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Live Blogging the Bible, Exodus 4:24-26
by Noah Lugeons
Even after only a book and 3 chapters, the title of “weirdest part of the bible” is a tough one to earn. I’m only 100 pages in or so and already I’ve had to stop, scratch my head, re-read, re-scratch my head and sigh in frustrated confusion approximately one time for every 3 chapters.
If pressed, up until this morning I’d have listed the curse Noah lays on his grandson when his grandson’s dad sees his pecker as the weirdest part of the bible, though I’d have hemmed and hawed a bit between that and the part where Jacob wrestles god on the river.
But now there is a brand new contender and I actually think it might remain the bible’s weirdest passage no matter how much of this crap I read. For those familiar with the bible, this is the part where Moses’ wife gives him magical foreskin powers so he can kick god’s ass. And for those of you unfamiliar with the bible, that part actually exists and if you don’t believe me, check out Exodus 4:24-26 and tell me what the fuck is going on there then:
On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the Lord met him [Moses] and tried to kill him. But Zipporah [Moses’ wife] took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched it to his feet and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.”
For a little context (and I’m afraid a little is all you’re gonna get), this is shortly after God charges Moses to go to Egypt and free the Israelites in bondage. God appears in burning bush form, tells Moses to go to the pharaoh, loads him up with a few magic tricks and tells him to meet Aaron along the way. And then, for no reason the bible bothers to explain, god appears and tries to kill Moses. But not very hard. Because of Zipporah’s clever foreskin maneuver.
There are so many fucking questions here, I don’t know where to start. Why would god try to kill Moses? How omnipotent is this guy if he can’t handle a Jew and his foreskin wielding wife? If god can appear in a form that can ineffectually assassinate Moses, why the burning bush crap a few passages earlier? And, most importantly, what the fuck?
This is some seriously crazy shit and the bible carries on like none of it happened a few verses later. God just got thwarted by a piece of baby-dick and we’re just supposed to move on like this was no big deal? And just how many of the early Jewish fathers have defeated god in a wrestling match?
I hoped that the annotations would help, but they just made it worse. They refer to this whole thing as an “Enigmatic Episode” and point out that when it says that Zipporah touched the foreskin to Moses’ feet, that may have been a euphemism for his nuts. Seriously.
So as I’m reading it, the scene from Zipporah’s perspective has to go something like this:
- Awakened in the middle of the night by sounds of a struggle.
- Wipe the sleep out of her eyes and glances through the moonlight to see her husband getting his ass kicked by God, Almighty.
- Says to herself, “If only I had something to mutilate my son’s cock with!” Finds flint.
- Hastily circumcises her infant with a random, unsanitized stone in the dark.
- Disrobes Moses’ while he’s fighting god.
- Touches his cock with bleeding ring of baby genital.
- God says… “Gross! I don’t even want to wrestle any more!”
- Says, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!”
I’m no closer to understanding this book, but at least now if I’m ever tasked with making an Exodus video game, I know what the power-ups will be.
Episode 11: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
(Note: Transcript contains some lines edited from the final version of the episode)
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of non-alcoholic Christian beer, “What Would Jesus Brew?” because who needs alcohol when you have Jesus? After all, like cheap beer, religion tastes bitter going down, sedates you, numbs you to your problems while exacerbating them, makes Sunday morning suck, gives you headaches, explodes violently if you shake it up, reduces your ability to make rational decisions and makes you ashamed of your sexual encounters.
“What Would Jesus Brew?” because alcohol is like liquid religion.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s May 2nd and abstinence didn’t work for Mary, now did it?
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from reluctantly spring-like New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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The LDS says that the Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough,
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I’ll have sex with Darrel Ray… oh, no wait… I’m sorry, I’ll “talk” sex with Darrel Ray. Which is still good, too, I guess… and
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And Benny Hinn will be a cruel, heartless fuck,
But first, the Diatribe:
Diatribe:
So before I tell you what happened on Sunday, let me tell you what didn’t happen on Sunday. In preparation for the show this week, I didn’t go to the “Christian” page on the Guardian’s website and when I wasn’t there, here are a few of the headlines I didn’t find:
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Joel O’Steen hates Jews and I have proof
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The Pope thinks gay people are gross
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Christians must accept that they’re almost certainly wrong, and
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I may believe in Jesus, but that doesn’t make me a Christian.
And what’s more, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find them there when I wasn’t looking. Because what kind of tampon-stain would print headlines like that on a Christian news aggregator? They wouldn’t. Because they would have to be total assholes.
Alright, so now, for act two, let me tell you what I did do on Sunday.
I went to the “Atheist” page on the Guardian’s website and when I was there, here are the headlines that I found:
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Dawkins’s latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy
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Sam Harris, New Atheists and the anti-Muslim animus
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The secular must accept that religion can save
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I may not have faith, but that doesn’t make me an atheist
I didn’t cherry-pick the bad ones here, by the way. These were the top 4 headlines on the page. That’s what the Guardian was giving the atheists to read. They have pages for all your major faith groups. The lead headline in “Christianity” was “At Easter, the tortured face of God teaches us to love our fellow man”… almost four weeks after Easter.
The lead story on the “Islam” page was “America’s greatest asset against radicalisation are Muslim Americans” and on the “Judaism” page, their first offering was “Poland’s ‘generation unexpected’ leads resurgence in Jewish culture”. Amazingly, in more than a dozen different faith-by-faith breakdowns, none of them lead off with a story where one of the most prominent and respected members of the group is smeared as a bigot on the thinnest shreds of dubious evidence. But since atheism isn’t a religion, they can lead off with not one such story but two.
As to the accusations against Dawkins, they’re the same ridiculous bullshit as always. He says Muslims are stupid because they believe a human being rode to heaven on a flying horse and that makes him an “Islamaphobe”. The fact that he also says that Christians are stupid for believing a zombie army wandered into Jerusalem doesn’t make him a “Christaphobe”, of course. And the fact that he says Jews are stupid for believing that Jacob outwrestled vampire god doesn’t make him a “Jewphobe”. The fact that he says astrologers are stupid for believing the relative positions of planets will adversely affect their financial situation doesn’t make him an “astrologophobe”. But if you think Muslim beliefs are stupid it’s because you’re scared of them.
The accusations against Sam Harris are only slightly less specious. He’s pointing out that a lot of terrorism comes from Muslim extremists so clearly does so because he hates Muslims. He also points out that when the car is running low on gas it needs filled up, so clearly he hates petroleum producing nations as well. And when he points out that his steak is actually more of a mid-rare than a medium, it can only be because of his irrational and seething hatred of cows.
These accusations aren’t new, of course, and they’re hardly worth refuting. Anyone who achieves prominence in this or any other social movement will be attacked by jackasses who trying to make a name for themselves. There’s nothing new or noteworthy about that.
But there’s something to be said for a major media outlet that runs a page dedicated to atheist readers and loads it up with character assassination pieces from wingnuts. They follow those up with a great op-ed about how secular people need to really accept the fact that the entire core of their movement is wrong and religion is actually right. And finally a piece on how miserable it must be to be an atheist.
It’s nice to have a page of our very own isn’t it?
Look, atheism is not a religion and atheists aren’t a “faith-group”. You’ll never hear me or any other atheist make the kind of absurd, bullshit demands of “respect” you hear from religious people. You’ll never hear us issuing death threats for drawing images of Christopher Hitchins or taking Dan Dennett’s name in vain. You’ll never hear atheists demanding that anyone capitalize the H in her when they talk about Madalyn Murray O’Hair and you’ll never hear us declare war on somebody for not believing that the magical calamari really turns into the body of PZ Myers.
But I do think it’s fair to ask that we’re treated with the same respect that would be afforded to any other group of human beings. There were no stories at all in their other “faith” sections defaming prominent figures as bigots and let’s face it, you wouldn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble finding stories like this if you were looking. Hell, you wouldn’t have to weave together strands of suspect bullshit to get there like they did with Harris and Dawkins.
I was so angry about it that I thought about dropping the Guardian as a news source for this show altogether, but then I remembered that they were the only outlet I saw that covered last week’s exploding Spanish dildo headline, so they’re off the hook. But it still pissed me off.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my hetero life-mate, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to not have gay sex?
Let’s not do it.
In our lead story tonight, the American Humanist Association has filed a lawsuit against Northwest Rankin High School in Flowood, Mississippi.
Go Cougars.
The suit alleges that students endured a mandatory Christian sermon during school hours in an assembly that didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was about science or dinosaurs or something. Instead, a representative from the Pinelake Baptist Church was invited to the school to talk about finding hope in Jesus Christ and even closed the assembly by leading the students in prayer.
Well I’m assuming there was an Imam leading a Muslim show-and-tell the week before. They probably have all kinds of special science classes like that.
Oh, I’m sure they do, and I’m sure they always stop the kids who try to leave, like they allegedly did at this one. William Burgess, legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, points out that “when a school sponsors an event, the religious speech of the speaker… is attributable to the school [itself] and is therefore subject to the Establishment Clause,” adding, “Fucking duh!”
Are they really worried that kids in Mississippi aren’t getting any exposure to the whole Christianity thing? Like there were kids leaving the auditorium that day, saying “You know what, I’m gonna google this Jesus guy. See what that’s all about.”
Died for my sins you say?
AHA files lawsuit over bullshit Christian Sermon in Mississippi school: http://www.americanhumanist.org/news/details/2013-04-humanists-file-suit-against-public-school-that-held
In other legal news, Pennsylvania judge M. Teresa Sarmina has filed a brief defending her recent decision in the trial and conviction of a Catholic church aide in a child-rape conspiracy case. Monsignor William Lynn, the first Catholic Church official in the US to be convicted in the cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests, is facing a paltry three to six years in prison and is still appealing the decision.
So he’s getting a punishment on par with stealing a car. Systematically covering up a decades-long righteous rape spree, or Geico makes slightly less unfair profit that quarter? Those balance.
Well no, according to Lynn’s attorneys, his crime was way more benign than grand theft auto. They’re appealing the decision because the judge allowed evidence of child abuse cases that predated Lynn’s involvement with the diocese. They argue that these details unfairly prejudiced the jury against their client.
“I didn’t start covering up those rapes until well after they clearly happened.”
Being the defense attorney here is rough . . .
I read they’re claiming that Lynn can’t be guilty of child endangerment because he didn’t actually supervise any children. That’s like blaming the abortion on the coat hanger.
Wow… it’s hard to transition out of a back-alley abortion joke so I’m gonna carry on like it never happened.
Judge defends Church aide’s trial and conviction for child rape conspiracy: http://news.yahoo.com/pa-judge-defends-church-aides-trial-conviction-211500942.html
And turning from Catholic pedophelia to Catholic sexism, the Vatican is now officially even less progressive than Kentucky. Former nun and current maverick, 70 year old Rosemarie Smead was ordained a priest over the vehement objections of the Roman Catholic Church. She faces excommunication for this heinous act, but dismisses the threat as a (quote) “Medieval bullying stick the bishops use to keep control over people…”, though it was unclear whether she was referring to excommunication or Catholicism.
She claims she’s not gonna let octogenarian men tell people how to run their lives.
Instead, she’s gonna start her own church, where a septuagenarian woman will tell people how to run their lives in the same way minus the male priest rule. Can’t exactly use a Bible as a study guide for your feminism class.
And according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, you can’t use the Vatican as a study guide for what Catholics believe, either. As many as 70% of American Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests if for no reason than they would rather their sons were molested by women, but the church warns that allowing women to be priests might lead to beastiality and hurricanes like gay marriage.
In that sense, I’m all for having priestesses.
Bestiality and hurricanes are both good job creators.
And those donkey shows are another perfect example of where replacing a man with a woman is definitely an improvement.
I bet lesbian marriage becomes legal in red states before gay marriage.
Kentucky woman ordained a priest despite Roman Catholic Church’s objections: http://news.yahoo.com/kentucky-woman-ordained-priest-defiance-roman-catholic-church-005633378.html
And in a follow up to our lead story from Episode 9, the Church of Latter Day Saints has kind-of endorsed the Boy Scouts decision to kind-of lift their ban on gays. Despite the multiple levels of half-assedness involved in this noncommittal pseudo-endorsement, conservative Christian groups are up-in-arms as though something had actually happened.
First, to the compromise. Facing pressure from pretty much everyone but Fred Phelps and the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy Scouts are backpedaling their 19th century stance on homosexuality by allowing gay boys to join the scouts, but not letting gay men serve as scout leaders.
This is great for preventing the hiring of scout leaders who are openly gay pedophiles.
But I think they might be slightly underestimating the amount of in-the-closet gay pedophiles. You know, the ones who are a little bit hush hush about being a gay pedophile during their job interview process.
In the interest of fairness, though, the Boy Scouts make no claim that their bigotry is based on a fear that gays are pedophiles. They just hate fags. And speaking of hating fags, the Mormon church, the largest financial supporter of the Boy Scouts of America, has sort-of endorsed the proposal. Recognizing this as the most anemic action they could possibly take to stem the tide of tolerance that threatens to force the Boy Scouts’ hands they issued the closest thing to an endorsement that they could get away with.
Well if the Mormons are behind it . . .
Surprising though. Those MoMo’s are super hetero.
Having 3 wives is double-plus-ungay.
Well you’re not the only one who was surprised. Among the bloviating, frothing bigots that have voiced opposition to this non-condemnation is one John Stemberger, head of something called “On-My-Honor(dot)com”. He points out that the Boy Scouts resolution doesn’t address how to (I shit you not, quote) “manage and ensure the safety and security of the boys in the program.”
Now, I can’t decide here whether this asshole is wondering how they’re gonna keep the other kids from beating up the gay kids or whether he’s worrying about the gay kids butt-raping the straight kids, but the tone of the message actually suggested the latter.
Based on what I believe to be an accurate depiction of gays on TV, the 11-year-old gay rapist survival expert is definitely KNOT the issue.
Family Research Council President and two-headed-dildo-aficionado Tony Perkins chimed in as well. He warns that this compromise sends the message that “homosexuality is morally acceptable until a boy turns 18” and remarkably, his point wasn’t that after 18 it continues to be morally acceptable.
This guy obviously sucks, but let’s not smear the 2-headed-dildo. Who doesn’t love Jennifer Connelly in the ass-to-ass scene in Requiem for a Dream?
Mormon’s say that Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/25/mormon-church-leaders-say-welcome-boy-scouts-proposal-to-lift-gay-ban-for-youth/ But many Christian groups say “Not so fast”: http://www.christianpost.com/news/lds-church-criticized-for-endorsing-boy-scouts-proposal-on-accepting-gay-members-94835/
And from the “If-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” department, the Vatican has sharply criticized the Vatican for failing to prevent ongoing child rape and torture. Proving that the Catholics are always the last ones to the conclusion, internal reports now admit massive culpability within the Vatican hierarchy for failing to do more to prevent abuse and failing to do less to ensure that it continued.
Sometimes a worldwide intervention and hundreds of millions of dollars in rape damages makes you take a look in the mirror.
And sadly, sometimes it doesn’t. The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Churches of Ireland couched the horror of the decades of horrendous sexual abuse in terms like “unacceptable delay”, “risky behavior”, “unsatisfactory response” and “double-plus ungood practices”.
An unacceptable delay would be getting raped, and then in order to rape the rapist back and get some money damages, you had to fill out some paperwork at the DMV first. Maybe a few hours.
But the message was clear and it was in keeping with the recent theme of “Internal Catholic Investigations”: We did some horrible shit, but now we’re positively awesome at not raping kids.
“There were a few, minor executive oversights, but we didn’t want to micromanage. All the way in Rome, out of context, who were we to dictate policies to others?”
Catholic Hierarchy had “unacceptable delay” in dealing with serial child-rapist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/24/catholic-hierarchy-priests-clogher Actual report: http://static.rasset.ie/documents/2fm/clogher-report.pdf
And finally, in “Fuck Pretenses, Just Give me Money News”, Televangelist and hairpiece repository Benny Hinn is asking his listeners for two and a half million dollars to get his ministry out of debt. Or rather, God is asking them to give the money and Benny is just the intermediary… a tool, if you will.
So there’s some mysterious benefactor who will match up to 2.5 million in donations . . . but only during the first 90 days.
And if you donate in the next 10 minutes, he’ll throw in this free slap chop, a 30 dollar value.
Act now, supplies of debt are limited.
Hinn, whose ministry must be about five million dollars in the red, promises his viewers that if they help god wipe out his debt, then God will help them wipe out their debt. So basically he’s saying that if you have financial problems and you’re mired in debt, the best thing to do is give your limited resources to a guy with a private-fucking-jet.
“Yeah I’ll get you some drugs. Give me the money and wait right here.”
We should set up a kickstarter campaign to finance an indulgence factory.
We could mass produce heaven stairways and easily outpace a megachurch.
Benny Hinn is a cruel, heartless fuck: http://www.christianpost.com/news/benny-hinn-asks-followers-for-2-5-million-to-get-out-of-debt-94822/
That’ll does it for headlines tonight, thanks for joining me Heath.
And when we come back, author and activist Darrel Ray will join us to talk dirty to me.
Skit:
(Rustling Papers)
“…hm… who’s next on the list here… oh, Yahweh.”
(Button push, beep)
“Tonya, can you send in Yahweh, please?”
(Door opens)
God, God, come on in… yeah, just leave the door open, that’s fine.. Here, have a seat.
(creaking seat)
Yeah, that chair’s not as comfortable as the throne you’re used to, I’m sure.
Now, I suppose this is going to be kind of an awkward meeting, what with my fragile human form being unable to withstand the awesome power of your voice and all but honestly, in this instance, it’s probably better if I do all the talking anyway.
I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that we’re not very happy with your performance. Your last several centuries of performance reviews have been well below standard and I think we all knew that this day was coming.
I mean… all we have to do is look over your performance history. There was a time when you were first appointed… you were flooding the world, parting seas, turning people to salt, raining down frogs… you were a go-getter! You were a god’s god.
But now what do we get out of you? We’ve got the AIDS epidemic in Africa, we’ve got nuclear proliferation, climate change and what are you doing? You’re taking the wheel! You’re finding people’s car keys. Finding car keys, god, really? Did you think I wouldn’t find out about that? You’re omniscient and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time?
I know you work in mysterious ways. You said that in your resume and we accepted it because of the whole omnipotence thing, but I’ve gotta be honest, here lately it seems like you’re resting on all seven days.
I’m looking back over it and I can’t find a significant achievement for you in over 1800 years! You’re averaging less than a miracle a millenia, bro. I’ve got saints doing better than that. You know I’ve always been in your corner. I fought for you since the beginning. Every day’s a thousand years but you still wanted a day off and I fought for you on that one. I’ve been fighting for you since the day we hired you and to be frank, lately you’re just embarrassing me, and I don’t think that’s too harsh a statement.
I think we both know where this is going and I want to make it as easy as possible. You’re still under contract so we’ll pay that off, but we’re gonna have Ricky Gervais step in as interim god until we can permanently fill the position. So just leave your keys to the pearly gates with Tonya and if you need a letter of recommendation, you have my number.
Alright, thank you very much. Close the door on your way out please.
(door closes)
Whew… that went better than I expected. Damn, I should have done that centuries ago.
Outro:
We’ve only got a couple of minutes left and apparently we had a pretty error-ridden show last week so I’ve gotta make a few quick corrections before we close things out. Most of the mistakes came in the Holy Babble segment and most of it was stuff like saying Jacob when I meant Joseph or saying brothers instead of sons. For that I apologize and we’ll try to do better, but one way or the other I wouldn’t recommend using this show as a stand alone source for the bible.
There was one major correction I wanted to make. We got duped into reporting on essentially an Onion headline last week. The story about the Christian couple who maintained their abstinence for years after marriage was a gag piece from Lark News and if I’d made any attempt to vet it I’d have figured that out. That’s a huge fail on my part and I want to apologize for it. We’re not exactly a “hard news” show, but that doesn’t excuse me from my due diligence as a newscaster and I owe you better than that. Without some modicum of journalistic integrity we’ll devolve into CNN reporting in the wake of a disaster.
Also wanted to throw a quick shout out to our incredibly awesome Canadian listeners, who apparently pushed our show all the way up into the top 100 of all podcasts on the Canadian iTunes ranks for a couple of days last month. Excellent job, Canadians. If listening to the Scathing Atheist was an olympic event, you’d be the team to beat.
Obviously I want to extend a huge thanks to Darrel Ray for such an informative and entertaining interview. Also need to thank Jake-Farr Wharton of the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast for providing tonight’s Farnsworth quote. He’s got a great podcast if you haven’t checked it out. It’s kind of like ours only more informed and in Australian. We’ll have a link to it in the shownotes, but I trust our listeners to be able to puzzle out where to go to find the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast. Need to thank Heath as always. Also want to thank all the listeners who sent in emails, especially the ones that include news items to make my life easier. Thank so much for taking the time out to help.
But most of all we’ve gotta thank our very favorite listeners of the week, John, Michael and Evan, who gave us money. Giving us money is a noble and moral act that brings peace and joy to all and we are all indebted to John, Michael and Evan for their heroic selflessness. Oh, and Evan, it went to a bottle of Laphroaig, but it was for before we recorded, not after.
Remember, if you’d like to prove your virtuous nature in the only way that really counts anymore, you too can donate to our show by clicking on the “Donate” button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Every little bit helps, but every big bit helps a lot more.
And if you want to help but have taken a vow of poverty, you can always help us spread the word by leaving a review on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews do wonders to help us build our audience and they really make my day as well.
That does it for us tonight, but if you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on YouTube, like us on Facebook and check us out on Stitcher. Seriously. Because all the other atheist podcasts on Stitcher are making fun of us.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact Page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
AIG Responds to the Dinosaur Quiz
by Noah Lugeons
I’d start by asking if you’d seen the dinosaur quiz yet… But you’ve seen the dinosaur quiz, right? It’s been everywhere the last few days. I didn’t find it all that surprising, as I’m quite familiar with what “Answers in Genesis” is teaching children, but judging by the buzz this quiz got, I’m in the minority there.
For the 3 people and the spam-bot who haven’t seen it yet, it’s this ridiculous shit:
At first people couldn’t decide if it was a parody or not, but eventually the name of the school popped up, the facts were verified and yes, this is precisely the kind of shit that AIG promotes in religious schools.
And now, of course, AIG is crying foul. They’re weeping themselves to sleep about how mean the atheists have been about it. After all, what’s wrong with pushing demonstrably false bullshit on children under the guise of science, thus ensuring that they have no chance in hell of succeeding in any intellectual field after graduation? What’s wrong with arming children with ignorance and finishing a test by making sure they know exactly how to pass their ignorance on and reinforce it? What’s wrong with lying? It’s not like there’s a commandment against it or anything.
So on his website, Ken Ham is pissing and moaning about it. He’s upset because atheists are getting so aggressive. He even has a list of “Evidence” that supports the claim that atheists are increasingly “intolerant”:
How Are Atheists Becoming More Aggressive in America?
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Billboards promoting atheism and attacking Christianity have popped up across the country.
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The American Humanist Association has launched a special website for children to indoctrinate them in atheism.
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An atheist rally in Washington DC last year had a special promotion to encourage kids to attend their atheist camps.
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Atheists have been increasingly using terms like “child abuse” to describe the efforts of Christians who seek to teach their children about creation, heaven, and hell.
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Many atheists claim that children belong to the community, not to their parents.
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Atheists have actively opposed any effort in public schools to even question a belief of evolution or suggest there are any problems with it.
Heath is on his way over to record and I’ve gotta get prepped, so I’ll trust the comments section to provide the editorial on these, but I just wanted to hop on really quick and let everyone know that they’ve noticed. Keep up the good work.
Public Bible Study
by Noah Lugeons
I spent the day yesterday doing my civic duty. I did jury duty once before in a small town down south and I was in and out in two hours, but in NYC it’s a bit different. Here you go into a large room and sit there for eight hours while they play bad movies so loud it’s hard to read. They call names and you leave and go do something, but I’m not entirely sure what it is, as my name was never called. So I basically sat in a large, uncomfortable room where I wasn’t allowed to use my phone for eight hours.
Luckily, I had some reading I needed to catch up on. We won’t be covering Exodus on the show until episode 13, but that’s no excuse to slack off. So I brought my Oxford 4th Edition Annotated NSRV Bible and I brought a notepad in case jokes or segment possibilities occurred to me while I was reading and I brought a highlighter, as I’ve taken to highlighting every passage in the bible where god does something horrible. And for some reason, it never occurred to me what kind of reaction this was going to draw.
So there I am, whittling away very long hours at a table with a bible that I’m clearly studying intently. I shouldn’t have been at all surprised when a very friendly Christian woman (or, as I would discover, a Christian woman with a very friendly facade) walked up to me, pulled up a seat and said, “I don’t want to interrupt your bible study, but if you don’t mind, are you in seminary?”
For the record, I could not possibly look less like I was in seminary without the addition of facial tattoos.
Now, three answers occurred to me, but none of them seemed socially acceptable:
- “Atheist. Just reading it to make fun of it later,”
- “Oh please,have a seat. Anything to interrupt me from this horrible fucking book” and
- “I’m boning up for an interview for the new anti-Christ position.”
And honestly, there are a lot of situations where I would have run with any of those, but in this instance it wouldn’t have been appropriate. After all, I was inviting the conversation by publicly reading a bible to the point of highlighting and taking notes. It was a fair question and she was probably a really nice person and I was going to be stuck in a room with her for most of the rest of the day, so I scratched all of those answers.
Then my mind started automatically looking for excuses. I was clearly reading and writing in English so I couldn’t go with the old, “¿Que?” and it would be hard to pretend that I actually had porn hidden inside it unless I could actually make with some porn (and remember, I wasn’t allowed to bring in my phone).
Ultimately I opted for the truth and that pissed her off so much I wish ended up wishing I’d just been a dick.
“Actually I’m an atheist and I’m studying it for debate purposes,” I said in as friendly a way as possible.
“So you don’t believe a word of it?” she asked incredulously.
“Well, I mean… I believe some of the geography and stuff.”
She made several false starts at speech at this point. She clearly wanted to say several things that Jesus wouldn’t let her say. Finally she settled on something like, “Well I hope you find some answers in there because I don’t envy your soul.”
“Okay, well… you know… have a nice day or whatever,” I offer back and she welcomes the opportunity to end the conversation. She takes a seat well across the room and kind of half-ass glares at me a bit.
At this point I realize that unless I want to do this a few more times, I should put the bible away and read something else. I suppose she took it as a personal insult that the other distraction I brought was “The God Virus”.
Episode 10: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of Christian Compact Fluorescents “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Are you tired of seeing all the benefits that godless scientists have brought to your life? Are you sick of facing all the perfectly obvious physical evidence that your beliefs are wrong? Well try a little less illumination and a little more enlightenment with “Let There Be Light Bulbs”. Each bulb contains our patented “Through a glass darkly” technology that will allow you to easily blind yourself to everything that isn’t happening inside your head.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 25th and we’re going for an hour tonight, so hopefully you hit traffic.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from sacrilegious New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
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Heath, Lucinda and I will dig through 80 pages of Bible without encountering a single moral,
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I’ll rudely correct my wife when she says, “boringest”,
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and Heath will spend 4 minutes making God glad he doesn’t exist;
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
I got a very compelling email from Dan in Toronto a few days back and I started to draft a response, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should address Dan’s concerns in a wider venue.
It was a pretty long email, but I pulled a quick excerpt that I think sums up the point. Dan starts off by admitting that he really enjoys the show and it makes him laugh, but he wonders what the cost of those cheap laughs really are in the following paragraph:
“The problem is one of productivity. What do we, as a movement, gain by being so antagonistic toward religion? It’s hard to imagine a believer that listened to your show having any reaction but a calcification of their dogma. Ultimately you’re providing the caricature that religious leaders need to smear atheists as cruel, angry and uncaring. And to what end? Have you done more in the end than simply affirm opinions already held? Have you done more than preach to the choir?”
As to providing a caricature to the opposition, well, that may or may not be true. I’m sorry, but those Christians would find something to be pissed off about regardless of what I do. But I don’t want to be dismissive. I have a lot of respect for Dan’s opinion here and he’s not the first person to bring it up. Hell, Heath, Lucinda and I discussed it in depth before we recorded episode one. Clearly, we fell on the good-outweighs-the-bad end of the argument, but I do feel that people like Dan still deserve an explanation.
The question is basically one of purpose and the tone of Dan’s email suggests that he believes that the purpose of an atheist show should be outreach to the religious community. I don’t mean to oversimplify the objection, but the implication is there that the first goal of an atheist show should be one of PR. That does make sense when you belong to a group seen as less trustworthy than rapists, but I also think it sells us short.
There are plenty of great atheist outreach podcasts. The Atheist Experience, the Thinking Atheist, Reasonable Doubts, An American Atheist Podcast… these are all great shows that I could recommend to a religious person if they wanted to know more about atheism. But that doesn’t mean that the only purpose an atheist show can serve is outreach.
I don’t mean to downplay the importance of outreach, but I fear that if we focus on it too much, we lose sight of an equally important element of the movement: Mobilization. It’s not enough to sway minds if we can’t also sway the feet they’re connected to.
So when we started this show, we tossed “outreach” out the window and I try to make that clear in the first 12 seconds of the show. In fact, I tried to make that clear in the first two words of the title. I’d have called it the “Fuck Jesus Show” if I thought iTunes would still promote it.
Religious people are welcome to listen to this show, but they aren’t invited. This show isn’t for them. They’ve got enough.
I’ve gone to church before and I’ve never complained afterwards that the pastor didn’t include the atheist point of view in his sermon. I’ve never written an angry letter to a televangelist for not being nicer to atheists when he tells them they’re all going to hell. If a Christian listens to this show and gets pissed off about it, I look at it like a neighbor showing up at your barbecue uninvited. You welcome him in and give him a beer anyway and then he starts complaining because there’s no vegetarian menu.
There is a time and a place for nice, but there’s a time and a place for fuck you as well. And in this movement we need both. Nice is good for outreach. Nice is good for PR. Nice is good for winning converts and softening our image. But fuck you has its uses, too. Fuck you is good for rallying the troops. Fuck you is good for boiling the blood. Fuck you is good for reminding people why they got active about atheism in the first place. And what’s more, when people are trying to shove their religion into your schools, your government and your life, Fuck You is not only useful, but it’s the only correct response.
The end result it that I spend a lot of time preaching to the choir. But what’s wrong with that? Keep in mind that despite the connotations implied in the expression, the preacher man does still preach to the choir! You have to. You can’t just assume that somebody who read The God Delusion back in 2009 is still as fired up about as she was when she put the book down. We all have to be reminded from time to time that these battles are still being fought and we still need all hands on deck.
So thanks for the email Dan, and if you’d like to continue the conversation I look forward to your response. But keep in mind that you started your email with the words, “I really enjoy your show…”, and I would argue that that’s enough.
If I make some atheists laugh, I’ve really done as much as I need to do to justify the effort. I don’t think it’s fair to judge everything done in the name of atheism solely through the lens of its effect on religious people. Singing hymns help Christians convince atheists that there’s a god, but that isn’t the point of singing hymns. We accept that Christians can do Christian things for Christian reasons. Why can’t an atheist do the same?
Headlines:
In our lead story tonight, Pope Francesca shows exactly how paper thin that whole “reform and focus on the people” thing was when he voiced support for the Holy See’s crackdown on the “Nuns on a Bus” movement in the US.
Basically, the issue here is that these nuns have threaten the authority of the Vatican by proving that you can do good works without hating gay people and demonizing abortion, positions which the Catholics actually refer to as “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic Faith”.
First of all, I wouldn’t call the abortion issue a feminist cause. I know lots of dudes who are psyched about Roe v Wade for good reason. Women as a whole want to be moms a lot more than men as a whole want to be dads.
Also, if you’re calling a group of nuns radically liberal, your organization is falling off the conservative side of a world you still think is 6000 years old and flat.
Yeah and the “radical” ones apparently comprise about 80% of all US nuns. The group says that the Vatican has reached “flawed” conclusions based on “unsubstantiated accusations”, though it wasn’t clear if they were referring to their own condemnation or the whole doctrine of Catholicism when they said that.
But I think this story really highlights the divide between what the Vatican is saying and what Catholics, at least here in the US are actually doing and believing. When 80% of your representatives are doing it one way and you’re still insisting that they do it the other way, you’re not allowed to then sit around and ask yourself, “Why are people leaving our church?”
But if they did want to sit around and ask that, it wouldn’t take too much brainstorming to recall a few other hiccups in their PR campaign of late.
Right, and here these nuns are with a slice of redemption on a silver fucking platter. If Pope Frankincense embraced their movement or even refused to condemn it, even people like me would have to stand back and say, “Hey wait a minute, this guy might actually be ready to bring the Vatican into the modern world”, but no. Status quo. Shut them women up so us men can get to important things like deciding what women should do.
You have to admit, the oppression of women as a group, has been successful on a global scale since Genesis 3. And it’s been good. Yes, we do a lot better job of hiding it in secular America than in Vatican City or Tehran, but we participate nonetheless.
http://news.yahoo.com/pope-francis-supports-crackdown-us-nuns-150211781.html
And in other news, the ephemeral nature of Pope Frankenstein’s “reforms” haven’t stopped a bunch of Catholic fundies from getting pissed off about them. The Society of Saint Pius X, a group that is described as “ultra-traditionalist” in comparison to the Catholic Church, charges that Pope Francophile is so focused on people not starving to death and shit that he’s forgetting to brainwash them.
These guys are lobbying the Catholic Church to stop being so progressive. They’re like the devil on the shoulder of the devil on the shoulder of the devil saying “I know the pitchfork is suspicious, but trust me you’re the angel. Pass it on.”
Pyschomachia cubed.
The leader of the group, Bishop Bernard Blowjob… I mean, Fellay, has made a habit of sharply criticizing the Vatican since Pope Benny was rockin’ the big hat. I’m all for sharply criticizing the Vatican of course, but unlike myself, he’s been arguing that the Vatican hasn’t been bat-shit crazy enough.
So I’m trying to decide what’s the ultimate example of politically untenable, and I settled on comparing these guys to holocaust deniers. Then I found out one of their prominent members for years was famous holocaust denier, Bishop Richard Williamson.
(THIS GUY WAS BORN IN THE UK IN 1940, AND DENIES THE HOLOCAUST!!!)
You can’t make this shit up. Granted he WAS recently expelled from the SSPX, but NOT because of publicly denying the holocaust.
At least when it comes to the holocaust, they’re equal opportunity appeasers.
The SSPX, which sounds like a group of British Special Ops Roller-Bladers, by the way, fears that the Vatican is modernizing too quickly, which is kind of like fearing that Rush Limbaugh might be too healthy. In an email that Fellay boldly nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg, he accused the Pope of “man-centered philanthropy” rather than “true religious leadership”.
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What kind of philanthropy isn’t “man-centered”?
You’d think these guys might know a little bit of Latin and Greek. Doesn’t philanthropy mean “love of humanity” ?
http://news.yahoo.com/catholic-rebel-group-begins-criticizing-pope-173638858.html
And in the former Soviet Union, former sane person Vladimir Putin looks ready to enact a law that would make it illegal in Russia to “offend religious feelings”. The current bill limits the offended parties to Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists and trust me on this one, at least 75% of those people are pretty easy to offend.
Blaspheming at Buddhists is tricky . . .
“Nothing isn’t not always or never everythingness!!!”
“Things matter and I am.”
Yes, much easier to offend is the craziest non-vampiric Vlad of all time. This bill is a reaction to the literal riot that followed Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance in which they criticized hang-gliding, bear-wrestling, hockey-phenom Vladimir Putin; for which each member of the group was given a two year sentence in a remote prison camp for (quote) “Hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. So yeah, hard to imagine how this law might get abused.
I’m actually kind of surprised with the punishment. I would have assumed Putin would have something a little more theatrical, like a slow-moving crotch laser, or a shark tank dipper.
Well, if it helps, I’m sure he spelled out the details of his evil plan before he sent them to the Gulag.
But it’s not exactly a James Bond level situation here, is it? If an all-girl band, dressed like Fat Albert characters, is your arch enemy, then you might be the bad guy in a cartoon show for girls on Disney Afternoon.
Well if that’s the case somebody better get Princess Luna and Ms. Harshwhinny on the line because we’re seeing more and more of these blasphemy laws being enacted all over the world. As Americans, the idea of free speech is so sacrosanct that it immediately makes us queasy and this is one of those few areas where I think we Americans actually have it right. Blasphemy laws get the whole thing backwards to begin with. If you’re offended by what I say, that shouldn’t be my problem.
If you’re offended by hearing blasphemous things like science, stop hanging out around reality where all the science happens.
And moving so far south it’s practically north again, our next story lands us in the land of Hobbits and Hobbit-references, New Zealand. This story comes to us from Paul Fidalgo at the Friendly Atheist blog. Kiwi teacher Christopher Scott Roy alleges that he lost his job as a teacher at Tamaki College in Aukland for the egregious infraction of not believing that there’s a little man in your head somewhere that drives your body like Voltron.
Nice – 80’s cartoon reference # 2 for you on the day. My Little Pony, and now the Defender of the Universe.
I’m planning to squeeze Inspector Gadget in for the trifecta. Roy, who left the school back in 2010, alleges that the school had an outlook that (quote) “saw Christian [and] Mormon faith as a core responsibility”.
This story gets a little tricky, as he actually settled his grievances with the school a while back and is now claiming that he did so “under duress and had no access to legal advice at the time the… settlement was signed”.
What’s the atheist dramatic act for protesting this? Maybe a really pushy science fair occupying the college’s chapel space. With people reading text books really loud, like a baptist minister: “Endoplasmic Reticulum”
And in exploding dildo news, a Spanish “anticlerical pro-sex toys group” is claiming responsibility for a series of amateur bombings, many involving vibrating rubber penises. Several packages containing vibrators and what the article called “mini-bombs” were sent to prominent Catholics around Spain.
This is great . . . Normally we have to make unsolicited dick jokes and those can get confused with rape jokes.
But these guys really just teed up the dick jokes for us this time. This is such a perfect piece of news for our tiny niche of offensively humorous atheist podcasts. It’s like the day when the midget actor community heard the news that Willow was being cast.
Do you think when they read the article anybody said, “Hey, the bombs weren’t that mini”?
Shipping was free, but they probably had to pay extra for handling.
The only injury mentioned in the article was a minor injury to a postal worker who was handling one of these packages when it exploded prematurely.
Somehow, the driver got the shaft, and no tip.
Well, in their defense, the group apologized for that incident in an email later where they said that nothing like this had (quote) “ever happened to them before”.
The delivery person probably found it flattering. He should have just waited 10 minutes, adjusted his grip, and tried to deliver it again.
So far this group has been responsible for a largely comedic series of fuck ups so we’re making jokes quick while we still can, but it looks like pretty soon they’re going to actually blow some people up and then this shit won’t be funny anymore.
Must continue dick joke . . .
Ummmmmm . . . Toma-Cock Missiles . . .
One more . . . The Uni-Corn Bomber . . .
Ok I’m done . . .
Would a joke about oversize black dildo’s be stretching it . . .
Ok last one . . . Penis bombs for priests is one thing, but carpet bombs for nuns . . .
Ok really the last one. . . Instead of sending UPS, they should have dropped them with “sexual predator drones”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/spanish-anarchists-catholics-explosive-vibrators
And in domestic news, a surprisingly rational decision from the Virginia Supreme Court confirms that you can’t sue your church for liking gay people. This story actually begins back in 2006 when a large contingent of the congregation at the Falls Church in Fairfax, Virginia started getting worried that the church was getting a little too lovey-dovey with the homo-butt sexers.
If I was donating money to the KKK, and they started tolerating blacks and jews all of sudden, I’d want my money back.
The group voted to leave the church but when they were faced with the daunting task of starting their own new gay-hatin’ church, they decided it would be easier to just sue the leadership at their old church and try to get the property in a homophobic coup.
That’s like paying for a homeopath to heal you magically, and then suing them after you get better, when you find out they cheated and learned to use some real medicine.
You know that actually happened with Zicam? I shit you not, they got in trouble for putting medicine in their medicine.
Anyway, somehow this shit got all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court and might yet go higher, but at the moment the court sides with the people who actually own the church and affirms their rights to not be bigots. Odds are high that we haven’t heard the last of this story though, as even if this one is settled, there are plenty of similar lawsuits going on all over the country.
“Put his hand on a bible and ask him how much he hates fags on a scale from 1 to 10. Anything under 7, and he’s clearly not fit to run a proper church.”
And in a combination of foreign, domestic and interdimensional news, the Vatican has confirmed a miracle in Colorado Springs. In the ongoing beautification of German nun Mother Teresia Bonzel, the vatican’s rigorous standards of evidence have confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt that the unexpected recovery of a four year old with cancer could only be attributed to the intervention of a dead nun from Germany.
Germany could really use this. Curing cancer is just about the only way to start getting the country a nice nod in the history books again.
Apparently the young man, who makes no claim whatsoever to having been cured miraculously, resents the assertion and isn’t a Catholic, had a tumor in his colon and despite a pretty miserable outlook, he got better. What distinguishes this from the all-too-infrequent but still plentiful stories of people suddenly recovering from grave illnesses? Why two nuns were reciting a magical incantation on or about the day that the illness reversed course.
This doesn’t seem like smart engineering by god here. Why not just get rid of cancer? But I guess that’s like everyone getting a trophy.
The then-boy, now-man at the center of this whole thing is skeptical of the Vatican’s claims, pointing out that God must spend a lot of time deciding to kill other kids whom nuns also prayed for, but that didn’t stop the Vatican from putting their seal of approval on it.
Every good thing is a prayer-induced miracle, and every bad thing is a mysterious oversight. Well, I can make up tautologies too. Heads, I fuck you . . . Tails, you fuck me.
And from the “Right-for-the-Wrong-Reason” department, Christian author Anna Ariel has a new book coming out titled, “Oprah Winfrey, The Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” where she warns Christians about the dubious spiritual messages hidden within Oprah’s seemingly benign declarations.
Did “On the Origin of Species” finally get the Oprah Bump?
Not sure, but I know one book that won’t. Interestingly, the press release suggests that the author isn’t pissed at Oprah for promoting dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit; she’s pissed at Oprah for promoting the wrong dangerous, pseudo-scientific, superstitious bullshit.
And look, I’m all about the “Most Dangerous Woman on the Earth” title for Oprah. She’s made a career of giving demonstrably incorrect medical advice to people too stupid to know any better and she’s made gazillions by pretending to be a philanthropist. Hint to Oprah viewers, by the way, if you’re getting rich off your philanthropy, you’re doing it wrong.
Yeah she’s like a mega-church without the guise of religion.
Now, I’m gonna tactfully avoid any potentially racist sounding references to kettles and pots here, but a book that claims the problem with Oprah’s promotion of pseudo-science is that it’s un-Christian is like attacking drone strikes because they’re noisy.
Like unborn children suing AIDS for the condom problem?
http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/3962071903.html
And finally tonight, in dry, dull and terribly unsatisfying news, a Christian couple is proudly proclaiming that they’ve managed to go two full years post-matrimony without having sex. After fourteen months of sexless courtship, Topeka couple Jon and Darla Crocker celebrated by not fucking for a further twenty five months and counting.
I think all Christians should take a cue from these wonderful role models.
They say they plan to continue to obscenely ignore their biological programming indefinitely, dedicating their sexual misfunction to their Lord and Savior in what they’re calling “Blue Balls for Jesus”. According to the seemingly real “Lark News” the couple occasionally has (quote) “bedroom thoughts”, but always pulls back. Among the tactics used to insure their unnatural state continues, the article lists poor Jon “eating a whole raw potato” to keep his sinful urges at bay.
You know what else is helping them? Jon being a gay, and Darla being a lesbian.
Talk clean to me, baby!
I loved the quote where Darla says that their abstinence was holy before marriage but it’s double-holy now. Look, since we got married, my wife and I have gotten “double hole-y” a time or two, but I’ll guarantee you it was more fun our way.
They could get double holey without breaking their streak, if they pulled off the “Finger-Cuff 69”, a very advanced maneuver in the poop-hole loophole toolbox.
http://www.larknews.com/archives/217
That’ll do it for headlines. When we come back Lucinda will join us and probably bitchslap me for the anal sex reference there.
Poem: Genesis in Two Minutes
by Noah Lugeons
In chapter one God makes the universe and it takes seven days.
In chapter two he makes it again… in a contradictory way.
By chapter three he’s made Adam, here he makes Eve,
Then he kicks them out of Eden cause they’re covered in leaves???
In chapter four God’s a dick to Cain, but not Abel,
So Cain strikes down his brother like he’s the tower of Babel.
In chapter six we meet Noah; God says “Get ready for bruises,
You’re going on the worst boat ride there’ll be until Carnival Cruises.”
Noah praises God for this unspeakable act,
But glancing at his cock’s an unforgivable act.
Then we spend an entire fucking chapter or two,
Learning ad nauseum who begat who.
By chapter twelve we meet Abraham and he uproots his life,
Takes his shit to Egypt and starts pimping his wife.
He fucks a slave, she has a kid and they exile that one,
But then at ninety-nine Sarah bares him a legitimate son.
Abraham tells God there’s at least ten in Sodom with class,
So he sends a couple angels that they try to fuck in the ass.
And when you try to ass-rape angels, what comes is your fault,
Whether your town’s burned down by brimstone or you’re turned into salt.
In chapter seventeen Abraham makes a crazy decision,
Regarding all his sons and slaves and adult circumcision.
In Twenty-Two he gets all screwy, and takes Isaac, his tyke,
Up a mountain and almost sacrifices him before the angels say, “Psyche!”
Later Isaac meets Rebekah, they have Jake and Esau,
The big brother’s got the muscle but the brains of a cow.
Jacob tricks him from his birthright for a warm bowl of soup,
And his old near-sighted daddy’s just as easy to dupe.
Jacob takes two wives, fucks both of them and their maids.
I swear a chapter’s dedicated to Jake getting laid.
In thirty four a dirty whore? No that’s Dinah, Jake’s daughter.
They demand the Hivites foreskins before commencing the slaughter.
Jake has a dozen sons in all but he liked Joseph the best,
So his bro’s conspire against him and they steal his vest.
They sell him as a slave and tell daddy he’s dead.
He winds up a slave of Pharaoh for not performing in bed.
Here he goes all psychic, starts interpreting dreams.
It takes a couple years but at last he’s redeemed.
He stores up food for famine and he gets filthy rich;
His bros come needing munchies and he makes ‘em his bitch.
Joey shows back up much to daddy’s surprise,
And Jacob, now called Israel, eventually dies.
Chapter fifty’s so uplifting, all the tribes makes a truce;
And by now god’s promised the entire known world to the Jews.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show where we set aside a few minutes to talk up some of the great atheist and secular meetups going on around the country and around the world.
We’ll start in Anaheim on the weekend of May 3rd when the Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference will be bringing in all my favorite atheists for a spectacular weekend of godlessness. PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Matt Dillahunty, Darrel Ray, Jamy Ian Swiss, Jessica Ahlquist and yes, I’m naming the speakers, not just all the prominent atheists I can think of.
MAY 3rd: Orange Country Freethought Alliance Conference in Anaheim, CA
http://freethoughtalliance.org/fta/annual-conference/
The friendly atheist Hemant Mehta would like to remind you that Sunday, May 5th is “Interview an Atheist at Church Day”. This is an experimental project but I love the concept. Atheists are volunteering to be interviewed at churches across the nation for a bit of outreach and while most pastors would rather eat glass, a few are taking the challenge. We’ll have notes and links on how to get involved in the show notes.
MAY 5th: Interview an Atheist at Church Day: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/04/18/interview-an-atheist-at-church-day-is-growing/
Looking beyond the borders of my homeland, we’ve got the 22nd Skeptic’s Congress coming up on the 9th of May in Cologne, Germany. I’d tell you more about it, but I don’t speak German. If you do, though, feel free to check the link.
MAY 9th: 22nd Skeptics Congress in Cologne, Germany
We’ve got a double whammy on May 17th with the Women in Secularism Conference taking place in DC and Imagine No Religion 3 ramping up in Kamloops, British Columbia. We’ll get to that in a second, but ladies first:
Women in Secularism 2 features a phenomenal lineup of speakers including but not limited to Susan Jacoby, Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson and the lovely, witty and talented Rebecca Watson. And if you don’t go, you’re a sexist, so there’s that.
MAY 17th Women in Secularism Conference in Washington DC:
http://www.womeninsecularism.org/
And finally in Kamloops we’ve got yet another mouth-watering list of secular speakers including Horseman number 3 Dan Dennett, Aron Ra, Victor Stenger, DJ Grothe and Mr. Diety. From everything I’ve heard about last year’s event, the folks putting this on put together a show you’ll never forget so if you’re anywhere near the area, it’s going to be worth the trip.
MAY 17th-19th Imagine No Religion 3 in Kamloops, British Columbia
That does it for this week’s calendar, but remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, secular or skeptical event that needs a little free publicity, let me know. You’ll find all the contact info along with links to all the events discussed on this episode on the “Contact Page” at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
Roast:
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Roast of God!
I’m your roast master, Heath Enwright. Before we talk about the big guy in the sky, let’s meet our dais:
First, we have a Muslim prophet, who wishes to remain anonymous, appearing over Skype, with his image blurred to protect his identity. We’ll hear from him later.
We also have Mary Magdalene . . .
Where is that slut? . . . There she is; the Bible’s own Penny Lane. The filthy groupie whoo-err of Jesus and his crew. You must have been passed around the last supper like a side dish. You belong at a Duke lacrosse party.
Speaking of disgraceful fraternities, the apostles are here . . . The roadies for Jesus and his Judaism cover band.
And speaking of God’s fuckup-of-a-son, that’s right, he’s here tonight too, the Fredo Corleone of the Bible, the Red-Handed Stepchild” . . .
Give it up for Jesus Christ.
I heard this guy was a carpenter. Here’s a lesson you obviously missed . . . Carpentry 101: “Here’s your hammer and nails . . . Whatever you do, don’t get crucified.”
Dumbass . . . How’d that work out for you?
How does dying for my sins taste? Bitter?
You’re like a less interesting, more fictional version of the guy from the Dos Equis commercials.
What does Jesus have in common with the women he fucks? Without a first coming, neither of them can have a second coming.
If your genealogy is described by a Greek tragedy like the New Testament, you might be a redneck.
Y’all belong on a daytime talk show . . . “Were you conceived when your dad magically raped a virgin and secretly impregnated her? Were you almost the first justified abortion? Do you live in the greater Jerusalem area? You could be on our next show.”
All this attention for the man of the zero hour!
I’ll be honest . . . when they asked me to come here and roast God, I was surprised. I thought he was dead. I was sure I had read that somewhere.
But he’s not . . . Look at this bastard. Doesn’t look a year past omega. God is so old, he’s gathering dust to dust. God’s so old, he was here when quote “it was bad”. God’s so old, he lost his virginity to Pandora’s box.
Hey God: How’s your particle, by the way? You know, that boson, that has nothing to do with you? That secret particle you’ve been hiding? You can’t be too happy it’s already named after an atheist, who postulated that shit in 1964.
Caught your ass imbuing fundamental particles with mass? Nobody found that particle right? Cuz that would be embarrassing. I know you love those gaps, but scientists are gonna keep finding stuff. You’re losing real estate faster than Israel.
In closing, I’d like to say on behalf of creation. This isn’t a roast, as much as it’s an intervention. That’s enough with all the mysterious ways, already. You’ve gotta stop being so fucking mysterious; cancer, terrorism, rape, genocide. We all love a good plot twist, but you’re really pushing it.
All I’m saying, is the reveal better be god-damn amazing.
Song:
(G, Emin, G, Emin, G, Emin, C, Emin)
Atheists eat babies, that’s just the way God made ‘em;
I heard it on the news, that’s what that feller said verbatim.
He said lock up all yer young ‘uns and that feller’s never lied;
He said their Girl Scout cookies have Girl Scouts inside.
Them godless motherfuckers’ll never cop to what they done;
But if you turn your back a second, they might julianne yer son.
If you think that they smell good it’s all the baby breath they’re fartin’
Pourin’ milk over a cereal made from the baby on the carton.
(C, Dmin, Emin)
Well Atheists eat babies yes they do.
They’ll put ‘em in a pot and make a stew.
(C, Dmin, G, Emin)
And if you lost yer faith in Jesus you would eat them, too.
So I’ll see you ‘gain next Sunday in that pew.
Atheists eat babies, don’t tell me it ain’t so.
You say you want some proof? Well they proof ‘em in their dough.
I reckon that explains why they hate them Catholic priests.
Those pedophilic bastards always tenderize their meats.
So be careful if yer kids are ripe for atheist cuisine.
And remember that agnostics eat ‘em up to age thirteen.
Cause folks what don’t fear god eat kids with every meal;
There ain’t nothing they like better than the taste of human veal.
Well atheists eat babies, yes they do.
I swear to god and Jesus that it’s true.
Them grumpy goats in their blue housecoats eat kid fondue,
and maybe sometimes orphan cordon bleu.
Or roast them little tykes for barbecue.
For dessert they’ll have a toddler cobbler, too.
They don’t mean the same thing as me and you,
When they ask their waiter for a kid’s menu.
Cause Atheists… Eat Babies… Yes they do.
Outro:
We’ve got time to respond to one quick email before we close things out for tonight. From the “You say tomato, I say it correctly” department, Jordan from Birmingham writes to tell me that she would love the show if it weren’t for the “nails on a chalkboard” reaction she has every time I say the word atheist.
Now, before I dismiss the criticism, I’ll admit that Jordan is correct. It’s not pronounced atheist, it’s atheist, and I am definitely guilty of mispronouncing the shit out of it constantly. That being said, I’ve tried to get that hard T-H in there and when I do I get all lispy. Sorry. I talk fast and sometimes pedantic pronunciation is the first victim. I hope that in time you can come to forgive me.
We’ll be back in 168 hours with the “Did Jesus Masturbate” Edition. We’ll be back to our thirty minute format for that one, but we promise to be doubly funny to make up for it. If you’re one of those people that falls into a Ben & Jerry’s induced comatose depression when this show ends though, fear not, there’s more. You can get us in bite-sized doses on our erratically published blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. We’ve also got bonus content there including an extended version of last week’s interview with Carl from Post Rapture Looting.
You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and You-Tube. Be sure to like us and/or follow us and/or subscribe to us and/or share us as you see fit. And don’t forget to swing over to iTunes and give us a review and if you haven’t checked us out on Stitcher yet, get on that shit. My patience is wearing thin.
A lot of people to thank. Obviously I want to thank Heath and Lucinda again for joining me tonight and helping me get through this tome of nonsense. I want to thank everybody who left us a review on iTunes, those really do make my day. I also want to thank everybody who sent us emails. There’s too many to thank by name, but I really appreciate your feedback and at this point I still respond to every email so if you want to drop me a line, you can find the email address on the Contact page of our website.
Most of all, tonight, I want to thank our very most favorite listener of the week, Laura, who gave us money. Only the best people give us money, and they deserve recognition for both giving us money and for being among the best of people. If you feel that you, too, are one of the best people, you can prove it by clicking on the “donation” button on the right side of our home page. In the interest of full disclosure, we’ll keep doing the show one way or the other, but Heath is way funnier if I buy him pizza before we record.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the info on the aforementioned Contact page. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
One Hour Special
by Noah Lugeons
No sooner had I talked Heath into doing this thing weekly than I started pushing to do an hour long show as well. The way I figured it, I was always having trouble shaving the last three minutes out of the program, so why not just do the easy thing and add 27 minutes instead?
Luckily Heath is a little more level-headed than me and talked me into taking a step back and realizing just how much work I was about to bite off. Sure, sometimes we had to lose a funny joke and sometimes we had to push a skit a few episodes ahead, but in the long run, pushing that 30 minute time limit has worked really well so far in keeping us fast paced and succinct. If we tried to switch to an hour long show, we might have to vamp a lot of time and overall we might add 10 or 15 good minutes but at the expense of padding the show with 15 or 20 mediocre or even crappy minutes.
So needless to say, when I suggested that we make episode 10 an hour long special, Heath was skeptical at first. But then I showed him all the good stuff we had. We’re starting the Holy Babble segment with our Genesis discussion, I’m debuting a new atheist song, we’re chocked full of good headlines plus Heath has a hilarious skit that he’s been working on that I really don’t want to deprive the world of any longer than necessary.
When we set out to fill up a show, 10 of the 30 minutes are already taken up. Between the sponsor, the intro, the diatribe, the calendar, the feedback and the outro, there’s only 20 minutes to fill in any given show and we have to divide that up between the headlines, the interview (or the panel discussion) and, much of the time, a skit or two. In this week’s show we’d have been left with about 15 minutes to split between the headlines and the panel discussions and given the slate of stories we’ve got this week, we could easily go 15 minutes just on those.
Anyway, it didn’t take long for Heath to see eye to eye with me on this one. There was just way too much content to try to squeeze it into a thirty minute show. And if we bumped half the stuff to next week, we’d have to postpone the very awesome, exciting interview that I’m doing later this week.
So hopefully you have an extra half hour for us this week because we’ve got a lot to talk about.
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 34
by Noah Lugeons
Alright, so I have a new favorite chapter in the Bible and I also have renewed hopes that the mammoth task of breaking this whole stupid book won’t all suck. I’m actually shocked that this isn’t one of the stories that Christians trot out more often because it’s fucking awesome.
The story starts out with Dinah, daughter of the notorious pussy-magnet Jacob, catching the eye of Shechem, a Hivite prince. And you know how those Hivites can’t keep their dicks to themselves, so Shechem rapes her. But according to Genesis 34:3, after he raped her he was really sweet to her:
And his soul was drawn to Dinah, daughter of Jacob; he loved the girl and spoke tenderly to her.
And so post-rape, he decides he want to marry Dinah but Jacob and his sons are still understandably pissed about the whole raping their daughter/sister bit so at first they’re reluctant. Shechem is persistent a la Pepe Le Pew so eventually Jacob makes a deal. He tells the prince that if he and all the Hivites will join their tribe, he can marry Dinah. Now that doesn’t sound to bad, but we learned back in Chapter 17 that part of joining their tribe is lopping off a significant portion of your cock.
But Shechem is smitten so he’s all “Lop off my foreskin and force all the men in my tribe to do the same? No problem.” And he agrees to it.
So in what must have been the single most baffling day in Hivite history, all the men cut their foreskins off. Understandably, there’s not a lot getting done in downtown Hivite-ville that day because all the guys are laying in beds moaning “I hate monarchy!” And while they’re in that prone, post-circumcision state, Jacob and his boys roll into town and kill all of them.
Yes, that’s right, they kill all the Hivites after tricking them into chopping at their genitals. I’m guessing the resistance was a bit subdued here. Hell, a lot of them were probably going, “Yeah, slit my throat, sure. Whatever takes my mind off the pain in my dick.”
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 4:24
by Noah Lugeons
So I’m reading the bible for this Holy Babble segment we’re doing on the show and I figured as I was reading I’d toss a few of my random thoughts out. These’ll probably be short posts where I reflect on something that I probably won’t have time to mention on the show.
My first such reflection comes in the 4th chapter of Genesis. We’re right in the middle of a “who-fucked-who” list (of which Genesis seems to have plenty) and suddenly my boy Lamech shows up out of nowhere with bloody hands and a crazed look in his eye. This homicidal polygamist gathers his wives together and says:
Adah and Zillah (his wives, banging chicks from A-Z, this boy was), hear my voice (what the hell else would they hear?);
You wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: (the Bible likes to repeat itself)
I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-seven fold”
And then we’re back to fuck-lists. This just pops up out of nowhere and as near as I can tell, it’s not setting up something else. So basically Lamech just shows up in the middle of the bible to tell everybody what a bad ass he is. I can’t help but think of him in the room while the scribes were writing it going, “Put in a part where I’m a badass. At least ten times… no eleven times more badass than Cain!”
So that was weird. Anyway, back to bible study.
Episode 9: Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new line of Christian feminine hygiene products, Penta-Douche. Remember, when you have that not-so-fresh feeling, it’s because you’re unclean in the eyes of God. So when you’re being shunned for seven days, as is proscribed in all of the Abrahamic faiths, be sure to use our new Adam & Summer’s Eve brand.
Penta-douche; because women are cursed and responsible for the fall of man.
And now, the Scathing Atheist
Intro:
It’s Thursday, It’s April 18th and due to an increase in promiscuity, Allah has cut it back to 54 virgins per Jihadee.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from scandalous New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode,
- Pope Frankie names a group of 8 mini-bosses you’ll have to defeat before entering his lair,
- Carl from Post Rapture Looting joins me for some atheist Easter Egg hunting where we look for eggs we know aren’t there,
- And Representative Joe Barton moves to tackle global warming by first gathering two of every unclean species and seven of every clean one
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
A lot of theists have trouble accepting that we really don’t believe in god. They like to think that deep down we’re just suppressing our faith but when we find ourselves in a really tough situation, we’ll revert to our programming, we’ll drop to our knees and we’ll start praying. After all, when they look at the world, they see god. So how could we look at the same world and not see him at all?
Similarly, a lot of atheists have trouble accepting that theists really believe in god. We like to think that deep down they know good and damn well that it’s all a myth propagated by power-hungry shamans and that when the shit hits the fan, they’ll abandon their superstitions and turn to a secular solution. After all, when we look at the world, we don’t see a god. How could they look at the same world and see one?
Clearly part of this is just a lack of intellectual empathy. They think we’ve got a ‘god shaped hole’ in our hearts and we think they’ve got a ‘reason shaped hole’ in their heads. It’s a defense mechanism like the one where we demonize the opposite side of the political spectrum. It’s harder to Accept that they’ve looked at the evidence and come to a contrary conclusion than it is to create a caricature of their opinions and pretend that they’re all heartless or stupid.
And I suppose a lot of people would tell me to leave it there. I said something bad about one side and then I said something bad about the other and now can’t we all just get along?
But I think it’s too neat and tidy to write it all off as a self-delusion. After all, when I listen to somebody tell me that they believe that god’s in heaven and Jesus loves them and grandma and Sparky are at the pearly gates waiting for them, I don’t wonder how they believe it. I wonder why they’re not in a bigger hurry to die.
If I ask them, they’ll tell me that god has a plan for them on earth and that they’d miss their kids or their grandkids or their friends or whatever, but if you balance the time we spend on earth with the eternity they expect to spend in heaven, it’s an insignificant blink of the eye. Ten billion years from now your grandkids won’t even remember that you weren’t there while they were learning to poop.
And why aren’t they more eager for their loved ones to die? It seems to me that once mom has arthritis or even a persistent headache she’d be better off in heaven where she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. How selfish is it for me to hope she lingers on in minor pain for decades just so that I can have her around to babysit the kids? Hell, it seems like as soon as your folks start hitting financial troubles you’d be hoping they’d die so they could move into that mansion god has for them in heaven.
I’ve watched friends grieve the loss of a loved one; both theist and atheist. And I can tell you from a statistically insignificant, unblinded anecdote that one didn’t seem to have any easier a time with it than the other. Somehow the person who professed to believe that their beloved was living in a mansion with a golden driveway in paradise was every bit as bereaved as the person who professed to believe that their loved one no longer existed at all. How could that possibly be?
When I say that I don’t think theists believe their own bullshit, it’s not something I’m basing on my own psychology, it’s something I’m basing on their behavior. If you honestly believed, all the way to your core, that you were going to meet the people you lose in a perfect world in the clouds, how could you possibly mourn their passing? How could a funeral be anything but a joyous occasion?
The religious dingbats of the world like to express their disbelief in atheists with one of the most pervasive and insulting clichés ever coined to smear rationalists; “There are no atheists in a foxhole.”
The idea is that even we heathens will turn to god if things get bad enough. Included, of course, is the unspoken assumption that when we experience this instantaneous conversion, it’ll be their god we’ll start praying to. It never seems to occur to them that if that’s how it worked, all the Christians in the foxhole would start praying to Allah, Shiva and Odin just to be on the safe side.
But I’d like to submit the opposite. When you’re in the proverbial foxhole, myths and superstitions are cold comfort. When the bombs are raining down, nobody’s saying “Shit, I sure hope that one hits us!” and if they were, we’d rightly assume that they’d lost their fucking minds. I submit that when we’re facing the uncertainty of our own deaths, we are all atheists by default.
Contrary to the adage, when it comes down to it, there are no theists in a foxhole.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my kemosabe Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to Lone Range?
In our lead story tonight, California legislators are subtly suggesting that perhaps the Boy Scouts of America should stop being bigots. A proposed law would strip the Boy Scouts of their tax exempt status along with any other nonprofit that excludes members based on sexual orientation, gender identity or religious affiliation.
There’s been a real outcry surrounding this proposal and strangely enough it’s not because this wasn’t done decades ago. How common sense is this proposal?
- I’d like to read a quote from christiannewswire.com: “Should SB 323 become law it would break new ground in using the tax system to punish those who are disliked by LGBT activists.” Those who are disliked by LGBT activists are called bigots. So the the tax system punishes bigots. Is that unreasonable?
- I’d like a tax system that punishes all sorts of shitty people. That’s actually the whole point of certain taxes. To discourage things with negative externalities, like the actions and opinions of the ignorant.
Yeah, hard to imagine why religious groups would be threatened by a law that strips tax exemptions from groups that institutionalize discrimination, huh?
While most of the major media coverage has focused on the gay stuff, this law would also force the Boy Scouts, and any other group seeking tax exemption, to allow the dreaded atheists to walk amongst them.
- Much like a black person disrupts the front of a bus, an atheist clearly disrupts a lesson in the tying of a bowline knot.
- What’s their problem?
The bill is saying, you can still be an asshole, and you can still have your asshole club.
The government just happens to offer extra credit on the test for clubs that are not assholes . . . So you assholes don’t get those particular bonus points.
- We’re bending over backwards to be tolerant of assholes. We’re just taking away the asshole subsidy they’ve been getting. And we’ll give it right back if they stop being assholes.
California pushes bill to end State tax exemptions for Boy Scouts because of anti-gay, anti-atheist policies:
– From a real news source: http://news.yahoo.com/calif-tax-bill-seeks-punish-scouts-gay-ban-193252719.html
– From Xian Newswire: http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2250071876.html
From the “Should we call it the Reform Council or the Council on Reform” Department, the Pope has assigned 8 cardinals to advise him on thinking about talking about thinking about reform. While major media headlines like “Pope Makes First Big Decision Naming Advisory Board” and “Pope Makes Tough Decisions as Reforms Loom” would suggest that he’d actually done something, the actual meat of this story is downright vegan.
So Pope Frankfurter has commissioned an advisory panel to look into overhauling the Vatican Bureaucracy. Vatican officials point out that it’s been a quarter century since the bureaucracy was updated, somehow missing the irony that it’s been two millennia since any-damn-thing else about their church was updated.
- Yeah their literature could use a few retractions. Maybe a new edition, in light of all this new shit.
- I heard the advisory panel has a small delegation scouring the woods to confirm or disconfirm the presence of bear shit.
- Maybe the panel can also look into whether there will ever be some way to create individual cross-sections that divide up an entire loaf of bread into convenient pieces.
But the collective media cock-guzzle around Pope Frank-n’-Beans continues and everything he does from washing a foot to wiping lefty is dutifully reported as proof that he’s a real reformer and things are gonna be different under his watch. He’s not like that old creepy pedophile-protecting Palpatine lookalike. He’s an old creepy, pedophile-protecting Droopy Dog lookalike.
- He reminds me of Elmer Fudd, but with a sillier hat . . . doing the “Kill the Wabbit” song to Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”.
- Sidenote: I’m thoroughly impressed by the lefty wiping. I tried to jerk it lefty one time, and I suffered an elbow injury and an eye injury.
Pope names 8 advisors to think about talking about thinking about reform: http://news.yahoo.com/pope-taps-cardinals-advise-governing-reform-124612388.html
And in earth-shattering international news, women are wearing man-clothes at the Western Wall. This news comes to us from the 1300s via modern day Jerusalem. Several female activists were arrested at the holy site last Thursday for wearing man-shawls and praying out loud.
- The man-shawls don’t help the sexual roles platform, and they definitely muddle the homophobia stance a little.
And as much as my liberal heart wants to stand behind the women involved in this protest, my rational mind says, “you’re trying to pray to an imaginary being whose very existence was largely manufactured to oppress your gender”, so it’s hard for me to rally behind them too much. If you want to advance women in these silly cultures, leave all the talking-to-walls to the men and maybe try reading or something. Just a suggestion.
- Yeah, why the hell do they want to go there or do that in the first place? They must have got Tom Sawyered.
- “Don’t even think about wearing that man-shawl and whitewashing this prayer wall with me.”
Clash with religious authorities at the Western Wall because women are wearing the “man shawls” http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/12/battle-of-the-sexes-at-western-wall/
And in “No-when-to-fold-em” news, a NY nun has admitted stealing more than an eighth of a million dollars to cover her gambling expenses. She now faces six months in prison, which, for the record, I would do in a heartbeat for $128,000. I mean seriously? Six months?
But before you go thinking the sentencing was light because she was a 68 year-old nun, I should mention that her attorney says she’s really, really sorry. And if we were more like Jesus we wouldn’t be so worried about the past.
- I guess you gotta support the habit somehow.
Vinnie “Knuckles” Malone, a source close to the case was quoted as saying, “That bitch just lucky she still has all her fingers. Nun or not, I’ll fuck that whore up.”
- The Knuckles brand of justice sounds surprisingly well-informed on the 1st Amendment.
NY nun admits to stealing $130,000 from churches to pay for her gambling addiction: http://news.yahoo.com/gambling-nun-pleads-guilty-theft-york-churches-224339427.html
And earning the honor of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight this week is Texas Republican… and I’d just like to point out that those two words very often precede the naming of the stupidest politician in the national spotlight on any given week…
- Texas Republicans making political decisions, are like the youngest brother in a big family getting to choose what everyone has for dinner on their birthday. You end up having to appease them once in awhile, so you try to take them seriously that one day, and they’re like “Deep Fried Chocolate Baloney Hot Pockets!!!”
Anyway, Texas Republican Joe Barton was trying to justify a bill to force Obama’s hand on the Keystone pipeline. And atheists, I’m sure, have differing opinions on the issue of this controversial energy project. But I think we can all agree that it takes a class A jackass to use the issue to write off climate change on the grounds of God’s predilection for flooding the whole world.
- The gradual melting of polar ice caps would be the lamest Great Flood ever. Not exactly an awe-inspiring demonstration of omnipotence.
- “Does the water look a couple inches higher to you? That’s it . . . I’m devoting my life to Jesus.”
- Decent amount of slavery in the bible, so that must not have been a man-made phenomenon either. Just pious plantation owners fulfilling their destiny. Somebody’s gotta get enslaved.
Now, if I quoted him directly, I’d probably get accused of making it sound stupider than it actually sounded, so here it is, in all it’s glorious fucktardary: [SOUNDCLIP]
Rep. Joe Barton cites the great flood as evidence that global warming is not man made: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/10/rep-joe-barton-biblical-great-flood-shows-climate-change-isnt-man-made/ (grab soundclip on this one, too!)
And finally tonight, the intrepid radio host and fundamentalist activist Bryan Fischer has uncovered our secret, homofascist plot to make Christians wear Christian badges like ghetto Jews in Nazi Germany.
- We ended up going ahead with that plot? I was thinking thorny crowns though. The sleeve patches are a little too subtle.
- Didn’t Fischer seem strangely preoccupied with the design of the Christian ghetto patch?
Our nefarious strategy had managed to stay so well-hidden over the years that not even the key players instrumental in its implementation knew about it, but despite this nearly preternatural level of secrecy, Fischer’s mind was able to twist through the various corridors of our labyrinth and figure out our plans even before we did. And he did so amidst the following random assemblage of gibberish: [SOUNDCLIP]
- Of course, you never want to hear about a holocaust. Of course. But if another one HAD TO HAPPEN, I’d say Christians are the logical victims. Hold on, what am I talking about? Muslims, obviously. What, it’s a fucking roast!
- I’d say that the most surprising thing I learned when I was researching this story is that spellcheck has no issues at all with the word “homofascist”.
Bryan Fischer discovers our homofascist plot to make Christians wear badges like ghetto Jews: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/12/bryan-fischer-homofascists-will-treat-christians-like-jews-in-the-holocaust/ (grab soundclip!!)
That does it for headlines, when we come back, Carl from the Post Rapture Looting Podcast will join us to discuss all the fun he had over Easter Weekend.
Skit:
Normally I save emails for the end of the show but I got one from a celebrity the other day and it got me really excited. I’m not sure if I he would want me to mention his name, but you know what? Fuck it, I’m pretty stoked, I’m gonna go ahead and tell you. It was from God.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s an email and anybody could say there were God, but the way I figure it, I’ve got exactly as much evidence that this email was written by god as Christians have that the bible was, so I’m rolling with it.
Anyway, it’s pretty cool, so I thought I’d share it with you:
Dear Noah,
This email is intended as official notice that you have been damned.
This action was taken against you by me, the Lord Almighty on April 13th in the year of our me 2013 for trespasses including, but not limited to:
- Taking my name in vain while suggesting that I, Father of Abraham, Granter of Life, Alpha and Omega, am physically comprised of fecal-pornography,
- Making it sound on your show like Jesus is bad at finding keys when, if fact, he is damn good at it, and
- Making a blasphemous exclamation while masturbating on the Sabbath to impure thoughts about your neighbor’s wife in mixed garments.
As a consequence of your damning, the standing invitation of your immortal soul to return to heaven upon its earthly passing has been revoked. Alternate accommodations will be provided. In addition, your prayers will be ignored separately from those of believers, you will not be permitted to use a crucifix to ward off vampires and Jesus says from now on you can find your own fucking keys.
If you feel that you have been damned in error, please reply within 30 days with an explanation of any extenuating or mitigating circumstances along with heaps of sanctimonious praise and obsequious adulation. Failure to remit in the time frame outlined above will result in your damnation being converted to eternal status.
Praise and adulation will be judged at the discretion of the damning party and may or may not be deemed sufficient for salvation.
May God have mercy on your soul… Oh wait, too late for that Bitch.
Jehovah.
Calendar:
It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. Normally we try to keep things light hearted and funny on this show, but sometimes there’s nothing funny about what we’re doing. And once in a while we need to step back and recognize that.
That’s why I’m dedicating this week’s calendar to the atheist bloggers and activists in Bangladesh that are risking their lives to do exactly what I’m doing. Freedom of speech is something I blithely accept as my birthright as an American, but not everyone is as fortunate.
I can’t possibly cover all the details of this story in such a short format, but I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. We’ll have links all over the shownotes and if you follow us on Twitter we’ll keep you abreast of the story. Suffice to say that a well-organized group of Islamic militants are trying to use their bully pulpit to divert attention away from their wrong-doing and a group of atheist bloggers have become their unwitting scapegoat.
Two bloggers have already been killed and Islamic leaders are calling for the execution of 84 more named atheist activists.
In response, atheist and humanist organizations all over the world have declared April 25th a day of action to stand with our fellow non-believers. And you can make a difference here. Write a blog, send a letter, join one of the many protests being organized across the country, or, if nothing else, take to social media and let people know what is happening.
Regardless of our beliefs, we can all agree that nobody should die for theirs. I urge you to check out the links at Scathing Atheist (dot) com and learn more.
And now, back to the fart jokes and stuff.
April 25th, stand with the atheist bloggers in Myanmar: http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/04/11/on-25-april-2013-we-stand-with-bangladeshi-bloggers-and-activists/
Outro:
There was one email I wanted to respond to before we closed things out for the night, but first a quick correction. You’ll recall that last week Heath and I discussed a nincompoop that wrote an article about how Steven Hawking proved the bible correct by referring to dust. Anyway, I identified the numb-skull as Paul Hitchins, his name is actually Paul Hutchins. So I wanted to apologize, not to the Christian dingle-berry, but rather to the name “Hitchins”. So sorry about that, I owe you more respect.
Okay, so first email comes to us from Renee in Clemsdale and I’m not sure what state or country Clemsdale is in. Renee was very polite in his or her full condemnation of everything we’ve done on the show and, in a round-about way, everything I’ve ever done in my life. But I just wanted to tell Renee that I did love the email, especially the contradictory notion of condemning me to hell in one paragraph, but then hoping I have a lovely day in the next.
Sorry to end on such a somber note, but that does it for our show this week. We’ll be back in 168 hours, when we’ll crack open our bibles and tackle Genesis in the “Holy Babble”. If you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and follow us on Twitter.
I want to throw a big thanks to Carl for joining me early on a Sunday morning for that interview. He had to miss church and everything, so I want to thank him for making the sacrifice. If you haven’t checked out his show, be sure to do that. Once again, it’s the Post Rapture Looting Podcast and we’ll have links to it on the shownotes for this episode. (http://postrapturelooting.net/PRL/)
I want to thank the person who gave us our first donation. Haven’t figured out how to find out who you are so I can thank you by name, but thanks. Really means a lot to us. If you’d like to join this exclusive group of one person, you can donate to the show as well. You’ll find the link on the right side of the page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
If you want to help us out but don’t want to part with any of your hard earned cash, you can always swing by iTunes and give us an awesome review. We really appreciate everyone who does that and we love them more than the other audience members… except the ones who give cash, who we love the most.
Of course, a huge thanks to Heath for everything he does to make the wheels of this podcast turn and a big thanks to everyone who decided to give us thirty minutes of their lives. We’ll be hard at work earning thirty minutes next time. Until then, check out the backlog and do it on Stitcher because seriously, our Stitcher rank sucks balls.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
The Scathing Atheist 
Live Blogging the Bible, Genesis 47
by Noah Lugeons
Genesis starts slow and it’s a pretty brutal read, but as it turns out, the third act is pretty good. It settles down into a cohesive narrative, things that are introduced to the story have relevance later, characters have depth and story arc and for a while there God bows out of things and stops being a dick. In fact, as I was polishing off the end of Genesis, I actually found myself quite drawn to Joseph. I thought I’d finally found a moral character in the Bible that I could get behind. And then I reached chapter 47.
For those who don’t know the story (it’s the Technocolor Dreamcoat one), Joseph is one of Jacob’s (Israel’s) sons and he’s daddy’s favorite. So his other 11 brothers (dad was a hound) did what any group of sociopathic jealous siblings would do. They took him to the middle of nowhere, stuck him in a pit and waied for some Egyptians to come by so they could sell him into slavery. They tell dad he was eaten by wolves or bears or something and they carry on with their lives.
Joseph makes the most of slavery but refuses to bone his master’s wife, which lands him in jail for a few years where his powers of dream-interpretation eventually catch the attention of Pharaoh, whose been having some pretty wacky sleepy-time romps of late. So he brings Joseph out of prison and tells him about his dream, which Joey interprets as God warning him about a coming famine.
Pharaoh is so impressed that he basically makes Joseph king of everybody but him. Joseph sets out to store a shitload of grain for the coming famine and sure enough, a few years later the famine settles in and thanks to Joey’s powers of precognition, Egypt is the only kingdom with any food.
Along the way he forgives his brothers, sends for his dad and hooks them up with the best grazing land in Egypt. Seems like a pretty upstanding dude up to this point. But then in chapter 47 he convinces all the Egyptians to sell themselves as slaves because otherwise they’ll starve.
It’s this surprisingly morbid aside in an otherwise uplifting story, but as the years of famine pile up, the peasants run out of money and can’t afford to buy food from Joseph anymore. So he convinces them to give him all their livestock and gives them enough grain to survive the year. Then they come back the next year with no money, no more food and no livestock, so he convinces them to give them all their land for another year’s worth of food. Then, of course, they come back the next year with no money, no food, no livestock and nowhere to freaking live, so he convinces them to sell themselves into slavery in exchange for another year’s worth of food.
Ultimately it’s clearly a story meant to justify an excessive tax laid upon the people of Egypt, but it really takes you out of this otherwise heart-warming tale of forgiveness and foresight. So far I’d say Joseph is the most moral central character in the bible, but if I can say that about somebody who locks up all the food and then demands you sell him your freewill if you want some, this book is clearly unfit as a moral guide.