next to daddy, isn’t nearly as glamorous as the express escalator to heaven.

That kid is back on the escalator to heaven: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/27/to-be-with-her-father-in-heaven-girl-12-commits-suicide/

Man am I glad that story’s over.  And finally tonight, in “We put the organ in organic” news, a website that doesn’t remotely seem like a credible news source is reporting that the Hasidic yeshiva of Gur has banned students from eating soy-based products, fearing soy might lead to gay sex.

Fossilized human remains in Asia show that people were using edamame as anal beads . . . Or possibly just eating edamame.  Point being, Jew rules about gays aren’t an exact science.  They kind of just spray at the wall and see what sticks.

Officials at the school warn that even one soy based product a week can lead to unwanted arousal, which goes a long way toward explaining Japanese porn.  They warn that soy contains magical circle-jerk hormones.

Which is true, if graded on a Hasidic Rabbi bullshit curve.

Rabbi bans soy because it may cause gay sex: http://www.yourjewishnews.com/2013/10/n29787.html?m=1

That’s gonna do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always.

All this nihilism is exhausting.

And when we come back, Lucinda will join us in wishing that god appreciated word economy.

Poem

I read One Samuel and the whole time I was thinking to myself, “hey, this should make for a pretty easy poem.  It tells a linear story, it makes sense, there’s a cornucopia of characters, a lot of shit rhymes with Sam and Saul…”

So I guess that it shouldn’t have surprised me at all that somebody already wrote a perfectly good poem about this particular book of the bible and far be it from me to try to outdo a master of the poetic arts.  So with apologies to the original author, I present to you… 1 Samuel:

I am Sam.

I am Sam.

Sam I am.

That Sam-I-am!

That Sam-I-am!

Do you like the Philistines?

I do not like those Philistines,

For god has said they are unclean,

I want to do things really mean,

To every single Philistine.

Would you like them Here or there?

I would not like them here or there.

I would not like them anywhere.

I thought that god had made it clear,

We should take to them the sword and spear.

We should slaughter each one like a lamb,

Because I do not like them, Sam-I-Am.

Would you like them in a house?

We should burn them in their house,

We should plague them with a mouse.

We should kill each child and spouse,

And treat them like a pubic louse.

We should catch their sheep and goats,

Kill their herds and burn their boats,

We should do what god denotes,

And slit their motherfucking throats.

I do not give a tinker’s damn,

I just don’t like them, Sam-I-Am.

Would you like them in a box?

Well sure, as long as that thing locks.

Plague them with a burning pox,

Feed them to a hungry fox,

With their normal, human, uncut cocks.

Would you like them with a van?

Am I mincing words here, man?

I would not like them in a van.

I would not like them in a can.

I despise each member of their clan.

I would not like them in a house,

I would not like them with a mouse,

I would not like them with a fox,

I would not like them wearing socks,

I would not like them in the night,

I would not like them in the light,

In no death would I find more delight…

Except for those Amalekites.

Babble

By far the most interesting book so far in the bible, 1 Samuel employs things like wordplay, foreshadowing, story arch

…and gay sex…

in a way that has been lacking since the last few chapters of Genesis.  And while the story is still horrible and largely immoral, it’s a much better read than the shit we’ve waded through to get here.

Yeah against all odds, they manage to limbo under the St. Louis Gateway Arch

So to help us break down yet another 66th of this book is my lovely wife, Lucinda.  Lucinda, welcome back.

Hi ya!

Why don’t you start us off with… let’s say Chapter one.

1. First we meet Hannah, whose husband Elkanah preferred her to his other wife even though his other wife had kids.

   1. Right. So she prays to god to have a son (because fuck daughters) and promises if god will grant her a son, she’ll give him to the priesthood.  So basically she wanted all the fun of childbirth without tedium of having an offspring.

   2. So god does and she does and this kid is the titular Samuel.

2. So little Sam ends up ministering with Phineas and Ferb, the sons of Eli..

   1. Phineas and Hophni

   2. That’s what I said.  Anyway, these guys are really shitty priests that abuse their power and god’s only willing to overlook that shit for so long.

   3. At least one century in the case of Catholic pedophiles.

• I thought the first rabbi to start signing tits was Matisyahu, but apparently these guys had ethnic groupies way back.  And what’s the point in running a tabernacle, if you can’t fuck the sluts that work the front door, right?  Eli gets mad, and yells at his sons: “This isn’t a restaurant…You don’t fuck the barely legal hostesses.  What did we just talk about?!?”  

3. –

4. Then the Philistines show up and attack because that’s what Philistines do.  The Jews get their asses kicked and they’re all like, “Hey, why you reckon god would have let them kick our asses like that?”

   1. So to find out they order that the Ark of the Covenant be brought to the battlefield so they could walkie-talkie heaven for help.  But then the Philistines just say, “Hey, look, it’s a box with god in it.  Kill them and take it.”  And then do.

   2. Phineas and Ferb die in the battle and when Eli hears about that he says, “meh…” but then the messenger says, “Oh yeah, and they took Indiana Jones’ box, too” he freaks out, falls over and breaks his neck.

   3. And Phineas’ wife hears about everybody dying and the godbox going missing so she freaks out, shits out the kid she’d been baking and dies too.

5. So they take the ark to Ashdod and put it in the temple next to a statue of their god; god decapitates the statue, gives them some cancer, you know, normal god stuff.

   1. And for seven months they keep taking it to this city or that one and every time they do everybody gets cancer or something and they move it again.

• Little did they know, the Jews switched the God-Box, for a box of weapons-grade plutonium they got from the Ralien Lizard-People during the redacted book after Leviticus, rumoured to be called Atomic Numbers.  

6. So the Philistines call up the Jews and say, “Here take your fucking box back already, this shit sucks.”

   1. But the Jews won’t just take it back and lift the curse or anything.  They start going all “Knights that say Neek” on them and ask for… I shit you not… five golden mice and five golden tumors.  TUMORS!  They ask them to make molds of their tumors and cover them in gold or god won’t lift his curse.

• “And not too expensive, but the following items must be covered in gold.  We want five gilded lillies- shit no that feels like a mistake.  Five . . . mice . . . and five . . . malignant tumors this time, you cheaters.”

7. Then they get the ark back and everyone rejoices.

8. Then all the people show up begging Samuel to appoint a king.  Because, you know, people are always wanting to be ruled over by tyrants.

   1. And Samuel tries to talk them out of it.  “He’ll be a dick and he’ll take their cattle and their slaves and all their best stuff and he’ll march them out to die in battle for him.”

   2. And the people are like, “Yeah, that’s cool.  We just really, really want a dictator, who will later control how history records this moment in time.”

9. Now we meet Saul who is supremely qualified to be a king since he’s both tall and handsome.

• I’ve always said I’d rule the Jews well.  I’m at least half qualified.        

1. So Saul is wandering around all of Israel looking for his dad’s donkeys when he runs into Samuel, who makes him king in full blown “Kung Fu Panda” style.

2. The “King of Israel can’t find his ass with both hands” joke is too easy, huh?

1. So Sammy boy announces Sauls king-ness and everybody says, “Well, sure… he’s tall.”

• This chapter gets pretty gay pretty fast.  Starts out with Samuel pouring oil on Saul while they make out.  Then Samuel tells Saul to go meet two men in a graveyard who will give up those asses he’s been searching for.  Just say, “I’m Saul, and I’m here to trap that ass.”  And then it ends with Saul’s disappointed dad saying, “What shall I do about my son?” … Just another gay in the life.

1. And then chapter 10 closes off with a quick “Meanwhile” aside: Meanwhile, there was an evil Ammonite king that was gouging out the right eye of all the Reubenites and Gadites.

1. Then the Ammonite king attacks Jabesh-Gilead and the people try to make peace with him and they say “Alright, evil king, what are your terms?” and he replies, “I want to poke all of your right eyes out.  It’s kind of my thing.”  So they think about it and say, “Give us a week.”

   1. And when Saul hears about this, he gets so pissed he hacks his oxen to death and then mails chunks of them around the country because, as we’ve seen before, chopped up bits of dead thing sent UPS is the best way to rally Jews.

• Some of the Jews must have got the package late though, right?  Guy walks into the kitchen with his right eye in his hand: “Honey, did you forget to give me this decomposing hoof we got in the mail yesterday?  Cause I thought we all agreed to the gouge plan, and here I can plainly half-see that you still have both your eyes.  Kind of an important message.”  

2. So they defeat the Ammonite king that seems to have shown up for no reason but to give Saul an ass to kick.

2. So here’s Chapter 12 in nine words: “Whose house?  God’s house!  Said whose house?  God’s house!”   

3. So now Saul is feeling big-dicked so he says, fuck it, let’s wipe out all the Philistines, which would have been fine, but he fucked up some ritual animal slaughter minutia so god abandoned him.

4. And just when you’re thinking, “Hey, this book isn’t too bad”, chapter 14 brings us more genocide and some divine retribution for honey eating.

   1. Yeah.  It all starts when Saul’s son Jonathon and his gay lover provoke a war.

   2. But Saul curses anyone who eats that day and nobody tells Johnny, so he eats a drop of honey (off the spear he’s been killing people with) and for that he’s sentenced to (almost) die… Then the army feasts on sheep sushi.

5. In chapter 15 god puts that whole “all-knowing” thing to rest once and for all when he starts regretting making Saul king.

   1. Right, and why does he regret it?  Because when he tells Saul to wipe out all the Amalekites, he keeps a few of the cattle alive.  And that’s the last straw dammit.

6. No surprise that Saul isn’t exactly anxious to give back supreme authority so he tells Samuel to fuck off.  Then god commands Samuel to go find David and anoint him king.

   1. So now Saul’s tormented by evil spirits and his servants say, “You know what helps with evil spirits?  Lyre-playing.  And you know who absolutely wails on a lyre?  David.”  Coincidence, or terrible literary foreshadowing?

• David could finger a liar better than Martha Stewart’s cell mate.  Better than Lance Armstrong’s giving himself a steroid suppository.  He could finger a liar better than a Jewish witness at the Nuremberg Trials.  

2. David goes to pluck Saul’s lyre and apparently he’s quite nimble indeed so Saul keeps him on to (ahem) carry his armor, wink, wink, nudge, nudge say no more.

3. Well if you mean “make David his gay sex slave that he would later share with his son and daughter”, then yes, I know exactly what you mean.  

2. Then we get David and Goliath, where, spoiler alert, David kills Goliath with a slingshot.  And even though you know exactly what’s coming, it still manages to disappoint you.  They spend 40 days throwing down epic biblical shit talk and then David pulls his pansy-assed Dennis the Menace coup de grace.

3. Now Saul’s worried that David will take his job, so he makes him his right hand man, tries to spear him a couple times, sells him his daughter for 100 Philistine foreskins and asks his son Jonathan to kill him.

• You always hear people using the phrase “back of dicks” rhetorically.  But at some point this guy was very literally carrying a fairly sizable bag of dicks.  Because David got cocky, and came back with two hundred foreskins.  Probably grabbed entire dicks first, then did the individual brisses later.  

• “This is only 199.” … “Those 2 are stuck together.”   

19. Meanwhile, David’s kicking ass left and right.  His armies are whipping way more Philistine ass than anybody else’s so Saul gets even more jealous…

• Yeah they even wrote a song about how David was an order of magnitude better at genocide than Saul.  Nobody likes to hear they’re less good at murdering other races, by such a large margin.  

1. So after the third or fourth time Saul tries to spear David, he says “You know, I think this guy who keeps lunging at me spear first is trying to kill me,” and he escapes.

2. So he finds Samuel and they get together and cast some kind of frenetic nakedness spell so that anybody who tries to come to get David strips and falls into a “prophetic frenzy”… not sure what that means, but it sounds fun.

1. In chapter 20 I’m pretty sure we confirm that David and Saul’s son Jonathan were gay lovers, just in case the butt sex scenes were ambiguous.

2. So David finds a priest and  asks him for some bread.  He says he doesn’t have normal bread, but he does have a little magical abstinence bread.

• “Hello random Zelda apothecary, selling exactly the items I might need.  Got any food for celibate fugitives, and maybe a mythical weapon, ideally formerly owned by my legendary vanquished nemesis?  You have Honzo swords too? Wicked!”   

22. So David gathers an army of 400 malcontents and then Saul kills some priests.

23. Chapter 23 is basically a montage episode.  Saul continues to be an asshole, still trying to kill David for banging his son.  Also, David bangs his son again.  

24. So David and his men are hiding in a cave.  Saul and his men are closing in on them.  Saul steps into a cave to take a shit and it just so happens to be the cave David and his men are in.

    1. Yeah, but David can’t bring himself to kill Saul because he loves him so much, so he just fires his gun in the air and goes “Argh!”… or the biblical equivalent thereof.

• What kind of crazy intense shit was he taking, that he didn’t notice another entire human being standing next to him, sawing off a square of his clothing?!?

25. And then Samuel dies.  There’s still 6 chapters and a whole other book named after this dude, and he doesn’t even have the decency to live through them.

    1. Then David sends his men to some rich dude to ask for bread.  He tells them to fuck off so David has god kill him and then he takes the dude’s wife.

    2. …and another wife.  Plus he already had a wife.

• And Saul makes a feeble attempt at spiting David: “You think you can fuck me, fuck my son, then buy my daughter for a bag of dicks?  Well I sold her to another dude while you were gone, and I’m keeping the dicks as a security deposit.”  

26. And in 26 we learn that  the authors liked chapter 24 so much that they did it again two chapters later… and in a field instead of a cave.  And Saul was sleeping instead of shitting.  But other than that it’s the same.

• Yeah, David’s supposed to be the protagonist here, but he’s making the mistakes of a Bond villain … or Daffy Duck.  Shoot him now or wait till you get home?!?  Always shoot him now!  Otherwise chapter 27 happens, and that’s the last thing a Jewish guy wants to do.  

27. Chapter 27: David hides in Palestine for 16 months…

28. Then the Philistines amass a huge army, Saul all like, “God, what do I do?” but God won’t answer or return his texts or anything.

    1. And then we get our first biblical seance, which, if I’m not mistaken and I probably am, is the first real mention of an afterlife in this whole book.  Strange that it wouldn’t have been an emphasis to this point…

    2. Yeah, you knew Samuel was gonna Obi-Wan Kenobi his way back into the story.

    3. Right, so the ghost of Sammy boy shows up to tell Saul he’s fucked.

29. –

30. Then you get some Typical bible stuff . . . Rape, plunder, evil Amalekites, village pillaged, so everyone’s pissed and starts yelling at David.  He says, “Everybody shut up, I know what to do.  Bring me . . . The Prayer Smock.”  So he wears the ephod apron thing, and god tells him they’ll succeed in recovering their rape victims, and might even get some 50 shekel checks out of the whole ordeal.     

31. And in the proto-Empire Strikes Back ending, this book wraps up with Saul falling in battle along with all his heirs, the Israelite armies getting massacred and the promised land falling into enemy hands.

Damn do I hope 2 Samuel doesn’t have Ewoks.

Well I guess we’ll find out that and more on the next installment of “The Holy Babble”.  Until then, thanks again Heath, Lucinda.

Outro

Before we put a lid on this thing tonight, I wanted to make a quick announcement that should be accompanied by a chorus of angelic trumpets, we did get the CafePress shop up and running this weekend.  It’s a little messy in there but when I find some time this weekend we’ll be getting it organized.  We’ve got the lovely scarlet A logo slapped on everything from Tshirts to iPhone covers to shot glasses to Christmas ornaments to bumper stickers so you can show your filthy monkey heritage with pride.  We’ll be adding new products and t-shirt designs throughout the season so be on the look out for that.

You’ll find a link to our online shop on the homepage or you can cut out the middleman and go straight to “CafePress (dot) com (slash) scathingatheist”.

I also wanted to make a quick correction to last week’s calendar section.  I mentioned the upcoming and stupendously awesome Skepticon but I said it was going to be in Springfield, Illinois.  I fucked that up.  It’s Springfield, Missouri, not Springfield Illinois… it’s also not Springfield, Florida or Springfield, Kentucky.  Or Springfield, South Dakota.  Or Springfield, Oregon, Tennessee, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Georgia, Massachusetts or Nebraska, all of which actually exist but aren’t the city where Skepticon 6 is going to be.  It’ll be in Springfield, Missouri, so know your Springfields and sorry that I didn’t.

I also wanted to add a quick addition to last week’s calendar if you’re going to be in the San Antonio area on November 12th you can catch Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism Tom Flynn at an event sponsored by the San Antonio Coalition of Reason and the Freethought Association of Central Texas (great acronym, by the way).  You’ll find links to the the event page on the shownotes for this episode.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Freethinkers-Association-of-Central-Texas/146015608750987?ref=ts&fref=ts

Need to very quickly thank the many people who make this podcast possible every week.  Huge thanks to Heath, Lucinda and, of course, Sam for providing this week’s Farnsworth Quote.

Oh, and a huge thanks to everybody who Tweeted (at) Ricky Gervais trying to get a Farnsworth quote out of him.  No response yet, but keep up the good work.  You’ll be rewarded for it in the no-afterlife.

But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week’s most irreplaceable expressions of genetic code, Michael, Mike, Josh, Ryan and Matthew.  Michael, whose blood is so pure mosquitoes cut it with baking soda; Mike, whose mind is so sharp it splits neutrinos; Josh, whose wisdom is so great that he reeled at the thought of splitting neutrinos; Ryan, whose penis is so massive it bends light and Matthew, whose confidence is so great he doesn’t need any of my over-the-top platitudes.

These five fine fellow freethinkers have gone above and beyond the high water mark of human decency this week by giving us money.  Not everyone has the compassion, the integrity and the raw sexual magnetism required to give us money, but if you think you can handle the enormous pressure such heroic acts often entail, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.  And you should really donate because we just found out our cat has diabetes and Lucinda’s pretty bummed about it and people giving her money makes her happy.

And unfortunately we’re out of time so I can’t remind you to give the show a 5 star review on iTunes, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on You-Tube, listen to us on Stitcher and tell your friends about us, but don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll have time to tell you that stuff next week.

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.