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Episode 43 – Partial Transcript
Oh, were you stopping by for the Stitcher Award Nomination Link? CLICK HERE… (and thanks)
by Heath Enwright and Lucinda&Noah Lugeons
(Note: Transcript contains elements that were edited from the episode due to time constraints)
Warning: This podcast contains adult language including two shits, a fuck, a piss, another fuck, dick, jizz, another fuck, motherfucker, bitch, two more shits, cunt, cock, fucktard, fuck-nozzle, several assholes, more fucks…
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new chain of pre-apocalyptic rapture supply outlets; Genesis 7-11. Because now that they’re letting the queers get married, you know god’s judgment can’t be far off. Mention this ad and get a free set of swimmies with any purchase over twenty dollars.
Genesis 7-11: Thank you Jesus, come again.
And now, the Scathing Atheist…
Intro:
It’s Thursday
It’s December 12th
And my ass is less of a J-Lo, and more of a Cee Lo
I’m Noah Lugeons,
I’m Heath Enwright,
And from coniferous New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist
In this week’s episode,
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We’ll learn that it’s hard to roll R’s with a dick in your mouth.
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We’ll find out that everyone has an equal right to discriminate against gays.
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And the perfect, plump roundness of Rush Limbaugh’s face is related to pi.
But first, the diatribe…
Diatribe:
If Tennessee is the buckle of the bible belt, South Georgia is the taint. Which works out well because clearly the Florida panhandle is the scrotum. So unless you consider the Mississippi delta to be the asshole, in which case coastal Alabama is the taint, South Georgia is the de facto Bible taint.
And boy what a taint it is. I should know. I spent a big chunk of my childhood there. I spent six formative years of my life living in a place where the two accepted religious affiliations were Baptist and Devil-Worshipper. Where you had to drive to a theater two towns away to see blasphemous films like, I shit you not, Wayne’s World. Where church groups organized dozens of people to protest a comic book shop because they were promoting, I continue to shit you not, Dungeons and Dragons.
My first job was washing dishes at a local pizzeria where I was dismissed as “the guy who thinks we came from monkeys”. The principle at my high school led the students in prayer during the morning announcements and before each football game. My 10th grade English teacher once spent an entire hour telling us about the dangers of Satanism and my 9th grade science teacher once told the class that gays were an abomination against god and should be dragged into the street and shot.
Religion was everywhere. It was in the school, it was at the mall, it was protesting in front of the movie theater, it was showing up uninvited at my house, it was scolding me from every church sign, it was staring at me from the bumper of every pickup, it was blessing me from every cash register, it was blockading my girlfriend’s vagina. It was inescapable, in charge and insane.
And the stories they believed weren’t just crazy, they were fucking silly. I couldn’t comprehend how anyone took them seriously. I remember walking past church services and wondering if it was all an elaborate hoax that everyone was in on but me. It felt like I was the only sane person on the planet.
I wanted to grab people as they came out of church and say, “can’t we at least agree that this is exactly what religion would look like if it was just made up out of whole cloth to oppress people? Can’t we at least agree that if a ten year old was lying about his invisible pet alien he would use the exact same debate tactics that you guys use? Can’t we at least agree that taking this book about dragons and talking donkeys and resurrected Jews seriously without asking for a shred of tangible evidence is functionally indistinguishable from clinical nincompoopery?”
I couldn’t understand it. Many of these people were reasonable and far more intelligent than me when we weren’t talking about resurrected Jewish messiahs, but as soon as that subject came up an otherwise rational human being would start spouting proofs that they’d never accept in any non-religious circumstance. All of a sudden basic moral precepts like “burning people for eternity is wrong” and “babies aren’t evil sinners” fly out the fucking window.
And for years I just wrote those folks off as stupid. And it’s damned tempting. It’s damn tempting to laugh off the Chicken Little campaigns against Harry Potter books and World of Warcraft and say that they’re the products of misguided, uniformed, paranoid minds. But if you leave it there, you’re underestimating them and you’re underestimating the consequences of growing up in a town that was willing to rise up as one to keep the scourge of Wayne’s World from the local youth.
Religion can only survive on ignorance. Information is the achilles heel of faith and unless they control everything a person watches or plays or reads or learns, nobody’s ever gonna buy into their bullshit. They won’t be able to shut the critical parts of their brain down in those critical moments. They have to fight against everything because it takes a lot of work to make people continue to believe in demonic snakes and octa-centurion ark builders.
But there was no internet back then. There was no way to fact-check them when they controlled the bookstores and the library and the schools. A kid could feel like he or she was the only person in the world with a fully functional brain. There was no internet and there were no forums or wikis or podcasts or blogs.
And maybe when you strip away all the post-hoc justifications, that’s the real reason I do this show. Just to know that when religion dies, I’ll have been a small contributor to the murder weapon.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is fellow brain in a jar Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to dismiss hard solipsism due to it’s lack of functional consequence?
Dismiss what?
Well there you go then.
In our lead story tonight, Al Azhar – a prestigious Islamic university in Cairo – released a study last month examining the fatwas issued by Islamic theocrats in Egypt during the one-year reign of Mohamed Morsi that ended in July of this year. And if you’re anything like me, and you worry about your 10-year-old wife’s tiny vagina being torn to shreds by something other than your adult male penis, the rules all make perfect sense.
So we’re just shredding 10 year old vaginas right up front, huh? Just gonna show up for the blind date with dick in hand. No, that’s fine…
For example, common sense stuff like: “Avoid creating a comfortable rape environment by turning off the air conditioner when you expect your heat-sensitive rapist neighbor might stop by.”
And as much as I wish you made that up, no, that’s a real fatwa. Better your wife spend her days in an un-air-conditioned house in a country with an average high temperature over 90 degrees.
There was another decree that prohibited women from handling bananas, cucumbers, and other phallic flora … that they might shove inside themselves in rabid seizures of uncontrollable female desire. Lesbians were also banned from buying almonds, curtains, and modern art … and from existing in the country.
There was also a fatwa against having sex naked, though, so you never have to know exactly which gender you’re fucking.
My favorite fatwa was issued in response to a clever group of Muslim adulteresses, who were cheating on their husbands with salt water. Turns out the word for “ocean” is a masculine noun, and if the wrong arbitrary linguistic gender assignment touches your wife’s vagina, it’s adultery. But for some reason, it’s perfectly normal for men to swim in a sea of dicks.
Just don’t swallow. It’s salty as fuck.
The Muslim Brotherhood showcased a surprisingly good string of puns when they released the following headline in conjunction with the Adultery Swim Fatwa . . . (quote) “Buoys on the Tide: Sticky situation in the Perversion Gulf as married women swim in gland shark infested waters seeking salt water staffy and motion in the brocean.” (end quote)
I’m adding the Adultery Swim channel’s existence to Jet Pack and the Darth Vader butt plug in case Santa is listening.
But here’s the problem . . . The Arabic word for “nothing” is also masculine, which means she’s gotta put something in there, but only about half the things are eligible, so it gets tricky. Book, but not page. Finger, but not knuckle. Shaft, but not tip. And again, no veggies, so what’s a girl to do?!?
Fatwa: Women who swim in the ocean are committing adultery: http://www.richarddawkins.net/news_articles/2013/12/1/-fatwa-women-who-swim-in-the-sea-commit-adultery-should-be-punished <<also>> http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/fatwa-al-azhar-university-cairo-women-swimming-in-sea-adultresses/1/326883.html
And in “Satan debatin’” news tonight; devil’s advocate, posthumous lesbianator and head of the New York based Satanic Temple Lucien Greaves has made it back into the news this week by filing a request to place a Satanic monument on the steps of the Oklahoma Statehouse… right next to the one with the ten commandments on it. Greaves argues that if that space is reserved for religious displays, his religion has as much right to it as any other and unfortunately for Oklahoma theocrats, the stupid laws they recently enacted accidentally agree with him.
This is the great playground moment. That asshole kid makes up a shitty new rule about the endzone boundary, and the very next play he’s past the hydrant, so it’s out of bounds.
When asked about the possibility of a Satanic monument, representative Bobby Cleveland dismissed the idea and the Satanists behind it as falling under (quote) “the nut category”. And not because believing in a giant red monster with a pitchfork that tempts humanity and runs the HR department in Hades is nutty.
So the notion that Lex Luthor exists is ridiculous … but Superman’s obviously real!!!
The Temple says they’re considering a number of designs none of which, unfortunately, involve Jesus and sodomy. And I’d put 30 seconds on the clock here for Jesus Butt-Rape porn titles, but something tells me we’re gonna need that 30 seconds later.
But if anybody wants to chime in with a few, it’s been way too long since (hashtag) Butt Raping Jesus was trending on Twitter . . . I’ll get things rolling . . . Ass-Holy Communion: Receiving the Body of Christ . . .
Satanist seek to put up monument in Oklahoma courthouse: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/12/08/satanists-seek-spot-next-to-ten-commandments-monument-on-steps-oklahoma/
And from the “Popes Parting Velvet Ropes” file, Catholicism’s Rico Chart-Topper told Italian churchgoers that he gained valuable experience as a bouncer at a nightclub in Argentina, where it was also very important to correctly identify the age of a minor, no matter what kind of tip they offered. His only regret was jumping right into the priesthood, before he got more experience working the rear entrance.
I wonder how the Union of Argentinian Bouncers is taking this news. On the one hand they might be thinking of using it in their advertising; you know, bounce today, pontificate tomorrow; but on the other hand it’s gotta knock your badass image down three or four spots when people know your job could be done by the elderly hybridization of Woody Allen and Droopy Dog.
To bolster his reputation as the “people’s” supreme pontiff, Pope Frangioplasty made sure to mention that before he was even known as Reverend Whore-Gay Beer Goggles, he was just a normal blue-collar guy, checking fugitive Nazi ID’s, sweeping floors, and figuring out how to become humanity’s conduit to the implied omnipotent watch-maker of the universe.
Pope admits he used to work as a bouncer: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/03/pope-i-was-once-a-bar-bouncer/
And in the “Who Would Jesus Shitcan?” file tonight, we have the story of Michael Griffin, a former teacher at the Holy Ghost Preparatory school in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, who was a current teacher at the Holy Ghost Preparatory school in Bensalem, Pennsylvania until administrators recently found evidence that he was trying to marry a dude.
It’s weird that they find the ‘attempt to marry’ more offensive than the pre-marital butt sex.
And because US law somehow protects the rights of Catholic institutions to write in “no sucking off dudes” clauses into employment contracts, this bullshit is legal. When asked how being gay-married could possibly affect the performance of Spanish and French teacher, an imaginary representative of the school explained that (quote) “being a homosexual probably helps you with French but he has to teach Spanish, too.”
Gay Catholic School teacher fired for applying for marriage lisence: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/08/us-catholic-school-fires-gay-teacher-marriage
And in “Rush versus The Holy Triumverate” news, Rush Limbaugh is furious at Pope Franno Domini for endangering the Republican Party’s delicate Christianity hijack mission, by reminding Catholics that Jesus – as well as Kindergarten – both teach that “sharing is nice”. Limbaugh believes the Pope is just bitter over losing to him in a “Jowl Roundness Contest”.
I’m dying to know how that thing was judged: I’m picturing them both holding one of those little Japanese drums from Karate Kid Two under their chins, flopping their heads back and forth. Next up, in the acorn hoarding round…
The Octo-Chinned Conservative Casey Kasem – who labeled the Pope’s sharing remarks as (quote) “pure Marxism” – became an expert economist while failing to graduate from Southeast Missouri State. In fairness, for all we know he could have breezed through at his safety school, which was West Northwest Southeast Missouri A&M.
Go Paddlefish!
Limbaugh released a segment called, “It’s Sad How Wrong Pope Francis Is [parentheses] (Unless It’s a Deliberate Mistranslation By Leftists)” . . . So built into his title – in parentheses! … as if almost tacitly understood! – is the claim that liberal spies have likely infiltrated the English translation department at the Vatican, for the purposes of sneaking references to “Das Kapital” into the Pope’s translated speeches, thus undermining American capitalism.
He’s not the best in the business for nothin’. Glenn Beck would have needed 10 minutes and a chalkboard to connect all that shit and Rush does it 14 words and some brackets.
In honor of shitty Christian commentators, as well as yellow and brown journalists everywhere, let’s put 30 seconds on the clock . . . Christian Assholes as Shit Porn Stars – GO!!!
And I’m adding the 30 seconds I didn’t use earlier because that’s fucking awesome. So now go.
I’ll start it out with a topical Flush Limbaugh … just as a courtesy.
Bowel O’Steen? Wait… that sounded better before I said it… um… Joel O’Stain?
Maybe Bowl Osteen? . . . No- Bowel Sharpton.
Or Bowely Graham, maybe?
Speaking of stretching the bowels: Bran Coulter?
Brick Perry
Dick Santorum’s too easy . . . Wolf Shitzer?
Cardinal Timothy Colon
Deuce Almighty
Fanny Crosby? That’s only funny if you’re a fan of late 17th century hymns, I guess. How about Pope Fran-Cesspool?
L Ron Buggered
No fair using Scientologists. My first thought was Shit Romney, but I didn’t use him, because Mormonism is a cult.
Anal Roberts
T.P. Jakes!
Scat Robertson
Rush v. the Holy Triumverate: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/02/rush-limbaugh-vs-the-pope/
Well, I hate to pinch off the poop puns early, but we’re outta time. Heath, thanks for hanging out.
And when we return, Lucinda will join us to ruin her chances at a future political career.
One Kings in Rhyme
I suppose that if I was a deity, who fashioned the earth and the seas,
Then covered all up in creatures and made some subordinate mes,
And I had a message I wanted to send them, something that I thought was vital,
I’d probably write them a list of instructions, or at least divinely inspire a bible.
It would be hard to decide what to tell them, though, since the book could be only so long,
I’d want them to know there was purpose, and to know the right path from the wrong.
And I’d stress over what I’d include there, and I’d stress over what to omit,
After all there’s a lot more to say than the space of one single book would permit.
See, I’d want to impart on them knowledge, and show them the value of peace,
And I’d probably want to include something in it, about the nature of germs and disease.
Should I remind them not to rape women? Or not to make people work without pay?
Should I tell them they can’t beat their children? Or beat off more than four times a day?
Should I explain that the sun’s in the center? Or the value of washing with soap?
Should I explain in unmistakable terms that there’s always a reason to hope?
Well, according to god the most wise course of action, is to leave out all of those things,
And make sure there’s plenty of space that’s left over, for a long list of Israel’s kings.
But I guess that’s why I don’t write bibles, and am just some anonymous tit,
And he’s the all-knowing creator of all, and the alpha, omega and shit.
If you read my book you’d know to be thoughtful, and to let people love who they choose,
But I’d fuck up and leave out important details, like who led the sixth century BCE jews.
I’d have skipped all the stuff about Solomon, and the temple he built for the Lord,
And instead I’ve had told them how telescopes work and what wonders they might point them toward.
I’d have droned on and on about hygiene, wasted time on nutritional facts,
And forgotten to mention who was leading the Jews when the Philistine army attacks.
I’d have pissed away pages on problems they would face as their populace grows,
And I’d have probably put is some stuff I can’t fathom that only a deity knows.
I’d have wasted a couple of chapters on the equality of genders and races,
And I’d have forgotten to smite them and punish their children for pillar and poles in high places.
I suppose that if I were to write it, you’d have questions at the end of the tome.
Like, “How long did it take for the third king of Israel to finish building his solid gold home?”
So I’ll submit that as I’m just a mortal, I can’t fathom a deity’s ways,
But from my perspective it’s fair to conclude that he sure writes in mysterious phrase.
Babble (One Kings)
One Kings; because god knows that you can never get enough mythologized Jewish history. This book babbles endlessly about a series of Israel’s kings as though it’s daring you to keep reading.
And I think the singular is pronounced “king”.
So joining Heath and me to celebrate being one sixth of the way through this book is my beautiful wife Lucinda, Lucinda, welcome back.
Always happy to be here.
The books are pretty linear at this point, so no need to set anything up; this basically starts right where Two Samuel ends.
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Now King David is old and sick and we have to decide who gets to be the next king.
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But before we get to all that, we have to tell you about the king’s new hooker, who he wasn’t fucking.
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No, she was just keeping him warm.
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“She wasn’t jerking me off! She was trying to start a fire with my cock.”
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Yeah, King David was cold so his doctor prescribed a new virgin. And also Solomon became king and his bro Adonijah was more than a little pissed about it.”
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The talent pool in the desert must have been running dry, considering the most attractive woman in the land is named “Abishag the Shunammite” . . . Sounds more like an orc general from Lord of the Rings.
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Then we get this touching bit where David takes Solomon aside and offers his final words. And it’s basically a list of people he wants Solomon to kill.
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Including Shimei, the dude that David promised not to kill in the previous chapter. He says, “All I said was I wouldn’t kill him. I never said anything about you, or other hired assassins. That wasn’t in the contract.”
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And then Adonijah says, “Hey bro, since you got the whole kingdom and everything, you think I could have dad’s new hooker?” Solomon says “no” and then kills him for asking.
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And then Solomon proves he’s wise by threatening to cut a baby in half.
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This is actually a pretty fucked up story. Two women are accusing each other of killing their baby and swapping him out for a living one, which is fucked up enough before David starts threatening to split the baby down the middle.
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So naturally the real mom says, “No, don’t chop the baby in half you fucking psycho!” but the other lady says, “Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll take half a baby. It’s enough for a stew.”
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And this is Solomon’s tagline moment . . . His “Yippie Ki-Yay Mother Truckers!” His defining biblical event is an episode of Judge Judah, when he settles a maternity dispute between a murderous whore and a regular whore. Also, since when are single mother whores trying to keep their babies?!? I guess the name Johnson had to start somewhere.
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And then chapter 4 is basically a list of Solomon’s cabinet, a list of what he eats and a list of people he was smarter than.
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They make very sure to mention that he spake 3000 proverbs, and wrote one thousand … five … songs … Which is clearly bullshit. Those are the most obviously “made-up numbers” I’ve ever heard. There’s no way he hits EXACTLY 3000 proverbs and EXACTLY 1000 songs, but can’t resist writing 5 extra jingles.
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And then Solomon gets the wheels turning on his new temple. And let me tell ya it’s gonna be one bitchin’ ass temple.
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And in case you were wondering, say, how many cubits wide the nave was or how many sides the door posts have, it’s all spelled out in chapter six.
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Yeah, and god has the same interior design sense as Jay-Z apparently.
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HaShemTV Cribs . . . Sons of Joshua Cribs
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And then we get all the important details about Solomon’s palace, including the latticework, the dishes, candle snuffers and spittoons. Really important shit going on here.
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“I know I’m just a slave laborer helping you build a palace, but do you guys think it’s the best idea to put all the gold, and the god box, all in one place?!? I think we’re overdoing it a little. I’m literally carrying a single basket of golden eggs.”
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And then he has a house party…
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And for all his help building the temple and shit, Solomon gives Hiram 20 cities, but apparently they were his 20 crappiest cities.
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This book of the bible is like a first date with a rich douche. Every few sentences we’re hearing about Solomon’s throne or his golden vessels or his fleets or his platinum butt plug.
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I think we call this a … ‘teachable moment’ … Jews should only put the rarest of metals in their palace, and in their ass. “But hold on – Stop making golden calves. You guys always go straight to that!”
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And in chapter 10 I’m pretty sure it brags about him fucking the Queen of Sheba, too.
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I believe it said he gave her everything she desired, and a taste of the royal bounty on top. So I’m pretty sure they fucked, and it sounds like they even got a milk and honey shot in there.
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And in case you were wondering what kind of mileage he’s getting with that dick of his, Chapter 11 actually starts with the words, “Solomon loved many foreign women” and went on to describe his harem of more than a thousand wives..
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This guy spread more STDs to minorities than the Tuskeegee Experiments.
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And if I’ve learned anything from this book, when vaginas show up, trouble can’t be far behind. So, of course, his wives talk him into turning against god and offering burnt offerings to other gods so real god concoct this convoluted, multi-generational revenge plot.
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So Solomon dies and his son Rehoboam takes over. The people come to their new king saying, “Hey, it would be awesome if you stopped whipping us.” And Rehoboam endeared himself to the people by saying, “You don’t like the whips? No more whips. We’ll use scorpions instead.”
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And then the kingdom was divided because god likes to go over his shoulder to scratch his ass.
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And they open 2 Mooby Burgers.
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So you’ve got Jeroboam who god gives a chunk of the kingdom to and he’s an asshole, too. He starts making non-Levite priests so god sends a prophet to tell Jeroboam that the shit’s about to hit the fan.
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And then god kills the prophet with a fucking lion for eating food and drinking water.
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Falls for the oldest trick in the book. Some guy walks up to him: “Are you a prophet from God? Get the fuck out of here – me too!!! Let’s go eat. Oh you have a note from God that says don’t eat. This is so crazy. I have a note. Also from God. Says that you should disregard your note and go eat with me, after which you will definitely NOT be mauled by a tiger.”
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So basically you’ve got Jeroboam running Israel into the ground and at the same time you’ve got Rehoboam fucking things up in Judah.
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Yeah, apparently they were making high places, pillars and sacred poles. And if that’s not bad enough (and it is), their temple prostitutes were the wrong gender.
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Bunch of savages in this town.
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Man-whores just aren’t cost effective . . . from an orifice perspective. Less bang for your buck . . . despite more “schmekel per shekel”.
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And is it just me or is this book pissed off at you for reading it? It keeps saying stuff like “And are not the acts of Abijam, are they not written in the Annals of the Kings of Judah?”
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Are you telling me the Gideons expect me to just guess what else happened to Abijam?!? I’m sitting here in my hotel room like an idiot … trying to get the whole story on this Judaism stuff.
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And during this unending war between Israel and Judah the Israelis get some practice walling off territories and that’ll come in handy later.
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And then we just start churning through one king after the other. King so and so reigned for so many years and did evil by the lord greater than all the kings before him and then he died, ad infinitum
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And then we finally meet Elijah, who god is pawning around during a drought. And he’s pretty badass. He has birds that feed him and magic jars of food and he even brings kids back from the dead by rubbing his genitals against them.
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Right … three dick rubs resurrects a dead baby. They don’t mention this, but if you do it right, that will also get you to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. I learned that the hard way.
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So Elijah shows up all Charles Bronsony and decides to prove that god is god by challenging the prophets of Baal to a divine Ox-burning contest, in which he kicks ass.
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And then to emphasize how total his victory is, he kills all the prophets of Baal.
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Then Elijah flees like a pansy and god commands him to anoint a few new kings.
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And in a lost “who’s on first base” opportunity, Elijah meets Elisha
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Then there’s some boring war shit and one king attacks another king… fuck, I don’t even know anymore. All I know is somebody didn’t kill the person god told him to kill so god gets all pissy.
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And we learn this from a bizarre story involving a masochistic prophet and a divine lion attack.
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Then Ahab wants Naboth’s vineyard, but he won’t sell it. So Ahab’s wife arranges to have him stoned to death.
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God hears about this and gets pissed so he sends Elijah to tell Ahab he’s fucked and dogs are gonna eat his wife.
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But Ahab fasts and wears a sack around so god says, “shucks, I guess I don’t have to kill you and have dogs eat your wife. I suppose we can save that punishment for your kids.”
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And then it ends with this long, pointless story about Jehoshaphat and the King of Israel want to go to war with Ramoth-Gilead and all but one of the prophets say they’ll win, but one prophet says the other prophets are full of shit… and they were.
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And the king gets killed in battle and, just as god had decreed, dogs lapped up his blood and, and in an understated twist, prostitutes bathed in it.
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Yeah I’m confused by all the whore talk. Why would there be prostitutes … when they had slaves? Slave is the world’s oldest profession. That’s like buying CDs on Napster.
So I suppose the real mystery of One Kings is how the fuck they managed to finance the sequel. We’ll find that out in three weeks and in the meantime, we’ll be washing our brains out with soap. Heath, Lucinda, thanks for sticking with it.
Outro
Before we ring the final bell tonight, I wanted to make a quick correction. We covered a story last week about public prayer booths in Kansas City and it was almost completely bullshit. Sorry about that. Another fail in our story-vetting process. We’ll try to tighten that up and in the meantime I want to thank all the astute listeners who clued us in on that.
I also wanted to let everyone know that the nomination phase has started for the 2nd annual Stitcher Awards. Heath, Lucinda and I really, really, really want to win one and we need your help. You can nominate us up to once per day in as many categories as you think are appropriate. So if you have a few minutes and you’re feeling generous this holiday season, please head over to Stitcher (dot) promoTW (dot) com and nominate the shit out of us. Daily. I’m not too proud to beg. You’ll also find links to the nomination page on our blog, our Twitter feed and our Facebook page because, like I said, I’m not too proud to beg.
That’s all the blasphemy we have for you this week, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with a visit from the Friendly Atheist himself, Hemant Mehta so get excited about that. But if you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out episode 33 of The Herd Mentality Podcast with Adam Reakes, where you can hear my impression of Joel O’Steen orgasming to death on an 8 horsepower, turbocharged, solid gold butt plug.
http://herdmentalitypodcast.com/
I need to thank Heath for keeping it real, Lucinda for putting up with the two of us, I want to thank everyone who did some Holiday shopping on our Cafe Press site and, of course, a huge thanks to Evan Bernstein from the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. He’s one fifth of my all-time favorite podcast, really cool of him to do it and of course, you’ll find a link to his show on this week’s shownotes, right next to the link to nominate us for a Stitcher Award.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/
But most of all I need to thank this week’s most valuable humans, Wayne, Debbie and Vinnie; Wayne, whose ejaculations have seismological designations; and Debbie and Vinnie, whose altruism and advice deserves less of a one liner and more of a very genuine thanks on behalf of both my wife and myself for reminding us that generally speaking, humans are awesome.
And since I already hit you up for a Stitcher nomination half a dozen times, I’m not gonna bother reminding you that if you’d like to support the show financially you’ll find the donation button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact information on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Live Blogging the Bible: Joshua 2
by Noah Lugeons
On the one hand, I’m happy to finally meet a women in the bible who doesn’t fuck anything up, get raped, get turned into a leper or perform any defensive penis surgery. On the other hand, she’s a prostitute that sells out her own hometown to a couple of strangers because she’s afraid of them.
Meet Rahab, everyone, somebody who would probably, in retrospect, wish they’d left her profession out of the bible. No before we get into the non-heroic actions of this biblical hero, I’d like to draw attention to an element of the story that never occurred to me until I actually read it. We all know the story, of course, but for those who don’t recognize the name, this is the story leading to the fall of Jericho. Joshua sends a couple of spies to scope out the city and when the king here’s of their presence, he sends his men to find them and kill them.
Rahab the friendly prostitute elects to hide the men, lie about their whereabouts, mislead the royal guard and assist them in their escape. In exchange, she asks that they spare the life of their family. And to the credit of the women and baby and elderly people murdering Israelites, they keep their promise.
So lets start at the beginning, shall we? Joshua sends a couple of spies into Jericho to check out the cities defenses. So where do they go? Straight to a whorehouse! This part is usually glazed over and I’m sure most Christians and Jews think that they just took refuge in a whore’s house when the kings men came after them, but that is clearly not the case. The king sent men to this whorehouse because he heard the spies were at the whorehouse. Straight from god:
Then Joshua, son of Nun, sent two men secretly from Shittim as spies saying “Go, view the land, especially Jericho.” So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there.
That’s the opening line of the story. It’s not until after that the king hears about their presence. Joshua sent two spies to check out the town and they decided to check out Rahab’s vagina first.
But that’s not the point. It’s just damn funny when you contrast it to the way these fundies feel about vaginas.
So the king sends his men, Rahab hides them in the roof of her house, misdirects the soldiers and sends them on their way. The spies go back and report everything to Joshua, then they have some dinner, cross the Jordan, circumcise themselves, observe passover and then attack the city. We might get into the pre-battle circumcision in a later article, but for now I’m just going to say I don’t recommend it as a military strategy. The reason I bring it up is that a bunch of shit happens between Rahab discovering that her hometown was about to be massacred and the actual massacre.
She had plenty of time to warn people. She had plenty of time to encourage her close friends to get the fuck out of Dodge. She had plenty of time to tell the king so that the city could be ready to defend the attack. But even failing all this, she also had a house that was a recognized sanctuary. The spies told her anybody in the house would not be killed, but anyone outside it would.
I’d like to think that if I was in that situation, you’d open my door after the battle and it would be packed like a fucking clown car. But we fast forward to chapter 6 and the only people in the house are her family. Really? Not one person outside the Rahab bloodline was worth sparing there?
I guess I shouldn’t complain. It’s one of the few acts in this book that isn’t horrible on every level. As bad as aiding in the genocide of your home town is, it’s the least reprehensible thing anybody’s done in the book of Joshua so far.
Live Blogging the Bible: Deuteronomy 10:21
by Noah Lugeons
Deuteronomy is boring compared to the other books of the bible.
That’s like saying someone is fat by sumo standards; ugly for a game show contestant; stupid for a CNN anchor. This thing is painfully, brutally, nut-crunchingly boring.
The book consists of three speeches that Moses gives and they have the feel of speeches you would give if there was no clock running on your last words. It has all the intrigue of a filibuster. It’s like reading about people studying people watching paint dry.
And if anything, I’m overselling the intrigue.
So when I say that I found verse 10:21 interesting, I feel that I should begin by qualifying the broad spectrum of relative application of the word interesting one must employ to apply it to something in Deuteronomy. We’re in the first act of Moses’ second speech where he’s rehashing the rehashing we were doing earlier and he’s reminding all the Israelites just what a bad mother fucker god is.
So he drops this line:
He is your praise; he is your god, who has done for you these great and awesome things that your own eyes have seen.
This is not the first time Moses appeals to empirical evidence to convince people of his holiness. God was more than happy to devour houses in Numbers or send gnats and flies in Exodus or make rocks bleed Aquafina in Leviticus whenever anybody started doubting his royal godness. Granted, he would then curse them, plague them and bury them in pheasants or something, but he wasn’t shy about appearing as a mountain of fire or wandering around the encampments in cloud form.
Clearly, then, god understands that we need to see some proof.
It seems reasonable to me to ask why it was reasonable for this one minuscule sliver of humanity to demand proof from god, but now that we have cameras and science and a million ways to verify the miraculousness of a miracle, god can’t be bothered. It’s somehow beneath him. Now that it’s easier than ever to communicate with the whole world at once. Now that it’s easier than ever to prove himself in a way that would satisfy even the most skeptical among us.
The standard retort of the theist is that god wants us to have faith, but that doesn’t sound like the genocidal ass-stain I know and love from the bible. He was all about flexing his muscle. What, did he mature? Was he imperfect back then and then grew up? Hard to imagine a timeless being maturing significantly in the eye-blink of human existence, but it seems like the strongest thread they have to hold onto.
Anyway, back to work. Somehow we’ve still gotta figure out how to do a segment about a book that does nothing but rehash shit we’ve already made fun of.
Live Blogging the Bible: Numbers 15:32-36
by Noah Lugeons
My normal methodology for the “Live Blogging the Bible” series is to jot things down whenever something strikes me as unusually brutal, illogical or inconsistent. That’s why I didn’t wind up writing anything about Leviticus: There was no part that was any more brutal, illogical or inconsistent than any other part.
But in Numbers the blog-worthy segments basically speak for themselves. The book is largely filled with boring censuses and details of various sacrifices, but there are a few segments that just leap out of the page and say, “What the fuck am I doing here.”
Obviously, 15:32-36 is such a passage. But to truly understand how jarring this part is, let me start by giving you the parentheses. Immediately before this, we just spent 31 verses repeating shit we heard before about sacrifices and offerings. Immediately after this, god expresses a fondness for tassels.
And what strange occurrence rests between these two relatively benign snippets? Why, the brutal murder of some stranger the Jews drug in from the forest. It would seem that this treacherous bastard had the audacity to pick up sticks on the Sabbath. So they stoned him to death.
Yeah, you read that right. He picked up sticks. I’m not exaggerating the triviality of this. The charges against him read, in full:
…a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath day.
So they drag this poor, hapless (and now firewood-less) guy before Moses and because of the unique nature of his offense, Moses checks with God and asks what should be done with this heathen. And god’s prescription is for everyone to gather together and throw rocks at him until he dies.
And oh yeah, he likes tassels. I shit you not, the gear shift into the next paragraph is exactly this (NSRV):
Numbers 15:36
The whole congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as the Lord had commanded Moses.
Numbers 15:37&38
The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the fringe at each corner.
Which is, I believe, God talk for “Squirrel!”
Live Blogging the Bible: Numbers 11:19-33
by Noah Lugeons
I’m only four books in and already I’m amazed at how many crazy stories that I’ve never heard are hidden in the bible. Why does nobody ever talk about Simeon and Levi? Or Gershom’s magical foreskin? Or the naked Noah story? Or, as I recently discovered, the retributive quail tsunami?
The first ten chapters of numbers deal with the Israelites getting ready to move to the promised land. After a considerable time putzing around Sinai with nobody to keep them company but the occasional golden calf, they get ready to move camp, Tabernacle and all, and march against all those assholes that are currently living in the land god clearly intended for them to inherit.
For the first quarter of the book the Jews are very well behaved. They camp where Moses tells them to camp, they enlist when Moses tells them to enlist and they sacrifice bulls and goats when Moses tells them he’s hungry. But once they start the march, Moses’ underlings get really bitchy, really fast. Every time he turns around their moaning about how they might as well have just died in Egypt as slaves where at least they didn’t have to spend years wandering through the wilderness with nothing to eat but manna.
So god hears their cries and he decides to be merciful and send them plenty of food. So much so, in fact, that he promises that all 600,000 of them can eat meat for a month. So he sends a month long tsunami or quails all around them. And just when you’re starting to think that maybe god has turned another leaf and stopped being a complete douche bag, you find out that the quail were a backhanded gift. It comes at the cost of a plague that kills thousands of the assholes. Oh yeah, and they lose their claim to the promised land. So no, god’s still an asshole.
But god being a dick isn’t anything new. He’s been consistent since Genesis so god pulling a dick move is hardly worth blogging about. I just thought I’d hop on to point out what a counterintuitive dick he was being. After all, if he’d just lighten up on the demands for bulls and goats and lambs and turtle doves and donkeys, there would be plenty of meat to go around. You know, the old “stop burning the food for an omnipotent god and start eating it” gambit.
I suppose god is all-knowing (or at least that’s what the people who didn’t write the bible seem to think) so he probably already thought of my solution and rejected it for one of his mysterious reasons. But I thought it was worth pointing out anyway.
Live Blogging the Bible: Numbers 5:11-31
by Noah Lugeons
Numbers is a tricky book. It rests there in between Leviticus and Deuteronomy, two of the most notorious books in the bible, and yet it manages to have very little reputation at all. It’s known for boring lists and the titular numbers, but little else. And you can read a few chapters in without seeing much more than that. It tries to put you to sleep with all the census lists and exact recounting of sacrifices, perhaps with hopes that you’ll overlook the talking donkey.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started this book off with no real idea what to expect and for the first four chapters I was starting to worry that we’d have nothing interesting to talk about in next week’s “Holy Babble” segment. And then I reached chapter five and we got something so weird it could fill the whole 9 minute segment if we wanted it to.
This is essentially a biblical Montel Williams recipe. If you want to know for sure if your woman has been faithful, apparently there’s just one way to know for sure and it’s outlined in detail for 20 full verses of Numbers, Chapter 5. Now, I’ll skimp a bit on the details, but essentially the process breaks down as follows:
- Take your wife to the temple along with a tenth of an ephah of flour.
- Get some water, put some dirt in it and muss up your wife’s hair.
- Say a magical incantation over the dirty water that turns it into adulteress poison.
- Make her drink it.
If she’s been faithful, she’ll be fine. If not, apparently her womb will fall out, she’ll be in horrible pain and she’ll never conceive.
Despite the divine seal of approval on this method, I suppose it’s easy to see why it fell out of favor. Obviously today’s women are much harder to talk into drinking dirt, but beyond that the price for finding out she’s been banging the UPS guy is pretty high. I’d kind of rather not know than have my wife’s womb fall out. But I suppose that’s just a by-product of the sissification of my secular lifestyle.
A Non-Trivial Problem
by Noah Lugeons
I’ve been trapped in an endless and ultimately pointless debate on this blog for over a week now. It all began when a pseudo-theistic pseudo-apologist commented on one of my “Live Blogging the Bible” posts with something that amounted to
“Tee-hee, yeah, this is a pretty silly part of the bible. I agree. But still, man is that book incredible and divine.”
Of course, I haven’t read the whole book and have barely crested the “preface” stage, but I still have to take issue with this assertion. The book cannot be more than the sum of its parts. If there are any genuinely meritorious parts of the book, one would still have to weigh them against the unscrupulous horrors in other parts of the book. And honestly, the rest of the book would have to pretty damn good to make up for the misguided anti-morality of the first three books.
The crux of the apologists argument was that my cursory reading of the bible was worthless as I wasn’t taking the time to understand it in context. I was also focused only on the bible and not the rich theology that has evolved through the ages. Christianity, he argued, is not the bible. The bible is just a starting point and the theology of the faith had advanced so much since the days of Moses’ foreskin aided wrestling match.
I pointed out that it’s not really possible to say that theology “advanced”, as one can no more say that theology of today is in accordance with the divine than the theology of yesteryear. It’s like talking about a breakthrough in homeopathy or phrenology. If the endeavor has no measurable value, it can’t be said to advance. Advance suggests a destination.
Instead of answering that charge, my esteemed opponent instead accused me of “religious intolerance” as though I did not boast of it. He suggested that I’d simply divided the world into the good people who are against religion and the bad people who are in favor of it. It was a thinly veiled charge of anti-theistic bigotry that rested on my continued insistence that without a goal one can draw no nearer to the goal. How dare I be so intolerant of people making bold and demonstrably false truth claims while insisting that they’re point of view should be respected and accepted without the burden of evidence?
This is a common tack from the “liberal” theist (and by liberal I refer here to their theology, not their politics). Atheists are bullies that are every bit as dogmatic as the believers. We’re intolerant of religious people (which is true) which means we’re just like the Muslims who are intolerant of the Jews (which is bullshit). They, on the other hand, are agnostics with a property-less god and the only honest position: self-imposed ignorance. We should just live and let live and who cares if fundamentalists stand in the way of science or oppress gays or mistreat women? That’s not religion’s fault.
It is an intellectually dishonest position and what’s more, anyone smart enough to take this position is also smart enough to see why it’s bullshit. Religious extremism is (as the name would suggest) simply a point on the spectrum of religiosity. Some people have benign tumors but that doesn’t mean tumors aren’t a problem. Fundamentalism is a problem that (a) all religions share and (b) cannot be found outside of a religious context. This would suggest that fundamentalism is a necessary byproduct of religion. And it really doesn’t matter what a bunch of Muslim scholars say about peace and love if the true believers are hacking people to death in the streets.
This is not a “live and let live” situation. This is a situation that demands intolerance. Religion is a non-trivial problem.
No rational person would wish for the destruction of the world. Such a proposition is as irrational as any you might propose. What’s more, no person irrational enough to wish for the destruction of the world could possibly acquire the means and assistance he or she would need to make it happen. While technology does give us the means to global catastrophe, it is hard to imagine that anyone with the stated goal of world destruction could find anyone willing to lend a hand. Sure, a clever statesmen could use nationalism and deceit to trick enough people into helping him, but the very nature of logic forbids any large scale attempt to bring about the end of one’s own species.
But, of course, if logic can be removed, there is no such safeguard. If one can be convinced without evidence that a whole different universe exists after you die that is way better and way more important than this petty world, you could overcome your natural survival instinct and happily march the planet toward the apocalypse that your god has promised you.
No doubt the liberal defender of theism would roll their eyes at this nightmare scenario. They would pretend it is ridiculous. They would pretend that there aren’t large, organized, multi-national groups with exactly this goal. They would pretend that somehow reason can prevail amid a group that has outlawed reason.
And of course they would. They have to. They can’t accept that the same thing that gives them their own personal love-Jesus might also have a dark side. And they certainly can’t accept that the dark side eclipses the bright side.
Religious extremism is just religion without constraint. No religion has ever voluntarily tempered itself. No religion has ever neutered its own power. It is the job of the secularist, the job of the scientist and the job of the atheist to castrate religion every time it thrusts its scrotum into the rest of the world. As fond as religion is of mutilating it’s own genitals, they still leave that job to us.
Episode 16 – Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright and Lucinda Lugeons
(Note: Transcript may contain material edited from the final episode for time purposes)
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of perforated Catholic Condoms, Kingdom Cum. These confusingly labeled condoms are no more contraceptive than cheesecloth, but we’re willing to wager we’ll catch a few drunken fornicators with this ruse.
What, you think that’s immoral? You should see what Catholics do when they take over a hospital.
And now, the Scathing Atheist:
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s June 6th and I know Jake Farr-Wharton has already opened up the show once, but the dude sent the quote to me in six different voices and I’m not letting good shit go to waste.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from abbreviated NY, NY, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s show,
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We’ll add contractual obligation to the list of reasons not to get addicted to meth,
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I’ll try desperately to come up with another nickname for Pope Francis,
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And Heath and Lucinda will join me in discovering that Leviticus is every bit as fucked up as you think it is.
But first, the Diatribe.
Diatribe:
I’m sick and goddamned tired of hearing about where people fall on the “Dawkins Scale”.
Before I go any further, I should note that I’m a big fan of Dawkins and I admire his non-sexist parts… he’s like the Benny Hill of atheism in that way. And what’s more, I completely understand the rhetorical utility of his sliding scale of theistic probability. In the hands of a skilled debater like Dawkins, it’s a valuable asset. But in the hands of a lay-atheist, it’s often a hell of a lot less than that.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the “Dawkins Scale” refers to a seven point scale Dawkins proposed in The God Delusion. A one on this scale represents absolute certainty that god exists, a seven is absolute certainty that god doesn’t exist. The point he’s making is that atheists generally fall on the “6”, not the “7”. It’s a useful explanation of the fact that atheism is the product of doubt, not certainty.
But certainty appeals to a lot of people, so when Dawkins talks about this publicly there’s often a backlash. People in the media stammer about how Dawkins is uncertain and concedes that there might be a god afterall. They don’t seem to understand that he’s not actually conceding that in any way. They just see two guys in a debate where one is saying he’s absolutely sure and the other’s saying he holds a tentative position that’s in accordance with the observable evidence. Somehow they don’t see this as an idiot vs. a responsible thinker, but rather they see it as confident guy vs. indecisive guy.
In the context of the book and in the context of some debates, employing this scale makes perfect sense. But before we lean too heavily on it, we should probably point out that this scale can also be applied to any other belief. Does gravity exist? Well, I’m pretty damn sure it does, but as a responsible thinker, I’ve got to go with a 6 on the scale, because if convincing evidence arose to the contrary, I would change my mind. I am not an immutable “7”. We could be part of a computer simulation titled “what if there was gravity?”, so as a proper logician I have to carve out a little, tiny, itsy-bitsy “margin of error” on the gravity thing.
Same thing for evolution, right? I mean, just because all the available data suggests and confirms it, that doesn’t mean that I’m absolutely certain beyond the shadow of a doubt, irrespective of future data. I’d have to hold the responsible position of “6” on the scale. But why hamstring oneself in debate by pointing this out only with respect to the thing you’re arguing about?
I feel the same way every time I hear Dillahunty, or anyone else for that matter, talk about Agnostic Atheism vs. Gnostic Atheism. Before we start making this distinction, somebody show me one of these gnostic atheists. Show me somebody who says that no matter what level of convincing evidence could be offered to the contrary, they would never believe in god. Show me somebody who says he would still be an atheist if god appeared in the sky before the whole world at once and said, “I am god, sorry about all the mysteriousness and shit and to prove my godness you’ll note that all the people who had cancer are now cured.” Show me that guy and then let’s start carving atheism up into gnostic and agnostic.
This isn’t just a semantic thing. And it’s not just a “trip-you-up-in-an-argument” thing either. The use of these devices is actually fucking this movement up internally. I can’t tell you often I see atheists offering up false-equivalency compromises with this nonsense. Search “Dawkins Scale” on Twitter and it won’t take long to find an atheist saying something like, “I’ll admit that being a 7 on the Dawkins scale is as ridiculous as being a 1”
What? No the fuck it isn’t! That’s a complete misreading of the point of the rhetorical device. Keep in mind that on this scale, 7 actually represents the thing that is right. 1 represents the thing that is wrong. The point of the Dawkins Scale is to point out the flaw in “Absolute Certainty”. But if you’re going to be absolutely certain of something, it’s still way better to be certain about the thing that conforms to all the known evidence.
Substitute anything else for the god assumption and it becomes painfully obvious. Somebody who is absolutely certain that the earth is round should, for the proper employment of scientific thinking, concede that overwhelming evidence could sway him… from a pedantic, vulcan, it’s-an-oblate-spheroid-bitch point of view. But that doesn’t mean that he’s exactly as wrong as somebody who is absolutely convinced that the earth is flat.
There’s a cat on my lap right now. If I was pressed, I’d admit that it could be a hallucination, it could be a robot, it could be a phantasm from another dimension taking the form of my cat. But if I say, “No, damn it, this is definitely my cat”, it may be technically wrong, but it’s certainly not as wrong as “No, damn it, this is definitely a phantasm from another dimension.”
The problem is with 7 point scales and binary choices like gnostic and agnostic is that there’s no way to truly express the 6.999999-ness of one’s atheism. If god appeared before me right now and we had a twenty minute conversation, I’d assume I’d lost my fucking mind before I’d assume that it actually happened. It would take a hell of alot more than than personal experience to overturn my conviction. I’d need tangible evidence that could be verified by multiple sources and, in addition, I’d need volumes of refutations for the hundreds of logical contradictions his existence entails. I’d need a world-overturning amount of evidence. I’d need an amount of evidence that one can reasonably assume will never exist.
So as to where I fall on the Dawkins Scale, it ultimately comes down to the question of how many 9s you can put after the decimal place before you run out of 9s.
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow skeptic, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to sharpen Occam’s Razor?
Is another old book club making outrageous claims?
I’m starting to think god is worse than Oprah.
In our lead story tonight, Oxford University researcher and author Kathleen Taylor made waves this week when she suggested that religious fundamentalism may one day be a curable mental illness. Now, when you and I hear this statement, the only new information is the word “Curable”, but when the religious folks hear it they’re once again forced to confront the fact that believing in magic people in the clouds is, technically, fucking nuts.
I hope the cure for religion comes out in some sort of weaponized form. I’m picturing a reality dart, and you can heal the radically ignorant right in the side of the neck with a blowgun.
This is only the latest in a long line of academics accidentally forgetting that we’re supposed to publicly ignore the fact that extreme religiosity and mental illness spend a lot of venn diagrams spooning.
Definitely got a shared region in the extra-wide vagina shape. That’s more like scissoring than spooning, I guess.
The media reports it like it’s a scandal and then they dig up a bunch of peacemaker psychologists who dutifully point out that technically it’s not a mental illness until it interferes with your day to day life and at the same time they’ll dutifully not point out that by the same argument believing that you’re Napoleon and your left testicle reminds you to water the house-plants is also not de-facto crazy.
And the Napoleon left testicle belief system is VASTLY more likely to be true than those of any major religion.
Worst thing that happens if insane people become radically orthodox about science is they make an atheist podcast. Nobody’s ever protested a theist funeral, or bombed a fetus rescue clinic, in the name of Darwin or Dawkins.
But don’t worry, it’s not like we’re going to now have a rational conversation about this topic, as the major media outlets have reported that, in fact, the pachyderm droppings on the loveseat were likely man-made and placed there intentionally.
Pay no attention to the Republican mascot behind the curtain, taking a shit on society’s couch.
Could religious fundamentalism be treated as a mental illness? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/kathleen-taylor-religious-fundamentalism-mental-illness_n_3365896.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
And speaking of fundamentalism and mental illness, our next story brings us to Kentucky and Ken Ham’s ailing “Ark Park” where Ham is inadvertently demonstrating the absurdity of the Noah story by showing how hard it is to get an ark of that size built when you’ve got modern shipping channels and $25 million dollars at your disposal.
Well Noah had the old-man strength going. You know how the best softball players are 45-year-olds? Noah did all the ark stuff between the ages of 480 and 600, so unfair advantage.
Plus, Ken Ham probably has far fewer Jewish slaves at his disposal for the project.
In addition to not having enough money to build the ark that will fail to serve as the centerpiece for this not-likely-to-exist theme park, Ham’s team is also not building other Old Testament attractions, including not breaking ground on a Tower of Babel observations deck and not moving ahead on a planned “Ten Plagues” themed ride.
I think they need to reread Genesis 11. They’re constructing a replica of the tower whose construction got god to smite everyone. That’s like re-airing the seizure-inducing anime clip.
Many atheists will remember hearing a lot about this park a couple of years ago when the state of Kentucky agreed to award it huge tax incentives to build it’s testament to credulous stupidity. It would seem now that the “Ark Encounter” has found a clever way to circumvent that controversy by failing to raise the requisite funds for construction until the proposed tax incentives expire in May of next year.
So Kentucky said, “Yeah, you guys can have these huge tax breaks, as long as you can build an impossible boat and an entire infinite tower to heaven before next May.”
Ark Park having trouble: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/noahs-ark-theme-park_n_3367579.html?utm_hp_ref=religion
And in “Are-They-Still-On-About-That-Shit?” News, a number of prominent Baptist leaders have called for a mass withdrawal of support for the Boy Scouts of America after they slight and decades overdue backpedaling of institutionalized of bigotry. Arguing that we can’t allow gay people to learn how to tie such good knots, homophobic pastors across the nation are urging their flocks to cut their ties with the Boy Scouts.
“I know this seems like it’s about the gay thing, in the standard cause and effect sense. But we’re just uncomfortable – in general – of a dozen 10-year-old boys and a weird adult in a tent, wearing matching short shorts and ascots. Whether or not there are any actual homosexuals present, it’s just too faggoty.”
Pastor Tim Reed of Arkansas forestalled that argument when he told a CNN reporter that (quote) “It’s not a hate thing here”, adding a bunch of other thinly veiled lies and bullshit that he has to tell himself to continue to believe that he’s not a bigoted anal-wart that cherry picked through one of the most egregiously horrific parts of the entire bible, bypassed laws against tattoos, fabric mixing and crustacean eating and selectively chose to enforce the one line he found that reinforced his hateful bigotry.
“It’s not that they’re gay, it’s that they’re evil BECAUSE they’re gay. It’s all in the book, you can check. Our hands are tied.”
“We’d also be this pissed if they endorsed uncovering your wife’s daughter’s nakedness!”
Sorry Pastor, but it’s still racist when you say hockey players are better than basketball players at water polo.
Baptists plan exodus from Boy Scouts: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/31/southern-baptists-to-urge-churches-and-members-to-cut-boy-scout-ties/
And in quasi-constitutional legislative acrobatics this week, we’ve got the state of Ohio hoping to pass a bill that would award high school credits to kids for going to church and learning about how evil gay people are and stuff.
I’d be willing to give PE credit to altar boys, especially if, you know . . . they swallowed.
Proponents of the bill argue that (quote) “It’s an attempt to reinstall some of the same things that made this country great”, which, in the mind of Democratic representative Bill Patmon, include religious indoctrination and rewarding people for knowing things that are wrong. Patmon went on to complain that we’ve taken prayer out of the schools, we’ve separated religious demonstration from learning areas, we’ve taken religious displays out of schools, I mean, it’s getting to where there’s hardly any way at all to exploit the public schools to evangelize.
“Some of these kids are going 7 . . . 8 hours in a row at school, in the middle of December, without seeing a single piece of visual Jesus propaganda. Do the math. You just can’t brain rape kids under these conditions. I thought this was America.”
Opponents of the law point out that giving educational credit for things that aren’t actually “education” kind of defeats the purpose and then they just kind of stare at the proponents and wonder why this isn’t enough to persuade them.
I got my health credits in high school by interning with a psychic chiropractor who cured headaches with leeches. And now look at me. I run a lucrative wishing well business.
Shifty payouts for religion by state of Ohio: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130601/NEWS/306010059/Ohio-may-OK-public-school-religion-credits?gcheck=1
And from the “Who-Will-They-Molest-Now?” file, Las Vegas’ oldest Catholic School will be shutting its doors permanently at the end of the academic year. The St. Joseph Catholic School has been instrumental in Vegas’ international reputation as a paragon of chastity and virtue since 1948, but a steep drop off in people gullible enough to entrust their children to Catholics has led to the school’s inevitable demise.
I think it’s telling, that the oldest Catholic school in Las Vegas, is named after Jesus’ stepdad, the patron saint of some other dude fucking your wife…the patron saint of “cuckolded by god’s dick”
Over the past decade about a quarter of all Catholic schools have been shuttered nationwide leading many to believe that god has abandoned us and no longer cares about the travails of mankind, instead focusing his divine attention on beating Contra without using the cheat code.
It’s all about the spreader gun. Maybe the laser near the end. The flamethrower didn’t get the good blast radius effect until Contra 2.
Beating Contra without the cheat code is like god… I’ll believe it when I see it.
Oldest Vegas Catholic school to close permanently: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/may/30/citys-oldest-catholic-school-falls-victim-low-enro/#axzz2UqCW1wru
And in this week’s forecast on international demon activity we find that despite papal intervention, the guy who thought that he was filled with devil spawn is still fucking crazy. Despite the Pope Frankenberry’s exorcism that wasn’t, a wheelchair bound man identified in the press as Angel V. insists that he is still possessed by demons.
Looks like he has a malpractice case, at the very least. They seem to have botched a fairly routine procedure. But I’ve seen a lot of spinals, dude, and it sounds like this Angel guy is a fake.
The fucking goldbricker claims to have undergone more than 30 exorcisms and somehow no matter how much holy water they throw at him while intoning latin platitudes, his clearly malfunctioning brain refuses to be miraculously cured.
What’s the problem, he’s hearing demonic voices, telling him to kill babies and eat them? Everyone get those sometimes, right? We don’t all have to act on them every time.
Instead of responsibly suggesting he seek psychiatric help, prominent Catholics affirm his harmful delusions by saying things like (quote) “the demons that live in him do not want to leave,” and (quote) “God exists”.
Man exorcised by Pope still possessed by demons: http://www.newsmax.com/edwardpentin/pope-excorcism-possessed-angel/2013/05/29/id/506975
And finally tonight, a story that comes to us from Friendly Atheist, prolific author and inaugural Farnsworth quoter Hemant Mehta and his Friendly Atheist blog. It would seem that a couple of parents in Utah have finally found the secret to instilling the importance of good moral judgement on their children: Cold hard cash.
Mother Katie Hughes had her daughters sign a contract that promises a reward of $1000 at the age of 20 if the now pre-pubescent girls can refrain from the use of drugs, alcohol and premarital sex between now and then.
“We’re willing to pay as much as 34 cents a day for you to have a shitty, sheltered childhood.”
Seems like a non-binding legal contract might not be the best way to tackle the subject. Are kids gonna need to start bringing legal counsel to have “the talk” ?
So yeah, setting aside the obvious fact that in another eight years these girls could earn that much in a night by breaking the pledge, one also has to doubt that the paltry sum of a thousand 2026 dollars will remain a sufficient carrot to forestall teen angst.
So, nine days of future minimum wage later . . . or drunken orgasms and cocaine now…
Mother offers daughter $1000 to stay a virgin: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/06/05/christian-mother-to-daughter-if-you-remain-abstinent-until-youre-20-ill-give-you-1000/
And since there’s nothing better to close on than drunken orgasms and cocaine, that’ll do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always for joining me.
And when we come back, Lucinda will join us to bust open our bibles and dig into the dirty parts.
Song:
After writing poems for Genesis and Exodus, I felt obligated to the Herculean task of capturing the mind-raping insanity of Leviticus in two rhyming minutes. To complicate matters, I used a weird rhyme scheme and upon recitation it had this really awful “middle aged white guy rapping” feel to it.
In an effort to counterbalance that I put a little music behind it, but I want to apologize to any musicians who might be listening. I was really under the gun on this thing so it’s basically A minor and E the whole way.
So without further ado, I present the book of Leviticus in rhyme:
Leviticus in Rhyme:
Let me tell you how to sacrifice a goat, bitch; First you cut it’s throat which,
seems a little mean and maybe more than a little gross, it’s
Nothing when compared to; What the Levites bear through,
Details of the entrails should be plenty enough to scare you.
The fat goes on a pyre; Set that shit on fire,
The smell’s a rancid hell but it’s the odor god desires.
How to kill a bird now; Case you hadn’t heard how,
Twist it’s little heard until it’s dead and when it’s burned, bow.
This is for atonement; Offer no postponement,
Couple jugs of blood is a critical component.
Now a proclamation; Regarding ordination,
light the candles right or you might risk assassination …From the Lord.
Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie,
Thou shalt not do it guy on guy,
Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.
Let me tell you what to eat bitch; Tell you who to sleep with
Tell you how to burn the heretics about that bewitch.
Tell you ‘bout your penis; And all it’s uncleanness,
For someone all-knowing I’m not much of a hygienist.
Oh, and if it pleases; Quickly on diseases,
Sacrifice a turtle dove if anybody sneezes.
Menstrual blood and semen; Need a lot of cleanin’
Best I never catch you whorin’ with all those goat demons,
Tell you ‘how to shave, man; Who you can enslave, man,
Tell you how to stone the motherfucks who misbhave and,
If you disobey me; I will not just slay thee,
Many generations I’ll be all up in your game, see …I’m the Lord.
Thou shalt be pure, thou shalt be true,
Thou shalt not get a damned tattoo,
Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.
Thou shalt speak up, Thou shalt not cheat,
Thou shalt not dine on rancid meat
Or stick your dick in things that bleat.
Thou shalt not mix thy rye and wheat.
Thou shalt be just, thou shalt be kind,
Thou shalt not trick the deaf and blind,
Or touch cadavers left behind.
Or let two fabrics be combined.
Thou shalt fear god, thou shalt be straight,
Thou shalt not look to kin with hate,
Thou shalt not ever masturbate,
Thou shant put weasel on your plate.
Thou shalt not rob, thou shalt be bold
Thou shalt rise up before the old,
Don’t get your daughter’s pussy sold,
Thou shalt give all my priests your gold,
…Thou shalt be easily controlled.
Thus spoke the Lord.
Outro:
That brings us to a quick recognition of this week’s most astonishing vertebrates, Steven, Lindsay, Ward and other Lindsay. These four vampire hunting, ninja decimating, time bomb deactivating, bus jumping heroes have distinguished themselves above all other carbon based lifeforms this week by giving us money. Drawing on stupendous reserves of tenacity, intelligence and spare cash lying around, these four fine folks have provided an example that all tenacious, intelligent people with spare cash lying around should aspire to.
If you’d like to join these noble few in the pantheon of Scatheist glory, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Oh, and Lindsay, if you’re listening, I was talking about the other Lindsay when I said, “other Lindsay”, not you.
That does it for tonight’s show, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with some hastily put together shit that’ll keep me up until 2 in the morning at least twice this week. But if you can’t wait that long without risking a stress induced seizure, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and our erratically Tweeted Twitter feed.
Oh, and please help us spread the word about the show. If you know any atheists that have auditory canals, please give us a plug when you can. I put every diatribe up on YouTube and I’ll be putting the Leviticus song up this week as well, so if you wouldn’t be risking will-altering alienation from your family, I’d humbly ask that you give one of our videos a share on Facebook or whatever.
A quick thanks to Heath and Lucinda for joining me tonight and to a bunch of dead Israelites for making the jokes so easy on the Holy Babble segment. And a quick thanks to you, dear listener, for giving us half an hour of your life. We’ll be working really hard to earn another thirty minutes next week.
If you have questions, comments or death threats you’ll find all the contact info on the Contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Episode 15 – Partial Transcript
by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright
Sponsor:
Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new anti-erection medication for all of your overnight camping trips with known pedaphiles and children needs. The flaccidating power of new Celibacyalis will tame even the most immaculate ejaculate.
Celibacyalis, because only the Pope can be infallible, but anyone can be in-phallus-able.
And now, the Scathing Atheist.
Intro:
It’s Thursday, it’s May 30th and what the fuck Detroit? You were up 3-1 in that goddamned series.
I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from bohemian New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.
On this week’s episode:
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A recent law change in Texas will make it legal to not break the law,
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Iowa takes concrete steps to be dumber and less vaccinated,
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And we’ll make you laugh so hard a little bit of pee comes out,
But first, the Diatribe:
Diatribe:
I’d like to start off tonight with, an update on the soundclip that opened our show last week. And for the apparently sizable percentage of our audience with bong related memory deficiencies, it was the one where Wolf Blitzer makes almost as much of an ass of himself as he did when he went on Jeopardy and proved himself to be biologically fungal in mental function. And if you somehow missed that clip on the YouTube, the Twitter and the Facebook, the story goes like this:
Man means woman, woman’s holding baby in front of a house recently destroyed by a tornado, man is a salivating news whore so he puts a camera in front of her. So here’s this feeble-minded simpleton who managed to score a negative $4600 on the dumbed down Jeopardy they give to celebrities and he’s vamping for questions so he asks the poor woman if she remembers to thank god.
Now, I can’t really blame Wolf Blitzer for assuming that the random Oklahoman he was talking to was Christian. You’re gonna win that bet a lot more than you’re gonna lose it. Hell, it’s not like answering “What is Jerusalem?” when the clue was “Jesus hailed from this town”, but it’s still a stupid thing to ask someone about whom you know nothing. But it’s Wolf “which appendages do the pants go on again?” Blitzer so you expect shit like that.
But what followed is something you wouldn’t expect. Instead of looking at her shoes and muttering “well… yeah, whatever, I thank him, sure” she very politely and somewhat timidly said, “well, no, because I’m an atheist”. And then Wolf laughs. Like retarded people getting pudding .
The woman he was talking to at the time, now identified as one Rebecca Vitsmun, didn’t have to self-identify as an atheist. She could have just shrugged. But she used the A word. She said on national TV (albeit a channel nobody watches) that no, she doesn’t thank God because she doesn’t believe in God. And if anyone had been watching, they might have said, “Hey look, there’s a regular person with real problems and an adorable baby that isn’t religious and seems like a normal human.”
Keep in mind that normally there’s no reward for saying, “No, I’m an atheist”. In fact, when you live in Oklahoma there’s often something quite antipodal to a reward. If she was doing it with any end goal in mind it was probably a subtle reminder to Wolf and the other newscasters out there that they shouldn’t assume people are religious. It’s a bit of a sacrifice to send a very important message.
Wolf Blitzer won’t learn, of course, because he’s so stupid that he doesn’t even know he’s too stupid to go on Jeopardy, but I’m willing to bet that a number of other news anchors are taking notes. But not Wolf. Because it was rainy that day and his crayons don’t work in the rain. And I’m sorry if it seems like I’m focusing too much on Wolf’s mental-impairments, but we are talking about a guy who once looked at a bowl of penne on a television screen and said, “What is fettucini?” I mean, fettucini Wolf? Are you fucking kidding me?
So I heard this silly little soundclip and decided to open the show with it. And I wasn’t the only one who thought it deserved a share because within 24 of the live broadcast it was all over the atheist blogosphere and all over the english speaking world atheists were giving Rebecca an enthusiastic fist pump. But the story doesn’t end here, because it turns out that wasn’t all we were giving her.
Enter comedian and secular church co-founder Doug Stanhope who sees this thing and realizes that it’s a perfect time to show the world the benefit of putting your faith in the faithless. So he started an Indiegogo campaign called “Atheists Unite” to raise money to help our latest viral celebrity rebuild. And it turned out that we atheists thought it a fantastic idea.
So thanks to the efforts of Stanhope, the inexplicable morality of non-believers and the power of the atheist blogosphere, the secular community was able to raise $50,000 for Vitsmun in less than three quarters of a day with more pouring in to help her and other recently smited people in Oklahoma.
Now, originally I was going to tack this update on to the end of the headlines section, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this story represented every single step between now and secular majority. It begins with normal people standing up and proudly (if timidly) proclaiming their atheism. It ends with secular humanism stepping in and serving those functions that we’ve left to churches for so long.
Christians have a lot of places to go when shit hits the fan. Within hours of the storm clouds clearing there were religious missionaries there to help the religious people cope. And most of these people are probably just good people that want to help. They’d be happy to help the atheists too, but they’re not equipped. They can only exacerbate the stress by talking about god’s plan and asking us if we remembered to thank Super Jesus.
In researching for this show, I come across a lot of shit that makes me wonder if there’s any point in fighting this fight. I see laws being passed today that the 18th century would be embarassed by. I see world leaders justifying their actions with Aesop’s fables. I see people being killed by the hundreds for believing in the right imaginary friend the wrong way. And it makes me want to start a podcast about hockey or something.
But once in awhile I come across a story like this and it gives me hope. And it reminds me that there’s really some power in this community even if we are a bunch of unherdable pussies. It reminds me that even our weird, nebulous, infrastructureless, leaderless movement can still get things done. And it reminds me that Wolf Blitzer is verifiably nine thousand, two hundred Jeopardy-dollars stupider than NANCY GRACE. And I like being reminded of stuff like that.
Atheist Community raises money for Wolf Blitzer’s surprise Oklahoma atheist: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/24/has-the-oklahoma-atheist-been-saved/
And Proof that Wolf is really that stupid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVC28oemocA
Headlines:
Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow ignorance wrangler, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to corral the flock?
I’m trying really hard to be the shepherd.
In our lead story tonight, it looks like we’re all going to heaven, unless, of course, the infallible guy was wrong, which, according to the people who believe him to be infallible, he was. The story begins at morning mass where the new, controversial pontiff controversially declared that everybody could get into heaven even if they’re not Catholic… and there was controversy.
I love when the pious get meaningless news…that they believe to be terrible news. Turns out they’ve spent their entire seratonin-deprived lives hedging their bets on the losing end of Pascal’s Wager. What’s wrong? You been completely wasting your time confiding your darkest secrets to an asexual man in the next stall every Sunday?
Could have just as well been going to a Minnesota airport mens room, and getting more than just your ego stroked?
Couldn’t be less productive than confession. Anyway, the atheist community, who, truth be told, could give a shit less what some senile old coot thinks about our chances of making it to space paradise, welcomed the statement and gave the pope a pat on the back for trying. In fact, many people of a number of different faiths welcomed the statement, but you can bet your ass that none of them were Catholic.
As quickly as they could rev up the holy-laptop…
Is that a Gateway… to Heaven?
No, they’re pretentious so it’s probably an I-Maccabees.
Wouldn’t they spring for the Adonai-Pad?
Well, whatever they used, the underlings that pull the pope’s strings took to the series of tubes to clarify the statement and assure faithful Catholics that what he really meant was the exact opposite of what he said. Despite infallible rumors to the contrary, only Catholics get sky-cake.
Nope, too late. You heard him, and like you said he’s infallible. “All my atheist sins of reason done been warshed away . . . Come on in boys, the water is fine.”
It’s gotta hurt to find out from Megatron that the heathen Autobots can have real cake, and sky cake, and eat it too. That’s like blowing someone for drugs that you’re not going to take, and then finding out they’ve been giving away free drugs to atheists the whole time.
Pope Decides Atheists Can Go to Heaven: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/23/heaven-for-atheists-pope-sparks-debate/
And in “It’s-Not-Praying-If-I-Don’t-Agree-With-You” news, Arizona legislator Steve Smith called for a metaphysical mulligan last week after atheist representative Juan Mendez profaned that body’s ritual of morning incantations by offering his own prayer to start the session. Steve Smith, who, in addition to being two washed up NFL wide-outs, is apparently also an old, white, bigoted fuck-plunger, was incensed by the audacity of equality and offered a second prayer in (quote) “repentance” for the godless heathen’s prayer.
That’s weird, because normally Representative Mendez arrives very late to these sessions, as Arizona law requires that he show his ID to any white person that sees him along the way.
Sounds like Smith is being fairly open-minded. He’s willing to allow anybody – even an atheist – to deliver a Christian prayer before the session?
Smith offered this hilariously stupid analogy to justify his actions, “If you don’t love this country… don’t say ‘I want to lead this body in the pledge’ and stand up there and say… ‘You know what, I love England’.”
Yeah we can’t have politicians wasting their time dwelling on societal problems. We need them focused on old books.
So apparently the constitutionally dubious opening prayer is okay and doesn’t endorse a particular faith group, but if you don’t pray to Mary’s Baby-Daddy, the Christians still get to pray anyway.
Michael Richards isn’t racist . . . We had Chris Rock open for him.
Atheist Prayer Not Good Enough For Arizona Lawmaker: http://news.yahoo.com/arizona-house-non-prayer-sparks-christian-213521848.html
And in military news, the state of Texas has issued a preemptive strike in the war on Christmas with House Bill 308, which protects a teacher or student’s rights to say “Merry Christmas” without repercussions. It also gives the districts the right to put up Christmas decorations, too. So apparently they can open the gates of the prisons and let all those “Merry Christmas” wishin’, mistletoe-hangin’ hoodlums back out on the streets.
I heard this legislation is just a piggy back on another larger bill, re-affirming that under Texas law, murder is still frowned upon. The amended murder ban would also include an exclamation point at the end. Texans want to show how serious they are about not murdering, unless of course, you’re paid by the government to inject people with poison.
Now, as an atheist, my ears always perk up when I hear about state legislators making things legal that are already legal and you don’t have to dig too deeply into this one to see what the real goal is. The bill doesn’t change a single letter of any law anywhere. What it does is send a firm message that atheists can go fuck themselves if they think they’re comin’ after the baby Jesus and our manger scene.
Well, if they’re worried about somebody stealing the baby Jesus from their tax-embezzlement-funded, life-sized shoebox diorama, why don’t they just nail him down?
Are they sensitive about that for some reason?
And just to clarify the visual gag I was using during a podcast, my arms were extended outward as I made that suggestion.
Who says sight-gags don’t work on audio? The bill specifically states that Christmas decorations are fine as long as there is at least one symbol from one other faith somewhere. Like, a menorah in the closet or a buddha in the attic or something.
Like a Jew under the floorboards?
…at least you didn’t say in an urn.
…or oven.
In fact, it even says that “at least one secular scene or symbol” is sufficient to offset the Christian-ness of a nativity scene leading one to ask, what the fuck is a “secular” symbol? I mean, are they saying as long as there’s a cross and a non-cross object, it’s okay?
Crosses are all about perpendicular, so they must mean secular objects like 2 lines that are extremely parallel.
“I mean, sure, that’s a diorama of Christ on the cross, but look at this secular umbrella stand next to it, so… you know?”
I guess representations of factual a priori knowledge would be secular objects.
I’m sure when questions like these come up, the highly-educated members of the Texas legislature routinely discusses Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the concepts behind the (analytic / synthetic) and (a priori / a posteriori) distinctions.
Yes, I’m sure that Rick Perry can both comprehend and spell those concepts.
Texas mounts preemptive strike in the War on Christmas: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/24/texas-set-to-pass-bill-protecting-the-phrase-merry-christmas-from-well-no-one-really/
And in morbidly-obese-gubernatorial news, New Jersey governor Chris Christie has decided that they’re pretty much recovered from that hurricane shit and now they’ve got a spare 11 and a quarter million dollars to give to seminaries for capital improvements. And no, I don’t have to be fucking kidding you, because I’m not.
You’ve must have been fucking kidding me when you said “I don’t have to be fucking kidding you”.
I wasn’t.
The appropriations are tucked away amid 174 less questionable grants going to 44 less questionable colleges around the state. But if you go a-diggin’ you’ll find two line items totalling $11.25 million going to two religious schools. And I’m not talking “We’re Notre Dame and we love Jesus and we’re religious” religious schools, I’m talking about “We’re training religious people to be more religious and only people of our religion can come here” religious schools.
First of all, I’m not ok with Notre Dame getting any public money if they’re going to teach students about fictional characters like god and Manti Teo’s girlfriend. Also, after doing some google images research on this, I’m fairly certain that former Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weiss is the same person as governor Christie.
Hard to believe considering that when Sandy hit, Christie was able to mount a defense.
The two grants include a $650,000 grant to Princeton Theological Seminary and a stereotype reinforcing $10.6 million to the Beth Medrash Govoha rabbinical school. I think it’s worth noting that the latter of the two not only excludes non-Jews, but non-men as well so one must invoke exponents to express the unconstitutional nature of these grants.
Really?!?! $11.25 million dollars going to teach clergy? How much does it cost to build a new pseudo-science lab? Are they demonstrating scripture concepts with large hadron colliders now?
Something strikes me odd about a rabbinical school modernizing anyway.
Chris Christie Wants to Funnel Millions in Taxpayer Dollars to Seminaries: https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/paying-for-praying-nj-governor-seeks-to-award-taxpayer-millions-to
And in “If-We-Stop-Testing-These-Kids-They’ll-Stop-Failing” News, the Iowa state legislature recently passed House File 215 in an effort to lower the bar of homeschooling standards so far that a person might theoretically trip over it. HF 215 ensures the success of every child by removing any standard that would require them to learn or do anything.
Is this in response to an outcry that Iowa parents were making their homeschooled children too smart?
Or maybe too healthy, as among the standards on the chopping block here is the requirement that homeschooled children be vaccinated
Most homeschooled children in Iowa are baptised, so why would they need vaccinations?
What’s worse is that some of this other shit is worse. This thing goes from relaxed to catatonic with revisions like:
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Homeschooled children no longer have to spend a set number of days a year learning things
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Homeschooled children no longer have to learn any things
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Homeschooled children never have to demonstrate knowledge of things
What is this, “No Child Pushed Ahead? Can parents get vouchers to cover the costs of not teaching?
Just the latest in Iowa’s aggressive strategy to end Mississippi’s reign as the stupidest state in the country.
And that’s a competitive category.
Iowa deregulates home-schooling: ttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/05/27/new-legislation-will-allow-iowas-homeschooling-parents-to-not-teach-their-children/
And in “We-Can-No-Longer-Afford-To-Be-Picky” news, the Church of England recently unveiled plans to allow people with vaginas to become bishops. After decades spent debating something the rest of the world had figured out so thoroughly it had long been encoded in law, the Church of England had decided that women have functional brains, too.
The Catholic Church needs to take a cue here. This would put a huge dent in the rape case numbers. I’m not saying female priests wouldn’t be capable of abusing their power, but it would end up being consensual way more of the time. When I was a 12-year-old boy, I would have happily taken a BJ from a toothless old nun.
12 years old? I’d still take a… oh, nevermind.
So perhaps it was for the toothless blowjobs,, perhaps it’s because you can’t fuck something up if it never has any actual results anyway or maybe it was spurred on by a genuine change of heart, the important thing to note is that they’re not going to rush into this. They’re only one full century behind modern thought on this so they’re gonna give it a couple more years before they revoke their bigotry.
This sounds a lot like the way the Republican Party is being forced to reluctantly embrace colored people.
And estrogened people at the same time.
Now, I have to point this out: In every article I saw on this they say that the church made “concessions” to the people who opposed women bishops, but I couldn’t find any details on that and I’m dying to know what that would entail. I mean, what, they can be bishops but I can still call them “Toots” and they have to make me a sandwich if I ask?
Listen guys, the female bishop thing is happening, but as a concession . . . From now on, “No” means “Yes”, and “Yes” means “Anal”.
Church of England to Allow Women Bishops in 2015: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/24/us-britain-church-bishops-idUSBRE94N0RV20130524
And finally tonight in our international forecast on demonic activity, we turn to Madrid where the devil seems to be winning one fiddle-battle after another. An anonymous spokeswoman for the archdiocese of Madrid told the Associated Press that they had only one priest who was fully trained in devil-wrestling and that just wasn’t enough.
Is a spokeswoman like a female spokesman? Like a woman talking?
I doubt it… they’re Catholic.
Now, apparently you can only make the normal water turn into magic devil-kryptonite if you’ve been authorized by a bishop to do so and, of course, the Vatican is well aware of how silly the whole exorcism thing looks to everyone except idiots. As evidence, I offer the recent shit show that erupted when stories got out that one might have been performed in St. Peter’s Square last week by Pope San Francisco Treat.
You’ve been managing to get lots of mileage out of Pope Francis nicknames. This time you’ve got him as gay rice.
Thanks you. I project that by episode 24 I’ll be using shit like Pope Fart-rancis so enjoy it while you can. But anyway, this leaves Spain in a delicate position because they’ve got one exorcist Bruce Lee-ing his way through the Spanish demon-hordes here and he’s in desperate need of reinforcements, but nobody’s coming to help. And somebody please tell Michael Bay that I’d sell him that script cheap if he wants it.
So I would normally make a Michael Bay joke here, but where does one find anything to criticize in films such as Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys 2, The Island, Transformers, Transformers 2, Transformers 3, and Untitled Transformers Sequel?
I think that’s the most offensive thing you’ve ever said on this show, so I guess we can close it out there. Heath, thanks for joining me.
And when we come back, we’ll HTTP colon… oh wait, that’s the link.
The Holy Babble Supplement:
I got an email the other day about our Holy Babble segment and it accused us of just cherry picking out the bad shit and ignoring the good shit.
Well that’s the point of our segment. We’re not fact checking the bible line by line to see how bad their batting average is; we’re out to make circumcised dick jokes at its expense.
And boy does this thing have dick jokes, but I’d still respectlessly disagree with the dink who sent this email because we really haven’t had to do that at all. We’ve really just been telling the story as it’s written and it really is that fucked up. In fact, if anything, we’ve left out some of the most fucked-up stuff so that we’d have time to talk about the spattering of good stuff.
Non-evil stuff anyway.
Right. So as evidence of that, we’d like to offer you the top five horribly fucked up things we didn’t talk about when we broke down the first two books of the Bible in a segment we like to call…
The HOLY BABBLE… SUPPLEMENT
5) Genesis 6.
Now, we skimmed over the whole Noah’s Ark bit because plenty has been said about what ridiculous horseshit it is, so when we talked about it, we never even mentioned what an implausible concept it is. Who feeds what to who? What are they drinking? And who’s shoveling all the shit?
Sounds like an impossible to solve LSAT question. If you have a bag of grain, and 2 foxes, and 2 hens, and 2 of every other animal, on one side of the river, and an impossible ark on the other side . . . Also, why did the birds need an ark to survive a flood?
And what about the amphibians? And where did Noah go to pick up two polar bears? And how did they keep everything from fucking everything?
Seems like if FEMA had hired this Noah guy before Katrina, blacks might not be extinct in New Orleans.
Yeah, they definitely needed a few more cubits of emergency housing. Now, to keep things fair, I did look at what the apologists had to say about these questions and according to AIG, the ark would have produced about 11 metric tonnes of shit a day, a quota that Answers In Genesis can only aspire to.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v2/n2/caring-for-the-animals
4) Exodus 21:7
This is a verse that starts with the words, “When a man sells his daughter as a slave,” and doesn’t then go on to say, “you will castrate him with a rusty mayonnaise lid and let him bleed to death in the public square.” How could we possibly be cherry picking the worst stuff if we skipped over the bit where it outlines the ethical way to sell your daughter as a slave?
Actually, I assumed I would cherry pick something from this, but their guidelines on this are surprisingly reasonable. It even includes guarantees the whores won’t be sold to foreigners . . . so that’s nice.
True. It even encourages you to continue to feed her after you get bored of fucking her.
It also says that if you buy her for your son and she marries the slave you have to treat the slave like your daughter. Which sounds good until you consider that one book earlier Lot was tossing his daughters to rape-starved sodomites.
Which brings us to…
3) Genesis 19:30-38
Here we have a lovely little story about those same daughters repeatedly force-fucking their dad. It doesn’t set anything up or connect anything to anything. It’s just there to give perverse goat-herders an image to jackoff to and insult Moabites.
I guess the lesson here is “Dad’s dick is better than no dick at all.”
That’s the moral, yeah. So in this passage, Lot, after escaping from Sodom with his two date-rapist daughters and his favorite salt-lick, unwillingly impregnates his daughters with two inbred, incestuous, polydactyl prison babies.
Must have been legitimate rape.
Well, the Jews were probably worried about future persecution on account of their genetic superiority, so a few extra fingers and chromosomes just made sense. Nobody figured every single Moabite would settle in the same 3-block radius in Brooklyn.
I guess the one good thing about being gang raped by sodomites is that you won’t get pregnant…
I wouldn’t say that’s the ONLY perk about being gang-raped by sodomites.
2) Exodus 21:20-21
There’s no way to dress this one up worse than it comes off in the actual bible, so here it is from the NIV version:
“Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”
I can’t help but picture a Jewish version of a Southern plantation owner. Like Woody Allen instead of Don Johnson in Django.
Yes, Exodus was full of fair and equitable treatment of one’s slaves. For example, while one was encouraged to regularly beat one’s slaves and children, the gouging out of a slaves eye was frowned upon. In fact, the rule says that if you knock out the slaves eye you have to let him go, so I figure if I was a slave, I’d just be moving my eyes in front of the whip constantly.
1) Genesis 9:20-27
And finally, the most perplexing parable in the book to this point, we didn’t even mention the crazy post-deluvian antics of Noah and his dancing weiner.
This is the “If your dad’s a drunk, you need to walk around your house backwards wearing a cape” chapter.
Right, apparently they were supposed to walk around shading the lower half of their vision like the Bela Lugosi double in Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Not sure how the fuck we forgot to mention this part, considering I plan to be an alcoholic father one day.
As it turns out, if I want to smite my son and get him sent to hell, all I have to do is get wasted and pass out while hanging brain. Or more directly, just wake him up with a tea bag.
I guess that really shows the concern my dad had for my soul. When I was a kid he would only take his dick out when he was behind me.
I think this chapter is the basis for the penis game in “Waiting”
I never saw that flick. How does that game work? … Oh fuck dude!
Outro:
I had one quick but important announcement before we close things out for the night. In response to a number of requests for Scathing Atheist shwag, Heath and I are commissioning the design of three Scathing Atheist T-Shirts that will be available soon if you’re willing to interpret the word “soon” in a geological sense.
But between now and then, we want your help deciding exactly what to put on those shirts. We’ll be doing shirts for three of our many fine sponsors. I’ll be posting a poll on our blog and on Facebook, so if there’s a particular sponsor you’d wear on a T-Shirt, let us know. You can let us know over Twitter, on Facebook, via email or, if you want to make absolutely sure your vote is counted, you can add your preference to the end of a 5 star review on iTunes.
That’s all the time we’ve got for tonight’s show, but we’ll be back in 168 hours to tackle one of the most infamous books in the bible. If you can’t wait that long, be sure to check out our erratically published blog at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. You’ll also get your daily fix of Scatheism by following us on Twitter and liking us on Facebook. And don’t forget to check out our You-Tube channel, even though everything on it is just a segment pulled from the podcast which you’ve probably already heard.
I want to thank Heath for all his help this week. I also want to thank Reap from the Angry Atheist for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. Hard to believe he had the ten seconds to spare with all the content that dude is producing in a week, so if you haven’t checked out the Angry Atheist yet, I definitely recommend it along with ReapSow Radio, which you’ll find linked on the shownotes for this episode.
But finally and most importantly, we have to take a minute to honor this week’s most sexually attractive human beings, Paul, Dee, Kevin and Graham, who distinguished themselves this week by giving us money. Paul, whose clever inventions and godlike nunchaku skills will one day save humanity; Dee whose wit and sharp mind are the very metric by which future robot generations will measure their intellect; Kevin, whose agility, fearlessness and ability to banter well with supervillains are the envy of masked-vigilantes everywhere and Graham; whose very presence soothes children, moistens vaginas and lengthens telomeres even over Skype. These truly superlative citizens have all earned their place in history and in my heart with their stolid generosity. And we love them all equally, except Graham who we love just a little more because holy shit, the dude donated a hundred bucks. Which was fucking awesome and totally made my week. Thanks bro.
If you, too, would like to earn your eventual spot beside these exceptional bipeds on the Mount Rushmore of altruism and erudition, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Remember, not every donation goes straight to booze and weed. Some of it goes to hosting and stuff.
If you have questions, comments or death threats, you’ll find all the contact info on the contact page of our website. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly and yes, I did have my permission.
Live Blogging the Bible: Deuteronomy 12:31
by Noah Lugeons
God loves a good genocide.
I can’t help but feel like they’re going out of their way to make this god character an asshole so that it’ll be more cathartic when he’s redeemed, but I’ve gotta be honest, even with 61 books to do it, I’m not sure if there’s any way they can make me like this guy.
So in chapter 12 god reminds us why we can’t realistically entertain the “moral guide” notion of the bible by spelling out all the good reasons to thoroughly destroy every member and memory of the cities they’re all about to ravage. This is late in the chapter after a thrilling and detailed reminiscence about proper meat-eating etiquette.
God’s explaining why you shouldn’t worship any other gods or even know about how other people worship, which he reminds us of no fewer than infinity times in the book of Deuteronomy. And in an apparent effort to soften the blow of killing women and children, livestock and slaves, then burning homes, buildings, temples, possessions, clothes and any remnant of a civilization to the ground, Moses takes a minute to remind us just how horrible these societies are:
My first thought was of Abraham taking ol’ Isaac for a midnight stroll so the actual depth of the irony of this passage took me a second to process. God’s in the middle of telling them to kill all of these heathens, even the children. Their god is telling them that they have to burn their enemy’s children because their enemies would burn their children for their god.
But it’s totally still divinely inspired, though…