Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 115: Religion of Pieces

Episode Date: September 9, 2013

Want to stream Cognitive Dissonance to your Android or iPhone? Buy the app. Go to DissonancePod.com and click on the link on the right-hand side of the page. Each purchase helps support the show. Hey, this is David in Saudi Arabia on my first of two calls. The first call, I just wanted to touch base. You were talking, I was just listening to your podcast where you were talking about the guy that got thrown in jail for not doing the 12-step recovery program. And the real part that you missed on that was it sucked was that he was actually going to it.

He was complaining about going to it but still going to it. And they said, no, you're doing it like you're being uncooperative about it. So we're going to count it like you didn't gocooperative about it so we're gonna count it like you didn't go and throw you in jail anyway so he was going to the 12-step program session he was just tell him hey I shouldn't have to do this I want to go to a non-religious version and they said screw you buddy you're going to jail and that's the that was even that made him even more suckier than if he just refused and they put him in jail. I just wanted to say that.

Glory hole. Bye. Hey, guys. Glory hole. This is Foster Disbelief. I was just doing a little bit of research on the statistics that Bradley Dane and his alleged gay lover, Jake McMillan,

came up with on the radio show about half of all murders being committed by 3.8% of the population. I found some other telling statistics. Did you know that 99% of all glory holes have at least one member of the junkyard profits on the receiving end? And this is a weird one from Japan. glory holes have at least one member of the junkyard profits on the receiving end and this is a weird one from japan 75 of all bukkake bay videos have bradley dean as the target it's amazing what statistics you can come up with when you don't have to worry about that hey there fellas

glory hole this is lee from up here in montana i run a little business called the Hell in a Handbasket Company, and I was listening to your podcast, and it got me to thinking, you know, that discussion about a basket full of dog heads? Now, that's the kind of thing that Hell in a Handbasket could really make some money off of. Now, if you fellas could, you know, arrange with some of them folks you know that are chopping off dog heads. And give them out my number. Why, I could do some lovely arrangements. Wicker and a dog head.

Now, my cousin Leon, he does some amateur taxidermy. He could make it real nice. Just real nice. So, if you've got some friends, they've got some dog heads they want to take care of. You know, they need to go to hell in a handbasket. Glory hole.

Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad.

news makes it big or makes us mad it's skeptical it's political and there is no welcome at this is episode 115 i'm pretty sure of cognitive distance thereabouts give or take yeah thereabouts i think we should we should go the jake system the magic. Yeah, and just start naming them? No, just fucking randomly number them. Oh, I like the random numbers. That's good. This is episode 300 and pi. I know there's mathematicians who listen to us. They should just send us equations for each episode.

That would be fucking awesome. That would be awesome. Just some ridiculous, impossible. Like a Goodwill hunting fucking one The thing is I'm too stupid to even be able to read that And you're like writing shit down On a mirror and erasing it It's got a big giant E on there

Cause all the hardest equations have a giant weird E Right they have to And that stands for fuck I gotta solve this problem We should have all of our numerical designations translated into trigonometry. So it's like, this is episode sine over cosine divided by tangent. I hated the sine cosine stuff. I did too, and I never understood any of it. I still don't understand it.

I remember that they were numbers on a calculator. It was so fucking baffling. And I was good understand it. I remember that they were numbers on a calculator. It was so fucking baffling. And I was good at math. And I think vaguely I understood it in like geometry when I was a kid. Because it's like one of them is like a fucking like the division of a something. And then there's like a division of a something. One of them has to do with a circle, I think. I don't know.

I remember doing trigonometry. I don't remember that. I remember doing trigonometry proofs and it just being like at every turn, I would take like 39 more steps to get what I needed. I would get to the right answer because I was just fucking dogging about it. But it would be like I'd hand it in and it would be a goddamn novella. And it would be like, you could have done this in three steps. I'm like, motherfucker, you could have done this in three steps. All right?

I knew early on I was going to be a humanities major. Yeah, you're not going to be a – I was actually pretty good at math. I just can't – like it's funny because there's so much shit. As you get older, you just flush shit from the cache. Like your RAM cache just disappears. Like we were talking about movies the other day, and I was just like, yeah, I saw that movie. I know I saw that movie, but I cannot for the life of me remember the plot of that movie. Just like fucking gone. And the same thing with the sine cosine shit. It's

just like that shit is gone forever. Like I may be able to relearn it, but man, it's not fucking here anymore. No, man. I got up to calculus in college as I stopped at calculus. So when I was in, God, this is like, this is in the way back. This is probably seven or eight years ago. There was a coworker who was in college and she was taking a basic algebra class. And I'm like, you know, no problem. I can help you. She needed some help. I'm like, give me your book.

I'm fucking certainly proficient in algebra. I am no longer proficient in algebra. I am no longer proficient in algebra. I remember staring, Cecil, fucking staring at the book like there was a time my brain did this. It's almost like if you were like a fucking gymnast and then you spent like 10 years on the couch doing nothing but eating Cheetos. Nothing. Wait, I wasn't a gymnast, but I did do the second part. Wait, I wasn't a gymnast, but I did do the second part. And then like 10 years later, somebody's like, all right, hop on the rings and, you know, get in the Iron Cross.

You'd be like, uh, my body won't do. Get on the balance beam, fatty. Right. You just roll yourself right down the fucking thing. Oh, man. You get a bigger guy to just bounce you on their trampoline floors like a basketball. Quick, we need you. We just need you for the mat.

We don't need you to be a gymnast anymore. If you could just sub in for the mat, that would be. Yeah, we just need when they're going to jump off the high jump, they need to land on something soft and you're it. You're like the bouncy spring thing in front of the pommel horse that they let go to vault. You just run, you just, ah, feed me more donuts. I don't practice Santeria. I ain't got no crystal ball.

I had a million dollars, but I'd spend it all if I could find it. So the first story we're going to cover comes from the Santa Cruz Sentinel dot com. And I'm going to fucking mispronounce this on purpose. In Caracas. Isn't it Caracas? It is if you say it. Water more precious than fuel.

You know, part of the reason, and only part of the reason, but part of the reason, Cecil, is fucking crazy Santeria nut huts keep dumping dead, sacrificed animals into the water. It's the worst tea ever. Yeah, because the water's a nice Earl Grey now. Yeah, what the fuck are you thinking? You're just like, yeah, you know, our water kind of is fucked up, and it's like there's a bunch of stuff.

And you're right. It's not just only the fucking dead animals that are floating in it like fucking croutons in soup at this point. It's just like it's like all kinds of runoff and industrialization and all that jazz, but it really comes down to the fact that they keep throwing dead animals in it.

Like, what, you know, let's just say you threw a dead animal in there, and then you're like, well, let's test the water. Huh. Still fucking not potable. Right? Still is not a drinkable thing. Okay. Get another animal.

Like, I mean, you already tried the animal thing. Like, adding more animals is not going to make it more delicious. You're not making a soup. It's not. Like, when your water supply is basically a stock of bacteria. Exactly. You have done your job wrong. When your water supply is basically a stock of bacteria. You have done your job wrong. And this guy, like the witch doctor in this story, is so blasé about it.

He's like, they never really give me a hard time as he chucks another fucking dead. Like the reporter's like, anyone ever bother you about chucking all these dead animals into the drinking water? And he's like, nope, everybody pretty much leaves me alone. He even says that's why he moved there. He says he moved there because nobody gives him a hard time. He's able to practice his witchcraft full time. He lived by a reservoir before that they would not let him throw things in. He couldn't even skip stones in it.

He was so furious. I just see what I see is the three guys from Monty Python with a cow on a fucking catapult. Just like fucking... Right into the fucking drink. Bloop. Bloop. Fuck.

At some point, you don't have to have any specialized knowledge of environmental sciences to know that putting rotting corpses in your drinking water is a bad decision. Like it's always it's never like, well, sometimes. No, always. That's a bad call. There's never a time where you're like, man, gasoline is cheaper than water.

Yeah, gasoline is cheaper than water there. You're right, Tom. It's totally true. In the past, it's not like in medieval Europe, they used to steep the fucking well with a cow. You know what I mean? They'd be like, whoa, you can't drink that stuff. Hold on a second. We need to get a cow on a rope.

Just dump it down into the well a few times. Two. Yeah. Three. I mean, seriously, like, we figured this shit out a long time ago. It's a fucking horror show. What I don't understand, too, is eat the animal. Like, sacrifice the animal.

Like, this guy, there's a picture of this guy. He's got a chicken. He's going to fucking cut the chicken's throat and do his fucking voodoo witchcraft bullshit magic dance or whatever you know like that's awesome fucking make chicken tenders when you're done So this story comes from Tribune.com. This is a fucking horror story cut into pieces. She challenged God's orders. Another cleric. Try to contain your fucking surprise.

Another cleric. He used his plus two mace to beat the shit out of her and then cut her up. He comes from the grand tradition of everyone's a cleric. Yeah. It's like when the priest walks in and he has that ball that shits out the water. You know what I mean? Like where he spits the water at people. That's basically how you become a

cleric. Like you get hit by one of those droplets. Just anybody. It doesn't matter who you are. Wait, if you're a woman, no. But if you're a dude. Don't be ridiculous. If you're a woman. At any age. I don't think there's an age requirement to be a cleric either. Like there's no you have to be this tall to ride this ride at all. It's like

you are just, you know, if you're a fucking infant you're a cleric probably over there. That's probably part of the Muslim baptism is just to become a cleric. Just immediately. It's like, oh, look at this beautiful cleric baby. That's so awesome. It's like not even a title you can be proud of.

You know, like when you're getting knighted in other countries and you're like, I'm Sir Patrick Stewart or whatever. Like here, it's just like your cleric. Yes, everybody's a fucking cleric. Nobody cares. He issued his first fatwa. Yeah.

Aw. Our little cleric is growing up. He hates women already? Look, he's abusing the neighbor girl. Aw. You're doing such a great job with him, sweetheart. He's a little misogynist. Well, we'll work on that.

We'll get him all the way there. Up his game. It'd be a good comic strip. Little misogynist. Little misogynist. Oh, my God. That would actually be kind of awesome. It should be done like, done in the style of, like, the Cathy. Yeah, exactly.

So that it's like, oh, I hate Mondays. It was like little sweat droplets, like, shooting off of the little misogynist's head. Or like family circus. Like family circus style. Like where the mom is just like, oh, and the kid's like, I hate women. Single frame. It's got to be the single frame. Yeah, it's a single frame.

Right, right. So this guy, this cleric, he was mad at his wife. Right. Because she didn't. Okay, now hold on. Let me, just pitch this story to me. Like, let's say we're going to do this later. All right.

So here's the scene. Okay. The cleric comes home from a hard day clericking. All right, yeah, sure. And I mean, that clerical work is difficult. He's busy all day. He's got paperwork like you wouldn't believe. And his wife, if you can believe this, steal yourself, had the nerve not to wear her veil.

What? And then she sent her children to school. What? What do you think he should do? Give her a turn talking to That is an option. He instead chose B. Hack her into

pieces. Oh, that's that escalated quickly. Yeah. Well, it is the religion of pieces. So. I wish I had tweeted that. That's so much better than my joke. That's the worst joke I've ever told.

That's terrific. It's terrible. At a certain point, you know, we're reading these stories and you think, okay, well, this guy's just a psychopath. Well, this guy's just a psychopath. Well, this guy's just a psychopath. I mean, are we just, I mean, they just either have an inordinate number of psychopaths or their religion tells them that it's okay to hurt women. It's one or the other. Which one do you think it is? Well, I mean, I'll tell you, I think, I think the culture breeds this sort of, I mean, the acceptance of this violence against women. I, I think the culture breeds this sort of, I mean, acceptance of this violence against women.

The religion breeds this. The religion teaches this shit. I think it's clear that it does. Anytime you have a religion that says, cover your fucking face, you know, that's dehumanizing. Right. I mean, your face is the, our faces are the essence of our humanity. Cover it up. Cover your fucking face.

That's it's dehumanizing. You're going to dehumanize half your population. It's I mean, there's no secrets here about what's going on. Yeah, this guy, you know, I do think this guy's probably fucking crazy. over the fucking edge from crazy to fucking incredibly insanely violent when you think that you've got the backing of your religious beliefs and when you think that the person that you're attacking is less human than you are. And I think that's part of this story is if you're attacking someone who is less human than you, as an attacker, the crime is a lesser crime.

Right? If I attack an equal, so Cecil, if you come over to my house for dinner and I just start fucking attacking you with a knife. By the way, what are you doing for dinner tomorrow? Worst dinner ever. Oh, no, you haven't eaten something. Don't get me wrong. I will still eat. I mean, you can be beating on me and I will still be shoveling food in my mouth.

I won't be happy, though. Right, like this mango salsa is so good. It's very delicious. Will you stop stabbing my eye? You're getting close to my eating hand. Don't make me drop the food. Yeah, now then I'll get pissed. Right, whatever you do, don't stab the stomach because I don't want any of this spilling out.

Yeah, no, exactly. But, you know, like, if you're attacking an equal, it's a different crime. But if you're attacking a less, you know, if you're attacking somebody that you don't see as your equal, that you don't see as fully human, you know, that's almost, in the attacker's eye, that's almost animal cruelty. Like, it's a step down. It's not justifiable by any stretch. But it's almost like it's a step down. When the religion dehumanizes women in such a grand way like this, I have to think that's a huge part. It doesn't seem like as big a crime.

You know, to me, of course, it does, because I'm not a fucking piece of garbage. Well, I don't think I am. My mom says I'm cool. I mean, the votes are still out, so we're not sure. There's a lot of hanging chaps on that one. Okay, I'm at Wikipedia

now, okay? So now, whether or not you believe Wikipedia is a source, I'm going to read a couple of statistics off. In Afghanistan, domestic violence is so common that 85% of women admit to experiencing it. 60% of all women report being victims of multiple forms of serious violence. of serious violence. In Bangladesh, about 40% report having experienced domestic violence from an intimate partner,

and 50% in rural regions report experiencing sexual violence. In Iran, it says a World Health Organization study found that in a previous year, 15% of wives had been physically abused, 42% had been sexually abused,

and 81% had been psychologically abused. Oh my God. Pakistan. 81%. According to Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, in 2002, over 90% of married Pakistan women surveyed reported being kicked, slapped, beaten, or sexually abused

when husbands were dissatisfied with their cooking or cleaning, and the women failed to bear a child and had to give birth to a girl instead of a boy or had an illicit affair. Fuck. Now, there's a bunch more in here that I could be reading, but those are just incidents of domestic violence among Muslims in those countries. So, you know, I think there's a trend there. I mean, I'm just looking.

I'm not a fucking statistician. I don't, I mean i mean but i'm looking and when you say 85 of women i can i can tell you right now that 85 of the women i know have not been abused right and i know i know a great deal of women uh i know you know i could probably say i mean i would i would be closer to the you know the one percent or two% in that group. You know what I mean? Like that have been abused, domestically abused. And we're talking domestic, when we say domestic violence, that means that intimate relationship. You know what I mean?

Right, yeah. So, I mean, I can't, I don't even know a single person. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that they haven't been, because that's not something that you talk about. But, I mean, I don't know any domestic abuse survivors. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, it's just not a thing. So there's gotta be something here that is leading people to think that this is a good thing. And you know, when you start, like you said, you start the very first mention of the conversation is let's put women in a bag and then that's where they live in this bag

and when they're home they can come out of their little fucking terrarium or whatever you know what I mean like that's not a moral good that is not a moral good and that leads to other problems that are happening obviously

clearly and you know while this guy is clearly a psychopath because he's fucking dextering his wife this is this is not an isolated case in the sense that you know there's a lot of women who experience something very similar while it doesn't lead to them getting fucking chopped up like a fucking pig it does lead to them getting beaten. In the name of Jesus, we speak that. In the name of Jesus, we speak that. So this story comes from the raw story. This fucking guy. This guy is fucking dude.

Creationist. Christians must challenge the culture shift to rational humanist thought. What? Dr. Jason Lyle. This guy. Fuck you, dude. Dr. Jason Lyle of the guy. Fuck you, dude. Dr. Jason Lyle of the Institute for Creation Research.

Really? Really? I got to stop there already. Research? Creation research. What research do you do? What possible fucking research do you do? At what point are you like, hmm, time to do some research on creation.

Where's our no evidence again? You know what I imagine is like they're all sitting around and God is in the lab and he's just creating things. Like he's just like, well, we made a weird-ass animal yesterday. Let's make another weird-ass animal. What do you guys say? And then we'll go out to lunch and have martinis. You know what I mean? Like that's the only – I mean what else can you do?

Unless things are currently being created. can you imagine going to their library it just has one book on a shelf yeah just the bible and it's a bunch of little footnotes in it you know like a bunch of like little tabs that you can open to all their creationist stuff oh yeah welcome to the uh center for we're fucking institute for creation. Have you read our one book? Yeah. Have you read our pamphlet? I did. I read that. It wasn't real convincing. Yeah. That's kind of all we got.

No, they got a dude. They got this dude. And this dude is basically yammer-jammering about how... Is that a technical term. It is a technical term. I learned it from the Institute for Creation Research. He's basically trying to bring back or bring forward or bring up.

I don't know. Presuppositional apologetics, which is basically his way of saying we all just have to decide first that there's God and that there's the Bible and that all that stuff is true. And then we'll make the evidence fit that. And he's upset because now people are looking at the evidence first and then they don't come to the conclusion that he starts with, that he presupposes. He's got, he actually has logic backwards. When did, when is that a good idea to presuppose the answer? I don't even know how you would build. Seriously, how do you say it out loud?

Couldn't you call it something else that doesn't automatically tip everyone off that your worldview is honestly backward? Right. I remember, I'm going to shame myself. I remember when I was in, God, it had to be seventh grade, seventh or eighth grade. I knew it was seventh grade. I was in seventh grade. And I did a science. Did you do science first, Cecil?

Yeah, when I was a kid, sure. I built a volcano. So we had to do actual experiments, right? So I did an experiment to see which type of bridge design would be best. And so my dad and I spent fucking a billion hours in his little workshop downstairs building a dozen of these bridges out of wood planks. And some of them were just a plank of wood. And some of them had these truss structures. And I researched different bridge designs. And we tried to build these things. And then we took pictures as we suspended weights from these bridges to see which structure was going to hold the most weight. Now, I knew from reading ahead of time that the more complex

structures, because that's the way we designed the experiment, right? The more complex structures with more triangles in them and stuff should have held more weight. What I didn't take into account was that we built the hard ones first. It took us weeks to do it. That wood got old and dry and brittle. And the plank wood was fresh and green and bendy and strong. So all of our

experiments were just wrong. They were all backwards. The plank wood held a billion pounds because it just kept flexing and flexing and flexing. So we just cheated. My dad's just like, that's not right. And we just did it. We just made it all up.

And here's the best part i went to regionals with that shit like i won the science fair like i had a like i won the science fair thing i presented the thing i went to the regional thing and i had all my pictures and you have your board you cheater i know my dad helped me cheat, too. That's the best part. Oh, my gosh. I have so little respect for your father right now. But it gets worse. Why does it get worse? Why did you become elected president after this?

Cheaterville. I'm the mayor of Chinatown. Because I'm stupid. Here's where it gets worse. So I've got all these Polaroid pictures because this is back in like 1989, right? So I've got all these Polaroid pictures of the bridges in action with the weight suspended from them. And I'm giving my little talk about bridges and bridge design and how the different trusses were more effective and they held weight. And here's a stress point.

I'm talking about this stuff and I'm 13 or whatever. i'm very proud of myself because i am at regionals and uh one of the people looking leans in close and sees my picture and i have a picture cecil on the board of like a hundred fucking weights underneath the one plank and it's still holding and then underneath the broken ones like two plates plates, like two weights underneath. And he's like, wait a minute. Those pictures don't match what you're saying. You got wake fielded. I totally did.

I got wake fielded. And I was like, look, Jenny McCarthy's naked. And everybody ran off. And I got an A. But that's the same thing. Like, I just decided what was supposed to be. Right. And when the experiment didn't match,

I just was like, well, I'll just lie about it. With some urging from your father. I love that your dad helped you cheat on a test. We did the same thing the next year, too. Did you really? I'm not fucking around. Yeah, we did the same thing. The very next year, I did a thing on oil-based water pollution's effect on plants.

And the plants that we watered with varnish and wood oil all did better than the ones we just watered. So did you fake your results again? We put them in the oven. You're the worst science fair... You are a science fair cheater. We baked them so they would get all dry and brown. You probably still have your ribbons and you're proudly displaying them somewhere. Gosh.

I totally forgot about this shit, too. I remember asking my dad. I'm like, they're doing better. They're not supposed to do better. Pollution's bad for stuff. And he's like, I just put them in the oven. So we just baked them. They didn't do so well in the oven, did they?

No. It turns out oven-based pollution is even worse. What you needed to do was a science fair project that was like, do plants do better outside of an oven or inside of an oven? Well, I'm just glad we never did any experiments with mice. Or dogs or something. I should have renamed it to like global warming. Like what happens if the earth hits three 50? This is just more fuel to the fire that you're the worst person in the world.

You realize that, right? You cheated all those other 13 year olds out of there. They're blue ribbon. I totally took somebody's spot. know you totally did somebody who worked hard and actually did real science oh come on no seventh grader does real science that's true yeah it's true at least not this one i do think your anecdote makes sense though in this context it's like you know this guy is is basically coming up with the

conclusion and then he's trying to fit everything in i mean you know we we had somebody comment this week on our on our facebook page about this and basically say you because we just said you know i mean this is stupid basically we just said this is stupid and somebody was like oh you guys are assholes and blah blah blah you know i can't believe you guys are you know you guys give the angry atheist vibe or some stupid shit, whatever. The dummy doesn't even listen to the show. You know what I mean?

Like you're a dummy and you don't even listen to the show. I don't really care. But he had, he had something to say about it. And it's like, look, we don't even start from the same fucking, I mean, it's like, it's like we're speaking different languages. Exactly. If the guy starts with, we all have to assume God is real. It's like, you know, you can't even get there.

That's been like, that's like two people sitting down and being like, okay, we all have to understand that the sky is red. We all have to understand that the sky is blue. You're never going to get anywhere. You know what I mean? Like, especially if you're talking about the sky in your argument. You know what I mean? Like, we're never going to get anywhere. Now, he and I may be able to get somewhere when we're talking about,

you know, I don't know, fucking food or something. If you're talking about God and the sense in the, like, if he's like, we got to understand that God is here or something, maybe there might be something that we can get to together.

But if we're talking about specifically theology or the lack of, you know, there being a God, we can't get to the same spot. We can't even get there. Like I have, I know people that say like, well, I just believe in like ultimate truth. And I'm just like, okay, well I can't argue with you. Like, because you have a belief that I can't, I can't do anything with.

It's like, we don't even start from the same. I don't believe in ultimate truth. I believe in, you know what I mean? I believe in what I can see and hear and whatever and be tested and that sort of thing, you know. But I don't believe in fucking ultimate truth. But that's where they start their argument. So there's just never going to be a meeting of the minds. It's never you're never going to sit this guy down at Starbucks and have a conversation with him and have him be like, like, there's going to be a fucking light bulb that lights up over his head.

Like, oh, I had this all wrong. It shouldn't be presupposition at all. Like, he's never going to do that. So, you know, there's no conversation that can I had this all wrong. It shouldn't be presuppositional at all. Like, he's never going to do that. So, you know, there's no conversation that can be had with this guy. And this is exactly what they're doing. They're basically cutting off conversation at the pass. They're allowing the people who listen to them and who get their ammunition in which to argue to be able to stop the conversation before it even starts. We talked, there was a guy by the name of Peter Boghazian at TAM who was having this conversation about how you,

how you sort of get people to believe, to stop believing. Basically it's like a talk you can have with them. And we're hopefully going to have them on the show in October where he's going to tell us how to do this. But it's like a, it's like a talk to have with somebody to get them to understand and start to realize that,

you know, maybe God isn't there. Right. It's like a, it's like a sort of have with somebody to get them to understand and start to realize that maybe God isn't there. It's like a sort of an atheist sort of talk. I don't even know where you start with this guy. Like if you put him and Peter Boghazian in the same room, I think it would be like Saw. Someone would cut their own leg off. It's matter and antimatter. The room would just explode. Yes.

It would just disintegrate. It's a cage match. A fucking fight to the death. And Bogatian would fucking own this dude. Yeah, Bogatian would fucking ruin this dude. He would ruin him. Is exactly what he would do. And it says right in here, it's like,

presuppositional apologetics is a school of theological thought that says all rational thought flows forth from the word of God. and that no science or scholarly investigation is possible without first accepting that the Bible is the word of God and absolutely true. You can't, I mean, that's not even a usable statement. It's just not, it's not a usable thing. What are you going to do with that? You basically have to say, well, if everything in the Bible is true and if that's my starting point, then it doesn't make any

difference that this evidence points in an opposite direction. Because if I have to start with this huge, and let's also admit too, like the Bible is not the same thing as like saying, well, I have a naturalistic worldview. Like, okay, well, what's a naturalistic worldview? Well, naturalistic worldview, you know, can be summed up in a sentence or two. Well, if you say like, okay, fine, I've got a biblical worldview. Well, what's a biblical worldview? Here's a fucking enormous book. All of it's true. Yeah. You know, it's not even, it's not, they're not even remotely comparable things to begin with. They're not even remotely comparable things to begin with. So we're going to take a quick break, give you information.

There's contact information in there and other information about where you can find stuff. And then we'll be back for the rest of the show and then the finish and email portion. Want to get in touch with the show? Send an email to dissonance.podcast at gmail.com. Be sure to follow the show on Twitter. Our Twitter handle is at dissonance underscore pod. Like the podcast page on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash dissonance pod, or just type cognitive dissonance into the Facebook search bar. Want your voice featured on our show?

Leave a short message on our Google Voice at 740-74-DOUBT. That's 740-743-6828. Visit DissonancePod.com to see the news stories featured in the show, buy apps and merchandise, or just leave a comment. And to everyone who helps spread the word about the show by sharing it, tweeting it, and rating it on iTunes, Glory Hole, you fucking rock. So this story comes from Examiner.com. Christians claim persecution after patriots caught Tim Elbow. Tebow.

Elbow? I love that you called him Tim Elbow. He does have huge elbows, though. Look at this photo, man. They're so pointy. You can fucking use them as a box cutter. You could hijack an airplane with those fucking elbows alone. You could. I want to read this, and then I'm going to hand it right over to you, Cecil, because from the conservative website The Blaze, here is a sample of comments.

Shame on NFL owners and coaches for caving under the pressure. Pressure? That's not a word. Yeah. Pressure brought on by the satanic liberals that have taken over ESPN and other sports media outlets. The problem here is Tim Tebow is not a gangster, drug dealer or user, wife or girlfriend, beater or a murderer. No, he chose religion over these other labels and is paying the price for it. Yes.

Tim Tebow was meant to play football. That's the gift the good Lord blessed him with. And you know it was Christian phobic liberals who had something to do with this decision. I like the dramatic reading of these. I think these are great. I will say to the second one, when they say that he's not a gangster, a drug dealer, a user, a wife or girlfriend beater or a murderer, and he chose religion over these other things. You know, the price he has to pay for not being a murderer and a football player is that he's not good. Because the murderers are really good. The murderers are very, very good.

I mean, look at Aaron Hernandez, who's running up the river right now, who wound up whacking somebody, and he's like, oh, he was still involved in drugs. He was really good. Ray Lewis was involved in a murder. Ray Lewis is really good. I mean, I just think in football, you just need a killer instinct. And I don't think that Tim you just need a killer instinct. And I don't think that Tim Tebow has that killer instinct.

I think, first off, I think Tim Tebow sucks. And as a football fan, if you don't know anything about American football, Tim Tebow is terrible. Like, I was looking at his stats earlier. I was talking to Tom. They're awful. Like, his stats, like the best year he had 14 games, and he basically threw what a running back would run.

He is awful. He's basically a running back would run. He is awful. He's basically a running back that can barely throw the ball. He's terrible. There's a reason he got cut from the Patriots. He can't even get fucking, he can't even get a job in the NFL. And it's because he sucks. It's not because God wants him, doesn't want him to play or whatever. Like the idea here that they're saying is that he's being persecuted because he's a Christian and he's loud about it.

Look, I was rooting against him because he's a Christian and he's loud about it. But he could have easily made me eat my words by being good. That's all he had to do was be better than he was. And he's not good. He's terrible. That's why he was a second string quarterback. That's why he got traded. That's why he got cut.

And that's why he's now unemployed. Because he's not good at his job. But Cecil, the gift that the good Lord blessed him with is footballing. Gosh. No, I mean, so the first thought I had when I read that is like, well, that's your gift. But that's like getting the shitty knockoff Kmart version of the gift, right? So

everybody in school is wearing I don't know, I'm going to harken back to a thousand years ago, like Z Cav Ricci's, right? Or Air Jordans or something. And instead you've got Air Biscuits. They're just different.

They kind of look the same, but they scuff the gym floor. Right, right. And they don't last very long. The swoosh goes the wrong way. It faces down. It's a sad face. It's like a thumbs down on your shoe. It's just like, no. They have no arch support.

You get shin splints after the first run. You would think that if God blessed somebody with the gift of footballing, that he would be an amazing footballer. The foosballs. He would be awesome at it because people would be like, man, I was trying to sack Tim Tebow, but then the mighty hand of the Lord swapped me out of the way. Right.

Or like Tim Tebow's fucking supernatural fast. Look at that guy. He's so good. Instead he's like, yeah, I got the gift of football from God himself. Are any good? Not that good. Not really good. I'm actually pretty bad.

It's like God spent all his mojo on Samson or something. You know what I mean? Because Samson can fucking decimate an entire temple by pushing on two stones or something, right? Samson could rock some shit. But Tim Tebow, it's like, yeah, he's kind of not accurate, really. And all he can do is threaten and then run the ball out of the backfield. That's all he can do.

It's like, well, you know what? That kind of sucks. And that's why Michael Vick sucks. And that's why Michael Vick sucks. And that's why Tim Tebow sucks. Well, you guys are being awfully hard on me. It's the thought that counts when I gave him the gift. I gave him the foosballs. It was a nice thought.

It was a gesture, you see. Wasn't meant to be taken all literal. Besides, pigskin is bad anyway. It's unclean. Lord, we just asked it to be covered with the blood of Jesus. Open hearts, Lord. Open hearts. See, so this story comes from the New Zealand Herald.

I'm just going to sit back and let you try to introduce, try as, as fucking as hard as you can to introduce this story. I love this story. Black Jesus hacked to death after girls murder. First of all, the story comes out of Pawpaw, New Guinea, and it's the only good thing that's come out of Pawpaw, New Guinea.

Cause every time a story comes from Pawpaw, New Guinea, somebody's getting burnt alive or hacked to death. Wait, somebody got hacked to death in this. But I guess he's a charlatan and a rapist, so it's okay. Yeah, right. Like it's justice. Like this is a justice hacking.

This is Papa New Guinea justice. Okay. So evidently self-styled black Jesus, Stephen Tari. He's a cult leader down there. He's also a convicted rapist. He's suspected of sacrificial killings and cannibalism, which did not evidently endear him to the peoples. He didn't win people over with that.

Right. Because moments, and this is totally not made up, moments before a pig roast, following which he was going to take a helicopter ride to Israel for no reason. The article doesn't even, the article says, we don't know why. You know, and the best part of the article, too, is they're not quite sure how he was going to make an 8,000 mile trip by helicopter. What I love is like, he's going to have to like stop and refuel every couple hundred miles. Black Jesus can do it, dude.

Black Jesus can do anything. He'll just get refilled in the air somehow. Evidently. But what Black Jesus cannot do is survive being attacked by 80 villagers. That's difficult. You got to fucking fend them off. After this guy, I guess they finally got fed up after he raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl. So that's the line.

They're like, that's the line in the sand. Whoa, black Jesus. Listen, if you were white Jesus, we'd let you get away with it. Oh, no. So they drew the line in the sand and they attacked him. 80 people attacked him. 80 people. What's amazing about this is he still fights back and manages to injure two of them.

Yeah. Before they kill him and a follower. That's kind of badass. This dude is not... Jesus does not tap. Right. He doesn't. He doesn't go down without a fight.

It's because his hands are nailed i was trying to tap i was trying so very hard it's just it's just absolutely like this story is so unbelievably crazy every part of this story is crazier when you read it you seriously you cannot read a paragraph of this story without being like, man, that's the craziest paragraph that's going to be in this story. And then something crazier happens. Here's a crazier part. Convicted in 2010 of raping teenage girls, he was serving a 20-year sentence when he broke out of prison along with 48 other men. Wait, that's not a break out of prison. The prison just left wait that's not a breakout of prison the prison just left but

it's a shutdown yeah it's a little breakout it's like they're scurrying through some sort of fucking vent right that just fucking walked out the door it's who's left in the prison at that point how do you break 48 people out of a prison and how do you how do you acquire a helicopter to go somewhere and then have a pig roast while you're a fugitive i this dude is this is like a fucking movie it's like a sci-fi it's like a fucking bollywood movie did they all dance after they murdered him there's like a dance number the 80 people the 80 villagers do like holding up his head as they like sway and dance. So when they're, I got to ask a question though.

So before they're, he's going to have the pig and then they start hacking him up and he's like, it's still good. It's still good. It's just a little hack. It's just a little hack. It's still good. I think the turning point for him was when they castrated him. No, yeah, that's difficult. Well, didn't they bury his ass in the ground, too?

Yeah, dude, they had to unearth him to figure out how he died. They're like, oh, hacked to death. Oh, it was a hackin'. That was a hackin'. Yeah. I mean, 80 fuckin' people did it. They couldn't just ask one of them, like, so what'd you... How'd you do it? Yeah, oh, yeah, we

hacked the fuck out of that guy. You're going to find parts of his penis over there somewhere. We didn't bury that with him. This is like a morals story, right? Like the moral to the story is don't rape and kill a lot of people. And then flaunt it by eating a pig dinner in front of them. And sacrificing and cannibalism and have a giant crazy cult. They said cannibalism. Are we sure it wasn't long pig that he was eating?

I was just going to say that, man. You just got right in front of it. You just got right in front of it. I just juked your joke, bro. You're all dead. Oh, be nice. Oh, my son doesn't stand a chance. The whole world's gone gay.

Oh, my God. What's happening now? We work hard. We play hard. Everybody dance now! So this is our weekly Klingerschmitt story. You're going to have to have a Klingerschmitt section. This dude's fucking awesome.

This is from the Raw story. Clean up in aisle Klingerschmitt. Clean up in aisle Klingerschmitt. Oh man aisle Klingerschmitt oh man he fucking spilled his Klingerschmitt again that doesn't come up easy you actually gotta use cold water a lot of people get that this is from the raw story former Navy chaplain

once worthy of death printed on all LGBT couples wedding photos. This dude's career as a wedding planner is severely limited. It's pretty bad. Nobody's hiring this guy. Like, oh, let me see your portfolio. Oh, these are so nice. I especially like how it says worthy of death on the back of my loved one's photos.

Yeah. Yeah. You don't get hired again. You don't get a lot of repeat business. Oh, you know, so I live and die by referrals, guys. So remember, if you have any gay friends for me to judge and humiliate, you know, send them my way. I'll treat them poorly.

Well, here's the thing about this. And Tom and I had a lengthy conversation before we recorded about there's a link, and it's just sort of a throwaway line. ruled that a Christian photographer basically had to take pictures because he was discriminating against the same-sex couple. They ruled that he's not allowed to do that. He's not allowed to discriminate. And Tom and I talked for a while, and my position on this is I actually, the guy runs his own business. He has his own business. And I totally think that if you're running your own business, you kind of get to say who you get to serve. But I also feel like – and so I don't feel like there should be a law or something there. But I also feel like it's totally fine to bring these people forward to a larger community so the community knows what kind of a jagoff they are.

I personally, if I was gay, would not want someone who was forced to take my pictures, take my pictures, because suddenly everybody's fucking Sasquatch. You know what I mean? It's just like, you can't, like, fucking, I can't tell what that is. Is that a Yeti or is that her dress?

I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, who would, it's gonna be. Is that a Yeti or is that her dress? I don't know. You know what I mean? Like, who would it? It's going to be just a disaster if you hire some jag off. And then there's this stuff you can't get back. You know what I mean? Like, and you may not know about it if the person is forced to take your pictures. Same thing goes with a cake.

And Tom and I were talking about there was a person who was discriminating against homosexuals in Minnesota and said they wouldn't make wedding cakes for same-sex couples. I wouldn't want someone who didn't want to make my cake make my cake because, I mean, there's going to be fucking nails in it or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, you know, just fucking fingernail clippings or pubic hair or something. You know what I mean? Like, there's going to be something in it because they're assholes because they're, they're willing to, if they're willing to turn you out of their door, they're going to do something shitty to you when it comes to, you know, being forced because they're going to be indignant about being forced. I feel like, I feel like I totally agree that,

you know, we shouldn't be discriminating against people. But when it's a private business, I would much prefer to know who the businesses are that are shitty rather than having them forced to serve me because I feel like being forced to serve me, it'd be even a worse proposition for me as a consumer. Well, it's interesting because we live in an age now where this information can propagate incredibly easily. If the cake company, for example, or the wedding photographer wants to discriminate, like you said, if you give them the opportunity to discriminate and then everybody calls them out on it, what's going to happen is either one of two things, I think. Either the market is going to weed those people out very quickly. They're going to get a million fucking reviews. They're going to get press stories. They're going to get word of mouth. Everybody is going to, in an evolving culture where intolerance is no longer tolerated or is much less tolerated. Those places are going to either get weeded out by the marketplace

or they're going to find a loyal base of customers who are also bigots and they can exist in their little bigot shell. That strikes me as likely in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, the southeastern bigot portion, like the bigot belt. You know, the bigot belt. That strikes me as – Yeah, the bigot belt. It strikes me actually – It's got a huge buckle, the bigot belt.

It's huge. It's like you could get a fucking dinner off that buckle the size of it. But, you know, like in some parts of the country, I actually think they could advertise that. You know, like, hey, we don't, you know, come to Billy Bob's fucking diner of hate. We don't serve the gays. You know, like. If I was gay, I wouldn't want to eat there. Oh, no, no, no.

Yeah, don't get me wrong. Like, if you're a homosexual, that's a, it's good to know. Like, that's good fucking information, right? Like, I'm not welcome at Billy Bob's diner of Hate, which I would have thought I'd be welcome for that. You know, based on the name. You think Billy Bob. I'm going to get the hate cakes and the. I'm going to get the vitriol salad.

Can I get the KKK Krispy Kremes? That would be awesome. I would love those. Oh, they only come in white and glaze. And maybe these hooded blintzes. Those are tasty. Krispy Kremes, that would be awesome. I would love those. Oh, they only come in white and glazed. And maybe these hooded blintzes. Those are tasty. I'll have one of the hooded blintzes. Yeah, but like obviously, like, you know, it's good to fucking know that information.

Like, I'm not going to. But if you're a minority, you can't exert in certain areas of the country. Like, obviously, you can't exert a whole lot of capital pressure. In certain areas of the country, like you obviously you can exert a whole lot of capital pressure. You know, if you're 3.8 percent of the population and most of the people are not on your side, you're not going to be able to exert a tremendous amount of free market pressure to close those places down or, you know, drive them out of business. I can actually see that backfiring a little bit like those places might be able to advertise based on that. Like, hey, we're in Mississippi. We don't serve blacks and gays.

Yeah, I guess I would be like, if I was black or gay, I wouldn't want to be served by them and I wouldn't want to give them money. And eventually, I just really think that that sort of pressure is just going to die out. I mean, I want to point to a place in the country where it's not changing, where it's going back, where they're stopping homosexuals from getting rights. I don't know where that place is because it's like a snowball at this point. Yeah, no, I agree. Long term, it's a bad, it's a fucking bad long term strategy for sure, right? Like, you don't want to be Billy Bob's roadside diner of hate in 2020. That's for fucking sure.

And the thing is, here's the thing, though. Like, nothing stops them from hating them. It's not like you're going to change their mind if you force them to do it. They're just going to hate them more. You know what I mean? It's not like, nobody wins. This is a fucking shit sandwich everybody's got to eat. It're just going to hate them more. You know what I mean? It's not like, nobody wins. It's a fucking shit sandwich. Everybody's got to eat. It's just a bad

call. I just understand the necessity for it. I just don't like that we don't get to know. I'd much rather know. The idea here in this story, and I'm going to try to bring it back

to fucking I Know Nothing Mr. Klingerschmitt here. This guy is basically saying that if you're forced to do it, be a dick about it. I mean this guy is clearly saying what I'm saying, what I would fear if I was a homosexual. He's saying, well, fine, you're close. If you're being forced, then you need to put a verse from the Bible on there that basically says homosexuals are worthy of death. Romans 132. When I'm trusting the raw story here to be interpreting this correctly. But they said, which he interpreted to mean that homosexuals are worthy of death.

Yeah. I mean, you're right. Right. I mean, I don't I don't disagree with you. I just because they will, you know, they will do a bad job. They will continue to hate. Like, forcing somebody to provide a service to you against their will does nobody any good. Like, I do. I get that.

And this guy clearly is trying to come up with a plan. Like, he's basically saying, like like almost civil disobedience, right? I mean like – because he's motivated, genuinely motivated by his conscience. It's just that his conscience is fucking horribly misguided and wrong. Right, right. But he is motivated by his conscience. And what he's advocating is a form of civil disobedience, saying like, hey, if we're going to be forced to do this thing, then we need to take measures to make sure that we do this thing in a fucking shitty way and fucking still find some way to ruin their special day. Exactly right.

It's like taking a dump on their cake or something. It's like punching the bride in the face well if it's a gay marriage you got to punch them both right just brides just line up the brides yeah it'll clunk their heads together like fucking three stooges style you want answers i think i'm entitled you want answers You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. So, Cecil, this comes from Alternet.org, and I love this one. Ten weirdest fundamentalist Christian conspiracy theories, and they are fucking so weird. Some of them we've covered before.

We have. We have. And the rest of them I wish I had found. We have. And the rest of them I wish I had found. I think the first one is my favorite because it's one of the most convoluted. It's relatively new. Same-sex marriage is an elaborate scheme concocted by lesbians to entrap men. What?

Because that's what lesbians want. Men. That's why they're lesbians. This is so weird. Fucking hell. There's so much weirdians want. Men. That's why they're lesbians. This is so weird. There's so much weird shit going on here. So they're going to first they're going to conscript men into supporting them by pretending they are on birth control when they are not. Doesn't that assume that lesbians are just going to be having lots of sex with straight men? Yeah, it totally it bypasses the whole fact lesbian that lesbians aren't attracted to men. Right. It ignores the lesbian component of lesbian entirely. It does entirely. And it

assumes, yeah, that that that lesbians are going to go out. Basically, the theory is the lesbians are going to go out and they're going to have sex with dudes, purposely get pregnant, and then force those men to pay child support to the child they didn't intend to have with the lesbian that wanted the child from the dude that they had sex with. But why? Why would, none of it works. What I think this is more than anything else is just the most misogynist thing because not only does it say that women, even when they're attracted to other women, really just want the dick, right? Of course. So that's – first off, that's a misogynist, stupid thing to say.

And then the next thing that they do is like, oh, and they just can't help themselves. They need to fucking birth a child. I mean, like even regardless of their sexual orientation, they still need to jump on a cock in order to birth a kid because that's all they want to do is birth a kid. And then it assumes that men are the ones who are economically viable. So you have to ensnare a man to pay because, you know, if there's two women in the relationship, well, women can't fucking earn money. They're both homemakers. Yeah, the home is spotless. The home is, they've washed all the dishes.

You've never seen a home. They both made dinner. They both at the same time made dinner. Two separate dinners. Competing, it's like dueling banjos every day with dinners right it's just fucking casseroles as far as the eye can see i'm scrubbing the toilet get out of here no i scrub it better yeah we're lesbians because we're lesbians yeah this story it doesn't like i love that no part no part of this crazy paranoid fucking misogynist fantasy of hate, no part of it makes sense.

Usually these things have some sliver of possible, maybe true. This thing is just concocted on a fucking thin air. I like number four, and it's the abortion mad Chinese eat human fetuses. I have not read something so xenophobic and awful as this. Basically, they're saying that the Chinese have so many, they eat what they call a fetus soup as an aphrodisiac. And I'm wondering, like, it would just be like a vicious circle, wouldn't it? And I'm wondering, like, it would just be like a vicious circle, wouldn't it? It'd be like, you get an abortion, then you have the appetizing egg soup, and now you want to fuck, and now she needs an abortion again.

It's sustainable farming. Oh, no. Shop local. Oh, you can't get more local than that really you gotta eat organic man right right that's yeah this is uh wow i mean and i love too that it's the chinese because it's like that like it's like that bad joke like uh chinese food is all cats and you're like yeah you guys i'd be like i still there's still guys at my work that say that. Like, they'll go out

and get Chinese food and they'll be like, I don't bring back any cats. I'm like, nobody was going to do that. Yeah.

And I'll say that like a big, they don't have cats there. So. Gosh, that'd be so funny in like 1960. Weird.

Like you still think that like, oh, the Chinese, so exotic. You know, like, what the fuck?

We love the cats. Number 10 is pretty bad, too. And it's birth control will turn your uterus into a graveyard littered with teeny weeny corpses or fully formed babies. Kevin Swanson said that certain doctors and certain scientists are finding women that on the pill have these tiny little fetuses, these little babies that are embedded into the womb. An evocative image, albeit one that requires not only falsely believing that the pill kills embryos, basically the pill works by suppressing ovulation, but simply refusing to believe that menstruation actually exists. I love the idea. I've noticed in the toilet a couple times a fucking, fully fucking

formed baby. Are you serious? Little teeny weeny skeletons? What is this, Halloween? It's like, was the call coming from inside the house it's it's like there's like just fucking homunculus in there like like my wife is just like every time we've had sex like and they just generate like little tiny like little stone baby like like those candy runts is what they are. Just tiny little, and they're peppered all around the inside of the uterus.

They sing songs. I love that they're runts. You know, it'd be like this guy, though, Tom. It'd be like this guy being like, yeah, if you get a vasectomy, you get all these tiny fetuses in your balls. Right. You know what I mean? It's just like you don't understand how anything works. You don't understand how any of the stuff works there, bro.

You hit that. It's none of the stuff. No part. I don't understand how you can be that clueless about the biology of your own species. Nobody's asking him to be like, describe the mating habits of the platypus. Be like, I don't need to know that. Do you know how women work? but like do you know how women work yeah do you know how to fuck yeah dude i do do you know how babies are made yeah i kind of do

you'd be like i mean it's it's it's as bad as that 40 year old version movie it's like it's like is it true if you don't use it you lose it like this guy would ask that question. For real. For real. This is like those long ago, like, you know, your sperm is your power. Like, you can't ejaculate or, like, you lose your essence. It's like, no, you just make more sperm. Yeah, it turns out. You just keep making it. Yeah, and you don't have tiny little fucking mummy babies all in your uterus. Like, fucking mumra. Like, every time you fucking sperm in there, it uterus. Like fucking mum raw.

Every time you fucking sperm in there, it's like the Thundercats. I see the Nightmare Before Christmas guy. Whatever his name is. He's singing a song in my wife's uterus. The boogie woogie man breaks into bugs when you

hit him with your cock or whatever. When you hit him with your cock. Sorry when you hit them with your cock oh sorry babe fucking went in too deep so did i did i break the boogie woogie again got bugs in your junk again yeah my wife calls uh calls her g-spot the boogie well she sings when you hit it oh there's i mean there's there's there's other things in here about Harry Potter and Satanism. And then Charles Darwin basically retracting everything he did on his deathbed. And then Obama being an antichrist. So some of these are just like blah.

Like you hear this not just from one person, but from a million people. But there's a few of them in here that are just weird. Well, you know, I got to tell you, like the Darwin Darwin thing, I wasn't gonna mention it, but it wouldn't matter if he did. I know, like that's it doesn't disprove his science. The science is not like, and I think that's so funny because it's like they're trying to attack

the man as if the man and the science are inextricably linked that one relies upon the other presuppositionally. Oh! I see what I did there. linked, that one relies upon the other. Yeah. Presuppositionally. Oh. I see what you did there. I see what I did there.

It wouldn't make any fucking difference. Be like, if Darwin fucking wrote it down, pooped on it, and took it all back, it wouldn't make any of the evidence less compelling. It would have no effect on the argument whatsoever. Once it's out, it's out. That's it. And the only question is does the evidence support it or not support it? Who fucking cares what Darwin said?

It's exactly what you're saying. It's like if they tear that dude down then it's like no takesies, backsies or whatever. This isn't fucking tag. You're not on glue. You know what I mean?

You can't just touch your Bible and be like, I'm on glue. I'm on glue. You can't make me it now. It's just like it's not a children's game. Stop treating it like that. Right. When your worldview is built on obsessing over a cult of personality in this case the cult of personality for jesus it's like then it matters right then it really matters darwin is jesus right like oh

he's your jesus no he's just a dude who made up who thought some stuff and we all think it's think that it's it's it's backed by evidence right it didn't matter if it was darwin or fucking you know bill you know whoever it was doesn't matter And it's not like that's like the be all end all of evolutionary biology. Like it's fucking come a long way since then. Right. And they do this with a lot of people. They try to do with Einstein all the time. They try to.

And it's just like, who cares? Right. Who cares whether or not he thought, you know, he believed in God or whatever. It doesn't matter. Like it doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking make E equals MC squared any less fucking relevant. Right. It's not all of a sudden it's like, uh, what happened to the satellites?

They're all falling out of the sky. Well, fucking E equals something else. God. E equals God squared. Right. It's just now E equals Jesus. I don't know. That's just fucking math doesn't work anymore. Sorry. So we only got a few pieces of mail this week. We got a couple of voicemails, which you've already heard.

We're going to start out actually, we're going to start out with a comment this week that was left on our Frequently Asked Questions page. Someone recently posted and said that they love the show. They understand it was likely not an elaborated viewpoint on libertarians that I mentioned, but would like to clarify some points and semi-identify with libertarians. I actually wanted to mention too, and this is a comment on our page, so you can go read it in its entirety if you like. It's on the Frequently Asked Questions page. I will say and the person who did it was

JG. JG, I am actually probably closer to libertarian than I am into anything else. I've like looked into, I was telling Tom earlier, I do those stupid quizzes they do online all the time and they have to be right. They have to be true, because they're quizzes

and they're online. It's an online quiz. It's like on Facebook. I mean, you can't put anything on Facebook that's not true. So I clicked on it, and I do. I mean, it's not just one, but like many of them always say I'm like libertarian. So I think, you know, and I do think, you know, I have a libertarian

viewpoint on several issues. So I'm not dogging on libertarians because I think I said that Klingerschmitt had a libertarian position. I'm not dogging on libertarians. And I, and I like to think that we don't exclusively dog on Republicans here. I think we will definitely dog on neocons on this show because we didn't like the Christian right adopted neocons that exist out there. Um, and I also think that people who are, you know, like, I think that it's, it's a bad position to be like, I've heard many people like get down on welfare and attack welfare in like a really shitty way. I, I don't, I don't like those people. And I don't think that I don't, I would never respect those people. So if people

have those sorts of viewpoints normally will be down on them. And I think that like the neocons really do hold those viewpoints. And we are very liberal friendly on this show, but I don't think that we, I mean, I'd like to think that we're a little more open-minded than that. So if you, if we did get down on it and, and, you know, you felt like we were attacked, we're not, we're not attacking libertarians at all. I don't think that there's, you know, I don't think there's inherently anything bad with how they think. I think that certain positions are always open to criticism though. Unfortunately, we haven't – I mean the best libertarian we've had has been Ron Paul who turned out to be something of a religious nut too.

Yeah, exactly. As the most prominent libertarian politician of recent note. That's problematic for the libertarian party, I think. We get an email from Don, and Don says, you can fire an elected official for being an idiot. You can have a recall election. Procedures vary by jurisdiction, but there is a petition phase to show generalized support and then an election itself and i and i guess i knew this because didn't they try to recall that dude

in wisconsin right yeah yeah and they had a recall election in california a few years back so so you i i i guess i i guess i knew that but thanks for clarifying it tom we got an email from alan that is uh pretty funny and we thought we'd read it. Hi, guys. I love the podcast. I've been struggling to come up with my stupidest prayer ever. Since I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, it has been a bit difficult. Then I remembered in college I experimented briefly with Pascal polytheism.

There was the god of partial credit, the God of two for one pizza delivery. And of course, the God of hot girls with low standards. To be honest, to be honest, even now, I occasionally pray to the God of the oblivious traffic cop. If I'm doing 20 miles over the speed limit, I see a cop. Is there really any harm in praying? I saw him first. Yeah, I saw it first. I saw it first. Is there really any harm in praying I saw him first? Yeah. I saw him first.

I saw him first. Oh, boy. That was a great email. Thank you, Alan. That was awesome. Yeah, actually, he remembers that he was in collage, not college. This was clearly typed on a phone.

Yeah, no, absolutely. We got an email from Andy, and we just, Andy's a funny guy, British Andy who did our shirts, funny guy, so Tom, I'm just going to let you read his email Hi Cecil and Tom, I have just taken delivery of two fantastic t-shirts my delight was only matched

by my wife's strangled gasp of horror as I pulled the glory hole one out of the box, thanks so much for going to the trouble of posting them over here I really appreciate it. Now I'm off to scare all the old ladies in town with a large, erect yellow

penis. And I just might wear the t-shirt too. Awesome. That made me laugh out loud when I read it. That's fantastic. I thought it was great. I want anybody who has the Glory Hole shirt send a picture. Yeah, just send a picture of you with it on.

I want to see somebody wearing that shirt.. Yeah, just send a picture of you with it on. I want to see somebody wearing that shirt. And I want to see a picture of you in a place. Yeah, not at home. Not at home. Yeah, that's not exciting. You got to be in a place. Because, I mean, the chutzpah to wear such a shirt is something to behold.

We sent the two test copies to Andy because he was nice enough to actually make them. So Andy got a couple of free T-shirts. And it's not free because he fucking spent time actually making the T-shirts. He designed them. But the T-shirts are available. Nobody has bought a Glory Hole T-shirt yet. So if you're interested, they exist.

I can't imagine anybody wearing that shirt. Where would you wear it to? I mean, I didn't like teaching preschool. Yeah, there's no. Yeah. I don't know. It's inappropriate anywhere else. You got a pee pee on you.

Drop your kids off here, lady. So we got an email from John and John had sent us this story about the reservoir in Venezuela but I bet the best part is he says also Caracas sounds an awful lot like Arrakis

which has it's own religion issues and water shortages I love that he threw a Dune joke in there. That is awesome. So funny. You, I mean, you have to have read, I guess, Dune to understand or at least seen the movie.

I like the subtle, which has its own religious issues and water shortages. Yeah, I'd say that's accurate. That's so funny. Well, that's it for another exciting week of Cognitive Dissonance. We're hoping we'll be back in the next week, and we're going to be recording soon, we hope, a second show. We've got to find time for that.

Before we go on vacation here, Tom. Because if we don't, the listeners will not have a thing for, I want to say it's three weeks. I think it's three weeks. I look at my calendar. It's not an insubstantial amount of time that I'm gone. And I just looking at my calendar, it does not look, because I fly out on the 24th. So they get a show on the 23rd, but a show on the 30th is not going to happen, and a show on the 7th would not happen, so two weeks. Yeah, we're going to try to fix that.

We're going to hopefully do a thing. It's not happened yet. Okay, so here's a quick poll. If you think that a movie review would be a good show, let us know, either by commenting on the blog or going to our Facebook for this particular episode, or you can tweet it at us. Let us know if you think,

these are going to be your choices. We would get somebody on to talk about a topic that isn't time sensitive. So we were thinking, what we're thinking is death, but we weren't sure who we were going to get on to talk about it. So I don't want to make any mentions on any of that stuff. So we would get another podcaster probably on to talk about atheists and how they deal with death. That would be one option. The other option would be going over a movie review, which does not obviously time sensitive. And then the other one would us be maybe commenting on the Bible, probably on the section of Revelations. That would be something that Tom and I would maybe read a little of Revelations and just yammer about it for a while. So if any of those appeal to you and you think, hey, I would really prefer this over the

other two, let us know. And then maybe we'll gauge your responses and then see what we can come up with. That might actually motivate us to actually do something. And an appropriate answer is not all three yeah that's not an appropriate answer if it's all three just don't even comment it's like a non-vote you have to prefer something I know how this works though so if you prefer one of those things let us know

and we'll try to accommodate the largest portion of the audience. So until next week, we leave you, as always, with the Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble, Pseudo-Quasi-Alternative, Acupunctuating, Pressurized, Stereogram, Pyramidal, Free Energy, Healing, Water, Downward Spiral, Brain Dead, Pan, Sales Pitch, Lateot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense.

Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and views expressed in this show are that of the hosts only. Our poorly formed and expressed notions do not represent those of our wives, employers, friends, families, or of the local dairy council. Outro Music