Archive
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 47
by Noah Lugeons
Genesis starts slow and it’s a pretty brutal read, but as it turns out, the third act is pretty good. It settles down into a cohesive narrative, things that are introduced to the story have relevance later, characters have depth and story arc and for a while there God bows out of things and stops being a dick. In fact, as I was polishing off the end of Genesis, I actually found myself quite drawn to Joseph. I thought I’d finally found a moral character in the Bible that I could get behind. And then I reached chapter 47.
For those who don’t know the story (it’s the Technocolor Dreamcoat one), Joseph is one of Jacob’s (Israel’s) sons and he’s daddy’s favorite. So his other 11 brothers (dad was a hound) did what any group of sociopathic jealous siblings would do. They took him to the middle of nowhere, stuck him in a pit and waied for some Egyptians to come by so they could sell him into slavery. They tell dad he was eaten by wolves or bears or something and they carry on with their lives.
Joseph makes the most of slavery but refuses to bone his master’s wife, which lands him in jail for a few years where his powers of dream-interpretation eventually catch the attention of Pharaoh, whose been having some pretty wacky sleepy-time romps of late. So he brings Joseph out of prison and tells him about his dream, which Joey interprets as God warning him about a coming famine.
Pharaoh is so impressed that he basically makes Joseph king of everybody but him. Joseph sets out to store a shitload of grain for the coming famine and sure enough, a few years later the famine settles in and thanks to Joey’s powers of precognition, Egypt is the only kingdom with any food.
Along the way he forgives his brothers, sends for his dad and hooks them up with the best grazing land in Egypt. Seems like a pretty upstanding dude up to this point. But then in chapter 47 he convinces all the Egyptians to sell themselves as slaves because otherwise they’ll starve.
It’s this surprisingly morbid aside in an otherwise uplifting story, but as the years of famine pile up, the peasants run out of money and can’t afford to buy food from Joseph anymore. So he convinces them to give him all their livestock and gives them enough grain to survive the year. Then they come back the next year with no money, no more food and no livestock, so he convinces them to give them all their land for another year’s worth of food. Then, of course, they come back the next year with no money, no food, no livestock and nowhere to freaking live, so he convinces them to sell themselves into slavery in exchange for another year’s worth of food.
Ultimately it’s clearly a story meant to justify an excessive tax laid upon the people of Egypt, but it really takes you out of this otherwise heart-warming tale of forgiveness and foresight. So far I’d say Joseph is the most moral central character in the bible, but if I can say that about somebody who locks up all the food and then demands you sell him your freewill if you want some, this book is clearly unfit as a moral guide.
One Hour Special
by Noah Lugeons
No sooner had I talked Heath into doing this thing weekly than I started pushing to do an hour long show as well. The way I figured it, I was always having trouble shaving the last three minutes out of the program, so why not just do the easy thing and add 27 minutes instead?
Luckily Heath is a little more level-headed than me and talked me into taking a step back and realizing just how much work I was about to bite off. Sure, sometimes we had to lose a funny joke and sometimes we had to push a skit a few episodes ahead, but in the long run, pushing that 30 minute time limit has worked really well so far in keeping us fast paced and succinct. If we tried to switch to an hour long show, we might have to vamp a lot of time and overall we might add 10 or 15 good minutes but at the expense of padding the show with 15 or 20 mediocre or even crappy minutes.
So needless to say, when I suggested that we make episode 10 an hour long special, Heath was skeptical at first. But then I showed him all the good stuff we had. We’re starting the Holy Babble segment with our Genesis discussion, I’m debuting a new atheist song, we’re chocked full of good headlines plus Heath has a hilarious skit that he’s been working on that I really don’t want to deprive the world of any longer than necessary.
When we set out to fill up a show, 10 of the 30 minutes are already taken up. Between the sponsor, the intro, the diatribe, the calendar, the feedback and the outro, there’s only 20 minutes to fill in any given show and we have to divide that up between the headlines, the interview (or the panel discussion) and, much of the time, a skit or two. In this week’s show we’d have been left with about 15 minutes to split between the headlines and the panel discussions and given the slate of stories we’ve got this week, we could easily go 15 minutes just on those.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for Heath to see eye to eye with me on this one. There was just way too much content to try to squeeze it into a thirty minute show. And if we bumped half the stuff to next week, we’d have to postpone the very awesome, exciting interview that I’m doing later this week.
So hopefully you have an extra half hour for us this week because we’ve got a lot to talk about.
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 34
by Noah Lugeons
Alright, so I have a new favorite chapter in the Bible and I also have renewed hopes that the mammoth task of breaking this whole stupid book won’t all suck. I’m actually shocked that this isn’t one of the stories that Christians trot out more often because it’s fucking awesome.
The story starts out with Dinah, daughter of the notorious pussy-magnet Jacob, catching the eye of Shechem, a Hivite prince. And you know how those Hivites can’t keep their dicks to themselves, so Shechem rapes her. But according to Genesis 34:3, after he raped her he was really sweet to her:
And his soul was drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob; he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her.
And so post-rape, he decides he want to marry Dinah but Jacob and his sons are still understandably pissed about the whole raping their daughter/sister bit so at first they’re reluctant. Shechem is persistent a la Pepe Le Pew so eventually Jacob makes a deal. He tells the prince that if he and all the Hivites will join their tribe, he can marry Dinah. Now that doesn’t sound to bad, but we learned back in Chapter 17 that part of joining their tribe is lopping off a significant portion of your cock.
But Shechem is smitten so he’s all “Lop off my foreskin and force all the men in my tribe to do the same? No problem.” And he agrees to it.
So in what must have been the single most baffling day in Hivite history, all the men cut their foreskins off. Understandably, there’s not a lot getting done in downtown Hivite-ville that day because all the guys are laying in beds moaning “I hate monarchy!” And while they’re in that prone, post-circumcision state, Jacob and his boys roll into town and kill all of them.
Yes, that’s right, they kill all the Hivites after tricking them into chopping at their genitals. I’m guessing the resistance was a bit subdued here. Hell, a lot of them were probably going, “Yeah, slit my throat, sure. Whatever takes my mind off the pain in my dick.”
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 12:12-20
by Noah Lugeons
So this Abram (cum Abraham) is a morally dubious motherfucker, which is clear pretty early on. When we meet the guy, he’s almost immediately whoring his wife off to the Pharaoh. A famine falls upon the land and he has to have this uncomfortable conversation with his wife:
“Hey baby, I know you’re smoking hot and anybody who sees you is gonna want to fuck you, even if they have to kill me to do it.”
“Well, thanks… kind of,” Sarai says back.
“Now, we could not go to Egypt, for sure, and if we don’t nobody will kill me to fuck you,” he added.
“Yes,” Sarai said hopefully, “let’s do that.”
But Abram had other plans, you see. “Well, yeah, we could. But I bet there’s another way to go about this where we get donkeys and shit.”
“Do you get killed?” she asked hopefully.
“Nope.”
“Do I get fucked?” she asked, equally hopefully.
“Well, yeah.”
He then proceeds to whore her off to the Pharaoh for some sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys and camels. Note that they don’t specify the genders on the sheep, oxen or camels, but they make sure to tell you that Abraham got enough donkeys to make more.
And what does god do about the whole “pretend-my-wife-is-my-sister-so-I-can-whore-her-off-for-livestock” charade? He punishes the poor Pharaoh who gave up donkeys of multiple genders for a barren, married prostitute.
This is a really fucked up book.
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 4:24
by Noah Lugeons
So I’m reading the bible for this Holy Babble segment we’re doing on the show and I figured as I was reading I’d toss a few of my random thoughts out. These’ll probably be short posts where I reflect on something that I probably won’t have time to mention on the show.
My first such reflection comes in the 4th chapter of Genesis. We’re right in the middle of a “who-fucked-who” list (of which Genesis seems to have plenty) and suddenly my boy Lamech shows up out of nowhere with bloody hands and a crazed look in his eye. This homicidal polygamist gathers his wives together and says:
Adah and Zillah (his wives, banging chicks from A-Z, this boy was), hear my voice (what the hell else would they hear?);
You wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: (the Bible likes to repeat itself)
I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-seven fold”
And then we’re back to fuck-lists. This just pops up out of nowhere and as near as I can tell, it’s not setting up something else. So basically Lamech just shows up in the middle of the bible to tell everybody what a bad ass he is. I can’t help but think of him in the room while the scribes were writing it going, “Put in a part where I’m a badass. At least ten times… no eleven times more badass than Cain!”
So that was weird. Anyway, back to bible study.
Episode 9: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new line of Christian feminine hygiene products, Penta-Douche. Remember, when you have that not-so-fresh feeling, it’s because you’re unclean in the eyes of God. So when you’re being shunned for seven days, as is proscribed in all of the Abrahamic faiths, be sure to use our new Adam & Summer’s Eve brand.
Penta-douche; because women are cursed and responsible for the fall of man.
And now, the Scathing Atheist
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 18th and due to an increase in promiscuity, Allah has cut it back to 54 virgins per Jihadee.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from scandalous New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- Pope Frankie names a group of 8 mini-bosses you’ll have to defeat before entering his lair,
- Carl from Post Rapture Looting joins me for some atheist Easter Egg hunting where we look for eggs we know aren’t there,
- And Representative Joe Barton moves to tackle global warming by first gathering two of every unclean species and seven of every clean one
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
A lot of theists have trouble accepting that we really don’t believe in god. They like to think that deep down we’re just suppressing our faith but when we find ourselves in a really tough situation, we’ll revert to our programming, we’ll drop to our knees and we’ll start praying. After all, when they look at the world, they see god. So how could we look at the same world and not see him at all?
Similarly, a lot of atheists have trouble accepting that theists really believe in god. We like to think that deep down they know good and damn well that it’s all a myth propagated by power-hungry shamans and that when the shit hits the fan, they’ll abandon their superstitions and turn to a secular solution. After all, when we look at the world, we don’t see a god. How could they look at the same world and see one?
Clearly part of this is just a lack of intellectual empathy. They think we’ve got a ‘god shaped hole’ in our hearts and we think they’ve got a ‘reason shaped hole’ in their heads. It’s a defense mechanism like the one where we demonize the opposite side of the political spectrum. It’s harder to Accept that they’ve looked at the evidence and come to a contrary conclusion than it is to create a caricature of their opinions and pretend that they’re all heartless or stupid.
And I suppose a lot of people would tell me to leave it there. I said something bad about one side and then I said something bad about the other and now can’t we all just get along?
But I think it’s too neat and tidy to write it all off as a self-delusion. After all, when I listen to somebody tell me that they believe that god’s in heaven and Jesus loves them and grandma and Sparky are at the pearly gates waiting for them, I don’t wonder how they believe it. I wonder why they’re not in a bigger hurry to die.
If I ask them, they’ll tell me that god has a plan for them on earth and that they’d miss their kids or their grandkids or their friends or whatever, but if you balance the time we spend on earth with the eternity they expect to spend in heaven, it’s an insignificant blink of the eye. Ten billion years from now your grandkids won’t even remember that you weren’t there while they were learning to poop.
And why aren’t they more eager for their loved ones to die? It seems to me that once mom has arthritis or even a persistent headache she’d be better off in heaven where she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. How selfish is it for me to hope she lingers on in minor pain for decades just so that I can have her around to babysit the kids? Hell, it seems like as soon as your folks start hitting financial troubles you’d be hoping they’d die so they could move into that mansion god has for them in heaven.
I’ve watched friends grieve the loss of a loved one; both theist and atheist. And I can tell you from a statistically insignificant, unblinded anecdote that one didn’t seem to have any easier a time with it than the other. Somehow the person who professed to believe that their beloved was living in a mansion with a golden driveway in paradise was every bit as bereaved as the person who professed to believe that their loved one no longer existed at all. How could that possibly be?
When I say that I don’t think theists believe their own bullshit, it’s not something I’m basing on my own psychology, it’s something I’m basing on their behavior. If you honestly believed, all the way to your core, that you were going to meet the people you lose in a perfect world in the clouds, how could you possibly mourn their passing? How could a funeral be anything but a joyous occasion?
The religious dingbats of the world like to express their disbelief in atheists with one of the most pervasive and insulting clichés ever coined to smear rationalists; “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”
The idea is that even we heathens will turn to god if things get bad enough. Included, of course, is the unspoken assumption that when we experience this instantaneous conversion, it’ll be their god we’ll start praying to. It never seems to occur to them that if that’s how it worked, all the Christians in the foxhole would start praying to Allah, Shiva and Odin just to be on the safe side.
But I’d like to submit the opposite. When you’re in the proverbial foxhole, myths and superstitions are cold comfort. When the bombs are raining down, nobody’s saying “Shit, I sure hope that one hits us!” and if they were, we’d rightly assume that they’d lost their fucking minds. I submit that when we’re facing the uncertainty of our own deaths, we are all atheists by default.
Contrary to the adage, when it comes down to it, there are no theists in a foxhole.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my kemosabe Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to Lone Range?
In our lead story tonight, California legislators are subtly suggesting that perhaps the Boy Scouts of America should stop being bigots. A proposed law would strip the Boy Scouts of their tax exempt status along with any other nonprofit that excludes members based on sexual orientation, gender identity or religious affiliation.
There’s been a real outcry surrounding this proposal and strangely enough it’s not because this wasn’t done decades ago. How common sense is this proposal?
- I’d like to read a quote from christiannewswire.com: “Should SB 323 become law it would break new ground in using the tax system to punish those who are disliked by LGBT activists.” Those who are disliked by LGBT activists are called bigots. So the the tax system punishes bigots. Is that unreasonable?
- I’d like a tax system that punishes all sorts of shitty people. That’s actually the whole point of certain taxes. To discourage things with negative externalities, like the actions and opinions of the ignorant.
Yeah, hard to imagine why religious groups would be threatened by a law that strips tax exemptions from groups that institutionalize discrimination, huh?
While most of the major media coverage has focused on the gay stuff, this law would also force the Boy Scouts, and any other group seeking tax exemption, to allow the dreaded atheists to walk amongst them.
- Much like a black person disrupts the front of a bus, an atheist clearly disrupts a lesson in the tying of a bowline knot.
- What’s their problem?
The bill is saying, you can still be an asshole, and you can still have your asshole club.
The government just happens to offer extra credit on the test for clubs that are not assholes . . . So you assholes don’t get those particular bonus points.
- We’re bending over backwards to be tolerant of assholes. We’re just taking away the asshole subsidy they’ve been getting. And we’ll give it right back if they stop being assholes.
California pushes bill to end State tax exemptions for Boy Scouts because of anti-gay, anti-atheist policies:
– From a real news source: http://news.yahoo.com/calif-tax-bill-seeks-punish-scouts-gay-ban-193252719.html
– From Xian Newswire: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2250071876.html
From the “Should we call it the Reform Council or the Council on Reform” Department, the Pope has assigned 8 cardinals to advise him on thinking about talking about thinking about reform. While major media headlines like “Pope Makes First Big Decision Naming Advisory Board” and “Pope Makes Tough Decisions as Reforms Loom” would suggest that he’d actually done something, the actual meat of this story is downright vegan.
So Pope Frankfurter has commissioned an advisory panel to look into overhauling the Vatican Bureaucracy. Vatican officials point out that it’s been a quarter century since the bureaucracy was updated, somehow missing the irony that it’s been two millennia since any-damn-thing else about their church was updated.
- Yeah their literature could use a few retractions. Maybe a new edition, in light of all this new shit.
- I heard the advisory panel has a small delegation scouring the woods to confirm or disconfirm the presence of bear shit.
- Maybe the panel can also look into whether there will ever be some way to create individual cross-sections that divide up an entire loaf of bread into convenient pieces.
But the collective media cock-guzzle around Pope Frank-n’-Beans continues and everything he does from washing a foot to wiping lefty is dutifully reported as proof that he’s a real reformer and things are gonna be different under his watch. He’s not like that old creepy pedophile-protecting Palpatine lookalike. He’s an old creepy, pedophile-protecting Droopy Dog lookalike.
- He reminds me of Elmer Fudd, but with a sillier hat . . . doing the “Kill the Wabbit” song to Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”.
- Sidenote: I’m thoroughly impressed by the lefty wiping. I tried to jerk it lefty one time, and I suffered an elbow injury and an eye injury.
Pope names 8 advisors to think about talking about thinking about reform: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-taps-cardinals-advise-governing-reform-124612388.html
And in earth-shattering international news, women are wearing man-clothes at the Western Wall. This news comes to us from the 1300s via modern day Jerusalem. Several female activists were arrested at the holy site last Thursday for wearing man-shawls and praying out loud.
- The man-shawls don’t help the sexual roles platform, and they definitely muddle the homophobia stance a little.
And as much as my liberal heart wants to stand behind the women involved in this protest, my rational mind says, “you’re trying to pray to an imaginary being whose very existence was largely manufactured to oppress your gender”, so it’s hard for me to rally behind them too much. If you want to advance women in these silly cultures, leave all the talking-to-walls to the men and maybe try reading or something. Just a suggestion.
- Yeah, why the hell do they want to go there or do that in the first place? They must have got Tom Sawyered.
- “Don’t even think about wearing that man-shawl and whitewashing this prayer wall with me.”
Clash with religious authorities at the Western Wall because women are wearing the “man shawls” http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/12/battle-of-the-sexes-at-western-wall/
And in “No-when-to-fold-em” news, a NY nun has admitted stealing more than an eighth of a million dollars to cover her gambling expenses. She now faces six months in prison, which, for the record, I would do in a heartbeat for $128,000. I mean seriously? Six months?
But before you go thinking the sentencing was light because she was a 68 year-old nun, I should mention that her attorney says she’s really, really sorry. And if we were more like Jesus we wouldn’t be so worried about the past.
- I guess you gotta support the habit somehow.
Vinnie “Knuckles” Malone, a source close to the case was quoted as saying, “That bitch just lucky she still has all her fingers. Nun or not, I’ll fuck that whore up.”
- The Knuckles brand of justice sounds surprisingly well-informed on the 1st Amendment.
NY nun admits to stealing $130,000 from churches to pay for her gambling addiction: http://news.yahoo.com/gambling-nun-pleads-guilty-theft-york-churches-224339427.html
And earning the honor of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight this week is Texas Republican… and I’d just like to point out that those two words very often precede the naming of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight on any given week…
- Texas Republicans making political decisions, are like the youngest brother in a big family getting to choose what everyone has for dinner on their birthday. You end up having to appease them once in awhile, so you try to take them seriously that one day, and they’re like “Deep Fried Chocolate Baloney Hot Pockets!!!”
Anyway, Texas Republican Joe Barton was trying to justify a bill to force Obama’s hand on the Keystone pipeline. And atheists, I’m sure, have differing opinions on the issue of this controversial energy project. But I think we can all agree that it takes a class A jackass to use the issue to write off climate change on the grounds of God’s predilection for flooding the whole world.
- The gradual melting of polar ice caps would be the lamest Great Flood ever. Not exactly an awe-inspiring demonstration of omnipotence.
- “Does the water look a couple inches higher to you? That’s it . . . I’m devoting my life to Jesus.”
- Decent amount of slavery in the bible, so that must not have been a man-made phenomenon either. Just pious plantation owners fulfilling their destiny. Somebody’s gotta get enslaved.
Now, if I quoted him directly, I’d probably get accused of making it sound stupider than it actually sounded, so here it is, in all it’s glorious fucktardary: [SOUNDCLIP]
Rep. Joe Barton cites the great flood as evidence that global warming is not man made: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/10/rep-joe-barton-biblical-great-flood-shows-climate-change-isnt-man-made/ (grab soundclip on this one, too!)
And finally tonight, the intrepid radio host and fundamentalist activist Bryan Fischer has uncovered our secret, homofascist plot to make Christians wear Christian badges like ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany.
- We ended up going ahead with that plot? I was thinking thorny crowns though. The sleeve patches are a little too subtle.
- Didn’t Fischer seem strangely preoccupied with the design of the Christian ghetto patch?
Our nefarious strategy had managed to stay so well-hidden over the years that not even the key players instrumental in its implementation knew about it, but despite this nearly preternatural level of secrecy, Fischer’s mind was able to twist through the various corridors of our labyrinth and figure out our plans even before we did. And he did so amidst the following random assemblage of gibberish: [SOUNDCLIP]
- Of course, you never want to hear about a holocaust. Of course. But if another one HAD TO HAPPEN, I’d say Christians are the logical victims. Hold on, what am I talking about? Muslims, obviously. What, it’s a fucking roast!
- I’d say that the most surprising thing I learned when I was researching this story is that spellcheck has no issues at all with the word “homofascist”.
Bryan Fischer discovers our homofascist plot to make Christians wear badges like ghetto Jews: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/12/bryan-fischer-homofascists-will-treat-christians-like-jews-in-the-holocaust/ (grab soundclip!!)
That does it for headlines, when we come back, Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast will join us to discuss all the fun he had over Easter Weekend.
Skit:
Normally I save emails for the end of the show but I got one from a celebrity the other day and it got me really excited. I’m not sure if I he would want me to mention his name, but you know what? Fuck it, I’m pretty stoked, I’m gonna go ahead and tell you. It was from God.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s an email and anybody could say there were God, but the way I figure it, I’ve got exactly as much evidence that this email was written by god as Christians have that the bible was, so I’m rolling with it.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool, so I thought I’d share it with you:
Dear Noah,
This email is intended as official notice that you have been damned.
This action was taken against you by me, the Lord Almighty on April 13th in the year of our me 2013 for trespasses including, but not limited to:
- Taking my name in vain while suggesting that I, Father of Abraham, Granter of Life, Alpha and Omega, am physically comprised of fecal-pornography,
- Making it sound on your show like Jesus is bad at finding keys when, if fact, he is damn good at it, and
- Making a blasphemous exclamation while masturbating on the Sabbath to impure thoughts about your neighbor’s wife in mixed garments.
As a consequence of your damning, the standing invitation of your immortal soul to return to heaven upon its earthly passing has been revoked. Alternate accommodations will be provided. In addition, your prayers will be ignored separately from those of believers, you will not be permitted to use a crucifix to ward off vampires and Jesus says from now on you can find your own fucking keys.
If you feel that you have been damned in error, please reply within 30 days with an explanation of any extenuating or mitigating circumstances along with heaps of sanctimonious praise and obsequious adulation. Failure to remit in the time frame outlined above will result in your damnation being converted to eternal status.
Praise and adulation will be judged at the discretion of the damning party and may or may not be deemed sufficient for salvation.
May God have mercy on your soul… Oh wait, too late for that Bitch.
Jehovah.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. Normally we try to keep things light hearted and funny on this show, but sometimes there’s nothing funny about what we’re doing. And once in a while we need to step back and recognize that.
That’s why I’m dedicating this week’s calendar to the atheist bloggers and activists in Bangladesh that are risking their lives to do exactly what I’m doing. Freedom of speech is something I blithely accept as my birthright as an American, but not everyone is as fortunate.
I can’t possibly cover all the details of this story in such a short format, but I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. We’ll have links all over the shownotes and if you follow us on Twitter we’ll keep you abreast of the story. Suffice to say that a well-organized group of Islamic militants are trying to use their bully pulpit to divert attention away from their wrong-doing and a group of atheist bloggers have become their unwitting scapegoat.
Two bloggers have already been killed and Islamic leaders are calling for the execution of 84 more named atheist activists.
In response, atheist and humanist organizations all over the world have declared April 25th a day of action to stand with our fellow non-believers. And you can make a difference here. Write a blog, send a letter, join one of the many protests being organized across the country, or, if nothing else, take to social media and let people know what is happening.
Regardless of our beliefs, we can all agree that nobody should die for theirs. I urge you to check out the links at Scathing Atheist (dot) com and learn more.
And now, back to the fart jokes and stuff.
April 25th, stand with the atheist bloggers in Myanmar: http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/04/11/on-25-april-2013-we-stand-with-bangladeshi-bloggers-and-activists/
Outro:
There was one email I wanted to respond to before we closed things out for the night, but first a quick correction. You’ll recall that last week Heath and I discussed a nincompoop that wrote an article about how Steven Hawking proved the bible correct by referring to dust. Anyway, I identified the numb-skull as Paul Hitchins, his name is actually Paul Hutchins. So I wanted to apologize, not to the Christian dingle-berry, but rather to the name “Hitchins”. So sorry about that, I owe you more respect.
Okay, so first email comes to us from Renee in Clemsdale and I’m not sure what state or country Clemsdale is in. Renee was very polite in his or her full condemnation of everything we’ve done on the show and, in a round-about way, everything I’ve ever done in my life. But I just wanted to tell Renee that I did love the email, especially the contradictory notion of condemning me to hell in one paragraph, but then hoping I have a lovely day in the next.
Sorry to end on such a somber note, but that does it for our show this week. We’ll be back in 168 hours, when we’ll crack open our bibles and tackle Genesis in the “Holy Babble”. If you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and follow us on Twitter.
I want to throw a big thanks to Carl for joining me early on a Sunday morning for that interview. He had to miss church and everything, so I want to thank him for making the sacrifice. If you haven’t checked out his show, be sure to do that. Once again, it’s the Post Rapture Looting Podcast and we’ll have links to it on the shownotes for this episode. (http://postrapturelooting.net/PRL/)
I want to thank the person who gave us our first donation. Haven’t figured out how to find out who you are so I can thank you by name, but thanks. Really means a lot to us. If you’d like to join this exclusive group of one person, you can donate to the show as well. You’ll find the link on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
If you want to help us out but don’t want to part with any of your hard earned cash, you can always swing by iTunes and give us an awesome review. We really appreciate everyone who does that and we love them more than the other audience members… except the ones who give cash, who we love the most.
Of course, a huge thanks to Heath for everything he does to make the wheels of this podcast turn and a big thanks to everyone who decided to give us thirty minutes of their lives. We’ll be hard at work earning thirty minutes next time. Until then, check out the backlog and do it on Stitcher because seriously, our Stitcher rank sucks balls.
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.
Why Atheists Always Win at Twitter
by Noah Lugeons
I just reached the satisfying conclusion of a five day flame war on Twitter. My wife’s kind of new to the whole Twitter thing, so I’ve been explaining my technique a bit as I go. It’s been educational for both of us, as it’s forced me to think a lot more about it than I normally do. And over that period, I’ve developed a theory to help explain why I always kick so much ass in Twitter fights.
Now, it’s too broad a generalization to say that atheists always win on Twitter, unless you define winning as being the person who turns out to be correct in the end. I’ve seen a few atheists get their asses handed to them by clever apologists on Twitter, forums, Facebook threads, Reddit, blog comments… you name it. But it seems that the vast majority of the time, I see the atheist beating the religious clod into the ground until they’re pounding their keyboards randomly with shaking fists.
So before I lay out my theory, we have to define two things. One is what I consider “winning” in a flame war. The second is, strangely enough, the word “faith”. We’ll start with the easy one.
The old trope about somebody being wrong on the internet is used to justify a lot of losses in online arguments. I’m not saying there isn’t something to the notion that arguing online is often unproductive, but I think one goes to far when one says it’s “useless”. As I’ve said before on this blog, it helps you hone your skills in live debate, it helps you reinforce your understanding of your own position and it helps you build a community of online support. But there’s also another benefit; it can be really fun.
Debates online are okay. I usually let somebody else takeover when the philosophical arguments get too far in the weeds because that shit bores me eventually. I don’t have the patience to walk theist after theist through all the errors in “irreducible complexity” or “Pascal’s Wager”. But I never back down from a good old fashioned flame war. Hell, I’ve been doing that shit since CompuServe.
In all that time, the enemy hasn’t changed, the wars haven’t changed and thus my tactics haven’t had to change much. Once an argument moves beyond any exchange of rational ideas and turns into a name-calling, juvenile insult war, there’s only one way to win. You have to be the one who maintains your cool longest. Eventually, if you do it right, you’ll get a response like:
You’re a pathetic, tragic, stupid, evil waste of breath. FUCK YOU!!!!1!!!
And then you can break out the champagne because you’ve won. When you’ve reduced a person to something like that, they’ve admitted that they’re through being clever or even intelligent. You’ve cracked their facade of confidence and revealed them to be your intellectual inferior. What’s more, you can pile on all you want at this point because they’ve gotten emotional and you haven’t. You can make them drool if you try hard enough.
For my purposes, this is the only measure of victory in a flame war. Being the last person to lose their cool says that you’re the one presenting the rational argument and they’re the one presenting the emotional one. It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not because all participants have long abandoned the logical standing of their position anyway. It’s simply about who can piss who off first.
And it is in this way that I see atheists win over and over and over again.
Part of this is certainly the fact that we’ve just got the better arguments. There can be little doubt, especially in the mind of a non-believer, who is approaching this question logically and who is approaching it emotionally. It also helps that we are forced into positions where we have to justify our worldview far more often than theists (and, of course, I’m speaking only to the culture I’m familiar with. Can’t say how true that is for my readers outside the US).
And that ultimately brings us to the role “faith” plays in all of this. Religious people love to talk about “faith”, but when they use it, it has a special meaning. If I were to use faith, it would be to describe a near-certainty: I have faith that the porch will hold my weight; I have faith that Heath will show up to record on Tuesday; I have faith that I will win Twitter wars with theists. But that type of faith is entirely different than the “faith” that believers talk about. So much so that they should really have to use a different word. It’s almost the polar opposite of what I mean.
Me: Faith is the expectation that something will behave exactly like it always does.
Them: Faith is the expectation that everything will eventually behave in a way I’ve never observed it behaving.
Ask an atheist and virtually all of them will tell you that they’d be willing to change their minds on the “god” question if compelling new evidence appeared. Ask a theist and virtually all of them would tell you the opposite. Theists look at that and see doubt in the atheists, while we look at it and see doubt in them. After all, I’m confident that my porch will hold my weight, but it would only take one time of me falling through it to change my mind on the subject. It’s a belief I’m so confident about that I don’t have to worry about changing my mind on it.
But consider the religious type of faith in that analogy. They would have to keep walking out on that porch every day, even after it collapsed. They’d have to walk out the back door, fall into the pile of broken lumber below, pluck splinters from their limbs and tell themselves that the porch was still holding their weight. No amount of evidence would sway them from their “faith”. But our kind of faith breeds a certain kind of apathy. If you’re confident enough about a belief, you don’t care. You’re not emotionally invested in the belief that the porch will hold your weight. You don’t bother justifying the belief to yourself with logic puzzles and wagers from long dead mathematicians. I need invoke no syllogism to prove to myself that the porch will hold my weight.
Which brings us back to the flame wars. I won’t deny that I’m emotionally invested in the atheist movement. I’m as emotional about fighting against religious intrusion as I am about any subject. I passionately donate my time, money, creativity and effort to furthering this cause and that is all fueled by an emotional investment. But what I’m emotional about isn’t the fact that god doesn’t exist. I have faith in that the same way I have faith in my porch. I might need a fancy analogy or two to justify it to a believer, but I don’t need anything but the evidence (or overwhelming lack thereof) to settle that question to my own satisfaction.
So when I’m battling with a believer, they keep expecting to find that emotional trigger. They fire blindly because they think there’s something about my atheism that has spurred my activism. In reality, it’s actually something about their religion. Meanwhile, it’s kind of easy to find their trigger. They want to tear down your intelligence because it irks them to think that a smart person would look at the data and conclude that there is no god. So simply being intelligent with your responses is enough to eventually bring out the worst in them.
Sure, we can be disrespectful, scathing and vulgar (hell, that’s kind of my niche), but we never abandon reason. Even in the filthiest of flame wars, I’m always in the realm of logic. And eventually that leaves them in the realm of ad hominem Fuck-Yous.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make someone drool.
An Interview With Carl
by Noah Lugeons
I woke up early this morning to do an interview with Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast (my podcast this time). Okay, so “early” is a relative term. It’s my day off and I normally don’t wake up until there are two digits in the hour on my day off, so waking up at 9:00 seemed a bit excessive. Carl’s the one who actually had to wake up early, as we started things off at 7:30 am his time.
I should note that this was his choice. I’d have been happy to do it a bit later, but as he explained, he has kids and they don’t care how much you drink, they wake up at the same damn time.
Carl had the good taste to invite Heath and me on his show when we were still only 3 episodes into our little experiment, so I definitely felt that I owed him some reciprocal promotion, but that wasn’t why I interviewed him. That lucky bastard got to go to the American Atheists’ 50th Anniversary Convention in Austin. What’s more, he lost his atheist convention virginity there.
I, of course, lost my atheist convention virginity a long time ago. It was to a convention that you don’t know and it moved out of state a while back, but it was a really good one. But Carl had never been to something like this before and I knew I was curious what his first impressions were. My hope was that our listeners would share that curiosity.
Like all my interviews, it went on way longer than I intended so I cut a 15 minute version for the website and an 8 minute version for the show. We’ll be airing it on this week’s show (hooray! I don’t have to read Genesis yet!) and after listening to the show-edit, I can assure you that even if you didn’t share my curiosity about the convention experience, you’ll enjoy the hell out of the interview. Carl’s a pretty funny dude and when you pack 15 minutes of his wit into an 8 minute package, it explodes with hilarity. Hell, it might even be dangerous to pack so much funny into such a short space, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Episode 8: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Mitt Romney’s new brand of baking soda, Mormon Hammer. Guaranteed to keep your fridge as free of odor as it is of alcohol, caffeine and gender-equality. So send one of your wives to the store and tell them to look for the whitest baking soda on the shelf: Mormon Hammer.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 11th and bananas are my worst nightmare.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from climatically-schizophrenic New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- A Louisiana legislator tries to teach kids about religious freedom by taking it away,
- We’ll use the word “fuck” more times than there’s any real need to and
- My wife and my best friend will join me for the most disappointing threesome of all time.
But first, the Diatribe…
Diatribe:
“How Hubble Saved My Soul”
I rejected religion at an early age. My parents were religious but they weren’t church-goers and they only made a half-ass attempt to brainwash me. I can’t tell you exactly when I out-logiced religion, but my earliest atheist memory is at the age of 8 when my 3rd grade teacher settled an argument between me and some other kid by affirming that there was too a god.
Now, I’d say I was proud of that fact, but atheism is nothing to be proud of. Outsmarting a book that starts contradicting itself in the second chapter isn’t very hard. And, as I proved for many years after rejecting my parent’s faith, you can be both an atheist and a gullible dipshit simultaneously.
See, I didn’t do the whole religion thing, but I was every bit as irrational in my puerile new-age hippy tie-dye, goatee, anything goes, neo-pagan spiritualism. I dismissed all the doctrines, but I still had a soft spot in my brain for ancient wisdom. What’s more, I wanted magic and eternal life. I just wasn’t willing to get them from a church.
So I alternately identified myself as a Wiccan, a spiritualist, a Thelemite or, my personal favorite, a Pangeantheologist. I read books on witchcraft and Kabbalah and chakras and high magick and low magick and herbal magick and color magick and chaos magick and shamanic magick and Enochian magick. And I read the I Ching and I read Tarot cards and I read runes and I read palms. And I read Aleister Crowley and Raymond Buckland and Donald Kraig and Israel Regardie and Peter Carroll. And I went to pagan communes and I met gurus and I went on silence retreats and I danced naked around bonfires and I called upon ancient spirits and I invoked undines and deep down I knew the whole time that it was a load of shit.
The cognitive dissonance wasn’t that hard at first, because I was getting laid. But it got harder and harder as I learned more and more about this stuff. There was never any substance. It never made any more sense. There were never any deeper secrets and there were never any results.
My friends would all say, “Oh, you’ve gotta meet this guru” and when I do, I figure out five minutes in that he knows less about what he’s talking about than I do after reading three books on the subject. I would get together with some coven for a big communal spell and I would happen to catch them on one of those rare nights when nothing happened at all. Or worse yet, you would know the ceremony was over when the most gullible jackass in the room says, “Did you feel that?!”
And as I’m going through this whole five year acid trip of the soul, something else was happening too. And even though I wouldn’t realize it for a quite a while, it was steadily eroding the foundation of my bullshit; I started to see the images being returned from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like practically everyone, I fell in love with these images as soon as I saw them. I was fascinated and I couldn’t possibly see enough. I wanted to know more about what they were and the incredible universe they revealed. But more than that I wanted to know how we got them and what they meant. It was slow and sometimes painful, but that was the origin of my love for science.
Somehow underpaid, uninspired public school teachers had failed to instill any real appreciation for something as fascinating as everything in my developing mind and it took seeing the universe in this scale for me to truly appreciate the wonders of human curiosity.
But it sure made that cognitive dissonance harder. After all, if science said what I believed was bullshit and they could back it up with pictures of the entire fucking universe, who was I to disagree? How could I cocoon myself in some arrogant worldview that places humanity in the center of it all when there were things like the Hubble Deep Field Image to contradict me?
Even the young religions had a multi-century head start on science when it came to this whole “heaven” thing and they were happy to tell you what it was like and who was in charge and how you could get there, but they never managed to take pictures. We never glimpsed the earliest stars through the power of herbal supplements. We never saw a cloud of dust four light years across through proper breathing techniques. We never saw galaxies forming with color-infused water. The methods and practiced that all my hippy gurus promoted had been around for centuries and sometimes millenia, and yet knowledge of their deep and mystical secrets had never managed something as stupefying and eye-opening as even the lowliest of Hubble’s observations. And yes, I’m talking about the blurry shit before they fixed it.
Sure, you eat enough mushrooms and get in a sweat lodge, you’ll see all the bright lights and pretty colors Hubble has to offer, but there’s nothing there. Just like every other silly little spiritual distraction, there’s nothing there. It’s all empty, hollow, meaningless, unsatisfying, Chicken Soup for the Brain drivel. It demands that you suspend your disbelief even to the point of suspending your own senses. It demands that you practice for years at something you can’t actually get better at. It demands that you nod along with every stupid post-modernist notion some yoga instructor blurts out because you don’t want to be the only one at the party wearing incredulity.
But science, as Carl Sagan said, brings the goods. The appeal of all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo was rooted in my desire to be part of something larger, but when I glanced at the universe through the eyes of a space telescope, I saw that science was offering me something larger than any new-age guru could dream of. And what’s more is that it was real; tangible; provable. Unlike the “truth” offered by faith, science demands nothing in return.
And that’s how Hubble saved my soul.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is my fidus Achates, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to, um… I don’t know, feed us?
In our lead story tonight, the state of North Carolina decided to declare a state religion last week, then the ether wore off and they wondered who that lump in the bed was and where that tattoo came from and what the fuck they were thinking.
This story starts in Rowan County, North Carolina (go Mustangs!) where a lawsuit threatened to stop county commissioners from opening their meetings with a prayer. They had two choices, one was concede, give up the prayer and not look like stupid assholes. The other was to try to rewrite the constitution.
- They were trying to invoke a silly little idea that I remember my 10th grade history teacher asserting. The idea is that the constitution only forbids congress from establishing a religion, not the individual states.
- I’m not sure if there’s any real constitutional ground for that argument but I’m skeptical and so is North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis, who killed the bill once the national media started to make a stink about this. Which suggests to me that somehow North Carolina legislators didn’t realize that people were gonna make a stink about this.
- And that’s why we need watchdog groups.
LEAD STORY: The North Carolina State Religion: http://news.yahoo.com/could-north-carolina-actually-declare-state-religion-130700725.html Follow Up : http://www.goddiscussion.com/108691/north-carolina-house-speaker-kills-bill-that-would-have-allowed-the-state-to-create-a-state-sponsored-religion-in-violation-of-first-amendment-to-the-constitution/
And in “I’ll see your state religion and raise you twelve pounds of raw bat-shit” news, Louisiana State Representative Katrina R. Jackson has proposed a new bill that would force students to recite the Lord’s Prayer along with the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
With an inspiring effort to yet be the most destructive Katrina in Louisiana’s history, Representative Jackson attempts to justify the bill with some of the most Orwellian language since Orwell. She actually says:
- “Students shall be informed that these exercises are not meant to influence an individual’s personal religious beliefs in any manner.”
- The recitations shall be conducted so that students learn of America’s great freedoms, including the freedom of religion symbolized by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Louisiana state rep proposes a prayer-in-school law: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/05/louisiana-state-representative-students-should-learn-freedom-of-religion-by-reciting-the-lords-prayer-every-morning/
And following up on a story we covered back in episode 4, the big Jesus picture in Jackson, Ohio is coming down. You’ll recall a flurry of defensive posturing by the school board, who insisted that nothing on heaven or earth was going to make them take down their beloved Jesus pitcher.
Well, it turned out that all it took was an insurance company deciding that Jesus was a liability. And this goes to show you how heartless we atheists are. They tried to compromise. They offered to take the picture down from the Middle School and put it up in the High School but that wasn’t good enough for those secular humanist jackoffs.
But I do think it’s worth pointing out what a signpost this really is. It doesn’t take too many successful lawsuits by atheists to convince insurance companies to pull the plug on shit like this before it ends up wasting a truckload of taxpayer money.
Follow Up: School in Jackson Ohio agrees to remove Jesus painting: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/the-giant-portrait-of-jesus-is-finally-coming-down/
And in more shameful news, a new poll finds that 13% of Americans think that Obama is the anti-Christ. Many of our listeners will have already heard about this survey, as we’re not the only media outlet that found that number interesting. In addition to that statistic, the study also found that:
- 20% of Americans believe that childhood vaccines are linked to autism,
- 9% believe that fluoride is added to the water to control our minds,
- And 4% believe that shape-shifting lizards secretly control our government.
I find some of those numbers hard to believe and I hope that there was a lot of the “these questions have gotten so stupid I’m gonna start fucking with the interviewer” effect in it, but the fact that David Icke’s lizard theory is even well known enough to be included on the survey is plenty of evidence of some horrible failures in public education.
– I’d still be ashamed if only 13% of people believed that there would be an anti-christ.
Studies show that 13% of Americans think Obama is the anti-Christ: http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf
And sometimes you’re combing through news sources and you see a headline so promising you know it’s gonna make the show even before you read the article. A headline on the Christian Newswire caught my attention the other day. It said, and I quote, “Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate”.
And basically what we’ve got here is every bit as stupid as what you expect when you read it. This apologist Paul Hutchins is trying to employ one of the Muslim apologist’s favorite tactics, the one where you say, “look at all the science that my book of bullshit predicts.”
This is kind of a dubious tactic in my mind, since all but eight words of the bible are contradicted by science, but nevertheless, he’s trying to say that the creation account in Genesis is in keeping with our current beliefs about how the planet formed.
Now, I’ll give him the credit of saying that he does get there, but he asks for a few huge favors when it comes to interpretation, including but not limited to:
– When the bible talks about 6 days they just mean “6 unequal periods of indeterminate time”
– When the bible says “Let there be light” what they clearly meant was “Let the sun transition from a protostar to a main sequence star.”
– When it talks about god making the sun 4 days after making day and night, they meant that he made the sun visible through the cloud of pre-solar system planetary fragments.
- He keeps talking about how these things “correspond exactly” to the Genesis account.
Stephen Hawking Solves Bible Creation Mystery Proving the Bible Accurate (I shit you not, that’s what the headline says): http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2911771800.html
And finally tonight, The Foundation Beyond Belief has announced is 2nd quarter beneficiaries. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Foundation Beyond Belief, it is a most excellent secular charity that gathers donations in the name of atheism and then distributes them to a number of deserving charities.
Basically, they do all the hard work of confirming that none of your charitable dollars are going to support one of these half-charity/half-proselytizing funds. Which is helpful if you’ve ever wondered exactly how much of the money you gave to the Salvation Army was spent opposing gay rights.
The five charities selected for this quarter are:
- The One Acre Fund
- The Innocence Project of Texas
- T’ruah
- Bernie’s Book Bank
- And Trees, Water & People
To learn more about these charities and all the news items discussed on this episode, be sure to check out the shownotes at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Foundation Beyond Belief Announces its 2nd quarter beneficiaries. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/03/foundation-beyond-belief-announces-q2-2013-slate-of-charities/
That does it for headlines tonight. Heath, appreciate your help as always.
And Heath, please stick around. When we come back, Lucinda Lugeons will join Heath and me for a little Bible study.
Skit:
Writer: Hey chief – Did you get a chance to look at the draft I sent you of “The Bible”?
Editor: Oh yeah the fictional allegory book . . . I looked it over . . . Why don’t you have a seat.
W: Sure, how did you like it?
E: (Sigh) I didn’t love it. I’m just a little worried people might take some of it literally.
W: Come on, seriously? The stories are absurd. How could someone take them literally?
E: Well… whenever the scripture department releases something, readers tend to get a little too carried away. Remember the shit show after we printed the Torah? Which actually brings me to my next concern . . . and if I’m way off base here, I’m sorry . . . But it seems like you pretty much plagiarized the entire Hebrew Bible for this first half. Is that what you did?
W: Listen, the Jews are not a very litigious people, so it’s not look they’re gonna sue us. But maybe I’ll add a few footnotes to properly cite the direct quotes.
E: Don’t get me wrong, that thing’s way overdue for a sequel, but do we really have to reprint the whole first book with it? That’s gonna cost a pretty shekel.
W: I’ll be honest, I had a little bit of writer’s block, and I couldn’t seem to get the ball rolling. I added some stuff though. Judith, Wisdom… um… Maccabees…
E: Yeah, we might have to trim that part.
W: Are you sure?
E: Not really no. Look, I understand borrowing from it, that’s not a huge problem. It’s not like a religious text is just going to pop into your head, divinely inspired, ready to print.
W: Right, I’m not just gonna find a bunch of golden plates with the words of god etched into them. So I did some research, and the Torah had a lot of stuff very similar to what I was looking to write myself. One god, omnipotent vengeance scenarios, get really mad at any future religion that also likes the Middle East. It just made sense as a jumping off point.
E: Okay let’s circle back to that. Open up your copy to the Leviticus section.
W: I’ve gotta stop you right there. I know what you’re gonna say. That was a really weird time for me. I had to stone my 4th concubine AND 3 slaves to death that month. Lots of mixed emotions. And my normal guy was out of town, so I had to call this delivery service I never used before, and I’m pretty sure they laced the frankincense with something crazy.
E: Listen, it’s understandable. I’m thinking maybe just a little disclaimer at the beginning. Novelty purposes only, or something.
W: I really think you’re underestimating the intelligence of our readership. It’s not like a giant population the world over is going to get swept up in some sort of crusade to make sure everyone agrees – word for word – with my little book here.
E: I guess you’re right. I’m probably being paranoid. I just had one other concern . . . Why all the hate against gays?
W: What?
E: All the anti-homosexual passages.
W: Where are there any anti-homosexual passages?
E: Right here in Leviticus. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination.” Then later in Romans and again in Jude. It seems like you’re at least tacitly allowing the lesbian stuff, but still…
W: I thought it was clear that this section was tongue in cheek. I guess I really didn’t sell the sarcasm. And I wasn’t even talking about the sex part, just the lying in bed after. Nobody wants to see 2 men cuddling. That’s just faggoty.
E: And what’s with all the Yoda talk, and the weird numbering. You really think people are going to refer back to this one book, line by line, and need reference numbers? Normal page numbers, like every other book, should be just fine.
W: That was a software issue. I wrote the thing in Aramaic, and when the word processor translated the characters over to Times Old Roman Latin, a bunch of random numbers showed up by accident.
E: Okay, let’s skip ahead to this “New Testament” part. I get what you’re going for here and I like the idea of god having a kid in the sequel, but that whole part seemed way off to me. The first four chapters just seem to be telling the same story over and over and none of them agree on the details. It’s just weird.
W: Yeah, I started off with a “choose your own adventure” concept in mind but eventually I just slapped everything together in that opening chunk.
E: (Big Sigh) Look, I’m gonna be perfectly honest with you. Religious texts are hot right now and the epic poetry division hasn’t had a best seller in centuries. There’s a lot of problems here, but we’re probably gonna roll with it anyway.
W: Good to hear.
E: Do you have anything in mind for the sequel?
W: I’m thinking illiterate, child raping warlord on a flying horse.
E: Not bad.
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 meet-ups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start off with a Skepticamp event in Essex County, Massachusetts on April 13th. Runs from 9:30 to 4, has some really interesting topics lined up and ends out with a Skeptical Trivia event that should be a lot of fun.
http://skepticamp.capeannskeptics.com/?page_id=45
On April 20th we have the South Dakota Conference of Reason in Sioux Falls. And I know that people who live in and around South Dakota have a lot of choices when it comes to atheist conferences, but this one should be worth the drive.
Facebook Page for conference: https://www.facebook.com/events/214700748667522/?fref=ts
On the 27th of April there’ll be another Skepticamp event in Denver with an equally impressive slate of topics including a pretty promising talk on pseudo-astronomy, woo in women’s health and teen atheist outreach.
http://skepticamp.org/wiki/Skepticamp_Denver_2013
And finally in Atlanta we’ve got a three day skepticamp conference starting on the 3rd of May and running through the weekend.
http://www.atlantaskeptics.com/skepticamp/
And how could I not mention the fact that the Brisbane Atheists are hosting a Pirate Party for their monthly meet up on April 30th. I’d love to go just to find out what pirate-speak sounds like with an Australian accent. And incidentally, if any of my Australian listeners want to settle that mystery for me, feel free to send an audio clip.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/pirate-party-australia-brisbane-monthly-meetup-2013-04-30/
That’ll do it for the calendar this week, but I want to remind everybody listening that if you’re involved with an atheist, skeptical or secular event that could use some publicity, let me know. Also if you’re aware of any good online resources for such events, let me know about those as well. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at ScathingAtheist (dot) com. And remember, we’re weekly now so I need all the help I can get filling this segment.
Outro:
I had a couple of quick announcements before we close out the show. We’ve been putting a few segments of the show on You-Tube so if you want to share one part of the show with somebody who might not be able to make it through the whole show, check out our You-Tube channel for some bite-sized pieces of The Scathing Atheist.
We’ve also added a donation button to the website so if you were anxious to give us money, you could do that. Those donations are tax-deductible, but unfortunately that’s only for residents of Tatooine, Mordor and the magical land of Hyrule. The rest of you still have to pay your taxes.
We’ll have the long version of the Holy Babble segment up on the extras page on the website soon so be sure to check that out. Wanted to thank everyone who’s made their way over to iTunes to leave us a five star review. Gotta thank Lucinda and Heath for helping out tonight.
And I want to give a big thanks to George Hrab for both providing the Farnsworth quote to start us out and for entertaining the shit out of my wife and I last Friday night. The guys an incredible musician so if you’re a fan of the music, find an opportunity to watch him live. It’s an incredible experience and I’ll have links to all his upcoming events on the shownotes for the page. He also has a really fun podcast that I’ll link to as well.
http://www.geologicpodcast.com/
That does it for tonight, but if you want more be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons, like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on You-Tube, listen to us on Stitcher and give us money.
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The Scathing Atheist 
The Moral Lessons of Genesis
by Noah Lugeons
I don’t say it often, but it turns out that those Christians are right. As an atheist, I’ve had this whole morality thing ass-backwards from the start. Luckily I’m reading their divinely-inspired ethical guide, though, so I’ll be able to correct my misguided notions. up until now, I’ve seen “morality” as a communal effort to decrease suffering while increasing happiness, but it turns out that none of that really matters. From what I’ve gathered in the first book of the bible, the keys to being a good person can be summed up with the following moral edicts:
I’m sure there will be moral messages that are every bit as surprising as we go forward, so I’ll try to keep all my godless brothers and sisters up to date. On second thought, just my godless brothers. I’m pretty sure I’ll learn later that teaching things to women-folk is immoral, too.