Archive
Scathing Atheist on You-Tube
by Noah Lugeons
By popular request, we’re putting select segments from the show on You-Tube. We’ll be adding full episodes at a future date and Lucinda and I have been kicking around all kinds of weird ideas about adding puppets, animation, stop-motion and a bunch of other stuff that will probably prove more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, first things first. We’ve uploaded a couple of the diatribes already. You can check out our channel here and be sure to subscribe. We’ll be adding all kinds of cool shit eventually and you’ll definitely want to be in on the ground floor of that.
And if you don’t have time to subscribe just yet, that’s fine. You can get a sample here, too:
Episode 7: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
This week’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by all the awesome people who sent encouraging emails and tweets, left complimentary comments on the blog, gave us positive reviews on iTunes and otherwise helped convince us to start doing this thing on a weekly basis.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 4th, and I’m already tired of changing my fantasy baseball lineup.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from decadent New York, New York, This is the Scathing Atheist
On this week’s episode,
- A Riyadh woman has consensual sex despite overt bicycle riding,
- God blames his mysterious ways on the lack of a father figure in his life,
- And Tom Beasley of an American Atheist join us to explain how he gets off naming his atheist podcast after a country that was clearly founded as a Christian nation.
But first, Heath Enwright with the diatribe…
Diatribe:
Many religions believe that the universe is created by an intelligent designer. Existence is an experimental game and god is the initial inventor of the game and is now an all-knowing spectator watching as we humans misuse the power of choice he gave us. This notion is fucking absurd, but let’s explore it anyway.
If god’s a sports fan, his model sport for humankind is definitely NASCAR. The world he built is a very similar, ridiculously dangerous situation . . . A bunch of crazy rednecks, competitively wasting fossil fuels and god’s just watching from the stands waiting to see the really good wrecks.
The takeaway here, is that if god is a NASCAR fan, he’s can’t be that intelligent.
So if he even exists, intelligent design is not the preferred nomenclature. I’d call it Military intelligent design at best. Even GOD didn’t think through his exit strategy. Intelligently designed games end elegantly, like checkmate in chess. For this game of existence on earth, his exit strategy seems to be nuclear holocaust.
I’m just saying, if religion were to dial back their stance on the intelligence, and just go for the design claim I’d still think they were silly but noticeably less so. But they don’t do dialing back very well. Admitting fault isn’t exactly in the church’s wheelhouse. Granted the faults they’d need to admit are often unspeakable, but I’m pretty sure that actually makes it worse.
The point . . . is that god’s clearly not that smart, and it looks like devoutly religious people agree. Everyone I’ve ever met who takes a religion really seriously, is always trying to justify absurd ways to bend the rules. Like god didn’t read his own fine print.
Great example . . . take butt sex. If you’re willing to bend over the rules a little, anal sex is the #1 virginity preservation method. I like to call this the poop-hole loophole . . . Like this somehow softens the blow later when you’re married, and trying to make your sexual history sound less bad; “No I’m a legit virgin. I’ve had huge amounts of cock in the hole right next to it, but that vagina is clean virgin territory.”
Bullshit . . . Even then, you know they’ve played, ‘just the tip’, a few times.
Speaking of just the tip, my circumcised friend from college, named Israel, also a firm believer in the validity of the poop hole loophole, was excellent at finding ways to just barely avoid directly breaking all these detailed Orthodox Jew-y rules he had to deal with.
For example, he’s not allowed to use any fire, electricity, or machinery of any kind on Shabas, which is sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. So if we were all hanging out smoking pot on Friday night, he couldn’t partake. Unless of course somebody drew a bong hit into the tube without inhaling it, and then happened by chance to leave that random, glass, smoke-filled column sitting on the table with a coaster over it, and then Israel happened to randomly choose to take one of his normal breaths of air while that coaster was quickly removed and that glass tube was on his face.
This would just be a chain of unrelated events. The fire used to burn the pot to make the smoke to fill the tube was wielded by someone else and the bong water acted as a mystical justification barrier, completely separating the fire from whoever might have, by chance, been breathing too close to the bong afterward.
Like Jew God is up there going, “Shit, yeah that bong water really ties my hands on this one. My boss – “God God” – will be up my ass about this if I smite this crafty stoner.” And as far as I know, Israel’s never been smote, so clearly the loophole worked. And this encourages further abuse of the rules.
So why are we so surprised about priests raping kids? Bunch of priests sitting around – trying to figure out loopholes:
“God says we can’t have sex, and can’t masturbate. What option does that leave us? Roll with me on this, keeping in mind, the lord works in mysterious ways. What if a kid gave me a Dutch Rudder?
“We’re not touching dicks. I’m touching my dick, and he’s just working my arm. So I’m not jerking it, and he’s not jerking it, and everybody wins.”
I guess not that many priests are big Kevin Smith fans. All I’m saying . . . it seems like nobody is telling the priests’ side of the story. Maybe the rape thing was a little extreme, but clearly the current rules aren’t sustainable. If I were a priest, I’d be lobbying for glory holes in the confessional booth. At least slutty sinners could try to buy indulgences with happy endings .
There is another solution. It’s nowhere near as fun as my glory hole idea, but probably more reasonable. The church could always just acknowledge that celibacy is ridiculous and goes against the biological instinct to reproduce, or at least the instinct to get laid. But this solution would never happen, because the church would end up having to reconcile its absurd universe view with contradictory things like evidence.
Church’s just don’t do epistemology. Figuring things out with reason is a giant hassle compared to faith.
Headlines:
Joining me tonight for headlines is the Tango to my Cash, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to tango?
Alright, in our lead story tonight, Pennsylvania State Representative Tim Krieger has introduced legislation designed to act as an impediment to the first amendment. There’s a lot going on here, but the important thing to take away from it is that Representative Krieger is willing to boldly stand up to a beleaguered minority, as long as they’re kids.
Our story begins with Moses wandering down a mountain with a couple of tablets and placing them, in a roundabout way, in front of a school near Pittsburgh. A few secular students pointed out that a giant copy of the Ten Commandments shouldn’t be there. Officials refused to voluntarily remove it so the students got together with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and sued the school.
Well the judge in the case is trying to let them sue anonymously, but that’s reasonable so the Christians are against it.
Enter Tim Krieger, fanatical Christian blowhard and guy who looks like he would be second-in-command for a plot to take over the world, but not the main bad guy. He calls bullshit on that and proposes a law that would make it illegal for a plaintiff to sue anonymously regardless of the ruling of the judge in the case. But don’t worry; this would only apply to cases where religious monuments were being challenged on a Constitutional basis, so at least they’re not trying to pretend it’s fair.
Pennsylvania representative proposes law that would force atheist students to sue publicly: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/03/29/pennsylvania-rep-tim-krieger-doesnt-care-if-atheists-get-harassed-by-christians/
And in other centuries, the morality of Catholicism is in the news again, despite not having changed in generations. The latest incarnation of their pre-scientific ethics comes to us from Boston, home of the nation’s oldest public park, numerous substandard sports franchises and Boston College where officials have threatened disciplinary action against students for the unspeakable crime of promoting safe sex.
Yes, it’s the fucking condom thing again.
The group BC Students for Sexual Health was hit with a “cease and desist” order saying that the group’s goal of promoting common sense was (quote) “not in concert with the mission of Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit University”
Boston College stops students from handing out condoms: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/27/us/boston-college-condoms-dispute/index.html
In other news, our whirlwind tour of bat-shit crazy states makes a long-overdue stop in Utah where the Mormons look to cement their reputation as backwards even compared to other religions. The Christian Newswire alerts us to a new service offered by a Salt Lake City based Mormon pseudo-clinic that brings cyber-homophobia into the 21st century.
This is another one of those “pray the gay out” type of things where some callous charlatan takes money from a conflicted person whose preacher tells them they’re identity is offensive to god. In the press release they refer to homosexuality as “same-sex attraction”, which I thought was a nice touch.
Anti-gay web resource for Mormon homophobes: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/8297071798.html
And from the “Somebody-Had-To-Say-It” department, a new study warns parents that extreme religiosity in a child could be a warning sign of insanity. Every article I saw on the study was really careful to point out all the beneficial corollaries of faith in kids, such as lower incidence of criminal behavior, higher self-esteem, better academic performance and less trouble fucking the preppy chicks, but the association between religion and crazy is pretty hard to ignore.
The study warns that extreme devotion to a religion could be emblematic of anxiety, unaddressed trauma or stress, obsessive compulsive disorder, bi-polar disorder, scrupulosity, schizophrenia, manic depressive or early onset of being-an-insufferable-dick.
Now, we make a lot of jokes about this, but this is pretty serious because one of the really pervasive side effects of religion is that it gives crazy people something to cloak themselves in. Everybody has to be at least a little “crazy” to profess some of the beliefs that organized religion demands, so it’s easy to imagine somebody delaying psychological treatment for a child because they don’t want to say, “he’s so religious it’s crazy”. Faith has been mislabeled a virtue so if something that would be clearly nuts in any other context pops up in the context of religion, people are way less likely to go, “that motherfucker’s crazy.”
Study warns that children who are “too religious” may be crazy: http://news.yahoo.com/child-too-religious-094552602.html
Moving on to some “Other-Countries-Are-Laughing-At-Us” news, an atheist shoe company in Berlin is charging that the US Post Office deliberately discriminates against them and backs up the allegation with an informal study that showed that identical packages with their abominable “Atheist” logo took an average of 3 days longer to arrive at their destination.
To be fair, this wasn’t exactly a scientific study and it wasn’t exactly published in a peer review journal, but the results look pretty damning for the USPS, especially since the whole experiment was prompted when US customers starting asking the company to leave off the telltale tape that said “Atheist-Atheist-Atheist” across it.
The take away, though, is that there’s a company that makes pretty cool looking shoes that say “Ich Bin Atheist” on them and they’re getting some free advertising on our show courtesy of the Post Office being a bunch of miserable dicks.
Atheist shoe company accuses US Post Office of discrimination: http://www.atheistberlin.com/study
And in this week’s living, breathing evidence against intelligent design, Dr. Joseph Mastropaolo has announced that he will impotently wave $10,000 around in the air in a vainglorious, insincere, meaningless publicity stunt.
Mastropaolo, a grown adult with an advanced degree who believes in Noah’s Ark is pretending to offer $10,000 to anyone who can “scientifically disprove” the literal creation account described in Genesis. And yes, that’s the one where they say god created night and day a full three days before creating the sun.
People with competent navigation of their own brains point out that “scientifically disproving” something is a meaningless term and thus an impossible standard to meet. They also point out that if Mastropaolo was so confident, he wouldn’t be insisting that anyone trying to claim the prize also put up $10,000. And of course, they also point out that the generally accepted foundations of biology, astronomy, geology, chemistry, cosmology, anthropology, literature and philosophy all “disprove” a literal interpretation of the bible to any reasonable standard.
Creationist offers $10,000 to anyone who can scientifically “disprove” creationism: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/joseph-mastropaolo-creationist-10000-disprove-genesis_n_2964801.html
And finally, in international news, Saudi Arabia makes a bold move to counteract the baseless stereotype that women are mistreated in majority Muslim countries. In a valiant and unprecedented move that would have made Elizabeth Cady Stanton look like Archie Bunker’s wife, the religious police in Saudi Arabia have lifted the ban on women riding bicycles.
Now, obviously you can’t do this all at once or you’d risk utter chaos, so they’ll be limiting this to specific parks and recreational areas, and, of course, the women will have to be chaperoned by a male relative and covered from head to toe in a potato sack, but I think it’s safe to say that sexism in Saudi Arabia is pretty much over.
Saudi authorities lift ban on women in bikes: http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-religious-police-lift-ban-women-bikes-111923001.html
That’s all we’ve got for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for hanging out.
When we come back, Tom Beasley will join me to circle religion like a hungry buzzard.
Skit:
Occasionally we get feedback from listeners that really enjoy the show, but think that we sometimes get a little carried away. For example, in last week’s episode, when discussing the Westboro Baptist Church, my co-host Heath Enwright expressed a desire to savagely penetrate Fred Phelps’ rectum.
We received several comments about the segment but I chose two that represented what I’ve come to think of as the two distinct audiences that this program appeals to.
Jon on Facebook said he really enjoyed parts of the show, but felt that the anally penetrating Fred Phelps portion went (quote) “beyond edgy and made me squeamish”. On the other hand, we also got an email from Daniel in Plano who said, “Love it! I almost pissed myself when Heath started talking about butt-fucking Phelps!”
So in our ceaseless quest to push the envelope of podcasting, I’d like to offer two explanations of the Fred Phelps comments. And because the show is only 30 minutes, I’d like to offer both explanations at the same time.
So if you find yourself in the “Jon” camp that feared that segment might make them vomit, please remove your right earphone for the remainder of this segment. If you’re more in “Daniel’s” spontaneous urination camp, please remove your left earphone. And if you’re not generally inspired to exude any bodily secretions over our skits, feel free to leave both earphones in and get twice as much podcast for the next few minutes.
*
We live in a world where the walls of censorship are fast falling away. Where once some government (censor/ cock-stain) stood between your ears and the vulgarities of less (cultured/ prudish) (individuals/ motherfuckers), in the 21st century, you’re no longer protected from words like (George Carlin’s notorious seven/ shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits).
There is, of course, one (negative/ positive) consequences (While/…) it expands the scope of the first amendment to previously unimagined heights, we also (have/ get) to (endure/ enjoy) a lot more (off-color/ dick and fart) jokes and (lewd/ hilarious) social commentary. As a result, some (refined/ uptight) consumers of new media with little (tolerance/ appreciation) for vulgarity get (offended/ fucked).
As a producer of such content, one must act as one’s own censor and must thus strike a (delicate/ frustrating) balance between being too (vulgar/ boring) and being too (academic/ vulgar). While I respect and appreciate the concerns of the people who wish I would be (vulgar/ myself) less often, I’m naturally inclined to side with the group that most mirrors my own sense of (propriety/ humor). The unfortunate result is that I must occasionally ask some members of my audience to (endure in good humor/ go fuck themselves).
Take, for example, our recent headline segment about the (detestable bigots/ spunk-garglers) at the Westboro Baptist Church. During that segment, our mutual dislike for the group was obvious and my co-host made some (untoward/ hysterical) comments about their leader, Fred Phelps, and things that might be hatefully inserted into his (anus/ asshole), including Heath’s (hateful /throbbing) (member/ dick).
While some (people/ prudes) found this offensive, I think it’s important to keep in mind that Fred Phelps is (despicable/ an ass nugget) and deserves to be (mocked/ gay hate fucked) mercilessly. What’s more, we should do so with (unapologetic/ un-lubricated), (spite-filled/ splinter-filled) (voracity/ broom handles) in the deepest, most (scornful/ painful) way.
And when we, here at the Scathing Atheist, (comment publicly/ blow our juice) on Fred Phelps, we hope that we can hit him (where it hurts/ in the eyes) and really make it sting. A gifted few can do so by way of intellectual criticisms, but those of us without the (education/ desire) or the (verbal dexterity/ words and shit) to express such scathing distaste without resorting to (obscenity/ fuck) filled tirades (have/ get) to resort to the (basest/ funniest) type of humor.
The important thing to remember is that regardless of what words we choose, we all agree that if any target is deserving of our foulest utterings, it is the kind of (visceral/ass-brained) (animosity/ fucktardary) and (lunacy/ bullshit) promoted by the Westboro Baptist Church.
Okay, this (segment/ shit) is really hard to edit, so please put your (right/ left) earphone back in now.
Calendar:
It’s time for the Atheist Calendar portion of the show. This week we’ll be highlighting some of the great secular meet-ups and conventions coming up in April.
We’ll start in Lawrence, Kansas where “Reasonfest 3” will be taking place over the weekend of April 20th. The lineup is fantastic, led by Seth Andrews, JT Eberhard, Jerry DeWitt plus Matt Dillahunty in a debate called “Moral Combat” and something with the enticing title “The Godless Pervert Story Hour” featuring notable godless perverts Greta Christina, David Fitzgerald and more.
http://kusoma.org/2013/01/reasonfest-2013/
A lot of action the following week in the nation’s capital: The Secular Coalition for America will be hosting a Secular Summit from April 24th to the 26th that’ll include some great instruction on effective secular lobbying.
http://secular.org/lobbyday2013
Also in DC on the 27th of April the Center For Inquiry will be hosting “Why Tolerate Religion”, a day long symposium tackling the contentious issue of religion’s role in our supposedly secular government.
http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/Calendar?id=103301&view=Detail
And for our West Coast heathens, CFI on Campus will be hosting a Leadership Conference in the City of Angels on the same weekend.
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/oncampus/slcla2013
Of course, wherever you are in the world, don’t forget that according to the Secular Students Alliance, Thursday, April 18th is National Ask an Atheist Day, so check your local listings to see if there’s any way you can get involved.
http://www.secularstudents.org/askanatheistday
If you want to learn more about this or any of the other events discussed on this episode, check the shownotes for episode 7 at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
That’ll do it for this week’s calendar. As always, if you’re involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. And if you’re not involved in an atheist, skeptical or secular event, what the hell are you waiting for?
Interview Links:
An American Atheist Blog: http://anamericanatheist.org/
Outro:
So that’s about all the time we’ve got for tonight. I want to thank Tom Beasley for hanging out with us, I want to thank Alan Blumlein for inventing stereo sound and also want to give a big thanks for Cecil & Tom from Cognitive Dissonance for providing this week’s circuitous Farnsworth quote. Those guys put on a really fun podcast, so you should definitely check them out at Dissonance Pod (dot) com.
I also want to thank the lovely Lucinda Lugeons for everything she does behind the scenes, Heath Enwright for everything he does in front of the scenes. But mostly I want to thank god for making this podcast possible by not existing.
Be sure to check back with us in 168 hours for the “Holy Babble” edition, in which Heath, my wife and I will do something that at least two of us will regret almost immediately. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow me on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons and like us on Facebook because apparently people still use Facebook.
If you enjoy the show, please help us spread the word by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes or whatever you use. Don’t forget to help drive up our Stitcher ranking by listening to us there and if you don’t have the Stitcher app yet, don’t worry, I’m not judging you for it the way all the attractive members of the opposite sex are.
If you have comments, questions 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.
Going Weekly
by Noah Lugeons
It’s not a decision I came to lightly, but it was one that seemed inevitable from the start.
I was careful when starting this podcast to avoid biting off more than I could chew. When we made our first false start years ago, we were trying to produce an hour long, weekly show and I quickly became overwhelmed with all the work that went into it. So much so, in fact, that we never got the show off the ground.
Granted, there was a lot more wrong the first time around than just shooting for a high level of content. We also lacked the right equipment, didn’t know how to process sound and had no clue how to produce a podcast.
So when we chose to reboot it, I spent a few months learning the technical stuff before we got going. I also opted to do so with a “dipping-a-toe-in-the-water” approach, starting with a 30 minute, biweekly show. The last thing I wanted to do was to produce a few subpar episodes and throw in the towel like we did before. I didn’t really know how hard it would be to fit it in around the rest of my life and I didn’t want to risk promising more than I could deliver.
But truth be told, it was always our intention to eventually make it a weekly show. I told my wife when we started that I’d give it five episodes and, depending on the response, we’d move it up to once a week. I arbitrarily picked the number 1000 and said that if we had 1000 downloads after 5 episodes I’d double our schedule.
I’m not really sure where that number came from. I had no idea what to expect, I had no idea what was typical and I had no idea what was possible, but I figured if we had 200 people willing to listen after 5 episodes, it was worth my while to keep putting a significant portion of my time into it.
Turns out that I massively low-balled the guesstimate. We had 1000 downloads after 2 episodes and by the time episode 6 was ready to drop we were well over 12,000. What’s more, the feedback we were getting was almost universally positive and the predominant theme in the feedback was “more please”.
The request came in a number of ways. Many people feel obligated to dance around the subject a bit when they’re asking somebody who gives them something for free to give them more, but others are far more direct. Contrast commenter EDT who says, “I’d take more episodes if more were there for the taking” with PyrOphelia’s more forceful approach, “damnit, get off your lazy ass and give me more!”
For the record, when you’re telling someone that you so enjoy their creative endeavor that you wish they’d do twice as much, you don’t have to pussy-foot around it. I’m flattered and I’m sure I speak for most podcasters when I say that.
Obviously, doubling our workload is an intimidating prospect. There are plenty of podcasters out there producing a lot more than 30 minutes a week so it’s clearly not unobtainable, but it will require a lot more effort and a little more sacrifice. My fear, of course, is that the quality of the show could suffer if we find ourselves overtaxed.
We’ve committed to doing the next ten episodes on a weekly schedule, but we do reserve the right to return to a biweekly schedule if we feel that the show is suffering. I’d much rather give you 30 great minutes once every two weeks than give you a pretty good 30 minutes every week.
That being said, up to this point we’ve been constantly bumping segments and shoring up diatribes just to make room for what we have. I have a skit we wrote for episode 3 that I’m hoping to squeeze into the end of episode 7. Heath and I recorded a bit for episode 4 that’s still sitting on my hard drive waiting for a spare 4 minutes in an upcoming episode. I’ve got interviews lined up for episodes in June and July. Every week we have to shave three of four good minutes off the program to make the 30 minute limit.
In other words, we’re already producing more content than we’re using without even trying to. Something tells me we’ll get used to this weekly schedule pretty quickly.
Episode 6: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Jeru-Salem Cigarettes; because an addictive substance that gives cancer to you and all the people closest to you is exactly the kind of thing a loving god would create.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s March 28th and guess which Sunday after which full moon after which equinox in which hemisphere’s coming up…
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from profligate New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode (and yes, I said that on purpose)
- Baptist Leaders pledge to civilly disobey gay marriage by not getting gay marries even just a little bit,
- Reasonable Doubts’ co-host Justin Schieber will join us to help me masturbate… er, master debate.
- And it turns out the Catholic Church agrees that when you have problems with somebody who has a checkered past with the Nazi party you turn to Argentina.
But first, the diatribe…
I’m often accused of cherry-picking the Bible and rightly so. They say, “Noah, there’s some really good stuff in the Bible, but you overlook all of it and obsess over the parts with genocide and rape and divinely sanctioned baby-murder and people being turned into salt and nut-grabbing prohibitions and scores of children being massacred by bears.”
I suppose it would be fair to point out that Christians are at least equally guilty of overlooking all the genocide and rape and infanticide and homicidal salinization and ursine bloodbaths and obsessing over the good stuff. In fact, I submit that when there’s a prophecy of a zombie apocalypse in your book, focusing on anything other part of it is off target.
But I have to admit that both atheists and Christians are guilty of cherry-picking the Bible. In a book that long and rambling, I suppose that there’s going to be something to support any view you have. That being said, I think that atheists can justify the assertion that the bible is, overall, an evil, horrible, demonically misguided book.
And I think we can make that case even if we have to set aside all the aforementioned butchery and carnage. Hell, let’s just look at the most sanitized selection of biblical nuggets we can find. Let’s just look at the Bible stories that they tell their kids:
– Jesus died for your sins. Because it’s never too early to learn about politically motivated accusations that lead to brutal capital punishment.
– The Exodus. Because it’s never too early to get your historical perspective from a slave narrative that makes Django Unchained look like a fucking documentary. And oh yeah, God likes to kill brown people.
– Job. Because your life and happiness might hinge on a bet between god and the devil and it’s okay if one set of kids dies as long as god gives you a new set later.
– Jericho. Where the heroic Joshua kills all the men, women, children and fucking animals except a family of turncoats that helped the Israelites in the aforementioned holocaust against her own neighbors… and their pets.
– And lastly, the most ubiquitous of all the “kid friendly” bible stories, Noah’s Ark, the single most horrible story ever imagined by humankind:
Here we have a story where God throws a temper tantrum so bad that it ends up killing all but a high school basketball team’s worth of people. He was so pissed at the humans that he killed all but two of the Patagonian screaming hairy armadillos.
And we’re not just talking about everyone dropping dead one day. God could’ve done that if he wanted to, but he decided to do it by flooding the whole goddamn world. Some of them are smashed to death with logs and debris, others drown quickly, still others get to swim for hours or float for days before eventually succumbing to dehydration or being pecked to death by scavengers.
Think about what a horrible vision this is for a child. They love the pictures of the two giraffes and two elephants and two lions walking into the ark together, sure, but what about the mental picture of every other giraffe, lion and elephant on the planet dying amid a horrible torrent of flood water tens of thousands of feet high. And it’s not like the evil genius that enacted this global catastrophe gets what’s coming to him in the end or anything. He’s the fucking good guy!
Consider legendary director Michael Curtiz who reenacted this disaster in a 1928 film. He decided that the coolest way to get the shot would be to tell all the extras to just act casual and then dump millions of gallons of water into the set without warning. He managed to capture the genuine horror of such a moment. Three of the extras were so inspired by this directorial decision that they improvised their own deaths.
Granted, we’ve largely forgiven Curtiz because Casablanca was so fucking good, but I think we can all agree that flooding that set was the work of a deranged psychopath. And he killed 3 people. And I should point out that none of them were infants. I’m not saying this excuses what he did, but it makes him less evil than god by at least 7 orders of magnitude. More if you count all the animals.
And keep in mind that the story doesn’t end with the flood either. It goes all 50 Shades of Incest a few chapters later when dad starts with the drinking again. Aronofsky is working on a new cinematic retelling of the Noah narrative and I’m thinking it could be brutal even compared to Requiem For a Dream.
Noah’s Ark is a horrible, awful, disgusting, repugnant story but it’s the one that makes the cover on most books of Children’s Biblical Stories. Now I ask you, if that’s the best you can do for a children’s story, how can you possibly argue that this book is anything but terrible?
Headlines
Joining me for headlines tonight is my co-conspirator Heath Enwright, Heath, are you ready to co-conspire?
Okay, so apparently there’s a new pope. I just heard about it and unfortunately the major media outlets have kind of ignored the story so I wasn’t able to find any real details. I guess we’ll have to skip that item until we can find some news coverage on it.
Moving on…
In our lead story tonight, a recent study shows that the more religious a country is, the more it sucks. Researcher Gregory Paul demonstrates a strong correlation between a nation’s religiosity and a host of negative descriptors including poverty, homicide rates, infant mortality and teen pregnancy and found that the more generally dysfunctional a nation is, the more religious it is likely to be.
Paul’s goal in publishing the research was to counteract the ridiculous notion that godless societies are somehow doomed to an inevitable decline into sybaritic dystopia but critics of the study point out that it makes religion look really, really bad so maybe we should just talk about baseball or something.
The major outlier in this study, of course, is good ol’ ‘Merica with a whopping 80% of the populace still believing in Aesop’s Fables despite our relatively high score on the scale of social success. But don’t worry, lawmakers in Washington are hard at work lowering that score to match our religiosity.
http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/EP07398441_c.pdf & http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013/03/05/f-religion-economic-growth.html
In other news, the ACLU has recently filed suit against the Puerto Rico Police Department on behalf of officer Alvin Marrero Mendez, an open atheist who was demoted, ostracized and publicly belittled by his supervisors for his lack of superstition.
The suit alleges that during a constitutionally dubious “closing prayer” after a briefing, Mendez politely excused himself. In response, his commanding officer publicly humiliated him, his service weapon was confiscated, he was taken off the street and given a new job in the department washing cars.
Clearly, the issue here is baseless discrimination, but if I was a Puerto Rican, I’d be far more concerned about losing a 14 year veteran police officer for the crime of being rational.
In more seditious news, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land has called for civil disobedience over same-sex marriage and the birth control mandate in the affordable care act. He and a group of like-minded Christ-ies explain that these issues are ‘non-neogtiable’ and worth the cost of paying fines and going to jail.
Yes, the Christians are actually claiming with a straight face that equality is a violation of their rights. Giving everyone else the same rights they have is a violation of their rights. They warn that they may soon lose their right to refuse to hire non-believers, their right to make medical choices for their female employees and their right to act on the belief that gay people are icky.
The first question I had when I read this is how exactly one goes about civilly disobeying something like gay marriage. I mean, civil disobedience is refusing to follow a law, so how exactly does a straight person civilly disobey gay marriage? When a married man introduces his husband to they just go “la-la-la, I hear nothing”? Do you go to gay weddings and pretend you can’t see anyone?
It makes no sense to me at all, but then again, this doesn’t make it at all unique amongst things Baptist Leaders say.
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2013/March/NRB-Christians-May-Have-to-Choose-God-over-Govt/
And what headlines segment would be complete without a facepalm prompting trip to the bible belt? This one comes to us from listener “Bad Teeth Alan” on Twitter. Back in episode 3, we marveled over the stupidity of a proposed Mississippi law that would allow student-led prayer in schools.
And on Thursday, March 14th, Governor Phil Bryant signed the fucking thing into law. Bryant admitted that a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law is inevitable but seems confident that the law will stand up to the legal challenge. What’s more, he seems confident that one way or the other, the defense of this law is a worthwhile expenditure of Mississippi taxpayer’s money saying, I shit you not, (quote) “If we’ve got to spend taxpayers’ money, I think we would be honored to spend it defending religious freedoms…”
The more legally savvy politicians are careful to cloak their support for this law in the official story crap about protecting students’ already well-established rights to wear pro-Jesus shirts and organize religious groups on campus, but the less savvy religious leaders aren’t as shy about talking about the bill’s true purpose. Take for example superintendent for the Mississippi District of the United Pentecostal Church and person whose name sounds like it was directly lifted from a Cohen Brothers’ Script, Reverend David D. Tipton Jr. who attended the bill-signing and was quoted later as saying, “We have listened to the argument of the separation of church and state for too long.”
Mississippi law about school-led prayer (from bad teeth Alan on Twitter):
In other Bible Belt insanity, Tennessee resident and suspected incubator of demons Andrew Byrd has filed suit against his pastor, his pastor’s wife and a deacon for injuries sustained in what sounds like a WWE inspired exorcism.
I couldn’t find a hell of a lot on this story, but from what I can gather, the lawsuit alleges that Reverend Joel Arwood asked Byrd to attend a meeting at the church because he had a demon that needed casting out. Unfortunately the part of the brain that you and I have that would trigger a ‘fight or flight’ response if a backwoods pastor asked us to attend a special, after-hours exorcism was malfunctioning in Byrd so he went.
And from what I can gather, Reverend Arwood’s notion of an exorcism is just beating the fuck out of this dude while his wife screams encouragement and eats popcorn from the first row. I just envision this poor guy getting tag-teamed by a pastor and a deacon and muttering “shouldn’t you be throwin’ holy water on me or speakin’ Latin or somethin’?”
Anyway, by the end of it, he’d suffered a broken tooth, bruises on his face and additional injuries to his back and his legs. He’s suing for $200,000 in compensatory damages and 3.5 million in punitive damages but has indicated that he might be willing to settle out of court for fifty cents and some envelopes.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/weird/NATL-Man-Sues-Church-After-Botched-Exorcism-196844971.html
And finally tonight, proving that secular people are way better at protesting than religious people, the nonprofit group “Planting Peace” has enacted my favorite protest of the decade. 31 year old LGBT activist Aaron Jackson has purchased a house in Topeka, Kansas and painted it with the ROYGBIV rainbow of gay pride.
No official word on how the neighbors feel about it, but I think we can take a pretty educated guess as the neighbors are the Westboro Baptist Church.
Jackson purchased the house for apparently no reason but to antagonize the notoriously gay-obsessed Fred Phelps and had no trouble at all finding some local volunteers to help him paint it. Planting Peace has dubbed the place the “Equality House” and intends to use it as a resource center for LGBT equality and anti-bullying initiatives.
That’ll do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks for joining me.
And when we come back, Justin Schieber will join us for a public debate on the merits of public debate.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. I haven’t had to dedicate a whole segment to a single weekend before, but it looks like if you missed the American Atheist’s convention in Austin, there’s a really good chance that there’s an awesome secular conference much closer by on the weekend of April 6th.
We’ll start in the Northeast with NECSS, the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism. They’ve really outdone themselves this year with a phenomenal slate of speakers including Leonard Mlodinow, Simon Singh, Michael Shermer, Mariette DiChristina, Massimo Pigliucci and at least a dozen others worth mentioning.
There’s a lot to look forward to, but I’m most excited about a podcasting workshop I’ll be attending with Dr. Steven Novella and Doctor of Funk George Hrab. You can expect to see a marked improvement in the quality of this podcast after that weekend and if you don’t let me know so I can ask for my money back.
NECSS: http://necss.org/
If you’re in the North but not the east, fret not, as the Northwest Freethought Conference is taking place over the same weekend. Friend of the show Hemant Mehta will be the keynote speaker there but he’ll be sharing the stage with some other notable names like Darrel Ray, Valerie Tarico and more. It’ll be taking place at Portland State University and includes three action-packed days of events and speakers.
Northwest Freethought Conference http://www.nwfreethought.org/
If you’re in the North but kind of in the middle, I’ve still got something for you. In Minneapolis, the SkepTech conference will be bringing in Greta Christina, Jesse Galef, the seemingly omnipresent Hemant Mehta and the Doctor Octopus of Atheism, PZ Myers. There are plenty more great speakers all themed around skepticism and technology.
Also keep in mind that April 6th and 7th are also “Just Pray No to Drugs” weekend where a bunch of superstitious yahoos will call upon the power of their invisible space-rapist to end all drug use so if you were concerned about the ongoing meth-epidemic, don’t worry, the Christians have it under control.
And finally, of course, this weekend also marks the celebration of Easter, when Christians believe that baby Jesus rides his sub-mammalian, egg-laying lagamorph down from heaven to give cavities to all the boys and girls.
That’ll do it for the calendar this week, but as always if you’re involved with an atheist, secular or skeptical event that’s in need of some free publicity, let me know. You’ll find all the contact info, along with links to all the events discussed on the program at Scathing Atheist dot com.
Interview Links:
Reasonable Doubts Blog: http://freethoughtblogs.com/reasonabledoubts/
Reasonable Doubts You-Tube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Doubtcast
Outro:
Interview ran a little long so I’ll have to close the show out pretty quickly, but he have really big announcement before we cue the music. Since we’ve started this thing, the most prevalent theme in our feedback has been “more please”, so I’m happy to announce that we’re doubling our workload and moving to a weekly schedule.
And from now on, I’m dedicating all the odd numbered episodes to all the awesome people who sent encouraging emails and tweets, left complimentary comments on the blog, gave us positive reviews on iTunes and otherwise helped us get this whole thing started. Thanks for all your support and we’ll be working hard to keep earning it every week.
We’ll be back in 168 hours for our “We’re Weekly Now” edition with co-host of an American Atheist podcast Tom Beasley for a pre-autopsy of religion, but if you can’t wait that long, be sure to follow us on Twitter @Noah (underscore) Lugeons and check out our erratically published blog.
Before we close it out, I want to thank author and indispensable activist Darrel Ray for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote… er… paraphrase. I also want to thank Lucinda for teaching me how to be a homo, Justin Schieber for being the world’s most patient interviewee and, of course, my partner in crime Heath Enwright for all of his numerous contributions to the show.
If you like the show, please help us spread the word by leaving a positive review on iTunes or adding us to your favorites on Stitcher. And if you don’t have the Stitcher app yet, get on that shit or the kids on the street will think you’re a square.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information along with links to all the events and headlines discussed on this program at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this program was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
No Longer New or No Longer Noteworthy?
by Noah Lugeons
I apologize in advance for what promises to be a self-pitying, egocentric kind of blogpost. If that’s not your flavor of Gatorade, feel free to skip this one and return tomorrow when I’ll get back to being a caustic, anti-theistic personified rage comic. But today I’m kind of in the dumps and what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t use it to bitch when you’re in the dumps?
I’ve joked that I’m a “new daddy” when it comes to my podcast. I’ve only been doing it a couple of months now and it’s still so novel to me that I feel like I have to sneak into its room at night and check to see if it’s still breathing. That’s hardly an exaggeration. If I get up to pee in the middle of the night, I’ll often log on really quick and see how my overnight downloads are going. Every time the podcast reaches a new milestone, I feel like a proud father.
So you can imagine how depressed and horrified I was when I checked the crib two nights ago to find that my baby was sick.
In the podcasting world, everything starts and ends with iTunes. Sure, Stitcher is out there and there are more and more alternatives for podcast listeners, but iTunes is still the first, second and third name in podcast aggregating. It’s where the overwhelming majority of podcast listeners go to get their favorite shows and, more importantly, where people go to find new ones. And luckily for us new podcasters, iTunes is set up to give everyone a chance to get noticed. It’s as close to a true meritocracy as I’ve encountered. When I uploaded my first episode, I obviously couldn’t compete with the people who have been doing it for years, so iTunes helped me find an audience by promoting my show in the “New & Noteworthy” section.
It was really something. The podcast went from getting a dozen downloads a day on a good day to getting over a hundred. We moved onto New & Noteworthy in both the Religious and Science categories so anyone who clicked on either of those options was going to see the Scathing Atheist logo right there at the top left of the screen, right where your eyes go first.
We were up there for a total of seven weeks and during that time the downloads continued to grow. By the time I released episode 5 we were garnering nearly 500 downloads a day. We shot up the ranks of religious podcasts and in our subcategory (other) we even took the number one spot a few times. All 5 episodes were showing up in the top 100 most downloaded episodes in our subcategory and the numbers just kept on growing. And even though I know that I shouldn’t, I started counting the shit out of those chickens. I started extrapolating from the growth we were seeing and I made predictions about when we would cross 10,000 total downloads and 100,000 and even a million.
And then the fairy tale ended. iTunes demoted us.
I guess in a sense I could consider it a promotion. We moved off of page 1 of the “New & Noteworthy” section and on to page 4 of the “What’s Hot” section. As much as this seems like a step forward, the actual result is that our podcast is no longer prominently displayed anywhere on iTunes. If you happen across it, it will be because you’re scrolling deep into the “What’s Hot” list on the “other” section of the “religious” section. In other words, the odds that you’re going to happen upon it have dropped to near zero. And it shows in the numbers. Our downloads over the last 2 days have been cut by more than half… and my baby is crying.
I suppose that on some level my arrogance blinded me to just how significant that endorsement from iTunes really was. I guess that I thought we were just so incredibly awesome that we were fast-tracked to outpace all of NPR’s shows combined. I stroked my ego and told it that it was simply the high quality of the program and the soothing mellifluence of my voice that was garnering all these downloads. The kids on the streets were shouting about it, deviants were plastering the underside of bridges with coded graffiti messages, businessmen were talking about it in hushed tones around the water-cooler, socialites were gabbing about it, learned men and women were analyzing it, Hollywood writers were listening to it with jealous reverence, the entire podcasting community was abuzz about it and they all recognized that soon it would grow to eclipse even the most established shows on iTunes.
But no, it was just the “New & Noteworthy” thing.
That’s not to say that we haven’t made some serious gains. During our brief stint of promotion we did pick up more than a thousand subscribers, more than 9000 total downloads and enough buzz that we should be able to continue to grow an audience even when pitted against far more experienced podcasters with far more established shows. That being said, there’s something painfully sisyphean about watching that fucking stone roll all the way down from 498 downloads one day to 147 the next.
Clearly, if I didn’t care enough about the show to be depressed about this, I don’t think I’d care enough to produce something worthy of our fine listeners. I know that we can continue to grow our audience even without that advantage. I know that by crossing that threshold into the “What’s Hot” category, iTunes is pushing us out of the nest a bit and that should be seen as a vote of confidence rather than an abandonment. It certainly wasn’t fair to all these shows that have been producing high quality content for years that I was able to rise above them in the ranks on the merit of having a really prominent position on the page. I recognize that it’s fair and it’s just and it’s part of the process of growing our show.
And I also recognize that there’s nothing to be gained by looking at all the shows that are still on the “New & Noteworthy” section and pointing out that fully eighty-fucking-percent of them are older than our show, some of them by more than a year. I know there’s nothing to be gained from checking every hour or two just to see if iTunes rethought their algorithm based solely on my depression. I know that there’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that a show with only 5 episodes can’t really compete on the “What’s Hot” section against shows with 100+. I know there’s nothing to be gained from writing meandering, self-indulgent blogposts about how we should really still be New & Noteworthy and our baby bird isn’t quite ready to fly just yet, but I’m gonna do all that shit anyway. After all, I’m a new daddy and that’s what new daddies do.
Obviously, if you want to help, you can help. After all, when iTunes closes a door, Stitcher opens a window so there’s still hope. If you listen to the show and you dig it, I need your help to spread the word. We can’t count on iTunes to do all the work for us anymore. I know ours isn’t exactly a show everyone can just share on Facebook, but if you have a friend that is an anti-theist or a completely areligious person who enjoys caustic humor, let them know that we kick ass. If you haven’t left a review on iTunes, please take a few minutes to do so. And if you haven’t listened to us on Stitcher, give that a try to. It’s a great way to get your podcasts and they have a New & Noteworthy section we haven’t cracked just yet.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a navel to gaze at.
An Amusing Story
by Noah Lugeons
I live in New York City, which means that if you don’t live in New York City, I pay more for everything than you do. I pay more for milk, more for movie tickets, more for takeout and, most of all, more for rent. And like many New Yorkers, when faced with the “you can afford a studio apartment on the seventh floor of a walk up if you don’t mind the well-armed cockroaches” dilemma, I chose instead to go with the “really nice place that I share with half a dozen other people” option.
My roommates have been very supportive of the podcast, which is fortunate. My wife and I have the basement apartment which means that from time to time I have to say stuff like, “nobody walk in the living room for the next half hour, I’ve got an interview”. And while they’ve largely been supportive, I can’t say that they’ve been “understanding” exactly. They’re very accommodating and they clearly realize this is something that is very important to me, but I don’t think any of them have the blindest clue why I’m doing it.
Basically, they don’t understand why I would work so often and so hard on something that I’m not getting paid to do. Sure, they all have passions and hobbies that they do without compensation, but I guess something about putting together a “show” that strikes them as the kind of thing one gets paid for. Why provide people with entertainment if there’s no financial reward?
Well, I’m sure that you know the answer to that already. Financial isn’t the only type of reward. Becoming a part of a community that I care passionately about, meeting and interviewing people I admire and respect, having a creative outlet, the knowledge that I’m doing a small part to correct a large injustice, the knowledge that at any given moment I might be making someone in the world laugh, the pride that I take when I see the podcast climb up the iTunes ranks, the ability to say things that I have to hold in through the majority of my day; any one of those things would probably be enough to keep me doing this, but the fact that I get all of them makes it a real no-brainer.
Despite my ready list of reasons, I’ve still been unable to sufficiently explain my motivation to my roommates. I’ll tell them all that good stuff and they’ll nod understandingly, but then they’ll still say, “you should be getting paid for it, though.”
Well, over the weekend I finally got an answer that explained it to at least one of them. I got an email from a listener named Jeff with the heading ‘An Amusing Story’. I hope he doesn’t mind me reprinting it here (and I can’t imagine that he does), but here’s the email in it’s entirety:
Just a story I thought I’d share. I was playing a game of Hearts with some guys during lunch, 2 Italian ,1 Irish, all Catholic. During the game I was leading and being annoyingly cocky. As it turned out I ended up losing, one of the guys turns to me and says, ”See? God don’t like cocky!!”
I replied,”I know, if God liked cocky he would have been sucking Joseph’s dick instead of fucking Mary, and you would have never gotten you little Savior”. The faces were priceless, I’m sure lightning was expected.
One of my roommates was there when I opened my inbox and, of course, asked me what I was laughing at. I read him the email and he had a laugh as well. Then he asks, “Is that a friend of yours from Georgia?”
“No, it’s somebody who listens to the show.”
“Well… wait, a perfect stranger sent you that?”
As much as I don’t like thinking of our listeners as ‘perfect strangers’ I didn’t want to nitpick so I simply said, “Yeah.”
“Why would a perfect stranger send you that story?” he asked.
“Because he knew I would appreciate it.”
He didn’t respond, but I could tell by the look on his face that for the first time, it clicked with him. He finally understood why I would invest a part-time job’s worth of time to produce a show that I then give it away for free.
The Crappy Music
by Noah Lugeons
I might just be too sensitive for this line of work. I’d like to think I’m pretty thick-skinned, but that would be contrary to all the evidence I’ve seen so far. I take a lot of pride in the Podcast we produce and I take the feedback personally.
That’s not always the case, of course. I get occasional feedback from true believers and I look upon that with amusement. But when I get feedback from an objective person who takes issues with the technical stuff, I really take it to heart. The upside of that is that if I didn’t, it would be really hard to improve the quality of our show. The downside, of course, is that a bad review in iTunes sends me into a multiple-day binge of hopeless alcoholism, drug use and self-flagellation.
Take, for example, a recent 3 star review we got that summed up their feelings in 7 words:
Get rid of the crappy music please.
That was the extent of the review, so I don’t know if there were additional unspoken issues that cost me stars, but the review seemed a bit harsh. I mean, if it was a music podcast, crappy music would be a pretty serious issue, but for the 15 second clips I use in episode transitions (and the music bed behind the calendar segment), I honestly didn’t think the quality of the music mattered much. I mean, I wasn’t gonna use Rebecca Black or anything, but I certainly didn’t think anyone would ever base 2/5ths of a review on it.
Exacerbating the depression that negative reviews of the podcast naturally give me is the fact that I compose and record all the music for the show myself. I guess ‘compose’ is a bit strong of a word, as what I actually do is improvise 2 or 3 minutes worth of stuff once every two weeks and take a few 15 second clips from it to plug in to the space between poop jokes. So this review was attacking both the podcast and my musical acumen.
To be fair, attacking my musical acumen shouldn’t bother me. I’ll readily admit that I’m an amateur musician without much will to advance beyond that amateur status. I enjoy writing music, but I have no illusions that I’m particularly good at it. I certainly envy the much cooler themes that shows like “Reasonable Doubts” and “Post Rapture Looting have. And don’t even get me started on the king of atheist podcast theme songs, “Won’t You Listen to Reason” from the Atheist Experience (and if that’s not the name of the song, it should be).
But I still dig the notion that I built the show from the ground up, including recording the theme, the music beds and the filler. I’m not married to it as a concept, but I also don’t want to comb the internet for better podsafe music that I’m only going to use 15 second clips of. I would be recording these little improvised jam sessions anyway. So with a high quality file of some original music at the ready, it seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass to add to all the work that goes into creating a podcast.
Of course, the most important thing is the quality of the podcast and I’ll readily cop to the fact that people are usually pretty bad at assessing the product of their own creative efforts. Upon reading the review, I had to open my mind to the possibility that the music is way shittier than I ever imagined and I’m just blinded to it by the same process that makes ones own fart smell rather better than those of others.
Up to that point, this review was the only comment anyone had made about the music specifically, so it weighed on my mind quite heavily until last night. And then someone said they thought the music on the podcast was really cool. That evened the pro and anti-columns up and I’m fine with that. I suppose that I’m also saying that the price of the free entertainment I provide is listening to a collective 84 seconds of crappy music once every two weeks, but I do want to produce the best podcast possible, and if the majority opinion is that I need better music, I’ll get better music.
But until more data can be collected, I’ll invoke confirmation bias and assume that ‘PiggyCop’ on iTunes just has bad taste in crappy music.
Post Rapture Looting Podcast Interview
by Noah Lugeons
I think the thing that has amazed me most since we started doing this podcast is how incredibly friendly and welcoming the atheist community has been. I’ve gotten encouraging emails and tweets from prominent atheists that I greatly admire, help from other atheist podcasters from around the globe, audio clips from complete strangers eager to help, listeners going above and beyond to assist with the research and heartwarming messages from complete strangers that urge us on. And that’s after only 4 episodes.
Case in point is an email I got the other day from Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast. It’s a podcast two friends started almost two years ago amid the hubbub of Harold Kamping’s famed doomed-day kerfuffle. It’s a biweekly podcast where they discuss news items of interest to atheists, bring on guests and go on occasional vulgar tirades about the frustrating side-effects of religion. But it’s nothing like our show. It’s a completely different length and everything.
Apparently Carl had happened upon our show on iTunes and liked it. In a friendly effort to help promote our podcast, he invited Heath and I to appear on his show to do an interview about the Scathing Atheist. We were understandably excited for the opportunity but, I have to admit, a little nervous as well. This would be the first time I’ve ever been interviewed, and even though I appear on an atheist podcast quite regularly of late, we script our show pretty extensively so the interview format was something totally new to me.
Luckily, Carl and his co-host Ben are old pros at it by this point and within minutes we were conversing like old friends. It was a lot of fun, we laughed a lot and we managed to sneak a few important topics in amid a morass of really off color jokes about eating babies, penetrating sheep, multiple-penis-fellatio and bear rape. I shit you not, those are all in the interview. And if that doesn’t have you ready to download it, I can’t imagine what would.
No word yet on when the interview will air, but as soon as we have a date, we’ll tweet the shit out of it.
—————————————
Update [3/11]: Spoke with Carl the other day. He told me the interview should be available on Saturday the 16th. Between now and then you can hear Carl and Ben interviewing David Silverman about the American Atheists 50th Anniversary Convention in Austin. That’s available at their feed now.
Episode 4: Partial Transcript
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And now, the Scathing Atheist:
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s February 28th and when I asked for more reviews on iTunes I meant good reviews, but thanks anyway.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from New York, New York, THIS is the Scathing Atheist.
On this fortnight’s episode:
- A school board in Jackson, Ohio decides there’s nothing explicitly Christian about a picture of Christ,
- Eli Bosnick will join me to try to fuck up the rhetorical meaning of the phrase “Is the Pope Catholic?”
- And I’ll try to figure out what all these little knobs on my new mixer do,
But first, the diatribe:
Diatribe:
Today I’d like to talk about being the only atheist in a room full of theists. It’s a diatribe I like to call “There is too a God, now pass the fucking string beans!” Because that’s usually where it comes up. It’ll be at some social event or a family gathering, you’re sitting around the table, minding your own business and suddenly those 7 fateful words’ll come up.
Somebody’ll say “So you don’t believe in God, huh?”
And you don’t want to have the conversation. You don’t feel like playing “stump the atheist”. You even try to distract them with something like “hey look, your kid’s on fire”, but it never works. They’re in that zone. They lean in really close and they put on their best “profound” face and then they’ll pose… “the challenge”.
The challenge usually come in the form of a question, and the question usually starts, “So how do you explain…”
And that’s where I stop them. I’ll say, “Hey man, I’m gonna let you finish your question and everything, but before you do, I’d like to point out that my ability or inability to answer whatever question you’re about to ask has absolutely no bearing on the existence of God. When I say that I don’t believe in God, I’m stating a lack of belief, not a claim of knowledge. I’m not an expert on the origins of life or the cosmos any more than the next guy and failing to be so doesn’t disqualify me from atheism. What’s more, whatever question you’re about to pose is also one for which you have no answer. I know that you think you have the answer, but ‘my guy has super-powers times infinity’ doesn’t really count at all… but by all means, carry on.”
I don’t want to dissuade them, after all. It’s pretty easy to argue with a Christian, since they only really have about three different arguments. So they’ll throw out Pascal’s wager or the Lunatic, Liar or Lord shtick or the First Mover argument or whatever and I’ll refute it in whatever way I refute it.
Sometimes you’ll even get that “sophisticated theist”, you know, that one who went on that there internet and looked up ways to stump atheists? And that’s always fun because you get to hear them try to pronounce words like “abiogenesis” and “flagellum”. And you can refute these points too if you want to, but there’s usually no point. Most of the time they don’t even understand the argument they’re regurgitating enough to know when you’ve countered it.
So you sit there suffering the slings and arrows of their tortured logic and you’ll come out on top, but eventually the tone of the argument will change altogether. It’ll no longer be a rational discussion on any level. It’ll turn into something like “Well I don’t want to live in a world without God,” or, “There is too a God, now pass the fucking string beans!”
And that’s when the real nature of the argument comes out. That’s when it becomes obvious that this conversation was never about logic, it was never about reason, it was about emotion. It wasn’t about the world you observe, it was about the world you want to observe.
Eventually you’ll have to come to understand that there is no logical reason to believe in God. If there was, atheists would believe in God. We got where we got by using logic and believe me, if there was a shred of evidence to suggest that I get to live on for eternity in space Disney Land, I’d take that deal even if it meant I couldn’t have fish on Fridays.
But even knowing that logic will never work, you’re still going to try to employ it you silly little Christians that stand between me and a second helping of mashed potatoes. So I’d like to make a request of you. Before you bring your “logical” argument to me, I want you to take a deep look at it and ask yourself, “If this was evidence going the other way, in other words, if this was offered as proof that God doesn’t exist, would it sway you at all?”
If I walked up to you and said something like, “I’m gonna prove to you that God doesn’t exist. Now let me tell you about the bacterial flagellum.” Would you listen to anything else I had to say at that point? And if the flagellum evidence ended up swinging the other way, would you give up your belief in God altogether? Are you subscribing to all the flagellum blogs and newsletter so you can know for sure if this God thing holds water?
You’re never going to win an argument with an atheist by using logic. We’re just better at it. That’s kind of our thing.
You have to admit going in that yours is not the rational argument. If you insist on arguing with atheists, at least be honest with yourself about where your beliefs come from. And I’ll give you a hint, it’s not your brain.
Headlines:
Joining us for the headlines this fortnight is Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to inform?
Hello, Noah Lugeons. As you said, I’m Heath Enwright . . . and there’s nothing clever about our names.
Now, before we jump into our lead story tonight, I should note that the Pope is still stepping down. Of course, we’ve known that shit for weeks, but that hasn’t stopped media outlets everywhere from covering it nonstop as though it somehow remained newsworthy even after everyone knew it. In fact, I’ve spent two weeks combing through news items for this segment and, like far too many altar boys in the past, I’ve been up to my balls in bishops and cardinals the entire time.
So what follows are the few non-papacy related nuggets I could dig up in that morass of ass-rapists and ass-rapist enablers.
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In our lead story tonight, the House of Representatives recently passed HR 592, a bill that would allow taxpayer money to be allocated to houses of worship as part of FEMA federal disaster grants. The bill, which passed by an overwhelming 282 vote margin, was created in response to recent caterwauling by Christian Leaders over FEMA’s refusal to grant churches and synagogues relief money after Superstorm Sandy.
When FEMA abandoned black people after Katrina, I gave them a pass. But now they’re neglecting Christians and Jews. A line has to be drawn somewhere.
Amen brother. There are, of course, numerous compelling reasons not to grant federal money to churches, but strangely Christian leaders have chosen not to address any of them and instead opt for a policy of crying, whining, bitching and flailing about like wounded animals.
Take pastor, author and latenight-accident-attorney-infomercial clone Paul De Vries’ recent Op-Ed in the Christian Post. Rather than tackling the constitutional and logical concerns one might have against giving taxpayer money to organizations that don’t pay taxes, he instead chooses to obscure the issue with a series of points that can easily be refuted in three sentences or less. Are you up to the challenge, Heath?
Game on.
#1 “…[the policy] treats churches as outsiders” After all, why should a groups devotion to god make any difference when it comes to public policy?
1. That’s why they should be paying property taxes, rather than being treated differently in public policy because of devotion to god, and getting a tax exemption.
2. If they were paying taxes this whole time, they would – in turn – be eligible to receive federal disaster aid.
3. That’s how taxes work. .
#2 “This ‘discrimination’ could open the door to “other risky discrimination”. Will the government stop providing churches with firefighters and police officers?
1. They should stop providing them with police, fire fighters . . . roads, water, electricity, freedom of speech, and any other government-provided privileges, unless they pay taxes.
2. Again . . . that’s how taxes work, and this is a basic principle of organized society.
3. And even if they did pay all the same taxes as everyone else, churches are clearly not the most important thing to rebuild.
#3 “…[the policy] ignores the immensely positive roles churches have already played after Superstorm Sandy”, and then he lists how many millions of dollars churches donated and raised for victims.
1. Don’t they justify their tax exemptions by citing their benefit to society?!?
2. They’re honestly trying to say, “The reason we should get tax-funded aid without paying taxes is the same reason we don’t pay taxes.”
3. That’s like saying that a disputed book is valid because in several passages within the disputed book, it indicates that the disputed book is valid.
Not to mention that “look how much money we had to give away” is a shitty argument when you’re asking for money.
Is their an entire bad tautology department at Christianity HQ?
And finally, My personal favorite, #4: “blocking FEMA grants to churches is to pretend to be ignorant of the continuing soul care needed by the many and various victims…”
I guess we can always feed starving children with the bullshit the church consistently feeds parishioners.
And of course, deep-fried figurative cannibal wafers would be good soul food.
You’d think that somebody with a good batting average could have been praying for the hurricane to go offshore: If that praying shit works, forget the church volunteerism after the storm, and try some simple fucking preventative medicine, idiots.
Well, they’ll probably say that the gay marriage interfered with their prayer frequency.
Can’t imagine a lot of people needed blankets, jackets, and bibles. If you gave bibles to homeless people in NYC after Sandy, they would have been burned in trash cans, just like the bibles they started with before the storm.
One can only hope. Anyway, the bill will now go to the Senate where we expect it will die quietly.
Like the way god died.
De Vries Op-Ed: http://www.christianpost.com/news/femas-ugly-superstorm-sandy-policy-no-churches-allowed-89755/
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Taking a page out of the Catholic playbook, a Baptist group has fired the independent investigators that were looking into child sex-abuse allegations against a member of the group mere weeks before the findings of their investigation were scheduled for release.
The Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, or ABWE has terminated the investigative firm “Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment” or “GRACE”. They cite a laundry list of general complaints about GRACE’s investigative technique, especially, one would speculate, the ones that result in them finding massive culpability within the group.
GRACE has issued a response to the allegations, pointing out that the ABWE refused to meet with them to address the alleged poor-practices that led to their eventual termination, repeatedly breached their contract by refusing to disclose documents and make witnesses available for interview, wantonly delayed the investigation and have the far lamer acronym.
Reminds me a little bit of the internal affairs department within the Gestapo. I think they were called Hitler Examines Internal Legality, or HEIL. They made sure that atrocities were carried out with dignity and GRACE. Brought it back full circle – nailed the joke. Seriously though, the Nazis would probably have gotten in big trouble if they hadn’t disbanded HEIL right before the release of their controversial report on the morality of holocausts. I’m led to believe that HEIL did, in fact, uncover one or two questionable practices.
Main Story: http://www.christianpost.com/news/us-missions-group-fires-child-sex-abuse-investigators-claims-process-fatally-flawed-90100/
GRACE’s response: http://netgrace.org/wp-content/uploads/GRACE-Response-February-10-2013.pdf
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In other news, Heisman Trophy winner, Christian Evangelist and former 3rd string New York Jets mascot Tim Tebow has cancelled a planned April appearance at the First Baptist Church in Dallas. The church, which is led by controversial pastor Robert Jeffress, is decidedly anti-gay, anti-Islam and anti-Mormon.
Tebow, who claims to have only recently realized that this church is even more ridiculous than average, announced the cancellation on Twitter, but added “I will continue to use the platform God has blessed me with to bring Faith, Hope and Love to all those needing a brighter day, except the ones who are fans of whatever unfortunate team has me on its roster.”
If god wanted Tebow to be a star QB, and big spokesman for religion, why did he give him the throwing ability of Helen Keller’s less-coordinated little sister?
He looks like a drunk redneck throwing a folding chair at a bowling alley fight.
He looks like he’s throwing a gallon of milk, but without the container.
This is only the latest piece of evidence that suggests that Tebow is as bad at picking PR events as he is throwing a fucking football. You’ll recall that in 2010 Tebow appeared in an ad where he encouraged women to ignore any doctor who said they had high risk pregnancies because “what do those doctor’s know? Just look how good I turned out.”
We can’t deny that without the Tebow fetus avoiding responsible parenthood planning, the Jets certainly wouldn’t have been able to convert those 3 fake punts, salvaging a 6-10 season in 2012.
And I apologize to all our international listeners who could give a fuck less about all these American football references.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/02/21/tim-tebow-pulls-out-of-speaking-at-dallas-church/
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Sticking with the regional focus, Oklahoma becomes the latest in a dishearteningly long list of state’s that are pushing some cretinous law that would give creationism a foot in the door of public schools. Republican State Representative Gus Blackwell has introduced a bill which he, of course, vociferously insists has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, claiming [quote] “I proposed this bill because there are teachers and students who may be afraid of going against what they see in their textbooks”.
And in my mind, it’s about damn time somebody stood up for the right of students to ignore all those realities in the curriculum. What gives textbooks the authority to determine what is and is not a fact? Other than school boards, textbook guidelines, knowledgeable authors, federal and state educational mandates and rigorous review by experts, I mean.
Can’t students study falsehoods at church like they always have? Isn’t there already a chapter in the science texts at Sunday school, that’s discusses in detail, many baseless claims about creation?
But you don’t understand. Blackwell promises with all his heart, so help him die, that this bill is in no way informed by his religious views or the multiple decades he spent working for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.
Is he claiming that he intentionally erased his subconscious?
That probably wouldn’t be the dumbest thing he’s claimed.
Oklahoma Creationism Bill: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/oklahoma-hr1674-science-evolution-climate-change
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In other news, a horrible bitch is suing New York’s Department of Education because they did not grant a religious exemption to vaccination for her five year old daughter. Proving definitively that there’s no stupid like religious stupid, she argues that [quote] “To inject invasive and unnatural substances into [god’s] divine creation is showing a lack of faith in God and His way”.
I forget which verse, but I’m pretty sure the bible does eloquently suggest, that law suits against public school districts are a good show of faith in god and his way.
I believe it’s in the book of Macabee-otch
Is it? Could’ve sworn it was in the Penta-douche.
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And finally tonight, Jackson Ohio has become a central front in the battle for the proper separation of church and state. A recent lawsuit by the ACLU and the Freedom From Religion Foundation charges that a portrait of Jesus that hangs in a public middle school illegally promotes religion and stands in direct violation of the first amendment.
Those Jews are always rubbing our smaller noses in the fact that they had Jesus first, aren’t they?
Rather than politely acknowledging their error and removing the portrait, school officials have dug in their heels and cobbled together an argument so disingenuous you almost expect them to use the word “quantum” at some point.
Damn godless hippies trying to take down our jesus poster. Somebody better stand in the way of this progress . . .
Is that approximately their argument?
Even worse, I think. They say that portion of the wall is reserved for clubs within the school to place pictures of “inspirational figures central to the club’s meaning and purpose”.
To get me pumped up before a big game, in my locker, I would always keep a little figurine of the sports god named Baal. I think he stood for good sportsmanship. I really idolized that little guy.
Well that’s, of course, the “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain” legal defense, but the layman’s defense is the same ones that worked so well when it was used to justify slavery, oppose women’s suffrage, rationalize prejudice against gays and validate circumcision: “It’s been there a really long time”.
http://news.yahoo.com/ohio-town-latest-focus-religion-legal-debate-204126487.html
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That’ll do it for headlines, when we come back I’ll be joined by unlikely papal candidate Eli Bosnick.
Calendar:
I made a request in last fortnight’s calendar for help finding a good online source for atheist, humanist and skeptical events in Australia and I got a few responses, but I really have to single out one listener in particular, @workMX on Twitter seemed to take this as a personal challenge and helped out a lot, so I decided that on this episode I’d devote the calendar section entirely to March Meet Ups in the land down under.
On March 13th – The Brisbane Rationalists are meeting from 6:30 to 8 and encourage anyone who enjoys rational conversation in an informal environment to join them… Although I’m sure if you show up in a tux they won’t turn you away. The monthly meet up will be held at the Coffee Club on Albert Street.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/brisbane-rationalists-2013-03-13/
On March 20th we have a few events worth noting – The Central Victorian Atheists will be holding their monthly gathering at the Albion Hotel in Kyneton. Or Keyenton. Or whatever. I’ve gotten some mixed advice on the pronunciation there. All free thinkers in the area up for an evening of godlessness are encouraged to attend, regardless of how they pronounce it.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/central-victorian-atheists-2013-03-20/
Also on March 20th in Adelaide the Humanist Society of South Australia will be holding their monthly meet up as they do on the third Wednesday of every month. The meeting runs from 7 to 9 at the Weatsheaf Hotel
Moving 1400 kilometers due east, on March 24th Sean Faircloth, author of “Attack of the Theocrats” will be appearing with AC Grayling and other secular speakers at the Sydney Opera House. This appearance will kick off a national “Reclaiming a Secular Australia” tour organized by the Rationalist Society of Australia and the New Zealand Association of Humanists and Rationalists. Additional appearances include:
March 26th at Melbourne University
March 27th at the Kyneton Mechanics Institute
March 28th at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne
For a full calendar of appearances, including stops in Perth and New Zealand, check the link on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
http://www.somewheretothink.com.au/events/reclaiming-a-secular-australia-sydney/
That’ll do it for the Calendar this fortnight. On our next episode we’ll turn our eyes to Austin and breakdown the schedule of events for the American Atheist’s 50th annual meeting, which I hope to be attending.
As always, if you’re involved with or aware of an atheist, secular or skeptical event that’s in need of some free publicity, feel free to email me or send me a Tweet. You’ll find all the contact info, along with links for all the events covered on this segment, at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Feedback:
I wanted to respond to a couple of quick emails before I closed out the show. First a correction: how quickly we forget. The Pope announced his retirement and within days I’m already forgetting the asshole’s name, apparently. On Episode 3 I accidentally called him “John” Ratzinger. Quick slip of the tongue while my mind was focused on a pretty crappy “John Ratzenburger” joke. Sorry about that. Kind of kills one’s credibility when one does shit like forgetting the Pope’s name.
Anyway, on to a more serious correction. I woke up to a pretty compelling comment on the blog on Sunday. John took me to task for repeatedly calling Ex-Benedict a Nazi in the last couple of episodes. As he points out (and as I will readily admit), mandatory membership in the Hitler Youth does not a Nazi make. But rather than frame this simply as an ad hominem, John hits me where he knows it will hurt. It’s not just an ad hominem, but a lazy one. After all, why go after a spurious connection to Nazi-ism when one could just as easily point to all the horrible shit that he actually did without being forced to by the state?
So I apologize for calling that sexist, homophobic, child rape enabling, child rape ensuring, genocidally anti-condom, thoughtless, heartless, antiquated, purposeless, money-laundering, hypocritical, superstitious, felonious Palpatine lookalike a Nazi. It won’t happen again.
That does it for our show but if you want more, there’s more. The interview with Eli went on a lot longer than I anticipated and when I cut it down for the show I left a lot of great stuff on the cutting room floor. If you want to hear the full version, check out Scathing Atheist (dot) com and click on the “Extras” tab at the top of the page.
I want to thank Heath and Eli for joining me and I want to wish Eli good luck in his bid for the papacy. I encourage you to follow him on Twitter if for no other reason than to see pictures of him wandering around Manhattan on Ash Wednesday with a smiley face drawn on his forehead.
We’ll be back in two weeks with our Countdown to Austin Edition. Between now and then, check out our erratically published blog and follow us on Twitter. If you liked the show, help us spread the word by leaving a good review on iTunes. If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info 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 4 is Up
by Noah Lugeons
We just polished off episode 4. It’s recorded, edited, processed, published and awaiting your approval. You can get it through iTunes (which I recommend if for no other reason than it ups our showing and gets the show in front of more people), but if you can’t wait for all that synching bullshit, you can also listen to it now by clicking here. And in case you haven’t picked up on this yet, this show is certainly NOT SAFE FOR WORK unless you work in a really cool place.
Enjoy.
The Scathing Atheist 