atheism | The Scathing Atheist

An Email from an Asshole

July 6, 2013 Noah Lugeons 5 comments

by Noah Lugeons

I should admit that when I first started this show, I assumed that by now I’d be getting a lot more of my material from slobbering, frothing, angry Christians who were sending me improperly capitalized death threats. Up to this point, I still really haven’t had an influx of hate mail. Almost all of the feedback we’ve gotten has been frustratingly positive.

So considering that, it wasn’t going to take much to earn the title of the biggest asshole that’s emailed the show so far. But thanks to Roger in Iowa, that bar has been raised. And unfortunately, the title currently belongs to an atheist. So how did Roger earn the coveted title of king of the rectums? Here’s a brief sampling of the ranting bullshit he sent me:

Why does every atheist seem to think I give a fuck about gays? Your show is supposed to be about atheism and you spend the half the show talking about fag marriage and how happy we should all be about that. What the fuck does that have to do with atheism? Atheism is just a lack of belief in god and I’m sick of people who try to make it into a political position. So if I don’t support gay marriage I’m not a “real” atheist?

And it just goes on and on like that for seven paragraphs (and that’s not even a whole paragraph there).

Now, buried amid his horse-fart rambling is a legitimate point that should be addressed. After all, the atheist movement often finds its weight being swung behind political movements that are only tangentially related to secularism. I’m sure this frustrates the libertarian wing of atheism up a wall, as these issues are almost exclusively liberal-leaning, but before I make any attempt to justify it, I should point out that there’s no pope of atheism. If the larger atheism movement swings one way or the other it’s only because a majority of its members swung that way. Nobody has the power to move us by fatwa.

But, that being said, there’s still a pretty logical reason why the atheist movement tends to rally behind things like gay rights; the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Most of the people who get active in atheism do so because they’re sick and fucking tired of watching people oppress other people in the name of religion. I’ve yet to hear the “secular” argument against homosexual equality so when I see the gay community win a victory, I interpret it as a victory against religion and religion’s influence in our society.

In fact, the framing of the discussion in episode 20 should make that pretty obvious. Heath and I hardly touched on the basic humanitarian justifications for full recognition of gay marriage. Instead, we focused on the ranting, petty, insane reactions from prominent Christians. We weren’t celebrating a step toward full human rights (though we probably should have been). We were celebrating the group we rally against getting smacked in the face.

So that takes care of the “legitimate” part of Roger’s point. Now let me address the larger “illegitimate” part. This whole argument that “atheism is just not believing in god so stop trying to make it mean more than that” nonsense really needs to stop. Yes, you pedantic fuck, that’s exactly what atheism means. So let me stop making any point on my blog or my podcast that isn’t simply a restating of the fact that god doesn’t exist. I’ll fill thirty minutes each week with not offering an opinion on anything except the existence of god. That should be fun.

Just back the fuck off and let this movement be what it is becoming. As atheism grows it will faction off and the people who want to just not believe in god can sit in their corner and just not believe in god. But those of us who choose to take it a step further and offer secular alternatives to the traditionally religious magesteria (morality, community, music, etc.) would appreciate being able to forge our path without dodging your stones.

Categories: Feedback Tags: atheism, atheist, atheist podcast

Episode 20: Partial Transcript

July 4, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

Sponsor:

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And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s July 4th and I only like snakes and sparklers.

I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from seasonably patriotic New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode:

We’ll learn why gay sex makes Jesus cry,
Buddhists will weigh in on all that blasphemous YOLO shit
And I’ll put the opening of the second chapter of the God Delusion to music

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

I had about half a dozen listeners email me the same article from the CNN Belief Blog this week. The headline read “Christians are happier than atheists… on Twitter.” Before I even clicked the hyperlink I was already salivating, ready to skewer the shit out of this pseudo-scientific nonsense. So I read the article and I took a look at the research and I read their conclusions.

And unfortunately, as much as I’d love to unleash both barrels of my verbal-ought-six on this thing, it turns out that there’s just nothing to criticize. The research was sound, the methodology was solid and the conclusions were perfectly defensible. It turns out they’re right. We’re a bunch of miserable, hateful, unhappy fucks.

I know this may come as a surprise to you, because you might often mistakenly think that you’re happy, but you can’t argue with science. In fact, you might as well just stop arguing altogether and dive head first into a tub of Caramel-Sutra laced with Xanax, for you will never know joy.

So quick before you slit your wrists while sitting in a running car and drinking bleach, let me explain how the advanced new science of Twitter-ology works. The first step is, of course, to draw a conclusion. As you’ll see later, if you don’t start with a conclusion, the data’s gonna be too messy to interpret later. So start off with a firm conclusion and hold on to it no matter what.

Step two is generating sample groups and remember, this is no time to worry about precision. To study atheists and Christians, for example, all you need to do is randomly select five prominent atheists and five prominent theists and call all of their followers your two groups. I know that not everybody who follows Dinesh D’Souza is a Christian and not everyone who follows Richard Dawkins is an atheist, but this is science… it doesn’t have to be exact.

So once you have your suspect samples, you analyze the words usage. Whatever words are used more often are indicators of deep psychological truths about the people using them. And we know this, because we just do. It doesn’t matter that there’s no credible research or even logical reason to believe in the core assumption behind this research. The people doing it wore lab coats or had pocket protectors or something and that makes what makes it science.

So with our rock solid assumption that people who say “happy” a lot are happy, people who say “family” a lot love their families and people who say “food” a lot are fat, we can go to work on our pseudo-data. And when we do we discover our conclusion, which, you’ll recall, we decided on before we started the research.

In this instance, we’ve proven that atheists aren’t as happy as Christians and they don’t love their families as much. Viola, conclusion reached, thesis proven, Nobel prize is in the mail.

Admittedly, some atheists have been a bit more critical about the research than I am. They point out that there’s no reason to assume that people who follow prominent Christians and people who follow prominent atheists are using Twitter for the same purpose. They point out that many atheists have multiple Twitter accounts and keep their atheism on one and their family stuff on the other. They point out that even with a perfect sample the study would still be nonsense, as the average Christian is older than the average atheist, more likely to have children and more likely to come from a large family and any one of these covariances would render all the data worthless. They point out that even if the data wasn’t useless, the conclusion still would be, considering that what they’ve proved is that a privileged majority is happier than the unprivileged minority.

But I think these critics are looking at it the wrong way. So before you toss out this study just because it’s poorly constructed, obviously biased, impossible to blind, poorly conducted, unscientific and stupid, I should point out some other things this study finds.

Consider the fact that atheists were shown to be far more likely to use words like “reason”, “think”, “idea” and “knowledge”, so if we accept the flawed premise of this flawed study it also proves that atheists are smarter than Christians. In addition, it shows that atheists are more likely to use words like “dick”, “fuck” and “pussy”, so clearly we’re also getting laid more often than the Christians.

After all, if we accept the first conclusion and the others are reached through the exact same process, it’s hard to ignore… not so hard that the researchers didn’t manage to ignore it, but hard to ignore nonetheless.

And if you need any further proof that this is sound science, consider the alternative. If this study isn’t legitimate scholarship, CNN just ran an article that used unproven science and half-ass conclusions to reinforce a hurtful stereotype that has no basis in fact and wouldn’t be newsworthy even if it did. And we all know that could never happen.

Song

“The God Song”

Well Jesus is great, he’s my best friend.

He’s the kinda fella who would die for your sins.

He says women should obey their men,

And ownin’ slaves is fine every now and again.

Well Jesus is my buddy and I’m really glad.

He’s the best buddy that a guy ever had.

And if you think some stuff he said was bad,

At least it’s nothing when compared to Jesus’s dad:

“Now let me tell you about that fella…”

He’s a homicidal, genocidal, pestilential, filicidal,

Petty jealous racist full of rage and spite.

Wicked and misogynistic, he’s a sado-masochistic

Homophobe that massacred Amalekites.

And Midianites.

And Sodomites.

And Perizzites and Moabites and Philistines and Benjamites,

Syrians, Assyrians, Ethiopians and Amorites.

And Egyptians.

“But we’re not yet, because he’s also…”

A Maleficent, Malevolent, Omnipotent, Irrelevant,

Megalomaniacal vindictive beast.

He’s ruthless and he’s useless; he’s an evil, brutal, futile nuisance.

Turned a chick to salt just for looking east.

Heartless, inexorable, rancorous and horrible,

He’s got a torture chamber and a thirst for blood,

He’s a fictitious, injudicious, vile, vicious, angry bitch;

His temper’s like a two year old with global floods.

He’s capricious and malicious and flagitious and pernicious

And an ethnic-cleansing bully of the highest sort,

Injurious, Inglorious, Nefarious, Notorious,

And when he raped a married virgin? Paid no child support.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my consiglieri Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to con-siggle?

I’d be happy to.

Well, not according to those Twitter-ologists, you aren’t, but I’ll overlook it.

In our lead story tonight, we’re one step closer to legalized goat-sex thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act.

According to Rick Santorum, it’s not just one step closer… We’ve actually legalized the equivalent of goat sex.

As all but one of our listeners know, the nation’s highest court recently struck down a 17 year old piece of bigoted legislation that denied federal benefits to same-sex spouses.

And just fucking barely. The highest court in the land, which should be 9 of the most rational and intelligent people in the country, came as close as possible to a tie on this issue. Which is almost as embarassing as the fact that gay marriage and gay rights in general are even an argument that’s still on the table.

“If we could have made no decision on gay rights, we would have, but there’s fucking 9 of us, so we couldn’t tie. And since Kennedy’s not a complete asshole, gays are people … according to 55.6% of us here at the highest court.”

The reaction of America’s religious leaders was surprisingly muted and tolerant:

(SOUNDCLIP)

The ruling was even enough to prompt scientifically-anomalous unhappy Tweets from Christians, calling the decision a “Tragic Day for Marriage and Our Nation”, declaring that the “Supreme Court Overrules God” and that “Jesus Wept”.

But don’t worry, it’ll only be a few decades before the prominent Christian voices are taking credit for this.

We’re forgetting the real victim here . . . the good people over at Merriam-Webster, who will now have to work tirelessly around the clock to go through every dictionary, and cross out the part that says, ‘between a man and a woman’.

No, trust me, I’ve read the Tweets, Jesus is the real victim here. Now, in honor of the DOMA ruling I put together my three favorite insane overreactions. My number three was Rick Santorum and you already beat me to the punch on that one. But I will say, in Rick’s defense, what is the difference between two consenting men or women entering into a legal bond of love and raping a donkey?

Mostly just the consent of the ass, I guess.

Number two was the verbal gymnastics of the guy with the most Christian name ever, Monsignor Charles Pope, who proposed the “freedom fry” option, suggesting that Christians just drop the word “marriage” altogether and switch to “Holy Matrimony”

Shit, yeah that would entirely disempower us f-word-lovers. Is that really what he’s going for?

But the gold medal goes to the head of the Catholic Church’s matrimonial court, Archbishop Oscar Cruz, who answers the question “Can gay men get married?” with “To lesbians, sure.”

What is he, multiplying negative numbers in his weird little head?

Supreme Court Decision on DOMA and bigoted reactions from churches: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/26/religious-reactions-to-scotus-decisions/ & http://wordnews.org/2013/06/26/reactions-from-christian-organizations-swift-to-supreme-courts-overturning-of-doma/

Catholic Priest: It’s okay for gay men to marry lesbians: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/428951/catholic-church-has-no-problem-with-marriage-between-gay-man-lesbian & Catholic Priest Suggests that in the wake of DOMA they should drop the word “marriage” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/marriage-holy-matrimony_n_3517019.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in a follow up to a story we talked about in episode 17, American Atheist president David Silverman unveiled America’s first monument to atheism in Fuckville, Florida last week. And, in the humble, deferential manner we’ve come to expect from Bible Belt Christians, a number of Evangelicals showed up to help us dedicate what inaugural Farnsworth quoter and blogger Hemant Mehta has deemed a “Non”-ument.

I was gonna say Skepti-Couch . . . or Secu-Lounger . . . or Seat of Doubt.

Protesters blasted Christian music and carried signs that read “Honk for Jesus”, “Preserve Florida’s Christian Culture” and “The South is a Christian Nation”.

Where the fuck do southern, conservative Christians get the balls to have pride as a group? And how does Christianity get southern blacks on board so well? Shouldn’t there be more awkward guilt around the South? You don’t see conservative Germans flying Third Reich flags . . .

And as if to lend validity to your point, according to our friends at Bar Room Atheist one of the signs actually read “Hook for Jeses”.

One lover of the lord tried to place a toilet seat on the bench during the ceremony, but not to be out-douched, prominent creationist and son of a felon Eric Hovind jumped on top of the monument to scream about how awesome Jesus was. Hovind said that he was happy that the American Atheist had provided him a platform to preach from that was 48 inches high; ten inches short of being one inch tall for every felony conviction for which his father is concurrently serving time.

So the genius who – at one point – was carrying around a toilet seat in public . . .

I’m just guessing, but he probably wasn’t making an artistic philosophical statement relating to Marcel Duchamp, was he?

I really hope somebody out there gets that.

The big news out of the unveiling ceremony is that the show was so popular they’re taking it on the road. Silverman announced that American Atheists are prepared to put up as many as 50 similar monuments all over the country in a social counter-offensive to the fundamentalist assholes who put Christian monuments on public property.

Excellent . . . Looking forward to The Seat of Doubt Tour <bunch of assholes>

Atheist Bench Unveiled in Starke, FL: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/atheists-unveil-monument-nonbelief-god-article-1.1386919 & http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/29/american-atheists-unveils-godless-monument-in-front-of-florida-courthouse-and-announces-many-more/

And in this week’s “How many felonies can the Catholics fit into one Scandal?” report, the Milwaukee Archdiocese was recently forced to release 6000 pages of Sexual abuse documents due to allegations of bankruptcy fraud stemming from some financial shenanigans allegedly intended to shield money from abuse victims.

Atheist Podcasters are already – as I speak – calling this the “Anal Leaks Scandal”.

Depends . . . but this could get messy.

And as it happens, Cardinal Timothy Dolan appears to have his hands about elbow deep in the anal leakage, too, as included in the documents is a deposition where he suggests moving money to a “cemetery maintenance fund” to keep it shielded from future claims.

So if it wasn’t obvious to everyone already, the Catholic Church is officially – financially . . . and morally – bankrupt.

“Ok, yes . . . we raped a bunch of kids, but if the courts make us pay for it, that would be prostitution, which is wrong. We didn’t want to make whores out of these kids, just innocent rape victims. Rape victims go to heaven. Think about that trade. Rape victim for several decades on earth, but then eternal bliss. We’re doing favors, here. We’re raping stairways to heaven for these kids.”

To Dolan’s credit, most of the documentation I’ve seen up to this point shows him impotently trying whatever he can to get these pedophiles the fuck out of the priesthood and while I’m not sure I’m in love with his proposed solution of paying them to leave and never turning them into the cops, he’s made to seem far less villainous by the merit of the people writing him back and saying, “No, pedophile or no, we need all the priests we can get.”

Milwaukee Archdiocese releases sexual abuse files: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/milwaukee-priest-sex-abuse-records_n_3527980.html

And in “We’re-worse-than-we-thought” news, a new international religion poll from German non-profit Bertelsmann Stiftung makes me want to swim with toasters.

So I take it we didn’t do that well?

The survey compared religious views of 13 nations and if you’re grading this thing fairly, the US lost to pretty much everyone on pretty much everything.

Among the study’s findings:

Americans lead all 13 nations in believing that (quote) “Only politicians who believe in god are suitable for public office”.
The very first amendment clearly says, “Don’t do that.”
Americans are the most willing to make sacrifices for their religion
It’s really just happiness and societal progress . . . so not THAT big a sacrifice.
And 50% of Americans find atheists (quote) “threatening”.
They fucking should. We’re expediting their inevitable removal from the political decision-making process.

The survey doesn’t offer any answers to the obvious follow up question: “Is it too late to un-secede from England?”

I’d be down for an Evolutionary War, where we get back with England for atheist reasons, by taking them back over. And then give away Northern Ireland for spite. Maybe drop the South on waivers.

I’d also like some answers on what, exactly, that 50% is afraid we vile secularists are going to do. Are they afraid we’re gonna incur the wrath of their petty god? Are they afraid we’re gonna make it legal to gay-marry a harem of chinchillas? Or are they afraid we’re gonna prove they don’t get to go to eat sky-cake when they die?

Well I probably shouldn’t even be talking about this, but Phase 2 of our plot IS complete. That’s all I’ll say, but they should certainly be threatened.

Or . . . Is it that everyone on the wrong, backwards, misinformed side of every argument ever, is threatened by the truthier side? The 50% number would be higher if more theists were smart enough to recognize their obsolescence.

New Survey: 50% of Americans find atheists “threatening”: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/26/new-survey-50-of-americans-find-atheism-threatening/

And from the “How-Much-Will-You-Give-Me-For-This-Golden-Rule?” file, Australian priest, Anglican opportunist and shining example of Christianity in practice Terry McAuliffe got a little unwanted press last week over an incident involving a lost bracelet and an asshole.

Please tell me this dude found a bracelet in his asshole.

…or in his gay lover’s asshole.

No, were that the case it would have been the lead story.

Oh, so instead we’re sticking it somewhere in the rear?

The story goes like this; he finds a bracelet valued at around $6,500. He tracks down the owners and offers to sell it back to them for half the price. But don’t worry, he wasn’t only trying to fuck them on the deal. He also suggested that they continue to claim it as lost and recover the money by scamming their insurance company.

“Wait… you’re telling me I get the bracelet that demonstrably belongs to me and I get to pay you $3000 and all I have to do is commit felony insurance fraud? What’s the catch?”

Yeah, if it sounds too good to be true…

The one good thing he does here is suggest screwing the insurance company, but that doesn’t exactly make him Robin Hood here. He’s stealing from the rich, and stealing from the poor.

Once the story hit the news the good reverend had a quick change of heart and offered instead to return the bracelet at no cost, stop being an asshole and wonder why he hadn’t just raped some kids instead.

Anglican Priest finds bracelet, tries to sell it to owners: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/26/reverend-bracelet-terry-mcauliffe_n_3503644.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in “God-Hates-Your-Jiggly-Bits” news, the Christian Post brings us the story of two Christian ministries in Southern California who are willing to bravely venture deep into the heart of the satanic underworld of strip clubs and porn conventions to win souls back for Jesus.

Among those brainwashed into doing Christian charity work, I imagine a “missionary position” like that is highly prized, so they probably only have a couple of holes to fill at once.

With names like (I shit you not) “JC’s girls” and “XXXChurch”, the ministries go to strip clubs armed with gift baskets that contain things like (I still shit you not) “Lotions, lip gloss and hot pink bibles” these groups send their crew to (again, I still shit you not), “strip clubs, brothels and between 8 and 11 porn conventions a year”

“If just one hooker find solace in her new pink bible, after getting sodomized for money, then we’ve done our job. And if just one porn star uses her pink bible to block a money shot, we get some good free product placement.”

Ok let’s put 20 seconds on the clock – Church Porn Titles . . . Go!

Lord of the Thighs

Cream Piety

How about Nympho Nuns Nine: The Naughty Nazarite?

Missionary Impossible

12 Apostles, One Cup

Numbers Colon 69

Can you reach the colon, in a 69?

Sheri Brown, lead coordinator of the San Diego Chapter of JC’s Girls told the Christian Post that god calls them to “reach out in love”, “form bonds with desperate women”, “offer them fulfillment” and “bring them to their knees for Jesus”; and then honestly expects us not to make fuck jokes about it.

Ok so what you’re saying is, “Last call for missionary fucking jokes.” . . .

“The Consu-Matrix” immaculate conception porn, starring Holey Trinity as the Virgin Mary. . .

It’s a threesome with Mary, Joseph, and God.

I love the concept of immaculate conception porn.

Yeah, kind of looks like masturbation… you can’t really tell.

Christian Outreach focused on Strip Clubs and Porn Conventions: http://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-outreach-into-strip-clubs-porn-conventions-to-share-love-of-jesus-98899/

And with those sexy images swimming through your head we’ll close out the headlines for the night. Heath, thanks as always for joining me.

And when we come back, you’ll realize that we never really left.

Bible Story:

Run grab the young ‘uns, folks! It’s time for Lucinda Lugeons’ Bible Stories for Kids!

——————-

Gather around boys and girls. Today we’re gonna open the bible up to Genesis and talk about the story of Lot’s daughters.

Now once upon a time there was a man named Lot. Lot had two daughters whose names weren’t important enough to record in the bible, because they were women.

Lot and his family grew up in a town called Sodom, a town where a lot of daddies loved a lot of other daddies in the butt. God hates gay people so he really, really hates whole towns of gay people. So one day he decided to destroy the town and all the people who lived in it.

But don’t worry, kids. Lot’s daughters were safe. God loved them more than the other people who lived there, so he sent two angels to warn them. They wouldn’t have to die. It would only be their sisters, all of their friends and all the little dogs and cats and hamsters that lived there that would perish in a fiery catastrophe. And trust me, boys and girls, the hamsters that lived in Sodom were begging for death.

But when the two angels showed up to warn Lot and his family, all the villagers, young and old gathered around because they wanted to anally rape the angels. But anally raping angels is very naughty so Lot said “No villagers! Don’t rape the angels! You can rape my daughters instead.” And he threw his two virginal, innocent daughters to a mob of diseased, rape-starved perverts.

But luckily for Lot’s daughters, the villagers really wanted to rape the angels instead, so the angels struck them blind.

“Hooray!”

Lot and his family had to move very quickly because death and torment was about to befall everyone they’d ever known. So mommy, daddy and their two daughters ran away. But mommy looked back at the town, so god killed her by turning her into salt. Because if you look in the wrong direction, sometimes god kills you.

So with their mommy dead and all of their friends and pets burned alive, they hid in a cave and slept on rocks with nobody to keep them company but their drunken daddy. And what’s even worse, they had nobody to have sex with except their daddy. Of course, daddy wouldn’t want to have sex with them because daddy’s having sex with their daughters is naughty, so they got daddy really drunk and they force-fucked him several times.

They both got pregnant with inbred rape-children who they loved very much and the few people who lived through the story lived happily ever after.

The End.

Skit:

Henchman: “Heath, Noah… SCOTUS has overturned DOMA.”

(Sinister Laughs)

It’s all proceeding exactly according to plan.

Gather the others. We must meet tonight.

(Scene Switch Sound Effect)

I hereby call this meeting of the League of….

Um… Doctor Myers, Mister Dillahunty… The buffet is supposed to be for after the…

Whatever, I now call… you’re really gonna just take all the baby-bacon? The whole platter. No… that’s fine. Um… yeah. That’s fine.

Like I was saying, I hereby call this meeting of the League of Sinister Secularists to Order. The honorless Noah Lugeons presiding.

Thank you, Heath. Now obviously we all know there’s big news this week, but first things first. Heath, can you read us the minutes of the last meeting?

We all started off pledging allegiance to Darwin, we hated America for a little while, Greta gave us an update about her cats, Doctor Myers and Mister Dillahunty ate all the baby-bacon before I got to the buffet, and we decided to go with the bench instead of the Trojan-Horse Satan Sculpture I submitted.

Thank you, Heath. Now if there’s no new business, I’d like to move on to the… Um, Hemant, can you practice your sinister finger steepling some other time? This is important. Thank you. And um… Tom, Cecil… We’re all still really impressed that you can both do that with your testicles, but if you don’t mind, we’re trying to have a meeting here.

Now, as you all know, we’ve received word that the Supreme Court has struck down DOMA, leaving marriage completely defenseless.

(Hooray!)

Yes, we should all be proud of the job we’ve done, but this is no time to rest on our laurels. The family isn’t destroyed yet.

You can’t even legally marry a sheep yet.

That’s right! Polygamy, bestiality, child-sacrifice; none of that is legal yet. And nevermind gay adoption… why aren’t those kids being aborted in the first place?

Or made into bacon? Or both? Fetus bacon is like the pre-veal filet mignon of atheist cuisine. In French, ‘mignon’ means cute, so this makes sense. If babies are cute, then fetuses are fucking adorable. And small strips of that tender, undifferentiated fetus meat, slowly smoked, and then fried in its own almost babyfat . . . fucking delicious.

Exactly. We’ve won an important battle, but we can’t lose sight of the war. Heath, what are we doing to further cement the destruction of traditional American values?

We’re drafting legislation now that would make happiness illegal in the month of December. We’ve got some of our top agents planting more apocryphal evolution fossils. And we’re still looking into that end-of-the-world-building from Ghostbusters, see if that’s for real, but it’s not looking good..

That’s not enough! Is it still legal to be heterosexual!? Why haven’t we fixed that yet? Is it still legal to love your neighbor and be moral? We’ve been fighting against that for centuries to no avail.

I think it’s time to enact phase 3 of the plan.

Is that the one where we cease human births and turn to cloning just to piss god off?

No… that’s phase 6.

Oh, right. Three is the one where we kidnap Anna Kendrick and chain her up in your basement.

No, that’s phase 13 and that one was tentative. Phase three is the part where we make Christians get UPC symbols tattooed on their wrists and foreheads. I tell you, I’m starting to think nobody’s reading my memos but Glenn Beck. And how the hell did he get a hold of those anyway?

Yeah, we’re still looking into that.

Hemant, the steepling. Don’t get me wrong folks; I don’t mean to downplay the significance of this ruling, but as long as happiness, democracy and virgins are still out there, we can’t afford time to celebrate. Remember, we can’t take away their ignorance, but we can damn sure take away their bliss!

Outro:

Before we cash in our chips tonight, we need to take a few seconds to recognize this week’s most exceptional mammals; Lindsay, April, Jason, Douglas and Geoff spelled the cool way. The quintessence of non-quiescent quercine qualities, this quick-witted quintet quietly quelled the quarrelsome quandary about quartering our quirky, quodlibetical quest by quantifying their appreciation and giving us money.

If you, too, would like to be the subject of some archaic alliteration and earnest appreciation, you can help keep this whole experiment going by clicking on the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com and giving til it hurts. And then continuing to give because you can take it.

All jokes aside, in all seriousness, we really do want your money. But if we can’t talk you out of your hard earned dollars, you can always help us out by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes because that’s free.

That’s all we’ve got for you this week but if you want more, there’s more. Frank and Dan at Thank God I’m Atheist invited me over to defend the utility of acerbic atheism the other day. It was a really good discussion and you can find it on episode 85 of their show, which will be linked on the shownotes for this episode.

TGIA Archive: http://www.thankgodimatheist.com/podcast/archives.php

I also need to thank Heath once more for all he does to make this thing possible, and of course, my lovely wife Lucinda for providing the bible story this week and, of course, for performing adult services for me for 17 years and counting. I also want to offer a concurrent thanks and apology to my muse Richard Dawkins, whose voluminous vocabulary acted as the inspiration for the song this week, as anyone who’s read the God Delusion probably already figured out.

I should also point out that I’m in a constant state of scrambling for Farnsworth quotes so if you have a blog, a podcast, a facebook page or even a consistently interesting Twitter feed, I’d be happy to throw you a plug in exchange for a 5 second audio clip of you quoting the 22nd century’s most stylish professor.

And finally tonight, I want to thank you, dear listener, for giving us 30 minutes of your life. We’ll be hard at work trying to earn 30 more minutes next week but until then, you can also check out our erratically published blog and get occasional nuggets of Scatheism by following us on the Twitter, liking us on the Facebook and subscribing to us on the YouTube.

If you have question, 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 19 – Partial Transcript

June 27, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright & Lucinda Lugeons

Note: Transcript contains portions that were removed from the show due to time constraints.

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new off-Broadway musical, “Joseph Smith and the Amazing Technicolor Underpants”. Because Matt Stone and Trey Parker made mad bank lampooning Mormons in a play, why the hell shouldn’t we?

And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

In Thursday, It’s June 27th, and sorry about all that money you pissed away accidentally expediting a binding legal ruling in favor of gay marriage, Mormons.

I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from pizza Mecca, New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

In this week’s episode:

We’ll couch domestic abuse in a bunch of feel-good Jesus talk,
A new poll shows that Americans are as dumb as everyone thinks we are,
And God will kill an enormous number of people,

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

When I was 13 years old, my older brother gave me a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and told me to read it. I was more of a climb trees, play sports, be sweaty and grass stained kid than a sit still for more than 30 minutes and read stuff kid, but it was short so I gave it a go.

It was the first time I’d seen religion treated with such brazen mockery. I was already doubting the conflicting messages from my Mormon dad and my Catholic mom, but when I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide I realized that it was okay to just call bullshit on all of it. After all, this dude wasn’t getting struck by lightening or brimstone and he certainly didn’t seem too worried about hell, so why should I?

And there’s a question that Adams poses in that book that’s been stuck in my craw for two dozen years: “Just who is this god person anyway?”

You’d think that in 5000 years of trying, the Abrahamic faiths would have come up with a concise definition, or, if not concise, at least consistent. But as we all know, if you ask 20 Christians to define god, you’ll get 20 definitions. Sure, there’ll be a few commonalities, but it’ll be clear pretty quickly that all these Christians are worshipping a different guy.

And none of them, none of the Christians, none of the Jews and none of the Muslims are worshipping the guy from the bible. The all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, moral, caring, forgiving, judicious, benevolent dude they talk about might make a cameo at some point, but he’s nowhere to be found in the first 4 books.

What’s worse, the guys who wrote the first four books of the bible, or more precisely, the guys who wrote the unrelated, independent sources that would later be woven together to become the first four books of the bible, also aren’t working from a coherent definition. Is god the dude who shows up in the Garden of Eden in Genesis or is he the guy that nobody can survive seeing from Exodus? Or is he the disembodied spirit they talk about in the gospels?

Is he the all-knowing guy from Jeremiah and Acts or if he the bumbling idiot from Genesis and Numbers? Is he the hard to anger guy they sing about in Exodus or is he the unjust, wrathful bully that was killing people for no reason right before they started singing that shit?

And if he’s all-powerful, why does he need Moses to do everything?

And if he’s all-loving, why is he such an asshole to virtually everyone he encounters?

And if he’s all-knowing, why do people have to keep reminding him of shit?

And if he’s moral why does he champion slavery so damn much?

And if he’s caring why does Moses have to keep talking him out of killing people?

And if he’s forgiving why does he punish kids for their parents crimes?

And if he’s judicious why can’t I find any Amalekites around these days?

And if he’s benevolent why does he have so much blood on his fucking hands?

Of course, these Christians that are so quick define god don’t know what the bible says because they’ve never read it. If you press them, they’ll often claim that they’ve read “most” of it, but then you start quizzing them and it turns out they don’t know that there’s a talking donkey in the 4th book. How much could you have possibly read? It’s the 4th fucking book! That’s like saying “I’ve seen most of the movie, but I missed all the parts after the opening credits.”

If I believed a book to be inspired by the all-knowing creator of the universe, let alone directly revealed by him, I’d know the damn thing by heart. But these dingbats, even the “literal word of the bible” folks, can’t be bothered to crack it open.

And I don’t think it’s because they’re too lazy, either. I’m willing to bet that many if not most of them started it at some point. And I don’t think they turned away because of the genealogies or the archaic language or the repetition or the bulk. I think they met their god and he scared them. I think they turned away because they started to realize that the more they knew about their religion, the harder it would be to believe.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my pan-racial color commentator who’s therefore allowed to say all the N-words, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to use otherwise-offensive slurs in the proper satirical context while berating believers in the absurd?

Cracka please!!! Let’s get started. Which confederate states are violating the first amendment this week?

We’ll get to that, but in our lead story tonight, recent polls show that 34% of Americans would vote for Jesus in 2016.

Another white guy?!?!

Yeah, but he’d be the first Jew. According to HuffPo columnist and author Fred Rich, a recent YouGov poll had more than a third of Americans answering yes to the question “Would you favor establishing Christianity as the state religion,” with the majority of those saying they would be “strongly” in favor of such a move.

What percentage thought we had already clearly established Christianity as the state religion?

It’s like polling plantation owners on their views about the economic modalities of the southern colonies.

“De facto segregation ain’t enough. We need to get this stuff on paper. Maybe we should make a grand public statement . . . a Proclamation of Demancipation . . . we’ll work on the name.”

32% favored taking this beyond their individual state and support an amendment to the Constitution that would make Jesus-worship the national religion as well. So basically a third of our country has seen how well theocracy is working in Saudi Arabia and want a piece of the action.

Strange how closely this number mirrors the percentage of people that identify as evangelical . . .

However most of this group couldn’t spell theocracy, and probably couldn’t find Saudi Arabia on google maps.

As Rich points out in his column, this was a national poll, so the heathens in New England and California were skewing the numbers. Imagine what a poll like this looks like in just the stupid states.

Poll shows one third of Americans want a theocracy: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-rich/breaking-news-34-of-your-_1_b_3461262.html

And speaking of the stupid states, our next story takes us to Kentucky, where Ken Ham seeks to rekindle the flagging attendance at his Creationism museum by adding… wait for it… zip lines.

After finding that dinosaurs and bullshit weren’t enough to bring in the kiddies, Ham and his knowledge-abhorring cohorts are turning to the time-tested technique of completely unrelated touristy shit like zip lines.

I bet the conservative group within his ultraconservative group are up in arms about this. Might not go over well with the physicists in the Christian Science Department. Aren’t there several bible passages that declare gravity an abomination?

“The Lord didn’t say Let there be heavy – He said Let there be light”

To unveil this new attraction, he invited Kentucky state representatives, Kim King, Bart Rowland, Tim Moore, Tweedle Dee and Foghorn Leghorn for the ribbon cutting, which hopefully involved safety scissors. Representative King showed just how little she cared about definitions and shit when she posted on Facebook that the (airquote) “museum” was (airquote) “educational”.

These guys are awful at this. How hard is it to get attendance when nearly everyone in a 5-state radius is brainwashed from birth about the theme of their museum?

If Mickey Mouse was in the bible, there would be Mini Disney Worlds in every WalMart.

Kentucky Creationism Museum unveils zip line attraction, complete w/ State reps: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/21/kentucky-state-representatives-visit-the-creation-museum/

And from Mickey Mouse to “Mecca-Mouse”, our next story takes us to the middle-east where Dubai will see Kentucky’s stupidity and raise them billions of dollars because Dubai is rollin’. In a probably-horribly-misguided attempt to combat the nation’s reputation of irreligion, the Dubai General Projects Department recently announced a Qur’an based theme park that will, I’m sure, be every bit as fun as that sounds.

I’m looking forward to “The Ideologue Floom” and “Twin Towers of Terror”

I believe that was our first 9/11 joke. Well done.

Anyway, Dubai apparently has a “Vegas of the Middle East” reputation that prompted a popular Saudi cleric to order women not to visit the city… because you know how women are about succumbing to temptations of the flesh.

How the women manage not to rape all those burka-less men is beyond me.

But Dubai officials hope they can counter this image by taking the only thing these rabid, undereducated fundamentalists give a fuck about and treating with the culture and sanctity we’ve come to associate with theme parks.

I think Islam is just angry as a whole, not about Western domination, or the Israeli Magic Act of 1948, but about being that 3rd guy out that nobody really cares about. They’re like Chris Bosh, Graham Nash, and the Green Party all rolled into one sad little box called “worst monotheists ever”.

Judaism and Christianity get all the attention, and little brother Islam gets ignored again. Historically, this leads to occasional bouts of radical attention-getting behavior.

Dubai plans Qu’ran based theme park: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/23/quran-theme-park-dubai-religious-pilgrimage

And from the “remind-me-why-they-venerate-the-murder-weapon-again” file, the city of Evansville, Indiana has approved a public art exhibit that will contain no fewer than 2 and a half dozen eight foot crosses all over the city’s waterfront.

Is this one of those avant garde things where the public interacts with the art, and they leave out hammer and nails to see what happens? Like a social experiment type of thing?

I wish… Unfortunately it’s one of those run-of-the-mill “I love the bible and the constitution almost enough to read them” things. Recognizing the constitutionally problematic nature of this project, the city insisted that the crosses not be overtly religious crosses, but rather secular crosses.

Sounds like a perfectly secular homage to the lowercase letter T.

City Attorney Ted Zeimer Jr. couldn’t agree more, explaining the rock-solid legal authority of the city to violate the first amendment by pointing out that the United Way was allowed to put up statues in this very same spot once.

So because Evansville, Indiana has a long, proud history of violating the 1st Ammendment, they’re claiming squatters rights to ignore the Bill of Rights.

Essentially, yes. Zeimer went on to explain that (quote) “We told them they could not have any writing of any kind on them so they’re statues. They might be a religious symbol to someone or they might be attractive statues to someone else.”

Yeah without the word Jesus actually written on them, they’re just an interesting demonstration of perpendicularity.

“If it ain’t a right wing angle, it’s a wrong wing angle.”

Let’s sell that T-shirt to Newt Gingrich.

City of Evansville, Indiana approved “30 Crosses” public art exhibit: http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/jun/20/old167/

And moving on to our final story of the night, two weeks ago we talked about a Christian who was obsessed with men spanking their monkeys and this week we’ll turn to some Christians that are obsessed with men spanking their wives.

I’ll keep saying this until it starts happening . . .

How is every womens’ group not also an outspoken atheist group?!?

Well maybe this’ll help: The Christian Domestic Discipline movement’s website goes to great lengths to explain that they’re not a fetish site. So stop asking, damn it. They’re not interested in the type of spanking that both of the people involved enjoy, that’s satanic. They’re interested in the type of spanking where men physically abuse their wives until they do as they’re told… but only if it’s consensual, of course.

Right, because biblically, the women you marry, and the blacks you own, are entitled to similar privileges. Except the black aren’t guaranteed the consensual part . . . And really neither are the women.

Yeah, God doesn’t do consensual.

We should get down there and hand out some atheist-themed rape whistles.

Maybe setup some womens’ crisis centers called “Planned Penetration”. We probably won’t get bombed by evangelicals.

I’d be worried about them discovering and attacking our secret podcast HQ here in New York City, but the atheist trolls at each bridge into the city ask a series of logic riddles that slow-witted theist spies never seem to answer correctly.

Which is nice, but it fucks traffic on the GW all up.

The CDD Lifestyle also advocates other forms of infantilization and punishments like time-outs, writing sentences like “I won’t disobey my master” and being humbled by (quote) “some sort of nude humiliation”. But, and I can’t state this enough, this isn’t about being an abusive, misogynistic, felonious, psychopathic, cowardly, demonic piece of shit that should have his head drilled open and his cerebrospinal fluid sucked out by poisonous leeches wrapped in barbed wire because Jesus.

Christian group promotes spanking your wife: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/19/spanking-for-jesus-inside-the-unholy-world-of-christian-domestic-discipline.html

And on that mental image, we’ll close out headlines tonight, Heath, thanks again for joining me.

Fantastic time.

And when we come back, Lucinda will join us to regret suggesting we all read the bible.

Calendar:

It’s time once again from the Atheist Calendar portion of the show. This is the now monthly portion of the show we set aside to talk up some of the atheist, skeptical and otherwise secular events going on around the country and around the world… only this time just around the country.

On the weekend of July 4th (and for our international listeners, July 4th is the day that Americans celebrate the 4th of July), the Skepchicks will be taking over the Science & Skepticism Track at ConVergance in Minneapolis. Not sure about the rest of the conference, but the Skepchick part looks awesome. Rebecca Watson and her team of Skeptical female superheroes team up with PZ Myers which would make for an awesome conference and an even more awesome comic book.

http://skepchickcon.com/

Of course, the big one gears up on the 11th in Vegas. It’s called The Amazing Meeting, and if you’re listening to this podcast you’ve heard of it, so all I’m gonna say is if you register before the 1st of July it’s $125 cheaper.

http://www.amazingmeeting.com/

But if Vegas is there and you’re here, perhaps you can make it out to SSA East, the other half of the Secular Student Alliances bicoastal conference extravaganza this year. Except that it’s in Columbus, Ohio, which certainly isn’t coastal. So if you’re secular and you’re a student, it starts on the 12th and runs through the weekend.

https://secularstudents.org/2013con/columbus

And finally, I wanted to toss out a plug for the CFI’s upcoming leadership conference in Amherst, New York on the weekend of the 25th of July. If you’re a student and have any plans or aspirations to start a skeptical, secular or freethought group on campus, CFI is a phenomenal resource.

http://www.cfileadership.org/

You’ll find more details about this conference and all the other events I just outlined on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Poem:

NUMBERS IN RHYME

by Noah Lugeons

1 is the number of gods and he gives

2 shits about who gets killed and who lives.

3 times Balaam and his donkey have spats

be-4 god starts talking out of that Midianite’s ass.

5 chapter in things get scary for chicks,

6-tuff’s prescribed if they’re getting side-dick.

And 7’s for resting unless you need stones,

To break some stick gathering heathen’s skull and his bones.

8 too much Manna? Should you voice your critiques?

God will plague you and kill you, but he’ll send quail for weeks.

And that asi-9 bastard may invoke some damned clause,

To show you what a 10-uous promise that promised land was.

11 Tribes conscribe all their fighting age men,

but the 12th tribe (the Levites) just carry the tent.

20 is war-age, but like most things, you’ll notice,

The tribe that’s exempt is the one that has Moses.

30 Days mourning when god kills Aaron on high,

Then 40 years waiting for all the bad jews to die.

50 percent of this book we spend bored

Counting jews and the booty they offer the lord.

We get a couple of censuses from all of the tribes,

Enumerated offerings are in detail described,

As the name would suggest, the book’s obsessed with amounts,

But no number gets higher than god’s body count:

We could start with the animals, who are killed by the score,

Each time the tabernacle opens its doors.

Bulls, rams and donkeys, pigeons and sheep,

And a pile of quails about three cubits deep.

Israelites? Oh yeah, he kills them by the thousand.

He opens the earth and swallows whole houses.

He burns their encampments, sends serpents and plagues,

And what heinous encroachments elicit god’s rage?

Being hungry or thirsty, doubting Moses’ clout,

Going to the tabernacle once the candles are out,

Being honest when scouting, gathering sticks,

Complaining to Moses and acting like dicks.

Whoring with Moabites, lighting incense all wrong,

Being treated like shit and not just going along;

Thinking manna tastes nasty, being slow to obey

Or living in cities that stand in his way.

But it isn’t like God is always a villain;

When he orders Moses to murder all the Midianite children,

He says if they’re virgins and if they behave,

He can spare the young women and keep them as slaves.

Holy Babble:

The Book of Numbers rests between two of the most notorious books in the bible and, perhaps because of that, it doesn’t get as much attention as Leviticus and Deuteronomy. And sure, Numbers doesn’t have the homophobic flare of Leviticus or the “Thank God the Pentateuche is over” satisfaction of Deuteronomy, but if you were to insert it into any other book ever written, Numbers would almost certainly be the most fucked up portion of that book.

But mostly it’s just a horribly boring book that details one leg of the trip from Sinai to the promised land, punctuated with moments of brutal insanity that might just be there to keep you awake. Joining Heath and me to discuss this strange little hybrid of bookkeeping and genocide is my beautiful wife Lucinda. Lucinda welcome back.

I’d say I’m happy to be here, but after reading Numbers, I don’t think god would want me saying that without getting my husband’s permission first. So I’ll just say hi.

Yeah, this is probably the most sexist book we’ve come across yet and we’ll get to all of that. But first things first. If the jews are gonna take over the holy land, they’re gonna need an army.

Right, so we start with the original Schindler’s Enlistment.

Then they lay out the structure for the Judaism pyramid scheme, or Tetra-Hebron.
“Why are the Levites at the top of the pyramid, considering they already run the IRS? Because they used all the goat taxes to become job creators. Somebody has to start the game with the reds and oranges, plus all 4 railroads.”

And on top of that, none of the people in Moses’ tribe have to join the army and when they camp in the wilderness, they get to set up their tents smack in the middle of 11 armies.

Would you want rabbis in the front lines of your army? No, you want badass, Israeli-Commando-type Jews like Adam Sandler . . . Not pale, bearded, shitty drivers that started the Crown Heights Riots by running over a black pedestrian.

And of course, god needs money to go with his army.

Right, so in chapter 3 Aaron loses about 1365 shekels in a card game, and sets up the most ridiculous, elaborate, nonsensical story to get the money back, from his flock of ancient nomadic tribes that apparently all carry reasonable amounts of fungible hard currency at all times.

“So technically, 273 extra babies that should have been righteously murdered.
Which sounds a lot like an endorsement for abortion.
No it’s not abortion right after birth – that’s just righteous murder.
“What had happened is, God was gonna kill all your kids, but me and my family of 22,000 agreed to live a life of purported divine privilege, in exchange for saving them. But you all had 22,273 firstborn children, so God’s gonna need 5 shekels apiece for the accounting discrepancy. Us Levites will collect the cash here and write God a check.”

Then we get god’s overly-elaborate Tabernacle relocation strategy. Basically he spends chapter four channeling a foul-tempered old lady with alzheimer’s bitching at the moving guys.
1. “I said wrap it in blue cloth! No, I want the Gershonites to carry the curtains! And careful with those lamps or I’ll incinerate you with fireballs!”
And then we get started with the sexism. In chapter five we learn how to tell the if your wife’s been fuckin’ the goat-milkman using nothing but some dirty water, a handful of flour and misogyny.

The old grain offering dirty water miscarriage trick. Seems like this was just a way for dudes to save face when they had a slutty wife. Having her drink dirty water might make her sick, but I’m fairly certain it’s never led to an instantaneous immaculate hysterectomy. So every time they do the ceremony, the dude doesn’t look like an asshole, because his wife’s womb doesn’t fall out on the spot.
Yeah, I was expecting them to break out a scale and a duck at any moment.

Then we get the rules for the vow of the nazirites, which is spelled “Nazi Rites” which kind of fucks me up in the middle of a Jew book.
In chapter 7 God shamelessly ups the word count by spelling out the exact same 90 word sacrifice 12 fucking times!
The Levites shave all their hair and pubes and become elevated in the eyes of the Lord.
In chapter 9 we learn that god’s a cloud and don’t forget that Passover’s coming up.
Then god adds a brass section and they’re ready to go conquer the promised land.

If I’m being a stickler, God should have asked for brass, plated with silver, if he wanted a fuller timbre for those trumpets . . . Nobody’s perfect.

As soon as they hit the road, the Jews start bitching because they don’t like Manna and they want some meat.

Couldn’t god have solved the meat-shortage by not demanding so damn many sacrifices?

Sure, but I guess this was supposed to be some grand punishment for not appreciating the triscuit rain, but not too impressive.
“Hey, do you guys have a 3-foot-tall pile of quail in your yard? Ok, I guess since we’re NOMADIC, we just eat a bunch now . . . maybe not so much that quail actually oozes out of my nostrils, but a lot . . . and then start heading toward the next place on Moses’s desert obstacle course.”
Yeah what the fuck was he trying to say there? Did angels force feed their asses like Kevin Spacey’s character in Se7en.
And God was like, “Shit, yeah that doesn’t smite them much at all-AND PLAGUE!!! I said the quail thing AND PLAGUE!!! Nobody heard me, but I had said “and plague” at the end as I trailed off.”

In chapter 12, Aaron and his wife talk shit about Moses so god makes her a leper for a week.

And when Moses asks God to go easy on her so she doesn’t turn out like a stillborn baby with it’s flesh half eaten off, he justifies making her skin rot off by saying, “If her father spit in her face, would she not be shamed for 7 days?” Oh, well when you put it that way…

Next we meet Double “O” Shiv’a scouting out the promised land and they say that all the people already living there are too strong for all the quail engorged Israelites to displace.
And then God throws one of his patented temper tantrums and kills pretty much everybody for bitching too much. He curses their children, he sends a plague, he marched an army out to die.

And as if that’s not enough, he “unpromises” the promised land to everybody but Joshua and Caleb.

Yeah, it’s the part of the act where the hypnotist removes all the free-thinking non-sheep from the stage, leaving only the blindly faithful idiots who are truly qualified for Judaism.

And then in chapter 15, right in the middle of some proper goat-killing etiquette, we learn that Moses and the gang find a guy picking up sticks on the Sabbath so god commands them to stone him to death.

And in a whiplash inducing subject change, in the next verse after the stoning, God reminds them that he likes fringes on the outfits, so don’t forget to add fringes.

“So seriously, it may sound somewhat contradictory, but no faggots on Saturday, and tassles for everyone!!! Also, lest ye forget, I’m fucking God.”

Then we get a weird little mutiny. Some other Levites challenge Moses’ leadership so he challenges them to an incense burning match to the death.

“What?!? I’m not clearly high priest because of actually talking directly to God?!? Take out your censers bitches . . . I’ll outsmoke anyone.”

“Bitch, you light incense like Michael J. Fox on meth! You call that a grain offering? I’ve got more fiber in my stools.”

So God goes fucking nuts, opens the earth to swallow whole families along with their slaves and furnishings, he burns 250 people alive and then he kills fourteen thousand more with a plague.
And I must say, god is a total badass about it. He says “Moses, step away from those dudes.” And Moses says “Why?” And God says, “So I can burn them to death with giant fireballs.”
Right… so why they didn’t all just stand really close to Moses is beyond me.

Anyway, just in case the house swallowing, fireball chucking, plague sending message wasn’t clear enough, God also has Moses write everybody’s name on a stick and only Aaron’s stick grows flowers.
In chapter 18 we reinforce the “the priests get all the best shit” motif.
And in 19 we kill cows and we don’t touch dead people.
In chapter 20 God kills Moses’ brother for expressing a slight hint of doubt. And in the serial-killer-fashion I’ve learned to expect from deities, he doesn’t just plain murder Aaron, he makes his son watch his naked father die, and then walk back down the mountain wearing his murdered dad’s clothes.
Then God continues to be an asshole and sends a bunch of poisonous serpents to get the Jews to stop bitching… then finally Moses goes on the warpath and starts killing some motherfuckers.
And then in chapter 22 there was some kind of biblical writer’s strike so they had the folks from Disney step in for a few chapters, because all of a sudden everybody’s breaking into song and there’s a talking donkey.

And didn’t Balaam seem strangely nonplussed by it? He just carried on a conversation with his donkey like it was nothing.

Well he thought he was speaking to god earlier, so a talking donkey is far more plausible.

So basically the story here is that Balak is trying to get Balaam to go to war against the Israelites, but Balaam knows god’s on their side so he spends a couple chapters refusing… in song.
^^
^^
Then we get another census because, holy shit, it’s been almost twenty two chapters since we counted all the jews.

Well God had killed a lot of them since then.

Then we spend 3 chapters going over old shit, but we do finally learn what we’ve suspected all along; God’s been cheating on Moses with Joshua.
^^
^^
In chapter 30 we learn the difference between man vows (must be kept) and women vows (must be kept unless a man says so)

Yeah, just in case the “women are inferior to men” thing wasn’t clear by now, God hammers it home one more time.

Then they go to war with the Midianites and slaughter them. All the men of fighting age are killed. Moses is furious… because they failed to kill the women and children.

“I’m not getting God to divinely inspire our army, for you guys to not fully murder, pillage, and rape everyone. I’ve gotta be a stickler on this, or my boss yells at me and he’s always watching. You either murder them . . . or you rape them . . . or both in either order . . . Understood?”
Easily the most disturbing moment in the narrative so far.

Then, thanks to the cattle-rustlin’ Reubenites and Gadites, Jews start a long and storied tradition of building settlements in other people’s land.
Then we get a chapter that rehashes every spot where they camped for the last 40 years.

Riveting.

Then they divvy up the promised land (before actually possessing it)

The first use of short selling.

God takes a minute to spell out exactly what is and isn’t “murder”. And can I just say, I love the whole “city of refuge idea”… we should totally bring that back

It would make a great setting for a Nicolas Cage movie.

And we finish with a soft close concerning inheritances and marriage.

So what do we learn in Numbers? We learn, first of all, that God’s a wrathful, vengeful, abhorrent, petty tyrant.

Well . . . we re-learn.

We learn that women are worthless
we learn that donkeys can talk, we learn that genocide is a-okay

And we learn that anybody who read the first four books of the Bible and didn’t become an atheist needs to work on their reading comprehension skills.

So Heath, Lucinda, thanks for suffering through this with me.

We’ll take a couple weeks off of the Holy Babble, but we’ll all meet back here to break down Deuteronomy in episode 22 for those of you playing along at home.

Outro:

Before we shut off the lights tonight I wanted to respond to a slight criticism recently posted in an otherwise extremely complimentary review. Mr “Something Clever About God” appreciates the toilet humor, the 30 minute format and overall production quality, but offers the following critique:

“The commentary is more ‘witty’ than ‘laugh out loud funny’, so Heath and Noah could use more snickers and less belly laughs”

First of all, thanks for the rating, but I do want to take issue with that minor objection. Every laugh you hear on this show is genuine and Heath and I would never pretend to laugh at one another’s material and we certainly wouldn’t laugh at jokes that we wrote for the other guy and we certainly wouldn’t cut and paste genuine laughs and drop them into the audio later and I’m certainly not lying right now and it’s certainly not obvious.

We also need to take a few seconds to recognize this week’s most vivacious, tenacious, loquacious, sagacious, perspicacious, papilionaceous, gracious, curvaceous and hellacious people, Benjamin and David, who proved themselves worthy of the kind of praise that can only be fully expressed by Googling “words that end in A-C-I-O-U-S, removing the ones that are insulting and then adding a really obscure term for “butterfly like” by giving us money.

Only the most intelligent and sexually virile specimens of human excellence have what it takes to give us money, but if you think you can live up to my verbose laudations, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you love the show but you lost all your money betting on Scotus outcomes, you can still help out by telling a friend about the show or leaving us a glowing 5-star review on iTunes. I should point out that as of this recording we have 68 reviews so there’s still time to be the sexually significant 69th reviewer if you’re into that sort of thing.

I need to thank Heath and Lucinda for joining me tonight and Remy G for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. This is normally the part where I’d tell you that you should check out his awesome Facebook page called “Fuck Your Fucking God, You Ignorant Blinded Dumb Fuck”, which totally makes this podcast sound PG and had an awesome avatar of a nude Jesus giving you this “Hey baby, I’ve got enough orifices for everyone” look, but I can’t because Facebook is run by a bunch of cowardly pube-waxing assholes who took down his page because religious people have fragile feelings and his words make them cry.

So since they won’t let him say it, I’ll say it, “Hey religious assholes on Facebook, fuck your fucking god, you ignorant, blinded dumb fuck.”

Anyway, that’s all the blasphemy we’ve got for you this week, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with more. If you can’t wait that long, you could always check out our erratically published blog and like (slash) subscribe (slash) follow us on Facebook (slash) YouTube (slash) Twitter. You can also find our archives at Scathing Atheist (dot) com or you can help us bump up our Stitcher ranking by downloading the Stitcher App and listening to us there.

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.

Live Blogging the Bible: Numbers 11:19-33

June 24, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons

I’m only four books in and already I’m amazed at how many crazy stories that I’ve never heard are hidden in the bible. Why does nobody ever talk about Simeon and Levi? Or Gershom’s magical foreskin? Or the naked Noah story? Or, as I recently discovered, the retributive quail tsunami?

The first ten chapters of numbers deal with the Israelites getting ready to move to the promised land. After a considerable time putzing around Sinai with nobody to keep them company but the occasional golden calf, they get ready to move camp, Tabernacle and all, and march against all those assholes that are currently living in the land god clearly intended for them to inherit.

For the first quarter of the book the Jews are very well behaved. They camp where Moses tells them to camp, they enlist when Moses tells them to enlist and they sacrifice bulls and goats when Moses tells them he’s hungry. But once they start the march, Moses’ underlings get really bitchy, really fast. Every time he turns around their moaning about how they might as well have just died in Egypt as slaves where at least they didn’t have to spend years wandering through the wilderness with nothing to eat but manna.

So god hears their cries and he decides to be merciful and send them plenty of food. So much so, in fact, that he promises that all 600,000 of them can eat meat for a month. So he sends a month long tsunami or quails all around them. And just when you’re starting to think that maybe god has turned another leaf and stopped being a complete douche bag, you find out that the quail were a backhanded gift. It comes at the cost of a plague that kills thousands of the assholes. Oh yeah, and they lose their claim to the promised land. So no, god’s still an asshole.

But god being a dick isn’t anything new. He’s been consistent since Genesis so god pulling a dick move is hardly worth blogging about. I just thought I’d hop on to point out what a counterintuitive dick he was being. After all, if he’d just lighten up on the demands for bulls and goats and lambs and turtle doves and donkeys, there would be plenty of meat to go around. You know, the old “stop burning the food for an omnipotent god and start eating it” gambit.

I suppose god is all-knowing (or at least that’s what the people who didn’t write the bible seem to think) so he probably already thought of my solution and rejected it for one of his mysterious reasons. But I thought it was worth pointing out anyway.

Categories: Live Blogging the Bible Tags: animal sacrifice in the old testament, atheism, atheist, atheist bible commentary, atheist bible study, biblical criticism, blood thirsty god, Moses, Numbers, Numbers Pentateuch

Live Blogging the Bible: Numbers 5:11-31

June 21, 2013 Noah Lugeons 3 comments

by Noah Lugeons

Numbers is a tricky book. It rests there in between Leviticus and Deuteronomy, two of the most notorious books in the bible, and yet it manages to have very little reputation at all. It’s known for boring lists and the titular numbers, but little else. And you can read a few chapters in without seeing much more than that. It tries to put you to sleep with all the census lists and exact recounting of sacrifices, perhaps with hopes that you’ll overlook the talking donkey.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started this book off with no real idea what to expect and for the first four chapters I was starting to worry that we’d have nothing interesting to talk about in next week’s “Holy Babble” segment. And then I reached chapter five and we got something so weird it could fill the whole 9 minute segment if we wanted it to.

This is essentially a biblical Montel Williams recipe. If you want to know for sure if your woman has been faithful, apparently there’s just one way to know for sure and it’s outlined in detail for 20 full verses of Numbers, Chapter 5. Now, I’ll skimp a bit on the details, but essentially the process breaks down as follows:

Take your wife to the temple along with a tenth of an ephah of flour.
Get some water, put some dirt in it and muss up your wife’s hair.
Say a magical incantation over the dirty water that turns it into adulteress poison.
Make her drink it.

If she’s been faithful, she’ll be fine. If not, apparently her womb will fall out, she’ll be in horrible pain and she’ll never conceive.

Despite the divine seal of approval on this method, I suppose it’s easy to see why it fell out of favor. Obviously today’s women are much harder to talk into drinking dirt, but beyond that the price for finding out she’s been banging the UPS guy is pretty high. I’d kind of rather not know than have my wife’s womb fall out. But I suppose that’s just a by-product of the sissification of my secular lifestyle.

Categories: Live Blogging the Bible Tags: atheism, atheist, atheist bible commentary, biblical criticism, biblical sexism, Christian sexism, Numbers, Old Testament, the holy babble, women in the bible

Episode 18 – Partial Transcript

June 20, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons and Heath Enwright

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Sony’s new Pray Station Portable Pocket Placebo: When you need to credit random events to a nonexistent force and a sugar pill isn’t enough, reach for the Sony Pray Station.

PSPPP – Because Sony wouldn’t sue God, would they?

And now, the Scathing Atheist:

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s June 20th and we’re still waiting on that God fossil.

I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from the perpetual parade that is New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

It turns out they did make a good Superman movie… in 1980,
The Pope will continue to suck at the infallibility thing,
And Dan from Thank God I’m Atheist will join us for a little “Faith No Mormon”

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

Even in a city as diverse as New York, an atheist can still apparently be a rarity. I learned this while fighting crime the other day when a co-worker approached me to ask about this podcast. She’d heard from one of the other masked vigilantes that I was an outspoken atheist and she was curious. She’s one of these people that was raised with religion, accepted it without any real devotion and never really bothered to question it.

To these folks, the idea of atheism is completely foreign. God’s there because he was always there and why wouldn’t he be there?

She said she had a million questions, but since we were both on the clock, I asked her to narrow it down to one. And from her bouquet of inquiries, she plucked one that perfectly encapsulated how little she understood about the atheist worldview.

“Don’t you want to live in a world where you’re part of something larger than yourself?”

Of course, three words in she’d already fucked up. I don’t base my beliefs on the world I ‘want’ to live in, I base them in the world I do live in. To suggest otherwise betrays not just a lack of understanding about atheism, but a lack of understanding about understanding. It isn’t a rejection of a world without an afterlife or a loving god or a divine plan. Rather it’s a recognition of such a world.

But that’s not even the dumbest thing about this question. Now I’ve heard it before so I didn’t give her the blank faced glacial blink that it deserves, but I couldn’t give her the answer that she deserved either. I didn’t have enough time to explain the vastness and limitlessness of the universe I’m a part of. Or to elaborate on the modest role I’m playing in the enormity of history. Or to expound on the profundity of working my way through a world while authoring my own path.

From the perspective of a theist, the universe exists for them. It was brought into being for them and the billions of light years that surround them is just a decoration. What’s more, the grandest knowledge will never be known and the grandest knowledge that ever will be known is already known. The purpose may be mysterious, but the goal is established. The further the theistic mind wanders from the center of god’s love, the smaller and less significant the cosmos becomes.

But for a mind unleashed by the wonders of science, I know that from one perspective I’m an imperfection on a speck of dust and from another I’m as grand as a galaxy. I know that every cell in my body is born of billions of years of evolution and that their key elements are older still, forged in the hearts of stars too massive to comprehend.

When I raise my eyes to the heavens I’m no less in wonder of them than a person who looks there to see god. When I see a dim star nearly invisible amid the endless curtain of space I think of the journey those photons took along their epic voyage to our night sky Thousands or millions of years ago they were ejected from the boiling surface of some nuclear furnace at the speed of light.

Did they pass by some distant world along the way? Were they part of some beautiful alien sunrise before they got here? Did they narrowly miss a spacecraft from some species thousands of technological years beyond our own? Did they pass by some rogue planet drifting through the abyss of interstellar space? What astonishing marvels might they have happened by on their million year pilgrimage to my eye?

But the wonders of science aren’t limited to the grandiose. I can find that same awe when I look down at a community of ants or into a drop of water. I find that wonder when I contemplate the mundane because I know that the mystery isn’t any less beautiful because it’s solved. I look at the rainbow and I find that I admire it more because it was unweaved. Magnets are more fun when you do know how the fuck they work.

She asked me if I wanted to be part of something larger and by that she meant some tiny little god that rules over some tiny little fraction of some tiny little world. The product of tiny little minds from the distant past that had never tasted something as grand as a light year; a fiction conjured by an imagination that couldn’t begin to comprehend how big the cosmos truly was and how small they were in comparison.

But I didn’t have time to tell her all of this because somewhere out there, my arch-nemesis was plotting something counterintuitive and unnecessarily complicated so I had to settle for a short answer:

In the third episode of Cosmos there’s a phenomenal bit where Carl Sagan is answering questions for a bunch of kids at his old elementary school in Brooklyn. One of the kids asks him if the sun is considered part of the Milky Way and he gets that smile that teachers get when they get to tell you something you’ll never forget. He nods and he says, “You are considered part of the Milky Way.”

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow empiricist, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to continue being angrily correct?

Indeed I am. Also, you haven’t had any introductory announcements, so . . .

Anchoring the headlines as always is my fellow disbeliever in the evidently non-existent, Noah Lugeons. Noah, are you ready to begin your systematic weekly skewering of the bumbling, theist masses?

There’s only one way to know for sure…

In our lead story tonight, Warner Brothers might have found a use for churches after all; captive-audience marketing. With “Man of Steel”, the latest Zack Snyder computer generated, testosterone-vomit of a film hitting theaters this week, Warner Brothers wanted to make sure it had all the marketing angles covered, including sending “discussion guides”, “sermon notes” and a special “faith-friendly” version of the trailer to pastors all over the country.

Nobody can sell bad fiction like the Christian church.

Ironically, the “Superman” title should really belong to God’s eulogist, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Which makes one wonder whether Hasselhoff might have been a better casting move.

I agree. He would have made a way better Lois Lane than Amy Adams. Now, if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll have noticed that you don’t really need a preacher to point out the heavy handed Jesus allegories in the movie and if you haven’t seen it, (spoiler alert) it sucks.

Wait, wasn’t Superman created by a couple of Jews?

Yeah, but to be fair, so was Jesus.

So how overboard did they go on the Jesus stuff?

Couple of examples:

Young Superman asks his stepdad “Did God do this to me?” and Jonathan Kent responds “You have another father and he sent you here for a reason.”

As shitty a director as Snyder is, he might have done that by accident.

When an image of Superman’s Krypton dad says, “You can save them all,” Superman stretches out in a crucifixion pose, despite the fact that he’s floating through a jagged hole in a spaceship at the time so it’s kind of a counter-intuitive arm position.

Yeah, but they could’ve been referring to any crucified savior.

Superman, at age 33, is wrestling with a moral dilemma in a church. Behind him is a stained glass window with an image of Jesus wearing a red cape. The scene climaxes with the priest explaining that sometimes you just have to take a (quote) “leap of faith”.

I don’t know, that’s a pretty tall building.

The bad guy’s hench-girl says, amid mid-battle banter, “There’s no point in fighting, evolution always wins.”

To be fair, I did learn two things from watching this movie. It doesn’t matter if you can tell what’s going on, as long as you know it’s an action sequence and you should always take the 3D glasses off before facepalming.

Warner Bros. pushing “Super-Jesus” at the pulpit: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/14/superman-coming-to-a-church-near-you/

Moving on to a news item that isn’t just me bitching about a crappy movie, Pope Fran-Sista-Please admitted last week that there was a (quote) “gay lobby” in the Vatican. In the seemingly weekly ritual of the Vatican trying to somehow distance itself from the Pope’s declarations, the Pope-wranglers have this time opted for the “That shit never happened because you don’t have it on tape” defense.

Well I’m pretty sure gays don’t show up on video or in mirrors, so . . .

To be fair, this report comes from a private meeting between the Pope and a group of Latin American Catholic leaders so nobody at the meeting was trustworthy, but rumors of an increasingly powerful gay-lobby within the Vatican have been gaining legitimacy ever since the Vatileaks scandal.

The gay-lobby, also known as the Fudge PAC, has indeed come from behind, and has now managed to widen and deepen their impact on those assholes in Washington. I guess they’re tearing it up inside the Vatican now too.

It would also explain who was hiring all those male prostitutes. This would represent the first official confirmation of such a lobby, except that it isn’t official and it isn’t confirmed.

Seriously?! The reports that some Catholics might be gay is being called “unconfirmed” ?

“I can’t say for sure, so let’s not get cocky and call this ‘confirmed’, but is that a priest’s dick in my son’s ass? And now out of it . . . And now in it again.”

“I could swear that’s a . . . Take a look at the this angle here . . . Is it safe to say that my son was ‘unofficially’ gay raped by that priest who had his penis out in the video?”

What?! Gays?! Here!? Wearing these clothes?

Just because of all that holy seed on the walls?

And I love that they justify their paranoia by noting that Cardinals and Bishops engaged in gay relationships would be vulnerable to blackmail. Well, yeah, but not if you stopped being a bunch of queer-hatin’ rednecks about this shit. See how that works? If you stopped being bigots, they wouldn’t be afraid of your bigotry, right?

Pope Francis admits to “gay lobby” in the Vatican: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/11/pope-francis-gay-lobby-exists-inside-vatican/

And in other “It’s a gay! Kill it!” news, Danielle Powell, a lesbian student at Grace University in Nebraska was recently expelled for being a lesbian student at Grace University. Citing the general ickiness of gays, the Christian college gave her the boot only a few months before graduation.

Lesbians aren’t gay in the evil sense of the word. I thought everyone had agreed to a perfectly legitimate double standard on this. Gay bad, lesbian good.

The bible says nothing at all about women lying with women… I think it’s okay for women to masturbate as well, as long as they don’t squirt. But as much as the Omaha school hates gay people, they don’t seem to hate gay people’s money, as Powell received a $6000 bill from the school for matriculation. What’s worse is that it wasn’t tuition she owed them for the semester or anything. This was for reimbursement of federal loans that she’d only lost eligibility for because the school kicked her out.

And Grace University receives federal funding, yet somehow doesn’t have to follow federal anti-discrimination laws.

Yeah, according to the Department of Education, schools “controlled by religious organizations are exempt from some federal requirements that might conflict with the organizations’ religious tenets.”

So the spirit of the law is:

You can’t hate the homos… unless you cite your sources. “It’s not that I hate fags, as you can see here in this bronze age goat-herder’s manual, the omnipotent universe creator hates fags.”

It’s worth pointing out that in addition to their “no being in love with an unapproved gender” rules, this school also has rules against students having premarital sex, kissing on campus or even, prolonged hugging. Yes. This school has a policy about the acceptable duration of hugging.

Sounds like they’re pretty tight-assed . . . rosary anal beads might help.

Yeah, but then you’ll never get rid of the gays.

Lesbian expelled from Christian college for being a lesbian; charged tuition anyway: http://news.yahoo.com/christian-college-expels-lesbian-charges-tuition-233514855.html

And in “Uh, Uh, Uh, You Didn’t Say ‘Jesus Says’” news, 64 year old Margaret Doughty, a UK citizen who has spent more than 30 years living in the US was recently denied citizenship based on the non-religiousness of her morals.

“You can’t REASON OUT your belief system. If you do that, new information could change your opinion. All of a sudden we’re talking about open, rational discourse. This isn’t some sort of parliamentary democracy, you limey logic snob.”

Exactly. What’s worse is that this is really just a punishment for being honest on the paperwork. Among the questions she was asked was one of her willingness to take up arms in the defense of the country. We’re talking about a 64 year old woman so she could have just said, “Sure, what the hell”. But instead she opted for full disclosure.

Her answer read, in part, “Since my youth I have had a firm, fixed and sincere objection to the participation in war.” Now, this is a perfectly acceptable answer as long as you finish with, “Because it would make the baby Jesus cry.” But you’re not allowed to just find killing people in the name or regional conflict wrong; it has to be against your religion.

“It’s okay to have a fancy watch that works, but only show it to Christians twice a day. Don’t be an asshole.”

So based on her honesty and her unwillingness to pretend to be religious for the purposes of dodging the granny-draft, she was ultimately denied her bid for citizenship.

This really pisses me off. If we don’t let the British immigrants in, who’s going to correctly pronounce all the words that Americans don’t want to correctly pronounce?

Woman being denied citizenship for having non-religious morals: http://dividedundergod.com/2013/06/14/woman-being-denied-citizenship-because-her-morality-doesnt-come-from-religion/

And in “magical hat” news this week, the Quebec Soccer Federation was recently suspended by the Canadian Soccer Association because apparently both of these groups exist. The suspension was in response to a recent international uproar against Quebec for its failure to lift the long standing ban on wearing Turbans during matches.

In fairness, the “towel header” maneuver, does give an unfair advantage. Plus, these teams don’t need to employ a towel boy.

Those are both valid points, but instead, they cited safety concerns, which supporters of wearing magical hats point out is pretty silly, as soccer players all over the world wear turbans and there’s no record of turban-related-injuries. Of course, the Quebecois can’t just come out and say, “No because fuck people in turbans” in so many words.

Right, because Quebecois can’t speak English.

And according to people in France, they can’t speak French, either. Now I know a lot of atheists are on the fence about stuff like this and I understand it, because there is an element of xenophobia to some of these burka-ban type moves. But I for one support any move that denies some special privilege to religious people on the merit of what their imaginary friend demands.

At least the Jews are sensible enough to avoid similar yarmulke-related issues by entirely avoiding sports as a group.

Quebec bans soccer-players wearing turbans; idiots outraged: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/soccer-ban-on-sikh-turbans-leads-to-backlash-against-quebec/2013/06/14/63f30292-d523-11e2-b3a2-3bf5eb37b9d0_story.html?

And finally tonight, Rick Perry is a callous, misinformed, obtuse, asinine, fallacious, babbling, unthinking, dogmatic, sectarian zealot. And his mother dresses him funny.

And in breaking Rick Perry news, he thinks Texas needs to replicate the success of the TV ad that made New York City into the financial center it is today.

“Texas doesn’t suck because of all the shitty, racist, rednecks. It’s because we never put out an infocommercial. Everyone loves infomercials. Remember how well Ross Perot did?”

We first talked about Texas’s so called “Merry Christmas” bill back on episode 15. This bill essentially acts as an impediment to secular challenges against unconstitutional religious displays in schools and on public property. The bill sailed through the house and senate and could hardly land all the way on governor colostomy-hose’s desk before he signed it into law.

During the bill-signing extravaganza, in his tireless campaign to make George W. Bush look good in comparison, Perry was actually quoted as saying, “Freedom of religion isn’t freedom from religion,” to which secularists all over the country responded, “Yes, the fuck, it is.”

Yeah, freedom of religion is freedom to one religion. Exactly. You can’t go having no religions. We’re not hearing any of that shit.

The number of religions you are free to have shall be an integral number not equaling or exceeding 2, and not equal or less than 0.

And three is right out!

Nice

Thanks, but this asshole makes it pretty easy. He might as well have said, “Freedom of peaceable assembly don’t mean the cops have to peaceful.”

Right, “The first amendment isn’t a license to yell ‘fire’ in the middle of a burning building.”

Rick Perry signs “Merry Christmas” bill; says “Freedom of religion isn’t freedom from religion.” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/15/gov-rick-perry-religious-freedom-does-not-mean-freedom-from-religion/

Well that does it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for joining me.

And when we come back, Dan from the Thank God I’m Atheist podcast will join us and teach me the secret Mormon handshake.

Outro:

Before we close things out for the night we need to take a few seconds to recognize the magnanimity, intelligence and pulchritude of this week’s best people Jason, Anne, Michael, Lindsay, Benjamin and Bryan.

Jason, the sharp-witted demolition expert with a heart of gold; Anne, the exotic and deadly master of disguise; Michael, the devastatingly brilliant computer genius with a black belt; Benjamin, whose sharp tongue and rugged good looks are urban legends in 14 countries; Bryan, whose indispensable wisdom is almost as valued as his katana skills and, of course, Lindsay, the fearless and brilliant leader of the team. Together, this duo of trios is known notoriously throughout the halls of villainy as the Fantastic Six, the Dirty Half-Dozen or sometimes the Hexa-Decimators. They’ve all earned our admiration and gratitude by taking bold steps to keep the world safe from stupidity by giving us money.

Not everyone has the magnificence and biological acuity that it takes to give us money, but if you share Jason, Anne, Michael, Lindsay, Benjamin and Bryan’s altruistic commitment and intellectual refinement, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you’d like to help but you’re money is yours damn it, you can also help us a ton by swinging over to iTunes and leaving us a good review there. Every review makes a big difference and it’s a great way that you can help us expand our audience. It also takes, like, 9 seconds and it’s free.

I also need to re-thank Lindsay (yes, the fearless leader) for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologize to 51% of the world’s population for it taking 18 episodes for us to have a woman’s voice doing the quote. I also want to plug Lindsay’s very cool Facebook page, “Have You Hugged an Atheist Today?”, which you’ll find linked on the shownotes for this episode. Her and her sister run it, they always manage to find some funny stuff and they get good discussions going on the big issues, so I strongly encourage you to check it out.

https://www.facebook.com/HaveYouHuggedAnAtheistToday

And hey, while you’re there, you might as well like the Scathing Atheist page as well. And then go to Twitter and follow us there. And then go to YouTube and subscribe to us there. And then go to the blog and subscribe there. And then go to Stitcher and listen to our archives there.

Lastly tonight, I want to thank Lucinda for the bible lesson, Heath for the color-commentary and, of course, Dan from the Thank God I’m Atheist podcast. He and Frank have one of the best produced atheist podcasts out there. They’re funny, well-informed and they provide a really important voice to the movement so I strongly suggest you give them a day in court as well. Again, you’ll find a link on the show notes. And while you’re there, you can hear an extended version of the interview on our “Extras” page, along with a bunch of other cool extra stuff.

Thank God I’m Atheist Website: http://www.thankgodimatheist.com/

Thank God I’m Atheist on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/thank-god-im-atheist-podcast/id481105796

Thank God I’m Atheist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TGIAtheist

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.

“Messiah of Steel” – A Movie Review

June 16, 2013 Noah Lugeons 3 comments

by Noah Lugeons

I’m a fan of movies, but I won’t pretend to be qualified to critique them. Sure, in the “everyone’s a critic” sense, I can tell you if I liked a movie (I usually didn’t) and why (or why not). But I’m not going to be able to comment intelligently on the cinematography or the score or the nuances of the performances. But I like to think of myself as something of an expert at critiquing irritating Christian themes that sneak their way into otherwise non-Jesus-things, so it is in that capacity that I’d like to take on Zack Snyder’s latest in a series of brain-splitting computer-generated testosterone-vomit films, “Man of Steel”.

This is the same guy that brought us “300”, which you’ll recall for its endless sequences of computer generated abs moving in alternately really slow and really fast motion. This is the same guy that managed to stay relatively true to the graphic novel when he made “Watchmen”, but still somehow managed to make it suck. And now Warner Brothers has given him Superman to artistically rape.

I was nervous as soon as I saw that Snyder was attached to the picture, but I hoped that producer Christopher Nolan would be there to hold his leash and keep him from fucking it up too bad. And while I hated everything beyond the first 30 minutes or so, I’m sure that Summer audiences will eat this crap up with a spoon and we’ll be treated to a couple more of Snyder’s feeble attempts at film-making in the inevitable trilogy to come.

So the big summer blockbuster Superhero movie sucked. Not exactly a blog worthy occurrence. I’d have left my bitching on Facebook and Twitter if it weren’t for all the heavy handed, brutally overdone Jesus allegories that plagued this movie that was managing to suck plenty enough by itself without Jesus.

I should admit up front that I’d already been researching a story about how this movie was being marketed to Christians, so I did go into it looking for the Jesus stuff. I was primed to find Jesus allegories and I did. But Zack Snyder has never been accused of subtlety and I’d venture that blind people who were hard of hearing could have picked up on the Jesus allegories in this flick just by smelling the print.

And before I’m accused of projecting these onto the film, let me give you a couple of examples of what I’m talking about (and don’t worry, no spoilers):

Superman is conflicted. He’s sitting in a church talking with a priest. The priest is telling him about the importance of sometimes taking a “leap of faith” in something you don’t trust. When we see Superman, the background is a stained-glass window of Jesus wearing a red cape. When we see the priest the background is just a big crucifix.
Superman is in a spaceship and he punches the wall out. A friendly character tells him “You can save Lois,” and then, as he continues the line with the words, “You can save all of them”, Superman holds out his arms in a crucifixion pose for no fucking reason at all and floats out into space. He holds this pose, which is completely pointless and counter-intuitive when one is floating through a jagged hole in a spacecraft, for a couple of seconds in case anyone was looking down at their popcorn.

These were the worst offenders that I noticed, but there were plenty more.

So one can’t help but wonder why all this Jesus crap got stuck into a Superman movie. Is Superman a particularly Christ like character? You’d have to really stretch to say that he was. Sure, he performs miracles and he’s moral, but Jesus can’t fly and Superman can’t make wine. Plus, martyrdom is sort of the key to the Jesus thing and Superman doesn’t die. Is Superman more Christ-like than Spiderman or Martian Manhunter? I think not.

Christ allegories aren’t really a signature of Snyder’s work. This movie had all the things we’ve come to expect from Zack; more CGI than reality, long and horribly unsatisfying action sequences, a crappy script, a disappointed audience… but where’s all this Jesus coming from?

I can’t help but feel that ultimately it was a marketing ploy and the way that the film is being marketed through churches backs me up on this. The studio wagered that if they got the Christians talking this movie up they’d make a lot of money even if it sucked (and it did). They saw all those Passions dollars rolling in and they said, “why go to the trouble of making a good movie when you can just make a good preview and stick some Jesus stuff in there?”

Sadly, they’ll win the bet. I absolutely hated the movie, but I’m sure I’ll be in the minority. I’m sure I’ll spend the next month hearing how it was “almost as good as the Avengers” (a sentiment I actually agree with, but that’s another story for another day) and everyone involved in making the Jesus gambit will see it pay off. And in the sequel, I’m sure Lex Luthor will be the anti-christ and in the third one Braniac will nail Superman to a kryptonite cross.

This isn’t much of a problem if it’s just the Superman franchise they’re fucking up with it. But we do have to consider the consequences if this becomes a trend. Will we get more religious figures sneaking their way into super hero movies? Will the Hulk ride upon a winged horse? Will Ironman force all his servants to get circumcised? Will Wonder Woman immaculately conceive? Will Will Gleek the Monkey die for our sins?

It’s hard to imagine that there’s a way to make the “superhero” genre suck more, but it’s comforting to know that they’re working on it.

Categories: General Bitches and Gripes Tags: atheism, atheist, Christ, jesus, Man of Steel, Man of Steel Jesus allegories, Man of Steel review, Superman, Superman and Jesus, Zack Snyder

Looking to Heaven for the Answers

June 14, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons

The other night I was standing on my back porch and glancing up at the thumbnail moon. New York City is likely the worst place in the world to live for an astronomy buff, but on a clear night we still get eight or nine visible stars. I glanced from the moon to one of them and I found myself in a familiar reverie.

I don’t know what star I was looking at or how far away it was, and odds are that if it was bright enough to see through the New York light pollution it was way too big to harbor intelligent life, but I found myself imagining it anyway. Perhaps there was a tiny ball of rock floating around that distant star that had at least the first dustings of unicellular organism. Perhaps spinning around that celestial furnace was the answer to whether or not we are alone in the universe.

And of course, perhaps there was more. Perhaps this star was home to some intelligent species; one that might have grown elsewhere and now colonized a small patch of atmosphere somewhere around the point of light I was glancing up at. In fact, it’s possible that on their way to my eyes, those exact photons had passed right by some being with an intellect I cannot fathom.

Floating around that star or some other there might be a species that has figured out the cure for illness, the secrets of interstellar travel, the antidote to war. Perhaps when our ancestors lifted their eyes to the Milky Way and hoped for knowledge, the knowledge was actually up there to be found.

Theist or atheist, we all look to heaven for the answers. Science has a better track record of actually finding them so I’ll bet on them. But I often think of these reflections when religious people claim that science robs you of your sense of wonderment. When I look to the heavens, I’m in no less awe than they.

Categories: Random Tags: atheism, atheist, extraterrestrial life, science, skepticism, space, the wonders of science, wonder

Episode 17 – Partial Transcript

June 13, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons and Heath Enwright

SPONSOR:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of Biblical shampoo, Seconds Acts Brain and Body wash. Our maximum strength indoctrination formula is powerful enough to wash away IQ points.

Hell, by the time we’re done with you you’ll be buying shampoo with vitamins in it. Like your hair can metabolize vitamins…

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

INTRO:

It’s Thursday, It’s June 13th and I can prove that if I have to.

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

On this week’s episode,

A high school valedictorian will boldly stand with the many against the few.
American Atheists will give the devil a place in Florida to rest his cloven feet.
And the New England Patriots guarantee us at least one more season of Tebow jokes,

But first, the Diatribe.

DIATRIBE:

There’s an apologetics tactic that seems to be gaining popularity of late. This one isn’t showing up in any formal debates, mind you. This one is reserved for the “infantry” of religious debaters, the drooling ass-hats that you find commenting on You-Tube videos and trolling Reddit. It’s a tactic I call “God, the ingredient-less sandwich”.

It goes like this: First, I, the apologist, upon seeing your blog post or YouTube video or whatever, tell you how wrong you’ve got it. Then I offer a definition of god that is so vague and meaningless it would make Deepak Chopra blush. By the time I’m done, I’ve defined god to be absolutely nothing. He’s a sandwich with no ingredients. He’s “all things” or he’s “the transcriber of physical laws” or he’s “the part of us that knows the divine” or he’s “innate sense of goodness in each and every one of us.”

And then you, the counter-apologist, have nothing to argue with. Sure, you can point out that if the term “god” just means “all things” then there’s no point in the term “god” because clearly we both agree that “all things that exist” exist. You can point out that if, by god, I don’t mean an all-knowing, all-powerful, omnibenevolent, all-creating, conscious force, then I should probably come up with a different word to use, since that’s what the rest of English has decided that the word “god” means.

But I’m never wrong. Because whatever you say about god, I’ll just exclude from my definition. Let me give you a real world example:

I do a segment on the blog called “Live Blogging the Bible” where I jot down some of the craziest shit in the book as I come across it. Among the passages that inspired a blog entry was the one in Exodus where Moses outwrestles god by calling upon the magical powers of his son’s penis wreath.

So some theist pops on and gives a response along the lines of “Tee-hee, yeah, this part is really silly. But boy is that book still really, really divine though. Like, really, really importantly, sacredly, divinely inspired. But tee-hee, yeah, the individual passages are really silly.”

This has been a pretty common criticism of the whole “Holy Babble” segment. A Catholic friend of mine told me I was missing the point of Christianity by focusing on the bible. Who reads Leviticus, after all? I felt obligated to point out that Leviticus is the one they use to justify the homophobia thing so, you know, it matters. But as I’ve said before that’s not the point of the segment. We’re not out to “disprove” the bible or offer a textual critique. We’re here to point and laugh and make dick jokes about it.

So I respond, he responds, I respond. He seems overwrought by the fact that somehow his innocent defense of the bible on a website called the “Scathing Atheist” turned into a debate. He gives me his ingredient-less god in the form of “I don’t claim to know all the answers like you atheists do. I don’t claim to know what god is. I’m just open to the possibility and believe that it’s true.”

Well bully for you.

And this “liberal” defense of theism; this “I’m open minded and you’re not because I’m willing to believe logically incoherent things and you aren’t” defense really pisses me off. It brings out the worst in me. These nearsighted fucktards defend some wishy-washy, intangible notion of religion and because of that, they think they can wash their hands of all the bad shit religion does.

Religion starts wars. Yes, but not my type of religion.

Religion oppresses women and gays. Yes, but not my theological bent.

Religion opposes science. Yes, but not my vision of god.

It doesn’t fucking matter, jackass. If you’re setting out to defend “god” against the atheists, you don’t get to just defend your gelatinous definition, because that’s not the only one I’m attacking. Yes, it’s bullshit, too, but it’s not the only bullshit. You’re involving yourself in a social movement and if you win, you don’t just win for your little slice of your side. You win for every homophobic, misogynistic, child indoctrinating, anti-science, anti-education, anti-abortion, anti-equality fucktard who wears the cross. And I think it’s worth noting that there are a hell of alot more of those Christians than there are of you.

Keep in mind that I’m not talking about what you believe. Believe whatever you want. I might make fun of it, but I really don’t give a shit what you believe. I’m talking about what you choose to publicly defend; what you choose to put the weight of your intellect behind.

So eventually this commenter writes me off under the label of “religious intolerance”. What, like that’s supposed to be an insult? I’m wear the “religious intolerance” label pretty proudly. I spent about 40 hours a week being actively intolerant of religion and the rest of my time being passively intolerant.

The fact is that these would be apologists are defending the side that makes good people kill other good people. To that I simply say, “You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re not, so I’m ashamed of you for you.”

HEADLINES:

Joining me for headlines today is my freelance confessor Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to hear my sins?

As long as you don’t show me video again, like the one when you <<<Bleep>>> all using just the one cup.

I was young and I needed the protein.

In our lead story tonight, churches around the country celebrated their unconstitutional and illegal tax exemptions last Sunday by telling the IRS to go fuck itself. Yes, once again it’s that time of year; the time of year when preachers and pastors and priests go in front of their congregations, deliver politically charged addresses that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that their tax exemptions are unlawful, videotape these sermons and send them to the IRS.

This doesn’t set any unreasonable precedents. I’m pretty sure the Confederacy still does slavery one day a year. Although I doubt they send the videos to the White House.

They call this ritual “Pulpit Freedom Sunday”, and it’s a reaction to that miswired portion of the Christian brain that sees “unrivaled societal privilege” and calls it “persecution”. By law, churches lose their tax exempt status if and when they endorse a political view. As their exemptions are based on the antiquated notion that a church’s primary function is the public good; using that institution to endorse a candidate or tell parishioners how to vote on an upcoming proposition is a clear violation of that societal contract.

The tax exemption for churches is especially egregious to me. Religious groups taken as a whole, own about 7% of habitable land on the earth. In this country, they don’t pay property tax on any of that. Lots of shenanigans where personal homes are somehow also tax exempt houses of worship, but nobody lets me in when I knock really loud late at night wanting to pray.

And somehow, that’s not enough for over 1000 religious leaders across the nation. They feel that they deserve tax exemption just because “up yours”. What’s more, they shouldn’t have to do anything to earn it, they shouldn’t have to conform to any laws or regulations and they should get a magical pony.

They’re already getting away with this. Having their sky-cake and eating it too. Churches are getting the exemptions, and they’re clearly helping organize votes for politicians that share their distaste for science.

“All you have to do, is shut up and take your impossibly over-generous status. Just don’t make a sex tape showing your greedy dicks in the taxpayers’ asses”

And yet they can’t manage that. They instead opt for the “do somethin’ muthatucka” approach. They provide the IRS clear evidence that they’re in violation of the law and dare them to act on it. The IRS, herein referred to as “Religion’s prison bitch”, responds by doing absolutely nothing and continuing to allow these leeches to flaunt their refusal to abide by even the most cursory attempts to limit their undeserved dispensation.

Christianity prefers syrup, and the IRS has obliged.

I also find it interesting, that without batting an eye at the thick ropes of irony on their face, the Christian vote went to Romney, whose religion defines marriage less like “one man and one woman” . . . and more like the porn industry.

Pulpit Freedom Sunday: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/09/today-is-pulpit-freedom-sunday-when-christian-pastors-dare-the-irs-to-revoke-their-tax-exemption/

And in “It’s-Just-a-Bench-You-Bloviating-Condom-Malfunction” news, we turn our eyes to north Cuba, also known as south New York City also known as the national death-queue, also known as Florida. This story begins with a six ton granite monument sitting in front of the Bradford County Courthouse in Starke, Florida, proudly displaying a list of secular values like “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”.

Now that god’s dead, can we have other gods after him? There’s gotta be some good midrash about this . . .

Anyway, maybe they’ll be able to find a Christian church somewhere in Florida. A place like that might be able to use six tons of propaganda to put out front.

And when American Atheists challenged the legality of it that’s probably what they should have done. Instead, they opted for the “fix-slavery-by-making-everyone-a-slave” approach and said that it was fine for Christians to put a monument up because anybody could put a monument up. So the atheists opted for the second best solution and offered a monument of their own.

This is great, because a whole bunch of Christians are going to be terrified of the secret Trojan Horse Satan sculpture us vile secularists are conjuring up.

Unfortunately they set aside your “Trojan Horse Satan” proposal and opted instead for a 1500 pound granite bench adorned by secular quotes from the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Madalyn Murray O’Hair. And, in an effort to complement the existing ten commandments structure, it will also include a list of Old Testament punishments for violating said commandments, including being stoned, beaten or burned to death.

Fantastic – I’m sure the Christians will appreciate a nice homage like that built into the otherwise entirely demonic bench.

Actually, in a stunning display of cognitive dissonance, Christians are outraged. They manage a paradoxical simultaneous outrage that someone would dare to question the legitimacy of a monument endorsing a particular belief system and that someone would dare to assert the legitimacy of a monument endorsing a particular belief set.

Probably the same mental trait that allows them to engrave the words “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images” without recognizing the irony. And again, there are thick, arcing ropes of irony in the room.

Atheists give satan a place to rest his cloven feet: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/7/atheists-set-unveil-first-public-monument-florida-/

Our next story takes us to Liberty, South Carolina, a town known for it’s upscale retailers like Family Dollar and nothing else. Because that’s honestly the only store in the whole fucking town.

Situated about 30 miles from anywhere you’d ever intentionally be, Liberty was home to a recent row between the ACLU, the FFRF and a bunch of Christian turd nuggets that liked to open their city council meetings with prayers.

We’ve been circulating that memo about the 1st of those 10 particularly important amendments since around Christmas of 1791. I know these people aren’t the most intelligently designed beings, but come on…

Yeah, you’d think they’d have heard it by now, but not so for high school valedictorian Roy Costner. Incensed by the sudden political pressure from folks what ain’t ever from ‘round here, Costner decided to use his valedictory speech to send a clear message against the ACLU and their damned Constitution of these United States.

Costner sounds like he’s bound for greatness. Valedictorians from Liberty are pretty much guaranteed admittance to North Northwest South Carolina Community College, and that’s like the Oral Roberts of North Northwest South Carolina community colleges.

And Costner proved that he’s got what it takes to stand in the proud ranks of North Northwest South Carolina’s fightin’ Fry Cooks by cleverly employing a surreptitious tactic called “lying”. He submitted one speech to the school for approval but then, upon taking the podium, dramatically ripped up his prepared speech and instead offered the Lord’s prayer. Because he’s an asshole.

“I had this whole speech prepared, but <DRAMATIC RIP> I’m going to improvise something entirely original . . . Follow along if you know the words . . . Our Father…”

What we have here is the specter of Christian persecution once again rearing it’s imaginary head. This podunk redneck can’t see beyond the Wal Mart on 93 up toward Greenville and actually thinks he’s part of the oppressed minority. The fact that nobody can get elected to national office in this country without swearing fealty to Jesus somehow fails to permeate his shell.

When a town in the pioneer Confederate State is called Liberty, the Christian white dudes there ABSOLUTELY DO NOT get to complain about oppression.

Douche-bag valedictorian delivers prayer for speech: http://www.christianpost.com/news/interview-valedictorian-roy-costner-iv-on-ripping-up-his-approved-speech-reciting-lords-prayer-97552/

And in the “There-are-only-atheists-in-foxoles-because-we’re-not-discriminating-hard-enough” news, the House armed services committee recently struck down a measure that would have created humanist chaplains to serve the near one in four American soldiers who have no religious affiliation.

Those atheist soldiers should have thought about this before they went and died before finding the lord. Of course the chaplains don’t tell the surviving parents that their atheist child is in hell outright. But they’re required to at least address how nice heaven would have been if they weren’t atheist, which is always awkward.

Arguing that humanists chaplains don’t believe anything, Republican pubic louse John Fleming of Louisiana said that humanists would make (quote) “A mockery of chaplaincy,” adding that if an atheist chaplain had to tell a family that their child had died they would tell them (quote) “You know, that’s it. Your son’s just worms.” And then he corrected himself by adding, “I mean, worm food.” Because he was too stupid to be that stupid correctly the first time around.

“You can’t talk to people about death without mass opiates to distribute.”

But don’t worry, it’s not like republicans hang their political hat on loving the troops or anything.

Also, to be fair, not all pubic lice are Republican Christians.

House Armed Services Committee kills humanist chaplaincy bill: http://www.goddiscussion.com/110407/house-armed-services-committee-kills-humanist-chaplain-amendment-for-military-service-members-by-a-vote-of-43-18/

And in military news this week, Jesus has declared war on the porn. We know because Pastor Jay Dennis told us so, and if anybody knows about the use of pornography, it’s apparently Pastor Jay Dennis, of Lakeland, Florida, whose infatuation with pornography has become his life’s work.

Well he’s gonna run into some opposition from the pastor-bation campaign known as “BCB” or “Bishops Choking Bishops”. They argue that if priests were to be denied access to porn, you might start hearing about rape scandals one day.

Even though he totally doesn’t stroke his own dick because, you know, that’s sinful, he presents himself as something of an expert on the sinful autoerotic stimulation of penises. He also doesn’t look at porn and only knows so much about it because he has vowed to obsessively take on the evil specter of pornography even if it means that he has to think about naked people fornicating all the time, day and night, forever.

Yeah I only go on the internet for the articles too. The reason that typing any single letter will autocomplete to a porn site is because I get my news on those sites.

Pastor Dennis is calling his single-minded preoccupation with men fondling their own genitals, “One million men porn free” and to end the evils of pornography, he often spends upwards of 16 hours a day thinking about all those poor men stroking their engorged, throbbing cocks; occasionally choking themselves a little bit at the end or maybe working in some ass play.

The fact that we can’t blow ourselves clearly disproves intelligent design. And the fact that we keep trying anyway indicates even less intelligence.

Calling pornography (quote) “the new bubonic plague in the church”, Pastor Dennis vows to figuratively “beat” every bishop that doesn’t take on the evils of pornography. To figuratively choke every chicken that doesn’t have the guts to take on this issue. To figuratively spank every monkey that covers its ears, eyes and mouth to the problem of pornography.

He should look into my new browser censorship software called “Stroke Ward”

Something about “Hand of God Job”

Pastor seeks one million porn-free men: http://www.christianpost.com/news/so-baptist-convention-2013-one-million-men-porn-free-among-featured-programs-at-annual-meeting-97526/

And in this week’s crucifix masturbation report, former Catholic student and current second cumming joke waiting to happen Valerie Dodds enraged officials at her former school, St. Pius X High School when she published nude videos of herself on school grounds masturbating with one of those little Jesus on the cross action figures that Catholics like so much.

We need to get this girl on our staff . . . And we should hire her too.

Basically, she just out scathed us by a mile; we just got served . . . We might need to dance back. “So you guys do a podcast about atheism? . . . That’s pretty cool . . . I just broke into a house of worship and came on the messiah’s face . . . Your move assholes . . . “

And then she just dropped the mic and walked off stage.

And while we here at the Scathing Atheist have occasionally been guilty of failing to fully vet our stories, you can bet your ass that I researched this one until I ran out of lotion. Because she’s smoking fucking hot. And she’s got a crucifix in her vag.

This is a way better take on the “pussy riot” concept. So did she cum or what?

I never made it that far into the video, honestly. She was later cited for public nudity for the stunt, so Dodds retaliated by returning to the school dressed in nothing but the legal minimum of a pair of panties and nipple covers, because she apparently entered the world by first escaping from a fourteen year old’s wet dream.

Also a 31-year-old’s wet dream during a post-shit nap earlier today.

Monsignor Perkinton, a representative of the school told the media that the school would respond by praying for the young woman. And I’d like to think that when you have a 19 year old porn star constantly showing up at your door in her panties, you should be done praying.

Her site should be called porn-huskers.com

Now that we’re not really on the subject, Jesus works well for several fetishes. My favorite is post-crucifixion necrophilia combined with the stigmata orifice thing. Any chance you have a snappy title for that genre? Must make pun . . .

A dirty Cristos? The holiest of holies? A wrist-job?

Former Catholic student breaks into school to videotape herself masturbating with a crucifix: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/07/nebraska-catholic-school-praying-after-former-student-masturbates-with-crucifix/

That does it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for joining me.

And when we return, we’ll be back.

SKIT:

Narrator: In the beginning, there were two gods. And while many know the story of the more ambitious brother, Jehovah, only a few know the story of his twin brother Mikey. Both were gifted with omnipotence, but only Jehovah was gifted with ambition.

This is the story of Mikey:

(angelic choir, door opening)

“Whoa! What the hell is that?!”

I call it light.

Well… don’t you think it kind of blows? I’m blinded over here.

Oh, bro, you haven’t seen anything yet.

That’s cause I’m fuckin’ blinded.

I’ve got a whole plan… heavens, seas, animals…

Dude, unless this is at least tangentially related to Super Smash Brothers, I’m not interested.

Mikey, this is really important stuff.

(dismissively) Whatever, man. I’m going to bed.

Narrator: And as Mikey slept, his brother continued with his momentous plan…

(Snoring sounds, Splashing water)

(grumbling) Now what?!

(Sloshing through water, door opens and closes)

What the fuck are you doing?

I call it water.

Well, you think you could make it suck a little less?

Don’t worry, I’m going to create solid ground next.

Well can you hurry the hell up? It’s kinda hard to sleep with all this churning and rolling and salty crap getting sprayed in my face.

Yeah, I should be done with the ground tomorrow sometime.

Tomorrow!? What’s wrong with now?

This is a lot of work, bro. I promise… I’ll get to it as soon as I can. I’m still separating all these seas.

Fine… just hurry the hell up.

(door slams)

Narrator: And on the second day, Mikey rested… And on the third day, Mikey continued to rest. And on the fourth day he mostly just smoked bong hits.

(Bong sound effect)

PART TWO:

Narrator: Four days after the first intrusion of Jehovah’s light, Mikey awoke within a sealed wooden enclosure he’d used to avoid his brother’s twisted machinations. Beyond the wooden walls he could hear strange sounds and his curiosity eventually bested his lethargy. Mikey ventured once more into Jehovah’s new creation.

(Door opens)

Yo, Joey!

(mutters) My name’s Jehovah

I’m digging that big orange ball of flame… it’s nice. I’d have put it a little higher up, but hey, that’s just me.

It actually rises and falls back over on that side. It moves kind of slow. I’m trying to get it to exactly 24 hours but it’s a pain in the ass.

How close are you?

I’m within a minute.

Close enough.

(mutters) Isn’t that always your answer…

Loving what you did with the sky, little bro. Little white patches floating by… nice touch.

Clouds, I call ‘em. You should see it at night. I did stars and everything.

Nice. So what are you planning with this whole thing?

(slightly maniacal laugh) Well… I still gotta finish the moon, but then the next couple days I’m working on animals.

What the fuck are animals?

Little living, sentient things that’ll eat each other and compete for limited resources. It’ll be fun to watch.

Sounds like a pain in the ass. Are you gonna take care of all those things? You know… take ‘em for walks and stuff?

Nope. They’re on their own in a cruel world, bro. But hold on, I haven’t told you the…

Wait… a cruel world? Why would you create a cruel world?

Cruelty will act as a lesson about the vastness of my power. I’ll creating suffering so that they can enjoy bounty in its absence.

That doesn’t make a lick of sense.

No… it does. See, you can’t have good without evil.

Yes you can. You’re omnipotent, remember? You can have anything you want.

Anyway, don’t worry about it. That’s not even the best part. I haven’t told you about ‘man’ yet.

(skeptically) What are mans?

Men.

Okay, what are mens?

No, man, but when you pluralize it, you say ‘men’.

This is already weird and you haven’t even told me what they are.

I work in mysterious ways, Mikey.

Whatever… fine. So what are ‘men’?

Okay… this is so cool… They’ll be like little versions of us. My own image and everything. And I’ll give them free will and I’ll stick them in a garden paradise…

Well that’s nice of you. I was afraid…

… but I’ll put a tree in there with really delicious fruit on it and I’ll tell them not to eat it and when they do… and you know they will… anyway, when they do, I’ll curse them for all of eternity.

… what?

And then I’ll fuck with ‘em for a few centuries and totally remove myself from their world. And if they don’t believe I exist after that, I’ll condemn them to spend eternity burning in a fiery pit.

What’s a fiery pit?

It’s something I’m going to create just to be a miserable ass place to spend eternity in.

Um …Why?

Because I want them to see how awesome I am. They’ll love me or they’ll burn in hell in an unending orgy of tragic pain for all of time. It’ll be great!

Dude… you’ve lost your fucking mind. I’m sorry to just lay it out there like that, but you’re fucking crazy. That’s the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard. Seriously… I should create mental asylums just so I could lock you in one.

Go ahead. See if you ever figure out how magnets work, dick.

Narrator: God turned his back on his brother and Mikey retreated to his ark to play some video games. It would be centuries before he came out again and by then, his brother had so irrevocably fucked up his experiment that he’d simply given up on it and moved on to a new project.

Thus ends the gospel of Mikey.

OUTRO:

Before we snuff the candles this week, I wanted to respond to a few concerns a fan of the show raised on an otherwise very complimentary review on iTunes. Il Divertente points out that the show is funny, well-written, thoughtful and great, all of which are true. He then goes on to share two minor irritants:

One is my persistent mispronunciation of atheist as atheist instead of atheist. He or she is, of course, correct and as she or he is not the first person to point it out, and I hope he or she noticed the concerted effort I’ve been making to get it right. I’ve got a bit of a lisp I have to work around and there’s something about the word “Atheist” that always trips me up.

The second concern was that of my hidden identity. He or she correctly points out that my name is not actually “Noah Lugeons” and wonders what I’m hiding from. Well, Il Divertente, I would direct your attention to another person who hid behind a secret identity and redeemed humanity through his suffering. And that person’s name was Batman.

Now clearly, Batman had a way cooler car than me because who needs a car in New York, but I think we can all admit that Noah Lugeons is a way funnier pseudonym than Batman.

I should also point out that if you’d like to unmask the Scathing Atheist, an easy way to find out my secret identity is to give us money. Because of the way paypal sets up its donation system, everybody who donates to the show actually sees my name on the confirmation email they receive.

Which brings us to a quick recognition of the unparalleled awesomeness of this week’s most exceptional carbon based lifeforms, Richard and April. Already among the pantheon of the world’s greatest people for having donated to the show in the past, these two transcendently admirable and admirably transcendent individuals have earned a spot within the pantheon of the pantheon by doubling down and donating to our show not once but twice.

We make a lot of jokes about pretty much everything, but we are truly humbled by the generosity of our listeners and thanks you sincerely, even if it means having to be sincere for a few seconds. If you, too, would like to join the pantheon of the world’s best people, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you want to help but all your money is tied up in Linguini-based energy, you can always help us out by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes, telling someone about the show and then forcing them to download it at gunpoint.

That does it for us tonight but we’ll be working hard to earn another half hour of your life next week. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook and subscribe to us on YouTube.

I want to thank Heath for everything he does to make this show possible. I also need to thank Lucinda for narrating the skit and putting up with the mostly unpaid second full time job I’ve decided to take on. I also need to thank Wesley from Atheist Nomads for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. He’s got a really fun and rowdy podcast going on over there. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend you give him and Dustin a day in court. You’ll find a link to their podcast on the shownotes for this episode.

http://www.atheistnomads.com/

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 your truly and yes, I did have my permission.

A Non-Trivial Problem

June 12, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons

I’ve been trapped in an endless and ultimately pointless debate on this blog for over a week now. It all began when a pseudo-theistic pseudo-apologist commented on one of my “Live Blogging the Bible” posts with something that amounted to

“Tee-hee, yeah, this is a pretty silly part of the bible. I agree. But still, man is that book incredible and divine.”

Of course, I haven’t read the whole book and have barely crested the “preface” stage, but I still have to take issue with this assertion. The book cannot be more than the sum of its parts. If there are any genuinely meritorious parts of the book, one would still have to weigh them against the unscrupulous horrors in other parts of the book. And honestly, the rest of the book would have to pretty damn good to make up for the misguided anti-morality of the first three books.

The crux of the apologists argument was that my cursory reading of the bible was worthless as I wasn’t taking the time to understand it in context. I was also focused only on the bible and not the rich theology that has evolved through the ages. Christianity, he argued, is not the bible. The bible is just a starting point and the theology of the faith had advanced so much since the days of Moses’ foreskin aided wrestling match.

I pointed out that it’s not really possible to say that theology “advanced”, as one can no more say that theology of today is in accordance with the divine than the theology of yesteryear. It’s like talking about a breakthrough in homeopathy or phrenology. If the endeavor has no measurable value, it can’t be said to advance. Advance suggests a destination.

Instead of answering that charge, my esteemed opponent instead accused me of “religious intolerance” as though I did not boast of it. He suggested that I’d simply divided the world into the good people who are against religion and the bad people who are in favor of it. It was a thinly veiled charge of anti-theistic bigotry that rested on my continued insistence that without a goal one can draw no nearer to the goal. How dare I be so intolerant of people making bold and demonstrably false truth claims while insisting that they’re point of view should be respected and accepted without the burden of evidence?

This is a common tack from the “liberal” theist (and by liberal I refer here to their theology, not their politics). Atheists are bullies that are every bit as dogmatic as the believers. We’re intolerant of religious people (which is true) which means we’re just like the Muslims who are intolerant of the Jews (which is bullshit). They, on the other hand, are agnostics with a property-less god and the only honest position: self-imposed ignorance. We should just live and let live and who cares if fundamentalists stand in the way of science or oppress gays or mistreat women? That’s not religion’s fault.

It is an intellectually dishonest position and what’s more, anyone smart enough to take this position is also smart enough to see why it’s bullshit. Religious extremism is (as the name would suggest) simply a point on the spectrum of religiosity. Some people have benign tumors but that doesn’t mean tumors aren’t a problem. Fundamentalism is a problem that (a) all religions share and (b) cannot be found outside of a religious context. This would suggest that fundamentalism is a necessary byproduct of religion. And it really doesn’t matter what a bunch of Muslim scholars say about peace and love if the true believers are hacking people to death in the streets.

This is not a “live and let live” situation. This is a situation that demands intolerance. Religion is a non-trivial problem.

No rational person would wish for the destruction of the world. Such a proposition is as irrational as any you might propose. What’s more, no person irrational enough to wish for the destruction of the world could possibly acquire the means and assistance he ~~or she~~ would need to make it happen. While technology does give us the means to global catastrophe, it is hard to imagine that anyone with the stated goal of world destruction could find anyone willing to lend a hand. Sure, a clever statesmen could use nationalism and deceit to trick enough people into helping him, but the very nature of logic forbids any large scale attempt to bring about the end of one’s own species.

But, of course, if logic can be removed, there is no such safeguard. If one can be convinced without evidence that a whole different universe exists after you die that is way better and way more important than this petty world, you could overcome your natural survival instinct and happily march the planet toward the apocalypse that your god has promised you.

No doubt the liberal defender of theism would roll their eyes at this nightmare scenario. They would pretend it is ridiculous. They would pretend that there aren’t large, organized, multi-national groups with exactly this goal. They would pretend that somehow reason can prevail amid a group that has outlawed reason.

And of course they would. They have to. They can’t accept that the same thing that gives them their own personal love-Jesus might also have a dark side. And they certainly can’t accept that the dark side eclipses the bright side.

Religious extremism is just religion without constraint. No religion has ever voluntarily tempered itself. No religion has ever neutered its own power. It is the job of the secularist, the job of the scientist and the job of the atheist to castrate religion every time it thrusts its scrotum into the rest of the world. As fond as religion is of mutilating it’s own genitals, they still leave that job to us.

Categories: General Bitches and Gripes Tags: antitheism, apologetics, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, biblical criticism, Christianity, fundamentalism, religion, religious debate, religious extremism, secularism, the bible, the holy bible, theism

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A Non-Trivial Problem

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