Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 225: Professor Stephen from Atheists on Air

Episode Date: May 11, 2015

   

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Hey guys, it's Andrew here. I had a thought that you'd probably be interested in hearing. I've never really understood why religious people are so against homosexuality. I mean, think about the first relationship in the Bible, and that wasn't Adam and Eve, and it wasn't Adam and Eve, it was Adam and God. And if you think about that relationship, think of it from God's point of view, you're going to be in this garden all by

yourself with a bunch of fluffy animals around you, you're going to be naked the whole time, and I'm going to be watching you in the clouds. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty fucking gay to me. Glory hole, motherfuckers. Hey, fellas.

This is Haley from rural Missouri, right in the middle of the Bible Belt. I was just calling to say hi to you guys. And I just got done getting berated by a Christian for not being a Christian. I get it a lot. I live in a small town with about 30 churches and two bars, 7,000 people. Anyway, you guys do a great job. Thanks for what you do. Hey, guys.

Mike. I was listening to your last episode, and you got into a little discussion of your feedback you'd received about Harry Potter. And I believe it was Cecil said that the Harry Potter fans would be spraying their tricks on their screen in anger. And I'm really going to correct you there, because tricks, as you've seen in the commercials, if you've paid any attention, are for kids. And I'm an adult. Sorry, old guy. 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. Recording from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago, 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. It's skeptical. it's political and there is no welcome mat this is episode 225 of cognitive dissonance and we are joined this fine episode by professor steven from the atheist on air podcast but i think i think that introduction does not serve him well. Having met Professor Steven, I think he is Natty Professor Steven. The best-dressed podcaster that I have ever met. Now, that's a dubious distinction at best.

What about George Crabb, though? See, I don't think he counts because I've only met him when he was being an emcee. And so, you know, he's got his fucking game face on, right? You know, it's like, but Professor Steven was just a dude at the podcasting conference, right? Right. And he's walking around every 10 minutes. He's like fucking Cher every 10 minutes. He's got a new fucking, he's got a change of wardrobe on.

He did. He did. I was very thankful that there wasn't any wardrobe malfunctions. I was hoping. You know? I had my camera out. I had it set to blur. I had my camera out, but I put my thumb over the shutter.

Good idea. Welcome to our show, Professor Stephen. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. I'm very glad to be here. So you were foolish enough to decide to cover a story with us. The story we're going to cover today is from the Friendly Atheist blog. This is unsurprising to anyone who listens to this show.

I only troll three websites. Texas GOP Representative Matt schaefer wants to force women to give birth even when the fetus has no chance of survival look at the picture of this dude he is so excited about it oh my god i can't wait for these women to give birth to dead babies this is a man who fucking he looks like he is just waiting for those fucking stillborn children to come out so he can fucking roast them up. Have you ever seen anybody more enchanted by the idea of a fucking dead baby and a grieving mother than Texas GOP Representative Matt Schaefer? He's pumped up about it. He is.

Oh, well, you know, maybe maybe he gets pumped up by grief and by adding pain on top of grief that seems to be what this is all about don't you think it says here so schaefer said during the debate and they had a fucking debate over this amendment by the way i don't know how you're on the like the one side is like the normal side and the other side is the pit of fucking hell like i can't imagine anybody like a fucking nerd scott the guy's got to have a goddamn pitchfork the whole time exactly talking he says that he says that suffering is part of the human condition and since sin has entered the world isn't it our job to fucking like mitigate suffering as much as possible i guess apparently we just accept it oh that's

what he's saying what was interesting about the debate though was that both sides simply read the bill that was it and they both rested their cases right oh my god i mean he's like son snidely whiplash i argue for the side of evil what on here? Tweaking his mustache the whole time. Exactly. Suffering's part of life. It's like we want Phil Robertson to come over and decapitate his wife's head off and then hold up his manhood and be like, suffering's part of life. So we just accept it, right? That's awesome. You know, this makes me wonder if he attempts to mitigate suffering at all in his own life or if he just seeks out

like times to suffer like you know like you stub your toe like fuck ah and he just immediately stubs it again yeah fuck oh that was awesome one of those flagellants he just beats himself constantly i praise god by hurting myself over and over again he's basically like a mother teresa type yeah right because it wasn't that one of mother Mother Teresa's. She kind of was a proponent of the same. Yes. Like, yeah, well, fucking poor people like poor brown people. Yeah, that's exactly. They should suffer because that gets them closer to God. Exactly. Oh, yeah, that's totally there. That's only part of it. And they have this lovely thing. They say in the he's a Southern Baptist, from what I can tell, where, you know, you do you want to make god a liar god said that we would suffer so if you try to alleviate suffering you're making god a liar oh it's like so why build a house you know i mean honestly like why eat a food like if i if i'm hungry and i don't eat for a long time i'll suffer the pangs of hunger right okay well why eat food exactly like well i'm mitigating suffering every time i eat and drink so don't do it i'm mitigating suffering every time i fucking set

the goddamn heat in my house in the winter so i don't freeze to death i'm mitigating suffering you know does this guy like buckle his kids in the car why why even bother why i just be like i'm fucking going for a ride 100 miles an hour with my baby strapped to the fucking luggage exactly nobody behaves like this the what he wants to do is he wants other people to suffer right not himself right that's what he's not saying he's like suffering is part of the human condition as long as it's part of your human condition right exactly i'd be willing to bet you a lot of money that there's some aspirin or Tylenol in a cabinet somewhere in his house. Right. Sure.

Right. So I guess that would make him a giant fucking hypocrite. Like you're going to have like knee surgery. You're just like, oh, I get fucking anesthetic. No, man. Fucking suffering will bring me closer to God. Fucking rip my knees open. I'll just fucking bite down on this stick.

Right. Exactly. Like it's a fucking Wild West. Hey, suffering came in the world because of sin. who am i to try to alleviate it right well isn't that funny because like don't they try to reduce the amount of sinning that they do right well why bother if the sinning just yields yields suffering and the suffering is from the sin and you can't avoid the suffering then just be like well fucking i'm gonna sin then right exactly well if jesus died for your sins and you need to sin so his death wasn't for nothing.

Right. Otherwise, it seems pointless, doesn't it? What if I lived a life without sin? Would Jesus be like, fucking, I did that for nothing? It'd be like if you were like, if you like, you helped your buddy move and then he's like, yeah, fucking thanks. I know you worked real hard, but I'm actually just, I'm not happy. I'm just going to move tomorrow again. I'd be like, well, fucking that was pointless.

Why did I do it? A lot of us still don't understand why Jesus had to die according to their myth anyway. I don't even, you know, of course, he's supposed to save us from hell, from an eternal damnation, yet he was only dead for three days. Doesn't seem quite equivalent to me. Why couldn't he just be like, and you're saved. Right. And nobody had to die.

Exactly. Right? I don't quite get it. I can't imagine telling my son like, oh, dude, man, like you forgot to flush the toilet. So I'm going to have to drown you in the feces. Otherwise, you won't learn your lesson. Rules is rules. feces you know otherwise you won't learn your lesson you know rules is rules i i want to talk for a second about what this would entail right so there's a good part of this where they talk

about what happened a couple years ago a few years ago in nebraska law banning late-term abortions forced a woman to give birth to a non-viable child that died 15 minutes later. Can you imagine? Like, not only the grief of going through and knowing that your child is going to die, right? So you might as well abort it, and then you've already gone through this big process, and you already know that the child's coming. I mean, it's got to be really tough.

I'm sure it's very tough on people who miscarry, and it's tough on people who don't want to get an abortion but are forced to because the child is going to be, you know, something very seriously wrong with it. But to force somebody to have that kid and then just watch it die yeah it's it's like pouring salt on a slug like what the fuck is wrong with you there are murderous psychopaths that wouldn't do that to other people that's true it's absolutely true my my wife has attended two births where the outcome was fetal demise and nobody leaves that room unscathed like nobody nobody

leaves that room like man i feel closer to jesus nobody said that no that was not the general consensus and obviously he doesn't care about alleviating suffering. But the point to having an abortion at that point is to save the mother from possibly getting sick and dying. From having a necrotic fetus in her body causing her to set up an infection that could kill her. Plus, any birth is not like... There's no guarantee on any birth that everything turns out rosy for mom. Can you imagine a scenario where it's like, oh, it's like

the baby's dead, but you still have to... You gotta give birth to it, and then mom fucking hemorrhages out and dies? Exactly. Oh, man, that was pointless on all counts. Exactly. Everybody loses. Oh, my God. Yeah, your baby's gonna be born with its brain outside of its head it's not going to live for more than two seconds but let's make sure that

you have to give birth to it in order to increase your risk of dying right yeah oh man and and but you should suffer before you almost die exactly for hours on end. Jesus loves sepsis. I did a little research on him, though, in his church. He's a Southern Baptist. And he goes to the same Southern Baptist church as Louie Gohmert. Wait, did you say research? You came on the wrong show, Professor Steve. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done it, but I couldn't help myself.

I couldn't help but be prepared, fuckers. Yeah, the he tends the same church as louis gomert to give you some idea god of the bubble that there must be there's like a county there somewhere in texas that makes western north carolina look like los angeles do you know what that county is texas it's the whole fucking state of Texas. You know, they're always threatening to secede, and I think we should just take them up on the offer. Let them do it. Right. It would really help us out.

Bye. Okay. Could you imagine how much better this country would be if we didn't have any politicians from Texas? There would be no Bushes. Don't make a man dream. Don't make me dream. How dare you give me hope so apparently he and gomert go to a church called green acres baptist church shut the fuck up i'm not making it up oh my god is there like

a fucking wilbur the pig exactly maybe he's a deacon oh that's awesome he just fucking oinks it would actually be a more rational fucking sermon if it was just a pig standing at the podium here comes brother wilbur here he comes exactly oh it's like is the church down the road like the beverly hillbillies methodist church i don't know doesn't say like green acres, the place you ought to be. Oh, man. Is that the one?

That's the one with that, like, woman who moves to the south who hates her life? Yes. That's, like, everybody who's moved to the south. I was going to say. I can't tell if you're talking about real life. Yeah, it's like, how could you pick out, single out one woman? I mean, come on everybody hates it yeah of course the funny thing green acres is actually i think set in the midwest

but you know six and one half of whatever they're hillbillies for christ's sakes exactly there look you go down 20 miles south of chicago and there's hillbillies hey wait a minute i'm 30 miles south of chicago you go down 25 miles south of chicago i know exactly what you mean i drove to chicago once took a chemistry club group to chicago and i had to drive through all of that oh man i know exactly what you mean it is it is you know it's it reminds me actually illinois reminds me of colorado to drive through it's totally fucking worthless until you hit the mountains and illinois is the same way. It's just fucking absolutely useless. You could burn the whole thing and nobody would notice until you get to Chicago.

And you're like, okay, this is worthwhile somewhat. Parts of it. So we'll be back at the end of the show with Professor Stephen. But until the end of the show, you're going to have to deal with us two schmucks. Now, the concern, obviously, is if this isn't bottled up in San Francisco, this kind of nonsense, then it's going to be spreading across the entire Fruited Plain, and you're going to be going to your Burger King in Des Moines, Iowa, and you're going to have a rainbow colored wrapper for your Whopper.

So speaking of schmucks, this story comes from time.com. Nebraska's Sylvia Driscoll will represent herself in Driscoll vs. Homosexuals. She's not representing herself. Well, she is representing herself. No, she's representing the Lord. She is. She's representing the Lord. She has power of a tony

nicely done nice yeah but she's uh she she i don't know if you read that did you take a look at this by the way okay so she's suing basically all the gays right right yeah right i did take a look at it yeah so she's she's suing literally all the gays every one of them yeah and and the thing that she she put in like she sent in did you see the thing she sent in like the actual like the thing written in cursive yeah it's awesome it's basically like fucking it the petition looks like your mom leaving you a stern letter for fucking neglecting your yard work. It's awesome. It looks just like my mom's handwriting.

Does it really? Oh, it's amazing. That's tremendous. I actually admire her penmanship. It's not bad. It's totally readable. It's a 66-year-old lady's penmanship, though. Back when they would actually pay attention to penmanship, not like now where it's like, I scrawled a letter word.

Right, right. It is pretty great. I did take a look at it. And it's not full of like crossouts. So I had to wonder like, how many times did you have to write this? Because if I had to write something. She might add white out. Yeah, maybe.

Maybe. Who files a cursive fucking petition? I don't know. It super super funny you know it talks like like number 26 like plaintiff's god god prophecies of his son jesus christ in isaiah chapter 53 verse 5 period that's not a sentence and then the next sentence is but he was wounded for our transgression. He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed. That's not an argument either. No.

You don't law good. No. I do love how it's stated, though. Basically, she says she's Sylvia Andriskel, ambassador for the plaintiff God and his son, Jesus Christ, versus homosexuals. Right. All the homosexuals. Their given name, homosexuals. Their alias, gay. I like, you know, I was thinking about this and i was thinking like man i bet process servers

got so fucking excited though oh yeah they were like oh my god we got it we get to serve literally every home it's gonna we're rich you know it's like it's like when the well the closers were making a shit ton of money during the boom it's a boom This is a boom for them. They're just like, oh, it's finally, our day has come. They're like traveling. They're like have like, their fucking car is just full of like Red Bull and like fucking Vibrant capsules

and they're just driving constantly for days on end to hit as many homosexual doors as they can. There's like the process server who like lives in the Castro district. Yeah. Who's just like, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God.

Please let this go through. I'm going to serve it. They're fucking just like showering fucking leaflets from airplanes. They're walking around with like a t-shirt gun full of summonses. It's like, ba-dunk, ba-dunk, ba-dunk. They got an airdrop boys town they just you're like picking up you're like what is this propaganda oh no it's a summons all right fair enough it's awesome you fucking served all the gays with paper because you just i mean what what what is the case yeah the case well you gotta to read like.24 she makes in her fucking crazy lawsuit.

I love this. Defendants, homosexuals, colon, in regards to paragraph three, line four, because God loves them. I don't understand. I really don't understand the suit, though. Can you help me understand what's happening? No. Can you? I looked at this, and I'm not even kidding.

I actually can't make heads or tails. What would you do with this? How would you rule on this? During no point in her crazy lawsuit does she ever cite any any prior cases does she cite any law does she cite any kind of like there's nothing in here like there's not even like a transgression that she's trying like there's no grievance she doesn't she doesn't there's no standing how are you suing How are you suing all the gays? And what are you going to like?

What would you win? Because a lawsuit, it's a civil lawsuit. You're going to win damages. Right. Right. So you're going to win money. Like, oh, well, here's the money. But we're still gay.

Like, it's not like even if you win, they're not just going to be like, well, guess we're not gay anymore because some lady in Nebraska won a lawsuit against the entirety of our sexual experience. That would be amazing if she'd be like, well, you have to change your sexuality if I win this suit. Yeah. Like the judge just comes down in favor and is just like, you're not gay anymore. I don't think that's how this works. All these guys are turning in their leather pork pie hats. There's like a big bucket where everybody's just, you know, like where they used to collect the guns in the old movies. They're just like throwing in like strap on dildos and like black leather vests and the keys to the Blue Oyster Club.

Black leather vests and the keys to the Blue Oyster Club. It's like when you go to a restaurant and it's like the recycle bins are labeled glass, plastic. It's like the recycle bins are just assless chaps. And the best part is that the holes match what you have. So the dildo one looks like a sideways dick so you could actually stick it in there and they're all like sad they're like like dejected like oh some like sadistic fucking hetero is like melting down all that latex and maniacally laughing ha our day has come oh good lord what else do you say about this? You know, the case was dismissed.

Can you believe that? Oh, was it? Yeah. Because when I read it, I dismissed it, too. The thing is, this had to weigh some law. Some clerk was like, Yeah, right. I have to file this.

He's got to type it out, too, fucker. It had to be presented to file this. He's got to type it out too, fucker. It had to be presented to a judge, like an actual judge who spent the time going to law school and getting elected and is sitting on the bench or in his chambers or whatever, in his fucking office, reading this thing. He's like, what's the next case? Crazy woman against all the homosexuals i just see him getting to like number 25 and just reaching in his desk drawer and pulling a pistol out and eating it like that's like this is what my life has become he just

shoots himself in the face no he's from nebraska he's probably he's probably disappointed that he had to fucking dismiss the suit nebraska is one of those flyover states that you never hope you land in. I don't even. Do they have airports in Nebraska? They have cornfields. They have a lot of cornfields you could land in. You could land in Nebraska and nobody would even notice. You could fucking crash land in Nebraska and nobody would notice.

Nebraska is a state that I seriously like. If it has a population above two dozen, I would be fucking shocked. Two dozen? Nebraska. Can you name something from Nebraska? No, you can't. There's nothing in Nebraska. I can't even think of a town. What's a good town in Nebraska?

A good town in Nebraska? What's a town in Nebraska? I was going to Like, what's a good town in Nebraska? A good town in Nebraska? What's a town in Nebraska? I was going to say, it's a fucking impossibility. It's like, no, that's Kansas. I was going to say Wichita. That's not. The only thing I can think is Omaha. Omaha.

Oh, that's a place, right? Right. And the only reason I can think of that is that, like, I just remember being a kid and watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on television with my dad. They're only known for a fucking insurance company that had a fucking nature documentary. That's all your state fucking brings to the table. At least it's not one of those fucking unoriginal states like Colorado or Wyoming, which are just squares. Really?

It's just a fucking square? That's what we went with, was this fucking square? You know, you could use a river, possibly, as a boundary or something, but instead we're just like, nah, just fucking throw the square up. Well, you know, the reason for that, though, is that the eastern side of Colorado is so fucking

bland and featureless that fucking seriously just drawing an arbitrary line there is no man there's no natural landmark there it's just fucking endless pointless wasteland that's all that it is when fucking lewis and clark fucking passed through that they fucking burned it behind nebraska is actually native american for fucking get me out of Nebraska. I don't think that's accurate. I believe that that's a true.

You know, you got to love the women from Nebraska, though. They all have four stomachs. I can't wait to get a Nebraska email. I know, right? Like from the one guy in Nebraska. Nebraska. I scrawled this out with a corn kernel. Hang on.

I drove to another city. I drove to another state to borrow their computer. Yeah, I'm fucking stealing Wi-Fi from Kansas right now. I would be worried, but like you said, it's not like they even fly here. No, I know. It's not like they've ever seen an airplane. Whenever an airplane flies over, they throw sticks at it. They just ook and hawk at it.

And they kill one of their own. They just kill one of their own. They just sacrifice somebody up for good measure. They sacrifice them on a fucking John Deere tractor is what they do. It's nothing out there but fucking farmland and desolation. Grow something for me to eat.

You're all sick! 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.

So this story comes from the progressive secular humanist blog at Patheos. A Christian developer releases Kill the Faggot video game. Huh. And this is not a misspelling of Kill the Wabbit. No. the faggot video game huh and this is not a misspelling of kill the wabbit no but you can make it sound adorable if you do it in an elmer fudd voice like kill the faggot it would be great if the if the music was the fucking ride of the valkyries amazing wouldn't it oh gosh who wouldn't play this game then huh uh just about anybody actually i watched a review for this game today and and before we move on it really is just that it's just it's a it's a fucking christian

developer the game is called kill the faggot and it's it's just it's a terribly fucking coded video game that's like a it's like fucking duck hunt with gay people and the thing is is like like they show uh a guy in a dress will come by and you shoot him and it'll say transgender kill and then you kill a gay guy and it'll say something like aids carrier eliminated or way to shoot that fag or something like that right the problem is is i was watching the game and i couldn't differentiate the the guy they were saying was gay from the guy that wasn't like i was just like oh there's two guys how do you know which is not gay and the way you know tom that one is not gay i figured out at the end of the video the guy who's not gay? And the way you know, Tom, that one is not gay. I figured it out at the end of the video.

The guy who's not gay is wearing camouflage pants. I wish I was kidding. But I'm not kidding. That's how you know. Oh, wow. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Wow.

Like, do they drive up? I actually watched this. I watched that. Are you talking about the YouTube clip at the bottom? It's like the four-minute YouTube clip. Yeah, yeah. This game, even if you were fucking a hate-filled bigot, this game would still be boring. Yeah, it's like I've played fucking phone games that were better than this.

Every phone game is better than this. Dude, I have broken my phone, and it was a better game. have broken my phone and it was a better game like looking at the fucking crushed screen of my phone that is fucking no longer operational i have actually launched a phone from a clay pigeon thrower and shot it with a shotgun yeah that was actually kind of that was actually a lot of fun as it turns out yeah so i take that back the game game description for this, I want to read this. The game description is, Hate gays? Want to unleash your frustration on the LGBT community? Well, now's your chance.

And I think it would be more accurate if it said, Really turned on by gays? Want to unleash your pent-up frustration for masquerading as a straight person? Well, now's your chance. You know what would be awesome? Is to take this fucking idiot's game and then recode it so instead of a gun, it's a fucking dick and you're fucking splooging on everybody. And instead of like the hate fucking speech that's like, it would just be like, I hate myself. I hate myself.

I hate myself. Every time you pull the fucking trigger. I got to go back home to my wife. The guy had a failed Kickstarter. So the guy who got this game coded had a failed Kickstarter. And this is what the failed Kickstarter was supposed to do. This is great. Promote the words and teachings ofesus christ through quality footwear so not only is he like a frustrated closeted homosexual but he also has a foot fetish yeah he's a shoe promoter

he's like wait a minute like somebody even if you were like i'll give money to fucking virtually anything on kickstarter you're looking through and you're like I just want to fucking any Christian chair I didn't care yeah promote through shoes yeah

how like well how want to contact the guys go to dissonancepod.com to get links to their Google Plus Facebook

and Twitter accounts if you want to contact themancePod.com to get links to their Google+, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. If you want to contact them directly, send an email to Dissonance.Podcast at gmail.com. Or you can call and leave a message at 740-74-DOUBT. That's 740-743-6828. Do you want to support the show? Go to Patreon.com. Do you want to support the show? Go to patreon.com.

That's p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com forward slash dissonance pod. Or click the link on the podcast homepage, and you can donate to the production of Cognitive Dissonance on a per-episode basis. If you can't spare any money, take a second to give us a five-star review on iTunes or Stitcher, or spread the word about the show. We want to send a big heartfelt glory hole to all the patrons and people who rate us. You fucking rock.

More Ben Carson. I fucking love Ben Carson. I hope he stays in the race. This guy is as good as, I would say this guy is as good as Michelle Bachman. Yeah, he's no Sarah Palin. No, Sarah Palin was her own special kind of dumb that was that was like that was this like beautiful perfect storm sarah palin was like the guy they got to talk at that fucking uh the legislature last episode where you just you cannot you cannot parse out what they're saying you're you just you they sound like they're drunk that

guy i think he was drunk yeah but i think that like Sarah Palin, I don't know if you saw that fucking when she lost her teleprompter. Oh, yeah. She couldn't word, dude. She just fucking broke. She could not word. She was like one of those dolls. You pull the string and shit was in the wrong order. She's like a speaking spell with low batteries.

Oh, my God. She was amazing. Anyway, Ben Carson. Federal government doesn't need to recognize gay marriage SCOTUS ruling. So, Ben Carson was recently on Newsmax TV. Newsmax TV. You know that you are a serious political contender for the presidency when you're spending your time on NewsmaxTV. NewsmaxTV. You know that you are a serious political contender for the presidency when you're spending your time on NewsmaxTV. Yeah, it was like when President Barack Obama was running and he was on Cognitive Dissonance.

Right? I'm here, guys, to promote my show. This is NewsmaxTV. This is Ben Carson. We're going to play a clip of him for you. Your belief system, whatever it is, whether you believe in God, whether you're an atheist, whether you think our rights come from our creator, or whether you think our rights come from government, whatever you believe affects who you are. There's no question about it. You can't separate that out.

And I personally would much rather have somebody who thinks about their fellow man in a compassionate way and has values and principles that guide their lives than somebody who just says, whatever, however I feel, you know, that's the right way to do things.

Who does that? Nobody does that. Yeah, it's a fucking, that's a straw man. Wow. You know, it's that fucking boring age old thing that's like, well, if you're, you know, if you don't have a religious conviction, then you just make it up as you go along.

You have no moral system. You have no code of ethics. You just whatever you feel like when you wake up in the morning is what you feel like when you wake up in the morning and you have nothing to compare it against. All right. Fucking that's so boring. That is so lame. It's just it. All it does is just miss all the facts.

Because to say that, you know, because you're a humanist, you're not fucking compassionate is ridiculous. As we as we talked with fucking Professor Stephen earlier, I would say that we're more compassionate than other than people who say things like that guy said, which was like fucking suffering exists. So we need to fucking suck it up or whatever. Right. Yes. Suffering is a part of sin. And so it's part of the world and so you know women should just give birth to dead babies or like the fucking christian dude who made the video game about killing faggots like right and and really you're gonna point the

finger in my direction good luck man yeah the supreme court just heard a case on same-sex marriage as president of the United States, what are you prepared to do to preserve traditional marriage? Well, first of all, we have to understand how the Constitution works. The President is required to carry out the laws of the land. The laws of the land come from the legislative branch. So if the legislative branch creates a law, it changes the law. The executive branch has a responsibility to carry it out. God, this guy's so dynamic.

I just want to fucking kill myself. They don't have a responsibility to carry out that law, you fuckhead. They can veto that law. Do you not even know how this works? Can't they just also do a signing statement where they just do the fucking presidential not it? This guy's not. Fucking I know more than this guy. That's a fucking sorry state of affairs is what that is.

It doesn't say that they have the responsibility to carry out a judicial law it's not a fucking law no one's passing a fucking judicial no one has ever passed a judicial law that's not a thing it's not a thing there's no judicial laws that's awesome it's like he's like fucking making it up as he goes along i know you know what he's doing he's obviously using a little bit of word play here because he wants to play to those people who are like, oh, you're legislating from the bench. Yeah. No, they're fucking deciding a case that was brought to them. Yeah.

They don't get to decide what cases are brought to them. They do get to make choices about which cases they'll hear, but they don't fucking decide the cases that are brought to them. So that whole like, fuck, you're legislating from the bench. It's fucking, that's fucking weasel words. And that's something that we need to talk about. Should there be a limit on the length of service of those serving in the federal judiciary, especially justices on the United States Supreme Court? I believe there should be because when these things were put into effect, the average

age of death was 47. It was a very different time. We have not adjusted with the times. So again, that's a discussion that needs to be had. Bullshit. Okay, first off, the idea of saying the average age of death is a dumb statement, because when you say the average age of death is a dumb statement because when you say the average age of death, you're incorporating all the infinite mortality. So even if that figure is right when he says like fucking, I guess he's saying like since the beginning of the country, there was like a, like the average lifespan was 47 years old or something like that. I don't even know if that's true. But who cares if it's true? Because it's not fucking played out with the richest people in that society. We're not dying at fucking 47. with the the richest people in that society we're not dying

at fucking 47 right they were living past that and i want to fucking bring your attention to the list of the supreme court past justices i'm going to read a few of these off to tell you how long they serve tom so we're going to start with the first few james wilson served nine years. John Kay served five years. William Cushing served 21 years and died. He died while he was in there. But I start looking at some of these other ones and I start looking at it. It's like fucking, you know, 31 years, 34 years, 30 years, 16 years, 19 years, 24 years, 33 years, 20 years. Like it's 31 years. Like fucking these people served a long time in the fucking goddamn Supreme court. This is, they were doing the same thing in fucking 1830 in fucking. And this guy served from 1889 to eight from 1789 to 1810 for 21 years. This other guy served.

It's from 1798 to 1829. It's fucking 31 years. It's a long time. That's how long our justices serve now. And the whole idea behind the justices not having term limits is so that it's not a political appointment. is not having term limits is so that it's not a political appointment. The whole idea, like, if you want to have the judicial branch be a sort of a branch of the government which is extra-political, meaning it lives outside of the political for the most part, then it cannot have term limits. If it has term limits, then it becomes, you know, a political bargaining chip

that's constantly up for renewal. It's the fact that these people serve for such a long time that allows them to exist without having to worry about being re-elected, without having to worry about getting elected into a position. It's very antithetical to your own argument. His argument, because what he's saying in that first part of his argument is that, you know, we don't want these judicial laws, legislation from the bench. We don't want the political element of the judiciary to be something we have to contend with. That's essentially what he's saying in the first portion of his conversation. And then he goes on to

suggest that we have term limits, which are like the one mechanism we have, which allows the judiciary branch to exist in an extra political state. It's fucking asinine and it's self-contradictory. Is trusting God important? It's the only thing that gets favor from him. He doesn't respond to pain or tears or heartache. He only responds to being believed. This story is from Right Wing Watch. Trey Ware.

Really? Trey Ware? Trey Ware. That's a man's name. America is suffering riots, terrorist attacks, and gay marriage. We're suffering gay marriage because the nation left God. Oh, God. This one again?

Doesn't everybody say this? I mean, but that's why we have it, man. We've got the riots and the terrorist attacks and the gay marriage because we fucking, we bailed. That's why they have the riots, the race riots in Norway that they had recently. Right. Oh, God. Those were horrible, Tom.

Yeah. And then the- Like, I think somebody dumped a lutefisk on the ground. Awful. I know that you heard about the terrorist attacks in New Zealand recently. Oh, yeah. It didn't happen. Those were huge.

Those were huge. Fucking Mordor erupted. Right. It's bad. You know, fucking... I heard, like, half the population, like, seven hobbits died. Yeah. So it was bad.

And, like, five sheep, which is is like, again, half the population. It's like their whole sexual population. It's bad. It's awful. Well, let's listen to what this guy has to say. This is, again, this is a guy from the Hagee Hotline. He was on the Hagee Hotline. His name is Trey Ware, conservative radio host, Trey Ware.

We have one group of people who are standing up to say we ought to be able to do this. And when someone shows up to shoot them, we don't call it terrorism. We don't call it anti-Americanism. We call the individuals who were locked in the auditorium by a SWAT team antagonists, while those outside with assault rifles are what? Yeah, well, that's exactly right. And it's really blaming the victim, like what happens in certain rape cases, too. You blame the victim. And that's what they're attempting to do in this case. There's a big movement and a strong undercurrent that's come to the surface in the past five or six years that really indicates that there's a transformation that's going on where all this is concerned.

And what used to be right is wrong, and what was wrong is now right. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria. I just don't know where to turn anymore. I used to know who to hate. And now when I direct my hate, now people are pointing their finger at me and saying, no, you can't hate those people. And I don't know.

I just, won't somebody tell me who to hate? And it's coming down from the highest forces of our leadership. Matt, you and I would look at this kind of thing and we would say it's a spiritual battle. Correct. There is no doubt that America, when we decided, as a nation I'm talking about, years ago to say, no, God, we don't want you. We don't want you in the schools. We don't want you anywhere. And churches even said, we don't want you in the churches.

What are you talking about? What? That's like McDonald's saying, we don't want the slop. Are you kidding me? They don't have slop. What do they sell? Literally nothing. I quit the show.

What are you saying? They kicked God out of the church. What the fuck are you talking about? God, that's like kicking Edgar Winner out of the Edgar Winner group. You can't do that. It's his group. The fuck are you doing?

We could go out of church. Oh, God shows up to church and they're just like, no. What do you mean? I got a parking spot outside. That's amazing.

What are you saying? Then God said, okay. He didn't say, okay. He said, okay. Alkaline alkali. Zip-de-da-da-doo. And we are now reaping what we have sown in American society. These riots that we've seen, the discussion about homosexual marriage that you and I are going to talk about today,

and even the situation where terrorists are in our country. A lot of this is because we as a nation left God. Okay, bro. Sure it is, man. You say so. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, we don't have riots because of all the reasons the rioters said they were rioting. Isn't that a great way to pass it off, though?

To say, like, these people have no reason to be rioting. These people, they have absolutely no reason to be rioting. The only reason they're rioting is because we're a godless nation. All of the grievances, the fucking list of grievances they have, it doesn't matter. I think that's an awesome point because these guys have decided that that list of grievances was never going to matter. It was never going to matter to these fucking dudes. They were never going to take seriously the plight of, you know, poor black people, right? They were never going to give a fuck about what it's like to live in fucking, you know,

inner city Baltimore. They don't give a fuck. They don't give a flying fuck what that's like. But they need a reason not to care about that, right? They need a way to fucking shoehorn their fucking callous disregard for the fate of other human beings on this planet into their worldview and still come out somehow feeling morally superior and that's how they do it it's fucking just so mean it's just so mean In the name of Jesus, we speak that.

I'm hooked on a feeling I'm high on believing This story comes from Right Wing Watch as well. Rick Wiles warns of fireballs from space. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire. It's better than space balls from fire. It really is. All right, so this is Rick Wiles on his show, True News, on his radio program. And we're going to play it for you now.

Courtesy of Right Wing Watch. Now the communists rule this nation. And everywhere communism takes control, they go after the churches. And they kill the pastors. Okay, bro. Wait. Keep playing bro. Wait. Keep playing. Keep playing because I know what he's going to say next.

And they demolish the church buildings and they re-educate the church children. When did that happen? It never, ever, ever, ever happened. It never happened. It's not happening. In America. Are you fucking for real that's awesome i you know i think he's right though because i remember there was like a bunch of churches that got bulldozed and there was like a fucking preacher who got run over and they shot him in the face they're just like all it's like

when they were talking before about the fucking fake re-education camps yeah where they just like they don't they just blatantly aren't a thing but you know for fucking dead certain Cecil that there is a fucking serious group of people who fucking sit around counting their teeth and you know listening to this fucking guy after they get to three listening to this fucking guy and they're like yeah man they're gonna fucking shoot my pastor in the face and smush my church with one of them they're like yeah man they're gonna fucking shoot my pastor in the face and smush my church with one of them they're fossil fuel building it like are you kidding god church smushing pastors communists and then out there in washington dc are we still really talking about communists? I don't know. Why not? Is that a thing we're still doing?

We're not. That's what's coming to America. It's already started. The pastors and the Christians did not rise up in righteous anger in the early 1960s to stop the Supreme Court's tyranny. They permitted wicked judges to strip away their god-given rights following the court decisions in 1962 and 63 there was a flood of wicked court decisions bad evil almost every year since they're totally wicked bro they're fucking radical they were radical and wicked that defied the living god of the universe.

That sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud. The god of the universe. Okay, bro, is he a master of the universe, too? Does he have the power? Does he pull his fucking sword out in front of Castle Greyskull? Does he ride a fucking

cringer into battle? Does he fight ride a fucking cringer into battle? Does he fight against a fucking skeleton man? It's not even more ridiculous. Their truth is not more ridiculous. And a guy with a helmet called Ram Man. Who literally rams things with his head. It's just nothing else. The most, it's like the dumbest character.

When I was a kid, I remember my buddy had, like, I had a bunch of those He-Man characters, right, I had like two. But my buddy had a whole bunch. And the Castle Grayskull, I fucking, I fucking lusted after that thing. It was awesome. It was big.

It was like a boy dollhouse, basically. Yeah, right. Exactly it is. But I fucking thought it was amazing. But he had a Ram Man. And what Ram Man was, unlike the other ones, which are posable and all the fucking legs moved, his legs were soldered together. You could

press it down and then he would pop up and bounce out. But his legs were together and his legs would retract into his body and a spring would shoot him forward he's the lamest figure ever i'm in the same exact boat like i used to play with my buddy's fucking he-man shit like he had like all the fucking he-man things and i could never figure out what to do with ram man because like even if you wanted to play with the fucking cervical injury ram man, right? Because really, he's good for, like, if that's your attack technique, you're good for, like, one, maybe two good rammings.

You know? And then you're less like, oh, God, I got a crick in my neck. I'm fucked. But you also like to play with him because he was fucking spring loaded, but he also stood straight up and down. Yeah. Like you had to like pretend that he was always like somehow at an angle. And I was a really hyper literal kid.

Like I wouldn't play with like matchbox cars because they clearly didn't have drivers. So I wouldn't play with them. So like Ram Man posed like a real problem for me because i would play with him be like we're standing straight up all i could do is go straight up he actually can't even attack because i can't bend him yeah into an attack position it's awesome that ram man sort of sent you into a spiral of existential on we you know that's awesome. I couldn't ram, man. We are at the end of the road as a nation.

If the Supreme Court dares to defy Almighty God one more time, I'm telling you, it will be the last time. This guy is too much, man. He is too much. I almost feel like he's a fake.

And I believe I am speaking under the unction of the Holy Spirit. I'm telling you that there will be swift, sudden, and devastating consequences for the United States of America. America will be brought to its knees. There will be pain and suffering at a level we've never seen in this country. The word that I hear in my spirit is fire. I do not know if it refers to riots and looting or war on the American soil or a fireball from space. I simply know that a sweeping consuming fire will come across the united states of america and this country will be charred and burned i hope it's a ladder i think that somewhere in america there will be a fire oh yeah oh you fucking think so? Oh, way to predict there. That's amazing.

Oh. So across 50 fucking states and fucking tens of thousands of square miles, there will be a fire. Oh, man. Wow. Oh, Rick Wiles fucking nailed it again, Rick. And also, what are you saying? A fireball from the sky? Like, is it fucking just a ball of fire?

Because that's going to dissipate. Right. It's going to dissipate. Right? It's going to be fine. Are you talking about like a fucking asteroid or a meteor or something? The fireball's in space, and it's just like, I don't know how I exist in space. I can't really. I have a very short lifespan. God's in space, and he's chucking fireballs.

They all go out right away. I can't get them to get there. I've been throwing fireballs at y'all and they just poof, giggle right out. I gotta use rocks or something next time. Cletus, bring me some of that kerosene.

Oh fuck, I'm just gonna chuck goddamn moon at y'all. I mean, I remember one time I had a pair of shoes that i wore and wore and wore and it just just for years these shoes did not wear out and i wore them years and years and years so you know sometimes god is saying little epiphanies to us little things to us but we don't know how to listen to his voice i love this this comes from the friendly atheist blog faith healer cindy jacobs claims she turned metal into bone she's looking pretty good there she turned my metal into bone so she and her husband mike jacobs they

they went to argentina oh to do their fucking fake voodoo garbage crap um you know where they just lie to people they lie to the gullible did they go down there to make everybody spaghetti oh the little bit spaghetti just kept multiplying the most but you wouldn't know that because you're probably you know poor right armed with only a microphone she she's got 2,000 people, and she says that she turned some fucking bow-legged dude's fucking metal legs into bone legs. And she did this by just saying she did it, actually. That's how she did it. Right, yeah. Yeah, it's the same way that I actually caused an amputee's legs to grow back.

Here, watch. Watch. Once, I caused an amputee's legs to grow back. I believe that, Tom. Wow, then it happened. I believe it. That's how you make truths. I believe you shot green lasers out of your eyes.

green lasers out of your eyes. So she says, one of the unusual ways God sometimes uses me for healing is turning metal into bone. I made a call to those who had lost mobility because of metal pins, rods, or wires in their bodies. And I first want to say like, they didn't lose mobility because of those things.

Those things are there to restore mobility. I'm certain that if you have metal pins and rods and wires in your body, had nobody inserted the metal pins, rods, or wires in your body, you would be less mobile than you are currently. That shit makes me crazy. It's like, oh, I can't fucking bend my leg right because I have a fucking metal pin in it. No, you can't bend your fucking leg right because you broke your fucking leg so bad. Yeah, that you need the metal pin. Right. Because if you didn't have it, you certainly wouldn't be bending it.

You wouldn't bend it at all. It'd be fucking rotten off, you know? That shit makes me fucking crazy. It's like they blame the fucking, like, oh, fucking metal pin really hurts. Well, fucking, you didn't show up to the doctor with a fucking perfectly functional leg. Somebody's like, let's put a pin in it. It's like, who's your doctor? Dr. Giggles?

Right? The fuck? It's just fucking crazy. Like, oh, I can't turn my head because I got fucking bone fusion. No, you can't turn your head because you fucking need it fucked yourself up right god yeah she says there it says here that there was a woman who had a bone protruding out from under her chest cavity because of a car accident and completely vanished i'm thinking there was somebody who had bones protruding from their chest cavity and they

came to like a seminar? They just showed up. What, did they show up in the fucking ambulance and go away in the fucking hearse? Yeah, completely vanished. I ripped it right out. She died immediately. Oh, gosh. But the bone vanished. Ridiculous.

Power of Jesus. All the stuff that she said before. When you listen to that long-ass clip that we have of her. Where she talks about like fucking multiplying oil and fucking the cars on her tire fucking went on for a long time and that's jesus yeah then she's the one who had like shoes that didn't wear out for a while or that pair of shoes for a really long time that's jesus right and her husband's like yeah honey that's jesus and there's like all the like hundreds of thousands of people in the world who are like, I don't even have shoes.

It's like, bitch, you've got money and forever shoes? Yeah. I don't even have shoes. How come yours last forever? It means nothing to you if you have to buy new shoes. I don't even get

one shoes. I don't even get fucking trial shoes. I can't even see what it's like. I don't even know. You get fucking infinity shoes. so we're back with professor steven from the atheists on air podcast professor steven if people never heard of you, which I can't imagine that that's the case, but if they haven't heard of you or your show, could you tell them a little bit about yourself and your show? Sure. The show is called Atheists on Air. It stars Cash and me, Professor Stephen.

We both use sort of fake names to hide who we are because we're not completely out of the closet yet with some people. But it's a call-in show. Usually the show morphs from time to time. It's a call-in show and we discuss any topic that is relevant at the time. Cash usually opens the show with a rant. And I have been responsible for what we call the snake oil woo-woo segment on the show where I debunk or talk about some snake oil, some ridiculous fake medicine, or some bad pseudoscientific idea. Why do you hate snake oil now? I mean, what do you have against snake oil? What do I have against snake oil?

Well, if it was actually snake oil, it would probably be pretty good for you because it would have omega-3 fatty acids. Don't recall the snake oil, it would probably be pretty good for you because it would have omega-3 fatty acids. I just want to warn you, Tom is brimming with omega-3 fatty acids. I am pretty much just the fatty acids part. I'm not even specific if they're omega-3. Tom's so big, he's the alpha

and the omega-3 acids. Oh, God. Well, as some people know know i licked tom after a reason he tasted like a salmon didn't he spam he tasted like salty and worthless that's pretty much it well that, that bacon-flavored spam, that's the specific thing. We had been to a smokehouse earlier in the day called Hillbillies, so that's why he tasted like that. I did rub some of that on my skin as a nice aftershave. He ate like four Hillbillies while we were there. I don't think that's what the restaurant intended. They kept sending the servers over, though, so what the hell?

You know, you did lick me at ReasonCon, and I didn't notice, and I think the reason that I didn't notice is that, you know, just from a sensory standpoint, I've expanded to such a size that it takes too much time for me to process. Like, for external stimuli to finally reach into my skin to brain,'s just it takes so long to get there the fucking nerves are exhausted they can't even transmit the impulse anymore so you're you're you do the snake oil segment let's talk a little bit about that what uh what are some of your favorite uh things to debunk um some of my pet peeves one is homeopathy okay you know that's not big here i'm surprised that he's even on your radar. Yeah. You know, there's a health food store near where I used to live.

And I walked in and there was just a huge rack of homeopathy stuff right in the front. And every drugstore I go to, there's oxycoxenam. What? Oxycoxenam. It's a fake homeopathic remedy. It's just sugar pills. And it's right next to the cold remedies. In the drugstores, these will help you with your cold.

It won't help you with your cold or your flu. And so I kept on noticing these things, and I kept on getting angrier and angrier about it. Because I had read about what homeopathy was. And as a chemist, I understand the concept of a dilution limit. Let's talk a little bit. If our listeners aren't familiar with homeopathy, just explain. Give us like the two or three sentence explanation of what it is. Here's the thumbnail.

It was made up in the 1600s. Basically, the idea is that whatever causes a disease, whatever causes the symptoms of a disease will also cure that disease, which is bullshit. What the what? Yeah. So this guy, he basically drank some, he realized that if you drink quinine, it helps with malaria.

So he drank a shit ton of quinine and got sick and noticed that the symptoms he got were similar to those of malaria. That's his research. That's it. Oh my God. If something causes you to itch, it'll cure poison ivy.

If something causes you to throw up, it'll cure stomach ulcers, whatever. So the cure for poison ivy is rubbing fiberglass insulation on my poison ivy? They found out that it gets more potent the more you dilute it. What? Huh? I can't.

What? How could anything? I mean, like, here's the thing I don't understand. I really don't about homeopathy is that it's one of those things that when you say it out loud – and I'm not even kidding. When you say something like, oh, yes, but it's diluted to where there's none of it left in there. At some point, somebody considering homeopathic remedies has to hear that, process that information and then say, yeah, that sounds about right. And I can't't i just can't i can't understand how you could possibly because nothing else in your life works that way imagine

if you had if you're like oh yeah i put gas in my car but then i you know i didn't want to buy a lot of gas so i diluted all of the gas with water until my gas tank was full of water and i'm just gonna drive around on super gas you gotta be careful because it would be super gas at that point it would be too gassy and oh my god i know a little something about too gassy yeah you know what's funny we were talking to uh um andy wilson from be incredulously skeptical and uh and he said he was he actually used to like uh actually maybe i didn't i don't i don't know if this was on a show that we were on. It might have been me just listening to his show by accident.

Wait, you can listen to his show if we're not on it? It was a total accident. Aren't we on all of his programs? It's like the podcast just played and I was tied up to a train track. There was no way I could get to it. But I vaguely remember him calling up somebody on the phone to ask them what uh the certain homeopathy did like so they called the person on the phone to to figure out like what

type of of homeopathic remedies there are out there and the woman that he's talking to at some point he says something like you know what uh you know can you give me a homeopathic remedy for i think it was like electromagnetic signals or radiation or something like that and she said yeah we totally have that and it was basically they put water by a radio like supposedly put water by a radioactive area and then they take that water and then they dilute it through that process still yep so there's homeopathic remedies for lots of different things. Oh, yeah. They'll make something up for everything.

They have something to cure everything. If you look hard enough. Wow. And some of them contain ridiculous things, like a bit of the Berlin Wall is one of my favorites. What the fucking way? What are you curing communism? What are you curing? It's a good question.

Berlin Wall homeopathy i i don't know what it cures but i'm gonna find out man see this is what pisses me off this is what angers me my mother and father are in their late 70s and they get why are you mad about that man no no it's fine look dude people age you just gotta let that shit go he's he's on the he's on the fucking will i think that's what he's doing that really mad so they get these catalogs full of you know trusses and canes and orthopedic shoes and stuff and interspersed amongst all that stuff are cures for things quote unquote and some of them are homeopathic and some of them are just other kinds of bullshit and my mom my dad shakes he's just he inherited it from his grandmother genetic thing

he just shakes and she bought him a bottle for like 40 bucks a bottle of these little sugar pills for shakes and they were homeopathic they were nothing they were nothing but sugar pills and it makes me angry because my mom dad are on a fixed income and they just spent 40 bucks of their hard-earned money yeah on a bottle of bullshit so let's talk a little bit you know we talked about homeopathy. Is there any other pet peeves you have when you debunk things? Well, with me, yes. First of all, anything that has bad chemistry involved with it, like homeopathy or alkaline water.

I won't go into that one. But the other thing that really irks me is whenever they have fake cancer cures. Not when they're trying to cure you of a cold or a hemorrhoid, but when they're claiming they're going to cure your 12-year-old's pancreatic cancer by massaging their neck or some shit. It just pisses me off. Yeah, and that's the worst because it's preying on people that are really, really vulnerable that are looking for answers that can't find answers

or that the answers are very, very bleak. Oh, yeah. And so they're preying on these people that are just super vulnerable. looking for answers that can't find answers or that the answers are very very bleak oh yeah and so they're preying on these people that are just super vulnerable they're desperate for anything and they're willing to try anything and i understand that but you're giving them fake things to try right that that's just awful you know and the profit motive for that is so much higher too because those people it's not like a cold a cold i might be like yeah here's seven bucks whatever if it works it works it doesn't, it doesn't.

If I have cancer and somebody's like, you need an alkaline diet, come to the Gerson Institute. I'd be like, okay, I don't want to die of cancer, so here's literally all of my money because it's meaningless. And not only that, Tom, they'll start a fucking Kickstarter for that. Sure. I'll fucking take money from my family. They'll just bleed as much money as they can. I know that there was many people that went to Brzezinski because of the – and they wound up getting their entire group of people that knew the person with cancer to donate. I mean, the immense amount of money that these people charge, it's criminal. Yes.

I think his name is Stanislav Brzezinski. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to do it. I think I'm doing an entire show on him one time. He's, in my opinion, a villain. So when we talked at ReasonCon and Tom abandoned me, I don't know if you remember this, but Tom abandoned me and I was forced to find somebody who could join in. You were forced to talk to Professor Steven.

That's what you're saying. Well, I was forced to find somebody to replace you, which was not hard. That's all I'm saying. Very, very easy, it turns out. But Heath was nice enough to join me, and we had a conversation with you. And you mentioned during that conversation that you grew up fundamentalist. Yes. Tell us about that.

Oh, yes. So my parents, they're both from Western western north carolina all their you know all their lives sure my dad he moved away for a while came back my mom lived here all her life and they were um good old-fashioned baptists and so i grew up in the baptist church um specifically the southern baptist church but then when i about the end of high school beginning of college i got really gung-ho about it and started to uh realize that the baptist church that i was in was a little wasn't exactly as fundamentalist as i wanted it to be really no yeah i switched over to an independent baptist church what is that what is that this is terrifying yes independent baptists are ones that think that the southern baptists are too liberal oh my god what is it full of rattlesnakes

you like walk in and there's just like like black men lynched or just swinging from the the main thing was is that they're King James Bible only. And the Southern Baptists, they're allowing you to have the NIV versions and the NSVB and all that, whatever version you like. But in the Independent Baptist Church I was in, it was King James only because that's the word of God. No other version. Can you explain to me? I want to and this is a genuine question, so I don't want it to sound snarky. Right.

How did you come to the conclusion that the King James Bible was the superior Bible? Here's the argument. Okay. That's the one that was being preached out of whenever I had my salvation experience. So that's the one with the power in it. Wow. Wait. What the fuck is a salvation experience? I'm sorry. I don't know what that even is. It's a theme park

in North Carolina, Tom. The saddest theme park in North Carolina sounds like the saddest fucking event ever. Welcome to North Carolina. Salvation experience. Oh, it was a salvation experience.

I was a shitty teacher. I was too fat to ride. So what a salvation experience. That's the experience of being born again. Basically, it happens in different ways. But in my instance, it was sitting in a church service and having the preacher tell me that I needed to get saved. I needed to get God's forgiveness because I was a sinner at seven years old. What?

And so I go up front and I bow my head and I say my prayer and ask God to forgive me. And then I feel better. I feel that he has saved me and he's come into my heart. And that's him talking to me. He's the one that convicted me of my sins and he's the one that forgave me. And I could really feel this. I thought, right. And so I thought this was a unique experience where I'd actually felt the presence of God in my life. It wasn't until I was 36 years old that I started to reevaluate that experience using skepticism to evaluate it and said, no, wait a minute. I went to a church full of people who sang a bunch of songs, had a guy yell at me for

a half an hour, everybody in the room trying to bolster up these emotions in me, my parents having tried to get me to be saved since I was a fetus, that all of a sudden I have an emotional experience and I think that that's God. No, that's just a delusion that was purposefully instilled in me by every person i ever knew when did you come to that realization when i was 36 it was about uh three years ago wow yep i was sitting on the toilet in my apartment and i went from being a christian to a theist to a deist to an agnostic to an atheist in about a 15 minute period oh my gosh that's one hell of a shit yeah it was a lot of bullshit a lot of shit left me at that point yes i gotta tell

you i have felt liberated after taking a dump i have walked away from that bathroom with a sense of pride and accomplishment that only a really epic rock rock-solid shit can produce. But never have I fucking transcended three layers of theistic thinking in a single dump. That is a level of shitting mastery. You're like a fucking Kung Fu Shaolin shitting monk. I hadn't thought of it, what the best part is is in about three years he's gonna shit and come up with the unified theory so yeah he was it was fucking revelation after revelation until he got reddit on his phone

and now it's just fucking right exactly yeah fucking oh that's amazing so uh so on the show like so on the show um you do the you do that portion but do you get a chance to interact uh other than that do you do are you there for the whole time yeah i'm there for the whole time i'm i was i'm sort of cash's co-host and then we've added rachel brown and rachel n. Uh-huh. And so we three sort of host it together. Now, his initial plan was to get Christians to call in. Has that been successful? No, it has not. Christians don't want to.

We get mostly atheists calling in and sharing their stories. So if people were going to find Atheists on Air and your show, where would they look? We're on all the usual places itunes and streaker and stitcher and we also have a website aoa.fm or type in atheists on air and google and you'll find us or on facebook or on twitter how often do you guys record we usually uh get one a month but we're trying to bump it up to two. Last month we didn't really record because Cash had to pull away from the program for a little while because of his job,

his business that he owns. And so I was trying to take over a lot of the production side of it. And I'm a bit like Tom in that. I don't do anything. I had to learn how to do it. Let me tell you, though, it turned out successful. I listened to your ReasonCon podcast where you interviewed a bunch of people at ReasonCon,

and it turned out great. Oh. Yeah. Thank you. I'm very glad to hear that. Yeah, it was great. I mean, you did a hell of a lot more work than Tom ever did on this show. So congratulations.

But to be fair, if you did one work. Yeah. Well, Professor Steven, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Well, Professor Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me. Thanks, man.

It was great. So we want to thank Jose for his one-time donation via PayPal, and we also want to thank our most current patrons, Christopher, Gareth, Robert, Casper, Donna,

Fine, I'll Give. Isabel, Tor, Stephanie, Dan, Karen, Mike, The Price of Reason, and Samantha. Thank you all so very much for your generous donations. Your generous donations go a long way to making sure this podcast is possible. We really, truly do appreciate it. And so thank you very much. That's super kind of you guys. Thanks.

I want to play this. This is a new call to prayer we got. Tom will recognize this. Oh, no. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha.

Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. Aloha. It keeps going. Aloha. oh man i still don't even know what happened the thing is is like all like both of us, there's moments in this show where we could easily, you could just take any of the moments where we're making weird sounds and turn it into one of those. It was awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's terrific to mock me terribly. That really was great.

That was from Patrick. I also got a message. This is from Tim, and Tim says that he's involved in this class right now. And he said, by the way, you should sort of turn your listeners on to this. There's a thing called edX, which I guess I looked it up today. And it's a place of Queensland has a course called Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. And he said it's an outstanding class to help those who have a pretty good feel for the relevant facts to gain a much stronger understanding of the science as well as the obstacles facing us in getting the message out. So if you're interested, check out that class. Like I said, it's on edX. It's really just Google it and you'll find it we got a message uh this is from phil from the uk um and uh and he sent us a message back a long time ago uh pat robertson had said something about like

fucking getting the clinkers and the clinkers for him were like constipation, I think. Right? You get the clinkers? Am I remembering this right? I don't know if it was. I think. I don't know what it was. I thought it was.

I thought it was poo. I thought it had something to do with poo. I don't remember. I honestly don't remember. I just remember dying laughing. But he said you get the clinkers. Clinkers. It's something about.

I thought it was something about nutrition or like working out or something. I forget. But anyway, he said you get the clinkers. And there's actually a candy called clinkers by Cadbury. Cadbury clinkers. I want to try these. They look gross. Well, yeah, of course they're gross.

They're Cadbury candies, dude. Green and chocolate never go together. Well, I guess pistachio. But I doubt they're pistachio. There's never been a candy from cadbury that i've been proud of myself after eating a bag of we got a message from uh from mike marshall who's the vice president of the merseyside skeptics society he also has be reasonably skeptical as his podcast and uh it's called be reasonable i'm being a jerk um and he also does skeptics with a k and

he's literally on almost every episode of incredulous so if you want to find him those are great ways to find him but he sent us a message and uh tom the the thing that they produced at qed we posted one page of last week, is super extensive and totally awesome. Every page is more hilarious than the prior page. It's like a fake news magazine. Yeah, I mean, looking

through this, it's just, what strikes me, Cecil, is that their mockery attempts are so much better than the best thing we've ever done. We've never done, I couldn't do something, I couldn't put something together this professional looking if I hired Marsh to do this exact thing.

Somehow my involvement would make it worse. It looks great. You guys do such a great job. I can't wait until we go out there next year. It's going to be awesome. Tom, we got a message about atheist presidents. Yeah, this messle came... Messle?

Messle. Messle? Divort the messle. Oh, Jesus. You need to make it up words. This message came from Elvis. He says, regarding Jonathan Morris,

the Fox priest from episode 223, you can't trust an atheist president because he would not fear eternal damnation. My sister and brother-in-law went to a Bible college while soliciting donations to finance missionary work. They plan to undertake in new Guinea. They made enough money to buy a mobile home, not a mansion like Jim and Tammy Faye, Faye Bakers, but still a fair chunk of change. Then they just changed their minds and decided not to be missionaries. None of the money was returned to the donors. In their minds, the money still went to do the Lord's work,

having children and raising them as hard-on-the-sleeve Christians like themselves here in the good old U.S. of A. They never considered their actions in any way fraudulent. After all, they needed the money, so God gave it to them. Fear of eternal damnation did not deter their fraud and only made rationalization of it necessary to clear their consciences, if they had any. That story is astonishing.

That's amazing, isn't it? Astonishing. That's great. isn't it? Astonishing. That's great. Like, hey, can you give me money for cancer research? Yeah, here's five bucks. Awesome. I'm going to buy beer. What?

We got a message from Phil, and he sent a glory hole clip. I want to play it for you. We've got the deepest, biggest glory hole in the history of the territory. The thing is, mine doesn't have to be deep or big. Right. Relatively small, actually. I prefer thin plywood. I've got to bring a friend, I think.

Tom, we got a message from Ben about prayer. Yeah, so Ben is a recent deconvert. And I'm not going to read his whole email, but he says, I feel a desire to pray quite frequently, mostly due to the fact that praying was always my outlet. I'm a very antisocial person and have many a problem when it comes to social interactions, so praying was always my release. I miss the close, personal, yet obviously one-sided talks I would have with whatever God when I was a believer. Do you have any advice for dealing with this issue?

I hate it, but I don't know how to change it, and I worry that somehow my emotional side will overpower my rational side. Look, I do have a little bit of advice. It's okay to be an emotional person. Deciding that a belief is irrational and you don't want to believe it anymore doesn't mean that you become fucking data from star trek yeah like we're not we're emotional creatures and we do lots of things to soothe ourselves um if if praying is something that soothes you there's no there's no reason why you can't talk to yourself there's no reason all prayer is is hoping shit out loud and talking things through out loud. That's all it ever was. It was never anything different. You were never really talking to God.

Yeah. There's no reason to change it. If you felt like it was something, I mean, you might want to change who you address. Sure. If you feel more comfortable changing the addressee, but there's absolutely no reason why you can't have the same experience in a secular way. Emotions, secular people are not emotionless people. Tom, we wanted to read one Google voice out loud. We got a bunch of voicemail, and this one sort of made the cut. So, how about that? May, whether packing an eye was not or fight yet.

Anyways, all that there was like first fight was this. I guess next in fight or example, Ukrainian fighter. So I was making fighter shows up with the other John 316. Around the so I can wait there buddy software john 316 i guess that's the only person of sponsoring employer makes no those to me but anyway so he's quarter brought up pliable right now so i just okay the regular buy will consider pocket but it up and but the bilingual ones or anything list highly outlook legally on that. So new wave in the out that thing, you know, that there are that the fighter and everything. So, you know, of course, a Ukrainian Jasmine dodging tonight or fire like the last.

You mark. So he obviously doing a buy any of this guy. These guys punches rising up when you guys match and beating the Mexican guy with the John 316 logo. Or okay, Jord and I'm watching this thing the whole time

think it's locked and I mean so so daughter. You know he does it. You know get in a way of the Paul just getting up right. You know, if the out of the people that diabetes really knows. But you know what he's going to do. Even intervening your boxing match teacher did ink. Okay, Flocker's Fortune do-do right now.

Okay, because you were that important. And I'm just going to see how if i wouldn't you're gone on the net maybe maybe i'm not that important you know this is yada drove me nuts anyway it's awesome lori all lori all i'm sorry i missed that l'oreal my that's just spectacular oh it's just a fucking mess is what that is love it it's so hard to read so we want to thank professor steven from atheist on air podcast for coming on uh and joining us this this episode uh you can check out his podcast at aoa.fM. And that's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do 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 late night info docutainment leo pisces cancer cures detox reflex foot massage death and towers tarot cards psychic healing crystal balls bigfoot, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak, stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides.

Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Our poorly formed and expressed notions do not represent those of our wives, employers, friends, families, or of the local dairy council. Outro Music