Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 246: Story of God - Chris Matheson

Episode Date: August 31, 2015

Special thanks to Chris Matheson for joining us. Check out his book when it comes out on Sept. 15th:

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Hi, Tom and Cecil. This is Susan in El Paso, Texas. My son's a vegetarian, and he started being a vegetarian when he was six, and he decided to stop eating meat because he likes animals. And he's been a vegetarian ever since, and now he's 10. And we found out another good reason to be a vegetarian, besides the ethical reason,

is that vegetarians have a lower environmental footprint or carbon footprint. They impact the environment less for a number of different reasons. So if you're a vegetarian, you're actually going to be helping the environment too. So I thought I'd just let you know and I thought that was really cool that my son is not alone being a young vegetarian or even if your son's considering it. So glory hole motherfucker. Hey everyone, Tom. This is Azriel from Australia of all places. I do believe that I have caught up with your backlog, but I really can't be sure

because I've been listening to your current and past episodes at the same time, and I might have lost that many brain cells that I've forgotten for your current episodes since you did your podcast with Seth Andrews. Thank you for the show. Later, guys. Hey, Tom and Cecil. This is Jason

in Ohio. I was calling on a quick question. Have you ever noticed the Quiznos demon and Sylvia Brown sound an awful lot alike? I was wondering, was Quiznos Demon around before Sylvia Brown died?

Just something to think about. Glory, Hulk. 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 live 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 246 of Cognitive Dissonance. Later on in the show, we're going to have Chris Matheson, author of The Story of God. It's a new book that's going to be coming out on September, and he's going to be a guest for a little while, and we're going to talk to him about his book and about his thoughts about God. So that should be pretty interesting. Stick around for that. That was kind of a fun interview. I enjoyed doing that with him. Yeah, it was great. So this is a hell of an episode. This is proof that nothing gets in the way of a cognitive dissonance episode. Absolutely nothing.

Nothing. You can't stop this train. This is – Even if you're, say, an elderly woman and you lay down in front of the tracks. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

My mom just died a couple days ago. She was old, and so she had it coming. Well, I mean, you're not a young man. I mean, you're like, you're 42? Yeah, 42 now. So she had to be, what, 55? Yeah. Because we were down in the South, so.

Oh, no. Yeah, no, she passed away a couple days ago, but it was as quick as I think a lot of people like it to be. You know, when you talk about, oh, I kind of want to go fast. Like, that was exactly how she went. See, and I want a long, drawn out. Oh, yeah. I want, like, I want last words and a drawn out gasping breath. I want last words, and then I want last words and a drawn out gasping breath. I want last words

and then I want to edit those last words. I want my last words and I want to call you to edit my last words. I want to record it and then edit it and I want to put my theme song on it. That's what I want. That's the sort of death I want. One last time. For good measure.

Testing. One, two, testing. Recording from Glorios. Recording from the deepest bowels of hell. I do want to tell a story that I may have told in the past. I don't know if I told it on the air. Air. There's no air. Air.

On the bits before. On the iPods. Yeah, on the bits. But here's the story. before on the ipod yeah on the bits but uh but here's the story so this story i'm gonna i'm gonna sort of trigger warning people who are gonna get their fucking keyboards out to send us messages about hitting your kids is bad i think everybody at this day and age understands that hitting kids and doing you know basically abusing your children is a idea. But my mom came from a very different time. And, you know, she was much older than a lot of people's parents. And so she and I think my,

you know, most people growing up, at least my age, I think were hit as kids. I think a lot of us were hit as kids. So not hitting your kids was sort of countercultural, I think, in a lot of ways. So I think that, you know, when my mom did these things to me, I don't think she, you know, I don't, I don't know. I'm not going to, I don't want to get in the argument.

So I just want to, I want to cut that argument off at the press. Cause I have no, I have no interest in the hit. Don't hit your kids argument. Cause I don't care. I'm not going to have kids. I don't give a shit.

Right. I don't hit my kids. I don't hit other people's kids and I don't hit my cats. Right. I don't, I don't hit them because I don't think it does anything. So I just don't do it. So in any case, so there it is. So that's the disclaimer.

So we're driving in the car and I'm like four years old. And my mom's in the front seat. And I think I'm four or five. It might have been five because I think I had a half day. Because when you're like a kindergartner, when I was that age, you went for part of the day but not all of it. Right. So I was like – I was a morning kid and then I was off in the afternoon. So she picked me up from school.

Both my brothers are still in school. So we're out doing whatever, whatever you – Errand things with mom. I'm in the back seat. And this is back in the day when you had like a fucking full-size swimming pool backseat and and i was and i was standing up in the backseat because back then you didn't strap your nobody nobody yeah you didn't the seatbelt laws weren't a thing you just open the door and threw as many kids into the car as you go it's basically the flintstone mobile so i'm standing in the back

seat and you know my mom's driving and at one point somebody cuts her off or sometimes on their brakes or does something she they do something in some way to make her mad yeah and she says you cocksucker wow and my mom was a good she was her a very very foul mouth she's got a deadwood mouth man oh yeah yeah i mean she she called called him a San Francisco cocksucker right there. And so I'm sitting on the back seat playing with my little crossword thing or whatever I was doing. And I kind of look up from it and I say, Mom, what's a cocksucker? And she says, be quiet. Don't say that. You can't say that word.

I was like, okay. So I fucking immediately filed it into save this for when something bad, someone does something bad for you because this is clearly one of those words. Because I knew the context in which he said it. So clearly it was a bad word. And it was a bad word that inflicted damage on someone else. So I thought, this is a goldmine. Thanks, mom. You gave me ammunition for later.

Fast forward to maybe a day or two later. I'm out next door and the neighbor girl, one year older than me. And at that age, one year older and a girl most times means much, much bigger. Yeah. Right. Much bigger. Yeah. So she's only a year older, but she's huge.

I mean, she's like, oh, they're monsters. She's like, she was like an ant. Like she was this huge thing. It was like, I can, you know, well, she's beating me up. Like she was like this huge thing. It was like fucking, you know. Well, she's beating me up. And she's got my hair. She's pulling my hair. And she's, you know, she's slapping me or whatever.

And so she pushes me down and she's standing over me. I'm like, I sort of rev it up. You know, it's like one of those like. And I was like, you cocksucker. That's amazing. And I was like, you cocksucker. That's amazing. And so everybody's sort of standing around. And I don't think many people thought much about it initially. They were just like, oh, whatever, you know, because they.

But about four seconds later, the front door of my house, the screen door kicks open like boom. And it's like a shotgun blast. And everybody just kind of freezes right because here comes a here comes a wild parent and they don't know what to do right oh everybody's just everybody's up and i'm like oh i don't know what to do you're like you're like a bunch of zebra yeah and like a lion just sucked out right it's just like fucking run run so it could take any one of us yeah it's indiscriminate in its rage has no idea what's gonna happen it will find the weakest exactly it's like it's like i don't even know it's like it's like you're in a fucking you're in a you're in a movie theater in colorado or something you know what i mean you don't even know so so she comes marching over

and i'm frozen in fear i don't know what to do she comes marching over, and I'm frozen in fear. I don't know what to do, right? So I'm immediately frozen. I'm kind of like, you know, I'm sitting on the ground, and I'm kind of doing one of those things to your legs where you sort of try to move your butt back away from the dragon as it's leaning over you. And she grabs me by my hair, and she lifts me off the ground by my hair and then drags me inside. And I'm immediately wailing because it clearly hurts when you get dragged by my hair and then drags me inside and I'm immediately wailing because it clearly hurts when you get dragged by your hair. Plus you're terrified of your mom.

Yeah, I'm already terrified. And she drags me to the sink and she pulls me over to the sink she leans me over her knee with my back, so my back is on her knee and my face is pointed to the ceiling. She yanks on my hair to open my mouth, grabs the liquid Lux, opens the thing, puts it in

my mouth and squeezes. So my whole mouth fills with soap. And it's just immediately, I immediately, I'm fucking, of course I'm leaning backwards too. So I start to throw up. I start to throw up. I throw up. She drags me upstairs. When it's easy to clean because there's plenty of soap. So I start to throw up. I start to throw up. I throw up. She drags me upstairs.

When it's easy to clean because there's plenty of soap. I know. It's great. And she threw me in the room. And there I sat for, I want to say, maybe half a day just blowing bubbles. Because you can just use your own saliva to create a bubble. So that's one of my fondest memories of my mom. Well, look.

And look at what it has taught you. Yeah. You never curse. I never say cocksucker anymore. I've avoided that word. Yeah. Yeah. That's a beautiful memory.

It is. It's one of those touching memories, you know? I wish that they would make that into like a little love is cartoon. How do you turn that moment into a Hallmark card? You know? The front of the card is a little love is cartoon how do you turn that moment into a hallmark card you know you open the front of the card is a little boy and you're like cocksucker you know it should be it should be one of those like talky it should be and you open up and just I will say this though that story has lived throughout my whole family for years and years and years we've told it at thanksgivings and kidded around about it for years and years and years.

It's been a joke in my family forever. And it's got everything. It's got foul language, abuse. I mean, it's got everything. Child abuse, maybe a little poisoning. Well, hey, here's to your mom, man. Here's to mom. But what the scriptures are anxious to

say, it's far more important that we be spiritually strong as a nation than that we be militarily strong. It's not enough to be militarily strong. If we are militarily strong, but we are spiritually weak as a nation, we are going to go down. And that's why it's critical, I believe, to have a commander in chief who is a Christian in chief first and then is our commander-in-chief. Absolutely critical that we have a man who is commander-in-chief who sits in the Oval Office, who has a personal relationship with the God of the Bible. Not the God of the Book of Mormon, not the God of the Koran, but the God of the Old and New Testaments. So this first story comes from 1011.

1011? What? Yeah, I know. 10-11. 10-11? What? Yeah, I know. 10-11 now.com. No, how can it be both 10-11 and now? It doesn't even know what time it is. Fucking whatever.

It's a fucking North Platte affiliate. A Tennessee man running for president, forming the Christian party. He actually looks like he's popping out of a doorway. I know because it's like at a weird angle. He's got this photo of him, which is like clearly taken by the portrait people in the mall. It's like, hey, guys. And he's like, he's popping out from the left at a crazy jaunty angle.

He looks like he's just like peeking around the door like what's going on there guys can i play hey guys want to start the christian party is this where the christian party is i heard it's a great party here it's super lame it's like the worst party ever everybody just dances around not touching each other so hookers at the good at the christian party so this christian party time can you read some of the tenants that it has because these Dances around not touching each other. No hookers at the Christian party. So this Christian party, Tom, can you read some of the tenets that it has? Because these are some of the best things. Except one of the things, a few of the things that he's planning on doing are just great.

He says the first part of the campaign platform is to do away with the separation of church and state and make it the union of church and state instead. Oh. There are some countries that church and state instead. Oh. There are some countries that do that, Tom. Yeah, I'm trying to think. A country that's ruled by its religious tenets. You know, there's actually even an entire theology that's taking over countries. Sort of going the backward route. Yeah, right. It's the theology first.

What do they call that? Is, is, ill i think it is that seems to be going swimming i like that is is yeah i mean sort of cuts the harsh edges off that you know they actually modeled that after uh bill clinton because it depends on what the definition of is is I did not behead that woman I did not fuck her next up I did not sell Monica Lewinsky into slavery I did not push that man off a building into slavery. I did not push that man off a building. I did not put their fingers in the

finger chopper off a machine. There's no graceful way to say finger chopper off a machine. I did not crucify that family. Oh, God. machine i did not crucify that family oh yeah oh but they've got he's got more great ideas he says uh he wants to make the bible a standard required subject in all public schools and universities for all grades just all of them hey what book we're reading i don don't know. Fucking same book as last year. I'm just going to recycle the same book report.

It's like you wrote it in first grade. You're still handing it in. In university. So one of my favorite tenants here, Tom, wants to increase the legal drinking age to 25 and ban alcohol on all college campuses. Super popular guy. I bet he wins. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. They have been trying to motivate that particular base of people for years and years and years to try to motivate them to get out to the polls.

Right. Right. This guy is a galvanizing force to get those college campuses to vote. Could you imagine if he was an action? I mean, fucking this guy. Nobody even cares who this guy is. Nobody even knows. Like when you're using your fucking, you know,

your profile picture from your Facebook as your thing for your campaign, that you took it like your buddy's wedding when you leaned around. Those sorts of, when you do that, nobody's taking you seriously anyway. But the very fact that this guy is saying this, this sort of thing is what the left would beg for. Oh, God. It's a great platform to argue against, to have on your opponent's side because it's all so crazy. Yeah. It's not like he's like – he's got good ideas, but he's also a little crazy.

It's like, no, no, all of it's all of it's crazy. All of it is insane. Yeah. I mean, I mean, well, here's the thing. He wants to make the Bible standard. He wants to increase the legal drinking age. He wants to ban alcohol on college campuses. He wants to he says if he becomes president, homosexuality will not be recognized legally or any other manner. This will also include a restriction on rating system for TV shows that ban any movie that contains homosexuality, among other restrictions. You know, and he's also talking about how he wants to, like, find people for who are guilty of abuse or infidelity in marriage. He wants to have people go to counseling classes before they get married. They have kids.

They have to go to parenting classes. How is this the thing that you look at and you say, yeah, we're the party of small government? Yeah. Like none of this is small government. I just want to regulate every moment of your life. Yeah. Of your love life, of your sexual life, of your television viewing habits. Everything.

Of your drinking. Yeah, everything. Of your educational experience habits, of your drinking, of your educational experience. But other than that, I'm totes small government. I'm totes small government. The thing where he says he wants to have Christian marriage counseling for everybody and you're thinking- What about Jewish people?

Well, okay. So you have Christian marriage counseling, but they're all government paid? How is that small government? How is it that you're creating a whole new step to get married and you're saying that that's small government i bet he would argue that you pay for your own and if you can't afford it you don't get married which is hilarious too because then that makes less people get married and people more people have sex out of wedlock which means more babies out of wedlock which means means more single parents. And it's such a wildly impractical, ridiculous platform that can't possibly survive.

Yeah. But part of me looks at this and thinks, like, I bet there's a ton of people who would be fucking like, yeah, that's how you fix America. You know? I think so. All those hell house idiots. You know, I think so. All those hell house idiots. All the all the people that are that are far, far Christian. Right. That, you know, think that the Bible is the literal word of God and all that. I think there's a lot of people out there that would see would hear this and say, yeah, I'd love to see America do that. Yeah. Well, it's like it's like those are people who love God more than they more than they think that they're citizens of this country. Right. Because because I don't think you can read this guy's principles and think, oh, yeah, I would want to make sure that I change the Constitution in such a drastic, crazy way. And it's not that I'm a, you know, let's keep the Constitution because it's some sort of magical document.

I don't think it is in particular some sort of crazy, magical document. I think that we can always improve and we can always progress and we can always change our mind i think that those are that's a merit that's not a flaw that's not that's not a fucking that's a that's a feature not a bug in the system right but in any case i think that these people like there's there's these people don't they don't fucking like america at all if that's the case they don't like any of the principles about america if that's the case yeah i think america is of the principles about America if that's the case. Yeah, I think America is just a convenient place for us all to have our houses. Sure, yeah.

For these folks. Yeah. And then beyond that, it's just like, go to my fucking church. Yeah. This story is just fucking nuts, man. This is from the Raw Story. North Carolina church member designated as an armed guard

leaves his gun in a toilet stall where a four-year-old finds it. Four-year-old, huh? Four, dude. That's super young. That's 66 years younger than the dude who had the gun. I think if children are going to be able to handle and use guns, they shouldn't be able to hold a gun that has an ammo count that's larger than their age.

So if a kid like that age, you'd probably give them a Derringer, right? There's only two bullets. Or a double-barreled shotgun. A double-barreled shotgun would be just fine. Right. You know, sure. But at a certain point, I think, you know, you don't want them to have, like, a 14-clip, 14-shot. Well, wait a minute.

Can I give them, like, my pump gun and put the plug in? It's down to three. I'm with that. I would love to see a four-year-old shoot your Benelli. That would be the funniest thing I've ever seen. Because that kid would go into the stratosphere if he shot it. That kick's so hard. It would be hilarious to see that kid shoot out.

That would be hilarious. No, but I think that's a good rule. That's a great rule. I like that. Yeah, see if we get the NRA behind that. Well, the NRA would complain like, whoa, wait a minute. You got to be 100 for a 100-round magazine? Outrageous.

Outrageous. So this guy, so so this church this is just fucking insane so this church hires i guess or appointed some dude that was some 70 year old dude no what they do what he did was no what they did was they they passed the collection plate and the bottom of it was a gun and whoever reached in and grabbed the gun, it's like pulling a sword out of a lake. That's how they decide these things. That's how they decide these things in the South. That's how you become mayor in certain places, right?

You pull the fork out of the cheesecake and there you are, you know. It was actually Bobby who fished it out of the river after somebody... He got their teeth out of the river. He got their teeth in a fucking handgun. Oh, it's a church guard handgun. And a sword.

The lady of the lake was in there. It's so crazy. So they give this dude a gun. He's just some dude. Yeah. They just give this dude a gun. And he just walked in from outside. They don't even know him. Here here we go here's a 38 special go ahead and guard our church can you go take a smash real quick and

fucking shitter that's the best thing like he goes he drops a deuce in church and leaves his gun i don't even know how you do that. Like, where was the gun? So it's not like in a holster. It's just like in his pocket. It was like. Maybe it was secreted in his anus. Why would you?

And he left it in the stall. So that means he took the gun. I mean, just follow this through. He takes the gun into the stall. You drop your trout. You sit down and you're like maybe he was cleaning I don't know what you're doing with it what is happening

or he was like sweating profusely and he took his shoulder holster off and sat on the ground everything just slides off of him it was such a hard and furious shit. He's on there de-clothing because he needs the air. He's like, oh man, I shouldn't have ate that block of cheese. What was I thinking?

Maybe he was so aggressive he was worried the gun would just go off on its own. Oh my god, it's getting dangerous in here. That smells like fucking raw gasoline. It's like the end of the stand when the thing comes up and grabs the missile and blows it. It's like the stink just reaches up and pulls the trigger. Then this four-year-old comes in, right? He grabs the gun. And thankfully, the father goes in and is like, because you don't let a four-year-old go to the bathroom by themselves. But, you know, if the kid was a couple of years older, kid could just wander in there

and be like, I found me a bullet gun. Ba-doom. I love the Second Amendment. God bless America. I'll use this to protect the First Amendment. Ba-doom. Oh, no. And then I love the uh i love the quote the quote here uh says haynes received a

ticket for child endangerment nope hey don't you leave your guns laying around now where kids can find them is there like like when i get a ticket for speeding yeah i can go to traffic school is there like a child endangerment school that i can go to to get out of this thing is there any way that this thing won't mar my record up is there any way where they show me that i shouldn't shake a baby or something like is there like a thing somewhere that i can go oh it's it's it's actually just for people who leave guns in bathroom stalls they just walk in and they slap you in the south the classes fill up quickly oh no it's just yeah and he says i love this he understood the severity of it quote a four-year-old is just nowhere old enough to be within reach of man i'm glad you said that because i was curious until you clarified is a four-year-old old enough

to have a gun wow but you've seen those stories i'm sure you've seen the stories where like somebody buys their young and they're like my first rifle and it's like it's like a five-year-old kid six-year-old kid and they're super proud they give them a rifle and it's fucking loaded and they fucking shoot their sister and shit happens with alarming regularity people think the kids are responsible enough for guns i'm i give my fucking eight-year-old a fishing pole. It has a hook on it. It's fucking Armageddon. I run away.

I just want to put a bobber on it with nothing else attached to it. Sure, yeah, and just let him throw it out there and be like, oh, no, that's how you catch fish on giant round things. Yeah, that's how the fish show up. The idea of giving my eight-year-old a gun yeah as much as i would love to take him shooting at some point in his life here's the thing we go shooting and we have to like you have to like remind the people you go shooting with not to do stupid shit and they're full-grown adults right we have gone out on a number of occasions and been we've gone out and been like that dude doesn't come back right that's happened yeah you know we've gone out and been like, that dude doesn't come back. Right. That's happened. Yeah. You know, we've gone out on a handful of occasions and somebody's like turned around.

You're like, fucking don't turn around. Yeah. Don't stand. Don't don't level the gun at us. Like, what are you doing? Or you see other people when we go out shooting and we shoot with other people and they're doing crazy shit. And you got to leave.

You're just like, well, I'm just going to go away because you can't shoot me when I'm in Chicago. Right. Yeah. I already have bullets to worry about down there. I mean, come on. Well, yeah. I mean, my wife will be so mad if I get shot. That's what I always tell people.

Like, please don't shoot me. Yeah. Colleen is going to be so mad if I come home shot. I don't want to deal with that. Like, I would rather have you fucking shoot me dead than wound me. To come home to that? No no when you're limping she's got to take care of you i would tell her it was something else yeah i'd widen the wound be like oh i got a bear bite or something i got attacked by a feral deer i stick an antler in the bullet hole? Oh, no, honey. You see, there are demons in the earth.

Read Matthew, Mark's Gospel, Chapter 5. There are demons all over where, and Jesus cast out demons when he walked the earth. God, this story is just, I hope none of this story happened. You ever read a story and you're like, I really hope it didn't happen, that none of this happened. Yeah, every week, Tom. Yeah. Every fucking week. So this comes from Huffington Post.

Family breaks open teenager's tomb saying they heard her screaming. So family members of a teenager. So there's a teenager in Honduras. She was pregnant and newly married and she collapsed and started foaming at the mouth. So the family did the only logical thing to do. Call 911. Yeah. They didn't do that. They called for an exorcist immediately.

They're like, fucking what? They dialed 9-1-2. They just dialed 6-6-6. Oh, that's awesome. So they call for an exorcist. The exorcist doesn't work. Right. You know, because that's not a thing.

Sure. So it's like newsflash. That'd be like if somebody was having a seizure and you just were like, punch him in the face. No. No. I can't imagine how that would. That's not going to work. Stab him in the gallbladder.

Like, why would you do that? How could that possibly? Yeah. Why would you do that? How could that possibly happen? So they decided she was dead and they buried her in her wedding dress. It's so sad. The story gets sadder.

It's so sad. And then the next day, the family heard her crying from inside her tomb. So then they had to exhume her from her tomb with their hammers right yeah um which they did they they exhumed her from the concrete enclosure um but she was dead again this is the second time she was dead um and uh it turns out that that she had like her fingers were all bruised up so possibly possibly tried they possibly buried this young woman alive that's what they're reporting i don't know if that's the case i don't think i don't know i mean it's it's you really have to wonder uh first off the tragedy about you know just throwing away a perfectly good teenager is terrible i think i mean i think that's i think that's ecologically one of those those bad things

that we look at and we're just like god i can't believe this we gotta wonder what the doctors in honduras are doing if they're if they're putting in a person in the ground that is not not dead not dead yet that's not a thing that's like an ye olde like 18th century seems like a ye olde thing right so part of me doesn't believe that that's the case i olde like 18th century it seems like a ye olde thing right so part of me doesn't believe that that's the case i'm not sure that they're saying that she was that she had bruised fingers or something and that may be caused by something completely different who knows you know could be part of this something was broken on the like inside too there was glass that was broken or something but we have no idea if they're banging on something did anything you

know what i mean like you don't know you know they're whacking away at this thing with sledgehammers i have no idea so i don't know what the facts in this case are and it's a fucking it's a huffington post weird news article so it's not very detailed it turns out it's only four or five paragraphs long so we don't know if any of that stuff really happened all we know is that she she was clinic supposedly dead they called an exorcist instead of a doctor. And then they exhumed her because they thought they heard her screaming. Those are things that we know. Can we just get to a place where we call doctors instead of exorcists?

Like that's that's the reason I included the story. Like, can we just can we just get to the place where we're like, oh, let's that's super sad that somebody's like pregnant newly married and flipped out and is foaming at the mouth we should probably call a doctor it should never occur i don't i want to live in a world where it never occurs to anyone to call an exorcist that would be a way better world to live in a fucking exorcist oh man what do we do i don't know get the demons out of her i don't know why did you that's all bred from a fear culture, though. You know what I mean? Like, that's all that that comes from. That comes from the culture of fear, of demons and fear of that sort of thing.

Because she exhibited signs that are traditionally what people would be exercised for. Sure. She had a seizure of some sort, and people automatically and immediately say that that is a demonic possession. That's where they associate those two things. So then they took her – they did the thing that they've been told throughout their whole life. belief system that causes you to have that you know to use that as a as a as a method in which to you know engage the world this that nothing can go right at that point there's no way that you can fix that without cutting i mean clearly this is the religion's fault this is the superstition's fault the thing the idea that a demon exists the idea that a you know that a demon can possess someone that a that a person uh needs another person to somehow scare the demon out of them those those

beliefs are are dangerous that's a dangerous it's a dangerous belief and it's and it's and it's evident in many different cultures all over the world where they have this, where they mistake brain activity, bad, like weird, tricky brain activity with being, having, having a demon. And that's, it's dangerous to all those people. All those people are walking a fine line can be, you know, they can be, you can be massively injured in an exorcist that in exorcisms that happens to a lot of people where they get injured. People sometimes die during exorcisms when they hold people down.

They suffocate them. They do all kinds of crazy shit. You know, they sometimes throw up and they make them stay in that position. You know what I mean? All those different ways that you can get injured in that position. And then also not treating things that should be treated by actual medicine. Yeah. All of it.

It's a lose-lose. It's just crazy yeah it's and like we're so you know the thing that kind of makes me crazy cecil is like we're guilty of it here in the states i'm not picking on honduras but just globally speaking we are we are absolutely comfortable with this idea of the supernatural yeah we're we're forgiving of it and even the people that don't believe in supernatural uh in the supernatural just generally we tend to have this sort of live and let live attitude toward toward these kinds of ideas where it's like oh well you know i believe in gold like

someone just casually be like you know this happened at my workplace the other day somebody's like yeah well you know blah blah blah and I believe in ghosts and all that stuff. And it's just like there's this casual I believe in the supernatural and that's OK. And I can't be challenged on it. And it's harmless. And it's, you know, some X-Files I want to believe sort of shit. But it is not harmless. This is garbage thinking.

It's bad thinking. And I don't blame people. This is garbage thinking. It's bad thinking. And I don't blame people. This is a cultural shift. It's educational. And you know the other thing too is we talk about the – recently in Illinois actually, Governor Rauner, our new governor, just signed a law. At least I read that he signed some sort of bill or something in that in that forbidding people from using that gay conversion therapy yeah i saw that gay conversion therapy is illegal you're not allowed to do that because gay conversion therapy hurts people sure it hurts people it psychologically damages people and we recognize that we look at this as a culture

and we say you know what that practice is barbar Right. Why can't we do that to the things that are causing harm like exorcisms? Sure. Why can't we do that? We do it when we talk about people who neglect their children when they give them home remedies that like for, say, leukemia that aren't an actual remedy. We do that. We pull the kid out and make sure that the kid gets the right treatment. Why can't we do this with something like exorcism?

Why can't there be a movement to ban exorcisms in general? Why can't we – people would look at it as an attack on their religious liberty. And it's like, man, I know you want – and I'm just going to sound like a total dick, but it's like, look, I know you want to have your your happy little sunday tradition that's and and and that you really believe in all this but set aside for a moment your your you know church choir and how great the pig roast is next sunday and how much you love your buddies and getting together and shaking hands and getting you know doing the whole sunday morning thing people are dying for this shit. They're just dying for it.

This is not an attack on... But you know that's the argument. Like, oh, now the government's telling us we can't cast demons out of people. Like, now all of a sudden the government says we need to keep demons in people, right? And that's how they spin it is, oh, well, look at the government is really – they're really trying to make sure that demons – they get a free pass.

Right. This is an – I feel like this is an educational issue. Like how do you get rid of exorcisms? Like what if somebody offered you an exorcism? Would you turn it down? Yeah. Yeah, I would turn that shit down too. Would you turn it down?

Yeah. Yeah, I would turn that shit down, too. If my kid fucking came down with chicken pox and someone was like, we should tie him to a chair and beat him and splash him with holy water. I'd be like, you need to leave immediately. You're fucking cuckoo. But this is an educational issue. Don't you think so? Sure.

I think you can get there. I just think it's a slower path. Want to contact the guys? Go to DissonancePod.com to get links to their Google+, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. I just think it's a slower path. That's 740-743-6828 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 5 star review on iTunes or Stitcher or spread the word about the show. We want to send a big heartfelt glory hold to all the patrons and people who rate us. You fucking rock. From Right Wing Watch, illegal immigration undermines America's core mission to spread the gospel of Jebus.

Sounds like the first story. It sounds very strikingly similar to the first story. Let's hear it out of Brian Fisher's poisonous own gob. Our purpose as a people, this is evident from the beginning of our history, our purpose as a nation, as United States of America, is to advance and expand the kingdom of God. That is the calling that's as the United States of America, is to advance and expand the kingdom of God. That is the calling that's on the United States. Huh.

No. Yeah, I didn't know that. No. It's not part of it. Because if that was our mission, don't you think that would be in the mission statement of the United States? The mission statement is called, by the way, the Constitution. Yeah, well, it could be argued that the mission

statement could have been a declaration okay right so if you made that argument it's still not in there either right yeah advance and expand the kingdom of god another way to put it our task is to fulfill the great commission what the fuck is he on about the great commission tom well how much is it like Like, what percentage? I want to know. I get a Great Commission. I would like a Great Commission. If you sell this bullshit, you get a Great Commission. You get a Great Commission.

Take the gospel to every nation on the globe. That seems exhausting. It does. I'm already tired. I got to take it to every nation? Ugh. Oh, jeez. I got to go to Pawpaw, New Guinea with the fucking book and be like, hey, I know you

wear like fucking twigs on your penis. Here's a book written 2,000 years ago. I love that they have twigs on their penis. Do they like lay them the wrong way? Do they lay them? They just start laying them? It's like a really weird game of Jenga, you know? Twigs on your penis.

But you're fucking footless dudes running around in the jungle. They're footless? They don't have any feet? They just got stumps and twigs on their penis. What world am I imagining? What kind of world is this where you've amputated the feet off of all the natives and put twigs on their penises? I'm fucking eating rooster eggs. And we have, up to this point in our history, we have abundantly fulfilled that mission.

United Spates. United Spates. I love that. I love the United Spatel. That's good stuff. That's great when you put a little demi-glace on the United Spatel. That's good stuff. That's great when you put a little demi-glace on that United Spatel. I'd eat my own head. Delicious.

Has invested more financial resources and sent more personnel carrying the message of the gospel to more darkened corners of the world than any other place on the planet. And that is our calling. And that. Really? Huh. Huh. Is that what we're supposed to do is spend is send the gospel to the darkest corners of the united well first off it's a globe so

there's no corners technically but let's just say it's troubling darkest corners of the globe i would think would that be antarctica is that the darkest well half the time it is yeah sure super bright kind of bright yeah so you got it yeah it's like halvesies with the north and the south like oh fucking or the other darkest corner fucking sail up there yeah yeah i and i also would i think i would i i think that would be grossly inaccurate i think if anybody like what what about like spain during the the time of exploration like when they were you know coming over America and North America and what have you and converting people by force. spread the gospel to the darkened corners of the earth i i can't see how america in 200 and change years has somehow done that more than again just throwing out there like spain right bringing

christianity to mexico to peru to you know vast swathaths of South America, where it has held. Yeah. And Central America. Sure. Right? Yeah, no. It doesn't make any sense to me either. And that is what illegal immigration is threatening.

It's threatening our ability to carry out that mission because we get consumed with internal problems. One of the things we need to be able to carry out the great commission is a sense of national unity we are one people with a common purpose that has to do with the things of god with expanding the reach of god expanding the impact that god's kingdom and the gospel has on the world and our job is to cooperate but well you can't do that if you're fractured if if you're divided over race. If you're divided over race? I thought this was about illegal immigration. Are we going to take all the rest of the races out except for Brian Fisher's race? What is that, pasty white guy?

Yeah, I mean, he's super. With white hair? That's definitely. He actually has to check that pasty white guy. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely as a Christian nation, according to Brian Fisher, wouldn't want hordes of extremely Christian people. Yeah. In desperate need.

Right? Isn't that exactly like, because the argument these guys always make is that it's people coming up from Mexico, from Mexico and Central and South America. These are by and large, as we just discussed, these are by and large very Catholic Christian nations. Sure. So they're sending their Christians into our country. And he's like, wait a minute. We've got to spread the gospel. How can we do that if we have more Christian people here in our Christian country?

It's dividing us, is what he said. It's dividing us because he doesn't like brown people. Right. That's why. That's what he's saying. He's like, we can't be divided on race, i.e., more whites, less browns. If you're divided because you have people living illegally that don't even belong here, have no intention of assimilating, no intention of entering into that larger purpose for your

nation, they're not going to be an asset to that. They're going to be a detraction to that. They're going to diminish the capacity of the country to do that. What a fucking... How? I mean, I don't even know how. Like, I don't even understand how most of those people are religious. Like, I don't understand what he's talking about.

I don't know either. It's not like there's a huge influx of people from, like, fucking Scandinavia. Yeah, like a bunch of atheists from Sweden are showing up. A bunch of, like, fucking Gothic Swedes or whatever. They're fucking death metal. That's what it sounds like. Oh, God. I'm going to fuck this whole show up.

Oh, man. Somebody's going to write us, like, that's not at all what Norwegian death metal sounds like. They don't sound like... I'll tell you what, Tom. If Norwegian death metal sounded like... I would buy it. I would listen to it. I would drive down the road with the windows open.

Listen. It doesn't matter what you sing. You can't understand any of that shit anyway. It's like death metal scatting. You know what I mean? It's like. Scatman Crothers does Norwegian death metal. I would buy the fuck out of that album.

Deedle-doo. It's a double disc. It's a one track. It's just... It's two hours and ten minutes. I would listen to that all day and all night. Are you kidding me? That would be the best thing ever. I broke my face laughing at this.

I'm like some footless penis twigs man. Abortions for all. Very well. No abortions for anyone. Abortions for some. Miniature American flags for others. So this story comes from Pat Robertson.

It does come from Pat Robertson, though. Well, it does by way of right wing watch. Market crash. God's punishment for abortion rights and planned parenthood funding what yeah that's how it works let's hear it let's hear what fucking jolly mcfucking chub face is gonna say here listen that organization is an absolute monstrosity to take your money and my money which the government extorts from us every year in the form of taxation is nothing short of tyranny bullshit wow bullshit they fund all different

kinds of things that i disagree with and i've got to fucking live with it sure suck it up dude suck it up that's the fucking it's the lamest fucking argument I've ever heard when they're calling that shit tyranny because they disagree with fucking Planned Parenthood. But I have to be totally fine with fucking drone striking a fucking six-year-old. Sure. I have to be like, oh, I guess that's okay. Sorry. Oops. Sorry, guys.

Fuck off. Fuck off. We should build more billion-dollar planes. Yeah, that's bullshit 500 million dollars goes to Planned Parenthood And I'm supposed to get my fucking Tits in a wad about that But we literally spend

A billion dollars in research On a new fighter jet For what? That we don't even want That the military has said That we have no fucking Use for this thing yeah nobody wants it sure i gotta spend a fucking billion dollars and you know what i honestly don't care i don't even i don't care about the individual line items

that my taxes go to i never think about it like that i think hey i gotta pay some taxes and i just pay the taxes you know i what i that's part of living in this society. I think it's perfectly fine to be like, fuck, I wish we didn't spend this money on this thing and contacting the people who make these budget items and doing what you got to do to do that. I think that that's fine. That's a perfectly valid way to interact with your government. But to say that it's tyranny is bullshit. Yeah, right. It's bullshit. And it's not extortion.

Yeah. Pay your taxes. That's every country has taxes. They're not extorting the taxes out of you. That's part of living in a civilized society. You don't like that gold. I mean, like, I'm sure like fucking Somalia in the early 90s, you had a fucking very low tax rate. You also had no government.

You also had no feet. Right. You were a footless walking around. You know, that business about taxation without representation. Well, we're getting taxed and the left is saying we're going to give it to an organization that is repugnant to most Americans. And the president has basically said, if you take that out of the budget, he said in a previous negotiation about sequester, he said, if you take this money away, I will shut the government down. Now, that's how strong he feels about funding the murder of unborn babies. That's a fall. That's false. That's just blatantly false because they're not funding abortions with any tax money.

Right. Yep. It's explicitly earmarked that it cannot go. It's blatantly false. Right. And here in America, we have been complicit in terminating the lives of in excess of 50 million precious unborn children. And don't you think Almighty God is going to hold us accountable for that? I do not think that. No, I don't. Yeah.

I don't, actually. No, I think that there's no God and there's no possible way. I do think that there's a God, though, Tom. And I think what he has... That's shocking to me. I think he has a giant abacus, but the beans on it are actually fetuses.

So he just slides one fetus over. They're looking really cute, too, because they're in that sort of like little zygote stage. You know what they call that? The fetal position. Is it the fetal position? They don't really have feet yet. They used to call it the abacus

position. You know, the hard part is threading them onto that little steel rod. That's not hard at all, actually. They're very soft. Yeah, they're very soft. Well, and he's omnipotent. Sure, yeah.

It's no big deal. Actually, that's how you get them out of there anyway, with the string. Well, you just use the hanger hole. I just use the hanger hole. I'm the worst person that was ever a worst person. All right. He's pre-threaded for my convenience. We will pay dearly as a nation for this thing going on. And possibly if we were to stop, stop all this slaughter, the judgment of God might be lifted

from us. But it's coming, ladies and gentlemen. We just have a little taste of it in terms of the financial system. Man, what a little taste we had. We had a day. Yeah, it was a whole day. Maybe a day and a half because there was kind of a drop and a rebound and some bouncing. It was a little volatility there. A little volatility. That's a, wow. You would never expect the stock market to be volatile at all.

No, not on a semi-regular basis. But it's going to get shaken to its core in the next few months, years, or however long it takes. Sure, if you have an unlimited time span, shit could just happen. I don't know. Well, however long it takes,

that's how long it's going to take. Right. Come on now. I bet the stock market crashes in four billion years when the heat death of the universe occurs or whatever. Don't make me pick a day. I'm not Harold fucking camping. And it will hurt every one of us.

It's coming down the road, but at least we could repent and try to change. Well, it won't hurt the people who make money off of it. Right. Because someone's going to make money off of it. Someone's shorting it, right? Yeah, someone's going to make money off of it. But the Congress has got to override a presidential veto. And if Obama sides with that, he is siding with murder.

Oh, boo! All right, so there's another clip here. This is more crash stuff. All right. Terry, I just, they talk in my ear. I just got an update on the uh futures and the uh dow it's down 650 points uh the markets of course haven't haven't opened yet and we're we're a little ahead of that but it will be before this program's on too long uh but uh what we're

looking at is is uh you know i read yesterday uh something I'd scanned before and interviewed the author of something called the Shemitah. Yeah. The Shemitah? What the fuck is that? What the fuck is he talking about? The Sabbath year, also called the sabbatical year or Shivit, is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the land of Israel and still observed in Judaism. Is there anybody paying attention right now?

None of that makes – like none of that is – how do you hear that and say, oh, wait, I should definitely sit up and take notice about a fucking super-duper old book talking about farming cycles? I love that it's like we're paying attention to a fucking seven-year ancient agricultural cycle, and that somehow is prophetic. That's something we need to fucking pay attention to. It's like we dug up a ye olde farmer's almanac. You know, it's like you open it up and you're like, oh, wait, this was bullshit then, too. Yeah, no kidding.

You know, it's like you open it up and you're like, oh, wait, this was bullshit then, too. Yeah, no kidding. But the forecast of that thing, that seven-year cycle, that it comes up just before the end of it, that there's usually a market, some kind of a correction. No, it's a correction. It's just a fucking correction in the market. That's it. Well, this thing is hitting with great force. And if, you know, Khan is right on that shmita.

Shmita. Sounds like a small indigenous person from somewhere. Oh, look at that little shmita. Look, he's got a little shmita. He doesn't have any fucking feet, though. He's like, we could be in for some really rough days in the markets, but this is serious. What do you suggest to people?

Buy gold. Tithe it. Tithe it all. Most people have their retirement, their investments tied up in the market. Well, it's really been tough. I mean, I used to like the Master Limited Partnerships. One of them had gone to public, and Ken and Morgan,

I thought it was the greatest thing ever, and it's had a big hit. Another one, Enterprise Products, has been killed, so they aren't safe. I thought healthcare scouts were pretty good. They've been hit pretty bad. There's really no segment.

The only thing that is gold, just gold. Holy shit. Gold's down. Gold. Gold in them dark hills. This guy's fucking still in fucking he's a 49er for crying out loud dude he's a dragon this is what he is whatever that thing is schmog or whatever right he just like he just wants gold in his life that's what schmitta is it's a dragon it's a dragon and uh And gold stocks. But that's – the federal long-term treasuries have stabilized and gone up a tad.

And so it looks like people are running to the safety of treasuries. But if the Fed wants to raise interest rates, it will kill that market. People always run to treasuries during volatility. Anytime there's any... It's like it's saying nothing. It's just how they do it. It's saying nothing. Like, oh, shit's a little unstable

over here. Great. We're going to move to treasury bonds. We're going to buy that. Of course they do. They just couldn't raise interest rates. That would be insane. But nevertheless, the the market it looks like it looks like the writing about the shemitah was right on the money it's starting to happen and uh the the height of it would be about the middle of september so we're a month away from trouble and trouble is really you don't know where to go there's no place to

hide financially so uh except in the Lord. The Lord is the ultimate refuge. Never changing. And aren't we glad. That's seed money stuff, isn't it? Right. He's talking prosperity gospel shit right there. Right.

The Lord is the ultimate. Yeah. Return on your investment. Right. Fucking chuck the money. I was kidding. I didn't tithe at all. But he's basically saying like, hey, just chuck it at God. And if you can't get directly to God and I'd like to welcome you to the show, Chris.

Thank you. It's good to be here. Just let our listeners know who you are, and you're the author of a book. Please let us know what book that is. The book is called The Story of God. And it's coming out in a few weeks. And it is the story of God telling from Genesis to Revelation. So I would find this then in the nonfiction section, I presume. I don't know i think i think it may actually be considered a work of fiction because i'm playing with it a bit and um turning him into a like a real character a real thing yeah that's what i tried to do the the start of it was reading the Bible repeatedly. Oh, I'm so sorry.

Oh, repeatedly? From a comedic standpoint, it's just gold. I mean, there's so much found in comedy. It's really great, I think. I mean, it's just filled with bizarre, ludicrous, hilarious things. But he makes no sense. Not really. I mean, he's such a strange character that eventually I thought, I want to try to figure out like, who would this guy be? If all of these

things are true, if all of this stuff literally did happen, what, who is this guy? Who would behave that way? So that's what I tried to do. I tried to track him from beginning to end. Of course, I focus on the comedic high points, you know, like when he basically meets Moses in the desert and attacks him and tries to kill him for no apparent reason. Well, I guess that his son hasn't been circumcised is the ostensible reason. That really is a good reason. I mean, when you're coming down to reasons to attack someone else, their son not being circumcised, I think, is high on my list. Anytime I meet a stranger at a cocktail party, I first ask to see... Cocktail, huh? I first ask to examine their son's cocktail wiener because, you know...

Fair, fair. I mean, it just seems appropriate. Sure. And then if I find that it is an uncircumcised wiener, then, you know, we battle to the death. It's a Festivus battle, is what it is. It's a feats of strength. Yeah, exactly. Sure. Do they know why you're attacking them?

It's half the fun, you know? Yeah, right, of course. I mean, I do the very same thing. I'll do it to complete strangers on the street. Let me see that child. That's the hardest barrier to cross in the whole, like, get to the fight.

Because you first have to examine the kid's genitals, and they're real weird about that. I don't know. People are strangely uncomfortable with that one. I hear if you wear, like, a priest collar, though, they're totally into it. Yeah, they do. So what I do to put them at ease is I've got the biggest van I can find filled with candy because I just want the kids to feel. I have nothing against the kids i'm gonna fight their dad sure yeah that would help that would help because

kid candy and guys who drive around with vans full of candy who doesn't trust them right right right i'm even willing to fill it with a puppy here or there that i steal from other kids you know whatever whatever it takes so you're trying to so you so you're you're going through you you read the bible a a number of times again my my sincerest condolences because the old testament has vast swaths of nothing it's like it's like driving through the fucking midwest you know what i mean if the midwest was filled with begats instead of like somebody just planted the gap fields there are boring stretches and i i think typically they're boring when he's off stage i think when he goes off state he's a pretty

compelling character he's very bizarre and he's very mean and he's very destructive and he's hard to understand he's very volatile and very human and when he's on stage i'm usually pretty interested when he goes off stage and it just becomes kind of a generational human story i find myself drifting a lot of times then unless the human characters are interesting and there's not that many interesting human characters actually in your story does god does god uh uh like go across the boundary between old and new testament oh yeah yeah oh yeah yeah no i tracked him from beginning to end it begins with it begins with him sitting in the darkness doing nothing because if you're if you believe the story literally he for some peculiar reason

sat in the darkness essentially eternally because he is eternal and before he decided he wanted light he just sat in the dark basically so i start although there's water underneath them to begin with which is peculiar too because like why is there water there did he make it and then he forgot about it or does it predate him it's very weird and so i start there and i yeah no i take him all the way through all the way through the end of the old testament and then and then kind of in my mind what he would consider plan b like plan a didn't work like that's a bust man that that was a couple of plan a's right because he had plan a he had like plan a 0.1 and then he washed that away. Like he's like, oh, I killed them all.

But here you go. Here's a rainbow. So I don't want there to be any hard feelings after this global genocide that includes puppies and kittens and everything you love. Right. So here's a rainbow. I've murdered everything but enjoy the rainbow. You're welcome. Love me. Love me so much it almost feels like a horrible aristocrats joke doesn't it it does you're right there's plan a and then plan b seems to start

with noah and that's a bust because noah is just a drunken asshole really he reveals himself to be a belligerent asshole who drinks too much and passes out and his robes go up and his junk is showing his poor son walks in and sees it like what's more horrible than that you walk in and see your dad laying there drunk with a dick hanging out it's for some reason the only words noah ever speaks are i curse your son to slip for that like the poor kid just walked in and and you know noah turns out to be a belligerent jerk but doesn't it maybe he's got some ptsd the guy's been through some shit he has seen some shit it's entirely fair uh mean, we give a lot more leeway to combat veterans that have seen a lot less than a global genocide. I get that he would want to drink a lot.

That I do understand. But coming down so hard on his son for walking in and he's like, wear some underwear, dude. That's a bit of a dick move. It's a dick move. It's literally a dick move. It is a dick move. One of the big jokes of the story. That's a bit of a dick move. That's a dick move, I would say. It's literally a dick move. It is a dick move, yeah, quite literally. One of the big jokes of the story, I think there's a bunch that are funny, and none of them are really stated. Like I said, it's kind of found comedy to me.

But one of the big jokes is he is ostensibly all-powerful, right? He's absolutely powerful. He's omnipotent. He's omniscient but things never seem to go he wants which is really funny to me like you could do whatever you want and yet you're always mad because things aren't going the way you want it doesn't make any sense and you just no matter what you try it doesn't work out and you get infuriated and then you make big blustery threats that you don't follow through on what what is the problem with you that is something i have never considered but it is hilarious because you it'd be like it'd be like uh somebody who i guess

somebody who has all the money in the world and all the power in the world and is you know just is is mad about it or whatever yeah they say like a motel six and they're mad that it's like a lumpy bed it's like you could have stayed at anywhere else right you could create any reality you want you created this perfect reality supposedly and you're mad all the time because it's not it's not what you want which to me i ended up thinking there's three different ways of looking at this guy. Number one, he's kind of a fraud. He's kind of the Wizard of Oz.

He's not really all-powerful. He's sort of claiming he's all-powerful, but he's a big talker and he really can't back it up. There's that, which is pretty funny. I like that one a lot. Number two, he's a fool, which is to say he is all powerful but he's just kind of an idiot and and he just does dumb things it's sort of like will ferrell as as god where he's just always tripping over his own feet and just because he's all powerful doesn't mean he's brilliant and he makes boneheaded moves like it explains all the physical comedy in the bible

and then the last one is the most interesting one and that's that he's basically a freak and that he's sort of self-hating that he that it's all going exactly the way he wants and it's this weird punishment game because in for some peculiar reason he kind of hates himself and he wants to torture himself and he does it again and again and again and he does it to us too and he and he and he hates us of, he hates humans. He hates all humans. I mean, he hates everybody other than his chosen people. And he doesn't like them either, really. He doesn't like anybody. And he hates us because he created us in his image. You know, you look in the mirror and you hate what you see. So they're all kind of interesting, I think. What is his thoughts on his hippie son? Does he hate his hippie son too? I ended up thinking that he did. I ended up thinking that he's so narcissistic and he's so vain and he's so pompous and he's so – he's such a drama queen basically that he can't stand all the attention going to Jesus,

who's a bit nicer than he is. He is. I mean, he's a bit nicer than he is. And he really, really doesn't like it because if you think about it, you'd send, okay, I'm going to send my son down.

And why wouldn't he, he can make people live a thousand years. I think Methuselah lives a thousand years. I mean, they routinely live to be 800 early on. Jesus could live a thousand years. He could go everywhere, right? He could, like the Mormons, could actually be correct. He could actually go to North America and say his thing and live until the Middle Ages or something and just tell everybody, go to China, go to Japan.

It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Very quickly, after about a year, it's like, no, pull the plug, kill him, get him out of there i don't like that i don't think he likes it i don't think he likes sharing the spotlight and he has to share the spotlight and so i ended up thinking no he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't like him and i don't think he understands him because jesus does very peculiar things that that i don't think god would understand i think i think you're right he is kind of like a hippie in in some ways and and he does weird things he like kisses a dude and and he walks around on the water at night you know it's like why don't you walk around on the water

in broad daylight and show people your power and it's like no he just walks around a lake by himself at night like what the fuck are you doing, man? Like, show off. I gave you that. Anyway. What's God's feelings on – I'm curious about God's take on revelation, you know, because that's the only part that hasn't happened yet. I think he makes his – he is offstage for most of the new Testament. He's,

he's backed off and he just can't deal with it. And he shows up and revelations is the final amazing star turn. It's like in seventies movies terms, if it was a trailer, it would be like, God is back and better than ever. You know, it's like,

he's amazing and somehow my take on it is being out of the spotlight for a while made him go crazy and he's so much meaner and he's so much darker and he's so much more evil he's like a james bond villain in revelations he's so bad or i decided at one point because he's so clean because he's got such clean good tastes and everything but like he becomes like a weird blend of like hitler and liberace in revelations because he's like i you know i want my palace to have you know an ice skating rink and i want to have and i want to have you know my eyeball creatures with eyeballs all over them singing these songs to me, songs which he presumably has composed to himself. The whole book has got to be like that, though, because everything is his to himself.

So he created these people who then, in many ways, forget about him. And then he has to remind them that they forgot about him. but they should never forget about him since he made those people it would make you i mean from his standpoint it would be it would be kind of shocking and like i made this whole thing i just did it and none of them even believe in me like five people believe in me like when you get to um you know right before abraham like nobody even seems to believe in me. Like when you get to, um, you know, right before Abraham, like nobody even seems to believe in him. Like, like they're,

they all are obsessed with bail, you know, the sex God, of course they're obsessed with bail, the sex God. Why wouldn't you be bail? I'm still interested. Yeah.

They're like, they're bail throws fun, drunken orgies. Of course they like bail. And God's like telling them all he does is make rules about what you can't do sexually because he hates sex because he's so repressed because he's so uptight because i think he's a repressed homosexual i think he's a repressed homosexual he's obsessed with cock that's for sure yeah he talks about cock endlessly cock and balls man cock and balls exactly how he

wants cock and balls to be and women he, he never talks about. He says nothing about women's bodies except they're unclean and they're impure. And they need to go out like in the wilderness. You can't touch them for seven days. He basically is like a Kim Jong-il level narcissist who thinks girls have cooties. That's pretty much it. So Revelations is the exact ending that he deserves because by the by the end of revelations he's sending angels down to earth to basically lop mankind to pieces while these eyeball monsters sing this song to him

about how wonderful and kind he is it's like okay you're a you're a villain man you're a super villain that it doesn't get any worse when you have an eyeball monster you are technically a villain at that point i don't think i think you yeah i think i think you absolutely are yeah let's get away from the story of the book itself but and let's talk about the motivations behind writing it what made you want to write this book well i'm a comedy writer you know i've i i wrote i've written movies for quite a long time and i'm as a comedy writer you live in search of a good character because characters are what makes comedy um in my view there's nothing else uh everything else is kind of thin. But a good character, that's what you remember.

That sticks with you. That's what's worth, and that's what's fun to write. You know, everything else is kind of jokey and, you know, just kind of, I don't know, whatever, clever. And I can't do that anyway, and I don't want to do it. So why I'm interested in religion at all, I don't know. Deep personal pathologies, I think. I just am. I can't stay away from this stuff. I'm the sort of person who reads the Koran for pleasure. I'm the sort of person who reads the Book of Mormon for pleasure. Always a certain kind of pleasure, mind you. It's comedic pleasure. I'm looking for things that I find funny. I'm not looking for like, oh, wow, this is going to – You're not looking for things that i find funny i'm not looking for like oh wow this is gonna you're not looking for spiritual salvation i'm not looking for spiritual guidance i absolutely

am not expecting to find there's very little of that there's a tiny little bit the only little bit that i really can think of in the bible is ecclesiastes which is completely different than anything in the book like if you take ecclesiastes seriously the rest in the book. Like if you take Ecclesiastes seriously, the rest of the book is total bullshit. If you actually read Ecclesiastes and took it seriously, it's a great subversive joke because it's like, you know what? Everything else in this entire book is bullshit.

It's all wrong. So I do like that. I like that one piece anyway. So I'm just drawn to it. And I thought this guy was an amazing character. He is an amazing character. He's the greatest character. And my end point, what I was getting is the Book of Job, which is typically perceived as a great work of spiritual wisdom, but it's not. It's a huge joke, and it's a deliberate joke, that it's the first and still the greatest work of satire ever written, that the author of the Book of Job knows that they are revealing God as a bully, belligerent, kind of vaguely insane. insane, he kind of falls apart at the end of Book of Job, and he just starts spouting all this irrational shit about unicorns and sea monsters. And he just loses his shit at the end of Job. And I thought I was just going to write that. And then I thought, no, I want to write, I want to track this guy. I want to just sort of sit on his shoulder, if I can,

and just follow him and see if i can make sense of this guy and that's what i tried to do so does god have a character arc i think he does absolutely yeah i think i think he absolutely does i mean he does and he doesn't because i think he ends up i mean at least the ending that i sort of stumbled onto is he's just he's back to square one and he's going to do the whole thing again and he really hasn't learned very much but because comedic characters never learn because they cease to be funny the moment they learn anything they can't really by definition once they figure something out they're not funny anymore they're not a fool anymore um but i think he goes through a tremendous amount of uh pain and suffering and I tried to write some of that too,

because I thought I made it a better story. And I ended up feeling, weirdly, the deeper I went into it, the more kind of sorry I felt for this character, because at a certain point, I thought, what a horrible job, what a role you know you're all by yourself you have no mother and there's no mrs god you have no well no there wouldn't be anyway well mister you know there would be there would be there's hunky angels i think who keep him company i think there's me but he has no friends he has no peers he has no dad he has no siblings he has nothing well he's got his hippie kid that he doesn't like yeah but i mean does he really know him i mean like who knows i mean some people would say well yeah they knew each other in heaven forever he's got

satan that's what he's got he's got satan you know satan's always there satan's there from the beginning right from the very beginning and to the end. So Satan's his only sort of companion on this weird journey. Are they kind of frenemies at this point? Like, is that? I think my take on it was they are enemies, of course. But if you take the story seriously, if you're going to take the book in any way at face value, you must believe that God created Satan, right? You have to, because otherwise it's not monotheism anymore. You're in some weird kind of polytheism where Satan is an equivalent power to God. So you must believe that God created Satan.

Therefore, this circles back around to God as freak, who at the very beginning of a giant plan, of implementing a giant plan, creates their worst enemy to fuck it up right from the start. Like right from the very beginning, you create your worst enemy to go in and basically knock it over. Like the Garden of Eden, it's right at the very start like how far are we into existence a week maybe and satan just basically waltzes in and tips the whole thing over so well the best part is god can't write it properly either like no not at all it's always made me laugh about that story too it's like satan derails the train and god's just like well fucking now we're derailed. Instead of being like, you do realize you can just mulligan your God. Yeah, right.

You can just be like, oh, no, you know what? I meant the other tree. And then eat the snake. Call it a day. It's not that big a deal. It wouldn't be. Or go back to square one. Do it again.

And make the humans a little different. Make them obedient. Because that's what you want, you big fuck big fucker i mean make them obedient little robots that's clearly what you want this whole free will thing is a disaster it doesn't work so so who's your audience for this book so you've obviously i'm i'm guessing i'm guessing it's not the christian right yeah so you know to the degree that any of them would read it because they'd just be so they want to know what the enemy is doing that's fine because i am adhering to their book i am trying to hoist them on their own petard a little bit you know because

there's a lot of i'm referring to their book i have a lot of biblical references i'm tracking their book this is your book but no i don't think that's the primary readership look i love i mean i love dawkins and i and i love what uh jerry coin does and i i mean these guys are great and and and pete bigosian is is a friend and an important part of the whole movement at hitchens i thought was great i think i can make people laugh about this stuff. I think I can make people, I think that we need to laugh at this story. I think it's important that we laugh at this story.

It's a ludicrous story and it will cease to have, it's already ceasing to have the power that it had a couple hundred years ago, but it's still very powerful. It's still ubiquitous. And I want – I think my role would be to help people laugh at it, and I would feel really good about that. So that's who I hope my readers are. To me, it's the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes story. This is the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes.

This is a joke. If you look at this book carefully, it's ludicrous. This is the ultimate Emperor's New Clothes. Sure. This is a joke. If you look at this book carefully, it's ludicrous. So when does it come out? September 15th. It's available on Amazon. I think it's on Kindle. I also did a voice version of it. So if anybody wanted to hear me read it, then.

Do your dogs bark while? My dogs are barking, yeah. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. The book's called The Story of God? It is. Okay, well, we'll send our listeners to go read it, and we'll download it ourselves. Thanks for joining us.

It's great talking to you guys. Nice talking to you, too. Thanks so much. Appreciate your time. It was my pleasure. So we want to thank our most recent patrons. We want to thank all our patrons, of course, for all their generous donations. We're super appreciative of all of you, but we want to thank the people who most recently signed on. Hector, Jim, Chase, Kristen, Niles, Rex, Sean, Mark, David, Theo, Emily, Elizabeth, Brett, Simon, Nathan, and Edward.

Thank you all so very much for your generous donations. We truly do appreciate it. We also got a few via PayPal, Tom. We did. Paul, Brian, and Seth, thank you very much for your generous donations via PayPal. One of them was very directed, Cecil. Yeah, somebody sent us a message. Brian, who sent in money, said, the nostalgia when you make a Dynasties Warriors reference is amazing.

I was going to get the new version. Then I realized that it hasn't changed since DW3. Just a rehash of the game with a new weapon, a new hairstyle, and a little more side boob on a pixel character than the last game. So instead, I donate to you guys. So I want to say to Brian, first off, Dynasty Warriors is always worthy of a buy. Always. It doesn't matter what the game is. It doesn't matter.

It's always worthy of a buy. That's number one. Won't you be punished by Lou Boo if you don't? You will. Absolutely. He'll come to your house, and he'll sing Norwegian death metal to you. It's going to make me laugh forever anyway uh the other thing too is that lubu in seven uh had a uh a four-sided halberd and in the new one he only has a one-sided halberd so i think

i mean that's totally a different weapon like it's not i mean it's not even it's you say like with a new weapon like that's a totally different weapon. Totally different. I mean, it's just fucking night and day. You've got to buy that game twice. It's so exciting. What a difference. We got a message.

This is from M. And M says a couple of pretty funny bits. M is living in Japan. And her boyfriend is Japanese. And the best part about this message is she said, I think you have your first Japanese listener. And he doesn't understand much English, but he can pick out the word homosexual. He also thinks you laugh like bad or stupid people. homosexual he also thinks you laugh like bad or stupid people so congratulations on having critics in every language she says that's a great line great line

thank you um yeah we got a great image this is from uh from caleb he sent us a todd starnes image i'll put it on this week's show notes. So check it out. Episode 246. It's really funny. It's super childish, which is why I love it. We got a message from Jonathan and Jonathan and said, hey guys, if your podcast were a woman, I'd sleep with her and then feel guilty about it. Stephen sent in

an Islamic call to prayer. So this is Stephen's call to prayer. So this is Stephen's call to prayer. Allah mu akbar, Allah mu akbar. Allah. It's great. We'll be making another run. I love that song. That's awesome. We got another call to prayer.

This one's from Pat. So this is Pat's call to prayer. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. That's so funny. I could listen to this song all day. That's great. I love that. I'll put that on my workout mix.

I love that song so much. It's awful. It's terrific. And you love it. I'm playing it at your funeral. We got a message, Tom, from Harrison, and he wants to he wants to ask us a question. Yeah. So he relays a story about going out. He's a geologist. They went out.

They pointed at some rock strata that appeared to be from the Paleozoic era. Jesus. And his geology buddy was there, and he said, well, how are we going to account for the layer from Noah's flood? And he thought he was kidding, of of course because that's retarded um but it turns out that his buddy was dead serious he says i just can't wrap my brain around the fact that this asshat spent four years getting a degree with a main principle being the geologic time scale if you guys don't know about it's a hell of a lot older than 6 000 years he acquired a geology degree for what to try to convince people of the earth being 6 000 years older to agree to back it up i'd love to hear your thoughts keep up the great work um yeah i i think i think folks like

that there's a tremendous amount of compartmentalization that people are able to do i've i've been flabbergasted before. Like the idea, honestly, that anybody who's engaged in the sciences, especially the hard sciences that have such a respect for, you know, observation and evidence could still be faithful to me. I can't I have a hard time bridging that gap, but people do it all the time with little difficulty. And I have like four vindictive degrees. Vindictive degrees? Then you just get to spite somebody. I just get to spite people. I got a culinary degree just so I could tell my mom she was doing it wrong.

We got a message from David in Kentucky and he says, listening to episode 245 with no religion required, it seems like reading the Bible on your show is becoming a rite of passage for podcasts, like a Jedi building their own lightsabers. Are you guys planning on reading the Bible on the air anytime soon? No, we don't believe in the force. So we're not going to do that. You know, the thing is, is like, I understand that there are people who think that they need to learn the Bible or read the Bible. And I understand that there's a necessity there because they want to get into those intricate arguments. They want to dig in there and say,

look at how absurd this is. How can you believe this? And they want to convert people. I have no desire to convert people. I don't ever want to convert. I don't want to convert a single person. Don't care. All I want to do is just have fun. And that's what this podcast is all about. And it doesn't require the Bible to do that. I don't need to know any kind of lore about leprechauns to know that they're not real. I don't need to know any kind of lore about leprechauns to know that they're not real. I don't need to know any kind of lore whatsoever about dragons or anything, any of the things that we talk about. I don't need to know any of the lore or the history behind those mystical things in order to think that they're not a real thing. And that's how I feel about the Bible. I

just don't, I don't believe it. I'm not even'm not even gonna i'm not even gonna meet you on the tennis court to talk about it i think like the whole you gotta read it before you know you don't believe it stuff i think that comes at it from an angle of of of kind of giving the bible sort of an inherent credence and and respect that that i'm i'm not convinced that it deserves at all i mean i've not read the whole thing but it is all so patently absurd all of the stories everything the whole god concept i can't get past the god concept yeah i mean it's not like you didn't pitch the book to me before you told before you had me read it right and you pitched the book by saying there's an omnipotent guy who's watching you masturbate and i'm just like well that's weird i know yeah give me some pointers

he's omnipotent can he at least fucking massage my prostate while i do yeah so we got a handful of emails um where i was corrected i made i made a foolish comment i was inaccurate uh more so than usual um i made a joke about a chubby security guard being the olympic bomber from the olympics uh that happened in georgia um turns out that dude didn't do it it was some other dude but there was kind of a rush to judgment this guy kind of got lambasted uh i forget the names of him i think richard jewel was the name of the guy um and he got you know sort of pigeonholed and lambasted when, in fact, he kind of was a hero in that circumstance. So I fell for it and didn't know.

Sure. And I'm sorry. I was just inaccurate and wrong. Yeah. Like usual. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I'm always inaccurate and wrong. I should probably spend less time making corrections than pointing out when I'm accidentally correct.

We also got a lot of messages about eating meat. And one of the things that people were talking about is the environmental impact. And I think Tom and I touched on it, but we got several different back and forth messages about environmental impact that were very interesting. So we wanted to thank everybody for sending us the back and forth because there were some people who were saying that there was environmental impact the other way too. Like when you're eating specifically vegetables, how farmland can be sometimes problematic, especially with how we fertilize that farmland and things like that. Some people had asked us to think about our environmental impact when we eat meat. And I think that I live my life pretty, I'm trying to be pretty environmentally sound. I think the major things that I do

to try to make sure I have a lower carbon footprint is I don't drive my car very often, drive it maybe once a week. I walk to work or ride my bike almost everywhere. I don't go, I normally don't go shopping with my car. I normally shop on my bike and then drive home. Uh, I have a very small place that I live in Chicago. Uh, you know, it's relatively small. It's not a, it's not one of these like very large, you know, sort of big houses. It's a, it's a small enough place for Sarah and I to sort of live. And I don't have kids. And I think that those, you know, those things, those things lead, you know, I mean, yeah, I do eat meat, but there's a lot of things I do that are pretty ecologically sound. So, you know, you just do what you can to try to, you know, reduce your carbon footprint.

That's one of the things I'm not willing to give up is eating meat. Got a message about Planned Parenthood. This is an interesting message. Price had sent this in and said, a lot of men, Planned Parenthood is the only game in town when it comes to reproductive health. a lot of men, Planned Parenthood is the only game in town when it comes to reproductive health. Vasectomies, STI testing and the like are often

only available through Planned Parenthood. So that's, wow, that's really great. I didn't even really... I had no idea they did vasectomy. I didn't either. I might just get another one just to, you know, see how they do. You gotta compare and contrast. What you should do is get one ball done by one person.

God, that would be fucking horrible god it's bad enough getting it done once i wouldn't know let me have these so we got it there's a couple of uh dave's dave sent in a a few towns and places in britain and i'm going to read some of these off the first one is butththole Lane. That's amazing. I like that. And Leicester, Leicestershire, Leicester, in that place. It's Leicestershire. Worcestershire sauce. Worcestershire sauce.

Andrew's Knob is another one. That's amazing. Willsford Cum Lake. That's a good one. It's a little salty. That's a saltwater lake, I think. Finger and Hoe Essex.

Shitterton. Shitterton is amazing. Upper Dicker. Sluts Hole Lane. Sluts Hole Lane. Cox. Shitebrook. Shitebrook. Shitebrook.

Now, this one doesn't mean anything here, but I know it means something over there. Fanny Ho. I like that. Fanny means something different. Fanny's ass here, right? Yeah, it means your butt. I think it means your twat over there. Does it?

I think Fanny means twat over there. Oh. They got a place called twat. It seems redundant. This one here too minge lane that's not anything like over here we don't we don't know what i don't know what i've heard minge before but i don't know what that means like i don't nothing i i that guy ali g said it to one of those spice girls he was talking about minge he's talking about meningitis but he

used minge instead and it was like i could tell it was a pun that he was doing, but I couldn't – I didn't have the vocabulary to make it work. So thanks, Dave, for sending in better names than Horsham. It would be great to have a home on Butthole Lane in Shitterton. Yeah. It would be tremendous. We got a message, a long message from Dave. And Dave was talking about the honorary professorship that Tim Hunt had. And he was making sure that we recognize that it's an honorary professorship, not a job.

And I think we tried to mention that, but we might have glossed over it. But you're right. It was an honorary professorship that he resigned from. Yes. So different. Although I thought he was given a letter that was basically just resigned. But maybe I'm remembering somebody else. But anyway, thank you for sending it in.

But I wanted to mention the image. He sent an image of Captain Canada that both of us laughed at. It will be in this week's show notes. We both thought it was great. It's so funny. It's great. So we got a message from Brandon, who's sadly in Louisiana. And he left a message or he sent a message to us talking about the bagel, Tom.

He did. He had a host of questions. But he specifically asked, what about when I put a bagel in my wife's ear? She really likes when I put my bagel there. And, yes, of course, it is a tight fit. But it does go there. And yes, of course, it is a tight fit, but it does go there. And I kind of like it, too. Great question.

Yeah. I mean, it's one for the ages. Yeah. Yeah. We got a message from Stephen, and this is Pastor Hagee's clip that he sent us. God will take a stand against us. I refer you to the Babylonlonians to the romans to the greeks

to the sweat drop down my butt that was great thank you we got a message uh this is from uh citizen gold and citizen gold asks us um first off if being a patron patron pulls any weight with us no it doesn't um so that's number one but we thought this question was interesting i have to talk about so we decided to talk about it the question you wanted us to to sort of uh ponder here was something that came across and you were wondering what we thought. So, Tom, what's the question? The question is, would a purely atheistic society collapse?

Why or why not? The question could be asked another way. Do you need religion for your society to survive? Yeah. I tend to think it doesn't have to be. I don't think it necessarily has to be that there needs to be religion. I think that if you, you know, I look as an example, I look at your own house, right? You have a son who never was religious, never brought up religious, very moral, caring,

nice little boy, you know, cares about other other people cares about how other people feel sure he's he's a he's a genuinely nice little kid you didn't teach him anything about god right but you taught him morality so i think you know i think that it's absolutely possible to have a world where you have a group of people who don't teach their children the boogeyman stories that scare them into being moral. Instead, teach them just genuine moral principles, and they'd turn out fine. Yeah, and I can tell you it's not hard because we did it. Yeah. And we're lazy and terrible parents.

Terrible parents. Yeah, I mean, horrible. This is to the kid's credit that he climbed up out of that muck. You know what I mean? We ask him these moral questions. Hey, what the fuck do I do here? Should I stop shaking your younger brother or no? I've been shaking him for 15 minutes while you've been riding your bike.

I didn't know this was wrong. I can't imagine why would an atheistic society collapse? I mean, there's countries that are 70% atheist. They're thriving so we want to thank our uh our guest tonight uh chris matheson author of the story of god uh the link for that book on amazon will be on this week's show notes uh episode 246 so if you want to check that book out you can pre-order it now from amazon we want to thank chris for coming on uh he was a great guest and we had a lot of fun. So that's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to be back next week, but we're going to leave you like we always do with Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit.

Couched in scientician, double bubble,il 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 in towers Tarot cards Psychic healing

Crystal balls Bigfoot Yeti Aliens Churches Mosques Synagogues Temples flex foot massage, death and towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, big foot, 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. 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