atheist podcast | The Scathing Atheist

Episode 20: Partial Transcript

July 4, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

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And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

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

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

On this week’s episode:

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

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song

“The God Song”

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

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

He says women should obey their men,

And ownin’ slaves is fine every now and again.

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

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

And if you think some stuff he said was bad,

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

“Now let me tell you about that fella…”

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

Petty jealous racist full of rage and spite.

Wicked and misogynistic, he’s a sado-masochistic

Homophobe that massacred Amalekites.

And Midianites.

And Sodomites.

And Perizzites and Moabites and Philistines and Benjamites,

Syrians, Assyrians, Ethiopians and Amorites.

And Egyptians.

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

A Maleficent, Malevolent, Omnipotent, Irrelevant,

Megalomaniacal vindictive beast.

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

Turned a chick to salt just for looking east.

Heartless, inexorable, rancorous and horrible,

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

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

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

He’s capricious and malicious and flagitious and pernicious

And an ethnic-cleansing bully of the highest sort,

Injurious, Inglorious, Nefarious, Notorious,

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

Headlines:

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

I’d be happy to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(SOUNDCLIP)

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

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

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

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

Mostly just the consent of the ass, I guess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really hope somebody out there gets that.

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

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

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

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

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

Depends . . . but this could get messy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I take it we didn’t do that well?

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

Among the study’s findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…or in his gay lover’s asshole.

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

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

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

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

Yeah, if it sounds too good to be true…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of the Thighs

Cream Piety

How about Nympho Nuns Nine: The Naughty Nazarite?

Missionary Impossible

12 Apostles, One Cup

Numbers Colon 69

Can you reach the colon, in a 69?

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

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

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

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

I love the concept of immaculate conception porn.

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

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

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

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

Bible Story:

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

——————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hooray!”

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

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

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

The End.

Skit:

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

(Sinister Laughs)

It’s all proceeding exactly according to plan.

Gather the others. We must meet tonight.

(Scene Switch Sound Effect)

I hereby call this meeting of the League of….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Hooray!)

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

You can’t even legally marry a sheep yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No… that’s phase 6.

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

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

Yeah, we’re still looking into that.

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

Outro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have question, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Episode 19 – Partial Transcript

June 27, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright & Lucinda Lugeons

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

Sponsor:

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

And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

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

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

In this week’s episode:

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

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headlines:

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

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

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

Another white guy?!?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, God doesn’t do consensual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantastic time.

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

Calendar:

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

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

http://skepchickcon.com/

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

http://www.amazingmeeting.com/

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

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

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

http://www.cfileadership.org/

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

Poem:

NUMBERS IN RHYME

by Noah Lugeons

1 is the number of gods and he gives

2 shits about who gets killed and who lives.

3 times Balaam and his donkey have spats

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

5 chapter in things get scary for chicks,

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

And 7’s for resting unless you need stones,

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

8 too much Manna? Should you voice your critiques?

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

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

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

11 Tribes conscribe all their fighting age men,

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

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

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

30 Days mourning when god kills Aaron on high,

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

50 percent of this book we spend bored

Counting jews and the booty they offer the lord.

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

Enumerated offerings are in detail described,

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

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

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

Each time the tabernacle opens its doors.

Bulls, rams and donkeys, pigeons and sheep,

And a pile of quails about three cubits deep.

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

He opens the earth and swallows whole houses.

He burns their encampments, sends serpents and plagues,

And what heinous encroachments elicit god’s rage?

Being hungry or thirsty, doubting Moses’ clout,

Going to the tabernacle once the candles are out,

Being honest when scouting, gathering sticks,

Complaining to Moses and acting like dicks.

Whoring with Moabites, lighting incense all wrong,

Being treated like shit and not just going along;

Thinking manna tastes nasty, being slow to obey

Or living in cities that stand in his way.

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

When he orders Moses to murder all the Midianite children,

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

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

Holy Babble:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well God had killed a lot of them since then.

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

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

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

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

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

Riveting.

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

The first use of short selling.

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

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

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

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

Well . . . we re-learn.

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

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

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

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

Outro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Episode 18 – Partial Transcript

June 20, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons and Heath Enwright

Sponsor:

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

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

And now, the Scathing Atheist:

Intro:

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

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

On this week’s episode,

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

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headlines:

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

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

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

There’s only one way to know for sure…

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

Nobody can sell bad fiction like the Christian church.

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

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

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

Yeah, but to be fair, so was Jesus.

So how overboard did they go on the Jesus stuff?

Couple of examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just because of all that holy seed on the walls?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the spirit of the law is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right, because Quebecois can’t speak English.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And three is right out!

Nice

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

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

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

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

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

Outro:

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.facebook.com/HaveYouHuggedAnAtheistToday

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

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

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

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

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

If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information on the “Contact” page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Yes, it’s 40 Hours

June 15, 2013 Noah Lugeons 4 comments

by Noah Lugeons

On our latest episode we ran a little pitch telling all our loyal listeners about the donate button over there on the right side of the page. We were about 90 seconds short on the episode and the skit we had planned was closer to 3 minutes so rather than hacking up a good bit, we decided we’d use the scheduled bit on some other show and fill the time with a quick “public service announcement” about all the wonders of giving us money.

Not something we’re planning on doing on every program, mind you, but a lot of time (and a little money) goes into making this thing so from time to time we like to remind people that they can help compensate us for our effort if they’d like.

Among the lines in my brief advert was the following:

“Your donation also provides inspiration to keep spending 40 hours a week working on this podcast even though the NBA finals and the Stanley Cup finals are going on right now.”

Well it would seem that a sympathetic listener was doubtful. And it’s not that he doubted that the NBA finals or the Stanley Cup finals were going on. Morgan sent us an email that was very complimentary, but it also included the following line:

I don’t begrudge you guys asking for money. You deserve it. But treat your audience with respect. Nobody’s going to believe that it takes 40 hours a week to make a podcast.

Well, Morgan, I appreciate your concern, but I can assure you that yes, indeed, it can very easily take 40 hours a week to make this podcast. In fact, between the effort Heath, Lucinda and I put in, it can take well over 40 hours a week.

Here’s how:

Everything on our show is written. There is almost no ad-lib. Occasionally Heath and I will hide good lines from one another to get an honest reaction to a joke, but almost every word that is spoken on our show is scripted beforehand. Considering how quickly I talk, that adds up to about 4,250 words a week (check the transcripts if you don’t believe me). That’s about half-pace for NaNoWriMo, and no, we don’t get it all correct on the first draft.
We at least kind of vet all our stories. I’m not going to pretend we’re a legitimate news source, but before we comment on any news story, we make sure that both Heath and I have read at least two separate sources for the headline. This isn’t always easy when you have to dig through all the news aggregate sites that just run the same damned AP story.
I write and perform all the music. I know that the music on our show isn’t great, but writing and recording music takes time even if it’s not good music. In addition to writing all the atheist songs we’ve done, I also write and perform all the music bumps, the theme song, and little piece of music we might need behind a particular skit. So far it works out to one original composition per 0.895 episodes.
That editing stuff. There’s a lot more to it than you think. Or, at least, there’s a lot more to it than I thought when I started doing this thing. Sure, there’s all the cutting and splicing and I expected all that. But when it comes to adding sound effects, equalizing vocal levels, compressing, filtering, fading, cutting and then trying to get all of that into an exactly 30 minute package every week, it becomes quite a chore.
Production meetings. These aren’t exactly chores, mind you. I sit around with a good friend and tell fart jokes and stuff. But we’ve still got to figure out what we’ll be doing for each show. Writing skits takes time, sure, but often coming up with the concepts and deciding how to execute them takes even longer.
We actually rehearse this shit. Yes, I know, it’s not typical of a podcast, but when it comes to our skits we always rehearse. We usually do at least two takes on the headlines (and sometimes splice them altogether) and our panel discussions are never quite right on the first attempt.
Scheduling. I’m in a constant state of setting up interviews or whoring myself out for more Farnsworth quotes. Trying to find people willing to appear on our show and then finding a time when we can make it happen can be a rough business and there’s usually at least as much time spent preparing and scheduling an interview as there is actually interviewing.
There’s all the ancillary stuff, too. Sure, there’s the writing, recording, editing, processing and uploading, but it doesn’t end there. If you need evidence, consider the fact that you’re reading this blog. In addition to occasional content on the blog (much of it unrelated to how hard we work), we’ve also got a Twitter feed, a Facebook page and a YouTube Channel to maintain. In addition we get a pretty steady stream of emails and while we really enjoy getting them, it still takes time to read and respond to every one… and every @mention and every FB post and every YouTube comment. Oh yeah, and reading the freaking bible.

I figured it up last week (which is why I mentioned on the show). Right now I spend about 12 hours a week writing stuff for the show, about 1 to 1.5 hours a day (7 days a week) working on all the social media stuff and responding to emails, between 3 and 5 hours a week on research, about 2 hours editing, about 4 hours recording (counting set up, break down, etc.) about 1 hour a week rehearsing, at least an hour a week scheduling and following up on stuff, 3 hours a week in our production meeting, anywhere from 1 to 12 hours a week writing lyrics, writing music and recording said lyrics and music and another couple hours reading the freaking bible or, if I’m lucky, something else for an interview.

That works out to between 32 and 52 hours a week. And that doesn’t count any of the work Heath or Lucinda puts into it.

Let me be clear here: I’m happy to do it.

Obviously I’m enjoying myself or there’s no way in hell I’d volunteer an average of 40 hours a week doing it. I still wrote stuff and composed music and got on Twitter long before I started this podcast so a lot of it is stuff I’d be doing one way or the other. Even if nobody ever sent us another donation, I have to imagine I’d keep doing this podcast as long as there were still a few people listening to it.

I’m not pointing any of this out to pull at your heart strings or to impress anyone with my stamina. None of this (except occasionally the scheduling stuff) is “work” to me. I’m having a blast with it. It’s taking too much time to call it a “hobby” any more, but it’s definitely something I do because I get more out of it than I put in.

And I’m also not pointing it out to Morgan, as I could have just as easily have put this all in a response email.

The reason I’m taking the time to write a blog about it is for all the people who send me emails (or leave comments or whatever) that say:

“I really love your show. I wish it was an hour!”

Believe me; I wish it was an hour, too. But until I can free up another 25 hours a week or so, it’s gonna have to stay at it’s current 30 minute length. We would rather do 30 great minutes than 60 good ones (or, if you’re not as big a fan of the show as I am, 30 good minutes rather than 60 mediocre ones). And we’ve long ago determined that there is no way we’ll be able to devote enough time to the show to keep the quality up with a 60 minute format.

Unless, of course, those donations really start rolling in…

Categories: Podcast Updates Tags: atheist podcast

Episode 17 – Partial Transcript

June 13, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons and Heath Enwright

SPONSOR:

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

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

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

INTRO:

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

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

On this week’s episode,

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

But first, the Diatribe.

DIATRIBE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well bully for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEADLINES:

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

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

I was young and I needed the protein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christianity prefers syrup, and the IRS has obliged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something about “Hand of God Job”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her site should be called porn-huskers.com

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

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

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

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

And when we return, we’ll be back.

SKIT:

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

This is the story of Mikey:

(angelic choir, door opening)

“Whoa! What the hell is that?!”

I call it light.

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

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

That’s cause I’m fuckin’ blinded.

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

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

Mikey, this is really important stuff.

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

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

(Snoring sounds, Splashing water)

(grumbling) Now what?!

(Sloshing through water, door opens and closes)

What the fuck are you doing?

I call it water.

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow!? What’s wrong with now?

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

Fine… just hurry the hell up.

(door slams)

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

(Bong sound effect)

PART TWO:

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

(Door opens)

Yo, Joey!

(mutters) My name’s Jehovah

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

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

How close are you?

I’m within a minute.

Close enough.

(mutters) Isn’t that always your answer…

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

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

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

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

What the fuck are animals?

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

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

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

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

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

That doesn’t make a lick of sense.

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

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

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

(skeptically) What are mans?

Men.

Okay, what are mens?

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

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

I work in mysterious ways, Mikey.

Whatever… fine. So what are ‘men’?

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

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

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

… what?

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

What’s a fiery pit?

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

Um …Why?

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

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

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

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

Thus ends the gospel of Mikey.

OUTRO:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://www.atheistnomads.com/

If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information on the “Contact Page” at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by your truly and yes, I did have my permission.

A Non-Trivial Problem

June 12, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freshly Boiled Blood

June 9, 2013 Noah Lugeons 3 comments

by Noah Lugeons

My issues with religion are largely philosophical. I live in a city rich with religious diversity and history among people who have long learned to overlook the demarcations of faith. New York City hasn’t always been a pillar of religious tolerance, but today it’s home to at least some number of any devotion to any sect of any denomination of any religion you can imagine. We have to share subways and sidewalks and parade routes and we’re constantly running late. Most of us simply don’t have the time for religious friction.

The point is that if I didn’t seek it out, I would hardly ever have a reason to be pissed at religion. I read the religious news, I seek out the abuses of religious authority, I immerse myself in religion’s festering underbelly. But if I didn’t make an effort to do so, I’d hardly ever encounter the bad parts of religion in my daily life.

I constantly remind myself that this is probably true of most people in this country. Sure, they know about the child rape and maybe they know about the fundamentalist camps, but what they see every day is religious people doing good things in the name of religion. Unless they make an effort to see the ugliness backstage, religion comes off looking pretty clean and pretty most of the time.

Of course, much of it is simply slick PR. When I was growing up, all I knew of the Latter Day Saints was from the heartwarming commercials they played during cartoons on Saturday morning. A guy on bike would get splashed with mud by a guy in a truck. Cut to guy on bike coming across guy in truck later. Plot twist: Guy in truck is no longer in truck because his truck is broken down. Resolution: muddy guy on bike stops and helps the asshole who splashed him. Because Jesus.

But it would be petty of me to write it all off as a PR campaign. Most of the sterling image of religion comes from the fact that most religious people are really awesome people. I think this is probably because most people are awesome and any random selection of people will probably contain a majority of awesome ones. But I don’t know that to be true. What I do know is that when you give good people an outlet for their goodness, you usually get some good results. You get some well fed homeless people or whatever.

Obviously I don’t think religion is necessary for charity, but I’m also not naive enough to overlook all the good. When I step outside of my own perspective, I can see why atheists look like ranting assholes to a lot of people. Why are they attacking this mostly good thing? Why are they pissed off about bibles in cabins or god references on money or prayers at graduation ceremonies? Why be so vindictive toward a mostly good thing. After all, taking “In God We Trust” off the money isn’t going to stop any kids from getting raped.

But as I said, I seek out the bad. And now that the podcast is starting to gain a wide audience, the bad is starting to seek me out as well.

If I’d really thought it through before I started the show, I should have seen this coming, but I didn’t. I was ready for vicious hate mail and death threats (which I still haven’t gotten), but I was not prepared for some of the heart wrenching stories I now find in my inbox.

And for the first time today, I was moved to tears by one of them. A fan of the show sent me an email detailing his personal experiences as a vulnerable child entrusted to the care of a sadistic Baptist minister. He said he loved the show because it allowed him to laugh at the abuses of religion instead of simply welling up with impotent rage.

I’ve gotten a couple of emails like his so far. None that detail such horror, but several from disowned sons, estranged spouses, alienated friends and psychologically tormented apostates and while I never expected them to come, I certainly welcome them. I don’t want to hear these stories but I need to hear them. They are the fuel that boils my blood.

I understand that a lot of people feel a need to share these stories. I invite them. I can’t help you much by listening to your story, but you can help me a lot by sharing it. To keep up the effort this podcast takes, I sometimes need freshly boiled blood.

Categories: Feedback Tags: atheism, atheist podcast, deconversion

Episode 16 – Partial Transcript

June 6, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright and Lucinda Lugeons

(Note: Transcript may contain material edited from the final episode for time purposes)

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of perforated Catholic Condoms, Kingdom Cum. These confusingly labeled condoms are no more contraceptive than cheesecloth, but we’re willing to wager we’ll catch a few drunken fornicators with this ruse.

What, you think that’s immoral? You should see what Catholics do when they take over a hospital.

And now, the Scathing Atheist:

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s June 6th and I know Jake Farr-Wharton has already opened up the show once, but the dude sent the quote to me in six different voices and I’m not letting good shit go to waste.

I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from abbreviated NY, NY, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s show,

We’ll add contractual obligation to the list of reasons not to get addicted to meth,
I’ll try desperately to come up with another nickname for Pope Francis,
And Heath and Lucinda will join me in discovering that Leviticus is every bit as fucked up as you think it is.

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

I’m sick and goddamned tired of hearing about where people fall on the “Dawkins Scale”.

Before I go any further, I should note that I’m a big fan of Dawkins and I admire his non-sexist parts… he’s like the Benny Hill of atheism in that way. And what’s more, I completely understand the rhetorical utility of his sliding scale of theistic probability. In the hands of a skilled debater like Dawkins, it’s a valuable asset. But in the hands of a lay-atheist, it’s often a hell of a lot less than that.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the “Dawkins Scale” refers to a seven point scale Dawkins proposed in The God Delusion. A one on this scale represents absolute certainty that god exists, a seven is absolute certainty that god doesn’t exist. The point he’s making is that atheists generally fall on the “6”, not the “7”. It’s a useful explanation of the fact that atheism is the product of doubt, not certainty.

But certainty appeals to a lot of people, so when Dawkins talks about this publicly there’s often a backlash. People in the media stammer about how Dawkins is uncertain and concedes that there might be a god afterall. They don’t seem to understand that he’s not actually conceding that in any way. They just see two guys in a debate where one is saying he’s absolutely sure and the other’s saying he holds a tentative position that’s in accordance with the observable evidence. Somehow they don’t see this as an idiot vs. a responsible thinker, but rather they see it as confident guy vs. indecisive guy.

In the context of the book and in the context of some debates, employing this scale makes perfect sense. But before we lean too heavily on it, we should probably point out that this scale can also be applied to any other belief. Does gravity exist? Well, I’m pretty damn sure it does, but as a responsible thinker, I’ve got to go with a 6 on the scale, because if convincing evidence arose to the contrary, I would change my mind. I am not an immutable “7”. We could be part of a computer simulation titled “what if there was gravity?”, so as a proper logician I have to carve out a little, tiny, itsy-bitsy “margin of error” on the gravity thing.

Same thing for evolution, right? I mean, just because all the available data suggests and confirms it, that doesn’t mean that I’m absolutely certain beyond the shadow of a doubt, irrespective of future data. I’d have to hold the responsible position of “6” on the scale. But why hamstring oneself in debate by pointing this out only with respect to the thing you’re arguing about?

I feel the same way every time I hear Dillahunty, or anyone else for that matter, talk about Agnostic Atheism vs. Gnostic Atheism. Before we start making this distinction, somebody show me one of these gnostic atheists. Show me somebody who says that no matter what level of convincing evidence could be offered to the contrary, they would never believe in god. Show me somebody who says he would still be an atheist if god appeared in the sky before the whole world at once and said, “I am god, sorry about all the mysteriousness and shit and to prove my godness you’ll note that all the people who had cancer are now cured.” Show me that guy and then let’s start carving atheism up into gnostic and agnostic.

This isn’t just a semantic thing. And it’s not just a “trip-you-up-in-an-argument” thing either. The use of these devices is actually fucking this movement up internally. I can’t tell you often I see atheists offering up false-equivalency compromises with this nonsense. Search “Dawkins Scale” on Twitter and it won’t take long to find an atheist saying something like, “I’ll admit that being a 7 on the Dawkins scale is as ridiculous as being a 1”

What? No the fuck it isn’t! That’s a complete misreading of the point of the rhetorical device. Keep in mind that on this scale, 7 actually represents the thing that is right. 1 represents the thing that is wrong. The point of the Dawkins Scale is to point out the flaw in “Absolute Certainty”. But if you’re going to be absolutely certain of something, it’s still way better to be certain about the thing that conforms to all the known evidence.

Substitute anything else for the god assumption and it becomes painfully obvious. Somebody who is absolutely certain that the earth is round should, for the proper employment of scientific thinking, concede that overwhelming evidence could sway him… from a pedantic, vulcan, it’s-an-oblate-spheroid-bitch point of view. But that doesn’t mean that he’s exactly as wrong as somebody who is absolutely convinced that the earth is flat.

There’s a cat on my lap right now. If I was pressed, I’d admit that it could be a hallucination, it could be a robot, it could be a phantasm from another dimension taking the form of my cat. But if I say, “No, damn it, this is definitely my cat”, it may be technically wrong, but it’s certainly not as wrong as “No, damn it, this is definitely a phantasm from another dimension.”

The problem is with 7 point scales and binary choices like gnostic and agnostic is that there’s no way to truly express the 6.999999-ness of one’s atheism. If god appeared before me right now and we had a twenty minute conversation, I’d assume I’d lost my fucking mind before I’d assume that it actually happened. It would take a hell of alot more than than personal experience to overturn my conviction. I’d need tangible evidence that could be verified by multiple sources and, in addition, I’d need volumes of refutations for the hundreds of logical contradictions his existence entails. I’d need a world-overturning amount of evidence. I’d need an amount of evidence that one can reasonably assume will never exist.

So as to where I fall on the Dawkins Scale, it ultimately comes down to the question of how many 9s you can put after the decimal place before you run out of 9s.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow skeptic, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to sharpen Occam’s Razor?

Is another old book club making outrageous claims?

I’m starting to think god is worse than Oprah.

In our lead story tonight, Oxford University researcher and author Kathleen Taylor made waves this week when she suggested that religious fundamentalism may one day be a curable mental illness. Now, when you and I hear this statement, the only new information is the word “Curable”, but when the religious folks hear it they’re once again forced to confront the fact that believing in magic people in the clouds is, technically, fucking nuts.

I hope the cure for religion comes out in some sort of weaponized form. I’m picturing a reality dart, and you can heal the radically ignorant right in the side of the neck with a blowgun.

This is only the latest in a long line of academics accidentally forgetting that we’re supposed to publicly ignore the fact that extreme religiosity and mental illness spend a lot of venn diagrams spooning.

Definitely got a shared region in the extra-wide vagina shape. That’s more like scissoring than spooning, I guess.

The media reports it like it’s a scandal and then they dig up a bunch of peacemaker psychologists who dutifully point out that technically it’s not a mental illness until it interferes with your day to day life and at the same time they’ll dutifully not point out that by the same argument believing that you’re Napoleon and your left testicle reminds you to water the house-plants is also not de-facto crazy.

And the Napoleon left testicle belief system is VASTLY more likely to be true than those of any major religion.

Worst thing that happens if insane people become radically orthodox about science is they make an atheist podcast. Nobody’s ever protested a theist funeral, or bombed a fetus rescue clinic, in the name of Darwin or Dawkins.

But don’t worry, it’s not like we’re going to now have a rational conversation about this topic, as the major media outlets have reported that, in fact, the pachyderm droppings on the loveseat were likely man-made and placed there intentionally.

Pay no attention to the Republican mascot behind the curtain, taking a shit on society’s couch.

Could religious fundamentalism be treated as a mental illness? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/kathleen-taylor-religious-fundamentalism-mental-illness_n_3365896.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

And speaking of fundamentalism and mental illness, our next story brings us to Kentucky and Ken Ham’s ailing “Ark Park” where Ham is inadvertently demonstrating the absurdity of the Noah story by showing how hard it is to get an ark of that size built when you’ve got modern shipping channels and $25 million dollars at your disposal.

Well Noah had the old-man strength going. You know how the best softball players are 45-year-olds? Noah did all the ark stuff between the ages of 480 and 600, so unfair advantage.

Plus, Ken Ham probably has far fewer Jewish slaves at his disposal for the project.

In addition to not having enough money to build the ark that will fail to serve as the centerpiece for this not-likely-to-exist theme park, Ham’s team is also not building other Old Testament attractions, including not breaking ground on a Tower of Babel observations deck and not moving ahead on a planned “Ten Plagues” themed ride.

I think they need to reread Genesis 11. They’re constructing a replica of the tower whose construction got god to smite everyone. That’s like re-airing the seizure-inducing anime clip.

Many atheists will remember hearing a lot about this park a couple of years ago when the state of Kentucky agreed to award it huge tax incentives to build it’s testament to credulous stupidity. It would seem now that the “Ark Encounter” has found a clever way to circumvent that controversy by failing to raise the requisite funds for construction until the proposed tax incentives expire in May of next year.

So Kentucky said, “Yeah, you guys can have these huge tax breaks, as long as you can build an impossible boat and an entire infinite tower to heaven before next May.”

Ark Park having trouble: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/noahs-ark-theme-park_n_3367579.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in “Are-They-Still-On-About-That-Shit?” News, a number of prominent Baptist leaders have called for a mass withdrawal of support for the Boy Scouts of America after they slight and decades overdue backpedaling of institutionalized of bigotry. Arguing that we can’t allow gay people to learn how to tie such good knots, homophobic pastors across the nation are urging their flocks to cut their ties with the Boy Scouts.

“I know this seems like it’s about the gay thing, in the standard cause and effect sense. But we’re just uncomfortable – in general – of a dozen 10-year-old boys and a weird adult in a tent, wearing matching short shorts and ascots. Whether or not there are any actual homosexuals present, it’s just too faggoty.”

Pastor Tim Reed of Arkansas forestalled that argument when he told a CNN reporter that (quote) “It’s not a hate thing here”, adding a bunch of other thinly veiled lies and bullshit that he has to tell himself to continue to believe that he’s not a bigoted anal-wart that cherry picked through one of the most egregiously horrific parts of the entire bible, bypassed laws against tattoos, fabric mixing and crustacean eating and selectively chose to enforce the one line he found that reinforced his hateful bigotry.

“It’s not that they’re gay, it’s that they’re evil BECAUSE they’re gay. It’s all in the book, you can check. Our hands are tied.”

“We’d also be this pissed if they endorsed uncovering your wife’s daughter’s nakedness!”

Sorry Pastor, but it’s still racist when you say hockey players are better than basketball players at water polo.

Baptists plan exodus from Boy Scouts: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/31/southern-baptists-to-urge-churches-and-members-to-cut-boy-scout-ties/

And in quasi-constitutional legislative acrobatics this week, we’ve got the state of Ohio hoping to pass a bill that would award high school credits to kids for going to church and learning about how evil gay people are and stuff.

I’d be willing to give PE credit to altar boys, especially if, you know . . . they swallowed.

Proponents of the bill argue that (quote) “It’s an attempt to reinstall some of the same things that made this country great”, which, in the mind of Democratic representative Bill Patmon, include religious indoctrination and rewarding people for knowing things that are wrong. Patmon went on to complain that we’ve taken prayer out of the schools, we’ve separated religious demonstration from learning areas, we’ve taken religious displays out of schools, I mean, it’s getting to where there’s hardly any way at all to exploit the public schools to evangelize.

“Some of these kids are going 7 . . . 8 hours in a row at school, in the middle of December, without seeing a single piece of visual Jesus propaganda. Do the math. You just can’t brain rape kids under these conditions. I thought this was America.”

Opponents of the law point out that giving educational credit for things that aren’t actually “education” kind of defeats the purpose and then they just kind of stare at the proponents and wonder why this isn’t enough to persuade them.

I got my health credits in high school by interning with a psychic chiropractor who cured headaches with leeches. And now look at me. I run a lucrative wishing well business.

Shifty payouts for religion by state of Ohio: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130601/NEWS/306010059/Ohio-may-OK-public-school-religion-credits?gcheck=1

And from the “Who-Will-They-Molest-Now?” file, Las Vegas’ oldest Catholic School will be shutting its doors permanently at the end of the academic year. The St. Joseph Catholic School has been instrumental in Vegas’ international reputation as a paragon of chastity and virtue since 1948, but a steep drop off in people gullible enough to entrust their children to Catholics has led to the school’s inevitable demise.

I think it’s telling, that the oldest Catholic school in Las Vegas, is named after Jesus’ stepdad, the patron saint of some other dude fucking your wife…the patron saint of “cuckolded by god’s dick”

Over the past decade about a quarter of all Catholic schools have been shuttered nationwide leading many to believe that god has abandoned us and no longer cares about the travails of mankind, instead focusing his divine attention on beating Contra without using the cheat code.

It’s all about the spreader gun. Maybe the laser near the end. The flamethrower didn’t get the good blast radius effect until Contra 2.

Beating Contra without the cheat code is like god… I’ll believe it when I see it.

Oldest Vegas Catholic school to close permanently: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/may/30/citys-oldest-catholic-school-falls-victim-low-enro/#axzz2UqCW1wru

And in this week’s forecast on international demon activity we find that despite papal intervention, the guy who thought that he was filled with devil spawn is still fucking crazy. Despite the Pope Frankenberry’s exorcism that wasn’t, a wheelchair bound man identified in the press as Angel V. insists that he is still possessed by demons.

Looks like he has a malpractice case, at the very least. They seem to have botched a fairly routine procedure. But I’ve seen a lot of spinals, dude, and it sounds like this Angel guy is a fake.

The fucking goldbricker claims to have undergone more than 30 exorcisms and somehow no matter how much holy water they throw at him while intoning latin platitudes, his clearly malfunctioning brain refuses to be miraculously cured.

What’s the problem, he’s hearing demonic voices, telling him to kill babies and eat them? Everyone get those sometimes, right? We don’t all have to act on them every time.

Instead of responsibly suggesting he seek psychiatric help, prominent Catholics affirm his harmful delusions by saying things like (quote) “the demons that live in him do not want to leave,” and (quote) “God exists”.

Man exorcised by Pope still possessed by demons: http://www.newsmax.com/edwardpentin/pope-excorcism-possessed-angel/2013/05/29/id/506975

And finally tonight, a story that comes to us from Friendly Atheist, prolific author and inaugural Farnsworth quoter Hemant Mehta and his Friendly Atheist blog. It would seem that a couple of parents in Utah have finally found the secret to instilling the importance of good moral judgement on their children: Cold hard cash.

Mother Katie Hughes had her daughters sign a contract that promises a reward of $1000 at the age of 20 if the now pre-pubescent girls can refrain from the use of drugs, alcohol and premarital sex between now and then.

“We’re willing to pay as much as 34 cents a day for you to have a shitty, sheltered childhood.”

Seems like a non-binding legal contract might not be the best way to tackle the subject. Are kids gonna need to start bringing legal counsel to have “the talk” ?

So yeah, setting aside the obvious fact that in another eight years these girls could earn that much in a night by breaking the pledge, one also has to doubt that the paltry sum of a thousand 2026 dollars will remain a sufficient carrot to forestall teen angst.

So, nine days of future minimum wage later . . . or drunken orgasms and cocaine now…

Mother offers daughter $1000 to stay a virgin: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/05/christian-mother-to-daughter-if-you-remain-abstinent-until-youre-20-ill-give-you-1000/

And since there’s nothing better to close on than drunken orgasms and cocaine, that’ll do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always for joining me.

And when we come back, Lucinda will join us to bust open our bibles and dig into the dirty parts.

Song:

After writing poems for Genesis and Exodus, I felt obligated to the Herculean task of capturing the mind-raping insanity of Leviticus in two rhyming minutes. To complicate matters, I used a weird rhyme scheme and upon recitation it had this really awful “middle aged white guy rapping” feel to it.

In an effort to counterbalance that I put a little music behind it, but I want to apologize to any musicians who might be listening. I was really under the gun on this thing so it’s basically A minor and E the whole way.

So without further ado, I present the book of Leviticus in rhyme:

Leviticus in Rhyme:

Let me tell you how to sacrifice a goat, bitch; First you cut it’s throat which,

seems a little mean and maybe more than a little gross, it’s

Nothing when compared to; What the Levites bear through,

Details of the entrails should be plenty enough to scare you.

The fat goes on a pyre; Set that shit on fire,

The smell’s a rancid hell but it’s the odor god desires.

How to kill a bird now; Case you hadn’t heard how,

Twist it’s little heard until it’s dead and when it’s burned, bow.

This is for atonement; Offer no postponement,

Couple jugs of blood is a critical component.

Now a proclamation; Regarding ordination,

light the candles right or you might risk assassination …From the Lord.

Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie,

Thou shalt not do it guy on guy,

Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.

Let me tell you what to eat bitch; Tell you who to sleep with

Tell you how to burn the heretics about that bewitch.

Tell you ‘bout your penis; And all it’s uncleanness,

For someone all-knowing I’m not much of a hygienist.

Oh, and if it pleases; Quickly on diseases,

Sacrifice a turtle dove if anybody sneezes.

Menstrual blood and semen; Need a lot of cleanin’

Best I never catch you whorin’ with all those goat demons,

Tell you ‘how to shave, man; Who you can enslave, man,

Tell you how to stone the motherfucks who misbhave and,

If you disobey me; I will not just slay thee,

Many generations I’ll be all up in your game, see …I’m the Lord.

Thou shalt be pure, thou shalt be true,

Thou shalt not get a damned tattoo,

Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.

Thou shalt speak up, Thou shalt not cheat,

Thou shalt not dine on rancid meat

Or stick your dick in things that bleat.

Thou shalt not mix thy rye and wheat.

Thou shalt be just, thou shalt be kind,

Thou shalt not trick the deaf and blind,

Or touch cadavers left behind.

Or let two fabrics be combined.

Thou shalt fear god, thou shalt be straight,

Thou shalt not look to kin with hate,

Thou shalt not ever masturbate,

Thou shant put weasel on your plate.

Thou shalt not rob, thou shalt be bold

Thou shalt rise up before the old,

Don’t get your daughter’s pussy sold,

Thou shalt give all my priests your gold,

…Thou shalt be easily controlled.

Thus spoke the Lord.

Outro:

That brings us to a quick recognition of this week’s most astonishing vertebrates, Steven, Lindsay, Ward and other Lindsay. These four vampire hunting, ninja decimating, time bomb deactivating, bus jumping heroes have distinguished themselves above all other carbon based lifeforms this week by giving us money. Drawing on stupendous reserves of tenacity, intelligence and spare cash lying around, these four fine folks have provided an example that all tenacious, intelligent people with spare cash lying around should aspire to.

If you’d like to join these noble few in the pantheon of Scatheist glory, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Oh, and Lindsay, if you’re listening, I was talking about the other Lindsay when I said, “other Lindsay”, not you.

That does it for tonight’s show, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with some hastily put together shit that’ll keep me up until 2 in the morning at least twice this week. But if you can’t wait that long without risking a stress induced seizure, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and our erratically Tweeted Twitter feed.

Oh, and please help us spread the word about the show. If you know any atheists that have auditory canals, please give us a plug when you can. I put every diatribe up on YouTube and I’ll be putting the Leviticus song up this week as well, so if you wouldn’t be risking will-altering alienation from your family, I’d humbly ask that you give one of our videos a share on Facebook or whatever.

A quick thanks to Heath and Lucinda for joining me tonight and to a bunch of dead Israelites for making the jokes so easy on the Holy Babble segment. And a quick thanks to you, dear listener, for giving us half an hour of your life. We’ll be working really hard to earn another thirty minutes next week.

If you have questions, comments or death threats you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Episode 15 – Partial Transcript

May 30, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new anti-erection medication for all of your overnight camping trips with known pedaphiles and children needs. The flaccidating power of new Celibacyalis will tame even the most immaculate ejaculate.

Celibacyalis, because only the Pope can be infallible, but anyone can be in-phallus-able.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s May 30th and what the fuck Detroit? You were up 3-1 in that goddamned series.

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

On this week’s episode:

A recent law change in Texas will make it legal to not break the law,
Iowa takes concrete steps to be dumber and less vaccinated,
And we’ll make you laugh so hard a little bit of pee comes out,

But first, the Diatribe:

Diatribe:

I’d like to start off tonight with, an update on the soundclip that opened our show last week. And for the apparently sizable percentage of our audience with bong related memory deficiencies, it was the one where Wolf Blitzer makes almost as much of an ass of himself as he did when he went on Jeopardy and proved himself to be biologically fungal in mental function. And if you somehow missed that clip on the YouTube, the Twitter and the Facebook, the story goes like this:

Man means woman, woman’s holding baby in front of a house recently destroyed by a tornado, man is a salivating news whore so he puts a camera in front of her. So here’s this feeble-minded simpleton who managed to score a negative $4600 on the dumbed down Jeopardy they give to celebrities and he’s vamping for questions so he asks the poor woman if she remembers to thank god.

Now, I can’t really blame Wolf Blitzer for assuming that the random Oklahoman he was talking to was Christian. You’re gonna win that bet a lot more than you’re gonna lose it. Hell, it’s not like answering “What is Jerusalem?” when the clue was “Jesus hailed from this town”, but it’s still a stupid thing to ask someone about whom you know nothing. But it’s Wolf “which appendages do the pants go on again?” Blitzer so you expect shit like that.

But what followed is something you wouldn’t expect. Instead of looking at her shoes and muttering “well… yeah, whatever, I thank him, sure” she very politely and somewhat timidly said, “well, no, because I’m an atheist”. And then Wolf laughs. Like retarded people getting pudding .

The woman he was talking to at the time, now identified as one Rebecca Vitsmun, didn’t have to self-identify as an atheist. She could have just shrugged. But she used the A word. She said on national TV (albeit a channel nobody watches) that no, she doesn’t thank God because she doesn’t believe in God. And if anyone had been watching, they might have said, “Hey look, there’s a regular person with real problems and an adorable baby that isn’t religious and seems like a normal human.”

Keep in mind that normally there’s no reward for saying, “No, I’m an atheist”. In fact, when you live in Oklahoma there’s often something quite antipodal to a reward. If she was doing it with any end goal in mind it was probably a subtle reminder to Wolf and the other newscasters out there that they shouldn’t assume people are religious. It’s a bit of a sacrifice to send a very important message.

Wolf Blitzer won’t learn, of course, because he’s so stupid that he doesn’t even know he’s too stupid to go on Jeopardy, but I’m willing to bet that a number of other news anchors are taking notes. But not Wolf. Because it was rainy that day and his crayons don’t work in the rain. And I’m sorry if it seems like I’m focusing too much on Wolf’s mental-impairments, but we are talking about a guy who once looked at a bowl of penne on a television screen and said, “What is fettucini?” I mean, fettucini Wolf? Are you fucking kidding me?

So I heard this silly little soundclip and decided to open the show with it. And I wasn’t the only one who thought it deserved a share because within 24 of the live broadcast it was all over the atheist blogosphere and all over the english speaking world atheists were giving Rebecca an enthusiastic fist pump. But the story doesn’t end here, because it turns out that wasn’t all we were giving her.

Enter comedian and secular church co-founder Doug Stanhope who sees this thing and realizes that it’s a perfect time to show the world the benefit of putting your faith in the faithless. So he started an Indiegogo campaign called “Atheists Unite” to raise money to help our latest viral celebrity rebuild. And it turned out that we atheists thought it a fantastic idea.

So thanks to the efforts of Stanhope, the inexplicable morality of non-believers and the power of the atheist blogosphere, the secular community was able to raise $50,000 for Vitsmun in less than three quarters of a day with more pouring in to help her and other recently smited people in Oklahoma.

Now, originally I was going to tack this update on to the end of the headlines section, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this story represented every single step between now and secular majority. It begins with normal people standing up and proudly (if timidly) proclaiming their atheism. It ends with secular humanism stepping in and serving those functions that we’ve left to churches for so long.

Christians have a lot of places to go when shit hits the fan. Within hours of the storm clouds clearing there were religious missionaries there to help the religious people cope. And most of these people are probably just good people that want to help. They’d be happy to help the atheists too, but they’re not equipped. They can only exacerbate the stress by talking about god’s plan and asking us if we remembered to thank Super Jesus.

In researching for this show, I come across a lot of shit that makes me wonder if there’s any point in fighting this fight. I see laws being passed today that the 18th century would be embarassed by. I see world leaders justifying their actions with Aesop’s fables. I see people being killed by the hundreds for believing in the right imaginary friend the wrong way. And it makes me want to start a podcast about hockey or something.

But once in awhile I come across a story like this and it gives me hope. And it reminds me that there’s really some power in this community even if we are a bunch of unherdable pussies. It reminds me that even our weird, nebulous, infrastructureless, leaderless movement can still get things done. And it reminds me that Wolf Blitzer is verifiably nine thousand, two hundred Jeopardy-dollars stupider than NANCY GRACE. And I like being reminded of stuff like that.

Atheist Community raises money for Wolf Blitzer’s surprise Oklahoma atheist: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/24/has-the-oklahoma-atheist-been-saved/

And Proof that Wolf is really that stupid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVC28oemocA

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow ignorance wrangler, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to corral the flock?

I’m trying really hard to be the shepherd.

In our lead story tonight, it looks like we’re all going to heaven, unless, of course, the infallible guy was wrong, which, according to the people who believe him to be infallible, he was. The story begins at morning mass where the new, controversial pontiff controversially declared that everybody could get into heaven even if they’re not Catholic… and there was controversy.

I love when the pious get meaningless news…that they believe to be terrible news. Turns out they’ve spent their entire seratonin-deprived lives hedging their bets on the losing end of Pascal’s Wager. What’s wrong? You been completely wasting your time confiding your darkest secrets to an asexual man in the next stall every Sunday?

Could have just as well been going to a Minnesota airport mens room, and getting more than just your ego stroked?

Couldn’t be less productive than confession. Anyway, the atheist community, who, truth be told, could give a shit less what some senile old coot thinks about our chances of making it to space paradise, welcomed the statement and gave the pope a pat on the back for trying. In fact, many people of a number of different faiths welcomed the statement, but you can bet your ass that none of them were Catholic.

As quickly as they could rev up the holy-laptop…

Is that a Gateway… to Heaven?

No, they’re pretentious so it’s probably an I-Maccabees.

Wouldn’t they spring for the Adonai-Pad?

Well, whatever they used, the underlings that pull the pope’s strings took to the series of tubes to clarify the statement and assure faithful Catholics that what he really meant was the exact opposite of what he said. Despite infallible rumors to the contrary, only Catholics get sky-cake.

Nope, too late. You heard him, and like you said he’s infallible. “All my atheist sins of reason done been warshed away . . . Come on in boys, the water is fine.”

It’s gotta hurt to find out from Megatron that the heathen Autobots can have real cake, and sky cake, and eat it too. That’s like blowing someone for drugs that you’re not going to take, and then finding out they’ve been giving away free drugs to atheists the whole time.

Pope Decides Atheists Can Go to Heaven: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/23/heaven-for-atheists-pope-sparks-debate/

And in “It’s-Not-Praying-If-I-Don’t-Agree-With-You” news, Arizona legislator Steve Smith called for a metaphysical mulligan last week after atheist representative Juan Mendez profaned that body’s ritual of morning incantations by offering his own prayer to start the session. Steve Smith, who, in addition to being two washed up NFL wide-outs, is apparently also an old, white, bigoted fuck-plunger, was incensed by the audacity of equality and offered a second prayer in (quote) “repentance” for the godless heathen’s prayer.

That’s weird, because normally Representative Mendez arrives very late to these sessions, as Arizona law requires that he show his ID to any white person that sees him along the way.

Sounds like Smith is being fairly open-minded. He’s willing to allow anybody – even an atheist – to deliver a Christian prayer before the session?

Smith offered this hilariously stupid analogy to justify his actions, “If you don’t love this country… don’t say ‘I want to lead this body in the pledge’ and stand up there and say… ‘You know what, I love England’.”

Yeah we can’t have politicians wasting their time dwelling on societal problems. We need them focused on old books.

So apparently the constitutionally dubious opening prayer is okay and doesn’t endorse a particular faith group, but if you don’t pray to Mary’s Baby-Daddy, the Christians still get to pray anyway.

Michael Richards isn’t racist . . . We had Chris Rock open for him.

Atheist Prayer Not Good Enough For Arizona Lawmaker: http://news.yahoo.com/arizona-house-non-prayer-sparks-christian-213521848.html

And in military news, the state of Texas has issued a preemptive strike in the war on Christmas with House Bill 308, which protects a teacher or student’s rights to say “Merry Christmas” without repercussions. It also gives the districts the right to put up Christmas decorations, too. So apparently they can open the gates of the prisons and let all those “Merry Christmas” wishin’, mistletoe-hangin’ hoodlums back out on the streets.

I heard this legislation is just a piggy back on another larger bill, re-affirming that under Texas law, murder is still frowned upon. The amended murder ban would also include an exclamation point at the end. Texans want to show how serious they are about not murdering, unless of course, you’re paid by the government to inject people with poison.

Now, as an atheist, my ears always perk up when I hear about state legislators making things legal that are already legal and you don’t have to dig too deeply into this one to see what the real goal is. The bill doesn’t change a single letter of any law anywhere. What it does is send a firm message that atheists can go fuck themselves if they think they’re comin’ after the baby Jesus and our manger scene.

Well, if they’re worried about somebody stealing the baby Jesus from their tax-embezzlement-funded, life-sized shoebox diorama, why don’t they just nail him down?

Are they sensitive about that for some reason?

And just to clarify the visual gag I was using during a podcast, my arms were extended outward as I made that suggestion.

Who says sight-gags don’t work on audio? The bill specifically states that Christmas decorations are fine as long as there is at least one symbol from one other faith somewhere. Like, a menorah in the closet or a buddha in the attic or something.

Like a Jew under the floorboards?

…at least you didn’t say in an urn.

…or oven.

In fact, it even says that “at least one secular scene or symbol” is sufficient to offset the Christian-ness of a nativity scene leading one to ask, what the fuck is a “secular” symbol? I mean, are they saying as long as there’s a cross and a non-cross object, it’s okay?

Crosses are all about perpendicular, so they must mean secular objects like 2 lines that are extremely parallel.

“I mean, sure, that’s a diorama of Christ on the cross, but look at this secular umbrella stand next to it, so… you know?”

I guess representations of factual a priori knowledge would be secular objects.

I’m sure when questions like these come up, the highly-educated members of the Texas legislature routinely discusses Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the concepts behind the (analytic / synthetic) and (a priori / a posteriori) distinctions.

Yes, I’m sure that Rick Perry can both comprehend and spell those concepts.

Texas mounts preemptive strike in the War on Christmas: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/24/texas-set-to-pass-bill-protecting-the-phrase-merry-christmas-from-well-no-one-really/

And in morbidly-obese-gubernatorial news, New Jersey governor Chris Christie has decided that they’re pretty much recovered from that hurricane shit and now they’ve got a spare 11 and a quarter million dollars to give to seminaries for capital improvements. And no, I don’t have to be fucking kidding you, because I’m not.

You’ve must have been fucking kidding me when you said “I don’t have to be fucking kidding you”.

I wasn’t.

The appropriations are tucked away amid 174 less questionable grants going to 44 less questionable colleges around the state. But if you go a-diggin’ you’ll find two line items totalling $11.25 million going to two religious schools. And I’m not talking “We’re Notre Dame and we love Jesus and we’re religious” religious schools, I’m talking about “We’re training religious people to be more religious and only people of our religion can come here” religious schools.

First of all, I’m not ok with Notre Dame getting any public money if they’re going to teach students about fictional characters like god and Manti Teo’s girlfriend. Also, after doing some google images research on this, I’m fairly certain that former Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weiss is the same person as governor Christie.

Hard to believe considering that when Sandy hit, Christie was able to mount a defense.

The two grants include a $650,000 grant to Princeton Theological Seminary and a stereotype reinforcing $10.6 million to the Beth Medrash Govoha rabbinical school. I think it’s worth noting that the latter of the two not only excludes non-Jews, but non-men as well so one must invoke exponents to express the unconstitutional nature of these grants.

Really?!?! $11.25 million dollars going to teach clergy? How much does it cost to build a new pseudo-science lab? Are they demonstrating scripture concepts with large hadron colliders now?

Something strikes me odd about a rabbinical school modernizing anyway.

Chris Christie Wants to Funnel Millions in Taxpayer Dollars to Seminaries: https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/paying-for-praying-nj-governor-seeks-to-award-taxpayer-millions-to

And in “If-We-Stop-Testing-These-Kids-They’ll-Stop-Failing” News, the Iowa state legislature recently passed House File 215 in an effort to lower the bar of homeschooling standards so far that a person might theoretically trip over it. HF 215 ensures the success of every child by removing any standard that would require them to learn or do anything.

Is this in response to an outcry that Iowa parents were making their homeschooled children too smart?

Or maybe too healthy, as among the standards on the chopping block here is the requirement that homeschooled children be vaccinated

Most homeschooled children in Iowa are baptised, so why would they need vaccinations?

What’s worse is that some of this other shit is worse. This thing goes from relaxed to catatonic with revisions like:

Homeschooled children no longer have to spend a set number of days a year learning things
Homeschooled children no longer have to learn any things
Homeschooled children never have to demonstrate knowledge of things

What is this, “No Child Pushed Ahead? Can parents get vouchers to cover the costs of not teaching?

Just the latest in Iowa’s aggressive strategy to end Mississippi’s reign as the stupidest state in the country.

And that’s a competitive category.

Iowa deregulates home-schooling: ttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/27/new-legislation-will-allow-iowas-homeschooling-parents-to-not-teach-their-children/

And in “We-Can-No-Longer-Afford-To-Be-Picky” news, the Church of England recently unveiled plans to allow people with vaginas to become bishops. After decades spent debating something the rest of the world had figured out so thoroughly it had long been encoded in law, the Church of England had decided that women have functional brains, too.

The Catholic Church needs to take a cue here. This would put a huge dent in the rape case numbers. I’m not saying female priests wouldn’t be capable of abusing their power, but it would end up being consensual way more of the time. When I was a 12-year-old boy, I would have happily taken a BJ from a toothless old nun.

12 years old? I’d still take a… oh, nevermind.

So perhaps it was for the toothless blowjobs,, perhaps it’s because you can’t fuck something up if it never has any actual results anyway or maybe it was spurred on by a genuine change of heart, the important thing to note is that they’re not going to rush into this. They’re only one full century behind modern thought on this so they’re gonna give it a couple more years before they revoke their bigotry.

This sounds a lot like the way the Republican Party is being forced to reluctantly embrace colored people.

And estrogened people at the same time.

Now, I have to point this out: In every article I saw on this they say that the church made “concessions” to the people who opposed women bishops, but I couldn’t find any details on that and I’m dying to know what that would entail. I mean, what, they can be bishops but I can still call them “Toots” and they have to make me a sandwich if I ask?

Listen guys, the female bishop thing is happening, but as a concession . . . From now on, “No” means “Yes”, and “Yes” means “Anal”.

Church of England to Allow Women Bishops in 2015: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/24/us-britain-church-bishops-idUSBRE94N0RV20130524

And finally tonight in our international forecast on demonic activity, we turn to Madrid where the devil seems to be winning one fiddle-battle after another. An anonymous spokeswoman for the archdiocese of Madrid told the Associated Press that they had only one priest who was fully trained in devil-wrestling and that just wasn’t enough.

Is a spokeswoman like a female spokesman? Like a woman talking?

I doubt it… they’re Catholic.

Now, apparently you can only make the normal water turn into magic devil-kryptonite if you’ve been authorized by a bishop to do so and, of course, the Vatican is well aware of how silly the whole exorcism thing looks to everyone except idiots. As evidence, I offer the recent shit show that erupted when stories got out that one might have been performed in St. Peter’s Square last week by Pope San Francisco Treat.

You’ve been managing to get lots of mileage out of Pope Francis nicknames. This time you’ve got him as gay rice.

Thanks you. I project that by episode 24 I’ll be using shit like Pope Fart-rancis so enjoy it while you can. But anyway, this leaves Spain in a delicate position because they’ve got one exorcist Bruce Lee-ing his way through the Spanish demon-hordes here and he’s in desperate need of reinforcements, but nobody’s coming to help. And somebody please tell Michael Bay that I’d sell him that script cheap if he wants it.

So I would normally make a Michael Bay joke here, but where does one find anything to criticize in films such as Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys 2, The Island, Transformers, Transformers 2, Transformers 3, and Untitled Transformers Sequel?

I think that’s the most offensive thing you’ve ever said on this show, so I guess we can close it out there. Heath, thanks for joining me.

And when we come back, we’ll HTTP colon… oh wait, that’s the link.

The Holy Babble Supplement:

I got an email the other day about our Holy Babble segment and it accused us of just cherry picking out the bad shit and ignoring the good shit.

Well that’s the point of our segment. We’re not fact checking the bible line by line to see how bad their batting average is; we’re out to make circumcised dick jokes at its expense.

And boy does this thing have dick jokes, but I’d still respectlessly disagree with the dink who sent this email because we really haven’t had to do that at all. We’ve really just been telling the story as it’s written and it really is that fucked up. In fact, if anything, we’ve left out some of the most fucked-up stuff so that we’d have time to talk about the spattering of good stuff.

Non-evil stuff anyway.

Right. So as evidence of that, we’d like to offer you the top five horribly fucked up things we didn’t talk about when we broke down the first two books of the Bible in a segment we like to call…

The HOLY BABBLE… SUPPLEMENT

5) Genesis 6.

Now, we skimmed over the whole Noah’s Ark bit because plenty has been said about what ridiculous horseshit it is, so when we talked about it, we never even mentioned what an implausible concept it is. Who feeds what to who? What are they drinking? And who’s shoveling all the shit?

Sounds like an impossible to solve LSAT question. If you have a bag of grain, and 2 foxes, and 2 hens, and 2 of every other animal, on one side of the river, and an impossible ark on the other side . . . Also, why did the birds need an ark to survive a flood?

And what about the amphibians? And where did Noah go to pick up two polar bears? And how did they keep everything from fucking everything?

Seems like if FEMA had hired this Noah guy before Katrina, blacks might not be extinct in New Orleans.

Yeah, they definitely needed a few more cubits of emergency housing. Now, to keep things fair, I did look at what the apologists had to say about these questions and according to AIG, the ark would have produced about 11 metric tonnes of shit a day, a quota that Answers In Genesis can only aspire to.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/caring-for-the-animals

4) Exodus 21:7

This is a verse that starts with the words, “When a man sells his daughter as a slave,” and doesn’t then go on to say, “you will castrate him with a rusty mayonnaise lid and let him bleed to death in the public square.” How could we possibly be cherry picking the worst stuff if we skipped over the bit where it outlines the ethical way to sell your daughter as a slave?

Actually, I assumed I would cherry pick something from this, but their guidelines on this are surprisingly reasonable. It even includes guarantees the whores won’t be sold to foreigners . . . so that’s nice.

True. It even encourages you to continue to feed her after you get bored of fucking her.

It also says that if you buy her for your son and she marries the slave you have to treat the slave like your daughter. Which sounds good until you consider that one book earlier Lot was tossing his daughters to rape-starved sodomites.

Which brings us to…

3) Genesis 19:30-38

Here we have a lovely little story about those same daughters repeatedly force-fucking their dad. It doesn’t set anything up or connect anything to anything. It’s just there to give perverse goat-herders an image to jackoff to and insult Moabites.

I guess the lesson here is “Dad’s dick is better than no dick at all.”

That’s the moral, yeah. So in this passage, Lot, after escaping from Sodom with his two date-rapist daughters and his favorite salt-lick, unwillingly impregnates his daughters with two inbred, incestuous, polydactyl prison babies.

Must have been legitimate rape.

Well, the Jews were probably worried about future persecution on account of their genetic superiority, so a few extra fingers and chromosomes just made sense. Nobody figured every single Moabite would settle in the same 3-block radius in Brooklyn.

I guess the one good thing about being gang raped by sodomites is that you won’t get pregnant…

I wouldn’t say that’s the ONLY perk about being gang-raped by sodomites.

2) Exodus 21:20-21

There’s no way to dress this one up worse than it comes off in the actual bible, so here it is from the NIV version:

“Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

I can’t help but picture a Jewish version of a Southern plantation owner. Like Woody Allen instead of Don Johnson in Django.

Yes, Exodus was full of fair and equitable treatment of one’s slaves. For example, while one was encouraged to regularly beat one’s slaves and children, the gouging out of a slaves eye was frowned upon. In fact, the rule says that if you knock out the slaves eye you have to let him go, so I figure if I was a slave, I’d just be moving my eyes in front of the whip constantly.

1) Genesis 9:20-27

And finally, the most perplexing parable in the book to this point, we didn’t even mention the crazy post-deluvian antics of Noah and his dancing weiner.

This is the “If your dad’s a drunk, you need to walk around your house backwards wearing a cape” chapter.

Right, apparently they were supposed to walk around shading the lower half of their vision like the Bela Lugosi double in Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Not sure how the fuck we forgot to mention this part, considering I plan to be an alcoholic father one day.

As it turns out, if I want to smite my son and get him sent to hell, all I have to do is get wasted and pass out while hanging brain. Or more directly, just wake him up with a tea bag.

I guess that really shows the concern my dad had for my soul. When I was a kid he would only take his dick out when he was behind me.

I think this chapter is the basis for the penis game in “Waiting”

I never saw that flick. How does that game work? … Oh fuck dude!

Outro:

I had one quick but important announcement before we close things out for the night. In response to a number of requests for Scathing Atheist shwag, Heath and I are commissioning the design of three Scathing Atheist T-Shirts that will be available soon if you’re willing to interpret the word “soon” in a geological sense.

But between now and then, we want your help deciding exactly what to put on those shirts. We’ll be doing shirts for three of our many fine sponsors. I’ll be posting a poll on our blog and on Facebook, so if there’s a particular sponsor you’d wear on a T-Shirt, let us know. You can let us know over Twitter, on Facebook, via email or, if you want to make absolutely sure your vote is counted, you can add your preference to the end of a 5 star review on iTunes.

That’s all the time we’ve got for tonight’s show, but we’ll be back in 168 hours to tackle one of the most infamous books in the bible. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. You’ll also get your daily fix of Scatheism by following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook. And don’t forget to check out our You-Tube channel, even though everything on it is just a segment pulled from the podcast which you’ve probably already heard.

I want to thank Heath for all his help this week. I also want to thank Reap from the Angry Atheist for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. Hard to believe he had the ten seconds to spare with all the content that dude is producing in a week, so if you haven’t checked out the Angry Atheist yet, I definitely recommend it along with ReapSow Radio, which you’ll find linked on the shownotes for this episode.

http://angryatheist.info/

http://www.reapsowradio.com/

But finally and most importantly, we have to take a minute to honor this week’s most sexually attractive human beings, Paul, Dee, Kevin and Graham, who distinguished themselves this week by giving us money. Paul, whose clever inventions and godlike nunchaku skills will one day save humanity; Dee whose wit and sharp mind are the very metric by which future robot generations will measure their intellect; Kevin, whose agility, fearlessness and ability to banter well with supervillains are the envy of masked-vigilantes everywhere and Graham; whose very presence soothes children, moistens vaginas and lengthens telomeres even over Skype. These truly superlative citizens have all earned their place in history and in my heart with their stolid generosity. And we love them all equally, except Graham who we love just a little more because holy shit, the dude donated a hundred bucks. Which was fucking awesome and totally made my week. Thanks bro.

If you, too, would like to earn your eventual spot beside these exceptional bipeds on the Mount Rushmore of altruism and erudition, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Remember, not every donation goes straight to booze and weed. Some of it goes to hosting and stuff.

If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page of our website. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Categories: Show Transcripts Tags: antitheism, antitheistic, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, biblical criticism, biblical satire, faith, Holy Babble, Iowa Home Schooling Laws, Pope Francis, religion, spanish demon hordes, Texas Christmas Laws, the ballsack of Heath Enwright, Wolf Blitzer Atheist, Wolf Blitzer idiot, Wolf Blitzer Jeopardy

Episode 14 – Partial Transcript

May 23, 2013 Noah Lugeons 2 comments

by Noah Lugeons and Heath Enwright

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Zoroastra-Zeneca’s new brand of prescription painkiller designed to get you through the headaches brought on by reading your holy texts and trying to apply them to the real world.

So next time you’re banging your head against the Bible, the Talmud, the Koran or whatever antiquated revelation you prefer, take some Orthodoxy-contin and turn off the parts of the brain that asks questions.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday, It’s May 23rd and normally I put a joke here.

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

On this week’s episode,

Texas lawmakers refuse to declassify the penis manual,
We’ll figure out what’s making those Hassidic kids look so cool,
And Heath will offend Christians, Jews, Women, Muslims, Blacks, People from Singapore and John Lennon fans.

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

I have nothing against raisins. They’re compact, nutritious, vitamin rich and tasty. I eat them when I hike and they actually make bran appetizing. I really like raisins… when they’re in a box of raisins.

When I don’t like them is when I’m eating a danish or a cinnamon roll or something and for three or four bites it’s been raisin-free and then, all of a sudden and without clearly distinguishing itself from a dead insect, I’m chewing on some little rubbery, wrinkled morsel of undeniably bug-like dimensions.

Similarly, I’ve got nothing against Christians when they come in a box clearly marked “Christian”. I can’t imagine an atheist walking into a church and saying, “Hey, what’s all this talk about Jesus, guys? Can’t you see you have guests?”

Like every single atheist I’ve ever met or interacted with, I support the right of all people to believe and worship whatever they want as long as they’re willing to shut up about it during grown-up time. As long as it doesn’t get all mixed up in decision making that affects others, you can spend your Sunday mornings being loved by whatever fictional character raises your pup-tent.

But if people constantly showed up at my door to ask what brand of raisins I preferred and whether I was prepared to accept their brand as the only true raisin, I’d hate the fuck out of those people. I’d probably start a podcast about what a bunch of assholes raisin-evangelists are and I’d probably start a You-Tube Channel, Twitter Feed, Facebook Group and Blog about it too, like I did for this show, hint-hint, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, say-no-more.

My problem with both raisins and Christians is that they’re subversive. They sneak into places where they aren’t welcome, they intrude on otherwise secular pastries and they seem to think that they have a right to be there and be all raisiny whenever the hell they feel like it.

I remember the families that would give out pamphlet ads for Jesus on Halloween despite the fact that it’s a secular holiday by any reasonable standard. I remember finding a bible passage on some toy my unsuspecting atheist uncle gave me. I remember finding Jesus ads on school handouts and I remember finding whole fucking sermons in the middle of Snoopy cartoons.

Christians would look at that list and see nothing subversive about it at all. What’s wrong with giving out information about Jesus? What’s wrong with putting our worldview out there? What’s wrong with a message about Jesus in the middle of a cartoon about a Christian holiday?

It wouldn’t even occur to them to flip the question on it’s head and imagine Linus taking a couple of minutes to refute Pascal’s Wager during a Thanksgiving cartoon. But it’s a secular holiday! Why shouldn’t it have a secular message? They would go apeshit if I started handing out little pamphlets of Dawkins quotes with my halloween snickers bars. Fox News would probably be at my door by November second asking me why I hated America. They would be apoplectic if some toy manufacture snuck a few sentences of David Silverman’s talking points on the package of their carpet-skates but yet they seem incapable of understanding why that pisses me off.

Instead, they just talk about the “Angry Atheist” and the Jesus-less depression that must fuel our animosity. All the while they sneak their stupid little pamphlets into phone booths and subway stations and restroom stalls and airports and all manner of places we wish we didn’t have to be. And they see nothing wrong with it at all.

And of course they don’t! They’ve been programmed to believe that we’re all going to hell so if they’ve got to corrupt a parents autonomy to raise their child how they want to, it’s a small trespass if the result it saving a soul. It’s despicable to annoy secular people on their deathbeds with last minute attempts to wash their dirty brains but they see it as virtuous. A soul lies in the balance! How could they stand silent when he was so close to the end and wanted nothing more than to not be harassed by used-afterlife-salesmen so he could enjoy the remainder of his life.

Sadly, there’s very little secular equivalent to this. We’re not even allowed to put up billboards verifying our existence if the nearby community really, really needs it. Our very existence challenges the most pervasive, and some would say, most important fiction at the heart of the religious virus; the notion that we “need” god. If we set out to devangelize we might not need pamphlets or slogans. We might make some headway just by knocking on doors and saying, “Hi, just wanted to let you know that at some point I’m going to die and I’m okay with that. I fully recognize that there’s no post-mortem, magical Six-Flags waiting for me and yet I live an inspired and contented life.”

And until we can make them understand that, I’m gonna stay vocal. I think reason is worth standing up for, and to be perfectly honest, I think that it says a lot about my worldview when it can grow and thrive despite having no computer generated anthropomorphic talking vegetables to sell it.

Headlines:

Joining me tonight for headlines is my fellow stickler about the use of reason, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to stickle the unreasonable?

I majored in stickling the unreasonable.

So you have a liberal arts degree, and now you bartend?

I provide free psychiatric advice and often prescribe beverages that I serve on premises, all whilst constantly wiping down the flat surfaces in front of me with a rag.

So it’s like being a priest except the people are adults and they know in advance that there’s alcohol in their drinks.

Anyway, in our lead story tonight, we once again have to talk about how stupid Texas lawmakers are. In response to unambiguous evidence of the whole and overwhelming failure of their eighteen year campaign to keep kids safe from the dangers of sex by pretending it doesn’t exist, Texas lawmakers have doubled down on their “Jesus Flavored” approach to sex ed.

Ahh, yes . . . the data-phobic ostrich approach.

In defense of ostriches I should point out that that’s an urban legend. Unlike Texas legislators, ostriches don’t actually stick their heads in their own asses.

If you read the fine print on the Texas state charter, you’ll find it clearly stated that ignorance is an inalienable right, guaranteed by a separation of truth and state.

Clearly. And for our first example we’ll travel back to a more innocent age when we thought the lowest the Die Hard franchise would stoop would be the one with Samuel L. Jackson in it, an antiquated time when we still thought that Mel Gibson was pretty cool, a bygone era when people still rewound shit, and a time when Texas high school students were still being taught a sensible curriculum with regards to sex ed.

They should have given us more practice with opening the condom wrapper . . .

And if you’re looking for more reasonable, progressive policies . . .

And you’re using Texas . . . from 2 decades ago . . . as your model . . .

Not a good sign.

Yeah, but as bad as things were then, they can always be made worse by putting George W. Bush in charge of your state. And in his first year as Texas’ governor, lawmakers passed groundbreaking legislation that replaced the “See Dick Dick Jane’s Spot” curriculum with more of a “I’d love to fuck you, Barbie, but I have no genitals” approach. The law actually gave the individual school districts the rights to forego sex-ed altogether and opt for a “La-La-La, I can’t hear you” based syllabus.

If a sperm fertilizes an egg, but there’s nobody there to understand it, who pays for the abortion? These are the philosophical questions that need to be asked before we even consider teaching about things like penes and vaginae in a school.

And now, 17 years after the new laws went into effect, the results are in and the results are pregnant because they didn’t know how a fucking condom worked. Texas went from bad to worse over that period and now ranks among the 5 worst states in every relevant teen-pregnancy statistic. And guess how Texas lawmakers have decided to tackle this disturbing problem?

More Jesus?

More Jesus! They’ve decided that despite the fact that abstinence-only education has been shown to be significantly less effective than comprehensive sex ed (which, by the way, still mentions that not having sex is a good way to not get AIDS), the real problem here is that their approach to human sexuality isn’t Bronze Age enough. SB 521 looks to further restrict student’s access to sex ed with requirements that parents fill out forms to approve teaching their kids that people have genitals. It also seeks to ban any material or speakers from Planned Parenthood, which all but guarantees it’ll become a law.

They’ve still got some Jim Crowe v. Wade Laws down there, don’t they?

Texas doubles down on Jesus-flavored sex ed: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20130314-editorial-texas-lawmakers-push-social-agenda-as-teen-pregnancy-problem-grows.ece & ftp://ftp.legis.state.tx.us/bills/83R/billtext/html/senate_bills/SB00300_SB00399/SB00310I.htm

And in other bullshit Bible-Belt bulletins, the state of Georgia has also recently doubled down on stupidity. This story starts with our intrepid hero, former president of American Atheists Ed Buckner, checking into a state owned cabin in the Amicalola Falls State Park and finding a bible there.

This is worse than when Al Sharpton found that subway ad for cotton white hooded sweatshirts.

As it is a state owned park, he politely informed the Park service that state-owned cabins shouldn’t endorse a particular religion and they said, “Holy shit, you’re right, our bad,” and took the bibles out.

That sounds impossibly reasonable. There’s no way the state of Jaww-Jah left it at that.

Of course not. As so often happens in these stories, along came a spider in the person of Governor Nathan Deal who ordered the bibles returned to the cabins, arguing that they didn’t put the bibles there because they were bibles, but rather because they were free, and dog-gone-it, we’d have let anybody put any books at all in them there cabins if they’d ‘a givin’ some to us.

Even non-fiction books that contain dangerous, factual material?

Doesn’t the south have book-burning firemen to prevent stuff like that?

Right when you’re thinking it’s about time for the second rape joke, I go curve ball, and give you a Fahrenheit 451 reference.

So yes, this fucktard actually told the former president of American Atheists that they would happily accept any freely donated literature for use in the state-owned cabins. And it just so happened that David Silverman had some Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ibn Warraq, Hitchins and Dawkins lying around, so I’m sure that the Governor will be happy to stack all that shit next to the bibles and tell his constituents that it’s okay because the copies of “The God Delusion” were free.

Dispute about bibles in state-owned cabins in Georgia: http://news.yahoo.com/georgia-governor-engaged-bible-dispute-125757816.html & http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/18/atheist-literature-is-about-to-be-distributed-in-georgia-state-parks/

And in “at least you don’t live in Saudi Arabia” news, that nation’s senior religious leader has recently added “Twitter” to the long list of possible perils for your eternal soul. Last Wednesday, top Saudi cleric, head of the Saudi religious police and guy with way too-damn-many names Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh declared that Saudis who use Twitter forfeit their rights to Muslim heaven for doing so. He warns that because what the hell ever he says goes and he says Twitter equals hell, you shouldn’t use Twitter.

Hold on there’s a shitty pun here… Lots of hash, no more tags.

I would think it’s okay as long as you Tweet @Mecca.

They can’t be happy about him having accounts on Instagram and Pinterest.

In the Mullah’s defense, with line-breaks you can ASCii-art mohammed now.

Twitter’s probably getting bumped because Halliburton’s new social media site, Cloud E-Arabia, has an exclusive contract.

Isn’t it remarkable how often god happens to be pissed off about whatever most immediately threatens the unencumbered rule of the theocratic government? This is apparently only the latest in god’s repeated condemnation of Saudi Tweets.

Tweeters gonna tweet. I guess this is just one of those times when god is powerless. Weird.

Saudi Arabia’s Top Cleric declares Twitter may cause damnation: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/18/twitter-saudi-arabia-damn_n_3294209.html?utm_hp_ref=religion&ir=Religion

And in a sarcastically rare case of money collected for god being misused, we travel all the hell way to Singapore where mega-church founder Kong Hee is on trial for embezzling $40 million dollars of god’s money to support the failing career of his wife, Z-list pop singer Sun Ho.

The pop tart will not face charges, and is using the excuse that the enormous expenses went toward creating music that glorified Christianity.

Singapore’s Yoko Ono refused to comment, as she was too busy plotting to have her husband murdered outside the Dakota building on Central Park West to fund the next godly album.

And before you send emails, it officially stopped being “too soon” to make John Lennon jokes at 3 pm Eastern Standard Time on February 11th of last year.

Sun-Ho, known sporadically as the semi-hot asian chick in that one Wyclef Jean video and back home as Singapore’s official “Least Admired Personality” of 2012 is apparently now directly in charge of the church’s finances since all the people who were embezzling money for her are under indictment.

I can’t help but wonder why you need to be a pop star if you can convince Christians to give you $40 million in the first place.

Evangelical Malaysian Church embezzles $40 million to fund unpopular pop artist: http://freethinker.co.uk/2013/05/19/evangelical-church-leaders-accused-of-embezzling-millions-to-boost-unpopular-pop-personalitys-career/

And from the “I-was-just-thinking-those-Hassidic-Jews-looked-hip” file, a Brooklyn Yeshiva recently sent a letter to parents warning of the dangers of modernity represented by the self-indulgent evil of thick framed eyeglasses.

The letter read, in part, “We are asking that everyone buy simple glasses. The yeshiva will not tolerate thick plastic eyeglasses. Thick frames… give the child a very fat look.”

Yeah, it’s probably the hipster glasses that are the root of the physical appearance situation in Hasidic communities.

Because if you’re about to say it’s the generations of inbred recessive DNA, you are an accurate racist (which tends to be received as the worst kind of racist).

Is it still antisemitic if you exclude the reform Jews though?

You’re right, it’s not. Hasids are the N-words of the Jewish community. Every time a Jewish person wants to have a good time . . .

And if you’re not familiar with that particular Chris Rock routine, fuck it, Heath is just that racist.

Orthodox Jewish school bans “hipster glasses”: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/brooklyn-orthodox-jewish-school-bans-hip-glasses

And in legal news, the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of Town of Greece, NY v. Galloway. The suit challenges the Town Board’s predilection for opening their meetings with what they call “inclusive” prayers.

I’ve never been to church . . . What exactly is an inclusive prayer? . . . Is that like a circle jerk?

No, because in this case only some people are getting fucked. Now, I’m no legal expert, or anything expert for that matter, but I find it strange that the suit doesn’t follow the “who gives a shit how ‘inclusive’ they are?” line of argument and instead opts for the “inclusive my ass” defense. And apparently both are valid. The plaintiffs allege that the board basically opened every meeting with a Christian prayer and then when they bitched loudly enough in the press they would invite two Wiccans and a Jew and then go back to the old-boy’s club.

Two Wiccans and Jew walk into a bar . . . Bartender says get that Jew the fuck out of here. Can’t even leave foreskin for the tip . . .

Hold on, I feel bad for singling out the Jews as bad tippers. That’s mean.

Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Europeans, and women are all great examples of groups that are shitty tippers as well.

The 2nd Circuit appeals court unanimously got it right on this one, but that incited a legal “stercore procellarum” that included legal briefs backing the city’s mythological incantations from as many as 49 members of congress and 18 state attorneys general, spanning the political spectrum from the conservative wing of the Republican party to the really conservative wing of the Republican party.

As long as the party remains hijacked by Christianity, they won’t even allow themselves to be reasonable-adjacent. The moment they sense moderate Republicans nudging up against logic, they have Rick “frothy-mixture-of-lube-and-fecal-matter” Santorum publicly express an opinion.

Speaking of which, was that Latin for “shit storm”? Nice.

Supreme Court to hear case of “non-denominational” prayers at town board meeting: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/20/high-court-to-review-church-state-dispute-over-public-prayers/

And finally tonight, from the “give-me-modesty-or-give-me-death” department we get a story so horribly stupid that it should be able to single-handedly end the debate about whether religion should ever be allowed to influence any decision about anything anywhere ever.

This story comes to us from the Friendly Atheist via Pensacola Christian College via a morbidly misguided hierarchy of priorities. According to a former student and some representative of the college that was willing to admit this shit to Hemant Mehta via email, the school’s stated policy in case of an emergency is for female students to dress appropriately for evacuation. They are asked to burn to death modestly before trotting out of a burning building showing a bit of thigh.

In defense of the college, this is a proven method for outing witches. Although any women attending a college are already suspect.

What, they don’t have scales and ducks in Florida?

When friend of the show Hemant Mehta pressed the school’s rep on this they actually pointed out that the dorm rooms were arranged so that the closets were on their way to the emergency exits anyway so it shouldn’t be much of a problem to change while feeling your terrified way through a smoke filled chamber of death.

Aren’t these women required to be clothed at all times anyway? It’s like they’ve never heard of a shower burka.

Christian college requires girls to dress appropriately before exiting in case of fire: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/17/this-school-has-the-worst-fire-safety-policy-youve-ever-seen/

And on the shower-burka visual image, we’ll close out the headlines. When we return, Heath and I will discuss the apex of all alliterative apologetics.

Skit:

Hello?

Hi, Joey.

(sigh)… that’s not my name, Mary.

Okay, fine. Jehovah. (playfully)

You… you should really call me God… or “Father Almighty” or something…

Fine. Hi, God.

So… to what do I owe the pleasure Mary? (exasperated in advance)

Whatcha doin?

Mary, I’m, you know, governing the universe, ignoring African prayers… these gay-marriage proponents aren’t just gonna smite themselves, so unless you called about something in particular…

Well yeah, actually. I wanted to let you know that I talked to our son the other day and he says he has another list of pedophiles for you to forgive.

Yeah, I know. I saw his post about it on Facebook.

You know I’m a little worried about him. He’s putting on a lot of weight lately.

Well, it’s Heaven, so, it doesn’t really matter. He’s not gonna have a heart attack or anything.

I know but I worry. He still hasn’t found a girl to settle down with and he’ll be turning 2014 soon…

Mary, I’m really busy here.

You’re always really busy when I call.

Yeah, Mary. I’m God. There’s a lot on my plate.

Why don’t we just talk anymore?

Mary, I’m just not gonna have this conversation with you again.

You told me you loved me, Joey.

(sigh) Mary, I’m all-loving. I told you I was all-loving. I love everyone. It’s in the freakin contract.

So you admit that there’s somebody else!

Jesus, Mary, there’s everybody else. I’m God.

Don’t you take our son’s name in vain with me. I will not tolerate blasphemy.

It’s… not… blasphemy when I do it. Look, I’ve really gotta go.

So when should I call you back?

You shouldn’t call me back, Mary. We’ve been over this.

That’s it, I’m coming over.

Don’t come over.

I’m already putting on my shoes.

Mary, I’ll phenomenize a moat or a dragon or something. Do not come over here again. It’s over between us. I still love you because I’m all loving and I have no free will by the dictate of the logical impossibility of my existence, but that thing was just a thing. You’ve got to just move on.

You used me, God.

I created you. I’m totally allowed to use you. It was part of my divine plan.

You know what, fuck you and your divine plan. You’re such an asshole.

No, actually, I’m perfect in all ways, but that’s beside the point…

(CLICK)

Yo, Adam!

“Here I am”

You want that rib back?

Calendar:

It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show, a time we set aside to annoy the shit out of the listeners that live way too far away to go to any of the great atheist, skeptical and secular events that we’ll be highlighting, so we’ll keep it brief.

We’ll start on June 15th with the SkeptiCal Con, which is really hard to google because it’s so damn clever that it’s actually just spelled “skeptical”, but that being said, it promises to be a great time if you’re gonna be anywhere near Berkley. Dr. Eugenie Scott will be there along with DJ Groethe, Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute and there’ll even be a remote appearance from one James Randi, though I think they’re doing Skype rather than projecting him as a “Hell me Obi-Wan Kenobi” type hologram.

http://www.skepticalcon.com/

On the weekend of the 21st of June we’ve got the SSA West, one half of the Secular Student Alliance’s bi-coastal conference bonanza. This one will be taking place in Sin City and there’s way too much good shit going on there to squeeze into this segment so I’ll just direct you to their homepage.

https://www.secularstudents.org/2013con/vegas

Over the same weekend we’ve got the Oklahoma Freethought Festival featuring Lawrence Krauss, Dale McGowan, Oklahoma’s own Seth Andrews and more. And all I’m gonna say is with all the prayer-mongers descending on them, by June 22nd the state is going to be in dire need of an injection of secularism.

http://freeok.org/

That does it for June but don’t forget the big one July 11th through the 14th. TAM is right around the corner so if you haven’t reserved your tickets get that done quick. We’ll be talking about it a bit more next time we do the calendar segment but if you need to know more now, now, now, you’ll find a link to their homepage along with links to all the events discussed on this segment on the shownotes for this episode.

TAM Homepage

Counter-Apologetics:

From time to time one this show, we like to set aside a few minute to tackle some of the more common apologetics used in defense of Christianity. Tonight, Heath has rejoined me to tackle one such topic. Heath, what poorly formed insult to proper logic have you chosen for us today?

We’ll be talking about the Lunatic, Liar or Lord concept.

Okay. And so for those who aren’t familiar with it, this is an argument by reduction of sorts, right?

Exactly. The apologists argues that if Jesus existed and our record of him is correct, the only possible explanations are

1. He was insane

2. He was deliberately misleading his followers, or

3. He was the son of god, martyred to redeem humanity.

He must be a lunatic, a liar or the lord. Then they try to work backwards with evidence that he wasn’t insane and that he wasn’t lying.

So the idea is that if they can prove that full of bullshit or full of batshit, the only explanation left is that he is the messiah.

Exactly.

But you said that this argument rests on the premises that Jesus actually existed and that our record of him is accurate. So it should actually be the Lunatic, Liar, Lord, Legend or Literary License argument, right?

Not so fast. Within the confines of the mythology that Christianity is based on one could also explain the appearance of Jesus by saying that he was actually the devil sent to confuse our love of god with all the trinity crap.

So Lunatic, Liar, Lord, Legend, Literary License or Lucifer.

Or leprechaun.

Wait, what?

Jesus also might have been a leprechaun. The theory goes that a person catches a leprechaun and wishes for a resurrected Jewish messiah. That explains the story, but in that case, Jesus isn’t really the son of god, but more of a mystical, leprechaun apparition.

Now wait a second, we shouldn’t have to consider that. I mean… leprechauns don’t exist.

It’s not that they don’t exist, it’s that there’s no evidence for their existence.

What’s the difference?

Look, there’s no evidence that god exists and no evidence that he could have a human son and no evidence that such a son would be divine and no evidence that if he was divine his martyrdom would somehow redeem humanity. So to truly employ this apologetic you don’t just have to rule out the things that exist. You also have to rule out anything that is within five degrees of not existing.

So what other kinds of things must the apologist disprove?

Well, Jesus could’ve been a were-Jew whose powers were unlocked by the full moon thus giving him the appearance of divinity. Or perhaps he was somebody who’d suffered some type of brain damage leaving the part of the brain that knows it isn’t the son of god destroyed but the rest of his brain intact. Or… or maybe he was one of David Icke’s shape shifting illuminati.

So we have to add lycanthrope, lobotomy patient and… lizard person?

Right. And it’s also possible that he was a time travelling assassin that teamed up with a younger version of himself and went back to biblical times to escape from a price on his head and then pulled a switcheroo when they crucified the older him.

I don’t even know what you’re going for there.

Looper.

That Bruce Willis movie?

Yeah, or maybe he was a teleporter that, while containing some magic powers, wasn’t actually the son of god. Or maybe the he had some weird necrotic disease that made him temporarily appear dead. In fact, it’s even possible that he bizarre early form of cloning.

I’m guessing that’s not all.

Well, I suppose he could be an actor hired by the Romans to fake a messiah. Or perhaps he was really a woman who loved Mary Magdalene and perpetrated this whole hoax just for some girl on girl action. Or maybe he was just a hippy who thought people would listen if he pretended to be the son of god.

And I suppose he could be a liquid metal robot like the one in Terminator 2…

Ooh… good one.

And I suppose that if they filled his post-crucified body with helium he would be “lighter than air” and that would explain the whole thing where he rose to heaven.

Now you’re getting it.

Or maybe he’s just impossible as described by Christianity.

And don’t forget Luigi from Mario brothers.

Really?

Yeah, after accidentally taking a really fucked up “Warp Zone”.

I suppose he does have extra lives… Okay, so that means that what we’re really dealing with is the Lunatic, Liar, Lord, Legend, Literary License, Lycanthrope, Lobotomite, Lizard Person, Looper, Leaper, Leper, Lab Accident, Lead, Lesbian, Liberal, Liquid Metal, Lighter than Air, Logical Fallacy, Luigi argument.

Exactly.

And that’s all of them?

Yeah.

So to…

…that start with the letter “L”.

What?

Yeah, I always felt like if an apologist ever got past all that shit they would have a lot more trouble with the Myth, Mirage, Magician, Moron, Misrepresentation, Machine, Misleader, Menace, Manticore, Meth-Head, Marshmallow Man, Martian, Mario, Mushroom Trip, Messiah argument but maybe that’s just me.

Outro:

Before we lock things down for the night, I did want to offer a quick apology. I was up late last week editing the show and apparently I fucked the whole thing up, which I didn’t realize until the following day when it was brought to my attention that episode 13 was only 29 minutes and 59 seconds long.

We strive for consistency here at The Scathing Atheist and our listeners deserve better than such lackadaisical oversight. To make up for this error, I’ve added one second to this week’s episode and beyond that I simply throw myself at the mercy of the court.

That’s all that’s left but to thank all the people who made this episode go. I want to thank C-Webb from the C-Webb Sunday School Podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. Very interesting cast he has going on there and definitely worth a listen. You’ll find a link to it on the shownotes for this episode.

http://cwebbssundayschool.com/

I also need to thank Lucinda for giving me her best creepy stalker chick, Heath, of course, for being the second, third and fourth wheel on this vehicle and, most of all, I need to thank Doug and April, this week’s most exceptional hominids. Thanks to their unwavering bravery and enviable cunninOg, we have more money.

Not everybody has what it takes to donate to this show, but if you feel that you share Doug and April’s superhero-like capacity for compassion and justice, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage.

And if you want to help us out but you’re saving all your money for a vintage replica Indiana Jones fedora, you can also throw us a bone by heading over to iTunes and leaving us a good review there. Remember, it takes 5 loyal listeners to counteract one Christian fart-vapor who sees the word atheist and gives us a one star ranking.

That does it for tonight’s show but we’ll be back in 168 hours with more. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and follow us on Twitter because when I see that we have new followers I feel imperial.

We also put clips of the show up on You-Tube so if you want to share a segment with somebody who doesn’t do the whole podcast thing, be sure to check us out there. And if there’s a segment that you’d like as a YouTube clip that we don’t have up there, let me know and I’ll get right on it.

Also if you’re on the Facebook, be sure to like us on the Facebook because we’ve only got about a hundred likes and that’s kind of embarrassing. And speaking of embarrassing, our Stitcher rank could use your help as well so if you haven’t downloaded the Stitcher App yet, get on that shit or I’m calling your mom.

If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.

Categories: Show Transcripts Tags: atheism, atheism podcast, atheist, atheist podcast, Christianity, Ed Buckner, Georgia book burnings, hip jews, Jewish hipster glasses, Judaism, Muslim, Nathan Deal, Sun Ho, Texas SB 521, texas sex ed, Twitter damnation

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