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Live Blogging the Bible: Exodus 25-31
by Noah Lugeons
Well, I just finished the “interior decorating” portion of Exodus. For those who haven’t read the book (and how I increasingly envy them), this is the part where Moses goes up on Mt. Sinai to receive the word of god. He’s up there for forty days and forty nights and honestly, it seems like god ran out of shit to talk about after day three.
The chapters immediately before 25 detail the closest thing to morality that the book has to offer yet. This part includes the nine commandments and the numerous supplementary commandments like “Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” and “Thou shall not offer the blood of my sacrifice with anything leavened” and as haphazard as this list is, many of the particulars deal with real world situations (mostly ox related).
But then God, supremely inefficient time manager that he is, decides that he’s pretty much taken care of all of human interaction with a few ox rules and a dictate to kill witches. So he spends the rest of his time on “Project Runway: Tabernacle Edition” and we spend 7 FUCKING CHAPTERS getting the low-down on exactly how he wants his tabernacle built… and his ark built… and his curtains… and his altar… and his separate little “incense altar”… and the clothes for his priests… and, I shit you not, the wash basin that the priests will use that will sit outside the tent.
For seven full chapters, we’re treated to details like (ex 27:16 & 27:17):
For the gate of the court there shall be a screen twenty cubits long, of blue, purple and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen, embroidered with needlework; it shall have four pillars and with them four bases. All the pillars around the court shall be banded with silver, their hooks shall be of silver, and their bases of bronze”
So apparently when Christians call the bible a “book of answers”, they assume one of your questions was “yes, but if I’m making an ark for god tablets, what kind of wood should I use for the poles to carry it?”
Episode 12: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
(Note: Transcript may contain portions that were edited for time reasons)
Sponsor:
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And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s May 9th and somebody needs to tell people in Kentucky to stop wearing “I ‘heart’ KY” shirts
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from voluptuous New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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Christians will get upset about imaginary threats to their imaginary friend,
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We’ll learn that in Turkey, you’re autistic,
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And Darrel Ray will rejoin us to talk about pee-pees and coochies,
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
I started my post-secondary education at a small state college in rural Georgia. And while you may not know me that well, even if this is your first time listening to the show you’ve probably already figured out that I’m not exactly right for a small state college in rural Georgia. Let’s just say that my theological opinions ran counter to the prevailing ones.
You may have also picked up on the fact that I really don’t give two shits who I offend.
As you can imagine, this made for a combustible mix that didn’t take long to ignite.
I all but insured it with what I thought a harmless and excessively hilarious gag. My dorm number was 174, but with a piece of posterboard and a sharpie, I cleverly changed it to 666. Now, rural Georgia or no, I didn’t think this would actually piss anyone off. Sure, they’re all Christian there, but this was college. We were all a bunch of seditious rebels telling the status quo to go fuck itself, right?
Well, as it turns out, not so much. Later that day I came back to a 174 where I’d left a 666 and below it there was a handwritten note. I don’t recall every word of it, but I remember the opening line exactly:
“All the rest of us on this hall are Christian.”
The righteous vandal went on to explain that they didn’t want to see none of my satanic crap any-no-how and if I didn’t love Jesus I didn’t belong in that dorm hall, I didn’t belong in that college, I didn’t belong in that state and, come down to it, I didn’t belong in this country. I was not welcome.
And, of course, I left a response. Again, I don’t recall it verbatim, but it was a variation on the following:
“How feeble is your conviction if the very fact that someone doesn’t agree with you threatens it?”
I probably used a lot more words than that and I probably ensured that a few of them would force his ass to the dictionary, but that was the core of my rebuttal. It’s been twenty years and I’m starting to think he’s not going to respond at all.
But that continues to be my strongest issue with religion as a whole. If your idea has merit, it doesn’t need you there to defend it. You can simply place it in the public arena and it can fend for itself. Hell, how impressive would an omnipotent god be if he needed you to fight his battles for him?
If you want to see the deafening echo of this threat-response, just express your atheism on any social media venue and watch the wagons circle. They’ll attack your intellect, your motivations, your morals, your conviction and occasionally your penis size (regardless of your gender). They’ll gather together like white blood cells to defend their precious idea.
But meritorious ideas don’t need white blood cells. If your ideas need to be reinforced once a week, they’re bullshit. If you need to read the same book over and over again and hang out with people pre-screened to agree with you, you’re giving the bullshit armor. If your ideas need to be propagated by an organized group that exists only to propagate your ideas they are bullshit. And finally, if you’re threatened by people thinking you’re full of shit, it can only be because you’re full of shit.
Nobody ever had to show up at my door on a Saturday morning to convince me that A is equal to C if both are equal to B. Nobody ever had to sneak a pamphlet into my Halloween candy to convince me that elephants are bigger than gerbils. Nobody ever woke up early and dressed their kids up so that they could go somewhere and sing songs about cesium atoms having 55 protons.
Nobody ever passionately held a belief because it was true. If it’s true, you don’t need passion. Logic is more than enough of a scaffolding to hold up a genuine fact. You only passion if logic isn’t enough.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is the Pythias to my Damon, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to… be pithy, I guess?
Like Tina Fey if she were a dude?
She’s not a dude? I feel so much less gay now…
In our lead story tonight, Christians across the internet are screaming themselves hoarse over an almost completely bullshit story about the Pentagon court-martialing people for being Christian.
Christianity pays for an entire staff of dudes who speak loudly about bullshit stories every week. As a group, not exactly the pantheon of epistemological rigor.
The tiny nugget of truth buried among this citadel of bullshit involves an April 23rd meeting between Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a group of pentagon officials including several generals and a chaplain. And the very fact that the pentagon had the audacity to sit down with a person bearing legitimate complaints about clear violations of military prohibitions against religious proselytization was more than Christians could bear.
If they’re not careful, all this logic is gonna snowball out of control.
Don’t worry, the paragons of journalistic integrity at Fox News were quick to put the brakes on it. They noticed an article about this meeting and asked the pentagon if there were any plans to court-martial chaplains who proselytize. The pentagon said no, but that wouldn’t piss of their viewers so they pretended the answer was yes. And before long bloggers were leading off with headlines like “Pentagon Confirms They May Court-Martial Soldiers Who Hold Christian Faith”.
Yeah, court martialing 90% of the armed forces. That shouldn’t fuck up military readiness, should it? I mean, who’s gonna remotely fly all these drones?
They manage to inflate a low-level meeting to Weinstein now chairing a panel to reform court-martial procedures, they conclude that this will mean the end of military chaplains and that Obama’s Defense Department was (quote) “promising to bring criminal charges against any military personnel who express or share their faith.”
I’m beginning to think Obama made up all that stuff about being Christian and white, just to get elected.
So yeah, scant amount of dubious evidence, passionately held conclusion despite overwhelming data to the contrary. Been there, done that.
Pentagon warns Christian soldiers that proselytization will be met with court martial: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/06/blog-posting/bloggers-say-pentagon-may-court-martial-christian-/ & http://nation.foxnews.com/religion/2013/05/03/rear-admiral-says-faith-under-attack-military & http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2569472030.html
And in other Christians-Being-Furious-Over-Shit-That-Didn’t-Actually-Happen News, a high-school track team in Texas was disqualified from a 4 by 100 meter relay last weekend when a runner made a religious gesture at the end of the race.
Jews are gonna get offended by swastikas . . . Muslims are gonna get offended by Danish cartoons . . . As an atheist, I’m supremely offended by any trinity-related gesture. Don’t we get to pick an N-word too? We’ve got unholy cows.
That sounds fair to me, but it really wouldn’t matter in this case because they weren’t actually disqualified because of a religious gesture, but rather because the judges deemed it “excessive celebration” and backed it up with clearly stated rules that specifically forbade “raising the hands or arms in celebration” after winning because, you know, it’s un-Jesus-y.
Do we really need to sit Christianity down for a quick seminar on what subset means? Did religion really manage to brainwash away the Venn diagram concept? That’s like a free built-in piece of brain functionality they’re throwing away. And don’t they believe that somebody REALLY IMPORTANT designed all the brains?
Well, I don’t know… if god made man in his own image then most of god is an idiot. But this is how desperate Christians are to maintain their “help, help, I’m being oppressed” narrative.
Supreme omnipotent power is a mandate from the masses.
Excellent supplementary reference. So here we’ve got a high school kid who gets disqualified from a track meet and it’s being reported on national news. Nevermind that he was DQed for “excessive celebration and acting disrespectfully toward officials” and admits himself that there was no oppression of his faith here.
We can’t keep having laws that say “No doing stupid shit, unless you REALLY believe in it, and have a group of people with similar hats.”
Track Team disqualified for making “Religious Gesture” (Officially for “excessive celebration”): http://www.christianpost.com/news/was-relay-team-disqualified-from-state-championships-for-religious-gesture-95251/
Our next story takes us to New York Cities parking lot, New Jersey, where three members of the Trenton Diocese have resigned amid allegations that they knowingly allowed a child-molester to accompany them on overnight youth retreats.
Father Michael Fugee was convicted of fondling a teenage boy in 2003, but the conviction was overturned on appeal despite the fact that he had previously confessed to investigators. Rather than retry the case, the prosecutors struck a deal with the archdiocese of Newark that would allow Fugee to remain with the ministry provided that he didn’t work with children.
I’m worried we won’t get in a dick joke if we don’t take the opportunity here.
This show does have a two dick-joke minimum…
So what do you suppose they had in their video library there? Movies like A Few Good Boys
The Priests of the Southern Child?
Altar Boys on the Side
Rosemary’s Adolescent
The Best Little Rectory in Texas
Super 8… Year Olds
Defrock of Ages (8-12)
And for the Jewish clients maybe Who Fucked Roger’s Rabbi?
It’s worth noting that in 2009 the archdiocese assigned him to the Saint Michael’s Medical Center in Newark and eventually removed him amidst scandal when this unsettling history came to light, so basically they’ve been moving this child-molester from place to place and waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, isn’t that dude a child-molester?” and then moving him somewhere else.
Wonderful . . . they figured out bit torrent for pedophiles.
3 resign from NJ church in pedophile priest scandal: http://news.yahoo.com/3-resign-nj-church-priest-scandal-161033762.html
And in our next story, a Turkish taint-stain has proven that when it comes to autism, one can actually have one’s head further up one’s ass than the anti-vaxers. Fehmi Kaya, the head of the Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children in Adana, Turkey said in a recent interview that atheism is (quote) “a different form of autism”.
If you’re gonna compare atheism to a mental disorder, autism is possibly the most flattering choice. Rain Man was an awesome dude. Sometimes autism comes with some super powers.
On the other hand, theism as a mental disorder, would be something more like addiction to delusional psychosis with an extra chromosome on top.
Arguing that autism is the result of a lack of development in the “faith” center of the brain, he explains that this is why autistic children lack empathy with others, just like we atheists.
Kind of like the way Martin Luther King had an underdeveloped bigotry center of his brain.
Turkish Head of Education Dept. says Atheism is a Form of Autism: http://www.examiner.com/article/all-autistic-kids-are-atheists-and-atheism-is-a-form-of-autism & http://www.timeturk.com/en/2013/04/22/all-autistic-kids-are-atheists.html
And finally tonight, from the “If-God-Existed-He-Wouldn’t-Make-It-So-Easy-On-Me” News, the priest who was in charge of the treatment center where they sent priests accused of inappropriate sexual conduct has resigned amid allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct.
You’ve gotta be a little suspicious of these corporate climber types. “So I hear you need somebody to head up the new Rape Department. Look no further. I’m your guy. I know rape backwards and forwards. I know it inside out… coming and going. I know it like the back of my fist.
What would that resume look like?
Now, in defense of Monsignor Edward J. Arsenault, former president and CEO of the Saint Luke Institute he was accused of more than just sexual impropriety. He’s also being investigated for some shady financial practices so he’s really proving himself Catholic to the core.
Throw in some Nazi affiliation and you’ve got the holy trinity.
And, of course, to a Monsignor the term “inappropriate sexual conduct” is redundant. So this could be an inappropriate, consensual relationship with his hand for all they care. If he’s coming, it’s inappropriate.
What if God blows you in a dream? . . . An Immaculate Erection scenario . . .
Or Ejaculate Conception…
Would that count as honorable discharge?
Priest who heads top clergy treatment center resigns amid allegations of impropriety: http://www.religionnews.com/2013/05/06/priest-who-heads-top-clergy-treatment-center-accused-of-impropriety/
Well, unfortunately we’ll have to leave you on that puzzler, as that’s all the time we’ve got for headlines tonight. Heath, thanks once again for joining me tonight.
And when we return, you’ll witness the second coming of Darrel Ray.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. Back and well rested from a hiatus on last week’s episode, this is the part of the show we set aside to keep everyone up to speed on all the great atheist and secular events happening around country and around the world.
We’ve already talked them up a couple of times on the show, but a quick reminder that the weekend of May 17th has two big events; Imagine No Religion 3 in Kamloops, BC and the Women in Secularism Conference in Washington DC. Details on the lineups are linked on the website.
Imagine No Religion 3: http://inr3.eventbrite.ca/
Women in Secularism Conference: http://www.womeninsecularism.org/
At the end of the month we’ve got the American Humanist Association Annual Conference in beautiful San Diego, California. They’ll be honoring some of the very best in the Secular Humanist movement including 2013’s Humanist of the Year, Dan Savage. Other honorees include Greta Christina, Katha Pollitt (I hope I’m pronouncing her name right…), Carl Coon and Richard Leakey. Oh, and did I mention Richard Dawkins was gonna be there? So yeah, if you’re in the same hemisphere as this thing (and by that, I mean Western or Northern), you should really try to make it.
American Humanist Association’s Annual Meeting: http://conference.americanhumanist.org/
The following weekend they’ll be doing something pretty similar on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Humanist Association Annual Conference will be taking place in Leeds over the weekend of June 7th. They’ll be honoring Terry Pratchett with the 2013 Award for Services to Humanism. They’ve already got a pretty impressive list of confirmed speakers and they’re promising more to come.
British Humanist Association’s Annual Meeting: http://bhaconference.org.uk/
You’ll find more information, including links to the homepages for all these events under the “Show Notes” for this episode. Remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, humanist, skeptical or secular event that could use a little free publicity, let me know. I’d be happy to plug your event to thousands of people who probably live nowhere near it, many of whom will hear it in archives long after it’s over. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Outro:
Before we wrap things up for the night I wanted to make a quick correction about last week’s episode. But unfortunately it looks like we didn’t fuck anything up last week so I won’t get to. I promise to try less hard next time.
Normally I close the show out by thanking all the people who help make it go. I usually thank all the people who send encouraging emails, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on YouTube, rate us on iTunes and tell their friends about us. Then I’ll thank people like Heath Enwright and Darrel Ray who joined me on the show and I’ll usually thank people like Bill and Suzy from the “Bar Room Atheist” podcast for providing the Farnsworth quote this week and for putting together a really fun and relaxed podcast which you’ll find linked on our shownotes.
Bar Room Atheists on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bar-room-atheist
And I usually thank everybody who could have spent the last 30 minutes listening to any number of awesome things and chose to listen to this show instead. And above all, I usually thank the world’s most astute, intelligent and discerning people, the one’s who donate money to our show. People like Justin, this week’s most valuable human.
But I’m not going to do that tonight. It’s not that all those aforementioned people don’t deserve thanks; they do, especially Justin because he gave us money, but I’ve got a really important thanks this week and I’m afraid it would have overshadow all those other ones. I want to thank one of the most dedicated, influential and admirable people in the modern secular movement. Eugenie Scott, long time director of the National Center for Science Education and valiant warrior against creationism and science denialism recently announced her retirement.
So I want to say to Eugenie Scott that we in the secular community cannot thank you enough for all the hard work you’ve done in defense of science and rationality. After a long and successful career taking on all comers, you’ve earned the right to retire in peace, knowing that you’ve made a substantive difference and that you’ve inspired an army of freethinkers to follow in your footsteps even if none of them will ever quite fill your shoes. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
That does it for tonight, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with the “Out of Egypt” Edition where Lucinda and Heath will join me to pour over 40 more chapters of immoral bullshit in the “Holy Babble”. But if you can’t wait that long for more us, fear not. Even in two parts I didn’t have quite enough room for all the good stuff from that Darrel Ray interview so I added a quick bonus question and answer to the “Extras” page on the website. While you’re there, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and if you want to help me buy a new alternator and a car to put it in, click on the donate button on the right side of the page.
If you have comments, questions 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.
Live Blogging the Bible, Exodus 22:28
by Noah Lugeons
So I’m at the part of the bible where God gives Moses the 10 commandments, which, by the way there aren’t ten of. I don’t give a shit how you decide to count those fuckers, there aren’t ten. I can see a reasonable argument for 9, 8, 11 or even 12, but to get to 10 you’ve got to start cutting these suckers up mid-sentence at some points and adding whole paragraphs together at others.
But after the 8 commandments, God carries on and it really seems like he just lost his train of thought. He keeps spouting out moral dictates, but they’re as haphazard as you can imagine. He’ll go straight from a details proscription for who pays who what if a donkey falling into an uncovered pit to a command to kill female sorcerers. A couple of these things do seem reasonably moral, but some of them actually start out with stuff like, “When a father sells his daughter into slavery…” and end with something other than him be punished mercilessly.
I suppose I should sit back and enjoy, as I know I’m in for a lot more of these schizophrenic lists of archaic morals and some of them are hilarious. These tend to be the parts of the bible you most often hear atheists alluding to, as they are the quickest proof that this book is a horrible source for morality and as I come across the little nuggets I’ve quoted before this whole endeavor seems momentarily less pointless.
Most of the best shit is in Leviticus, to be sure, but I was quite pleased to come across this one tonight. I’ll be sure to toss it out next time I see one of my Christophile friends or neighbors bitching about Obama. Exodus 22:28;
You shall not revile God or curse a leader of your people.
I can see how that one gets lost, as it is sandwiched between a pointlessly involved explication of why you shouldn’t borrow your neighbors cloak and then not give it back to him if he’s cold and a warning not to delay in making offerings from the fullness of your harvest, so I can see how maybe it got tossed out as archaic. I mean… who sleeps in a cloak any more, right?
But to all of those Obama-haters that actually believe in this silly little book, it might be a conflict worth losing sleep over. At the very least, I can hope.
Live Blogging the Bible, Exodus 10:1
by Noah Lugeons
Holy shit is this god guy a dick.
So I’ve gotten to the plagues and I have to admit that even though I knew how many their were, I never bothered to check out what all of them were. Sure, I knew about the bloody Nile and the staff into the snake and the boils and the first born and the frogs, but I didn’t realize he also plagued the Egyptians with gnats and flies and hail and shit.
But the other thing I never realized was that God made pharaoh disobey him just so he could show off how many flies and gnats he could make.
It actually says that throughout the plague narrative. Again and again the bible talks of god “hardening pharaoh’s heart” so that he will disobey Moses’ commands. He hardens the hearts of both pharaoh and his officials. He ensures that pharaoh refuses to let the Israelites go just so he can send more plagues.
I could back this up by directing you to passages like Exodus 4:21, 7:13, 9:7, 9:12 and 9:35, but why bother when you can just look at Exodus 10:1-
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his officials, in order that I may show these signs of mine among them…
And if this doesn’t spell it out plainly enough, the next verse really nail it down,
…and that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I have made fools of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them – so that you may know that I am the Lord.”
Thus far there haven’t been many things that were clearly spelled out in the bible. The authors and editors seemed to have a thing for ridiculously vague and ambiguous. But this is one of the minority of instances where they make good and damn well that you know what’s going on here:
God is threatening the people of Egyptian with Eli Roth level horrors, he’s circumventing pharaoh’s freewill so that he won’t obey the directives, he’s perpetrating the horrors and then he’s doing it some more. And why is he doing this? Because fuck Egyptians, that’s why.
I suppose an apologist could argue that sometimes God just has to remind everyone how bad-ass he is and I’m willing to concede that, but couldn’t he show how awesome he was by curing diseases instead of creating them? Couldn’t Moses have sauntered in there and said, “Hey, if you let my people go, God will cure all the disease in Egypt, turn the Nile to beer and give you a lot of kids (which seemed to be the only currency these biblical folks cared about)”?
Or if he insisted on being so damn negative, couldn’t he have just given boils and gnats and shit to the pharaoh? How much more effective would the hail storm be if it was following pharaoh around and not hitting anyone else? That’s some seriously divine intervention. But no, he makes his point by giving all the people boils, killing slaves with hail, starving people with pestilence, dehydrating them with stinky, fatal blood-water and murdering their first born children.
What irresponsible fuck gave this guy omnipotence?
Live Blogging the Bible, Exodus 4:24-26
by Noah Lugeons
Even after only a book and 3 chapters, the title of “weirdest part of the bible” is a tough one to earn. I’m only 100 pages in or so and already I’ve had to stop, scratch my head, re-read, re-scratch my head and sigh in frustrated confusion approximately one time for every 3 chapters.
If pressed, up until this morning I’d have listed the curse Noah lays on his grandson when his grandson’s dad sees his pecker as the weirdest part of the bible, though I’d have hemmed and hawed a bit between that and the part where Jacob wrestles god on the river.
But now there is a brand new contender and I actually think it might remain the bible’s weirdest passage no matter how much of this crap I read. For those familiar with the bible, this is the part where Moses’ wife gives him magical foreskin powers so he can kick god’s ass. And for those of you unfamiliar with the bible, that part actually exists and if you don’t believe me, check out Exodus 4:24-26 and tell me what the fuck is going on there then:
On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched it to his feet and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”
For a little context (and I’m afraid a little is all you’re gonna get), this is shortly after God charges Moses to go to Egypt and free the Israelites in bondage. God appears in burning bush form, tells Moses to go to the pharaoh, loads him up with a few magic tricks and tells him to meet Aaron along the way. And then, for no reason the bible bothers to explain, god appears and tries to kill Moses. But not very hard. Because of Zipporah’s clever foreskin maneuver.
There are so many fucking questions here, I don’t know where to start. Why would god try to kill Moses? How omnipotent is this guy if he can’t handle a Jew and his foreskin wielding wife? If god can appear in a form that can ineffectually assassinate Moses, why the burning bush crap a few passages earlier? And, most importantly, what the fuck?
This is some seriously crazy shit and the bible carries on like none of it happened a few verses later. God just got thwarted by a piece of baby-dick and we’re just supposed to move on like this was no big deal? And just how many of the early Jewish fathers have defeated god in a wrestling match?
I hoped that the annotations would help, but they just made it worse. They refer to this whole thing as an “Enigmatic Episode” and point out that when it says that Zipporah touched the foreskin to Moses’ feet, that may have been a euphemism for his nuts. Seriously.
So as I’m reading it, the scene from Zipporah’s perspective has to go something like this:
- Awakened in the middle of the night by sounds of a struggle.
- Wipe the sleep out of her eyes and glances through the moonlight to see her husband getting his ass kicked by God, Almighty.
- Says to herself, “If only I had something to mutilate my son’s cock with!” Finds flint.
- Hastily circumcises her infant with a random, unsanitized stone in the dark.
- Disrobes Moses’ while he’s fighting god.
- Touches his cock with bleeding ring of baby genital.
- God says… “Gross! I don’t even want to wrestle any more!”
- Says, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”
I’m no closer to understanding this book, but at least now if I’m ever tasked with making an Exodus video game, I know what the power-ups will be.
Episode 11: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
(Note: Transcript contains some lines edited from the final version of the episode)
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of non-alcoholic Christian beer, “What Would Jesus Brew?” because who needs alcohol when you have Jesus? After all, like cheap beer, religion tastes bitter going down, sedates you, numbs you to your problems while exacerbating them, makes Sunday morning suck, gives you headaches, explodes violently if you shake it up, reduces your ability to make rational decisions and makes you ashamed of your sexual encounters.
“What Would Jesus Brew?” because alcohol is like liquid religion.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s May 2nd and abstinence didn’t work for Mary, now did it?
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from reluctantly spring-like New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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The LDS says that the Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough,
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I’ll have sex with Darrel Ray… oh, no wait… I’m sorry, I’ll “talk” sex with Darrel Ray. Which is still good, too, I guess… and
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And Benny Hinn will be a cruel, heartless fuck,
But first, the Diatribe:
Diatribe:
So before I tell you what happened on Sunday, let me tell you what didn’t happen on Sunday. In preparation for the show this week, I didn’t go to the “Christian” page on the Guardian’s website and when I wasn’t there, here are a few of the headlines I didn’t find:
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Joel O’Steen hates Jews and I have proof
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The Pope thinks gay people are gross
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Christians must accept that they’re almost certainly wrong, and
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I may believe in Jesus, but that doesn’t make me a Christian.
And what’s more, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find them there when I wasn’t looking. Because what kind of tampon-stain would print headlines like that on a Christian news aggregator? They wouldn’t. Because they would have to be total assholes.
Alright, so now, for act two, let me tell you what I did do on Sunday.
I went to the “Atheist” page on the Guardian’s website and when I was there, here are the headlines that I found:
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Dawkins’s latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy
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Sam Harris, New Atheists and the anti-Muslim animus
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The secular must accept that religion can save
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I may not have faith, but that doesn’t make me an atheist
I didn’t cherry-pick the bad ones here, by the way. These were the top 4 headlines on the page. That’s what the Guardian was giving the atheists to read. They have pages for all your major faith groups. The lead headline in “Christianity” was “At Easter, the tortured face of God teaches us to love our fellow man”… almost four weeks after Easter.
The lead story on the “Islam” page was “America’s greatest asset against radicalisation are Muslim Americans” and on the “Judaism” page, their first offering was “Poland’s ‘generation unexpected’ leads resurgence in Jewish culture”. Amazingly, in more than a dozen different faith-by-faith breakdowns, none of them lead off with a story where one of the most prominent and respected members of the group is smeared as a bigot on the thinnest shreds of dubious evidence. But since atheism isn’t a religion, they can lead off with not one such story but two.
As to the accusations against Dawkins, they’re the same ridiculous bullshit as always. He says Muslims are stupid because they believe a human being rode to heaven on a flying horse and that makes him an “Islamaphobe”. The fact that he also says that Christians are stupid for believing a zombie army wandered into Jerusalem doesn’t make him a “Christaphobe”, of course. And the fact that he says Jews are stupid for believing that Jacob outwrestled vampire god doesn’t make him a “Jewphobe”. The fact that he says astrologers are stupid for believing the relative positions of planets will adversely affect their financial situation doesn’t make him an “astrologophobe”. But if you think Muslim beliefs are stupid it’s because you’re scared of them.
The accusations against Sam Harris are only slightly less specious. He’s pointing out that a lot of terrorism comes from Muslim extremists so clearly does so because he hates Muslims. He also points out that when the car is running low on gas it needs filled up, so clearly he hates petroleum producing nations as well. And when he points out that his steak is actually more of a mid-rare than a medium, it can only be because of his irrational and seething hatred of cows.
These accusations aren’t new, of course, and they’re hardly worth refuting. Anyone who achieves prominence in this or any other social movement will be attacked by jackasses who trying to make a name for themselves. There’s nothing new or noteworthy about that.
But there’s something to be said for a major media outlet that runs a page dedicated to atheist readers and loads it up with character assassination pieces from wingnuts. They follow those up with a great op-ed about how secular people need to really accept the fact that the entire core of their movement is wrong and religion is actually right. And finally a piece on how miserable it must be to be an atheist.
It’s nice to have a page of our very own isn’t it?
Look, atheism is not a religion and atheists aren’t a “faith-group”. You’ll never hear me or any other atheist make the kind of absurd, bullshit demands of “respect” you hear from religious people. You’ll never hear us issuing death threats for drawing images of Christopher Hitchins or taking Dan Dennett’s name in vain. You’ll never hear atheists demanding that anyone capitalize the H in her when they talk about Madalyn Murray O’Hair and you’ll never hear us declare war on somebody for not believing that the magical calamari really turns into the body of PZ Myers.
But I do think it’s fair to ask that we’re treated with the same respect that would be afforded to any other group of human beings. There were no stories at all in their other “faith” sections defaming prominent figures as bigots and let’s face it, you wouldn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble finding stories like this if you were looking. Hell, you wouldn’t have to weave together strands of suspect bullshit to get there like they did with Harris and Dawkins.
I was so angry about it that I thought about dropping the Guardian as a news source for this show altogether, but then I remembered that they were the only outlet I saw that covered last week’s exploding Spanish dildo headline, so they’re off the hook. But it still pissed me off.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my hetero life-mate, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to not have gay sex?
Let’s not do it.
In our lead story tonight, the American Humanist Association has filed a lawsuit against Northwest Rankin High School in Flowood, Mississippi.
Go Cougars.
The suit alleges that students endured a mandatory Christian sermon during school hours in an assembly that didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was about science or dinosaurs or something. Instead, a representative from the Pinelake Baptist Church was invited to the school to talk about finding hope in Jesus Christ and even closed the assembly by leading the students in prayer.
Well I’m assuming there was an Imam leading a Muslim show-and-tell the week before. They probably have all kinds of special science classes like that.
Oh, I’m sure they do, and I’m sure they always stop the kids who try to leave, like they allegedly did at this one. William Burgess, legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, points out that “when a school sponsors an event, the religious speech of the speaker… is attributable to the school [itself] and is therefore subject to the Establishment Clause,” adding, “Fucking duh!”
Are they really worried that kids in Mississippi aren’t getting any exposure to the whole Christianity thing? Like there were kids leaving the auditorium that day, saying “You know what, I’m gonna google this Jesus guy. See what that’s all about.”
Died for my sins you say?
AHA files lawsuit over bullshit Christian Sermon in Mississippi school: http://www.americanhumanist.org/news/details/2013-04-humanists-file-suit-against-public-school-that-held
In other legal news, Pennsylvania judge M. Teresa Sarmina has filed a brief defending her recent decision in the trial and conviction of a Catholic church aide in a child-rape conspiracy case. Monsignor William Lynn, the first Catholic Church official in the US to be convicted in the cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests, is facing a paltry three to six years in prison and is still appealing the decision.
So he’s getting a punishment on par with stealing a car. Systematically covering up a decades-long righteous rape spree, or Geico makes slightly less unfair profit that quarter? Those balance.
Well no, according to Lynn’s attorneys, his crime was way more benign than grand theft auto. They’re appealing the decision because the judge allowed evidence of child abuse cases that predated Lynn’s involvement with the diocese. They argue that these details unfairly prejudiced the jury against their client.
“I didn’t start covering up those rapes until well after they clearly happened.”
Being the defense attorney here is rough . . .
I read they’re claiming that Lynn can’t be guilty of child endangerment because he didn’t actually supervise any children. That’s like blaming the abortion on the coat hanger.
Wow… it’s hard to transition out of a back-alley abortion joke so I’m gonna carry on like it never happened.
Judge defends Church aide’s trial and conviction for child rape conspiracy: http://news.yahoo.com/pa-judge-defends-church-aides-trial-conviction-211500942.html
And turning from Catholic pedophelia to Catholic sexism, the Vatican is now officially even less progressive than Kentucky. Former nun and current maverick, 70 year old Rosemarie Smead was ordained a priest over the vehement objections of the Roman Catholic Church. She faces excommunication for this heinous act, but dismisses the threat as a (quote) “Medieval bullying stick the bishops use to keep control over people…”, though it was unclear whether she was referring to excommunication or Catholicism.
She claims she’s not gonna let octogenarian men tell people how to run their lives.
Instead, she’s gonna start her own church, where a septuagenarian woman will tell people how to run their lives in the same way minus the male priest rule. Can’t exactly use a Bible as a study guide for your feminism class.
And according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, you can’t use the Vatican as a study guide for what Catholics believe, either. As many as 70% of American Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests if for no reason than they would rather their sons were molested by women, but the church warns that allowing women to be priests might lead to beastiality and hurricanes like gay marriage.
In that sense, I’m all for having priestesses.
Bestiality and hurricanes are both good job creators.
And those donkey shows are another perfect example of where replacing a man with a woman is definitely an improvement.
I bet lesbian marriage becomes legal in red states before gay marriage.
Kentucky woman ordained a priest despite Roman Catholic Church’s objections: http://news.yahoo.com/kentucky-woman-ordained-priest-defiance-roman-catholic-church-005633378.html
And in a follow up to our lead story from Episode 9, the Church of Latter Day Saints has kind-of endorsed the Boy Scouts decision to kind-of lift their ban on gays. Despite the multiple levels of half-assedness involved in this noncommittal pseudo-endorsement, conservative Christian groups are up-in-arms as though something had actually happened.
First, to the compromise. Facing pressure from pretty much everyone but Fred Phelps and the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy Scouts are backpedaling their 19th century stance on homosexuality by allowing gay boys to join the scouts, but not letting gay men serve as scout leaders.
This is great for preventing the hiring of scout leaders who are openly gay pedophiles.
But I think they might be slightly underestimating the amount of in-the-closet gay pedophiles. You know, the ones who are a little bit hush hush about being a gay pedophile during their job interview process.
In the interest of fairness, though, the Boy Scouts make no claim that their bigotry is based on a fear that gays are pedophiles. They just hate fags. And speaking of hating fags, the Mormon church, the largest financial supporter of the Boy Scouts of America, has sort-of endorsed the proposal. Recognizing this as the most anemic action they could possibly take to stem the tide of tolerance that threatens to force the Boy Scouts’ hands they issued the closest thing to an endorsement that they could get away with.
Well if the Mormons are behind it . . .
Surprising though. Those MoMo’s are super hetero.
Having 3 wives is double-plus-ungay.
Well you’re not the only one who was surprised. Among the bloviating, frothing bigots that have voiced opposition to this non-condemnation is one John Stemberger, head of something called “On-My-Honor(dot)com”. He points out that the Boy Scouts resolution doesn’t address how to (I shit you not, quote) “manage and ensure the safety and security of the boys in the program.”
Now, I can’t decide here whether this asshole is wondering how they’re gonna keep the other kids from beating up the gay kids or whether he’s worrying about the gay kids butt-raping the straight kids, but the tone of the message actually suggested the latter.
Based on what I believe to be an accurate depiction of gays on TV, the 11-year-old gay rapist survival expert is definitely KNOT the issue.
Family Research Council President and two-headed-dildo-aficionado Tony Perkins chimed in as well. He warns that this compromise sends the message that “homosexuality is morally acceptable until a boy turns 18” and remarkably, his point wasn’t that after 18 it continues to be morally acceptable.
This guy obviously sucks, but let’s not smear the 2-headed-dildo. Who doesn’t love Jennifer Connelly in the ass-to-ass scene in Requiem for a Dream?
Mormon’s say that Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/25/mormon-church-leaders-say-welcome-boy-scouts-proposal-to-lift-gay-ban-for-youth/ But many Christian groups say “Not so fast”: http://www.christianpost.com/news/lds-church-criticized-for-endorsing-boy-scouts-proposal-on-accepting-gay-members-94835/
And from the “If-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” department, the Vatican has sharply criticized the Vatican for failing to prevent ongoing child rape and torture. Proving that the Catholics are always the last ones to the conclusion, internal reports now admit massive culpability within the Vatican hierarchy for failing to do more to prevent abuse and failing to do less to ensure that it continued.
Sometimes a worldwide intervention and hundreds of millions of dollars in rape damages makes you take a look in the mirror.
And sadly, sometimes it doesn’t. The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Churches of Ireland couched the horror of the decades of horrendous sexual abuse in terms like “unacceptable delay”, “risky behavior”, “unsatisfactory response” and “double-plus ungood practices”.
An unacceptable delay would be getting raped, and then in order to rape the rapist back and get some money damages, you had to fill out some paperwork at the DMV first. Maybe a few hours.
But the message was clear and it was in keeping with the recent theme of “Internal Catholic Investigations”: We did some horrible shit, but now we’re positively awesome at not raping kids.
“There were a few, minor executive oversights, but we didn’t want to micromanage. All the way in Rome, out of context, who were we to dictate policies to others?”
Catholic Hierarchy had “unacceptable delay” in dealing with serial child-rapist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/24/catholic-hierarchy-priests-clogher Actual report: http://static.rasset.ie/documents/2fm/clogher-report.pdf
And finally, in “Fuck Pretenses, Just Give me Money News”, Televangelist and hairpiece repository Benny Hinn is asking his listeners for two and a half million dollars to get his ministry out of debt. Or rather, God is asking them to give the money and Benny is just the intermediary… a tool, if you will.
So there’s some mysterious benefactor who will match up to 2.5 million in donations . . . but only during the first 90 days.
And if you donate in the next 10 minutes, he’ll throw in this free slap chop, a 30 dollar value.
Act now, supplies of debt are limited.
Hinn, whose ministry must be about five million dollars in the red, promises his viewers that if they help god wipe out his debt, then God will help them wipe out their debt. So basically he’s saying that if you have financial problems and you’re mired in debt, the best thing to do is give your limited resources to a guy with a private-fucking-jet.
“Yeah I’ll get you some drugs. Give me the money and wait right here.”
We should set up a kickstarter campaign to finance an indulgence factory.
We could mass produce heaven stairways and easily outpace a megachurch.
Benny Hinn is a cruel, heartless fuck: http://www.christianpost.com/news/benny-hinn-asks-followers-for-2-5-million-to-get-out-of-debt-94822/
That’ll does it for headlines tonight, thanks for joining me Heath.
And when we come back, author and activist Darrel Ray will join us to talk dirty to me.
Skit:
(Rustling Papers)
“…hm… who’s next on the list here… oh, Yahweh.”
(Button push, beep)
“Tonya, can you send in Yahweh, please?”
(Door opens)
God, God, come on in… yeah, just leave the door open, that’s fine.. Here, have a seat.
(creaking seat)
Yeah, that chair’s not as comfortable as the throne you’re used to, I’m sure.
Now, I suppose this is going to be kind of an awkward meeting, what with my fragile human form being unable to withstand the awesome power of your voice and all but honestly, in this instance, it’s probably better if I do all the talking anyway.
I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that we’re not very happy with your performance. Your last several centuries of performance reviews have been well below standard and I think we all knew that this day was coming.
I mean… all we have to do is look over your performance history. There was a time when you were first appointed… you were flooding the world, parting seas, turning people to salt, raining down frogs… you were a go-getter! You were a god’s god.
But now what do we get out of you? We’ve got the AIDS epidemic in Africa, we’ve got nuclear proliferation, climate change and what are you doing? You’re taking the wheel! You’re finding people’s car keys. Finding car keys, god, really? Did you think I wouldn’t find out about that? You’re omniscient and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time?
I know you work in mysterious ways. You said that in your resume and we accepted it because of the whole omnipotence thing, but I’ve gotta be honest, here lately it seems like you’re resting on all seven days.
I’m looking back over it and I can’t find a significant achievement for you in over 1800 years! You’re averaging less than a miracle a millenia, bro. I’ve got saints doing better than that. You know I’ve always been in your corner. I fought for you since the beginning. Every day’s a thousand years but you still wanted a day off and I fought for you on that one. I’ve been fighting for you since the day we hired you and to be frank, lately you’re just embarrassing me, and I don’t think that’s too harsh a statement.
I think we both know where this is going and I want to make it as easy as possible. You’re still under contract so we’ll pay that off, but we’re gonna have Ricky Gervais step in as interim god until we can permanently fill the position. So just leave your keys to the pearly gates with Tonya and if you need a letter of recommendation, you have my number.
Alright, thank you very much. Close the door on your way out please.
(door closes)
Whew… that went better than I expected. Damn, I should have done that centuries ago.
Outro:
We’ve only got a couple of minutes left and apparently we had a pretty error-ridden show last week so I’ve gotta make a few quick corrections before we close things out. Most of the mistakes came in the Holy Babble segment and most of it was stuff like saying Jacob when I meant Joseph or saying brothers instead of sons. For that I apologize and we’ll try to do better, but one way or the other I wouldn’t recommend using this show as a stand alone source for the bible.
There was one major correction I wanted to make. We got duped into reporting on essentially an Onion headline last week. The story about the Christian couple who maintained their abstinence for years after marriage was a gag piece from Lark News and if I’d made any attempt to vet it I’d have figured that out. That’s a huge fail on my part and I want to apologize for it. We’re not exactly a “hard news” show, but that doesn’t excuse me from my due diligence as a newscaster and I owe you better than that. Without some modicum of journalistic integrity we’ll devolve into CNN reporting in the wake of a disaster.
Also wanted to throw a quick shout out to our incredibly awesome Canadian listeners, who apparently pushed our show all the way up into the top 100 of all podcasts on the Canadian iTunes ranks for a couple of days last month. Excellent job, Canadians. If listening to the Scathing Atheist was an olympic event, you’d be the team to beat.
Obviously I want to extend a huge thanks to Darrel Ray for such an informative and entertaining interview. Also need to thank Jake-Farr Wharton of the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast for providing tonight’s Farnsworth quote. He’s got a great podcast if you haven’t checked it out. It’s kind of like ours only more informed and in Australian. We’ll have a link to it in the shownotes, but I trust our listeners to be able to puzzle out where to go to find the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast. Need to thank Heath as always. Also want to thank all the listeners who sent in emails, especially the ones that include news items to make my life easier. Thank so much for taking the time out to help.
But most of all we’ve gotta thank our very favorite listeners of the week, John, Michael and Evan, who gave us money. Giving us money is a noble and moral act that brings peace and joy to all and we are all indebted to John, Michael and Evan for their heroic selflessness. Oh, and Evan, it went to a bottle of Laphroaig, but it was for before we recorded, not after.
Remember, if you’d like to prove your virtuous nature in the only way that really counts anymore, you too can donate to our show by clicking on the “Donate” button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Every little bit helps, but every big bit helps a lot more.
And if you want to help but have taken a vow of poverty, you can always help us spread the word by leaving a review on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews do wonders to help us build our audience and they really make my day as well.
That does it for us tonight, but if you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on YouTube, like us on Facebook and check us out on Stitcher. Seriously. Because all the other atheist podcasts on Stitcher are making fun of us.
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.
AIG Responds to the Dinosaur Quiz
by Noah Lugeons
I’d start by asking if you’d seen the dinosaur quiz yet… But you’ve seen the dinosaur quiz, right? It’s been everywhere the last few days. I didn’t find it all that surprising, as I’m quite familiar with what “Answers in Genesis” is teaching children, but judging by the buzz this quiz got, I’m in the minority there.
For the 3 people and the spam-bot who haven’t seen it yet, it’s this ridiculous shit:

At first people couldn’t decide if it was a parody or not, but eventually the name of the school popped up, the facts were verified and yes, this is precisely the kind of shit that AIG promotes in religious schools.
And now, of course, AIG is crying foul. They’re weeping themselves to sleep about how mean the atheists have been about it. After all, what’s wrong with pushing demonstrably false bullshit on children under the guise of science, thus ensuring that they have no chance in hell of succeeding in any intellectual field after graduation? What’s wrong with arming children with ignorance and finishing a test by making sure they know exactly how to pass their ignorance on and reinforce it? What’s wrong with lying? It’s not like there’s a commandment against it or anything.
So on his website, Ken Ham is pissing and moaning about it. He’s upset because atheists are getting so aggressive. He even has a list of “Evidence” that supports the claim that atheists are increasingly “intolerant”:
How Are Atheists Becoming More Aggressive in America?
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Billboards promoting atheism and attacking Christianity have popped up across the country.
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The American Humanist Association has launched a special website for children to indoctrinate them in atheism.
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An atheist rally in Washington DC last year had a special promotion to encourage kids to attend their atheist camps.
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Atheists have been increasingly using terms like “child abuse” to describe the efforts of Christians who seek to teach their children about creation, heaven, and hell.
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Many atheists claim that children belong to the community, not to their parents.
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Atheists have actively opposed any effort in public schools to even question a belief of evolution or suggest there are any problems with it.
Heath is on his way over to record and I’ve gotta get prepped, so I’ll trust the comments section to provide the editorial on these, but I just wanted to hop on really quick and let everyone know that they’ve noticed. Keep up the good work.
Public Bible Study
by Noah Lugeons
I spent the day yesterday doing my civic duty. I did jury duty once before in a small town down south and I was in and out in two hours, but in NYC it’s a bit different. Here you go into a large room and sit there for eight hours while they play bad movies so loud it’s hard to read. They call names and you leave and go do something, but I’m not entirely sure what it is, as my name was never called. So I basically sat in a large, uncomfortable room where I wasn’t allowed to use my phone for eight hours.
Luckily, I had some reading I needed to catch up on. We won’t be covering Exodus on the show until episode 13, but that’s no excuse to slack off. So I brought my Oxford 4th Edition Annotated NSRV Bible and I brought a notepad in case jokes or segment possibilities occurred to me while I was reading and I brought a highlighter, as I’ve taken to highlighting every passage in the bible where god does something horrible. And for some reason, it never occurred to me what kind of reaction this was going to draw.
So there I am, whittling away very long hours at a table with a bible that I’m clearly studying intently. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised when a very friendly Christian woman (or, as I would discover, a Christian woman with a very friendly facade) walked up to me, pulled up a seat and said, “I don’t want to interrupt your bible study, but if you don’t mind, are you in seminary?”
For the record, I could not possibly look less like I was in seminary without the addition of facial tattoos.
Now, three answers occurred to me, but none of them seemed socially acceptable:
- “Atheist. Just reading it to make fun of it later,”
- “Oh please,have a seat. Anything to interrupt me from this horrible fucking book” and
- “I’m boning up for an interview for the new anti-Christ position.”
And honestly, there are a lot of situations where I would have run with any of those, but in this instance it wouldn’t have been appropriate. After all, I was inviting the conversation by publicly reading a bible to the point of highlighting and taking notes. It was a fair question and she was probably a really nice person and I was going to be stuck in a room with her for most of the rest of the day, so I scratched all of those answers.
Then my mind started automatically looking for excuses. I was clearly reading and writing in English so I couldn’t go with the old, “¿Que?” and it would be hard to pretend that I actually had porn hidden inside it unless I could actually make with some porn (and remember, I wasn’t allowed to bring in my phone).
Ultimately I opted for the truth and that pissed her off so much I wish ended up wishing I’d just been a dick.
“Actually I’m an atheist and I’m studying it for debate purposes,” I said in as friendly a way as possible.
“So you don’t believe a word of it?” she asked incredulously.
“Well, I mean… I believe some of the geography and stuff.”
She made several false starts at speech at this point. She clearly wanted to say several things that Jesus wouldn’t let her say. Finally she settled on something like, “Well I hope you find some answers in there because I don’t envy your soul.”
“Okay, well… you know… have a nice day or whatever,” I offer back and she welcomes the opportunity to end the conversation. She takes a seat well across the room and kind of half-ass glares at me a bit.
At this point I realize that unless I want to do this a few more times, I should put the bible away and read something else. I suppose she took it as a personal insult that the other distraction I brought was “The God Virus”.
Episode 10: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of Christian Compact Fluorescents “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Are you tired of seeing all the benefits that godless scientists have brought to your life? Are you sick of facing all the perfectly obvious physical evidence that your beliefs are wrong? Well try a little less illumination and a little more enlightenment with “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Each bulb contains our patented “Through a glass darkly” technology that will allow you to easily blind yourself to everything that isn’t happening inside your head.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 25th and we’re going for an hour tonight, so hopefully you hit traffic.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from sacrilegious New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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Heath, Lucinda and I will dig through 80 pages of Bible without encountering a single moral,
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I’ll rudely correct my wife when she says, “boringest”,
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and Heath will spend 4 minutes making God glad he doesn’t exist;
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
I got a very compelling email from Dan in Toronto a few days back and I started to draft a response, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should address Dan’s concerns in a wider venue.
It was a pretty long email, but I pulled a quick excerpt that I think sums up the point. Dan starts off by admitting that he really enjoys the show and it makes him laugh, but he wonders what the cost of those cheap laughs really are in the following paragraph:
“The problem is one of productivity. What do we, as a movement, gain by being so antagonistic toward religion? It’s hard to imagine a believer that listened to your show having any reaction but a calcification of their dogma. Ultimately you’re providing the caricature that religious leaders need to smear atheists as cruel, angry and uncaring. And to what end? Have you done more in the end than simply affirm opinions already held? Have you done more than preach to the choir?”
As to providing a caricature to the opposition, well, that may or may not be true. I’m sorry, but those Christians would find something to be pissed off about regardless of what I do. But I don’t want to be dismissive. I have a lot of respect for Dan’s opinion here and he’s not the first person to bring it up. Hell, Heath, Lucinda and I discussed it in depth before we recorded episode one. Clearly, we fell on the good-outweighs-the-bad end of the argument, but I do feel that people like Dan still deserve an explanation.
The question is basically one of purpose and the tone of Dan’s email suggests that he believes that the purpose of an atheist show should be outreach to the religious community. I don’t mean to oversimplify the objection, but the implication is there that the first goal of an atheist show should be one of PR. That does make sense when you belong to a group seen as less trustworthy than rapists, but I also think it sells us short.
There are plenty of great atheist outreach podcasts. The Atheist Experience, the Thinking Atheist, Reasonable Doubts, An American Atheist Podcast… these are all great shows that I could recommend to a religious person if they wanted to know more about atheism. But that doesn’t mean that the only purpose an atheist show can serve is outreach.
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of outreach, but I fear that if we focus on it too much, we lose sight of an equally important element of the movement: Mobilization. It’s not enough to sway minds if we can’t also sway the feet they’re connected to.
So when we started this show, we tossed “outreach” out the window and I try to make that clear in the first 12 seconds of the show. In fact, I tried to make that clear in the first two words of the title. I’d have called it the “Fuck Jesus Show” if I thought iTunes would still promote it.
Religious people are welcome to listen to this show, but they aren’t invited. This show isn’t for them. They’ve got enough.
I’ve gone to church before and I’ve never complained afterwards that the pastor didn’t include the atheist point of view in his sermon. I’ve never written an angry letter to a televangelist for not being nicer to atheists when he tells them they’re all going to hell. If a Christian listens to this show and gets pissed off about it, I look at it like a neighbor showing up at your barbecue uninvited. You welcome him in and give him a beer anyway and then he starts complaining because there’s no vegetarian menu.
There is a time and a place for nice, but there’s a time and a place for fuck you as well. And in this movement we need both. Nice is good for outreach. Nice is good for PR. Nice is good for winning converts and softening our image. But fuck you has its uses, too. Fuck you is good for rallying the troops. Fuck you is good for boiling the blood. Fuck you is good for reminding people why they got active about atheism in the first place. And what’s more, when people are trying to shove their religion into your schools, your government and your life, Fuck You is not only useful, but it’s the only correct response.
The end result it that I spend a lot of time preaching to the choir. But what’s wrong with that? Keep in mind that despite the connotations implied in the expression, the preacher man does still preach to the choir! You have to. You can’t just assume that somebody who read The God Delusion back in 2009 is still as fired up about as she was when she put the book down. We all have to be reminded from time to time that these battles are still being fought and we still need all hands on deck.
So thanks for the email Dan, and if you’d like to continue the conversation I look forward to your response. But keep in mind that you started your email with the words, “I really enjoy your show…”, and I would argue that that’s enough.
If I make some atheists laugh, I’ve really done as much as I need to do to justify the effort. I don’t think it’s fair to judge everything done in the name of atheism solely through the lens of its effect on religious people. Singing hymns help Christians convince atheists that there’s a god, but that isn’t the point of singing hymns. We accept that Christians can do Christian things for Christian reasons. Why can’t an atheist do the same?
Headlines:
In our lead story tonight, Pope Francesca shows exactly how paper thin that whole “reform and focus on the people” thing was when he voiced support for the Holy See’s crackdown on the “Nuns on a Bus” movement in the US.
Basically, the issue here is that these nuns have threaten the authority of the Vatican by proving that you can do good works without hating gay people and demonizing abortion, positions which the Catholics actually refer to as “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic Faith”.
First of all, I wouldn’t call the abortion issue a feminist cause. I know lots of dudes who are psyched about Roe v Wade for good reason. Women as a whole want to be moms a lot more than men as a whole want to be dads.
Also, if you’re calling a group of nuns radically liberal, your organization is falling off the conservative side of a world you still think is 6000 years old and flat.
Yeah and the “radical” ones apparently comprise about 80% of all US nuns. The group says that the Vatican has reached “flawed” conclusions based on “unsubstantiated accusations”, though it wasn’t clear if they were referring to their own condemnation or the whole doctrine of Catholicism when they said that.
But I think this story really highlights the divide between what the Vatican is saying and what Catholics, at least here in the US are actually doing and believing. When 80% of your representatives are doing it one way and you’re still insisting that they do it the other way, you’re not allowed to then sit around and ask yourself, “Why are people leaving our church?”
But if they did want to sit around and ask that, it wouldn’t take too much brainstorming to recall a few other hiccups in their PR campaign of late.
Right, and here these nuns are with a slice of redemption on a silver fucking platter. If Pope Frankincense embraced their movement or even refused to condemn it, even people like me would have to stand back and say, “Hey wait a minute, this guy might actually be ready to bring the Vatican into the modern world”, but no. Status quo. Shut them women up so us men can get to important things like deciding what women should do.
You have to admit, the oppression of women as a group, has been successful on a global scale since Genesis 3. And it’s been good. Yes, we do a lot better job of hiding it in secular America than in Vatican City or Tehran, but we participate nonetheless.
http://news.yahoo.com/pope-francis-supports-crackdown-us-nuns-150211781.html
And in other news, the ephemeral nature of Pope Frankenstein’s “reforms” haven’t stopped a bunch of Catholic fundies from getting pissed off about them. The Society of Saint Pius X, a group that is described as “ultra-traditionalist” in comparison to the Catholic Church, charges that Pope Francophile is so focused on people not starving to death and shit that he’s forgetting to brainwash them.
These guys are lobbying the Catholic Church to stop being so progressive. They’re like the devil on the shoulder of the devil on the shoulder of the devil saying “I know the pitchfork is suspicious, but trust me you’re the angel. Pass it on.”
Pyschomachia cubed.
The leader of the group, Bishop Bernard Blowjob… I mean, Fellay, has made a habit of sharply criticizing the Vatican since Pope Benny was rockin’ the big hat. I’m all for sharply criticizing the Vatican of course, but unlike myself, he’s been arguing that the Vatican hasn’t been bat-shit crazy enough.
So I’m trying to decide what’s the ultimate example of politically untenable, and I settled on comparing these guys to holocaust deniers. Then I found out one of their prominent members for years was famous holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson.
(THIS GUY WAS BORN IN THE UK IN 1940, AND DENIES THE HOLOCAUST!!!)
You can’t make this shit up. Granted he WAS recently expelled from the SSPX, but NOT because of publicly denying the holocaust.
At least when it comes to the holocaust, they’re equal opportunity appeasers.
The SSPX, which sounds like a group of British Special Ops Roller-Bladers, by the way, fears that the Vatican is modernizing too quickly, which is kind of like fearing that Rush Limbaugh might be too healthy. In an email that Fellay boldly nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, he accused the Pope of “man-centered philanthropy” rather than “true religious leadership”.
-
What kind of philanthropy isn’t “man-centered”?
You’d think these guys might know a little bit of Latin and Greek. Doesn’t philanthropy mean “love of humanity” ?
http://news.yahoo.com/catholic-rebel-group-begins-criticizing-pope-173638858.html
And in the former Soviet Union, former sane person Vladimir Putin looks ready to enact a law that would make it illegal in Russia to “offend religious feelings”. The current bill limits the offended parties to Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists and trust me on this one, at least 75% of those people are pretty easy to offend.
Blaspheming at Buddhists is tricky . . .
“Nothing isn’t not always or never everythingness!!!”
“Things matter and I am.”
Yes, much easier to offend is the craziest non-vampiric Vlad of all time. This bill is a reaction to the literal riot that followed Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance in which they criticized hang-gliding, bear-wrestling, hockey-phenom Vladimir Putin; for which each member of the group was given a two year sentence in a remote prison camp for (quote) “Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. So yeah, hard to imagine how this law might get abused.
I’m actually kind of surprised with the punishment. I would have assumed Putin would have something a little more theatrical, like a slow-moving crotch laser, or a shark tank dipper.
Well, if it helps, I’m sure he spelled out the details of his evil plan before he sent them to the Gulag.
But it’s not exactly a James Bond level situation here, is it? If an all-girl band, dressed like Fat Albert characters, is your arch enemy, then you might be the bad guy in a cartoon show for girls on Disney Afternoon.
Well if that’s the case somebody better get Princess Luna and Ms. Harshwhinny on the line because we’re seeing more and more of these blasphemy laws being enacted all over the world. As Americans, the idea of free speech is so sacrosanct that it immediately makes us queasy and this is one of those few areas where I think we Americans actually have it right. Blasphemy laws get the whole thing backwards to begin with. If you’re offended by what I say, that shouldn’t be my problem.
If you’re offended by hearing blasphemous things like science, stop hanging out around reality where all the science happens.
And moving so far south it’s practically north again, our next story lands us in the land of Hobbits and Hobbit-references, New Zealand. This story comes to us from Paul Fidalgo at the Friendly Atheist blog. Kiwi teacher Christopher Scott Roy alleges that he lost his job as a teacher at Tamaki College in Aukland for the egregious infraction of not believing that there’s a little man in your head somewhere that drives your body like Voltron.
Nice – 80’s cartoon reference # 2 for you on the day. My Little Pony, and now the Defender of the Universe.
I’m planning to squeeze Inspector Gadget in for the trifecta. Roy, who left the school back in 2010, alleges that the school had an outlook that (quote) “saw Christian [and] Mormon faith as a core responsibility”.
This story gets a little tricky, as he actually settled his grievances with the school a while back and is now claiming that he did so “under duress and had no access to legal advice at the time the… settlement was signed”.
What’s the atheist dramatic act for protesting this? Maybe a really pushy science fair occupying the college’s chapel space. With people reading text books really loud, like a baptist minister: “Endoplasmic Reticulum”
And in exploding dildo news, a Spanish “anticlerical pro-sex toys group” is claiming responsibility for a series of amateur bombings, many involving vibrating rubber penises. Several packages containing vibrators and what the article called “mini-bombs” were sent to prominent Catholics around Spain.
This is great . . . Normally we have to make unsolicited dick jokes and those can get confused with rape jokes.
But these guys really just teed up the dick jokes for us this time. This is such a perfect piece of news for our tiny niche of offensively humorous atheist podcasts. It’s like the day when the midget actor community heard the news that Willow was being cast.
Do you think when they read the article anybody said, “Hey, the bombs weren’t that mini”?
Shipping was free, but they probably had to pay extra for handling.
The only injury mentioned in the article was a minor injury to a postal worker who was handling one of these packages when it exploded prematurely.
Somehow, the driver got the shaft, and no tip.
Well, in their defense, the group apologized for that incident in an email later where they said that nothing like this had (quote) “ever happened to them before”.
The delivery person probably found it flattering. He should have just waited 10 minutes, adjusted his grip, and tried to deliver it again.
So far this group has been responsible for a largely comedic series of fuck ups so we’re making jokes quick while we still can, but it looks like pretty soon they’re going to actually blow some people up and then this shit won’t be funny anymore.
Must continue dick joke . . .
Ummmmmm . . . Toma-Cock Missiles . . .
One more . . . The Uni-Corn Bomber . . .
Ok I’m done . . .
Would a joke about oversize black dildo’s be stretching it . . .
Ok last one . . . Penis bombs for priests is one thing, but carpet bombs for nuns . . .
Ok really the last one. . . Instead of sending UPS, they should have dropped them with “sexual predator drones”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/spanish-anarchists-catholics-explosive-vibrators
And in domestic news, a surprisingly rational decision from the Virginia Supreme Court confirms that you can’t sue your church for liking gay people. This story actually begins back in 2006 when a large contingent of the congregation at the Falls Church in Fairfax, Virginia started getting worried that the church was getting a little too lovey-dovey with the homo-butt sexers.
If I was donating money to the KKK, and they started tolerating blacks and jews all of sudden, I’d want my money back.
The group voted to leave the church but when they were faced with the daunting task of starting their own new gay-hatin’ church, they decided it would be easier to just sue the leadership at their old church and try to get the property in a homophobic coup.
That’s like paying for a homeopath to heal you magically, and then suing them after you get better, when you find out they cheated and learned to use some real medicine.
You know that actually happened with Zicam? I shit you not, they got in trouble for putting medicine in their medicine.
Anyway, somehow this shit got all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court and might yet go higher, but at the moment the court sides with the people who actually own the church and affirms their rights to not be bigots. Odds are high that we haven’t heard the last of this story though, as even if this one is settled, there are plenty of similar lawsuits going on all over the country.
“Put his hand on a bible and ask him how much he hates fags on a scale from 1 to 10. Anything under 7, and he’s clearly not fit to run a proper church.”
And in a combination of foreign, domestic and interdimensional news, the Vatican has confirmed a miracle in Colorado Springs. In the ongoing beautification of German nun Mother Teresia Bonzel, the vatican’s rigorous standards of evidence have confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that the unexpected recovery of a four year old with cancer could only be attributed to the intervention of a dead nun from Germany.
Germany could really use this. Curing cancer is just about the only way to start getting the country a nice nod in the history books again.
Apparently the young man, who makes no claim whatsoever to having been cured miraculously, resents the assertion and isn’t a Catholic, had a tumor in his colon and despite a pretty miserable outlook, he got better. What distinguishes this from the all-too-infrequent but still plentiful stories of people suddenly recovering from grave illnesses? Why two nuns were reciting a magical incantation on or about the day that the illness reversed course.
This doesn’t seem like smart engineering by god here. Why not just get rid of cancer? But I guess that’s like everyone getting a trophy.
The then-boy, now-man at the center of this whole thing is skeptical of the Vatican’s claims, pointing out that God must spend a lot of time deciding to kill other kids whom nuns also prayed for, but that didn’t stop the Vatican from putting their seal of approval on it.
Every good thing is a prayer-induced miracle, and every bad thing is a mysterious oversight. Well, I can make up tautologies too. Heads, I fuck you . . . Tails, you fuck me.
And from the “Right-for-the-Wrong-Reason” department, Christian author Anna Ariel has a new book coming out titled, “Oprah Winfrey, The Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” where she warns Christians about the dubious spiritual messages hidden within Oprah’s seemingly benign declarations.
Did “On the Origin of Species” finally get the Oprah Bump?
Not sure, but I know one book that won’t. Interestingly, the press release suggests that the author isn’t pissed at Oprah for promoting dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit; she’s pissed at Oprah for promoting the wrong dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit.
And look, I’m all about the “Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” title for Oprah. She’s made a career of giving demonstrably incorrect medical advice to people too stupid to know any better and she’s made gazillions by pretending to be a philanthropist. Hint to Oprah viewers, by the way, if you’re getting rich off your philanthropy, you’re doing it wrong.
Yeah she’s like a mega-church without the guise of religion.
Now, I’m gonna tactfully avoid any potentially racist sounding references to kettles and pots here, but a book that claims the problem with Oprah’s promotion of pseudo-science is that it’s un-Christian is like attacking drone strikes because they’re noisy.
Like unborn children suing AIDS for the condom problem?
http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/3962071903.html
And finally tonight, in dry, dull and terribly unsatisfying news, a Christian couple is proudly proclaiming that they’ve managed to go two full years post-matrimony without having sex. After fourteen months of sexless courtship, Topeka couple Jon and Darla Crocker celebrated by not fucking for a further twenty five months and counting.
I think all Christians should take a cue from these wonderful role models.
They say they plan to continue to obscenely ignore their biological programming indefinitely, dedicating their sexual misfunction to their Lord and Savior in what they’re calling “Blue Balls for Jesus”. According to the seemingly real “Lark News” the couple occasionally has (quote) “bedroom thoughts”, but always pulls back. Among the tactics used to insure their unnatural state continues, the article lists poor Jon “eating a whole raw potato” to keep his sinful urges at bay.
You know what else is helping them? Jon being a gay, and Darla being a lesbian.
Talk clean to me, baby!
I loved the quote where Darla says that their abstinence was holy before marriage but it’s double-holy now. Look, since we got married, my wife and I have gotten “double hole-y” a time or two, but I’ll guarantee you it was more fun our way.
They could get double holey without breaking their streak, if they pulled off the “Finger-Cuff 69”, a very advanced maneuver in the poop-hole loophole toolbox.
http://www.larknews.com/archives/217
That’ll do it for headlines. When we come back Lucinda will join us and probably bitchslap me for the anal sex reference there.
Poem: Genesis in Two Minutes
by Noah Lugeons
In chapter one God makes the universe and it takes seven days.
In chapter two he makes it again… in a contradictory way.
By chapter three he’s made Adam, here he makes Eve,
Then he kicks them out of Eden cause they’re covered in leaves???
In chapter four God’s a dick to Cain, but not Abel,
So Cain strikes down his brother like he’s the tower of Babel.
In chapter six we meet Noah; God says “Get ready for bruises,
You’re going on the worst boat ride there’ll be until Carnival Cruises.”
Noah praises God for this unspeakable act,
But glancing at his cock’s an unforgivable act.
Then we spend an entire fucking chapter or two,
Learning ad nauseum who begat who.
By chapter twelve we meet Abraham and he uproots his life,
Takes his shit to Egypt and starts pimping his wife.
He fucks a slave, she has a kid and they exile that one,
But then at ninety-nine Sarah bares him a legitimate son.
Abraham tells God there’s at least ten in Sodom with class,
So he sends a couple angels that they try to fuck in the ass.
And when you try to ass-rape angels, what comes is your fault,
Whether your town’s burned down by brimstone or you’re turned into salt.
In chapter seventeen Abraham makes a crazy decision,
Regarding all his sons and slaves and adult circumcision.
In Twenty-Two he gets all screwy, and takes Isaac, his tyke,
Up a mountain and almost sacrifices him before the angels say, “Psyche!”
Later Isaac meets Rebekah, they have Jake and Esau,
The big brother’s got the muscle but the brains of a cow.
Jacob tricks him from his birthright for a warm bowl of soup,
And his old near-sighted daddy’s just as easy to dupe.
Jacob takes two wives, fucks both of them and their maids.
I swear a chapter’s dedicated to Jake getting laid.
In thirty four a dirty whore? No that’s Dinah, Jake’s daughter.
They demand the Hivites foreskins before commencing the slaughter.
Jake has a dozen sons in all but he liked Joseph the best,
So his bro’s conspire against him and they steal his vest.
They sell him as a slave and tell daddy he’s dead.
He winds up a slave of Pharaoh for not performing in bed.
Here he goes all psychic, starts interpreting dreams.
It takes a couple years but at last he’s redeemed.
He stores up food for famine and he gets filthy rich;
His bros come needing munchies and he makes ‘em his bitch.
Joey shows back up much to daddy’s surprise,
And Jacob, now called Israel, eventually dies.
Chapter fifty’s so uplifting, all the tribes makes a truce;
And by now god’s promised the entire known world to the Jews.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show where we set aside a few minutes to talk up some of the great atheist and secular meetups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start in Anaheim on the weekend of May 3rd when the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference will be bringing in all my favorite atheists for a spectacular weekend of godlessness. PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Matt Dillahunty, Darrel Ray, Jamy Ian Swiss, Jessica Ahlquist and yes, I’m naming the speakers, not just all the prominent atheists I can think of.
MAY 3rd: Orange Country Freethought Alliance Conference in Anaheim, CA
http://freethoughtalliance.org/fta/annual-conference/
The friendly atheist Hemant Mehta would like to remind you that Sunday, May 5th is “Interview an Atheist at Church Day”. This is an experimental project but I love the concept. Atheists are volunteering to be interviewed at churches across the nation for a bit of outreach and while most pastors would rather eat glass, a few are taking the challenge. We’ll have notes and links on how to get involved in the show notes.
MAY 5th: Interview an Atheist at Church Day: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/18/interview-an-atheist-at-church-day-is-growing/
Looking beyond the borders of my homeland, we’ve got the 22nd Skeptic’s Congress coming up on the 9th of May in Cologne, Germany. I’d tell you more about it, but I don’t speak German. If you do, though, feel free to check the link.
MAY 9th: 22nd Skeptics Congress in Cologne, Germany
We’ve got a double whammy on May 17th with the Women in Secularism Conference taking place in DC and Imagine No Religion 3 ramping up in Kamloops, British Columbia. We’ll get to that in a second, but ladies first:
Women in Secularism 2 features a phenomenal lineup of speakers including but not limited to Susan Jacoby, Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson and the lovely, witty and talented Rebecca Watson. And if you don’t go, you’re a sexist, so there’s that.
MAY 17th Women in Secularism Conference in Washington DC:
http://www.womeninsecularism.org/
And finally in Kamloops we’ve got yet another mouth-watering list of secular speakers including Horseman number 3 Dan Dennett, Aron Ra, Victor Stenger, DJ Grothe and Mr. Diety. From everything I’ve heard about last year’s event, the folks putting this on put together a show you’ll never forget so if you’re anywhere near the area, it’s going to be worth the trip.
MAY 17th-19th Imagine No Religion 3 in Kamloops, British Columbia
That does it for this week’s calendar, but remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, secular or skeptical event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. You’ll find all the contact info along with links to all the events discussed on this episode on the “Contact Page” at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Roast:
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Roast of God!
I’m your roast master, Heath Enwright. Before we talk about the big guy in the sky, let’s meet our dais:
First, we have a Muslim prophet, who wishes to remain anonymous, appearing over Skype, with his image blurred to protect his identity. We’ll hear from him later.
We also have Mary Magdalene . . .
Where is that slut? . . . There she is; the Bible’s own Penny Lane. The filthy groupie whoo-err of Jesus and his crew. You must have been passed around the last supper like a side dish. You belong at a Duke lacrosse party.
Speaking of disgraceful fraternities, the apostles are here . . . The roadies for Jesus and his Judaism cover band.
And speaking of God’s fuckup-of-a-son, that’s right, he’s here tonight too, the Fredo Corleone of the Bible, the Red-Handed Stepchild” . . .
Give it up for Jesus Christ.
I heard this guy was a carpenter. Here’s a lesson you obviously missed . . . Carpentry 101: “Here’s your hammer and nails . . . Whatever you do, don’t get crucified.”
Dumbass . . . How’d that work out for you?
How does dying for my sins taste? Bitter?
You’re like a less interesting, more fictional version of the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.
What does Jesus have in common with the women he fucks? Without a first coming, neither of them can have a second coming.
If your genealogy is described by a Greek tragedy like the New Testament, you might be a redneck.
Y’all belong on a daytime talk show . . . “Were you conceived when your dad magically raped a virgin and secretly impregnated her? Were you almost the first justified abortion? Do you live in the greater Jerusalem area? You could be on our next show.”
All this attention for the man of the zero hour!
I’ll be honest . . . when they asked me to come here and roast God, I was surprised. I thought he was dead. I was sure I had read that somewhere.
But he’s not . . . Look at this bastard. Doesn’t look a year past omega. God is so old, he’s gathering dust to dust. God’s so old, he was here when quote “it was bad”. God’s so old, he lost his virginity to Pandora’s box.
Hey God: How’s your particle, by the way? You know, that boson, that has nothing to do with you? That secret particle you’ve been hiding? You can’t be too happy it’s already named after an atheist, who postulated that shit in 1964.
Caught your ass imbuing fundamental particles with mass? Nobody found that particle right? Cuz that would be embarrassing. I know you love those gaps, but scientists are gonna keep finding stuff. You’re losing real estate faster than Israel.
In closing, I’d like to say on behalf of creation. This isn’t a roast, as much as it’s an intervention. That’s enough with all the mysterious ways, already. You’ve gotta stop being so fucking mysterious; cancer, terrorism, rape, genocide. We all love a good plot twist, but you’re really pushing it.
All I’m saying, is the reveal better be god-damn amazing.
Song:
(G, Emin, G, Emin, G, Emin, C, Emin)
Atheists eat babies, that’s just the way God made ‘em;
I heard it on the news, that’s what that feller said verbatim.
He said lock up all yer young ‘uns and that feller’s never lied;
He said their Girl Scout cookies have Girl Scouts inside.
Them godless motherfuckers’ll never cop to what they done;
But if you turn your back a second, they might julianne yer son.
If you think that they smell good it’s all the baby breath they’re fartin’
Pourin’ milk over a cereal made from the baby on the carton.
(C, Dmin, Emin)
Well Atheists eat babies yes they do.
They’ll put ‘em in a pot and make a stew.
(C, Dmin, G, Emin)
And if you lost yer faith in Jesus you would eat them, too.
So I’ll see you ‘gain next Sunday in that pew.
Atheists eat babies, don’t tell me it ain’t so.
You say you want some proof? Well they proof ‘em in their dough.
I reckon that explains why they hate them Catholic priests.
Those pedophilic bastards always tenderize their meats.
So be careful if yer kids are ripe for atheist cuisine.
And remember that agnostics eat ‘em up to age thirteen.
Cause folks what don’t fear god eat kids with every meal;
There ain’t nothing they like better than the taste of human veal.
Well atheists eat babies, yes they do.
I swear to god and Jesus that it’s true.
Them grumpy goats in their blue housecoats eat kid fondue,
and maybe sometimes orphan cordon bleu.
Or roast them little tykes for barbecue.
For dessert they’ll have a toddler cobbler, too.
They don’t mean the same thing as me and you,
When they ask their waiter for a kid’s menu.
Cause Atheists… Eat Babies… Yes they do.
Outro:
We’ve got time to respond to one quick email before we close things out for tonight. From the “You say tomato, I say it correctly” department, Jordan from Birmingham writes to tell me that she would love the show if it weren’t for the “nails on a chalkboard” reaction she has every time I say the word atheist.
Now, before I dismiss the criticism, I’ll admit that Jordan is correct. It’s not pronounced atheist, it’s atheist, and I am definitely guilty of mispronouncing the shit out of it constantly. That being said, I’ve tried to get that hard T-H in there and when I do I get all lispy. Sorry. I talk fast and sometimes pedantic pronunciation is the first victim. I hope that in time you can come to forgive me.
We’ll be back in 168 hours with the “Did Jesus Masturbate” Edition. We’ll be back to our thirty minute format for that one, but we promise to be doubly funny to make up for it. If you’re one of those people that falls into a Ben & Jerry’s induced comatose depression when this show ends though, fear not, there’s more. You can get us in bite-sized doses on our erratically published blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. We’ve also got bonus content there including an extended version of last week’s interview with Carl from Post Rapture Looting.
You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and You-Tube. Be sure to like us and/or follow us and/or subscribe to us and/or share us as you see fit. And don’t forget to swing over to iTunes and give us a review and if you haven’t checked us out on Stitcher yet, get on that shit. My patience is wearing thin.
A lot of people to thank. Obviously I want to thank Heath and Lucinda again for joining me tonight and helping me get through this tome of nonsense. I want to thank everybody who left us a review on iTunes, those really do make my day. I also want to thank everybody who sent us emails. There’s too many to thank by name, but I really appreciate your feedback and at this point I still respond to every email so if you want to drop me a line, you can find the email address on the Contact page of our website.
Most of all, tonight, I want to thank our very most favorite listener of the week, Laura, who gave us money. Only the best people give us money, and they deserve recognition for both giving us money and for being among the best of people. If you feel that you, too, are one of the best people, you can prove it by clicking on the “donation” button on the right side of our home page. In the interest of full disclosure, we’ll keep doing the show one way or the other, but Heath is way funnier if I buy him pizza before we record.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the info on the aforementioned Contact page. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.



The Moral Lessons of Exodus
by Noah Lugeons
Exodus is a good guide for morality only if you compare it to Genesis. I’ll give the book of Exodus the credit that it did seem that on some level the authors were aware that this book would one day be used as a moral guide. In Genesis we basically got a bunch of morally dubious just-so stories but in Exodus at least we get a haphazard, antiquated, random list of dictates.
Granted, that only comprises a small portion of the book. The majority of Exodus is consumed with god’s sick revenge fantasy against all things Egyptian and some really detailed instructions on how he wants his tabernacle (which are repeated no fewer than four times in the fucking book). So it seemed that the authors figured all moral enigmas could be taken care of in about four chapters but we need at least a dozen chapters to hammer down how many cubits of tanned rams’ skins and goat hair each curtain around the tent around the altar get.
So despite the fact that god spends the first half of Exodus breaking many of the commandments he’s going to lay down later, the book does manage to squeeze in a few good moral nuggets. It’ll make for a kind of long list, but I’m going to break all of the “commandments” down here and we’ll rate them all on a moral scale with the following grades:
We’ll start with the eight and a half commandments:
So far we’ve got 3 genuine moral ones, three that lean that way and two that lean against. That gives Exodus a +7 on the moral scale, so that’s not too bad. But then we get into all the sub-commandments and it gets pretty wonky.
And that’s pretty much all god offers in Exodus in the way of moral instructions. If you add up the 47 sub-commandments, you get a whopping negative 28 (negative 21 if you factor in the 8 and a half commandments). Even if you quibble with a couple of my scores, you have to admit that we’re dealing with a pretty crappy source for ethics.
It also bears mention that of the 15 things that I rated moral, 11 of them are meaningless if you don’t have any goats, oxen or vineyards, so even a negative twenty eight is probably too high a score. I mean, there’s no way I know of to quantify the relative morality of an act, but if there was, I’m willing to bet beating a slave to death would be way more than twice as immoral as spreading rumors.