religious podcast | The Scathing Atheist

Episode 86 – Show Notes

October 9, 2014 Noah Lugeons 5 comments

General Links:

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Guest Links:

Click Here to buy your copy of Steve Well’s Strange Flesh: The Bible and Homosexuality

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Click Here to check out the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible online

Headline Links:

Ben Affleck is an idiot: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/its-gross-its-racist-ben-affleck-and-bill-maher-clash-over-criticizing-islam/

‘Marriage’ still defined as ‘marriage’ instead of ‘straight marriage’ in 11 more states: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/religious-right-reacts-scotus-gay-marriage-decision-unconscionable-unconstitutional-and-un-a

More Amish Kidnapping: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/influential-religious-right-donor-indicted-his-role-lisa-miller-kidnapping-case

NC Public Schools teach 7 day creation as literal fact: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/ffrf-church-funded-bible-class-in-nc-public-schools-teaches-kids-7-day-creation-is-literal-fact/

More Godwin’s Law – This time it’s abortion: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/10/05/newly-elected-texas-state-senator-compares-roe-v-wade-to-holocaust

This Week in Misogyny:

GOP to women: Voting is like picking a wedding dress: http://thinkprogress.org/election/2014/10/01/3574672/say-yes-to-the-candidate/

Tea Party Leader: Women shouldn’t serve in combat because… wacky bullshit: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/tea-party-leader-women-shouldnt-serve-combat-because-men-should-be-taught-treat-them-queens

John Stossel: Women are always worried about shit like Ebola and climate change: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/10/john-stossel-ebola-is-being-overhyped-like-climate-change-by-especially-you-women/

Episode 36 – Partial Transcript

October 24, 2013 Noah Lugeons 6 comments

By Heath Enwright and Noah Lugeons

(Note: Transcript contains elements that were edited out of the final program due to time constraints)

Warning: This podcast contains explicit, fiendish, naughty, dirty, filthy, filthy, filthy language.

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And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday,

It’s October 24th,

And children, sluts, and gays have only seven days left to shop for clothes in the same store.

I’m Noah Lugeons,

I’m Heath Enwright,

And from genetically dominant New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

In this week’s episode

We learn that Texas would make a great electoral college dropout.
The Tea Party files suit against a gaggle of gay rhesus monkeys.
And we’ll take an in depth look, at the last of three bullet points.

But first, the diatribe…

Diatribe:

What I wouldn’t have given to have been sitting across from Oprah when she said it. If I could have possessed Diana Nyad’s brain for five quick minutes Oprah would never need another fad diet again cause I’d have torn that fat bitch a new asshole so big she could pass a whole turkey. I feel like Travolta in Pulp Fiction: It would’ve been worth her saying it, just so I could have been there to answer it.

Now, before I go any further, let me take a minute to explain the situation to the six atheists that haven’t heard it yet. Oprah, as you may know, is a vile, contemptible, immoral, melon-headed scut. She’s made billions by shilling for every pseudo-scientific snakeoil salesman she can find, she gives demonstrably incorrect medical advice to the least educated people in our society and she pretends to be a philanthropist when companies donate shit to her audience.

But she’s a Christian. Because there’s nothing in the bible against pilfering from the poor and lying, is there? And what’s more, she one of those bitchy, holier-than-thou, high and mighty Christians with superiority complexes. I believe the technical term for those type of Christians is “Christians”.

So last week she’s interviewing Diana Nyad, who is an exceptional human being in pretty much anyway you care to define “exceptional”. She’s the one that recently became the first woman to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage and she did it at age 64. And this is only the latest in a long list of incredible shit she’s done in her life. She swam all the way around the island of Manhattan and was the first woman to ever swim from Bermuda to Florida. And she’s an atheist.

Oprah has her own television channel now because what’s the point in making the money if you can’t piss it all away in an ill-advised hyper-self-indulgent debacle of a business strategy? And among the many shows nobody’s watching over there is Oprah’s “Super Soul Sunday”.

Now, as you can tell from the witless pun in the title, it’s a show about faith. So Oprah doesn’t take long to broach the subject. In the opening minutes of the interview she points out that Nyad identifies herself as an atheist.

Nyad launches immediately into that semi-apologetic “I’m an atheist but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends” response. I hate hearing this crap, but I understand why so many prominent atheists say it. She’s basically saying, “I don’t believe in your fairy tales, but it’s okay if you do.” It’s basically a cultural necessity in this country, which is a sad damn shame. There’s no other demographic of belief that feels obligated to publicly apologize for existing, but that’s ‘Murica for you.

Anyway, she’s in the middle of saying something along the lines of, “I’m an atheist, but when I sit on a beach with my Christian and Muslim and Buddhist friends and we all look up in to the night sky, we all share the same awe and wonder and appreciation for the universe and for all the people that came before us and are yet to come.” But she can’t get all the way through it, because Oprah has gone 42 consecutive seconds without bloviating and that’s her limit.

So as soon as Nyad starts talking about awe and wonder, Oprah cuts in with an interjection that was all but scientifically-formulated to be maximally condescending. “Well then I don’t consider you an atheist” she says. “If you believe in the awe and the wonder, then I don’t consider you an atheist.”

Now, Nyad was as political as possible and handled herself well. Not that it would have taken a Herculean effort to highlight what a derogatory bitch Oprah was being there, but Nyad did fine. She killed her with kindness and that was probably the smartest way to handle it. That being said, I’d have gone another way.

When Oprah said, “Well I don’t consider you an atheist, then,” I’d have answered back with, “Well if you think women should be allowed to speak in public I don’t consider you a Christian, but luckily all that matters is what you consider yourself.”

But it got worse. Nyad admitted that, hey, maybe she was wrong. And rather than concede that she, too, could be wrong, Oprah agreed that yes, Diana Nyad might be wrong. And then she went on to explain how distressing that was going to be when she died and burned for eternity in hell.

And to her credit Nyad played along. I’d probably have answered back with something like, “Yeah, but I suppose it’s just as likely that you and I will both be standing in front of Allah or Ganesha or some long-forgotten Irish Pagan god and we’re both fucked, but most likely none of these prehistoric civilizations were able to circumvent centuries of scientific research and chance upon an unverifiable truth about the origins of the cosmos by sitting around on mushrooms and staring into a fucking bonfire.”

I’ve already talked plenty about the awe of atheism on this show so I don’t want to rehash is all here, but I will say this: When I look up at the sky I see billions of years of stellar transformation. When Oprah looks up at the sky she sees a wizard who likes shiny lights. When I look at my hand I see trillions of generations of evolution that connect me to every organism that lives or has ever lived. When Oprah looks at her hand she sees a wizard who needed something that would fit around the banana. When I look at the mountains I see a complex and exciting geological history writ large before me. She sees a wizard who figured earth wasn’t lumpy enough.

As atheists, we stand in awe of a lot of things… but perhaps the thing I’m most in awe of is the stupidity it takes to look past the entire universe of things that actually exist and stand in awe of something that doesn’t.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is a man whose liver can convert scotch to creatine, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to enhance your performance with performance impairing drugs?

Cheers, bitches! Let’s do this!

In our lead story tonight Scientology is bullshit. France’s highest court confirmed as much when recently upholding a 2009 fraud conviction that indicted the church’s French branch, it’s bookstore and five of it’s leaders.

They have a fucking bookstore?!? What’s it called . . . Borders on Insanity?

The church was sued for pressuring their members to pay vast quantities of money to have invisible alien souls removed from their aura. And while the church does not deny that they were pressuring recruits to pay for said alien soul removals, they still appealed the conviction on the grounds that they’d rather not talk about the invisible-alien-soul thing.

How did Christianity, Judaism, Islam, et al manage to avoid similar convictions?

They were grandfathered in. Calling the decision (quote) “an affront to justice and religious liberty”, Scientology’s head whackaloon accused the French government of (quote) “anti-religious extremism”. He even said that they would have officially change the name of fried potato wedges in their cafeteria to “freedom fries” except that would be stupid.

Instead of fries, you can also get the tossed salad, ordered by saying: “Freedom kiss my ass.” Jelly and syrup optional.

Speaking of eating ass with jelly in it, the French court sentenced the church and its affiliated bookstore more than three-quarters of million dollars in fines for what they plainly labeled as “organized fraud”. In an unrelated story, those thetans were a little bigger than we thought they’d be, you know, and the wiring’s shot… so it’s probably gonna be a couple hundred more than we talked about to, you know, relieve you of your engrams.

Scientology fraud conviction upheld: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/16/scientology-fraud-france_n_4108668.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

And in “Of Fucking Course They Did” news, Secular Humanism recently shat all over Christianity in a debate, as one might imagine. The question was: “What provides a better foundation for civil society: Christianity or Secular Humanism?” Turns out … despite being in an old book … rape, genocide, slavery, homophobia, and misogyny are generally bad for civil society, so Christianity loses.

I hear this was the latest in a series of debates that included, “Which provides a more accurate depiction of anatomy; McGraw-Hill’s “A Textbook of Human Biology” or Milton Bradley’s Operation™?” and “What would you rather have on your scrotum, Kiera Knightley or flesh eating termites?”

Sociology professor Dr. Phil Zuckerman represented the anti-rape, anti-genocide, anti-slavery, pro-anal, anti-misogyny Secular Humanist position. Dr. David Marshall argued pro-those-things … and anti-anal. Zuckerman won within the first minute when he and his opponent both submitted the Bible as Exhibit A.

“We ask that the audience kindly disregard everything except John 3:16 and the rear cover”

Adventure Christian Church – the California mega-church that foolishly hosted and filmed the religion-embarrassing event – is refusing to release the tape, despite having promised Zuckerman the results would be publicized. Zuckerman pointed out they were caught with their pants around their ankles, and that those pants were on fire, and demanded an explanation. Pastor Bryan Hardwick responded, (quote) “It just didn’t go the way we wanted it to go. We were not represented well. So our publicists advised us to destroy something called the ‘EE..VID…DEN…SEE’. And after they explained that meant the tape, we destroyed the tape.”

Christianity loses debate and refuses to release tape: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/20/after-christian-loses-to-atheist-in-a-debate-the-church-that-sponsored-the-event-wont-release-the-video/

And in “No, I really could eat a horse, it says so right here” news tonight, a group of Syrian clerics have expanded the acceptable sources of sustenance to starving citizens to include dogs, cats and donkeys. Curiously the fatwa stopped short of authorizing people to eat “whatever the fuck they had to to not starve!” Seriously. Bacon is still off the fucking menu.

The news coverage shows these tragic scenes in Syria . . . Mountains of corpses with big piles of atheist air-dropped bacon sitting right there next to them. It’s hard to watch.

Now, I kind of want to tread lightly here, because there is some massively horrible shit going on in Syria and people are starving and there’s nothing funny about starving people unless there’s a lot of them in a phone booth or a tiny car or something, but the audacity of a religious leader telling people “Yeah, it’s okay to eat the dog now” when people are already burping up hairballs and the collar is still worth noting.

Say what you will about groups of starving people and Latinos, but they do indeed look funny all jammed into that one clown car.

To the clerics credit, the fatwa was meant to draw attention to the plight of the Syrian people, warning that if things get much worse, the living might be forced to eat the Denny’s.

“Moons Over My Hamas” would finally become popular . . .

Okay as we often do, let’s put 30 seconds on the clock: Menu Items at the Muslim Denny’s. Go!

Arab Spring Rolls

The Hot Mohamm-and Cheese

Fettucine Allah-Fredo

I could go for a turban-ana split.

Belgian Fatwaffles … with a Hijack and Coke

Followed by a Martyr-imisu for desert.

Capitalist Pigs in a Blanket

I was thinking Pigs in a Burka, but okay…

Jihad Boiled Eggs… or no, Sunni Side Up

Gitmos Rancheros?

Rib-Eye-E-D

If we’re going steak, I prefer Gaza-Strip.

Hash Browns is already a derogatory term for Arabs, right? If it’s not, I call it.

Muslims decide it’s okay for starving Syrians to eat dogs: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24532793

And moving on to “Ass Holy Land” news, the new Mecca of homosexuality is surprisingly close to Mecca. The State of Kuwait finally noticed all the gays we Americans smuggled in, while storming and subsequently shielding their desert. The ungrateful Kuwaiti government we installed, has responded by developing highly advanced gaydar technology, with plans to screen out homosexuals at their borders.

“Not gay, huh? Okay, Mocha, champagne, chartreuse. Colors or beverages? Quickly now!”

The ass-crack security squad will be aided by genital sniffing dogs that can detect that “gay sex smell” up to 72 hours later.

Common misconception. They’re not smelling the gay sex, they’re smelling the resulting santorum.

And they’re eating it up. In addition, Kuwait will employ geneticists that can tell from your DNA, if your biological parents are indeed a same-sex couple. Furthermore, anyone displaying clothing with several colors of the visible light spectrum, or anyone stylishly coordinating a single color of said spectrum, will be executed on the spot. It may sound crazy, but gay people really do dress like that.

My total lack of color coordination is one of the two main reasons I’d be terrible at homosexuality. The other being that I gag when I brush my tongue.

Now I wouldn’t normally do this, but I’d like to make a joke about Muslims here . . . Nevermind, I’ve got nothing. So I’ll just genuinely describe their final method of homosexual detection. Taking a cue from the Salem Witch Trials, all suspected gays will be shackled and thrown into a river. If they drown, they’re safe, and have conveniently already received a proper Muslim burial. But if they float, they’ll be denied entry for being too flam-buoyant.

Kuwait gets national gaydar technology: http://www.newsweek.com/kuwait-plans-medical-test-identify-and-ban-gays-569

And in “Isn’t the fact that you believe we’ll burn in horrible torment for eternity enough?” news tonight, the American Atheist Organization has hit a stumbling block in their efforts to promote their upcoming 2014 Convention in Salt Lake City. The stumbling block? Salt Lake City.

Nobody wants a bunch of atheists – with long, evolved genitalia – coming to town for the weekend, and fucking their wives. We’re hung a lot better than Jesus.

Now as I count it, there are at least 7 companies renting billboards in the Salt Lake area and at least seven of them have rejected American Atheist’s ads for being too offensive. One company actually rejected the ads with an explanation that they reserved the right to reject ads that they (quote) “find to be misleading, deceptive or offensive…”

So you’re telling me Matt Stone and Trey Parker had to publicize their Tony Award-winning, broadway musical homage to Mormonism, without any help from billboards in the MoMo Mothers Land?

Must have. And lest you allow an image of Satan skull-fucking the Virgin Mary to color your opinion of the news story, we should point out that basically the only factual claim being made on these billboards is “Atheists: We aren’t nonexistent”. When asked if there were changes they could make to the ads to meet the companies standards, officials replied, “no, it’s your existence that offends us.”

And that’s why we put the convention in Utah . . .

Offend people with “Atheists Aren’t Not” campaign . . . Check.

American Atheists to hold convention in Salt Lake City, no billboard company will rent to them: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/10/18/these-atheist-billboards-were-deemed-too-controversial-for-salt-lake-city-utah/

And in “I thought the blacks gave us AIDS” news, it wasn’t the blacks, it was the gays . . . at least according to Tea Party leader and former Baptist pastor Rick Scarborough. We will circle back to that, I promise, but first, I’ve gotta say . . . I fucking love this story!!! You’ve got potential for AIDS jokes, gay jokes, and Tea Party jokes … which is like the holy trinity of scathingly atheist podcast headline stories. Plus black jokes – It’s the holy quartet of that stuff.

So a black guy, a gay guy and an AIDS patient walk into a tea party…

Barista says “Get the fuck out of here!” . . . or “Oh what a lovely tea party” . . .

This tale of bigotry starts in an unexpected place. At a Tea Party unity event, homophobia champion Peter LaBarbera suggested to Scarborough that FOX News and NatGeo should devote more coverage to interesting rare species like ex-gays and black Republicans, also known as Aunt and Uncle Toms, respectively and disrespectfully.

And while we’re at it, where are all the stories about transgendered, evangelical, inuit potato barons and black people that tip?

Scarborough then made the obvious segue to the idea that there should be a class action lawsuit against homosexuals for making god mad, and forcing him to rain sulfur and AIDS on us. To justify this plan, the former pastor said the following, out loud: (quote) “Homosexuality much more likely leads to AIDS, than smoking leads to cancer.”

This whole conversation was a Russian nesting doll of insanity. I shit you not, every time I thought we’d reached the lowest stratum, they would peel back one more layer of psychological guano and take us deeper into the dank and labyrinthine dungeon that is the ultra-conservative mind. Two seemingly conscious human beings are sitting there talking about suing… what, suing earth for spawning the queers? And THEN it gets crazy!!!

LaBarbera agreed he would love to see such a law suit, although he lamented the lack of a perfect infected poster child for the cause, saying (quote) “We always wanted to see one of the kid in high school who was counseled by the official school counselor to just be gay, then he comes down with HIV. But we never really got the client for that.” How unfortunate for the Tea Party that a guidance counselor didn’t idea murder a gay student yet.

Tea Party leader proposes class action lawsuit against homosexuality: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/10/18/tea-party-leader-proposes-class-action-lawsuit-against-homosexuality/

And in “gold-plated gold plates” news, Vatican officials the world over are asking Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst why he couldn’t have built a more modest gilded palace. The complaints center around a renovation to the Bishop’s palace that was originally estimated to cost an already obscene 3 million euros, but eventually ballooned to an amount more than 31 million euros, or 261,519 kids not starving to death in a given year.

And speaking of starving kids, this is not the first time Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst has been accused of having a lifestyle as stupidly extravagant as his name. Last year a magazine article pointed out that when he went to visit starving kids in India, he took a first class flight, costing a thousand euro, or 8 dead kids, plus a ninth kid about 40% dead. Then he lied about it in sworn affidavits, which led to legal fees of about fifteen thousand euro. This meant murdering 126 more kids, which – in his defense – is a nice round number … but still.

When asked how he thought Jesus would feel about his ostentatious lifestyle, the gold-plated bishop pointed out that he’d also invested millions in genetically engineering really tiny camels.

German Bishop builds palace fit for an Prosperity Gospel preacher: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/10/catholic-bishop-spends-lavishly-palace

And that’s gonna do it for headlines, Heath, thanks as always.

Blasphemy sign off…

And when we come back we’ll be the same… but different.

Calendar:

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

We have a lot to talk about this week so we’ll have to move quick. We’re gonna start in America’s penis, Florida. On the weekend of November 2nd the Florida Freethought Conference in Orlando will be welcoming in James Randi, Dale McGowan, DJ Grothe, Darrel Ray and more.

http://floridahumanist.org/freethought-conference/

On the same weekend and half a world away we’ve got the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, Australia. Not exactly an atheist event but it will feature the Australian debut of “The Unbelievers”, the new documentary featuring Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. Should be fun.

http://fodi.sydneyoperahouse.com/

On November 9th it doesn’t matter where in the world you are, it’s Carl Sagan day. But if you happen to be near Bloomington, Indiana, you can check out the Carl Sagan Day Conference featuring my favorite living astrophysicist, Phil Plait. Should be fun.

http://action.centerforinquiry.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=42122.0

On the 15th we kick off a huge one one state over. The 6th annual Skepticon in Springfield, Illinois will feature a huge list of prominent speakers including but not limited to Greta Christina, Richard Carrier, Hemant Mehta, Aron Ra, Rebecca Watson, Shelly Segal and dammit I wish I was gonna be there.

http://skepticon.org/

On the 16th of November we’ve got the Orszagos Szkeptikus Konferencia in Szekesfehervar, Hungary. I’d say more, but holy shit, every Hungarian word seems to have at least one ‘z’ in an unpronounceable place and half a dozen accent marks so fuck it, just check the link if you’re interested.

http://telapo.datatrans.hu/szkeptikus/2013/index.htm

On the weekend of the 22nd we’ve got a big one in Australia. The Australian Skeptics’ National Convention in Canberra. Should be a lot of fun even though I’ve never heard of any of the speakers except Richard Saunders. I know we’ve got a lot of listeners in and around New South Wales so figured I had to mention this one.

http://nationalskepticsconvention.org/

That does it for this month’s calendar but remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, skeptical or otherwise secular conference or meetup that could use a free plug, let me know. You’ll find the contact info along with links to the homepages to all the events we discussed here on the shownotes at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Feedback:

It’s time for the part of the show that comes net, listener feedback.

This is the part of the show where you say shit, and we say shit back.

Our first email comes to us from Heath in Long Island City and he says, “Hey, we should have some kind of bumper for the feedback segment.”

And our next email comes from Noah in Forest Hills, New York and he says, “What do you think of this?”

(Drop)

Eh… it’ll do.

And our first real email comes to us from the land down under Georgia, Florida, where Nate was sitting when he typed, “I think your show has real potential,”

Laying the flattery on thick early…

Your email’s flawed so far, but may have prospects just yet.

Right… oh, it gets better, “I think your show has real potential, but it’s getting to the point where I can hardly listen to it. We get it. You hate Christians. Can we move on to something else?”

Well I guess our work here is done. From now on, it’s all heart-warming stories about crippled puppies overcoming adversity. The religion problem is solved. Nate gets it . . .

No we would never do that!!! Crippled puppy stories just don’t have legs.

Yeah, sorry if you get it, Nate, but this is kind of what we talk about on our anti-theistic podcast here. But luckily there are these things called “other podcasts” that you may not yet get, so I’d encourage you to branch out.

And our next message comes to us from someone with much better taste in shit to write to us about, Clara in Virginia writes to ask, “Why is your show only 30 minutes long? You say all the time that you have to edit down the interviews or cut bits, but why? I don’t think anybody would mind if it ran to 35 or 40 minutes once in a while.”

Okay, fair question. Part of this is just sheer anal retentiveness on my part and I’ll admit that, but ultimately I think we can put out a better show every week if we know we’ve only got 30 minutes to get all the shit said that we’re gonna say.

And it’s very much our intention to leave Clara in Virginia always wanting just a little bit more.

Next we’ve got a message that comes to us from the Facebook. Dalene wants to know if Heath is as sexy as he sounds.

Yep . . . (clears throat) I mean “Dammmnnn Riiiighttt!!!”

That Heath Enwright is one Atheist Mother-Shut your mouth!!!

We also got an email from David in Australia who took time off of battling prehistoric dragon-flies with a machete long enough to write the following email:

“Hey guys (and gal),

I write to you with a heavy heart. From all the news reports I’ve seen it seems less and less likely that Ken Ham will ever be able to open the doors on his Ark Park. It seems to me that nobody stands to gain more from the opening of a Creationism based theme-park than people who make fun of religion for a living, so I was hoping I could inspire you to help.

Any ideas on what Ken could do to prop up the flagging interest in his park and inspire the investors to push it over that final hurdle?”

Great question.

Yeah, David, I’m glad you asked. And the answer is, of course, gay atheist midget velcro wall catapult tic-tac-toe. That’s right, if Ken Hamm hired a troupe of gay atheist midgets to wear velcro suits, and be shot from a catapult by redneck kids into a life size tic-tac-toe wall, he’d easily double his attendance. It would also give us atheist podcasters the chance to make jokes about gay atheist midget velcro wall catapult tic-tac-toe, but as long as Ken Hamm refuses to be creative, we never get that opportunity.

Hell, I’ve never even had a chance to say gay atheist midget velcro wall catapult tic-tac-toe… but I’m only out hope that someday I’ll have a reason.

I also thought of a few rides he could add to the investor’s prospectus that might grease the wallets a bit. First of all, I should have to tell them that they need a ride called the “Screaming Jesus”. I’m an atheist and I’d go there to “ride the Screaming Jesus”.

Couple other ideas:

A tunnel of love with bucket seats and a glass partition… you’ve gotta cater to your target audience, after all.

The sermon on space mountain, seemed like an obvious one to me.

Maybe a “Guess your IQ” booth?

Gotta have the basics of course, the Holy Roller Coaster… maybe the Virgin Mary-go-round.

And finally, and this one might fuck up repeat customers, but how about the “Catapult to Heaven”? And basically it just goes straight into a brick wall.

Nice little heaven pile at the bottom.

That does it for the feedback section. If you want us to answer your shit, you’ve gotta send it to us.

You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Outro:

Before we pull the drain plug tonight, I had a couple of quick announcements. First I wanted to make a correction to something I said in last week’s outro. I said that if I didn’t have a CafePress site up and running by Saturday I’d have nobody to blame for it but myself. Turns out I do have somebody else to blame, namely the dude that promised to have all the files in the correct size and format to me by Thursday, didn’t send them until Sunday and didn’t have them in the correct format or size. All that being said, I feel every bit as confident that we will have shwag available this Saturday as I was when I incorrectly announced that we would have shwag available last Saturday.

But I really think it’ll happen this time. Seriously. Because to be perfectly honest, I’m sick of looking like a tit that’s too stupid to open a CafePress site over a five week span.

I also want to tease you with the promise that on episode 40 we’ll be announcing a couple of other long awaited awesome reasons to give us money, but that’s all I’m saying about that just yet.

I also wanted to ask for a little help from our audience. I really, really, really want Ricky Gervais to do a Farnsworth quote for the show because Rick Gervais is fucking awesome. So I’m hoping all the Tweeters in our audience can help us out with that. So your challenge is to figure out a way to ask Ricky to do the Farnsworth quote in 140 characters or less. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we could get his ear, he’d be happy to do it, so if you’ve got a minute and a Twitter account, we’d really appreciate your help.

And speaking of really appreciating and help, I need to thank Heath for raising the bar week after week, I need to thank Lucinda for gracing us with her lovely voice to open the show and I need to thank Tim and Matt from the brand spanking new Atheism 101 podcast for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote and terrible monkey impersonation. Haven’t had a chance to check out their show yet, but I’m always stoked to hear more voices getting involved… assuming their show is better than their monkey noises.

But most of all, of course, we need to thank this week’s paramount humans, Forrest, Gerry, Magnus, Jennifer, Drew, Ward, Joshua, Josh and Martin. Forrest, who is often mistaken for a bird or plane; Gerry, whose mind is so sharp they harass him for it at airports; Magnus, whose ejaculate is worshipped by tribal cultures around the world; Jennifer, whose IQ can only be expressed in scientific notation; Drew, whose gargantuan genitals inspired the term ‘testicular eclipse of the sun’; Ward, whose intimidating brilliance will one day earn his visage a spot on the Canadian flag; Joshua, who makes the biblical Joshua look like a pussy; Josh, whose sexual magnetism deflects solar radiation; and Martin, who wants to tell his girlfriend Susan that she’s made the past year of his life the best year of his life… and yes, that’s Susan Bolton of Scotland, whose boyfriend Martin loves her so much that he forewent laudable praise of his intellect, wit and/or penis size to wish her a happy anniversary.

These nine distinguished disbelievers have earned far more praise than my vocabulary can provide by giving us money. Only the highest echelon of humanity donates money to this show, but if you think you share Forrest, Gerry, Magnus, Jennifer, Drew, Ward, Joshua, Josh and Martin’s commitment to excellence in dick and fart jokes, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And incidentally, as I’ve recently demonstrated, if you donate eighty bucks to the show, I’ll be more than happy to wish anyone a happy anything on your behalf.

And of course, if you like the show but not enough to give us money, you can also help us out a ton by leaving a five star review on iTunes, recommending us to a friend and following us on the Facebook and the Twitter and the YouTube. And also, if it’s all the same to you, check out our most recent episodes on Stitcher because we’re on Stitcher so why the hell not, right?

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 26 – Partial Transcript

August 15, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons

Sponsor:

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And now the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday, It’s August 15th, and there’s no evidence to suggest anything important happened 2,013 years ago.

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

In this week’s episode:

A judge in Eastern Tennessee will hand down a verdict in the case of State of Tennessee vs. Whoever the fuck I say you are,
We’ll learn about the lighter side of Nazi symbolism,
And we’ll meet a man who blew up the family dog for all the wrong reasons,

But first, the diatribe…

Diatribe:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/new-meta-analysis-checks-the-correlation-between-intelligence-and-faith/

For some reason, the fact that atheists are smarter than religious people is controversial. The fact that it’s a fact isn’t controversial, of course. That’s been born out by study after study, and regardless of wealth, education, gender and religiosity of the parents, atheists as a group always outscore theists when it comes to the ability to think.

Yes, of course, the smartest Christian is way smarter than the dumbest atheist, but on the average, the nonbeliever is significantly more intelligent than the believer.

And as well established a fact as this is, it’s absurdly polemical. It’s just not polite to talk about. Why, it’s downright rude to point out that people who believe logically incoherent things based on the authority of a guy in a silly hat are dumber than people who don’t. Even if you use big words they’ll know you’re picking on them from the tone of your voice.

Take for example the response to the new meta-analysis from psychologists Miron Zuckerman and Jordan Silberman. You probably saw it on Facebook under the heading “Fucking duh”.

Their study, which was recently published in Personality and Social Psychology Review, looked at decades worth of data from sixty plus well-designed studies and found that, to nobody’s surprise, atheists are still definitely smarter than theists.

And sure, this study has its detractors because religious people are really good at getting angry at reality when it fails to conform to their desires. So sure, a bunch of Christians are yelling “we’re not as stupid as we are!” and a bunch of scientists confirming that they’re wrong. Nothing new to see here. In fact, the only really interesting part of the study was the bit at the end where they try to answer the “why” question.

This is always really tricky for sociologists dealing with this issue. What we have here is a stupid question that demands an intelligent response. Why are atheists smarter than theists? Well, if you define intelligent as the ability to come to correct conclusions when given sufficient information you’re asking why intelligent people are smarter than non-intelligent people. But sociologists aren’t allowed to end their paper with “We conclude that religion is stupid”. So instead they offer up three possibilities to explain the data. And all of them are commendable attempts at not rubbing it in, but none of them stand up to intellectual scrutiny.

The first is that intelligent people are simply less likely to have conformist personalities and are therefore less susceptible to religious indoctrination, leading to lower levels of religiosity later in life. Now I’m sure that this is true and is a contributing factor, but at best it only partially explains the data. Even if you separate out just the people raised without religion, the atheists in the remaining group will still, on the average, be smarter. This fact, which is in their data, completely dismisses possibility number one.

Possibility number two is a little more reasonable. It posits that intelligent people are less likely to accept any belief that isn’t subject to empirical testing or logical reasoning. But as reasonable as this is, it still has no explanatory powers because all they’re saying here is that intelligent people are better at thinking. And yeah, that’s true, but it still doesn’t address the parlor pachiderm.

Which brings us to possibility number three, which is the “gee, shucks” bullshit explanation that relies on four dozen assumptions that are unsupported by their data. They say that perhaps intelligent people are simply less likely to “need” the things religion “provides”. Of course, try as they might, they fail to demonstrate any “benefit” of religion, so this lacks any explanatory powers as well.

It’s worth noting that some of the nonsense in their third possibility is directly contradicted by their own findings, as one of the explanations they try to use is that atheists are generally wealthier and in less need of a supplemental feeling of control. But since the data shows that the trend holds even when you account for wealth, this clearly can’t be the case.

I don’t want to be too hard on the researchers of course. They did the best they could to draw attention to a fact that needs to be given more credence in public discourse.

But if we were being fair, the question “Does an invisible person listen to you when you wish for things?” would be on the IQ test and if you answered yes you shouldn’t be allowed to have an IQ at all, but I know we’re not gonna get that. Still, the premise of this question is pretty simple if you grant that there is a correct answer to the god question. Basically, what we’re saying with this study is “People who got this major question right also tended to get other questions right”. It’s like a study that finds that people who know that capital of Belize are better at geography.

Why are atheists smarter than religious people? Because getting answers correct is the definition of intelligence.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is the brains of the operation, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to be statistically more intelligent than your theistic counterpart?

As an atheist, I walk into a church. There’s a guy nailed to a cross, there’s an 80-year-old likely pedophile giving a speech, and there’s a whole bunch of people hanging on his every word. Who’s the Vegas favorite to be smartest guy in the room?

In our lead story tonight, the Obama administration filed an amicus brief in favor of prayer at public meetings in advance of an upcoming Supreme Court challenge to the unconstitutional practice.

I thought Obama was an atheist . . . Uncle Clarence Thomas Aquinas . . . turncoat bastard.

That was a Wheel of Fortune ‘before and after’, a literary race traitor reference, a religious supreme court justice tie in, and a religion connection, all in one.

Give yourself more credit than that, it was a Wheel of Fortune “before and after and after plus before again.”

Anyway, the brief claims that as long as a prayer isn’t clearly intended to proselytize and doesn’t denigrate a particular faith, it is an entirely reasonable way to open a meeting of elected representatives. After all, as the brief points out, the House and Senate both have chaplains and when have either of those bodies ever fucked anything up?

What the fuck does a Congress chaplain do? Pray for separation of church and state? Pray for themself to be fired for a First Amendment violation?

And ALL wasting of taxpayer-funded time denigrates atheists. Live animal sacrifice has the same statistical success as Christian prayer in causing things to happen. Let’s just skip the prayer, save the goat, and have legislative bodies spend ALL their time preventing progress like they’re fucking supposed to.

This is just the latest attempt to reach around to the religious community, to offer a stroking hand of friendship, to bend over frontwards in hopes of attenuating the Prince of Darkness reputation Obama has among evangelicals.

Have I already made a joke about rosary anal beads?

Yes, but you can never make too many.

They’re acting like the beliefs of Christians are somehow informed by facts and occurrences in the real world.

Right, and despite the impressive string of compromises, concessions, copouts and consolation prizes, the fundies continues to clean their guns and stock up on freeze-dried legumes against the inevitability that the population will be imprisoned and forced to pledge their souls to satan.

Obama administration files amicus brief supporting prayer at government meetings: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/08/09/obama-administration-backs-legislative-prayer-in-amicus-brief/

And in “nautical nincompoopery” news tonight, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip that started from a tropic port when some homophobic weasel-eating rednecks lost the ability to separate Fox News from reality and decided to endanger the lives of their children in a fruitless and ill-conceived attempt to escape the abortion-loving US in favor of the rapidly sinking Kiribati islands.

Listen, I’m not saying bringing your children to almost die with you on a boat is the same as abortion . . . I’m saying it’s MUCH MUCH WORSE!!!

Abortion is quantifiably good for society.

Whereas negligent almost homicide, even bible-inspired negligent almost homicide, not good for society.

30 year old Sean Gastonguay and his 26 year old wife Hannah cited a number of imaginary reasons they chose to leave ‘Murica, including tax payer funded abortion, state control of churches, mandatory homosexuality and the tiny robots that sneak into their brains when they sleep.

Well they’re bluffing about that last thing, because they can’t know about the brain nanobots. That’s the whole thing with nanobots.

As far as the tax-funded abortion, that sounds weird, because I usually get my abortions done at a private doctor, but I never got any voucher checks.

I go to Jerry Orbach as Jennifer Gray’s dad in Dirty Dancing . . . the first and last likable abortion doctor in a movie.

“Nobody puts baby in the dumpster in the corner…”

Anyway back to the harrowing story of our deficient defectors, figuring that nothing goes better with stupid than more stupid, they opted to escape the country by sea; setting sail across the Pacific Ocean with a 3 year old, a baby and absolutely no knowledge or experience in navigation. Hannah explained that they (quote) “decided to take a leap of faith and see where God led us”, which, as it turned out, was floating aimlessly in the Pacific ocean for three months after rough weather crippled their laughably under-equipped vessel.

I guess it’s a no-brainer for atheists, but if they didn’t get rescued in time, who gets eaten first on that boat?

Family sails away from the gay, abortion loving US and gets lost. http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/219129631.html?page=all&prepage=1&c=y#continue

And in “Not the preferred nomenclature” news tonight, it turns out there’s a legal limit to how weird a black person’s name can be. Or at least, that’s the opinion of the dishonorable Judge Lu Ann Ballew, who decided to change a 7 month old babies name of her own volition during a custody dispute.

If black people weren’t allowed to give their kid any name they want . . . I’d probably be able to make a racist-sounding analogy right here. But I can’t, so black mothers – and occasionally black fathers – can name their kids whatever they want.

The Eastern Tennessee Judge was hearing a custody case involving a baby named “Messiah” and despite having not been crowned emperor and thus having no legal right to do so, she decided to overrule the birth certificate, explaining that Messiah was a title, not a name and it had only been earned by one person and that person was our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Right, because the word messiah comes from Hebrew and appears in the Old Testament, which was that book all about Jesus.

In an effort to explain her actions, Ballew asserted that the name Messiah could cause problems in the largely Christian area. And while I understand the sensitivity to insult a person whose last name kinda rhymes with swallow and has the word ball in it that adjudicates in Cocke County certainly has, that still doesn’t afford her the jurisdiction to rename people’s kids.

Quick story time . . . My atheist friend was being raised Catholic to placate grandparents, and when he got confirmed, he had to choose a saint to have as his confirmation name. So he tried to have “God” as his confirmation name, claiming that Jesus is a saint, and Jesus is God, therefore God is a Saint. To which his priest responded, “Wait, you lost me at therefore” . . .

Tennessee Judge renames baby during custody hearing: http://www.goddiscussion.com/113836/parents-told-by-tn-judge-they-cannot-name-their-baby-messiah/

And in yet another “naked, alien-worshipping lunatics redeeming Nazi regalia” story, the Raelians are in the news for the third time in as many decades this week with a misguided effort to rehabilitate the swastika.

Against all odds, they found something less-defensible than their existing cult beliefs.

And gratuitous mention of terrible attention-grabbing things like swastikas, Nazis, genocide, rape, cancer, abortion, and whatnot . . . That’s no way to get attention. Unless you’re our podcast.

Even I wouldn’t wear an ironic hipster swastika t-shirt.

Boasting a worldwide following nearly equal to the population of Pawtucket City, Rhode Island, the Raelians bill themselves as the world’s largest UFO religion, a statistical advantage cemented by the frequency with which their competitors commit mass suicide.

At this point, if you’re part of some alien cult, and somebody sets up any kind of punch bowl situation, you’ve gotta see that coming.

But if you think about it, they can only claim that because Scientologists are too embarassed to admit what they believe in public.

In the latest installment of their thinly veiled attempt to get people to talk about Raelians, the group flew a swastika laden banner over a popular Long Island beach sporting a web address where people could join them in their fight to reclaim the true meaning of the swastika.

This sounds like the worst Kurt Vonnegut book ever. Some galactically important alien plot that revolved around using swastika shapes for communication, and the Nazis unwittingly fucked up their whole plan, and Kilgore Trout had something to do with it somehow.

Fuckin’ anti-semite tralfamadorians…

Raelians work to take back the Swastika: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/aug/11/ufo-religion-raelians-reclaim-swastika

And in this week’s installment of CSI: Nazareth, Kenyan Lawyer Dola Indidis is fighting to overturn the conviction of one Jesus H. Christ. Arguing that Jesus clearly didn’t do it, Indidis has filed a case with the International Court of Justice against Pontius Pilate, King Herod and a ham sandwich.

How are Christians mad about this? Didn’t the Romans and the Jews kill Jesus for your sins? Follow the money. Who benefits from Jesus dying? Everyone. We all get to sin for free now. Plus, none of you are supposed to believe Jesus really died! This is all in the script(ure).

Included in his list of defendants are the modern day nations of Italy and Israel. The stuff that Indidis uses in place of logic supposes that Italy incurs guilt for pretty much being Ancient Rome and Israel incurs guilt by being full of Jews.

If they’re found guilty in court, what happens? We crucify a rabbi and a soccer player? Kenya owns Vatican City? Obama takes over as interim Pope?

In one of the greatest dismissals of all time, the International Court of Justice, which exists to hear claims pursued by states rather than individuals working on the behalf of bronze-age superheroes said that (quote) “it is not even theoretically possible for us to consider this case.”

Can’t waste time on religion bullshit, when that princess is still kidnapped, and that Bowser guy is still at large.

Kenyan lawyer works to overturn Jesus’ death sentence: http://www.policymic.com/articles/58445/this-kenyan-lawyer-wants-to-sue-italy-and-israel-for-killing-jesus

And from the “plumps when you cook ‘em” file tonight, police in Stevenson Washington arrested a man last Sunday after he decapitated his dog… with a homemade bomb… because it was possessed by the devil.

Here we are – atheist podcasters – basically reverse-publicists for religion. And they go ahead and start murdering puppies. We don’t even have to try anymore. I don’t think there exists a PR gaff worse, than having your institutional fairy tales lead to puppy murder. I’m gonna say religion and puppy murder one more time.

Feels good doesn’t it? The way we get to link those things because crazy people are almost always deeply religious? Anyway, 45 year old religious puppy murderer Christopher Dillingham was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment and possession of an explosive device last Sunday after strapping a black powder bomb to his labrador retriever and blowing it the fuck up in his backyard at four in the morning.

Bunch of savages. At least when an atheist murders a puppy with an IED, it’s not for an awful reason like religion.

Dillingham explained to police that his ex-girlfriend had given him the dog after imbuing it with evil spirits. When police asked why his windows were broken and a bunch of his shit was strewn around the yard, he explained that many of his utensils were also possessed and that purging his cookware of demonic forces was all part of his rapture preparation strategy.

Crazy people are capable of crazy shit like this, regardless of their feelings about Jesus.

But when sane people start filling crazy people’s heads with shit about impending apocalypses and seven headed dragons rising from the sea, aren’t they at least partially liable for the puppy murder?

I loved that when reporters asked why Dillingham wasn’t facing charges of cruelty to animals the sheriff actually said that such a charge requires proof of the animal suffering and when you blow a dog’s head off, it’s admiring its new collar one second and…

Man blows up family dog because it had devil in it: http://www.christianpost.com/news/man-preparing-for-rapture-blows-up-family-dog-because-it-had-the-devil-in-it-101756/

And finally tonight, in “If that tree wasn’t magic why would it be weeping tears of aphid shit?” news, a group of gullible spunk monkeys in California have managed to convince themselves that a tree outside their church is blessed with holy tears.

They need to bottle that stuff. It only takes 3 god tears to cure a person of homosexuality, and just a dab on the taint restores anal virginity.

Providing yet another example of the cognitive dissonance that religion can inspire, they’ve managed to maintain that belief despite the fact that the “tears” have been identified as a known phenomenon that is not only common in the area, but common on that fucking street!

Yeah it looks like God might have also been crying on my laptop screen and a sock I wore yesterday.

So according to people with knowledge and shit, what we’re actually dealing with is aphid poop. The aphids suck out the tree sap and crap out what arborist Jon Reelhorn describes as a “honey-dew excrement”.

How does this so-called “tree expert” know it’s aphid shit? He’s probably never even read the section of the bible that discusses the fecal form often taken by god’s tears on earth.

Though it wasn’t mentioned in the article, I’m willing to bet the parishioners are now employing the “space-peanut” defense by claiming that it’s a divine honey-dew excrement.

The Holy Shit defense lacks consistency. Not as solid as they think. Hard to digest . . . And a little bit corny, from what I’ve seen.

People pray to “weeping tree”; tears turn out to be bug excrement: http://www.wptv.com/dpp/news/national/People-pray-at-tree-outside-St-Johns-Cathedral-in-Fresno-California-say-tree-weeps-Gods-tears

That’ll do it for headlines tonight, Heath, thanks as always for joining me.

Pleasure

And when we come back we’ll be one up on Jesus.

Donation Pitch:

Here at the Scathing Atheist, we know that you could be spending your donation dollars anywhere and sometimes it can be difficult to decide to give them to us.

On the one hand you could support underprivileged people, handicapped by a misfortune of geography and desperate to taste the smallest fraction of the wealth our nation enjoys. On the other hand you could give it to a couple of middle-income New Yorkers who make fart jokes.

So to help you make the right decision when it comes time to donate your hard earned dollars, Heath and I would like to present our top ten reasons to give your money to us instead of starving kids in Africa.

10 – African kids are awesome at starving to death and who are you to take that away from them?
9 – No matter how you slice it, we’re funnier than starving kids.
8 – AIDS is already an appetite suppressant.
7 – The entire African economy is based on bony kids with flies crawling on them. How are a bunch of chubby kids going to inspire a coffee a day’s worth of sympathy?
6 – A lot of Africans are Muslims.
5 – These kids live in tribal Africa. The rent out there is nothing! It costs $450 a month to park your fucking car in Manhattan. When’s the last time subway fares went up in the Burundi? Never? That’s what I thought.
4 – The swarm of flies around one kid is CGI just for the commercial.
3 – Statistically speaking, at least some of the kids you’d be feeding are total assholes.
2 – This should go without saying but podcast hosting costs money. Starving is free.
1 – In the words of the late, great George Carlin, “Fuck the Children”
- Also in the words of the last few popes.

So if jokes about starving children with aids and a little pedophilia humor tugs at your heartstrings the way it tugs at mine, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

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 to Genesis and learn all about the first people that god ever made, Adam and Eve.

Adam was god’s finest creation, whom god fashioned in his own image. And Eve was an afterthought made from a rib when Adam decided bulls, sheep and hamsters were inadequate companions. And together they lived in the Garden of Eden.

The Garden was a beautiful paradise where the weather was always nice and there was always enough to eat. There were plenty of delicious fruits to eat, but the very most delicious fruit of them all was the only thing in the whole garden that they weren’t allowed to have, because it would give them knowledge.

God could have made the fruit they weren’t allowed to eat taste really bad or he could have just not put it there at all, but he decided to put the only thing they couldn’t have right there where it would be really, really easy for them to get it. But they didn’t because god had told them not to.

But then the devil came to them in the form of serpent and he spoke to Eve. Because, yes, boys and girls, the devil can inhabit snakes and talk to you. And it’s okay to tell kids that because they would probably have nightmares anyway.

God also could have not made devil snakes or been there when he knew that the devil was tempting Eve, but he decided not to because god is mysterious, so instead he allowed Adam and Eve to disobey him, even though he already knew that they would before they did, because god knows everything.

And when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they realized that they were naked and they were ashamed of it because people should be ashamed of their bodies no matter what and nakedness is evil. And it’s okay to tell kids that because they’d probably already have plenty of suicidal thoughts in their teen years anyway.

So Adam and Eve made clothes out of leaves and they hid when they heard god coming because they didn’t want him to see their naughty bits. So god asked them, “Hey guys, where’s your cock and tits and stuff?”

And Adam told god that he didn’t want god to look at his penis anymore. So god got really mad. And it’s okay to tell kids that because the priests would have probably overpowered them even if they weren’t theologically predisposed to letting authority figures see them naked.

And god said “Did you guys eat the fruit I told you not to eat?”

And Adam said, “It was all Eve’s fault” which meant that god wasn’t the only one who wasn’t gonna see her naughty bits for a while.

So god became so angry that he stole the snake’s legs and made it crawl on it’s belly, which is a punishment even though it’s an equally valid method of locomotion that is better suited to the snake’s ecological niche than legs would be.

And god got so mad at Eve that he made childbirth hurt for all animals forever and ever. And he also kicked them out of the beautiful garden and made them live in a crappier world with hurricanes and earthquakes and disease and stillborn puppies. And he also cursed every human being who would ever live to carry the sin of Eve. Because she ate a fruit god told her not to eat.

And nobody ever lived happily ever after again. Because of a fruit.

The End

Outro:

Before we power down the engines tonight I wanted to apologize to anybody who got the impression last week that we’d changed to an hour long format. It was an hour long special because of the subject and the divisibility by five but we never actually said that during the show so if you were expecting 30 more minutes at this point, I do apologize.

I also wanted to offer another apology to one of the world’s most important bipeds, Evan. I was checking back over some notes and I’m almost certain that I forgot to thank him a couple of weeks ago for his generous donation. I’m really not sure how it happened and how I managed to keep missing it for several weeks, but Evan, thank you, you’re more awesome than almost everybody on earth and I’m really sorry.

And finishing my trifecta of mea culpas is an apology to Mechy from the Autistic Jesus Facebook page who provided last week’s Farnsworth quote and then didn’t get the plug I promised him in return for it. He’s just getting his page started there but if you can’t get enough godlessness on your Facebook wall, you’ll find a link to his page on the shownotes for this episode.

https://www.facebook.com/AutisticJesus

I also need to thank Heath for making this podcast so damn much better than it would otherwise be and I need to thank my beautiful wife Lucinda for doing a bible story this week despite her miserable head cold.

But of course, most of all, I need to thank this week’s most momentous multicellular organisms, Harry, Kevin, Will, Matthew, Richard, other Richard, Anne, Ben, Tyler and Michael. Harry, Kevin, Richard and Will who are feared by supervillains almost as much as they’re loved by damsels in distress; Other Richard, Anne and Michael who are formidable on their own, but together form the greatest robot warrior in the universe and Matthew, Ben and Tyler, three men with the scientific acumen, the penis girth and the bravery to rape dinosaurs but the willpower not to. These TEN brave and illustrious examples of humanity proved themselves this week by giving us money.

Of course, not everyone has the tenacity, capacity, veracity and sense of bold personal style required to give us money, but if you think you share Harry, Kevin, Will, Matthew, Richard, other Richard, Anne, Ben, Tyler and Michael’s eleemosynary proclivity, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

And if you want to help us out but only if it’s free, you can also help us a ton by leaving us a sterling review over on the iTunes, adding us to your favorites list on Stitcher, liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, subscribing to us on YouTube and following our blog. Or doing some combination of those things as you see fit.

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.

Categories: Show Transcripts Tags: atheist podcast, Dola Indidis, Hannah Gastonguay, holy aphid shit, Judge Ballew, Lu Ann Ballew, Raelian Swastika, religious podcast, scathing atheist transcript, Sean Gastonguay

Episode 23 – Partial Transcript

July 25, 2013 Noah Lugeons 3 comments

by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons

(Transcript may contain material edited out of the final version)

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Fox’s new reality talent show, American False Idol. Watch as cult-leader contestants from around the country compete against each other and against god in feats of talent and existence.

The last prophet standing wins their own religion and a lifelong tax exemption. American False Idol, because even when Fox puts the name of the sin in the title, Christians still watch it.

And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s July 25th and it’s not too late to wave some popcorn under a Muslim’s nose tomorrow afternoon.

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

In this week’s episode;

Former celebrity Kirk Cameron is told by Facebook to cease and desist the fuck up,
A new law in Louisiana won’t not make it not not legal to obey the law.
And we’ll make fun of Fred Phelps’ dead mother,

But first, the diatribe.

Diatribe:

Boy, this new pope sure is awesome. He’s a reformer. He’s a radical. He’s a beacon of light illuminating the dimmest hour of Catholic decline. He’s beloved by all, Catholic and otherwise. He’s approachable, off-the-cuff and lovable. He’s the antithesis to Pope Palpatine the second. He’s a game-changer.

Except for all the places that matter.

The major-media outlets are suffering from a bit or “Protestant Guilt” after spending two decades covering stories about Catholics butt-raping children so I guess I understand why they’ve been so quick to cram into the papal-fellatio waiting room, but in their eagerness to finally have something good to say about the Vatican, I think they’ve forgotten that balanced doesn’t equal honest.

So let me make something clear about Pope Franks-but-no-Franks: He hasn’t done a fucking thing.

Despite the publicity juggernaut to the contrary, carrying your own bags and posing for a photo-op in a jalopy doesn’t count as reform. Living in a palatial guest house instead of a palatial palace doesn’t count as reform. Washing feet and ad libbing shit about atheists going to heaven doesn’t count as reform. To reform something, you have to actually do something.

Let’s face it, during the reign of Pope Bene-dickhead we had some pretty legitimate complaints about the papacy. And none of them were, “That old fucker won’t even carry his own luggage!”

So where does Pope Frankly-my-dear-I-don’t-give-a-damn stand on the big issues?

He’s against condoms. He fully endorses the genocidal opposition to contraception that exacerbates the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It would take nothing but waving his magic pope wand to halt these detrimental policies, and yet he’s done nothing.

He’s against ordaining women. Not only has he made no moves on that, but he also left a long line of politically motivated misogyny behind him on the way to the Vatican… not to mention a few allegations of war crimes.

He’s staunchly homophobic. He’s actually described the move in Argentina to legalize gay marriage as “a war against god” and shows no signs whatsoever that he’ll be moving the Vatican into the twenty-first century with regard to gays.

He staunchly supports celibacy for priests despite the fact that it isn’t biblical (and actually directly contradicts the biblical prescription for priests and their sex lives) and could give a damn less if it’s harmful psychologically.

Come meet the new pope, same as the old pope. In all the ways that matter, he hasn’t done a fucking thing. And yet everyday I hop onto a religious news site and read about all these great “symbolic” reforms he’s making. Symbolic actions are great unless they’re coming from somebody who has the authority to make real change.

But the media is so desperate to paint him as a reformer that I’ve seen him extolled for coming out “strongly against the financial misdealings of the Vatican bank.” Like there was some other pope who was all about publicly endorsing money laundering for the mafia?

Look, maybe the media is right and I’m wrong. Maybe Pope Franky-Doodle-Dandy really is planning on reforming the Vatican from the ground up. But he hasn’t started yet. And when you take over as the head of the most corrupt institution on the planet you don’t get any extra credit for dressing less flamboyantly than the last guy.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my fellow expositor Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to exposit?

I’m all about exposition. Whenever I need extra cash, I make an exposit at the sperm bank. That’s what that means, right?

In the interest of getting the sperm jokes started early, we’ll say yes.

Sperm gags are all about coming early.

The Spanish Inquisition of sexual events.

In our lead story tonight the state of California is considering a bill that would help child abuse victims receive compensation if they were otherwise unable to file suit because of time or age restrictions. Obviously, this bill enjoys wide, bipartisan support because who on earth would actually oppose allowing victims of child sexual abuse to pursue long overdue justice?

Catholics.

That’s right. The Los Angeles archdiocese made the mistake of taking the high road on justice for sex abuse victims back in 2002 and the bill California passed back then almost wiped them out. So this time they’re fighting against justice for abused children with everything they’ve got.

So a whole bunch of those tax-deductible donations to churches, are going to pay for pedophile advocacy experts. There’s a positive social externality in there somewhere.

Yeah, one has to imagine the lobbyists are all hoping not to get the “maintain strict statutes of limitations on child rape” assignment.

They’re trying to argue that “A certain day needs to exist, on which these people wake up, and they’re no longer a rape victim.”

Usually it’s the other way around in Christianity … Fall asleep a virgin, and wake up a rape victim. That’s how it went for Jesus’s mom, and lots of slutty altar boys, I imagine.

The archdiocese recognizes the public relations tightrope one must walk when vociferously siding with pedophilic rapists, so they’re hard at work trying to sell this bill as a prejudicial witch-hunt against Catholics.

If the tightrope represents the right way to side with pedophilic rapists, then I wouldn’t say the church is walking it. I don’t think they can see the tightrope from where they’re standing. I’m not impressed by “The lord rapes kids in mysterious ways.”

Well, they point out that the bill would not allow victims to sue public schools for abuse that had passed the statute of limitations, so clearly they’re just going after Catholic child rapists. After all, allowing victims to sue for tax dollars is directly analogous to allowing them to sue a private institution that is still largely governed by people who were and are actively involved in covering up the details of child rape and torture, isn’t it?

I don’t think the public school system could have pulled the same moves to cover for pedophile teachers . . .

“What?!? We sent the rapiest ones to teach Nazi grandchildren in Argentina.”

Catholic Church fighting child abuse bill in California: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/catholic-church-private-schools-lobby-against-california-childhood-sex-abuse/

On now to the ever-burning question “Could we have freed the slaves but not kept the South?”, we turn to Louisiana where Democratic state senator Mary Landrieu has introduced a piece of legislation called the “Freedom to Pray” bill, which would, in her words, “protect American’s right to pray.”

Was that part of the larger, “Right to Being and Nothingness Bill”?

This might mean the end of the atheist psychic nanobot thought police.

And as we long ago learned, making legal shit legal is a favored strategy for sneaking bullshit religious laws through the legislature and this one is no different. If you dig even a little, you’ll find that the intent of the bill is clearly to allow state and federal funds to go to programs that are explicitly religious in nature.

Does the legislation explain exactly how The Bill of Rights no longer applies in Louisiana? And if the church needs more money, they should just pray for it, hold their breath, and die.

Amen. Anyway, this all comes as a response to a recent hullabaloo about a quasi-military religious indoctrination camp being run by a Louisiana Sheriff’s department. The program was denied $15,000 in federal funding due to the ubiquity of prayer within the program along with pledges to “attend the church of my faith” and to “Love god”.

Bible Camp for redneck cops makes me nervous. Like ‘venerated obsoivances and rituals’, ‘Waco, Texas’ nervous.

Well hopefully you’ll be reassured by the evangelists running the program, who insist that the prayers are voluntary and a whole room full of people praying around you isn’t coercive at all. And that’s enough for senator Landrieu, who would clearly have no problem with a state run, federally funded program encouraging her children to bow to Mecca, as long as it was voluntary.

In theory, this would create an awkward, alienating situation for any Jewish or Muslim officers. But Jews and Muslims certainly don’t get hired by police departments – or sold property – in Louisiana, so in practice, it’s a moot point.

Louisiana Senator proposes bill to protect religious groups that receive federal funding: https://www.au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/prayer-posturing-la-officials-seek-taxpayer-support-for-religious-program

And in satanic lesbian news tonight, Fred Phelps’ dead mother is now gay thanks to the efforts of the New York based Satanic Temple. Person whose name left him no career options except arch-villain or spokesman for the Satanic Temple Lucien Greaves explained that the action was meant to convey (quote) “a message of love in the face of hate”.

Like a money shot all over hate’s face. Chicken fried hate smothered in white country gravy. Phelps needs a Chia Pet, so people everywhere can put sticky seed all over his face.

6 sperm jokes already. He’s going for the record!

Anyway, the ceremony, which the Satanic Temple refers to as a “Pink Mass” was performed by Greaves and two same-sex couples and took place at the Mississippi grave of Phelps’ mother. The goal of the ritual was to turn the mother of the notoriously sodomy-obsessed preacher’s spirit into a posthumous lesbian.

This strategy makes sense, given the way shit works in the bible. This can even get her expelled from heaven. Jesus stops having pre-emptively died for your sins if you posthumously witness gay sex near your gravesite. Plus, that bitch natured and nurtured her bile duct of a son.

The ceremony was, of course, tongue in cheek, as in some dude’s tongue in some other dude’s cheek.

Jelly? Syrup? Rusty Trombone? What does a party like that cost? I guess if I have to ask, I probably can’t afford it.

Apparently the ritual called for two prolonged homosexual makeout session over the headstone along with some divine cock-stroking. Phelps’ mother, who died as the result of god’s retribution over our butt-sex loving culture, could not be reached for comment.

Satanic church holds same-sex ceremony at Fred Phelps’ mom’s grave: http://www.thegauntlet.com/article/28311/The-Satanic-Temple-Performs-Same-Sex-Ceremony-At-Westboro-Baptist-Church-Leaders-Family-Gravesite

And in “Apparently there’s a snooze button on your 15 minutes of fame” news tonight, Kirk Cameron, who you’ll remember from trying to remember where you remember him from, is in a tizzy because people can tell the difference between him being earnest and spam.

Who could forget about Mike Seaver and his best friend Boner? Classic member of the shitty 80’s sitcom canon. And let’s not ignore Cameron’s illustrious film career, including “The Growing Pains Movie” in 2000, and of course the Godfather 2 of sitcom movie sequels, “Growing Pains: Return of the Seavers” in 2004.

Cameron, who has used his post-C-list celebrity decline to promote creationism, has a new movie coming out and he’s been having a bit of trouble promoting it on social media. It began when Facebook blocked promos for his movie and called them “abusive”, “unsafe” and “spammy”.

It’s good to hear that Facebook is using algorithms that can sniff out abusive, unsafe, spammy shit like religion. Software that can process content, and then quantify its level of malignant wrongness – love it. Or maybe they just noticed Kirk Cameron’s name on it.

Facebook later apologized when almost dozens of Cameron’s fans made a fuss but just as Facebook unblocked him, YouTube gave him the boot calling promos for his film, “spam”, “scam” and “deceptive”. This block was later lifted as well, though promos for his film are still “spam”, “scam” and “deceptive”.

Spoiler alert: God did it. He was the rapist in the end.

Which end?

I was impressed by Cameron’s unflinching optimism when he boldly used the plural form of theater in describing the film’s upcoming release.

Further proof that you were never really a celebrity if people could say of your solitary known vehicle, “The star of that show was really Alan Thicke”

Kirk Cameron’s movie blocked on Facebook: http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/facebook-blocks-kirk-camerons-new-movie.html & http://www.examiner.com/article/facebook-apologizes-to-kirk-cameron-for-blocking-new-movie

And in this week’s papal back-walking report, the Vatican is offering time off from purgatory for his Twitter followers, unless you ask Catholic pundits, in which case they definitely aren’t, because that would be stupid.

And if you retweet a papal bull in the next 10 minutes, the Pope will personally murder you, and send you directly to the good part of heaven with the comfy chairs for all the rape victims.

The latest in an illustrious Catholic tradition of trading imaginary favors for real ones, this story reminds us all that Catholics still kind of endorse the antiquated notion that you can earn perdition vouchers for climbing certain stairs and attending certain parties in Rio.

Also, if you duck for 3 seconds while standing on a white platform, you can fall into a 3rd dimension, and get a whistle that takes you to a warp zone that bypasses purgatory altogether.

The story begins when the Apostolic Penitentiary issued a document offering a plenary indulgence for those who attend the upcoming World Youth Day in Brazil. And because the Apostolic Penitentiary is known for being cutting edge and hip, they extended the indulgence to those who follow the event on Twitter.

For those who don’t want to be kidnapped by a dance-fighting cocaine cartel, they decided to allow the Twitter exception to participate without actually entering Brazil. . . I’m okay with that. But why not just go all the way, and put up some indulgence buy-it-nows on eBay?

That sentence may very well have contained earth’s first capoeira joke. Well done.

Recognizing that everyone loves a good “Damn is Catholic theology stupid” story, headlines like “Follow Pope online and reach heaven sooner” started popping up all over the place. Because, you know, that’s exactly what they said. But the accuracy of these mocking headlines didn’t stop Catholics from getting pissed off about them.

When your group is regularly offended by things that are true, it’s your group’s fault, not truth’s.

Try explaining that to Reverend James Martin who wrote a lengthy blog for CNN where he explained that you can’t get time off from purgatory for following Tweets, as that would be silly. It doesn’t count unless you follow those Tweets contritely.

Pope offers indulgences for following him on Twitter: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/17/sorry-you-cant-get-out-of-hell-by-retweeting-the-pope/

And finally tonight, in lubricated jew dick news, we bring you the story of Trigg laboratories where a congregation of rabbis from the Rabbinical Council of California have recently declared their “Wet” brand of personal lubricants to be Kosher, making it the first sex lube that is approved for orthodox jews.

Unless you count the fact that “Moses parting the Red Sea” was code for using menstrual blood as a lubricant.

Check out the mid-rash on that one . . . is what they would say about an unkosher vagina.

It’s important to note the implications of this move. Kosher laws are dietary laws. There is no requirement that suppositories, cosmetics or vaginal cleansers be approved by rabbis unless somebody plans on eating them. So this sex lube hasn’t been cleared for use as a sex lube, it’s been cleared for use as a condiment.

Yeah I could see marinating a chicken in that . . . and then shoving it up a Jewish girl’s ass, if she was into that sort of thing. I mean I wouldn’t suggest it, but if she asked, I’d step up.

And this is great for the Jews . . . They can finally go ass to mouth without worrying about the dietary repercussions.

You never go ass to mouth!

Ass to mouth notwithstanding, this does open up a wide range of new orifice/object permutations for Jews.

Yeah, just what are the rules about sucking orthodox cocks?

In other words, is it okay for women to kneel before the wailing balls?

Can Hassi chicks suck Hassi dicks?

This new lube opens the door to some easier Schindler’s fisting.

Maybe now they can finally put a glory hole in the wailing wall.

Gives new meaning to “Torah new one”

I guess it’s just the latest in the ongoing rabbinical debate on whether or not it’s okay to suck a dick that isn’t eight days old and recently mutilated.

To be fair, when CAN YOU suck an eight day old dick, if not right after you mutilate it?

Also to be fair, whose recently mutilated dick CAN YOU suck, if not that an eight day old boy?

Kosher lube opens orthodox jews to oral sex? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/jul/17/kosher-lube-oral-sex-jews-lubricant

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

You’re not gonna trim the end of those circumcision jokes off in post are you?

And unlike Jesus, we’ll be back soon.

Calendar:

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

We’ll start in Toledo, Ohio on the weekend of August 18th where the Great Lakes Atheist Convention is welcoming JT Eberhard, Zack Kopplin, Jerry DeWitt and many more, including the Mayor of Toledo, which I find encouraging. And let’s face it, if a speaker lineup can get me thinking “I wish I was in Toledo”, it’s gotta be pretty damn impressive.

http://lanyrd.com/2013/great-lakes-atheist-convention/

Moving 7 days ahead and 7 thousand kilometers away, we’ve got the 15th European Skeptics’ Congress in Stockholm, Sweden on the weekend of the 23rd. Even though parts of the website are in Swedish, the conference itself will be in English

The speakers list includes DJ Grothe, Max Maven and a bunch of Europeans I’ve never heard of that have really interesting topic lines for their talks.

http://euroscepticscon.org/

We talked up the Atheist Alliance of America’s upcoming National Convention in Boston last week, but it seems like every time I look at their website they’ve added more awesome speakers. Aron-Ra, Ed Buckner, Seth Andrews, Steven Pinker, Greg Epstein, Sean Faircloth and the list keeps going.

That one’s taking place in Boston over Labor Day weekend.

http://www.aaaboston2013.com/

Lastly, of course, over that same weekend in Atlanta you’ve got DragonCon, which isn’t an atheist or humanist convention, but it’s awesome and it has a hell of a skeptical track so definitely worth checking out if you’re going to be anywhere near Atlanta. Michael Shermer, David Silverman, Rebecca Watson, Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage.

http://www.skeptrack.org/

If you want to know more you’ll find links to the homepages for all these events on the shownotes for this episode. And, of course, if you’re involved with or aware of an atheist or secular event that needs a plug, you’ll find all the contact info at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Top Ten:

Ah, Ramadan, the only holiday that could also be considered a war-crime. It’s that desultory time of year when Muslims gather together in misery so that they can be reminded that sometimes being a Muslim really sucks. Considered to be one of the five pillars of Islam, Muslims work hard to ensure that Ramadan will never be commercialized like Christmas by making it as miserable as possible.

But knowing that our listenership might not be as familiar with the Muslim customs as they are with the Christian ones, we decided to dedicate a few minutes to answering the top ten most often-asked questions about Ramadan.

Number ten: How do you celebrate Ramadan?

You don’t. This isn’t the kind of holiday you celebrate exactly. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite of celebrating. During Ramadan, all post-pubescent Muslims are required to observe a month long daylight fast. From sunrise to sunset, they aren’t allowed to eat, drink or smoke and are also expected to refrain from sex and foul language throughout. This is in addition, of course, to the lifelong Islamic prohibitions against alcohol, pork and critical thinking.

Number nine: Does everyone have to fast during Ramadan?

Not everyone. Pregnant women, people who are ill, women who are breast feeding and people who are travelling are allowed to forego the fast as long as they make up the days later in divine detention.

…writing “I will not comprehend” on the chalkboard.

And while Muslims are quick to point out that little kids aren’t required to fast, because in most of the world that would be considered child-abuse, they are certainly encouraged to as practice for later in life.

Number eight: Why?

Because the month of Ramadan is believed to be the month that Allah first revealed himself to Mohammed so Muslims mark the occasion by hating life.

Number seven: When is Ramadan?

Easier asked than answered. Because Muslims use a lunar calendar, Ramadan moves around in the year. Each year it begins 11 days earlier than the year before, so sometimes they fast in the short days of the winter when you need food the most, and sometimes it falls in the summer when not drinking water is borderline suicidal in most of the Muslim world.

Number six: What does the word “Ramadan” mean?

Yeah, even the word itself foretells of the general shittiness of this custom. It comes from the Arabic word ‘Ramida’ or ‘ar-radam’, and while there is no direct English translation, the gist of the word is “Heat and scorching dryness”.

Number five: Why the hell would anyone do this?

Because religion makes people do dumb shit. Muslims justify it by pointing out that it helps them focus on the spirit rather than worldly things, as though ignoring reality in favor of imagination was a virtue. They also claim that it helps them master self-control without recognizing the irony that by doing it they’ve explicitly surrendered control of themselves to a fictitious autocrat.

But most of all, they say it helps them empathize with the less fortunate

Number four: Well what about the sex part? Are they also trying to empathize with ugly fuckers?

Yeah, they never really address the fact that even people who are starving and thirsty are still allowed to jerk off.

Number three: Is fasting like that unhealthy?

No… how could foregoing all the life giving sustenance for absurd amounts of time possibly harm you? And what’s more, how could believing that failing in this Herculean task would offend god himself damage a 14 year old psychologically?

Of fucking course it’s unhealthy.

Which leads us to the Number two most often asked question about Ramadan: Seriously?

You bet your ass seriously. And we’re talking about Mulsim seriously. They’ve got levels of seriously we can scarcely comprehend. In fact, it’s even encoded in the laws of many Muslim countries.

The ones that have laws, that is.

Right, like Kuwait, where publicly eating, drinking or smoking during the day carries a heavy fine during Ramadan. Or the UAE, where it’s punishable by hundreds of hours of community service and in Algeria daylight mastication during Ramadan can land you in jail for years.

And finally, the number one question asked about Ramadan…

How the hell do they get away with calling this a holiday?

It’s only a holiday in the technical sense of being an annual observance. In all other ways, it’s a punishment for being religious. The only real “holiday” part comes at the end of the month with a celebration called Eid al-Fitr, which means “festivity of breaking the fast”. It’s a day when Muslims reflect on the fact that if you hit your testicles with a hammer over and over again for long enough, the act of not hitting yourself in the testicles with a hammer seems like a reward.

Bible Story:

Gather ‘round boys and girls. Today we’re going to open our Bibles to Exodus and read about Moses’ wife, Zipporah.

Now Zipporah was a very important person in the bible. She was so important that we know her name, even though she was a woman.

She grew up in a desert with her six sisters and spent all day doing whatever her father told her to do or getting beaten because that’s what women do in the bible. One day her and her sisters took their sheep to a well so that they could drink, but a bunch of mean men told them to go away so that they could water their sheep first.

Zipporah was sad and angry, but there was nothing she could do because she didn’t have a penis. But luckily, there was somebody around who did: Moses.

Moses was sitting by the well wondering if the corpse of the man he’d recently murdered was starting to stink yet when the bad shepherds shooed Zipporah and her sisters away. Moses decided to step in and help Zipporah water her sheep.

“How can I ever repay you?” she asked.

“A hand job?” Moses suggested.

So she invited him back to her tent so she could tug on his cock for a while, but when they got there her dad was home so she married him instead.

(Hooray!)

Moses loved Zipporah so much that he didn’t marry any other women even though he could have because that was okay back then. He took a job tending her father’s flocks, but one day he came home and told her that God had spoken to him and ordered him to free all the Jews in Egypt.

His eyes were red and he wreaked of burning bush, but Zipporah was a woman so she had no choice but to do what her husband said. So she grabbed their newborn son and left for decades of aimless wandering and random smitings.

But one night, on the way to Egypt, god decided to come to earth in human form and wrestle Moses to death at an inn. God was winning because he was god, so Zipporah decided she would have to help her husband out. But she couldn’t out-wrestle god, so what could she do?

Luckily, there was a baby weiner nearby, so she chopped a little piece of it off and touched it to Moses’ foot so that he could wrestle better. Then Moses suplexed god and everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

Outro:

Before we call it quits for the night, I have a very important apology to make to one of the most adept, admirable, altruistic, adroit, awesome, amazing, accommodating, astonishing, astounding, awe-inspiring anthropoids in the animal kingdom, April. April, I am so sorry that I neglected to thank you last week for your generous donation. Because of the extreme level of your magnificence, I had originally thanked you separately from the rest of last week’s best people, and then in a hasty, late night edit I cut it out without realizing it.

And to those of you who aren’t April, I should note that April told me she and her husband were competing to see who could get more mentions on the podcast through their extraordinary generosity and because of my mistake, April spent a week unjustly occupying the lower portion of the leaderboard in that noble competition. So to make up for that, I’d like to point out to April’s husband that I’ve now mentioned her 6 times in the last 33 seconds.

And in keeping with the “A” themed opening to this outro, I’d also like to thank two more prime examples of human DNA in action whose names also begin with A. Andrew, whose transcontinental philanthropy serves as a shining example of godless morality and another person who would rather remain anonymous but is also a biological exemplification of wit, wisdom and selfless magnanimity.

And while we’re on the topic of apologies to people whose names start with A, I’d also like to apologize to Ann who sent us a very eloquent and well-reasoned email a few weeks ago that deserves an on-air answer. And unfortunately I don’t have time to give it the response it deserves so for the time being I’ll simply say sorry about not making more pimp jokes. We’ll work on that.

That’s all the blasphemy we have for you tonight, but if you want more, there’s more. Tom and Cecil over at Cognitive Dissonance invited me on to chat with them and while it’s not available yet because it hasn’t actually even happened yet, I have reason to believe that you’ll find our conversation on episode 109 of their program, which I have reason to believe will be out on Monday.

And if you can’t make it until Monday, you can find occasional nuggets of Scatheism on our erratically published blog, our Twitter feed @Noah (underscore) Lugeons or our Facebook page at (slash) Scathing Atheist. And people who leave us 5 star reviews on iTunes are better than people that don’t. I also have it on good authority that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will give them mansions closer to the beer volcanos in the afterlife so Pascal’s Wager guys, might as well leave us a 5 star review.

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

Categories: Show Transcripts Tags: antitheism, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, Christianity, faith, Fred Phelps, Fred Phelps gay mom, Jew Lube, Kirk Cameron, Kirk Cameron "Unstoppable", Mary Landrieu, Pope Francis, Ramadan, religion, religious podcast, Senator Mary Landrieu

Episode 22: Partial Transcript

July 18, 2013 Noah Lugeons 2 comments

by Heath Enwright, Lucinda Lugeons and Noah Lugeons

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Deuteromino’s Pizza. Try some of our angelic wings, our cheese’s crust, or a delicious salad with all the cruci-fixins. Every pie is sliced by Christ, just for you.

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And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

It’s Thursday, it’s July 18th and during Ramadan, Muslims are like Mogwais in reverse.

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

In this week’s episode;

We’ll learn that Deuteronomy is really repetitive,
We’ll learn that Deuteronomy is really repetitive,
And we’ll have to turn off the window unit while we record

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

This past Saturday, Heath and I were invited to emcee a roast for a mutual friend that was moving out of town.

We were delighted to do it, but the guy we were roasting is exactly the kind of guy you hate to roast: He has no flaws. He’s in good shape, he’s good looking, he’s confident, he’s talented, he’s intelligent and he seems to have a new woman on his arm every weekend. Not exactly the cornucopia of personal defects that you hope for in a roast victim. So most of us were forced to make jokes about the number of different women he’d slept with in the time we knew him.

Now, it’s a roast and in a roast the guest of honor isn’t the only one that gets ripped on. Everybody rips on everybody and that’s the fun of it. We make fat jokes about the fat guy, we make bald jokes about the bald guy, we make timid jokes about the black guy. And I’m the atheist guy so they make atheist jokes about me.

It’s a roast. I’m a good sport about this stuff so I smile and I laugh along. Hell, I started making jokes about god early on so I wasn’t about to take anything said about me or my beliefs personally. But there was one brief exchange in the roast that I thought was worth reflecting on.

Before we get to the exchange, I need to play a clip to set it up. It’s a skit I wrote that revolved around a mock-scrapbook of memorabilia that I was leafing through:

(First Sound Clip)

A little later, the dude that we all knew was gonna bomb was up. It was an awkward four minutes of him trying to figure out why he’d volunteered for this and as he wrapped up, he closed by turning to me and making corrections regarding two things I’d said that evening:

(Second Sound Clip)

Like I said, it’s a roast. I definitely didn’t take his little “believe in god” aside personally. Earlier in the night one guy did a mock dialogue where I tried to explain the intellectual justification for my atheism to Saint Peter (which was actually fucking hilarious) and another guy thanked me for providing an example of atheism that would lead so many people to Christ. It’s a roast. That’s the point.

And if the only time a Christian had ever said to me “You should try believing in god” was during a roast, I wouldn’t have bothered to reflect on it at all. But I think we’ve all heard this or the equivalent of this plenty of times before. You say “I’m an atheist” and somebody just stares at you wide-eyed and jaw agape and offers an incredulous, “Really!?”

It’s hard to imagine this kind of reaction to other groups. It’s hard to imagine a person saying, “Have you tried not being a Jew?” or, “Muslim, huh? How the fuck did that happen?” or “Did you become a Christian because Buddha disappointed you?” but in at least most of this country, when you meet an atheist it’s socially acceptable to throw holy water at them and yell “The power of Christ compels you!”

In the interest of fairness, there are also plenty of places in this country where you’d get the same blank-faced stare if you said you were Christian. Places like institutions of higher learning, science labs and the East Village. And in the parts of this country where I grew up you could earn such a stare for any answer to the faith question other than “Baptist”, so we’re not the only ones who face this kind of shit.

That being said, I think it’s fair to say that through most of America, atheist is the only religious choice that people feel no social qualms about trying to talk you out of. And I think it says a lot about religious people that they’re more comfortable with you having a religion that is irreconcilable with their own than they are with you having no religion at all.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is a man who needs an introduction, Heath Enwright. Heath, you’ve been introduced. Say something to all the listeners.

I’d like to apologize for a Sarah Palin joke last week that mentioned her son Trig, who happens to have Down’s Syndrome. He’s actually a lot brighter than you might think. He’s only 5 years old, and he’s already reading as many newspapers as his mother.

All of them?

In our lead story tonight, it turns out that despite rumors to the contrary, atheists are normal humans. And apparently a lot of people were waiting for some hard data before they were willing to make this call.

Well, not quite normal. Apparently we do have a normal ‘personality distribution’ . . .

But our atheist group has statistically better IQ test-taking ability, or IQ.

We’re also – by definition – better at ontology, and that’s really the crux of the whole argument, isn’t it?

Yes, but the study was not without its flaws. It sloppily categorized nonbelievers into 6 groups and the divisions prejudiced the fuck out of their conclusions. Some of the categories made sense; they separate out “Seeker Agnostic” and “Non-Theist”, which they define as a person who is completely apathetic to religion. But after that shit gets pretty wonky.

Like Gene-Wilder-as-Willy Wonky . . .

The whole study seems like a confused attempt at examining a superior race of aliens.

Were they hoping to use atheist stem cells to help cure faith cancer? Like real faith healing?

Not sure where they were going, but I don’t think they got there. Here are three separate categories of non-believer, according to University of Tennessee researchers: “The kind of atheist that reads books and learns stuff”, “the kind of atheist who is an activist” and “The kind of atheist who thinks religion is harmful to society”. They actually treat those three characteristics as though they were mutually exclusive.

Doesn’t it seem like the study was conceived by the characters from Lord of the Flies?

One of the kids says “Hey I think I should explain what a Venn Diagram is.”

“Put that nerd’s head on a stick!!!”

Right, and because they ignored Piggy,they were able to make some insanely stupid statements like “activist atheists are the least narcissistic” and “anti-theists are the most angry and dogmatic”, without bothering to point out that since these two qualities almost always co-exist in a single human, they’re using shit like dogmatism and narcissism to define the fucking categories in the first place.

These guys love them some Juicy Juice logic.

“But it says what I’m saying on the tele-prompter, and in the fictional book about which we’re arguing.”

In all, I suppose I have to be happy that they’re not treating “thinks god is bullshit” as an abhorrent monolith.

Study shows that nonbelievers are as diverse in personality as any other group: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/02/atheism-study-authors-congratulations-non-believers-youre-just-like-everybody-else/

And in a transparent attempt to force Heath and I to make testicle jokes tonight, Ball State made waves this week by hiring one Guillermo Gonzalez as a new professor of astronomy despite his 2004 authorship of a book that pretends that intelligent design is valid science.

When he gets fired for lying on his resume about being a scientist, the headline will surely read: “Ball Sacks Nutty Professor”

Heath Enwright, king of the ball joke.

Apparently “The Privileged Planet” was bad enough to prompt 120 faculty members at Iowa State to sign a petition renouncing it when it was rumored he would be working there. Gonzalez claims this was a political move and that a single blogger who isn’t even an astronomer was responsible for it. So yeah, not only does he believe god made shingles on purpose, but he also believes that one blogger can be responsible for a petition of 120 people.

And why would the blogger (or anyone else) need to be an astronomer to know that intelligent design is complete nonsense?

Is he suggesting we should go check with the astronomy community, and they’ll back him up on the intelligent design thing?!?

What’s worse, this news comes on the heels of another non-testicular reason to make fun of Ball State. There’s also an ongoing investigation into Ball State assistant professor of physics Eric Hedin who is accused of essentially teaching a Creationism class in the science department.

Shouldn’t teaching wrong things – in any class anywhere – be considered a bad thing?

Also, gotta squeeze more testicle headline jokes in here while we can . . .

It’d be a slap in the face not to. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit.

Facing Hairy Situation, Ball Trims Staff.

More of a sticky situation.

There’s a new wrinkle everywhere you look.

Now Ball clearly has two dicks.

Feeling His Taint, Ball Gives Hedin Shaft.

What can I say, you’re the king.

Ball State hires creationist professor: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/09/ball-state-comes-under-scrutiny-for-hiring-professor-who-wrote-book-on/

And in this week’s child-fucking report, the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child has posed a list of tough questions to the Vatican in preparation for the stern talking to they’ll be giving them next January over the systematic child rape, child torture and consequent global cover up that has come to define the papacy in recent years.

Define is a strong word . . .

But “Rape Scandal Blues” is definitely track 1 side 1 of the Vatican’s greatest hits.

I like the older stuff, but they seem to prefer the younger stuff, and that’s illegal.

As insubstantial as a voluntary meeting with a group that has no enforcement powers may seem, this will actually represent the first time that any international panel has had the chance to publicly question the Holy See about the scandal.

“Did you guys rape those kids?”

“No, no, no, . . . a bit . . . we did do the nose . . .” — “Many of them had headaches!”

The Vatican, for its part, is quick to ensure the UN that they are doing everything necessary to keep pedophiles away from kids, they’ve weeded out the bad seeds, they’ve definitely stopped running slave-laundries in Ireland and they can totally prove it. But they can also totally pull out of the treaty on the Rights of the Child, so they’re gonna definitely do one or the other.

Too bad they didn’t pull out of those kids assholes when asked nicely the first time.

I think I understand part of the confusion though.

In the Bible, know means begat, but in the real world, No means No.

So these weren’t rapes as much as homo-phone issues. Just a little case of consent getting lost in translation.

UN probes Vatican child abuse scandal: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/10/uk-vatican-abuse-un-idUKBRE9690LK20130710

And in “How the fuck are we even discussing this?” news, the Senate may soon consider a revision to FEMA policy that would allow untaxed houses of worship to collect federal disaster relief money.

FEMA doesn’t have time for this.

They’re just barely started with fishing te black people out of New Orleans harbor.

Also, I thought those houses of worship were designed more intelligently, to withstand even the most catastrophic acts of intelligent design.

Under current law, federal disaster relief can only be used to rebuild and repair homes, businesses and infrastructure. And since churches aren’t necessary, should be insured and can go fuck themselves, they’re left to fend for themselves with hopes that the combination of not being taxed and selling a product that doesn’t exist for money that does will be enough to keep them through hard times.

Yeah what’s the overhead on selling indulgences? Not getting a good enough markup on those lies? They manage to get people to pay today for an impossible hamburger they won’t get until after they die on Tuesday. How fucking dumb do you have to be?!

But thanks to the bi-partisan pandering of Republican Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri and Democratic bitch that I actually voted for Kirsten Gillibrand, all of that could change. Both our tax dollars and our potential future disaster relief might be diverted to characters from Jew-sop’s fables.

How are churches going to learn to compete in the free market economy?

You know the competitive marketplace loved so dearly by the political party they hijacked?

But don’t worry, the bill does stipulate that the federal money could only be used to cover the costs of the building itself, the doors, the windows, the building envelope, physical plant support spaces, electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, sprinkler systems and related site improvements. So apparently they’re not allowed to use federal money to buy bibles or pay off sex abuse victims but everything else would be okay.

Didn’t think this would need mentioning or repeating, but money is fungible. The $10,000 FEMA check stolen from secular taxpayers, is very similar in value to 10,000 different dollars.

By the same token, giving the church 40,000 taxpayer quarters, or 100,000 taxpayer dimes would also clearly violate the First Amendment.

Senate may lift House of Worship ban on FEMA: http://www.christianpost.com/news/us-senate-may-take-up-bill-to-lift-fema-ban-on-aid-to-churches-100094/

And finally tonight, we bring you the story of the this month’s greatest sleight against god. Montage of crazy YouTube preachers, would you care to guess what it was?

(Soundclip)

No, I’m sorry, while I’m sure that all those things pissed him off, he also got snubbed from a Sam Adams commercial this month.

Snubbing God in your beer commercial . . . Always a good decision.

This might be the best God snubbing decision since Roe v. Wade.

The ad in question uses a brief appended quote from the Declaration of Independence, with the spokesman saying that people were (quote) “endowed with certain unalienable rights” while conspicuously leaving out the part about those certain unalienable rights coming from a magical man-fairy.

You said “coming from a magical man-fairy” . . .

Sounds like a Joseph on Joseph version of the immaculate conception.

Those type of conceptions do tend to be immaculate.

Imagine how much better the world would be if abortion had been legal when God went all Roethlisberger on Mary?

Yeah, even the conservatives tend to make exceptions in the case of incest and rape and that was both.

Was that God’s first time too, by the way? Did God lose his virginity during a magical rape when he was over 1000 years old?

And proving once more that there is no rung of pettiness under which religious people can’t limbo, the Sam Adams facebook page was bombarded by Christian jizz-rinsers demanding that the company love and fear the lord, our god, and threatening to boycott the brand if they don’t issue an apology to Jesus.

The beer is named after Sam Adams so why didn’t they just use the founding father’s actual, documented opinions on religion?

Tell me this wouldn’t move some brew: “Sam Adams’ Beer; because Catholicism ‘leads directly to the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed’. Please drink responsibly.”

Idiots pissed about beer commercial not paying homage to god: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2013/07/samuel-adams-defends-ad-omitting-god-reference/

Poem:

“Deuteronomy in Rhyme”

by Noah Lugeons

Deuteronomy’s on to me, I’ve got say, honestly;

I’m not paying the bible the attention I wanna be.

It’s long and it’s dull and it’s so full of bull,

that the stress of the process is hurting my skull.

I’m plodding through and I’m human; I’ve got shit to do, man.

I can’t study each verse like a Hassidic Jew can,

So I skim and I skip, and I flip through and scan,

I glance at the footnotes here and there when I can.

But I’ll admit I hit bits I don’t get and I’m split,

Should I study it further or not give a shit?

After all, we’re not scholars and I got no white collar;

I’d trade biblical knowledge for Liberian dollars.

Besides, most verses are worthless like the begats and the curses,

That god intersperses with no discernable purpose.

What’s worse is the verses they don’t read in the churches

I’m not sure why they skip ‘em, though, it be a hell of a service.

But I digress. And I guess what I mean to express,

Is that no one who reads this thing knows what it says.

How could you? Why would you? It’d do you no good, you’d

be mem’rizing words that no one understood. True,

I guess there’s a few who have nothing to do,

that obsess over passages and pretend that they’re true.

But what about the incredulous rest of us who stopped listening at Exodus

We’re bored and it’s nebulous and among the effects of this,

Are low comprehension and even lower retention

So in hopes of prevention and to hold your attention.

Moses proposes verboseness, he know us;

He rightly supposes we’ll be losing our focus.

So Deuteronomy’s a colloquy that repeats all the policies,

God laid down earlier about sex and idolatry,

A dishonest anthology that restates the chronology,

And explains the pathology of Jewish theology.

So the gist, if you missed it, is that when god gets pissed

It’ll likely consist of him swinging his fist.

He insists he exists and if his laws are dismissed,

You’ll be reaping his vengeance and he offers a list:

And it goes like this…

He’ll curse your cities and your countries and your basket and your bowl,

He’ll curse your womb and curse your vineyard and your cattle and your soul.

He’ll cause your enemies to rise before you, sword in bloody hand,

He’ll curse you coming, curse you going, drive you screaming from your land.

The lord will send to you disaster, and frustrate your every whim,

He’ll cover you in leprosy from limb to fucking limb.

He’ll inflict you with consumption, inflammation, heat and drought,

He’ll turn the ground below to iron so no sustenance can sprout.

Your corpse will be a meal for every creature on the earth,

And your wife will eat your children and her bloody afterbirth.

The lord will give you boils, ulcers, scurvy and the itch,

You’ll be abused and robbed and helpless and your home will be a ditch.

Begrudging food to your own brother and to the wife that you embrace,

You’ll be a pariah to your people and he’ll remove you from his grace.

You’ll starve and want for water and screw up everything you touch.

Because the lord is wonderful and he loves you very much.

The Holy Babble:

Ah, Deuteronomy, the rewrite notes of the Pentateuch. It’s repetitive, immoral, disgusting and verbose, but beyond that, it manages to simultaneously shock and bore you in a way the other books could only dream of. So joining me to discuss this chore of a book is my lovely wife Lucinda. Lucinda, welcome to the show.

And of course, triangling out this trifecta is Heath Enwright who you’ll remember from 3 and a half minutes ago. Heath, welcome back, it’s been a lonely few minutes.

So where does Deuteronomy rank so far in terms of boring?

You get Moses telling us what god told him that he already told us that we already read. So pretty fucking boring.

It was like reading about somebody being bored by the book they’re reading.

Yeah, the word Deuteronomy literally means “second law”. It consists of three speeches that Moses gives before he dies and almost no new information comes out. Sure, there’s an odd testicle-grabbing rule here and a revision to meat slaughtering custom there, but basically he’s just repeating shit. It’s like getting to the first big battle scene in Braveheart and then listening to Mel Gibson deliver the “They’ll never take our freedom” speech over and over again for an hour and a half.

Except it comes off less like William Wallace, and more like Woody Allen complaining. It seems like they got Ridley Scott to direct Genesis and Exodus, but by the time they get around to producing Deuteronomy, they’re stuck hiring his suicidal brother.

–
–
We spend the first three chapter listening to Moses brag about his greatest hits. It basically recaps the bloodiest highlights of Exodus through Numbers.
Then we spend chapter 4 rehashing all the crap that just happened in the first three. We rehash the rehash.
1. And reinforce the message that only god is god, god damn it.
And since we’re clearly dealing with Moses’ farewell concert here, you knew he was gonna do “The Ten Commandments”, and he gives us the long version with the full blown sax solo and everything.

“Play Exodus: 20!” “No – Play Exodus: 34!”
And of course the asshole musician has to do it all new and different, so nobody really likes it. “It’s called Deuteronomy: 5 now, man! No more of that tired Exodus crap!” Wouldn’t want to play it like it sounds on the fucking album that brought everyone to the concert in the first place.

–
Then in chapter 7 God spells out the importance of a good, thorough genocide.

If you’re a Jew, you gotta be worried about running into some sort of genocidal backlash one day. Although their strategy of concentrating themselves all in a safe place like Israel seems to be working.

–
By chapter 9 Moses has completed his transformation to Chris Farley; “You remember that time when I went up on that mountain and talked to god for a month? That was awesome.”
More rehashing, but an interesting phrase in my translation at 10:16 “Circumcise, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer.” So let’s hope the biblical literalists never make it this far…

We don’t want those dicks or hearts getting hard, now do we?

–
By chapter 12, Moses’ Alzheimer’s has turned into full blown dementia. Now he’s telling the Jews they can eat meat in the same way you would eat gazelle or deer, which are, of course, vegetables.

And we’re reminded that you can only be Jewish with the help of union rabbis at the union temple.

Then we learn that if you should ever have tangible evidence that god is bullshit, it’s just god testing you.
1. Oh, and kill the person with the evidence.
–
–
–
We rehash the rules about diet then slavery, then holidays, then judges. I swear this fucking book reads like a filibuster.
1. Reads like a James Joyce filibuster
2. Reads like a Dan Dennett analysis of a James Joyce filibuster.
Give your shit to the priests when they tell you to, kill sorcerers and if anything in this book later proves to be untrue, we know it isn’t the word of god. Because it says so.
Moses repeats himself some more and throws out the “eye for an eye” line.
And then in 20, Moses spells out the rules of engagement:
1. Before making war with a city, at least offer to enslave all the citizens.

So you start by offering them a Billy Martin. “Listen, we’re willing to overlook the whole thing where you stole our land while we spent 40 years over there in the woods . . . Just submit to slavery, we takes the women you have on you, and we calls it even.”

Yeah, we’re awesome slaveowners. Tell you what, I poke out your eye, I’ll let you go. Promise.

Be sure to kill all the men.
Steal the women, children, livestock and riches.
Unless the women and children are Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites or Jebusites. In that case, kill them, too.
And whatever you do, don’t cut down the fruit trees like a barbarian.

In chapter 21 we get CSI: Promised Land. If you find a dead body in the street, just break a cow’s neck, wash your hands over it… you know, the usual stuff.
1. Also, marrying captive women is okay if they’re bald and naked.

Slave harem etiquette is important. We’re not savages.

And if you’re into government sponsored murder, don’t hang the victim on a pole for more than a day. In the sequel, we’ll get into using 2 poles to form a T-shape that’s useful for public murder of Jew-traitors.

Then we get the chapter where Glenn Beck gets his morality from:
1. Here we finally learn that god hates trannies, though we were suspecting it the whole time.

“Bitches shalt not steal my boxers and favorite T-shirts after sex, and then wear them home.”

We learn the etiquette of when you can and can’t stone someone to death for having a vagina.

Oh I missed something – when can’t you do that?
- The Sabbath?
And don’t forget to bleed profusely when your husband fucks you.

We learn that if a woman is raped in town she gets killed along with her rapist, but if she’s raped in the country, she gets to just be a rape victim.

Being female, in a town, and out of earshot – that’s basically asking for it.

And again with the fucking tassels…

Chapter 23 starts with the words, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the lord.”
1. More on nocturnal emissions
2. God actually gives proper instructions for taking a shit.

No shit, cum, or atheists allowed in a foxhole.

There’s a chapter that’s almost moral…
And then we’re back to crazy, random shit. This is the chapter where we get gems like:
1. If your brother dies you have to fuck his wife and if you refuse, she gets one of your sandals and she spits in your face.
2. If a woman grabs a guy’s nut-sack when he’s fighting her husband, you should cut off her hand.
3. Kill every Amalekite on the fucking planet.
–
–
–
This book is a sign that says “Read this sign”. I swear, half the book is spent saying “obey this book or I’ll fuck your skull”.
And I think it’s worth mentioning that In three chapters of curses, there’s no mention of an afterlife, no mention of postmortem retribution, no concept of heaven or hell.
Now, follow me on this one. This book tells the story of the writing of this book. And then in chapter 31 it starts talking about shit that happened once the book that I’m reading was done being written. So the Deuteronomy explains the aftermath of the writing of Deuteronomy… and the death of it’s author, but that’s later.
Even back then they had to know that they weren’t gonna get away with having Moses say the exact same fucking things he’s repeated half a dozen times again.
1. Yeah, so in chapter 32 he sings them! He actually sings about how skull-raped you’ll be if you piss god off.
And apparently the Israelites were holding up their lighters, so he breaks into another song in chapter 33. One for each tribe for fuck’s sake.
1. By now it’s clear that God said, “Go say your last words and then I’m gonna kill you, Moe” and Moses is obviously just milking it at this point.
And then Moses dies on a mountain and according to the book it’s a pretty spectacular death, but you know how it is when people tell you about their own deaths; they always exaggerate.

It was frustrating to learn that we could have just skipped from Genesis to Deuteronomy and not missed anything but Moses’ origin story and some Tabernacle details.

In all honesty, though, I’m actually kind of looking forward to Joshua now… it’s like I’m done jerking off but I’m still watching for the money shot. You know, like, I don’t care about anything that’s going on in the story, but I’ve made it so far I want to see these bitchy jews inherit the holy land already.

Or at the very least, see some jizz on somebody’s face, so I can get up and wipe my hands on the cat already.

Seems like exactly the right note to close on, so Heath, Lucinda, thanks again for joining me.

We’re gonna take a few weeks off of this book, but the Holy Babble will be back in three weeks to wrap up the Pentateuch in an hour long “5 down, 61 to go” special.

Outro:

Before we shut down the oven for the night, I wanted to take a minute to thank this week’s most unabashedly, flagrantly, shamelessly awesome humans, Rob, Richard, Andrew and Ann, who affirmed their high-minded beneficence this week by giving us money. In addition to providing all the stuff that makes this show possible, giving us money has been clinically tested to improve lung function or something. Seriously, because advertisers now say shit has been “clinically tested” for stuff and hope you hear “clinically proven”.

Remember, if you’d like to be slathered in praise by someone who knows nothing about your discriminating taste if podcast financing, you’ll find the donate button on the right side of our homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

I also need to throw a big thanks and a big shout out to President of the Atheist Alliance of America, Chuck Vonderahe for providing this week’s Farnsworth quote. It’s a great organization, they do great work and they also have a great convention coming up next month in Boston.

The Atheist Alliance of America’s 2013 National Convention is stacked. Host of the Thinking Atheist Seth Andrews will Emcee and the speaker list includes Dr. Steven Pinker, Ed Buckner, Aron Ra and the keynote speaker Paula Apsell, Senior Executive Producer of NOVA. They’ve got early-bird pricing still going so check out the link on our shownotes for the complete list of speakers and events and do it with great haste.

http://www.aaaboston2013.com/

Oh yeah, and follow us on FaceTube and subscribe to us Twicher Plus and don’t forget to leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you found us in the first place.

Episode 19 – Partial Transcript

June 27, 2013 Noah Lugeons 1 comment

by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright & Lucinda Lugeons

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

Sponsor:

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

And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

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

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

In this week’s episode:

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

But first, the Diatribe…

Diatribe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headlines:

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

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

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

Another white guy?!?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, God doesn’t do consensual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantastic time.

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

Calendar:

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

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

http://skepchickcon.com/

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

http://www.amazingmeeting.com/

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

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

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

http://www.cfileadership.org/

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

Poem:

NUMBERS IN RHYME

by Noah Lugeons

1 is the number of gods and he gives

2 shits about who gets killed and who lives.

3 times Balaam and his donkey have spats

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

5 chapter in things get scary for chicks,

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

And 7’s for resting unless you need stones,

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

8 too much Manna? Should you voice your critiques?

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

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

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

11 Tribes conscribe all their fighting age men,

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

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

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

30 Days mourning when god kills Aaron on high,

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

50 percent of this book we spend bored

Counting jews and the booty they offer the lord.

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

Enumerated offerings are in detail described,

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

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

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

Each time the tabernacle opens its doors.

Bulls, rams and donkeys, pigeons and sheep,

And a pile of quails about three cubits deep.

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

He opens the earth and swallows whole houses.

He burns their encampments, sends serpents and plagues,

And what heinous encroachments elicit god’s rage?

Being hungry or thirsty, doubting Moses’ clout,

Going to the tabernacle once the candles are out,

Being honest when scouting, gathering sticks,

Complaining to Moses and acting like dicks.

Whoring with Moabites, lighting incense all wrong,

Being treated like shit and not just going along;

Thinking manna tastes nasty, being slow to obey

Or living in cities that stand in his way.

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

When he orders Moses to murder all the Midianite children,

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

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

Holy Babble:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well God had killed a lot of them since then.

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

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

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

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

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

Riveting.

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

The first use of short selling.

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

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

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

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

Well . . . we re-learn.

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

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

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

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

Outro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 16 – Partial Transcript

June 6, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons, Heath Enwright and Lucinda Lugeons

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

Sponsor:

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

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

And now, the Scathing Atheist:

Intro:

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

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

On this week’s show,

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

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headlines:

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

Is another old book club making outrageous claims?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Song:

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

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

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

Leviticus in Rhyme:

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

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

Nothing when compared to; What the Levites bear through,

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

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

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

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

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

This is for atonement; Offer no postponement,

Couple jugs of blood is a critical component.

Now a proclamation; Regarding ordination,

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

Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not lie,

Thou shalt not do it guy on guy,

Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.

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

Tell you how to burn the heretics about that bewitch.

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

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

Oh, and if it pleases; Quickly on diseases,

Sacrifice a turtle dove if anybody sneezes.

Menstrual blood and semen; Need a lot of cleanin’

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

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

Tell you how to stone the motherfucks who misbhave and,

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

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

Thou shalt be pure, thou shalt be true,

Thou shalt not get a damned tattoo,

Thus unto Moses spoke the Lord.

Thou shalt speak up, Thou shalt not cheat,

Thou shalt not dine on rancid meat

Or stick your dick in things that bleat.

Thou shalt not mix thy rye and wheat.

Thou shalt be just, thou shalt be kind,

Thou shalt not trick the deaf and blind,

Or touch cadavers left behind.

Or let two fabrics be combined.

Thou shalt fear god, thou shalt be straight,

Thou shalt not look to kin with hate,

Thou shalt not ever masturbate,

Thou shant put weasel on your plate.

Thou shalt not rob, thou shalt be bold

Thou shalt rise up before the old,

Don’t get your daughter’s pussy sold,

Thou shalt give all my priests your gold,

…Thou shalt be easily controlled.

Thus spoke the Lord.

Outro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 12: Partial Transcript

May 9, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright

(Note: Transcript may contain portions that were edited for time reasons)

Sponsor:

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And now, the Scathing Atheist.

Intro:

It’s Thursday, It’s May 9th and somebody needs to tell people in Kentucky to stop wearing “I ‘heart’ KY” shirts

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

On this week’s episode,

Christians will get upset about imaginary threats to their imaginary friend,
We’ll learn that in Turkey, you’re autistic,
And Darrel Ray will rejoin us to talk about pee-pees and coochies,

But first, the Diatribe.

Diatribe:

I started my post-secondary education at a small state college in rural Georgia. And while you may not know me that well, even if this is your first time listening to the show you’ve probably already figured out that I’m not exactly right for a small state college in rural Georgia. Let’s just say that my theological opinions ran counter to the prevailing ones.

You may have also picked up on the fact that I really don’t give two shits who I offend.

As you can imagine, this made for a combustible mix that didn’t take long to ignite.

I all but insured it with what I thought a harmless and excessively hilarious gag. My dorm number was 174, but with a piece of posterboard and a sharpie, I cleverly changed it to 666. Now, rural Georgia or no, I didn’t think this would actually piss anyone off. Sure, they’re all Christian there, but this was college. We were all a bunch of seditious rebels telling the status quo to go fuck itself, right?

Well, as it turns out, not so much. Later that day I came back to a 174 where I’d left a 666 and below it there was a handwritten note. I don’t recall every word of it, but I remember the opening line exactly:

“All the rest of us on this hall are Christian.”

The righteous vandal went on to explain that they didn’t want to see none of my satanic crap any-no-how and if I didn’t love Jesus I didn’t belong in that dorm hall, I didn’t belong in that college, I didn’t belong in that state and, come down to it, I didn’t belong in this country. I was not welcome.

And, of course, I left a response. Again, I don’t recall it verbatim, but it was a variation on the following:

“How feeble is your conviction if the very fact that someone doesn’t agree with you threatens it?”

I probably used a lot more words than that and I probably ensured that a few of them would force his ass to the dictionary, but that was the core of my rebuttal. It’s been twenty years and I’m starting to think he’s not going to respond at all.

But that continues to be my strongest issue with religion as a whole. If your idea has merit, it doesn’t need you there to defend it. You can simply place it in the public arena and it can fend for itself. Hell, how impressive would an omnipotent god be if he needed you to fight his battles for him?

If you want to see the deafening echo of this threat-response, just express your atheism on any social media venue and watch the wagons circle. They’ll attack your intellect, your motivations, your morals, your conviction and occasionally your penis size (regardless of your gender). They’ll gather together like white blood cells to defend their precious idea.

But meritorious ideas don’t need white blood cells. If your ideas need to be reinforced once a week, they’re bullshit. If you need to read the same book over and over again and hang out with people pre-screened to agree with you, you’re giving the bullshit armor. If your ideas need to be propagated by an organized group that exists only to propagate your ideas they are bullshit. And finally, if you’re threatened by people thinking you’re full of shit, it can only be because you’re full of shit.

Nobody ever had to show up at my door on a Saturday morning to convince me that A is equal to C if both are equal to B. Nobody ever had to sneak a pamphlet into my Halloween candy to convince me that elephants are bigger than gerbils. Nobody ever woke up early and dressed their kids up so that they could go somewhere and sing songs about cesium atoms having 55 protons.

Nobody ever passionately held a belief because it was true. If it’s true, you don’t need passion. Logic is more than enough of a scaffolding to hold up a genuine fact. You only passion if logic isn’t enough.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is the Pythias to my Damon, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to… be pithy, I guess?

Like Tina Fey if she were a dude?

She’s not a dude? I feel so much less gay now…

In our lead story tonight, Christians across the internet are screaming themselves hoarse over an almost completely bullshit story about the Pentagon court-martialing people for being Christian.

Christianity pays for an entire staff of dudes who speak loudly about bullshit stories every week. As a group, not exactly the pantheon of epistemological rigor.

The tiny nugget of truth buried among this citadel of bullshit involves an April 23rd meeting between Mikey Weinstein, the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a group of pentagon officials including several generals and a chaplain. And the very fact that the pentagon had the audacity to sit down with a person bearing legitimate complaints about clear violations of military prohibitions against religious proselytization was more than Christians could bear.

If they’re not careful, all this logic is gonna snowball out of control.

Don’t worry, the paragons of journalistic integrity at Fox News were quick to put the brakes on it. They noticed an article about this meeting and asked the pentagon if there were any plans to court-martial chaplains who proselytize. The pentagon said no, but that wouldn’t piss of their viewers so they pretended the answer was yes. And before long bloggers were leading off with headlines like “Pentagon Confirms They May Court-Martial Soldiers Who Hold Christian Faith”.

Yeah, court martialing 90% of the armed forces. That shouldn’t fuck up military readiness, should it? I mean, who’s gonna remotely fly all these drones?

They manage to inflate a low-level meeting to Weinstein now chairing a panel to reform court-martial procedures, they conclude that this will mean the end of military chaplains and that Obama’s Defense Department was (quote) “promising to bring criminal charges against any military personnel who express or share their faith.”

I’m beginning to think Obama made up all that stuff about being Christian and white, just to get elected.

So yeah, scant amount of dubious evidence, passionately held conclusion despite overwhelming data to the contrary. Been there, done that.

Pentagon warns Christian soldiers that proselytization will be met with court martial: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/06/blog-posting/bloggers-say-pentagon-may-court-martial-christian-/ & http://nation.foxnews.com/religion/2013/05/03/rear-admiral-says-faith-under-attack-military & http://www.christiannewswire.com/news/2569472030.html

And in other Christians-Being-Furious-Over-Shit-That-Didn’t-Actually-Happen News, a high-school track team in Texas was disqualified from a 4 by 100 meter relay last weekend when a runner made a religious gesture at the end of the race.

Jews are gonna get offended by swastikas . . . Muslims are gonna get offended by Danish cartoons . . . As an atheist, I’m supremely offended by any trinity-related gesture. Don’t we get to pick an N-word too? We’ve got unholy cows.

That sounds fair to me, but it really wouldn’t matter in this case because they weren’t actually disqualified because of a religious gesture, but rather because the judges deemed it “excessive celebration” and backed it up with clearly stated rules that specifically forbade “raising the hands or arms in celebration” after winning because, you know, it’s un-Jesus-y.

Do we really need to sit Christianity down for a quick seminar on what subset means? Did religion really manage to brainwash away the Venn diagram concept? That’s like a free built-in piece of brain functionality they’re throwing away. And don’t they believe that somebody REALLY IMPORTANT designed all the brains?

Well, I don’t know… if god made man in his own image then most of god is an idiot. But this is how desperate Christians are to maintain their “help, help, I’m being oppressed” narrative.

Supreme omnipotent power is a mandate from the masses.

Excellent supplementary reference. So here we’ve got a high school kid who gets disqualified from a track meet and it’s being reported on national news. Nevermind that he was DQed for “excessive celebration and acting disrespectfully toward officials” and admits himself that there was no oppression of his faith here.

We can’t keep having laws that say “No doing stupid shit, unless you REALLY believe in it, and have a group of people with similar hats.”

Track Team disqualified for making “Religious Gesture” (Officially for “excessive celebration”): http://www.christianpost.com/news/was-relay-team-disqualified-from-state-championships-for-religious-gesture-95251/

Our next story takes us to New York Cities parking lot, New Jersey, where three members of the Trenton Diocese have resigned amid allegations that they knowingly allowed a child-molester to accompany them on overnight youth retreats.

Father Michael Fugee was convicted of fondling a teenage boy in 2003, but the conviction was overturned on appeal despite the fact that he had previously confessed to investigators. Rather than retry the case, the prosecutors struck a deal with the archdiocese of Newark that would allow Fugee to remain with the ministry provided that he didn’t work with children.

I’m worried we won’t get in a dick joke if we don’t take the opportunity here.

This show does have a two dick-joke minimum…

So what do you suppose they had in their video library there? Movies like A Few Good Boys

The Priests of the Southern Child?

Altar Boys on the Side

Rosemary’s Adolescent

The Best Little Rectory in Texas

Super 8… Year Olds

Defrock of Ages (8-12)

And for the Jewish clients maybe Who Fucked Roger’s Rabbi?

It’s worth noting that in 2009 the archdiocese assigned him to the Saint Michael’s Medical Center in Newark and eventually removed him amidst scandal when this unsettling history came to light, so basically they’ve been moving this child-molester from place to place and waiting for somebody to say, “Hey, isn’t that dude a child-molester?” and then moving him somewhere else.

Wonderful . . . they figured out bit torrent for pedophiles.

3 resign from NJ church in pedophile priest scandal: http://news.yahoo.com/3-resign-nj-church-priest-scandal-161033762.html

And in our next story, a Turkish taint-stain has proven that when it comes to autism, one can actually have one’s head further up one’s ass than the anti-vaxers. Fehmi Kaya, the head of the Health and Education Associations for Autistic Children in Adana, Turkey said in a recent interview that atheism is (quote) “a different form of autism”.

If you’re gonna compare atheism to a mental disorder, autism is possibly the most flattering choice. Rain Man was an awesome dude. Sometimes autism comes with some super powers.

On the other hand, theism as a mental disorder, would be something more like addiction to delusional psychosis with an extra chromosome on top.

Arguing that autism is the result of a lack of development in the “faith” center of the brain, he explains that this is why autistic children lack empathy with others, just like we atheists.

Kind of like the way Martin Luther King had an underdeveloped bigotry center of his brain.

Turkish Head of Education Dept. says Atheism is a Form of Autism: http://www.examiner.com/article/all-autistic-kids-are-atheists-and-atheism-is-a-form-of-autism & http://www.timeturk.com/en/2013/04/22/all-autistic-kids-are-atheists.html

And finally tonight, from the “If-God-Existed-He-Wouldn’t-Make-It-So-Easy-On-Me” News, the priest who was in charge of the treatment center where they sent priests accused of inappropriate sexual conduct has resigned amid allegations of inappropriate sexual conduct.

You’ve gotta be a little suspicious of these corporate climber types. “So I hear you need somebody to head up the new Rape Department. Look no further. I’m your guy. I know rape backwards and forwards. I know it inside out… coming and going. I know it like the back of my fist.

What would that resume look like?

Now, in defense of Monsignor Edward J. Arsenault, former president and CEO of the Saint Luke Institute he was accused of more than just sexual impropriety. He’s also being investigated for some shady financial practices so he’s really proving himself Catholic to the core.

Throw in some Nazi affiliation and you’ve got the holy trinity.

And, of course, to a Monsignor the term “inappropriate sexual conduct” is redundant. So this could be an inappropriate, consensual relationship with his hand for all they care. If he’s coming, it’s inappropriate.

What if God blows you in a dream? . . . An Immaculate Erection scenario . . .

Or Ejaculate Conception…

Would that count as honorable discharge?

Priest who heads top clergy treatment center resigns amid allegations of impropriety: http://www.religionnews.com/2013/05/06/priest-who-heads-top-clergy-treatment-center-accused-of-impropriety/

Well, unfortunately we’ll have to leave you on that puzzler, as that’s all the time we’ve got for headlines tonight. Heath, thanks once again for joining me tonight.

And when we return, you’ll witness the second coming of Darrel Ray.

Calendar:

It’s time for the atheist calendar portion of the show. Back and well rested from a hiatus on last week’s episode, this is the part of the show we set aside to keep everyone up to speed on all the great atheist and secular events happening around country and around the world.

We’ve already talked them up a couple of times on the show, but a quick reminder that the weekend of May 17th has two big events; Imagine No Religion 3 in Kamloops, BC and the Women in Secularism Conference in Washington DC. Details on the lineups are linked on the website.

Imagine No Religion 3: http://inr3.eventbrite.ca/

Women in Secularism Conference: http://www.womeninsecularism.org/

At the end of the month we’ve got the American Humanist Association Annual Conference in beautiful San Diego, California. They’ll be honoring some of the very best in the Secular Humanist movement including 2013’s Humanist of the Year, Dan Savage. Other honorees include Greta Christina, Katha Pollitt (I hope I’m pronouncing her name right…), Carl Coon and Richard Leakey. Oh, and did I mention Richard Dawkins was gonna be there? So yeah, if you’re in the same hemisphere as this thing (and by that, I mean Western or Northern), you should really try to make it.

American Humanist Association’s Annual Meeting: http://conference.americanhumanist.org/

The following weekend they’ll be doing something pretty similar on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Humanist Association Annual Conference will be taking place in Leeds over the weekend of June 7th. They’ll be honoring Terry Pratchett with the 2013 Award for Services to Humanism. They’ve already got a pretty impressive list of confirmed speakers and they’re promising more to come.

British Humanist Association’s Annual Meeting: http://bhaconference.org.uk/

You’ll find more information, including links to the homepages for all these events under the “Show Notes” for this episode. Remember, if you’re involved with an atheist, humanist, skeptical or secular event that could use a little free publicity, let me know. I’d be happy to plug your event to thousands of people who probably live nowhere near it, many of whom will hear it in archives long after it’s over. You’ll find all the contact info on the contact page at Scathing Atheist (dot) com.

Outro:

Before we wrap things up for the night I wanted to make a quick correction about last week’s episode. But unfortunately it looks like we didn’t fuck anything up last week so I won’t get to. I promise to try less hard next time.

Normally I close the show out by thanking all the people who help make it go. I usually thank all the people who send encouraging emails, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, subscribe to us on YouTube, rate us on iTunes and tell their friends about us. Then I’ll thank people like Heath Enwright and Darrel Ray who joined me on the show and I’ll usually thank people like Bill and Suzy from the “Bar Room Atheist” podcast for providing the Farnsworth quote this week and for putting together a really fun and relaxed podcast which you’ll find linked on our shownotes.

Bar Room Atheists on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bar-room-atheist

And I usually thank everybody who could have spent the last 30 minutes listening to any number of awesome things and chose to listen to this show instead. And above all, I usually thank the world’s most astute, intelligent and discerning people, the one’s who donate money to our show. People like Justin, this week’s most valuable human.

But I’m not going to do that tonight. It’s not that all those aforementioned people don’t deserve thanks; they do, especially Justin because he gave us money, but I’ve got a really important thanks this week and I’m afraid it would have overshadow all those other ones. I want to thank one of the most dedicated, influential and admirable people in the modern secular movement. Eugenie Scott, long time director of the National Center for Science Education and valiant warrior against creationism and science denialism recently announced her retirement.

So I want to say to Eugenie Scott that we in the secular community cannot thank you enough for all the hard work you’ve done in defense of science and rationality. After a long and successful career taking on all comers, you’ve earned the right to retire in peace, knowing that you’ve made a substantive difference and that you’ve inspired an army of freethinkers to follow in your footsteps even if none of them will ever quite fill your shoes. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

That does it for tonight, but we’ll be back in 168 hours with the “Out of Egypt” Edition where Lucinda and Heath will join me to pour over 40 more chapters of immoral bullshit in the “Holy Babble”. But if you can’t wait that long for more us, fear not. Even in two parts I didn’t have quite enough room for all the good stuff from that Darrel Ray interview so I added a quick bonus question and answer to the “Extras” page on the website. While you’re there, be sure to check out our erratically published blog and if you want to help me buy a new alternator and a car to put it in, click on the donate button on the right side of the page.

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

Categories: Show Transcripts Tags: agnostic, anti-theism, antitheism, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, biblical criticism, biblical satire, christian oppression, darrel ray, Eugenie Scott, religious criticism, religious podcast, Turkish Atheist Autism

Episode 11: Partial Transcript

May 2, 2013 Noah Lugeons Leave a comment

by Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright

(Note: Transcript contains some lines edited from the final version of the episode)

Sponsor:

Today’s episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new brand of non-alcoholic Christian beer, “What Would Jesus Brew?” because who needs alcohol when you have Jesus? After all, like cheap beer, religion tastes bitter going down, sedates you, numbs you to your problems while exacerbating them, makes Sunday morning suck, gives you headaches, explodes violently if you shake it up, reduces your ability to make rational decisions and makes you ashamed of your sexual encounters.

“What Would Jesus Brew?” because alcohol is like liquid religion.

And now, the Scathing Atheist…

Intro:

It’s Thursday, It’s May 2nd and abstinence didn’t work for Mary, now did it?

I’m your host Noah Lugeons and from reluctantly spring-like New York, New York, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week’s episode,

The LDS says that the Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough,
I’ll have sex with Darrel Ray… oh, no wait… I’m sorry, I’ll “talk” sex with Darrel Ray. Which is still good, too, I guess… and
And Benny Hinn will be a cruel, heartless fuck,

But first, the Diatribe:

Diatribe:

So before I tell you what happened on Sunday, let me tell you what didn’t happen on Sunday. In preparation for the show this week, I didn’t go to the “Christian” page on the Guardian’s website and when I wasn’t there, here are a few of the headlines I didn’t find:

Joel O’Steen hates Jews and I have proof
The Pope thinks gay people are gross
Christians must accept that they’re almost certainly wrong, and
I may believe in Jesus, but that doesn’t make me a Christian.

And what’s more, I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t find them there when I wasn’t looking. Because what kind of tampon-stain would print headlines like that on a Christian news aggregator? They wouldn’t. Because they would have to be total assholes.

Alright, so now, for act two, let me tell you what I did do on Sunday.

I went to the “Atheist” page on the Guardian’s website and when I was there, here are the headlines that I found:

Dawkins’s latest anti-Muslim Twitter spat lays bare his hypocrisy
Sam Harris, New Atheists and the anti-Muslim animus
The secular must accept that religion can save
I may not have faith, but that doesn’t make me an atheist

I didn’t cherry-pick the bad ones here, by the way. These were the top 4 headlines on the page. That’s what the Guardian was giving the atheists to read. They have pages for all your major faith groups. The lead headline in “Christianity” was “At Easter, the tortured face of God teaches us to love our fellow man”… almost four weeks after Easter.

The lead story on the “Islam” page was “America’s greatest asset against radicalisation are Muslim Americans” and on the “Judaism” page, their first offering was “Poland’s ‘generation unexpected’ leads resurgence in Jewish culture”. Amazingly, in more than a dozen different faith-by-faith breakdowns, none of them lead off with a story where one of the most prominent and respected members of the group is smeared as a bigot on the thinnest shreds of dubious evidence. But since atheism isn’t a religion, they can lead off with not one such story but two.

As to the accusations against Dawkins, they’re the same ridiculous bullshit as always. He says Muslims are stupid because they believe a human being rode to heaven on a flying horse and that makes him an “Islamaphobe”. The fact that he also says that Christians are stupid for believing a zombie army wandered into Jerusalem doesn’t make him a “Christaphobe”, of course. And the fact that he says Jews are stupid for believing that Jacob outwrestled vampire god doesn’t make him a “Jewphobe”. The fact that he says astrologers are stupid for believing the relative positions of planets will adversely affect their financial situation doesn’t make him an “astrologophobe”. But if you think Muslim beliefs are stupid it’s because you’re scared of them.

The accusations against Sam Harris are only slightly less specious. He’s pointing out that a lot of terrorism comes from Muslim extremists so clearly does so because he hates Muslims. He also points out that when the car is running low on gas it needs filled up, so clearly he hates petroleum producing nations as well. And when he points out that his steak is actually more of a mid-rare than a medium, it can only be because of his irrational and seething hatred of cows.

These accusations aren’t new, of course, and they’re hardly worth refuting. Anyone who achieves prominence in this or any other social movement will be attacked by jackasses who trying to make a name for themselves. There’s nothing new or noteworthy about that.

But there’s something to be said for a major media outlet that runs a page dedicated to atheist readers and loads it up with character assassination pieces from wingnuts. They follow those up with a great op-ed about how secular people need to really accept the fact that the entire core of their movement is wrong and religion is actually right. And finally a piece on how miserable it must be to be an atheist.

It’s nice to have a page of our very own isn’t it?

Look, atheism is not a religion and atheists aren’t a “faith-group”. You’ll never hear me or any other atheist make the kind of absurd, bullshit demands of “respect” you hear from religious people. You’ll never hear us issuing death threats for drawing images of Christopher Hitchins or taking Dan Dennett’s name in vain. You’ll never hear atheists demanding that anyone capitalize the H in her when they talk about Madalyn Murray O’Hair and you’ll never hear us declare war on somebody for not believing that the magical calamari really turns into the body of PZ Myers.

But I do think it’s fair to ask that we’re treated with the same respect that would be afforded to any other group of human beings. There were no stories at all in their other “faith” sections defaming prominent figures as bigots and let’s face it, you wouldn’t have a hell of a lot of trouble finding stories like this if you were looking. Hell, you wouldn’t have to weave together strands of suspect bullshit to get there like they did with Harris and Dawkins.

I was so angry about it that I thought about dropping the Guardian as a news source for this show altogether, but then I remembered that they were the only outlet I saw that covered last week’s exploding Spanish dildo headline, so they’re off the hook. But it still pissed me off.

Headlines:

Joining me for headlines tonight is my hetero life-mate, Heath Enwright. Heath, are you ready to not have gay sex?

Let’s not do it.

In our lead story tonight, the American Humanist Association has filed a lawsuit against Northwest Rankin High School in Flowood, Mississippi.

Go Cougars.

The suit alleges that students endured a mandatory Christian sermon during school hours in an assembly that didn’t even have the decency to pretend it was about science or dinosaurs or something. Instead, a representative from the Pinelake Baptist Church was invited to the school to talk about finding hope in Jesus Christ and even closed the assembly by leading the students in prayer.

Well I’m assuming there was an Imam leading a Muslim show-and-tell the week before. They probably have all kinds of special science classes like that.

Oh, I’m sure they do, and I’m sure they always stop the kids who try to leave, like they allegedly did at this one. William Burgess, legal coordinator of the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, points out that “when a school sponsors an event, the religious speech of the speaker… is attributable to the school [itself] and is therefore subject to the Establishment Clause,” adding, “Fucking duh!”

Are they really worried that kids in Mississippi aren’t getting any exposure to the whole Christianity thing? Like there were kids leaving the auditorium that day, saying “You know what, I’m gonna google this Jesus guy. See what that’s all about.”

Died for my sins you say?

AHA files lawsuit over bullshit Christian Sermon in Mississippi school: http://www.americanhumanist.org/news/details/2013-04-humanists-file-suit-against-public-school-that-held

In other legal news, Pennsylvania judge M. Teresa Sarmina has filed a brief defending her recent decision in the trial and conviction of a Catholic church aide in a child-rape conspiracy case. Monsignor William Lynn, the first Catholic Church official in the US to be convicted in the cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests, is facing a paltry three to six years in prison and is still appealing the decision.

So he’s getting a punishment on par with stealing a car. Systematically covering up a decades-long righteous rape spree, or Geico makes slightly less unfair profit that quarter? Those balance.

Well no, according to Lynn’s attorneys, his crime was way more benign than grand theft auto. They’re appealing the decision because the judge allowed evidence of child abuse cases that predated Lynn’s involvement with the diocese. They argue that these details unfairly prejudiced the jury against their client.

“I didn’t start covering up those rapes until well after they clearly happened.”

Being the defense attorney here is rough . . .

I read they’re claiming that Lynn can’t be guilty of child endangerment because he didn’t actually supervise any children. That’s like blaming the abortion on the coat hanger.

Wow… it’s hard to transition out of a back-alley abortion joke so I’m gonna carry on like it never happened.

Judge defends Church aide’s trial and conviction for child rape conspiracy: http://news.yahoo.com/pa-judge-defends-church-aides-trial-conviction-211500942.html

And turning from Catholic pedophelia to Catholic sexism, the Vatican is now officially even less progressive than Kentucky. Former nun and current maverick, 70 year old Rosemarie Smead was ordained a priest over the vehement objections of the Roman Catholic Church. She faces excommunication for this heinous act, but dismisses the threat as a (quote) “Medieval bullying stick the bishops use to keep control over people…”, though it was unclear whether she was referring to excommunication or Catholicism.

She claims she’s not gonna let octogenarian men tell people how to run their lives.

Instead, she’s gonna start her own church, where a septuagenarian woman will tell people how to run their lives in the same way minus the male priest rule. Can’t exactly use a Bible as a study guide for your feminism class.

And according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, you can’t use the Vatican as a study guide for what Catholics believe, either. As many as 70% of American Catholics believe that women should be allowed to be priests if for no reason than they would rather their sons were molested by women, but the church warns that allowing women to be priests might lead to beastiality and hurricanes like gay marriage.

In that sense, I’m all for having priestesses.

Bestiality and hurricanes are both good job creators.

And those donkey shows are another perfect example of where replacing a man with a woman is definitely an improvement.

I bet lesbian marriage becomes legal in red states before gay marriage.

Kentucky woman ordained a priest despite Roman Catholic Church’s objections: http://news.yahoo.com/kentucky-woman-ordained-priest-defiance-roman-catholic-church-005633378.html

And in a follow up to our lead story from Episode 9, the Church of Latter Day Saints has kind-of endorsed the Boy Scouts decision to kind-of lift their ban on gays. Despite the multiple levels of half-assedness involved in this noncommittal pseudo-endorsement, conservative Christian groups are up-in-arms as though something had actually happened.

First, to the compromise. Facing pressure from pretty much everyone but Fred Phelps and the Ku Klux Klan, the Boy Scouts are backpedaling their 19th century stance on homosexuality by allowing gay boys to join the scouts, but not letting gay men serve as scout leaders.

This is great for preventing the hiring of scout leaders who are openly gay pedophiles.

But I think they might be slightly underestimating the amount of in-the-closet gay pedophiles. You know, the ones who are a little bit hush hush about being a gay pedophile during their job interview process.

In the interest of fairness, though, the Boy Scouts make no claim that their bigotry is based on a fear that gays are pedophiles. They just hate fags. And speaking of hating fags, the Mormon church, the largest financial supporter of the Boy Scouts of America, has sort-of endorsed the proposal. Recognizing this as the most anemic action they could possibly take to stem the tide of tolerance that threatens to force the Boy Scouts’ hands they issued the closest thing to an endorsement that they could get away with.

Well if the Mormons are behind it . . .

Surprising though. Those MoMo’s are super hetero.

Having 3 wives is double-plus-ungay.

Well you’re not the only one who was surprised. Among the bloviating, frothing bigots that have voiced opposition to this non-condemnation is one John Stemberger, head of something called “On-My-Honor(dot)com”. He points out that the Boy Scouts resolution doesn’t address how to (I shit you not, quote) “manage and ensure the safety and security of the boys in the program.”

Now, I can’t decide here whether this asshole is wondering how they’re gonna keep the other kids from beating up the gay kids or whether he’s worrying about the gay kids butt-raping the straight kids, but the tone of the message actually suggested the latter.

Based on what I believe to be an accurate depiction of gays on TV, the 11-year-old gay rapist survival expert is definitely KNOT the issue.

Family Research Council President and two-headed-dildo-aficionado Tony Perkins chimed in as well. He warns that this compromise sends the message that “homosexuality is morally acceptable until a boy turns 18” and remarkably, his point wasn’t that after 18 it continues to be morally acceptable.

This guy obviously sucks, but let’s not smear the 2-headed-dildo. Who doesn’t love Jennifer Connelly in the ass-to-ass scene in Requiem for a Dream?

Mormon’s say that Boy Scouts are still just bigoted enough: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/25/mormon-church-leaders-say-welcome-boy-scouts-proposal-to-lift-gay-ban-for-youth/ But many Christian groups say “Not so fast”: http://www.christianpost.com/news/lds-church-criticized-for-endorsing-boy-scouts-proposal-on-accepting-gay-members-94835/

And from the “If-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em” department, the Vatican has sharply criticized the Vatican for failing to prevent ongoing child rape and torture. Proving that the Catholics are always the last ones to the conclusion, internal reports now admit massive culpability within the Vatican hierarchy for failing to do more to prevent abuse and failing to do less to ensure that it continued.

Sometimes a worldwide intervention and hundreds of millions of dollars in rape damages makes you take a look in the mirror.

And sadly, sometimes it doesn’t. The National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Churches of Ireland couched the horror of the decades of horrendous sexual abuse in terms like “unacceptable delay”, “risky behavior”, “unsatisfactory response” and “double-plus ungood practices”.

An unacceptable delay would be getting raped, and then in order to rape the rapist back and get some money damages, you had to fill out some paperwork at the DMV first. Maybe a few hours.

But the message was clear and it was in keeping with the recent theme of “Internal Catholic Investigations”: We did some horrible shit, but now we’re positively awesome at not raping kids.

“There were a few, minor executive oversights, but we didn’t want to micromanage. All the way in Rome, out of context, who were we to dictate policies to others?”

Catholic Hierarchy had “unacceptable delay” in dealing with serial child-rapist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/24/catholic-hierarchy-priests-clogher Actual report: http://static.rasset.ie/documents/2fm/clogher-report.pdf

And finally, in “Fuck Pretenses, Just Give me Money News”, Televangelist and hairpiece repository Benny Hinn is asking his listeners for two and a half million dollars to get his ministry out of debt. Or rather, God is asking them to give the money and Benny is just the intermediary… a tool, if you will.

So there’s some mysterious benefactor who will match up to 2.5 million in donations . . . but only during the first 90 days.

And if you donate in the next 10 minutes, he’ll throw in this free slap chop, a 30 dollar value.

Act now, supplies of debt are limited.

Hinn, whose ministry must be about five million dollars in the red, promises his viewers that if they help god wipe out his debt, then God will help them wipe out their debt. So basically he’s saying that if you have financial problems and you’re mired in debt, the best thing to do is give your limited resources to a guy with a private-fucking-jet.

“Yeah I’ll get you some drugs. Give me the money and wait right here.”

We should set up a kickstarter campaign to finance an indulgence factory.

We could mass produce heaven stairways and easily outpace a megachurch.

Benny Hinn is a cruel, heartless fuck: http://www.christianpost.com/news/benny-hinn-asks-followers-for-2-5-million-to-get-out-of-debt-94822/

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

And when we come back, author and activist Darrel Ray will join us to talk dirty to me.

Skit:

(Rustling Papers)

“…hm… who’s next on the list here… oh, Yahweh.”

(Button push, beep)

“Tonya, can you send in Yahweh, please?”

(Door opens)

God, God, come on in… yeah, just leave the door open, that’s fine.. Here, have a seat.

(creaking seat)

Yeah, that chair’s not as comfortable as the throne you’re used to, I’m sure.

Now, I suppose this is going to be kind of an awkward meeting, what with my fragile human form being unable to withstand the awesome power of your voice and all but honestly, in this instance, it’s probably better if I do all the talking anyway.

I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that we’re not very happy with your performance. Your last several centuries of performance reviews have been well below standard and I think we all knew that this day was coming.

I mean… all we have to do is look over your performance history. There was a time when you were first appointed… you were flooding the world, parting seas, turning people to salt, raining down frogs… you were a go-getter! You were a god’s god.

But now what do we get out of you? We’ve got the AIDS epidemic in Africa, we’ve got nuclear proliferation, climate change and what are you doing? You’re taking the wheel! You’re finding people’s car keys. Finding car keys, god, really? Did you think I wouldn’t find out about that? You’re omniscient and you couldn’t think of anything better to do with your time?

I know you work in mysterious ways. You said that in your resume and we accepted it because of the whole omnipotence thing, but I’ve gotta be honest, here lately it seems like you’re resting on all seven days.

I’m looking back over it and I can’t find a significant achievement for you in over 1800 years! You’re averaging less than a miracle a millenia, bro. I’ve got saints doing better than that. You know I’ve always been in your corner. I fought for you since the beginning. Every day’s a thousand years but you still wanted a day off and I fought for you on that one. I’ve been fighting for you since the day we hired you and to be frank, lately you’re just embarrassing me, and I don’t think that’s too harsh a statement.

I think we both know where this is going and I want to make it as easy as possible. You’re still under contract so we’ll pay that off, but we’re gonna have Ricky Gervais step in as interim god until we can permanently fill the position. So just leave your keys to the pearly gates with Tonya and if you need a letter of recommendation, you have my number.

Alright, thank you very much. Close the door on your way out please.

(door closes)

Whew… that went better than I expected. Damn, I should have done that centuries ago.

Outro:

We’ve only got a couple of minutes left and apparently we had a pretty error-ridden show last week so I’ve gotta make a few quick corrections before we close things out. Most of the mistakes came in the Holy Babble segment and most of it was stuff like saying Jacob when I meant Joseph or saying brothers instead of sons. For that I apologize and we’ll try to do better, but one way or the other I wouldn’t recommend using this show as a stand alone source for the bible.

There was one major correction I wanted to make. We got duped into reporting on essentially an Onion headline last week. The story about the Christian couple who maintained their abstinence for years after marriage was a gag piece from Lark News and if I’d made any attempt to vet it I’d have figured that out. That’s a huge fail on my part and I want to apologize for it. We’re not exactly a “hard news” show, but that doesn’t excuse me from my due diligence as a newscaster and I owe you better than that. Without some modicum of journalistic integrity we’ll devolve into CNN reporting in the wake of a disaster.

Also wanted to throw a quick shout out to our incredibly awesome Canadian listeners, who apparently pushed our show all the way up into the top 100 of all podcasts on the Canadian iTunes ranks for a couple of days last month. Excellent job, Canadians. If listening to the Scathing Atheist was an olympic event, you’d be the team to beat.

Obviously I want to extend a huge thanks to Darrel Ray for such an informative and entertaining interview. Also need to thank Jake-Farr Wharton of the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast for providing tonight’s Farnsworth quote. He’s got a great podcast if you haven’t checked it out. It’s kind of like ours only more informed and in Australian. We’ll have a link to it in the shownotes, but I trust our listeners to be able to puzzle out where to go to find the Imaginary Friends Show dot Com Podcast. Need to thank Heath as always. Also want to thank all the listeners who sent in emails, especially the ones that include news items to make my life easier. Thank so much for taking the time out to help.

But most of all we’ve gotta thank our very favorite listeners of the week, John, Michael and Evan, who gave us money. Giving us money is a noble and moral act that brings peace and joy to all and we are all indebted to John, Michael and Evan for their heroic selflessness. Oh, and Evan, it went to a bottle of Laphroaig, but it was for before we recorded, not after.

Remember, if you’d like to prove your virtuous nature in the only way that really counts anymore, you too can donate to our show by clicking on the “Donate” button on the right side of the homepage at Scathing Atheist (dot) com. Every little bit helps, but every big bit helps a lot more.

And if you want to help but have taken a vow of poverty, you can always help us spread the word by leaving a review on iTunes. Those ratings and reviews do wonders to help us build our audience and they really make my day as well.

That does it for us tonight, but if you can’t get enough of us, be sure to check out our erratically published blog, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to us on YouTube, like us on Facebook and check us out on Stitcher. Seriously. Because all the other atheist podcasts on Stitcher are making fun of us.

One Hour Special

April 22, 2013 Noah Lugeons 2 comments

by Noah Lugeons

No sooner had I talked Heath into doing this thing weekly than I started pushing to do an hour long show as well. The way I figured it, I was always having trouble shaving the last three minutes out of the program, so why not just do the easy thing and add 27 minutes instead?

Luckily Heath is a little more level-headed than me and talked me into taking a step back and realizing just how much work I was about to bite off. Sure, sometimes we had to lose a funny joke and sometimes we had to push a skit a few episodes ahead, but in the long run, pushing that 30 minute time limit has worked really well so far in keeping us fast paced and succinct. If we tried to switch to an hour long show, we might have to vamp a lot of time and overall we might add 10 or 15 good minutes but at the expense of padding the show with 15 or 20 mediocre or even crappy minutes.

So needless to say, when I suggested that we make episode 10 an hour long special, Heath was skeptical at first. But then I showed him all the good stuff we had. We’re starting the Holy Babble segment with our Genesis discussion, I’m debuting a new atheist song, we’re chocked full of good headlines plus Heath has a hilarious skit that he’s been working on that I really don’t want to deprive the world of any longer than necessary.

When we set out to fill up a show, 10 of the 30 minutes are already taken up. Between the sponsor, the intro, the diatribe, the calendar, the feedback and the outro, there’s only 20 minutes to fill in any given show and we have to divide that up between the headlines, the interview (or the panel discussion) and, much of the time, a skit or two. In this week’s show we’d have been left with about 15 minutes to split between the headlines and the panel discussions and given the slate of stories we’ve got this week, we could easily go 15 minutes just on those.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for Heath to see eye to eye with me on this one. There was just way too much content to try to squeeze it into a thirty minute show. And if we bumped half the stuff to next week, we’d have to postpone the very awesome, exciting interview that I’m doing later this week.

So hopefully you have an extra half hour for us this week because we’ve got a lot to talk about.

Categories: Podcast Updates Tags: agnostic, atheism, atheist, atheist podcast, atheist special, religious podcast

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528: Banned Wagon Edition March 30, 2023
In this week’s episode, book banning bites the butts of the city of Brigham, God visits a town in Connecticut to serve unlimited breadsticks made of his son, and Don Ford visits a podcast in Jersey, Michigan, and Georgia and doesn’t bring any breadsticks at all. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAth […]
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527: Marshtacular Edition March 23, 2023
On this week’s episode: Virginia gives a whole new meaning to periodic investigation ... The religious zealots of the Taliban will find they’re not cut out for clerical work ... And Gwyneth Paltrow experiments with putting noxious gas INTO her butthole. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To b […]
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526: Elevated Edition March 16, 2023
In this week’s episode, we head to Seattle, so we leave you with a whole bunch of headlines we recorded over the last six weeks so you wouldn’t miss us. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click there: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSV […]
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