The Scathing Atheist

by Heath Enwright and Lucinda & Noah Lugeons

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Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new chain of confessional restaurants, Plenary Hollywood, where there’s truth in every booth and respite in every bite.  Come in Tuesdays for half priced Absolution Vodka Martinis because drinking your problems away is every bit as effective as Catholicism.

And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s September 26th and we don’t fuck with Hindus enough.

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

In this week’s episode…

• We discover that the Lone Star State was graded on a scale of 5 stars,

• We’ll learn that you can’t say ‘bomb’ on an airplane, ‘fire’ in a theater or ‘atheist’ on a bus.

• And we’ll manage to make abortion jokes and anal sex jokes at the same time.

But first, the diatribe.

Diatribe

It doesn’t surprise me at all that most Christians haven’t read the bible.  It’s long, it’s repetitive, it’s boring, it’s pointless and it’s stupid.  Why would anyone read that fucking thing?  But what does surprise me is how few of them even know what it’s about.  You couldn’t bother even reading the cliff’s notes, guys?

You constantly hear Christians attributing shit to the bible that isn’t there.  A lot of them will tell you that the bible says, “God helps those who help themselves”.  But not only does that never appear anywhere in the bible, it’s completely antipodal to the bible’s core message.

They’ll tell you the bible says to “Love the sinner, hate the sin”, but, surprise, surprise, that doesn’t come from the bible either.  It comes from St. Augustine’s desperate attempts to dial the bible back a bit.

How about “spare the rod, spoil the child”?  Nope.  Not in the bible.  Don’t get me wrong, the bible certainly endorses the fuck out of beating your children with rods, but somehow god wasn’t able to come up with the pithy pro-child abuse slogan that stuck.

Hell, the other day I was walking by a conversation and heard a guy saying, “Well the bible says, ‘Know Thyself’…”  No, buddy, that was the facade at the temple of Apollo you were thinking of.  But what the hell, it’s good advice, right?  It should be in the bible, right?  So why not attribute it to the bible?

The big problem here is that these jackasses have convinced themselves that the bible is some… book or virtues or something.  They actually think it’s some collection of ethical parables that provides moral guidance.  And who can blame them right?  That’s what everybody told them it was.  That’s what the assholes who know better told them.  It’s not like they’re ever gonna read it and prove them wrong, right?

So instead they bumble around misquoting their own holy book and talking about living their lives by the bible as though that would be desirable… or even legal.

But seriously, the fucking bible!?  It’s the most horrible book on earth.  To pretend that thing’s moral you have to pick cherries like a recently martyred Muslim.  Go open a bible to a random page.  Read a random passage.  I’m willing to bet the vast majority of my penis that you didn’t find anything moral there.  Hell, you’re lucky if you found something morally ambiguous.

You follow the bible do you?  Well how many Amalekites have you killed this month?  How many bulls have you sacrificed at the altar?  How many armed Jewish land conquests have you participated in this year?  Because that’s what this fucking book is about.  I’m reading the damn thing.  You can’t fool me into thinking this is a book about morals.  It’s like if I finally got around to reading the Harry Potter books and found out that there weren’t any wizards in them.

Now, a talented preacher can spin this thing so that it sounds good.  Of course they can, that’s their job.  And that’s fine if you’re in the studio audience, but what about people who are playing the home game?  You’re actually handing people a book that explicitly endorses genocide.  It plainly justifies indiscriminately murdering people that are different than you, that worship different gods than you, that ascribe to different sexual mores than you, that live in different countries than you, that have different genetalia than you… and you’re telling them it’s the be-all, end-all of morality handed down from the all-knowing forger of the universe.  Hard to imagine how that could go wrong.

It’s like replacing the gum in baseball cards with plutonium and saying, “It’s okay, nobody eats the gum.”

A commenter on our Facebook page recently applauded us for our holistic reading of the bible.  He said he felt like it should be required reading for atheists.  Well, I don’t know if I agree with that, but I’d love it if it was at least required reading for Christians.

I don’t honestly think that being an atheist means you have to read the bible, but I do think that honestly reading the bible means you have to be an atheist.

Headlines

Joining me for headlines tonight is a man who loves both head and lines, Heath Enwright.  Heath, are you ready to make Reuters your crack whore?

Not that I need another crack whore, but sure.

In our lead story tonight, from the “Can you quantify delusional?” file. . . Yes you can.   According to a study by LifeWay Research, “[one] third of Americans – and nearly half of evangelical, fundamentalist, or born-again Christians – believe prayer and Bible study alone can overcome serious mental illness.”  

Wait a second… they’re deluded into thinking delusions can cure delusions?  This is like a Christopher Nolan script that isn’t a horrible cheat rushed to the theater to cap a trilogy.

Granted praying and reading the Bible should quickly turn a person atheist, but there ‘s lots of other ways to cure mental afflictions like Christianity.

I assume you’re referring to crusades.

Here’s some more stupidity by the numbers. The church-funded LifeWay Research group accidentally found and presented the following:  More than two thirds of Americans would feel welcome in church . . . if they were mentally ill . . .

Well if they’re gonna write their own punchlines about themselves, then what the fuck are we doing here?!?  That’s just selfish.  

So two thirds of Americans sit in churches thinking to themselves, “you know what make me fit right in here?  Brain damage”.

Right … just as a general strategy point, the church might want to consider NOT sponsoring studies that in any way juxtapose religion and mental institutions.  And also probably not advisable to poll your flock of inmates on what pills they should take in the asylum.

One third of Americans believe prayer can cure mental illness: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/21/prayer-heal-mental-illness_n_3963949.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

Our next story takes us to the “Lone IQ Point State”, where Texas creationists are asking, “If humans evolved from less intelligent primates, why are there still Texas creationists?”

Give us miscegenated liberals a couple more decades, and we’ll breed them out.  

Can’t wait to watch creationism win a Darwin Award.  

Yeah, but between now and then we have to suffer through the oxymoron that is the Texas state Board of Education.  They’re already synonymous with gerrymandering the cerebellums of America’s youth in an effort to rewrite biology, cosmology, physics, anthropology and American history to conform to their narrow, misguided worldview so it should come as no surprise that they’re at it again.

Every house in Texas already has a creationist textbook, where kids can read all about what science would eventually get wrong.  It’s a bestseller.  It’s the best seller ever, literally for Christ’s sake!!!  

But what’s the point in having bibles if you don’t have any throats to cram them down?  So the alarmingly ubiquitary “anti-reality” wing of the Texas electorate is cloaking their efforts to dismantle scientific literacy in the clever but familiar “analyze and evaluate” guise.  Unfortunately for them, Governor Rick Perry doesn’t do “clever” and spilled the beans when he boasted that (quote) “In Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools” during his abbreviated presidential run, which, incidentally, was abbreviated because he thought teaching creationism was brag-worthy.

As long as old white Christian men are legislating the content of Texan education, why not add the widely-held belief in Texas that slavery is a “complicated issue . . . Way I rememmerit, the coloreds was enslavin’ us sometimes too.”  

Well, they pretty much already did that!  This is only the latest skirmish in a long war.  As many of our listeners are aware, the Texas state Board of Education wields inordinate influence over textbook standards throughout the country.  Unlike every other state in the union, Texas adopts a K-12 curriculum on a statewide rather than district by district basis, which means the Texas state Board of Education is the only single textbook purchaser tossing around twenty billion dollars at a time.  And apparently a dollar sign, a 2 and ten zeroes invariably trumps whatever commitment to educational excellence inspires one to be a textbook publisher.

Texas School Board trying to get more creationism in the school books: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/texas_science_textbooks_creationists_try_to_remove_evolution_from_classrooms.html

And in “Malcolm X Machina” news, just when you thought the atheist movement would never find its Black Panthers, enter the radical militant godless group known as the Northeastern Pennsylvania Freethought Society.  

Or the N.P. Frees, as they’re known on the street.

Normally they spend their time planting righteous irony bombs under the cars of abortion clinic bombers, but this time the NPFS really crossed the line.  They recently proposed an advertisement for buses in Lackawanna County, that would show the unadulterated image of the word ‘atheism’, followed . . . by a period.    

In addition to the opprobrious noun, the ad also contained a conspicuous blank space where the crucifix and the benediction should have been.

One deeply offended religious person argued, (quote) “The poster might as well show Dawkins, Hitchens, and Nietzsche forcing Jesus to watch them run the train on his dad.” (end quote)

I smell T-shirt…

In an unrelated coincidence, a new policy was immediately approved by the county transit board, pre-emptively banning any future bus ads containing religious beliefs, including but not limited to belief in the existence of the word atheism.  In Pennsylvania, the mere subject of atheism is too controversial already, so they certainly won’t allow entire atheist sentences with verbs and stuff.  Atheist podcasts are right out.  

We should start a betting pool on which bible belt state will be the first to avoid atheist bus ads by doing away with public transit altogether.

Pennsylvania bus company changes ad policy over lowest-key atheist ad in history: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/18/least-offensive-atheist-ad-ever-leads-to-new-advertising-policy-in-pennsylvania-county/

And in “Chicken Chuckin’” news tonight, human beings with brains and central nervous systems and stuff think they can transfer their asomatous demerits to farm fowl.  I’m talking, of course, about the Jewish ritual of Kapparot, in which people appease Jew god in some kind of centrifugal transmission of sin by swinging live chickens above their heads.

Well the chickens aren’t live for the entire process.

• “Listen Shmuel . . . You can’t learn physics without murdering chickens.  It’s all right here in the text book.  So like I was saying . . . Centripetal force is what your arm exerts on the chicken.  Centifugal force is a “faux force” that causes the sin to slide down to its beak.”  

Well they better choke their chickens quick while they still can, as radically reasonable Rabbi Adam Frank wants to put an end to this barbaric practice and yes, not wanting to swing chickens to death in the street apparently can qualify a person as radical.

Nothing new here . . . Jews swinging their cock around, and then chopping its head off.  I’m not saying the Kaparot chicken thing and circumcision are equally ridiculous, but they’re certainly sitting in the same enormous ballpark with fifty thousand other stupid antiquated religious rituals.  

And by stupid, antiquated religious rituals, you mean… religious rituals.

And let’s not forget … the rationale is the chickens go to feed the poor.  

But now picture the scene: an orthodox Jewish man swinging a chicken to death over his head as he approaches a homeless Brooklyn man to hand him the carcass.  

Might lead to confusion at times . . . that’s all.  

“Vhat, it’s a perfectly good chicken.”

Rabbi Frank warns that in addition to being sadistic, obscene and moronic, it also causes the rest of the world to lose respect for Jewish culture, adding, “look at these fucking hats and tell me we’ve got respect we can afford to lose”.

Do they hide their expendable respect in the overgrown sideburns of their eight translucent sons, who all appear to have leukemia?  Is that where they hide it?  All the respect?  

Jews perform the annual chicken-baton sin-absorption ritual: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/09/17/rabbi-is-embarrassed-by-religious-jews-using-swinging-chickens-as-sin-absorbers/

In ‘assaulted by a salted meat’ news, Wayne Stilwel of Scotland has been sentenced to ten months in jail for stealing my idea about using bacon at airport security and Gitmo, but taking it a little too far.    

…or not far enough if you’re me.

The obviously hilarious Edinburgh prankster rendered an entire mosque doubly useless by attaching bacon to the door handles, and throwing bacon into the building.  And when I say ‘doubly’ useless, I mean useless in general reality, and also useless to porkophobes that day.

Yeah, they said the sentence was meant to (quote) “…act as a lesson to show people that all religions need to be respected.”  I’m sorry, but the fact that these nincompoops are calling out the hazmat team to remove the satanic bacon from their magical house fails to earn them any respect with me… And the fact that UK courts sent a dude to jail for illegal use of pancetta doesn’t make me start respecting Muslims, it just makes me stop respecting the UK courts.

The . . . uh . . . head Muslim guy was not reachable for comment, however this would have been his official statement: (quote) “We routinely feast on American infidels, so we don’t have any interest in the other white meat.”      

I’m not saying that what the dude did wasn’t bigoted, but it was hilarious so it doesn’t count.  It’s like all the stuff we say on this show.

Yeah if funny doesn’t cancel out racist, we’re out of business.

And in related “eschewing the fat-wa” news, we learn later in the same story that while a bacon attack will get you ten months, death threats against apostates are just fine, because apostates that don’t wear a burqa anymore, are usually asking for it.  

Yeah, what the fuck was that?  After calling for the death of a Sudanese woman, Liberal Democrat councillor Salah al Bandar was cleared of any wrongdoing, cause you know those Muslims and their fatwas…

Nahla Mahmoud – the fatwa victim – has been advised by police that her best legal recourse would be to stop existing, because it angers Muslims.      

Well, she does have a vagina…

Man sentenced to 10 months for vicious bacon attack: http://freethinker.co.uk/2013/09/18/mosque-attacked-with-bacon-scottish-man-receives-a-10-month-jail-sentence-for-offending-muslims/

In left-wing conspiracy news, our teams of gay stoner fetus killers have successfully altered global thermodynamics as planned . . . but Pastor Kevin Swanson of Colorado is onto us.

Drats!

He cites marijuana, abortion, and (quote) “decadent homosexual activity” – I guess dudes are eating dark chocolate mousse while they fuck – Those things are the underlying cause of Colorado’s worst year for fire and floods.  

Man… if I’d known there was dark chocolate mousse I might have been gay.

Liberals in his state are indeed conducting a powerful new dark ritual, involving marijuana, gay sex, and fetal sacrifice.  Our operatives get high, have extraordinarily decadent butt sex, and then murder the resulting embryo . . . (A butt embryo, no less) And because of a weird loophole in cosmic law (other than butt sex leading to embryos), this magically forces God to flood wealthy conservative enclaves like Colorado Springs and John Galt’s impossible valley.

Yeah… butt sex causes forest fires.  I love that this vision of climatology is perfectly acceptable but the idea that CO2 is causing a greenhouse effect is ludicrous .

But despite his stint as a climate change denier, it looks like the ignorant hate theory isn’t so ignorant this time.  It’s just a well-informed hate theory.  It’s just hate.  Which means on this particular day, Swanson will not gain any ground on Jerry Falwell in the prestigious ignorant hate speech standings.   

Nobody beats the king… except Pat Robertson.

Denver is the new Sodom: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/kevin-swanson-blames-colorado-floods-decadent-homosexual-activity-marijuana-and-abortion-rig and also… http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18209-decadent-homosexual-activity-marijuana-and-abortion-caused-colorado-floods-talk-radio-minister-charges-denying-global-warming

And finally tonight, in “Hey, it’s German… You’re lucky nobody’s shitting on anybody” news tonight, a group of German churches have teamed up to offer “erotic” sermons.  In an effort to combat the sexually repressive reputation the church was unfairly saddled with after millenia of repressing sex, two Protestant churches in Dresden, Germany have announced a series of sexually charged sermons in the coming months.

And you’re positive nobody’s shitting on anybody?  Not even a bronze shower in some shit-laden holy water?    

Program organizer Rudolf Renner hopes that the program can help people see that homosexuality isn’t a sin, because it’s in the bible.  Because being in the bible makes something okay.  So basically they’re conceding that homosexuality is at least as moral as things like slavery, rape, incest, bestiality, genocide, infanticide and animal sacrifice.

Alright, 30 seconds on the clock: Titles for the new Spermin’ German sermons.

• Dong of Solomon

• Ezekiel in the Valley of the Dry Humps… or no, wait… valley of the wet bones.

• The Burden of Blow Job: Carrying the Load

• Moses Parting the Pink C

• Jonah and the Sperm Whale – What? That’s technically a jizz joke.

• Noah’s Arcing Ropes of Jism

• Okay that’s a better jizz joke . . . I’m coming from behind now . . . Titus: Tying up Loose Ends

• The Cautionary Tale: Moses and his burning bush.

• The Roman Bondage Sermon: Nailing Jesus.

German churches to offer “erotic” sermons: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/20/german-churches-erotic-sermons-sexuality-gay_n_3956958.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

Sexualizing the death of their savior.  Now that’s what I call ending on a high note.  Heath, thanks as always for joining me.

And when we come back we’ll ask what the fuck all those orthodox jews in the corner are doing.

Calendar

It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show.  This is the time we set aside once a month to bring you up to speed on all the great atheist, secular and skeptical events going on around the country and around the world.

And damn do we have a full slate in October.  We’re gonna start in Charlotte, North Carolina when the “Carolina Secular Conference” is going to be welcoming Margaret Downey, author and activist Katherine Stewart, Shelley Segal, and a lot more.  That’s going on over the weekend of October 4th, it’s reasonably priced and should be a blast.

http://www.carolinassecularconference.org/

A week and a coast away we’ve got Sacramento’s 12th annual Freethought Day on October 12th.  Huge festival featuring Richard Carrier, Greta Christina, Annie Laurie Gaylor, friend of the show Tom Beasley and a ton of others.  One day, great lineup, damn I wish I was gonna be there, hopefully you can go in my stead.

http://freethoughtday.org/

But not all great conferences happen is awesome states.  Some of them also happen in Ohio.  For example, the 2013 “Sexy Secular” Conference in Akron on the 19th of October.  This one has practically every awesome speaker I just mentioned with the addition of Aron Ra and the incomparable Dr. Darrel Ray http://sexysecularconference.com/

And three quickies to round things off.  On the weekend of October 26th we’ve got the Kentucky Freethought Convention with Annie Laurie Gaylor, Hemant Mehta, Jamila Bey and more.   http://www.kyfreethoughtconvention.com/ A little further south we’ve got “Reason in the Rock” in Little Rock, Arkansas with Dan Barker, Matt Dillahunty, Jerry DeWitt, Zack Kopplin and friends.  http://reasonintherock.org/

And finally because I know we’ve got at least a couple of listeners in the Netherlands, the 26th of October is also the start of the Skeptic’s Congress in… a city.  Sorry, don’t speak Dutch so I couldn’t figure out anything except the country where it’s taking place and the date.  But if you’re interested, you’ll find a link to this event and all the others we’ve discussed on the shownotes for this episode at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

10/26 Skeptic’s Congress in the Netherlands: http://www.skepsis.nl/congres2013.html

And of course, if you’re involved with a conference that needs a free plug, you’ll find all the contact info on that very same website.

Top Ten

In a religion renowned for pointless and crappy holidays, Sukkot stands out as possibly the single most baffling celebration on the Jewish calendar.  This is a holiday celebrated by sitting in booths, shaking palm fronds at god and being generally miserable.

So to help our listeners and ourselves better understand this ancestral absurdity, Noah and I will be answering the top ten most asked questions about Sukkot in a segment we like to call…

“How the Hell is this a Holiday?”

1) What does Sukkot mean?

Sukkot is the plural form of Sukkah.

2) Okay, smart-ass, so what the hell does Sukkah mean?

It means a shitty little temporary hut.  So literally translated, the holiday is called, “Shitty Little Huts”.

3) How do Jews celebrate Sukkot?

The same way toll booth operators celebrate Tuesday.  They sit in little booths all day.  They erect a little shed and then spend time in that shed.  Because god.  Or something.

And they wave palm fronds.  That part is apparently really important, otherwise passersby might forget to reflect on how stupid their religion is.

4) Why the hell would anyone do that?

When you’re chosen by god, for the sweet-ass life of a Jewish person, you don’t ask questions.  Since I clearly wasn’t chosen, I looked it up.  Following a labor dispute, Jewish people spent 40 years living in makeshift desert dwellings northeast of Egypt.  Not sure what makes anyone think that ever stopped after 40 years though.              

5) But desert dwellers didn’t live in booths.  They lived in tents.  So what the fuck?

Well, like all things described in the bible, Sukkot predates the bible.  Not sure why people have so much trouble with the “if the bible describes it, it didn’t inspire it” rule, but they do.  Despite later attempts to shoehorn Sukkot into the Exodus narrative, it’s widely believed that it originated with farmers sleeping in booths in their fields during the harvest.

6) Do all Jews live in booths during Sukkot?

No.  Sukkot was once considered the holiest of all celebrations, but it lost some of it’s luster when humans invented heat and the humane treatment of animals.

And Judaism in general lost some luster when humans invented scientific explanations for stuff.  

These days most jews don’t bother with the booths, though some families eat their meals in their rickety hovels and some hardcore Hebrews still sleep in them overnight.

7) So how did they celebrate back when they lived in booths?

They killed a lot of animals.  And that’s a lot of animals for templic Jews.  Back in the Jews’ animal slaughtering heyday this was the bloodiest of all Hebrew celebrations and all Hebrew celebrations were pretty damn bloody back then.

8) What’s up with the palm fronds?

Fucked if I know.

9) Why do Jewish holidays always suck?

Pretty much every event in Judaism’s history is bloodier than Edward Scissorhands botching an octo-mom abortion, but you’ve gotta celebrate something, right?

10) Can non-Jews celebrate Sukkot?

Yes, but not according to the Torah you have to wait until after the end of the world.  Scripture says that after the apocalypse, even the Goyim will celebrate Sukkot and get their very own booths.

And you thought the apocalypse was gonna suck.

Bible Story

“Run get the young ‘uns folks!  It’s time for Lucinda Lugeons Bible Stories for kids”

Today we’re gonna open our bibles up and meet one of the few women in the bible important enough to have names, Miriam.  In this story we’re going to learn all about why we should love god and the pitiless vengeance that’s in store for us if we don’t.

Once upon a time there was a Cushite named Miriam and she married a nice Jewish boy named Aaron.  They lived a happy simple life until one day Aaron’s brother Moses showed up and told her husband that they had to go to Egypt to rescue all the Hebrews.

Miriam and Aaron were skeptical but they did what Moses said because Moses was an unhinged murderer.  And because they were loyal to god.

So they packed up all their stuff and grabbed their kids and left with Moses so that god could mercilessly torture Egyptians after rescinding their free will.  So after god got finished turning all their water to blood, covering them with festering sores, filling their towns with bugs and frogs and murdering the oldest kid in every family, he lets the pharaoh let the Jews go so that they could all wander miserably through a desert for decades.

And Miriam and Aaron didn’t like the plan at all because wandering around in the wilderness and eating flavorless crap for years and years wasn’t very fun.  But they did what they were told because they didn’t want to die.  And because they were loyal to god.

Now, because their sons were related to Moses, god liked them more than he liked everyone else, so he decided to make her sons priests.  That meant that they didn’t have to do any work and everyone else had to pay for their food and all they had to do was kill animals, slit open their stomachs, take out all their guts, drain their blood, splash it around and set them on fire.

But one day her sons tried to see what god looked like, so he burned all their skin off their bones and killed them.  And Miriam and Aaron were very sad, but they didn’t say anything because they didn’t want their flesh burned away.  And because they were loyal to god.

So they spent most of their lives wandering in the wilderness, not having a home or a comfortable bed or pets or any of their favorite foods or the ability to decide for themselves what to do.  It was so bad that practically all the Jews wished that they were still Egyptian slaves because at least then they weren’t always starving and thirsty.

And then one day Aaron and Miriam complained and said, “hey, maybe wandering in the wilderness until we all die isn’t a very good idea at all.”

Now, this made god very, very angry.  So angry that he gave Miriam a horrible disease called leprosy that caused her skin to rot and fall off so that you could see her guts and bones.  And Moses and Aaron begged god to take away the horrible disease but he wouldn’t.  And because being in horrible pain and having to watch your own flesh rot away isn’t bad enough, god also made all the other Jews shun her so nobody would talk to her or take care of her or bring her food and water for seven days.  Because after blindly devoting her life to Moses’ every whim, she was disloyal for a few minutes once.

And nobody lived happily ever after.

The end.

Outro

Before we drop anchor tonight I wanted to give everybody a quick update on the perpetually postponed merch I keep promising.  We’re still making a few minor tweaks to the new logo.  Hopefully that’ll all be done this weekend so we’ve got our fingers crossed that by episode 33 we’ll have some shwag available for you.

I also wanted to let everybody know that I’m pretty much constantly looking for Farnsworth quotes at the last minute, so if you’ve got a blog, a Facebook page, a podcast or any other atheist outreach vehicle that you want us to plug, let me know.  I’d be happy to give you some on-air love in exchange for a brief audio clip of you quoting everybody’s favorite 31st century scientist.

I also wanted to congratulate Cecil from Cognitive Dissonance for being the first team to best me this year in the Fantasy Football League of Sinister Secularists.  I want to congratulate him not so much on the win, which he clearly doesn’t deserve, but rather in finding a way to successfully cheat at Fantasy Football in a league that I commission, as my team is far too awesome to be defeated by normal human means.  Well played, Cecil.

As always, I can’t close this thing out without thanking Heath for everything he does, which is a lot; I need to thank the lovely Lucinda for gracing us with her dulcet tones tonight, I need to thank Shane from Calgary for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote and while we’re at it, I want to thank all those filthy monkey men we evolved from.  Way to naturally select.

But most of all I need to thank this week’s best people, Beth, Russell and Robert.  Beth, whose resourcefulness, brilliance and cunning will be recognized by our would-be alien overlord a little too late; Russell who boasts both the strength to arm-wrestle lions and the compassion to occasionally let them win and Robert who has never demolished a building with his gargantuan and mighty penis, only because he’s never needed to.

These three brave, gracious and genetically superior examples of humanity have distinguished themselves this week by giving us money.  Only the most discerning, respectable and attractive people have what it takes to give us money, but if you think you belong in the pantheon, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.  And remember, we make a lot of jokes about it, but all kidding aside, giving us money really does cure cancer.

And if you want to help us out but not if it costs money, you can also help us out by leaving us a review on iTunes or telling a friend or 6 about the show.  And if 30 minutes a week of blasphemy just isn’t enough, be sure to like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on You-Tube and favorite us on Stitcher.

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.