Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 59: Why Are You Atheists So Angry

Episode Date: August 3, 2012

Islamists in North Mali Stone Couple to Death Indonesian police arrest 62 over Ramadan bar attack 11 nabbed for not fasting — Daud Kuwait police arrest, detain man for drinking in public during Ramadan Colorado Batman shooting shows obvious signs of being staged   Florida man kills door-to-door salesman: I’ll kill anybody that steps on my property Scalia Suggests ‘Hand-Held Rocket Launchers’ Are Protected Under Second Amendment Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (This week in Bronze Age Ethics) GOP Rep. Steve King Defends Dog Fighting Dutchman builds replica Noah's Ark after flood dream To buy Greta’s book: This link has all the info on how people can order the book in all formats: ebook, print, everything. It's probably the best link to give people for the book. http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/2012/05/15/wayasa/ Here's the link for buying the ebook on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007MCMKV6 Here's the link for buying the print book at the Richard Dawkins Foundation: http://store.richarddawkins.net/products/product And here's my blog: http://freethoughtblogs.com/greta/ Visit our Website at http://dissonancepod.com for more info.

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Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. This is Cognitive Dissonance. Every episode we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news, makes it big, or makes us mad. It's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. For this episode, we have Greta Christina from freethoughtblogs.com slash Greta Christina, and also the author of Why Are You Atheists So Angry? I think we can probably find some reasons why atheists are so angry, hence the existence of this show. Greta, thanks for being on.

Thank you so much for having me. A very quick correction, the URL for the blog is freethoughtblogs.com slash Greta. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you. And if anybody just wants to Google it, it's called Greta Christina's blog. I definitely missed the class in writing school that said how to title your blog cleverly. And for those, I actually was doing that exact thing looking for the blog. And if you mistype Greta and type Great Christina's book, you will actually get corrected by Google for Great

Christian books. So it's a little bit of Google irony if you typo that. Definitely. So, Greta, the story I want to talk about with you is from the New York Times. This is from the Africa column. I love that they have an Africa column or division. The whole continent gets one heading. Islamists in North Mali, stone couple to death. Islamists in control of a town in northern Mali evidently buried a couple up to their necks and then repeatedly struck them with stones until they were dead. And their crime was

premarital sex. Now, Greta, the title of your book, again, as I mentioned, is Why Are You Atheists So Angry? It strikes me that this might be one of those reasons. This is definitely one of those reasons. If this story had happened before I had written the book, it definitely would have made it into the list of things that make me angry about religion. I mean, angry isn't even a strong enough word about this story. I read this story, and it just made me sick and sad and absolutely furious it's it's the idea that that anybody would be able to commit such a barbaric act you know ever in human history but especially in the year 2012 that people would be buried up to their necks and then

stoned to death i mean it's just appalling for the supposed crime of having out of wedlock sex and having out of wedlock children, which first of all, the couple said they didn't even do. And second, who cares? The idea that having sex out of wedlock, having consensual sex and consensual children out of wedlock would be punishable not just by death, but by such a barbaric form of death. It's just really utterly repugnant to me. And the thing that really struck me about this story, when I read it in the Times, was that the people who committed this act specifically said they did it because God wanted them to do it. They specifically said it was the law of Sharia that prescribed it, that God willed it.

And this is the point that I make in my book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, is a point I make in that book, which is people do horrible things for all kinds of reasons. Religion is not the only thing that inspires people to do terrible, terrible things. You know, it's unfair to make that accusation, but religion seems to be uniquely capable of inspiring really appalling acts that people would otherwise just shrink from. And the reason for that is that there's no reality check. You know, the whole idea of what religion is, pretty much by definition, religion is a belief in the invisible, it's a belief in the unknowable, in audible voices, you know, beings that we can't

see or touch or know exist, beings that we have no, you know, we have no way to tell if they even exist, much less to settle any kind of disagreements we have among religious believers about what God wants and what God is and what kinds of laws God is supposedly setting out for us. There's no way to tell. There's no reality check. And so when people believe something as appalling and as utterly morally repugnant as God wants us to bury people up to their necks in the ground, throw rocks at their heads until they die because they had sex without being married, there's no reality check to say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe this isn't correct. Maybe God wants us to do something else. Maybe God wants us to be nice

to each other. Maybe God doesn't care what kind of sex we're having or with whom, as long as it's consensual. Reality check is no way to tell what God really wants and what God doesn't want. And so if you have a belief in, say, a political ideology, for instance, you know, political ideology is a good example of a kind of belief that inspires people to do really bad things. People do bad things based on political ideology. But ultimately, there's this reality check. If you have a belief in that, say, in, say, Soviet-style communism, and you think if we organize our country according to Soviet style communism, you know,

within 50 years, everybody's going to be eating strawberries and cream and do go all live in this egalitarian utopia. If that doesn't happen, eventually people notice because you're making a promise about this life, making a promise about this world. And if the ideology that you're putting doesn't pan out, people will notice.

But because religion is this belief in the invisible and the unknowable and is in the afterlife after you're dead and nobody can tell you about it. You know, nobody has any way of knowing what's really happening supposedly in heaven or hell because there's no reality check. hell because there's no reality check uh people will just commit these atrocities and they'll continue to commit atrocities with any kind of you know with any kind of break on it the the one thing you talk about in your book you talk about uh you have this this section where you talk about the moderates and you say uh you know the moderates lots of times prioritize prioritize wishful thinking over reality but in this case, the moderates sort of stood by while they murdered these people. So in a way, they're not just prioritizing wishful thinking, they're actually prioritizing a more horrible reality over the current reality.

And that's one of the big complaints that I have about religion is people will often say, oh, when you criticize religion, I have this long list of 99 things that piss off the God list, this long list of things about religion that make me angry. And moderate or progressive believers will often say, oh, but that's those, you're criticizing the extreme version of religion. You're criticizing, you know, the hardcore, the fundamentalists, you know, the violent extremists. And well, first of all, it's not like that kind of religion is unusual. You know, extremist religion is all over the world. And it's, you know, very prevalent in a lot of the country, including in the United States. But it's also the case that even if even in the case

of progressive or moderate religious believers, they're still endorsing the idea, the basic idea of faith. They're still endorsing this basic idea that it's okay to believe things that you have no reason to think are true, that it's okay to just say, I believe in God and I believe that whatever I think God is telling me, I'm going to believe is true. I'm going to reject any kind of reality check that there might be in the world around me on my beliefs. I'm going to prioritize my beliefs over reality, over any evidence. And all too often, progressive and moderate believers will stand by when the extremist version of religion is playing out in the world. The extremist version of religion is playing out in the world because to them, the idea of faith is more important and the idea of defending this idea of faith is It lends credibility to the idea that you can make your decisions about the world based on whatever messages you think you're getting from God, and that you can reject evidence, that you can reject

reason. And that idea is a bad one. the core idea of faith is what does harm. And sometimes it does extreme, horrible, hideous harm as it did in the story that we're talking about. And sometimes it does more moderate harm, such as undercutting education, you know, convincing people to pursue faith healing instead of, you know, actual medicine, you know, that sort of thing. But it still does harm. The idea that you can base your life on what you imagine your imaginary friend in the sky

is telling you without any reality check on it, that you should prioritize faith over evidence, that is a fundamentally bad idea. Since this came out, since the story was released, the government of Mali has come out and said, hey, you know, we don't endorse that. That shit's barbaric. I mean, they've come out and been pretty strongly worded about this incident. It's too graphic and horrifying to justly call an incident, right? I mean, it makes it trivial in some way. But it strikes me immediately when I read that. It's like, well, great, two people are still dead and you're not in control.

So you've allowed this culture, this culture of religiosity, which is I think what you were talking about just a moment ago, this deference toward faith to have a foothold in your communities, to have power and sway within communities in your country. So great, you've come out after the fact and you've said, well, that was barbaric. But they're still already dead and you're not in control. You're clearly, you know, any pretense toward civil authority at that point has been surrendered to this religious authority and religious deference toward that authority. I mean, I will say right off the bat, I'm not an expert in foreign policy. I'm not an expert in international relations. And I'm certainly very far from an expert on

what's happening in this region and the politics of this region. And I think it's entirely possible that the government in, you know, the government of mali is very much opposed i'm very glad that they've come out as fervent as strongly as they have and i'll make these acts and i don't know enough about the politics of the region to to be able to to comment on them you know i feel like i need to lay that out uh what i will say is that if they have allowed, you know, essentially an Islamic theocracy, an Islamic shadow government or, you know, parallel government to theirs to flourish without opposition, then yes, I mean, basically, you know the this is the consequences and you know again i keep coming back to this idea that when you have what is essentially a theocracy whether it's an official theocracy such as the type that you have in countries like iran or saudi arabia or whether it's an unofficial theocracy in the kind that we have apparently in mali and in other countries and in south carolina

exactly where okay the law says they're not supposed to do this, but the people, the religious organizations have so much social power and they have, you know, they have, you know, they have, they sort of

essentially become a government, even if they're not officially a government, that, that again, when you have, you know, government, quote, unquote, whether it's official or unofficial, by religion, you know, again, there's, there's, once again, there's no reality check that, you know, who's to say whether what God really wants, who's to say what God's ruling on, you know, this particular crime or this particular situation is.

you know, this particular crime or this particular situation is. And so what you have is religious leaders who claim to speak for God, and they get this kind of false authority, because people think, oh, well, they're speaking for God. And if you believe in God, and if you believe fervently enough in God, God's authority takes precedence over the law. God's authority takes precedence over any democratically elected government. God's authority takes precedence over the Constitution. God's authority takes precedence over everything. And therefore, anybody who's claiming to speak for God gets this mantle of authority that's entirely unearned. And that's very difficult to bring down. So if you've tuned in just to hear Greta speak, which I fucking do not blame you at all, just to tune in to hear her. But we're going to actually

have her on at the end of the show. We're going to have a few news items and some bullshit and some joking around between now and then with just Tom and I. But later on in the show, we're going to have a few news items and some bullshit and some joking around between now and then with just Tom and I. But later on in the show, we're going to invite her back. We're going to talk about her book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless and about her blog. But you're just going to have to sort of deal with us until then. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.

Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar. So Cecil, this story is from MSN News. Indonesian police arrest 62 Tiger Woods and Steven Seagal impersonators over Ramadan bar attack. 62 people, most of them minors, attacked a bar in Jakarta for serving alcohol. Cecil, they attacked it carrying swords and golf clubs. And sickles, it says. Part of me wonders if they thought it was actually a zombie apocalypse instead. Because these are the weapons of the zombie apocalypse. Samurai swords, sickles, and golf clubs.

If you were stuck in a vendor and all they sold were samurai swords, sickles, and golf clubs, you would be fine for the entire zombie apocalypse. You wouldn't have to worry one moment of the zombie apocalypse. So I think that's probably what they thought was going on. You would have to worry about the purveyor of those items, though. I mean, if you're stuck in that store doing a zombie apocalypse, at some point you have to look at the proprietor and say, wait a minute. You made a living before the zombie apocalypse?

Selling swords and golf clubs and yeah they knew that islamists were going to be around the corner knocking down bars evidently take that ramadan i gotta i'm just throwing this out there ramadan sucks yeah it does ramadan super sucks i i actually you know i read this and the very first thing that pops to mind is who just has swords who just i can understand the golf clubs golf yeah you're angry you grab the first fucking stick implement i can understand sickles you know maybe you got a little field or garden or whatever you know you grab a sickle that's but swords you just fucking we gotta check that bar why they're serving alcohol. It's a bar. I know. Fuck it. It's Ramadan. They were there before.

I know. But we still, we got to attack it. Why? Ramadan. I don't know what that is. Get your swords. That I understand. I'll be right back, sir.

Yeah. The thing that they say, they say that they're committing sins. They get drunk. So action must be taken. That's what they said. You know what? I wonder what the first thing I want to say is mind your own fucking business, asshole. I guess that's the first thing I want to say.

But then, you know, you got to wonder. You're like, OK, you believe in this fucking magic dude in the sky who has given us free will. I have the free will to drink during Ramadan. Now, God, your God, may fucking really have it in for me when it comes time for me to fucking check out he may be like man i am so pissed i'm gonna torture you forever and ever because you drank during ramadan maybe he'll do that but why do you have to inflict some fucking justice for your god in between like can't you just fucking can't you wait are you that impatient maybe god is like a bad middle manager he's like he's just delegating everything.

You know, everything that comes across his desk. Well, I got to give this to 62 youths armed with swords and golf clubs. Where are my 62 youths? I got to give it to my sales team. They're like going door to door selling perfume and fucking Avon. They were like armed with golf clubs just in case. Yeah. These are my just in case golf clubs.

Yeah, because you could get really fucked up off that perfume. If you drink it. Ramadan really is a stupid fucking thing because there's a couple of other stories we got about Ramadan. We did. We got this one from Borneo Post Online, the largest English news site in Borneo. I'm suspecting your competition is not fierce. Eleven Muslims have been nabbed by the Islamic religious department for not fasting. So basically they were just eating a food.

It's like, Hey, you know what? I'm hungry because I'm made of biology. I would like, I would like to metabolize something. I would like fucking ATP to be produced within my fucking. No,

whatever Ramadan, but I'm hungry. No Ramadan arrested. I would be I'm hungry. No, Ramadan. Arrested. I would be arrested every year. No kidding, right? I can't go four hours without a snack. What are you kidding me?

I think they have to wait till sundown. You would think that their fucking god would have the common decency to move this shit to a fucking winter month. No kidding, right? When it's like sundown immediately. Right? Like in December, like where you're like, oh, the sun's up and it's right back down. Great. Time to eat. Ah, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.

The summertime, that's a fucking mean joke. Like I can't even go like four hours. Like I said, I need my own fucking fingers after five hours. Are you kidding me? Like I'd fucking start chewing on my calf just to get a little sustenance at a certain point during the day. What about if you're chewing gum? I mean, you're not really eating at that point. I don't know.

You're just like, this is like chewing. Yeah, but the fucking, you know, the Jews, they can't go in a fucking elevator on some days. They can only go in the elevator if the fucking buttons automatically press themselves. Right? Because you can't reach out. How do you get dressed as a Jew? How do you button your pants on the Sabbath? You're just like, I hope the clothes fall.

Do you have to wear like a Wallace and Gromit style contraption? You need like a bedpole where you just slide down it and you're in your outfit, you know? Right? That's what I mean. Or you just get dressed the night before. Yeah, you must. Yeah, you sleep in your clothes. The thing is about the same thing I suspect applies here.

They probably have ways to get around it. Like they've they've somehow, you know, they they've fucking out thought God. Oh, we got you, man. You know, like I think that there's some ways that they probably get around it. But this seems just it just seems stupid. And the next one we're talking about a guy drinking in public in the desert water he wasn't drinking like whiskey and not that it would matter but he wasn't drinking he was drinking water well you need water like we're mostly water that's what we are like how you

feeling well mostly water that's how i'm fucking feeling what are you fucking i mean you live in the desert like you said. You just – this is just mean-spirited. What do you do if you're like a construction worker working outside and it's 104 fucking degrees? Die. Yeah. You die. That's great.

Because you can't – at a certain point, your body is like, well, I'm shutting all that down. Just all of it is going down. This article comes from Bic Yasmer. This is independent news of the world, Cecil. Don't make fun of Bic Yasmer. Bic Yasmer. Yeah, I can't even pronounce it. But anyway, weren't they saying like this guy technically was just like he was an Asian drinking water?

Right, right. And they held him and they detained him until – and they're going to detain him until after Ramadan. You think maybe the guy was like visiting. What if he was there on vacation? He's not even part of your religion. Well, countries are just – you're always part of it. They're like, welcome. You are part of the religion now.

Which is why I'll never visit a single fucking one of them. No shit. Don't put that in the travel brochure. By the way, you'll get fucking arrested if you drink water during the day. You know, it's like you travel to some countries, it's like, oh, don't drink the water. Oh, you mean like I should just drink bottled water, right?

So I don't contract it. No, I mean, don't drink the water. Really? Like, at all? No, not at all. Not till sundown. Well, I'm not a gremlin. I'm not a gremlin. Like, I'm not gonna... If it even splashes out, it'd be more me's don't pop out.

I mean, I have the mask for that, but... That's why they needed the sickles and the samurai swords to stop a horde of gremlins. So we're gonna take a break and give you all the information that you need to find us on facebook to find us on twitter send us emails leave us voicemails google plus is also an option for you i've been pretty okay somewhat about posting shit to google plus you can check us

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So Cecil, this next story is from naturalnews.com. Real news powered by the people, naturally. Not actually powered by the people. No, no. Power to the people is what I say. So first of all i have to mention realnews.com is crazy this website is fucking insane like you look at this website and if you're not immediately skeptical of everything that you read everything even the

fucking copyright at the bottom you should be skeptical of then you're just not a thinking person yeah anybody that's selling colloidal silver or thyroid helper um you know what i mean like there's something there's certainly and there's a picture of a fucking a cross-section picture of a toilet on the side in the ad that says discover the truth about your toilet it could be killing you my toilet is killing me you're an asshole you know what killed a lot of people not having toilets and let me me tell you, I killed a couple toilets in my day. So this story is Colorado Batman shooting shows obvious signs of being staged. This is by Mike Adams, the health ranger.

Bullshit. Bullshit. This story is kind of crazy. Bullshit. This story is kind of crazy. The suggestion here, Cecil, is that the Colorado Batman shooting was part of an elaborate government conspiracy to force a conversation about gun control. There is so much conspiracy garbage, Tom, in this all fucking glued together that it almost doesn't – I mean it almost fucking turns into like a black hole of idiocy like it's almost fucking like voiping out of existence and sucking me into the computer it's so fucking unbelievably stupid but you know i mean you just work your way down

this article that they start out the article talking about um mind altering neuroscience research and the reason why i i can say that so quickly is because it's very highly bolded on the page, right? So you know one of these websites when they've got a bold bunch of shit, you know that they're kind of, they're already trying to fucking lean in with their point as we move forward. But one of the things they say is

that he wasn't acting in his right mind and that typically can only be accomplished through drugs drugs hypnosis or trauma hypnosis what what did they say like they fucking came to said you're getting very sleepy when i count to bane you will kill everyone like what what the fuck man like really hypnosis is what caused it you know what else causes people to act crazily? Being crazy. Yeah, being crazy helps. This just discounts the idea of mental illness entirely.

It's just like, well, no, no, no, no. It had to be that he was a totally normal, fully functioning dude who some third-party actor just co-opted in some way, either through hypnosis, because that's really going to happen, or drugs. Can you imagine being given a drug where you're like, oh man, I'm so fucking high. I'm totally going to fucking put on this vest and go shoot up a Batman movie. Yeah, no kidding, right? Like that's the first thing that comes to your head. Not, I'm going to go get a bag of Cheetos. Right.

Really? I'm going to make myself the biggest ice cream sundae and watch Mythbusters for like four hours. And then I'm going to fuck it. You know, even worse case scenario, you're like, you know, I could go for somebody's face right now. Either it all leads back to munchies right no the the next the next paragraph though they start talking about well how he's not consistent with being a crazy person right because he calmly sort of gave up and he booby-trapped his house and then told people about it it's like that doesn't sound like a you know somebody who was uh who's a typical crazy person and you're like well in the

fucking previous care paragraph you're fucking arguing well, in the fucking previous paragraph, you're fucking arguing that he was like given hypnosis and mind-altering drugs. And in this one, you're saying, well, he doesn't act like a normal crazy person. You know, the fact that he's acting unpredictably is a way to say, I don't know, that he might be fucking nuts. Remember that normal crazy person? No? Yeah, that's because that's kind of the essence of mental

illness is that there's, and this sort of has that fundamental misunderstanding about mental illness, right? That if you're mentally ill, that you're not capable of performing complex actions. But we know for sure from history and from, you know, that's just not true. Like there's plenty of people who are severely mentally ill that engage in incredibly complex actions, you know, that's just not true. Like there's plenty of people who are severely mentally ill that that engage in incredibly complex actions, you know, making bombs and, you know, dressing up as the Joker and shooting up a movie theater isn't inconsistent with insanity unless you don't understand insanity. This is getting into the next part of the article where he's talking about how he had these exotic gear and these bombs. It's not inconsistent with what normal people can get either because they say pictures from inside the apartment are fairly disturbing. The devices look to be sophisticated, adding booby traps or something we've never seen. A knife, a bulletproof vest, a ballistic helmet, a gas device, a gas mask, military SWAT clothing, and unidentified blah, blah, blah, unidentified stuff. And they're saying that this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections in military equipment or someone with a connection that happens to fucking connect to the internet. Because I looked up each one of those fucking things and they are available for sale

for about 200 to $700 a piece, depending on your item. You know, certain items are more, but a gas mask I could buy for as little as $20 or as much as $300. A ballistic helmet I can get for 200 bucks to 700 bucks. A bulletproof vest I could probably pay about the same amount. For SWAT clothing, you're saying he needs a connection to get SWAT clothing. I go to the fucking army surplus store and get SWAT clothing. Are you fucking serious? SWAT clothing is just fucking black pajamas with pockets. You know,

it's just like, what is that? Like the, I get, yeah, the bulletproof vest is kind of a specialty item, but they're available. They're so available that people bought them and shipped them overseas to our

own soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq conflict. I mean, families were buying body armor and shipping it overseas to our own soldiers. That shit's readily fucking available. I've got news for you. The only thing you can't buy online are the guns themselves. And all the guns they list that are perfectly legal in the U.S., like it or lump it. There's nothing like a shotgun. Oh, okay.

Well, that's not it's not like the guy had a fucking abrams you know attack vehicle he didn't swoop in like well jesus that guy had an f-16 we didn't think that they sold those military fighter jets to the apache helicopter in the middle of him and just started shooting no that's just not the fucking case he had a he had a and the thing is he has-automatic rifle. An AR-15 is what they've been saying that he had. Seven automatic. That's fucking – I could go out and buy an AR-15 right now. Now, I've got to wait 48 hours to get it.

But you know what? All I've got to do is plan my shooting spree two days in advance. It's not that hard. The other thing, Tom, and this is the last thing I want to say about the starter calls. It's – well, maybe not the last thing because you had a point about the $20,000. We're going to talk about in a second. But one of the things they say is the FBI has a track record for staging similar assaults and then stopping them last minute. It says the FBI, of course, which has a long history of setting up and staging similar attacks and then stopping them right before they happen.

See our four documented stories on these facts. Well, they had fucking whoops, fucking dropped the ball on that on that one sorry we were at the fucking concession stand getting popcorn he was supposed to come in when bane actually drove fucking his car in we a fucking asshole came in a little early and he fucked half of the people up we were gonna stop it as it happened are you fucking serious 17 people died that's not a fucking stopping it before it happens maybe they called in sick you know maybe the guy's like oh man oh i got a bad case of the stomach flu can somebody stop that mass murderer that we set on that's crazy why would the fbi send like a fucking attack dog against innocent civilians only to stop it that just, that's the worst kind of paranoid, kooky bird nonsense.

As soon as you hear that, it's like, wow, I have dismissed you. Yeah. Well, and then the next part where they're saying, Tom, you talked about this before. We had a conversation about this. How does an unemployed, Tom, tell me how an unemployed medical student can afford $20,000 in weapons and gear? Credit cards. America.

Debt. Like, we, when I was in college, people fucking shat credit cards at you. Like, everywhere you went, you'd go to like, you'd go to take a piss, you'd grab like a fucking paper towel

to dry your hands, credit cards fall out. I remember, I remember filling out a credit application when I was in college and saying like, I was a drug dealer and a prostitute. All I wanted was the free t-shirt. You remember that? Like they would be on your campus and

they'd be giving away a free shirt just to fill this application. I'd be like, my income is zero. I am a drug dealer and a prostitute. Like three weeks later, you get the card in the mail. It's like a $5,000 limit. You only need like four of those because the whole game, the whole credit card game is to get college students in debt while their earning potential is low. So they rack up a lot of debt. And then when they get jobs, they spend the rest of their fucking lives paying high interest. That's the game. So $20,000 isn't even that much money.

Not for a med student. Yeah, not for a – and for a med student? They're probably coming coming they're probably fucking begging him to take the credit card at this point right and the last thing tom the last thing i want to talk about is at the bottom near the i mean near the bottom of this giant fucking wall of text fucking time cube like article cube fucking there's a part where it says governments routinely murder millions and there's a list here of, you know, a bunch of them. And they're like 50 million dead.

Mao Zedong, 12 million dead. Adolf Hitler, 8 million dead. Leopold II of Belgium and Congo, blah, blah, blah. And they go on and on. And, you know, like what am I supposed to believe? You know, and coming in at number 14, it's 16 dead in a movie theater. Number 13, Number 13. This is a long distance dedication to Rwanda.

Like, are you serious? Like fucking like like they stopped the list at 800,000 dead. Yeah. Is it that is the next one down? 16 people is the next one down after that 16. Because I think that there's probably a little bit more in that fucking gradient that we're missing. Right. You know, that's and it's such a it's such a liar's argument to be like, well, it's been done in the past. So that must mean it's true now. Oh, wow.

And you have your you're comparing events that aren't analogous and using events in the past to demonstrate why something is true now without evidence? That is a fucking the most poorly reasoned piece. And the thing is, is like there's so many points in it. This is so typical of the online community though, isn't it? Where they just – they'll just belch out fucking so much text at you that you just can't respond to it all. Because you just don't have the fucking energy to respond to it all. They're making points. They're trying to say that certain things are fact when they're not.

They're making like sweeping broad generalizations that they just want you to accept as true. And then they're throwing in all these other arguments on top of it. So in order to really take it apart, you'd have to write half a fucking novel to take that apart. Cause it's, I'm not kidding. It's like fucking six pages worth of text if you were to copy paste. And, and that's not something anybody wants to do. Everybody's just like so exhausted when they look at it. They're like, Oh gosh, I can't, there's no way I want to reason with you. You're just such an idiot. And other people that are idiots are going to glom onto that and be like,

well, I think that stuff was a Colorado shooting. I don't know about that one. That seemed like a government job. Natural News really had a point. Pass me the colloidal silver. I want to be blue. I'm turning blue right now. 100% organic blue.

Made with real Smurfs. So, Cecil, this story is from raw story the raw story florida man kills door-to-door salesman quote i'll kill anybody that steps on my property good luck doing that in jail when they step on your property this story fucking sucks a man in cape coral florida on on Wednesday was arrested. Basically, this door-to-door salesman walks up to his house. The guy's not even home. Knocks on the door. Nobody answers.

Guy turns around, starts walking down the driveway. Crazy nut. Drives into his driveway. What are you doing on my property? Oh, I'm here to sell you some fucking meat and seafood. Blam. Shoots him. Gets out of the, and shoots him again in the head, quote, for effect. This guy sounds kind of balanced.

I mean, I think he probably stood his ground, Tom. He did, in fact, stand his ground. Yeah, so I don't think that there's a problem with this. I think that this is perfectly valid under Florida law, right? Somebody came on your property, you're allowed to shoot him in the face. Is that how that works? You know, there's a lot of uproar recently, especially in this Colorado shooting,

where a ton of people that were pro-gun keep on saying the same thing, which is like, if there was an armed person in that situation, this wouldn't have, it wouldn't have happened. Who in this situation, Tom, would you arm to stop it from happening? I don't think that there's an answer to that. I don't think so either. Because who's going to – who really is honestly going to – let's say this fucking salesman had a gun on his person. And he comes walking down.

Oh, hey, what are you doing on my property? Oh, I'm just going to sell you some seafood. Blam! What happens? He's still dead. Right. It didn't stop him. If he starts reaching for the gun, he's even more dead because the other guy already had his gun out.

The idea that guns somehow protect people from violence is a stupid notion. We're going to get to that in a little bit. But I think that it really does come forward in this story. Here's an example of a guy who has 12 fucking guns in his house, a guy who's perfectly capable of going to the store, buying a bunch of fucking guns and being a complete fucking goober. He's just a fucking nut job who wants to kill people because they trespass. This fucking guy doesn't deserve to have a firearm. But in this country, we don't give a fuck about that. Yeah, we don't care at all.

You know, I mean, is that they stand your ground? You know, this guy, I've seen several justifications, you know, where somebody said, well, how many no trespassing signs does the guy need to have on his property before people take him seriously? Shut the fuck up. And yeah, no trespassing solicitation is not trespassing. First of all, walking down somebody's driveway and solicitation is not trespassing. First of all, walking down somebody's driveway and soliciting is not trespassing.

But even if you are trespassing, is that now a capital offense where the judge jury is the property owner? Like, well, you know, that guy was, you know, that kid thought it would be funny to egg my house.

So I shot him in the face, but I had a no trespassing sign. So I stood my ground. I felt threatened. Tom, think about it this way. It's illegal to booby trap your place, your house, your property in the United States. And the reason why it's illegal to do that is because it's fucking, it's not a capital offense to fucking trespass.

It's not a capital offense to even burglarize somebody's place. So the idea that you would have a fucking like a loaded shotgun on the window and your window open and they slide the window in and they lean their head and they fucking get it blown off. That's illegal to do. You're not allowed to do that in this country. And it's because you're not allowed to fucking just murder people fucking willy nilly. When did we become a society that thinks it's okay because you have a fucking sign on your lawn that you could shoot somebody whatever if i wore a shirt that said i'm gonna shoot you i'm allowed to shoot you yeah i mean it's not like that's a fair warning you know

it's not like you said well i gave him fair i said don't trespass here like oh well i ignored that sign i trespassed that doesn't mean that the risk is murder i mean the risk is not murder the risk is you know i'll have you arrested for trespassing that's the risk yeah it's it's totally unreasonable it's like oh yeah i thought i could be a door-to-door salesman well fucking went door to blam and we don't want door to blam exactly you don't want and like you said like what would it have helped if the other guy was armed? I don't know. Is any community benefited by a shootout in the streets? I mean, what if they got-

Okay, corral. Right. Right. I mean, we have an epidemic of violence here in Chicago. We're both, you live in Chicago. I live outside of Chicago. Chicago has an absolute epidemic of violence that's been the subject of worldwide attention. And, you know, people are

killed collaterally all the time in gang violence. You know, just last week, a four-year-old kid was shot at the beach during a gang dispute because it's not a good idea for people to just shoot at each other like it's never a good idea well i don't know i don't know that uh one of the supreme court justices would agree with you cecil you must be referring to this article from thinkprogress.org transition scalia suggests handheld rocket launchers are protected under the second amendment. Um,

Scalia is nuts. He basically says anything you can hold in your arms. Like if you could transport it with your arm muscles, then it is an arm. You can shoot it and own it. And God bless America. Yeehaw. Launchers. I love this right like i do not think in their

wildest dreams the fucking founding fathers thought a weapon like a handheld rocket launcher would ever be carried by civilians i'm sorry but my interpretation here is so different and you know i'm not a constitutional scholar you know this guy first off doesn't he look like a little hobgoblin like when this guy, first off, doesn't he look like a little hobgoblin? Like when you look at him, you're just like, you look like a little hobgoblin. He's like this hunched over little old man. And he's the kind of guy who, you know, while everybody else was getting girlfriends, like he cut a hole in his tort law book and fuck that. You know what I mean? Like that's sort of what you get when you think about this guy. But really, I feel like people like this, specifically people like this, where they talk about the founding fathers with this sort of reverence, where they talk about the founding documents with reverence.

I don't know that that's such a good plan to hold those founding documents in such reverence. I mean we've changed a lot of things in this country. We've defined rights differently. We've defined voting differently. We've defined voting differently. We define marriage differently now. We got a lot of shit wrong early on. And really, I think we need more room to look at the Constitution and say, hey, you know what? We've evolved. We've evolved as a species. We were more technically advanced than they could have ever imagined at this point. We are more diverse than they could have ever imagined at this point. We've got to take a look at this document that we hold on high that we think can do no wrong and really examine it.

Because when you start to hold things on high like that, you start to worship them. And when you start to worship them, then bad things happen. See the Bible. Yeah, no shit. I think that's a great point. You know, like you said, technology plays, I think, a key role in this. This idea that you can be a constitutional literalist, you know, and say, oh, well, it's about keeping and bearing arms. So as long as you can bear the arms, well, that's not really the founding fathers had no idea that a rocket launcher could even be a thing. You know, what about a suitcase bomb? Like, what about a suitcase?

What about a suitcase nuke? You know, a dirty bomb? Yeah, you can bear that in your hands. I mean, if if we ban all suitcase bombs, only criminals will have suitcase bombs. So everybody needs suitcase bombs. You know, I mean, like, that's that's fucking that's a level of ratcheting up the insanity that just beggars belief it's utterly insane you know there was a time in in history and world history people carried swords around you know because it's swords and

there's a certain element of hey if we if we're going to sword fight, maybe I die. Maybe you die. Guns change the equation. And then rocket launchers further change the equation. Yeah. Rocket launchers are a fucking, they're an exponent. You know what I mean? Like they're not even fucking involved in the regular numbers that are involved in the equation.

There's an idea in this country, though, that that shit should be protected. And, you know, there's a sort of an ideal in this country that we think about when, you know, when you think about gun control. I personally own a gun, Tom. I know you own a gun. You own more guns than I want, I own two, I think you own four or three. Um, the thing is, is like, we use our guns for sporting. If the, if they came by tomorrow and told me, Hey, you know, there's no more guns in the United States. I would be okay with giving my gun back to the, to the United States so that they could just take it. And I would not have a gun. I wouldn't play shooting sports anymore, which is what we do with them. I wouldn't go out and do trap shooting. I wouldn't go hunting with it. And I'd be OK with it. And I know you'd be OK with it, too. And I think that there's a lot of people in this country that are level headed enough to really think that they'd be OK with it.

lot more people in this country that would definitely not be okay with it. That would be the pry it out of my cold dead hands type people that you're never going to get their guns away. So we, we start off with this, with this, uh, sort of false dichotomy, sort of, we have this false notion in this country that we think when we start talking about gun control, what we're talking about is everybody's just going to give up their guns. That's never fucking going to happen here ever, period. So we need to fucking wash that out of the consciousness. That's not going to happen. What can happen and what should happen for gun control that is realistic is really what we should be talking about. Yeah, and it's reasonable restrictions, right?

I mean everything else is governed. Everything else we – and we allow certain governance of, of weapons, you know, like, uh, by and large, automatic weapons are forbidden to the, to the populace. And, and there are people who oppose that. There are people that, that strikes me like it's, I can't even imagine having a conversation where somebody is like, well, you know, it would have come in handy last Wednesday to be able to fire off 60 rounds in two seconds. But because I had to squeeze the trigger and, you know, my finger got so tired after like 25 bullets were ejected. You know, what the fuck? Are you serious? It's, you know, there's a certain amount of reason that has to

enter into the equation when you have the conversation. You know, you have to say, well, reason that has to enter into the equation when you have the conversation. You have to say, well, this is an inherently dangerous item. And if people are going to own it, there needs to be some thought and some consideration paid to the danger that that item poses to the individual who owns it and the families of those people and the people that those people in turn come in contact with. But we're like, you know, we're afraid to have that conversation. It's like you said. It's like there's this false notion that it's an all-or-nothing argument, that it's a zero-sum game. It's like, you've got to have every weapon imaginable, all the weapons,

fucking raptors should be available, aircraft carriers, battleships. Who cares? If you've got the money, buy it. And then the other side is like, nobody should have spoons. They could be sharpened into a point. You know, like that's nonsense. And neither side is ever going to coalesce into ever happening. So like you said, just throw that shit out.

And the other thing too that I think we really need to have besides regulation of some sort – and I mean regulation should be pretty tight. I don't dislike the idea of regulation. You've got to go through a lot of tests to be able to drive a car in this country. You've got to go through a lot of tests to be certified as a fucking – somebody who has a license to serve food in this country. You've got to go through a test. You've got to go through a test. You've got to study for that test in order to drive around in a big truck with hazardous materials in it. You've got to have certification. You've got to go through a commercial driving license,

a test review with hazardous materials. There's work you have to do. All those things are dangerous. You can hurt other people with all those things, with a car, by feeding them bad food, by spilling fucking acid on them, okay? You can hurt people that way. We regulate those things. Why don't we regulate guns? Where it's so easy to kill another human being with a gun,

we don't regulate it at all. In our state, it's a fucking joke to get a gun. It really is. You sign a sheet that says, I'm not fucking smearing shit on myself. Like I am not, I am not fucking bonkers, fucking crazy. That's what you have to say. And I'm not a felon. Right. And you could probably lie on it and still get a gun. The idea that, that we're, you know, that regulation isn't involved is stupid. But, you know, I think the

other thing that we do in this country is there's a lot of times many people do gun crime and they get a slap on the wrist. I think like in other countries and in many other countries, gun crime is a serious fucking deal. And I think that while regulation needs to happen, I think punishing people very, very severely for gun crime is something that really needs to happen, too. And I don't know who would be opposed to that. Well, you know, the problem is, and we touched on this earlier, but the problem is Scalia, right? The problem is that people have a constitutional right, and they think that that constitutional right gives them not just a legal authority, because that's what the constitution does. It gives you a legal authority, but it doesn't give you an ethical authority.

And ethical authority can only come from a reasoned, well-thought-out position that's defensible for a society and for a person. But the Constitution gives you a legal authority. And people look at that and they say, it's my fucking right. It's my right to own a gun. So I'm going to get this gun. I'm going to shoot everybody I know because I got a right to it. And that's crazy.

And like you said, in Illinois where we're at, if you buy a gun used, you don't have to do anything. There's no waiting. It's only new guns that have any regulations at all. You buy one used. There's no waiting period. No, there's a waiting period. You just don't. I mean, like, It's only new guns that have any regulations at all. You buy one used. There's no waiting period. No, there's a waiting period. You just don't. I mean, like, who's going to tell you?

You're going to go on Craigslist, meet a guy who's like, yeah, I don't even know if you can buy a gun on Craigslist. But I'm saying, like, if you, like, go on a forum, let's say, and the guy's like, yeah, I'm selling this gun. And you go to see him. He's supposed to tell you, I think by law, that you're supposed to wait two days. But is he going to wait two days and be like, okay, come back and see me in two days right you're here now no he's gonna hand you the money because there's nobody to look over the shoulder exactly there's nobody regulating that sale and illinois is the only state in this in the country that doesn't have concealed carry concealed carry in 49 other states that's insane people can walk around like it's the wild west fucking

yosemite samming that shit just because they want to it's like whoa i have a gun really what do you need it for nothing live in a civil society primarily safe most of the places that i go oh okay but i think i should have a gun so uh we're gonna we're gonna roll out a new segment that we're going to try to do weekly, although who knows if it's actually going to happen weekly. We had enough fucking time this week to do one for you, so we did one. So here it is, our new segment. And now, this week in Bronze Age Ethics. Dateline, Cabsale.

August 1st, 1708, BCE. Meet Cabsale's most eligible bachelor. Settle down, ladies, he's taken. Phineas, a 27-year-old tanner, sealed the deal last night when he raped 12-year-old little Lydia. The marriage took place last night as Lydia was walking home with a bag of seeds for her father's farm. Phineas took a liking to Lydia, and the rest is history. Now the two lovebirds are forever bonded in holy and beautiful matrimony. Because we all know the law, if a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged,

he must pay 50 pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he has violated her and he will never be allowed to divorce her. Phineas has paid Lydia's father according to tradition and the two are now on their honeymoon. Hey, you kids, get a room. This has been This Week in Bronze Age Ethics. So while that's fun and all, Tom, we do have something that we do want to talk to, talk about people on this break. We want to talk about our fundraiser, Apocalypse Without Borders. You know, Apocalypse Without Borders is so far raised $520 from our listeners, which I just, I truly think that's completely incredible.

We're recording this on a Wednesday. We released our show on Monday, right? Yeah, on Monday. That's crazy. And we're so incredibly grateful. The very first contribution was $100. That kind of generosity is just awesome. Doctors Without Borders is a really terrific cause, and we encourage you guys to go to our website and contribute.

And we'll be putting our money where our mouth is, and Cecil and I will be contributing as well. Yeah, we're going to be contributing that $100 in the next couple weeks. And then we're going to have that other $100 that we're also going to be contributing because you guys have well gone past the $200 mark. Right now, a couple people are tied for first because they have $100 donations. As we get a little closer, we'll let you know who's tied for first so you guys can fight it out, so to speak, with your donations. Maybe you might want to donate a second time to make sure that you're the person that gets a shirt. But right now, we have three people tied for the lead with $100 donations. Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Who?

Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out? Who?

Who? Who? Who? Who let the dogs out? So Cecil, this story is also from thinkprogress.org. GOP Representative Steve King defends dog fighting. And the picture, I have to say, it's awful. It really is awful.

The picture has Representative Steve King and right next to it, this horribly maimed dog. Yeah. It's kind of not safe for life almost. It's really not. But it's such – I love that whoever put this article together was like, well, let's compare these two. Well, I like that on the caption underneath they tell you who's on the left and who's on the right. I know. In case you can't figure it out. Like in the caption it says left, Stephen King. On the right, dogfighting victim.

I like that quite a bit. You could tell where they're going with this, right? dogfighting victim. I like that quite a bit. You could tell where they're going with this, right? But one of the things that they say here that the article says, and this is from the Think Progress article I'm going to read here, it says, of course, there is very good reason to ban dogfighting and other similar forms of cruelty. Now, this guy, by the way, in this article, I guess I should go back a little. This guy had said that, well, you know, we have MMA fighting. What's the big deal? We, you know, these people go out there and fight in a cage. What's the difference? Why can't we have dog fighting? Which really this ThinkProgress article really just hammers them on. It says, it says, of course, there's very good reason we ban dogfighting and other similar forms of cruelty.

Animals don't have a choice in the manner. Manny Pacquiao chooses to step in the ring. Michael Vick's dogs did not. Similarly, when a human boxer loses a fight, he's not ritually executed after the fight. The same is not always true in dogfighting, and that is absolutely true. I don't know if you remember it was so long ago but you and i talked about michael vick when he did this years ago when we covered it on everyone's a critic and we were talking about how we fucking electrocuted dogs how he picked them up and slammed them down until

they died uh this is a cruel form of uh voyeurism of a cruel form of sadism that people put together for their own jollies. They get off on this dogfighting bullshit. It's so not the same as a MMA fight, which is highly regulated, has doctors outside the outside waiting to help the people that if they get an injury, it has a ref there to stop it so nobody gets too injured. I mean, in these other fights, these dogs, they fight. I mean, if you look at the face on that dog, there wasn't a ref to stop that fight. No, no. Here's the other thing.

When you fight it, like when humans fight, they aren't allowed to bite each other. Like we recognize that there's something about using your teeth, which we're like, whoa, whoa. Now that's just fucked up. That just causes too much damage. Mike Tyson bit a dude's ear off and it was like a big fucking deal. We don't allow that. Like even if you were to draw the fucking false analogy, like even if you were going to say, like, well, this is somehow equal to this, which it's not, we already don't – like, OK, I'll – you know what, Cecil? I will go this far.

Dog fighting with no teeth? I don't have that big a problem with it. I think they just stand up and kind of nuzzle into each other. If they can't bite each other, fine. That's like – it'd be dog hugging, really. It really wouldn't be a lot of going on there maybe dog humping yeah exactly while but that's not even remotely analogous what kind of and this is the same guy who just this week also said that obama's parents

could have telegrammed the birth announcement from kenya yeah the this guy's still a birther. Oh, yeah. Who's taking this man seriously? The problem is, is fucking government's taking him seriously. The people of Iowa are taking him seriously by electing him, Tom. Right. Like, that's the problem. You know, and really fucking I think some people in this world, you know, need to understand what the fuck consent is. You need to understand what the fuck consent is. We have this thing now where obviously where the fucking people in the church don't understand what consent is.

And this is another, I think, example of people not understanding what consent is. These people consent to fight. And they're not going out there with fucking – fighting with fucking gloves that look like Wolverine, punching each other until they die oh they call that the stinger you're not allowed to use that anymore exactly it's like there's no that shit doesn't happen there the comparing the two is so fucking out of bounds and stupid you you you can't imagine that somebody would even put two and two together it's like it's like somebody can comparing and fucking, you know, like the sumo, the guys who dress in those big sumo suits and bounce into each other. Like, hey, we allow that. We should allow fucking crocodiles to fight in a ring. By this guy's theory, like every animal should just be always fighting every animal.

Because he's not condemning the human fighting either. He's not saying like, well, you know, the human fighting is wrong, like dog fighting. Instead he's saying like, hey, all fighting is cool with me. All fighting is awesome. I want to see fucking sharks fight gorillas. That's what I want to see. Sharks and gorillas, go. You want answers?

I think I'm entitled. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. Story of the week comes from cnn.com dutchman builds replica noah's ark after flood dream he should have gotten flood insurance after the flood dream that was a huge useless boat right yeah well you know i i kind of empathize with this guy. You know what I mean? Like, because I've in the past had dreams about eating pizza. And then the next day I ordered a

pizza. So I, I mean, I'm kind of with him on this. Like sometimes when you dream something, you're just like, man, that'd be awesome. And then you do it. So I think, you know, maybe not building an arc. I think probably getting flood insurance would be better, but still, you know, he, he still, he's just following his dreams. I once had a dream that I was eating a cheeseburger and I woke myself up with the clacking of my teeth clicking together. And I woke up so disappointed. I've never woken up feeling a sense of loss like that when I realized I didn't have the cheeseburger. That's awesome.

You know, you said earlier, you said it was a replica. And I'm going to read here from this article. It says, Hubers and his team built the boat by welding together metal holes of 25 barges into a single frame and then covered it with Scandinavian pine. It would be a replica. It's like a replica. If the ancient people had access to welding gear and metal barges, then it would be an exact replica. No, that's, you know, this is just like Noah's Ark because this one has a theater. And I remember Noah, no, Noah was a movie buff.

A lot of people don't know that because it's not true. It's like a showboat. It's actually just a carnival, like, cruise's all it is hey everybody i'm glad you chose noah's arc lines and i would point out that this boat seats 1500 people whereas noah's boat only sat one family it sat all the animals right it didn't right this one look through the fucking pictures and it looks very roomy for these animals you see the the panda bear behind the two flamingos and there's a fucking camel back there it's very roomy it's a very spacious it's like they have their own little little rooms here on the on the noah cruise line it looks looks good. I also am...

He says that he wanted to sail his Ark to London for the Olympics, but he was forced to abandon his plan to sail across the North Sea after authorities raised safety issues, probably because Arks aren't really good sailboats, owing to their lack of a sail.

Have you noticed the Ark doesn't have a sail? How do you steer the Ark? Hope. Yeah, right? Faith. The thing is fucking 450 feet long and made of metal and wood. What, are you going to hold your hand on a tiller? Here's the thing.

Tom, you don't understand. You don't fucking get God's divine mysteries. Let me explain this to you. That's very true. Here's the thing. He flooded the entire earth. What do you have to steer around? Yeah, okay.

All right. All right. You got me there. But, you know, at no point was he broadside to a wave. Like, at no point was he. Now, look, I just fucking told you. I know. I know.

I don't know. Anyway, the other thing, too, let's talk about the Noah story for a second. The fucking ridiculous Noah story. You know, the Ark itself is really fucking silly. Like you say, there's talk about the Noah story for a second. The fucking ridiculous Noah story. You know, the ark itself is really fucking silly. Like you say, there's no fucking sail on it. How the fuck do you steer it? What is it? Did you fucking convince all the fucking animals to row for you?

Is that how that works? It's like a galley. Heave! It's like heave! But, you know, here's the thing. They're talking about fucking gopher wood, right? They're saying Noah's boat was made of gopher wood. And they can't figure

out what the fuck that is today i looked this up today they're trying to figure out what that actually is because in the like gopher wood isn't a thing like that's not a real thing so they have to figure out like what is it a mistranslation is it are they talking about something else are they talking about laminated wood because there's a way in which you know you could say that instead of uh the like one of the, it's a different letter. So they're not sure what it even means. Is it just gopher boners? I think that's the smallest arc.

I don't know how you fit a lion on gopher boners. There's so many horny gophers. I'm just saying. They all just lace their penises together and just float on them. No, but like – but it seems like it fits the rest of the story, right? So I mean like really the one thing that you're worried about is the type of wood, not that you fit all those fucking animals on it or that you weren't blindsided by a wave or that the world was able to fill up with water. Like there's so many things in that story that are so un-fucking-believable that they fucking hurt your brain. But the one thing you're going to fucking nitpick about is the wood type? Right.

You know, in this story he says, too, he resolved to build the Ark to inspire children with the biblical story of how no inhabitants of his Ark survived the flood that, according to the Old Testament, washed the world clean of sin. That's a nice way to say drowned women and children and infants. Yes. Like, how is this? Okay, it didn't happen.

So none of those people died. I get that. But if you believe it happened, how are you going to inspire children with that? So you mean that if everybody does bad, that I'll just drown in a flood for no reason? Well, not again, because there's rainbows. Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah.

Well, don't worry. God loves you. I't worry god loves you i mean he loves you enough to fucking drown you so the holocaust is so hilarious So we're back with Greta Christina. You can find her blog at freethoughtblogs.com. She also is the author of the book, Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off The God List. Now, Greta, I got to ask this question first, I think. you atheists so angry 99 things that piss off the godless now now um greta uh you i you know i gotta ask this question first i think you are part of the lgbt community you are a feminist and you are

an atheist which one of those three things have has gotten you the most shit um that's a little bit of a hard question because the question has gotten me most shit from, um, certainly in the world at large, you know, as in the, you know, walking in the world at visible, very vocal, very activist form. It's been going on for decades now. It's been, you know, the very visible, you know, phase of the LGBT movement has been going on since 1969, ever since the Stonewall riots. And so we've had decades to educate people, to inform people, to get laws passed protecting LGBT people. Obviously not as much as we need to. There's still a lot of discrimination against LGBT people in a lot of the country and a lot of the world. But we've had many decades to educate people and to do this work. You know, the atheist movement has really only been very, very visible and very vocal and very active and very mobilized in the last few years. And people are just really not as familiar with us. And so I would say that when I go out into the world, when I go to, you know, when I travel, when I go, you know, travel around the country or whatever, I'm more reluctant to come out as an atheist than I am to come out as a queer person, especially among younger people.

I feel like people 30, 40 and under, for the most part, they don't care that much whether I'm gay or whether I'm bisexual. And they are going to be more likely to be upset by me being an atheist. Um, now within the atheist community, um, I obviously, if anybody's been following the assorted, you know, controversies and conflagrations have been going on with the, within the community, uh, I get more pushback, uh, for being a feminist than probably anything else. I think that that's, that's probably been the hardest thing for me within the atheist and skeptical community is my feminism. And the one thing I would say about that, though, even though that's very frustrating, and even though, you know, I've gotten a lot of stupid pushback, and I've also gotten a lot of really ugly, hostile, hateful, even violent and threatening pushback on the feminism. And that can be really hard.

It can be very frustrating. But at the same time, and I know this sounds totally bass-ackwards, but I find it very heartening. And here's the reason I find it heartening, is when you look at the history of other social change movements, when you look at the history of such as the LGBT movement or the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, what you see is that these movements didn't deal with these issues of inclusivity and diversity issues, such as, you know, sexism and racism and so on. They didn't deal with those issues early on. And so, you know, there's, again, to take the LGBT movement as an example, there's a lot of sexism and a lot of racism in the early days of the LGBT movement. And that has created problems for the movement ever since. It set bad habits into place that were really hard to break out of. It created a lot of resentment early on that's been very hard to undo. early on that's been very hard to undo. There's sort of this talking about race and sex in the LGBT movement is kind of this minefield that nobody wants to get into because there's this

whole decades of history about it that are really ugly and difficult. And so the fact that the atheist and skeptical movements are wrestling now in the fairly early, and obviously atheism and skepticism have been around for decades and centuries, but in the fairly early stages of being a very vocal, very visible, very activist movement, the fact that we're dealing with gender and race now means that in 10 years and in 20 years, I think we'll have hashed a lot of these issues out. You know, I'm not optimistic enough to think that we're going to be perfectly sexist free and perfectly racist free in 10 or 20 years. But I think that we're hashing a lot of these issues out now means that we're going to be much healthier and much more diverse in 10 or 20 years. And so as frustrating as these conversations are in the movement, I'm actually very glad that we're having them. supportive of him being gay. But when he came out as an atheist, he received some of the worst backlash that he's ever received in his life. And he feels like the reason why is because when he's gay, that doesn't really truly affect a ton of people unless you're, you know, homophobic or

something. But when you're an atheist, you're almost just saying you're an atheist is attacking someone else's beliefs. Well, I think that there's some truth to that. I mean, I think part of it, again, is just that LGBT people, like I was saying, have had decades to do, you know, education and teach people that we're not monsters and so on. And atheists are behind the curve on that. not universal, but a lot of gay or lesbian or bisexual atheists say that it is harder to come out as atheist and to come out as gay. And when they come out as gay, they're largely supported. When they come out as atheist, they get a lot of hostility. And I do think that some of that is because, as this person you're talking about was saying, when you come out as gay, you're not telling straight people that they're wrong to be straight. There is no way to come out as an atheist without at least implying that if you're a religious believer,

you're wrong. There's no way to say, I don't believe in God without having the message be, if you do believe in God, you're mistaken. And I do think that there is always going to be a little bit of tension between believers and non-believers in a way that isn't necessarily there between straight people and gay people. Because, you know, we are telling them that they're wrong. There's kind of no two ways around this. And that doesn't mean that we can't work with them. It doesn't mean we can't be friends with them. It doesn't mean we can't be close family members with them.

It doesn't mean we can't work in alliance with them. But there is this fundamental disagreement about does God exist? Is there a supernatural world? And the fact is that when we come out as atheists, we are saying it's not just like coming out as gay where you're saying this is who I am. We're saying this is what we think. And if you disagree with it, we think you're wrong. Well, sure, there's an element of mutual exclusivity that's inherent in the theism versus atheism conversation, where there's no, necessarily, there's not an element of

exclusivity or mutual exclusivity for straight versus LGBT, and especially considering LGBT comprises bisexual, transgender, bisexual, transgender and other, you know, other queer identified sexual orientation. So, you know, there's a spectrum for sexuality that seems like you can kind of see where people can reconcile themselves, whereas atheism is very clearly a kind of a line that's being drawn. So that makes a lot of sense. One of the things in your book that I wanted to talk to you about a little bit was you talk in your book about religion as a hypothesis, that it makes claims about the world,

and it makes predictions about how the world should work. If these things are true, then necessarily some other things follow from that and it should be treated as any other hypothesis. In the world of ideas, it should be subject to open criticism and it's clearly not. It's clearly not find most frustrating in talking about religion, especially talking about religion with religious believers. But even some atheists kind of buy into this, which is this idea that religion should be treated with kid gloves, that religion should be a special case and that it should be off limits from criticism, that it's rude, that it's intolerant, that that that it's even bigoted to say, I think your religion is mistaken. And whether to say that generally, I think all religion is mistaken, or whether it's pointing out specific ways that this particular religion is mistaken. Here's why baptism is mistaken. And here's why Wicca is mistaken. And here's why Islam is mistaken.

And here's why Judaism is mistaken. That's considered in our society really rude. It's rude at best and really intolerant and bigoted at worst. And I think that there's a commenter named Lynette on the Daylight Atheism blog who made this comment that really stuck with me. I quoted it in the book, which is that people have gotten so used to whispering around religion that an everyday voice sounds like a shout. I like that. And the kind of dialogue and discourse and debate that we're used to around other topics such as politics or science or art or medicine or who had the best dress at the Golden Globes

this week or whatever. You know, people accept a very vigorous level of debate and discourse in our society in general, but religion gets to be the special case. Religion gets protected from that, you know, from that kind of criticism. from that kind of criticism. And I sometimes say that religion is a house of cards inside a fortress. The idea itself is really flimsy. The idea itself is really, really weak.

But it's protected by this incredible fortress. And when you try to criticize religion, what you see is that a lot of the defense that it gets, a lot of the defense that believers give it, it's not really defenses of the idea itself. It's defenses of why we shouldn't even be having this conversation. It's saying, you have to convince believers that we can even have the debate, that we can even have the conversation. And it's hard not to think that that's because they know on some level that the ideas themselves don't hold up.

And so they have to protect it from being questioned and from being criticized. And so that's where we get this idea that, that to criticize religion, to treat it like any other idea, to treat it like any other hypothesis about the world, is this horrible, intolerant, bigoted act, and that it should just never be discussed. And, you know, people say it's like, oh, I sometimes joke that my blog is about, you know, I'm talking about all the things that you're not supposed to discuss at

the dinner table, you know, religion, politics, and sex. And I think one of the big reasons that people that arguing about religion is considered to be, you know, socially unacceptable is, like we were saying before, for instance, you can settle the argument. You can do the experiments and you can do the studies and say, oh, well, this hypothesis is correct and this one is wrong. But there's no way to settle arguments about religion because a hypothesis should be testable, and it really isn't. But many religions do make claims. They do make testable claims. You know, if you're a young Earth creationist, you're making the claim that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and that's a testable claim. You know, if you believe in faith healing, that's a testable claim.

And, you know, you should be able to test that your prayers you know cure your cancer or whatever and but because the ultimate arbiter is this invisible inaudible being in the sky and the ultimate judgment is after everybody's dead um it's not ultimately verifiable and so you can't settle the discussions you can't settle the discussions. You can't settle the disputes. And so therefore, they get really ugly because there's no saying, oh, yeah, you're right. I was wrong. And it's such a weak hypothesis. It's such a weak claim that it has to protect itself from ever being seriously questioned or challenged like we would question or challenge any other kind of idea. In your book, there's this, you know, like you have the 99 things that piss off the godless. And doing this podcast with Tom for a while now, we've been doing it for over a year, we cover a lot of atheist news items. And most of the time, I feel like I'm desensitized to the horrors that happen because of religion. But I got to tell you, I was, you know, I was up till a certain point. I kind of was just nodding along with you like, OK, yeah, I guess I knew that.

I guess I knew that. But the one fact that really just sort of turned my stomach and something that I guess hadn't even occurred to me is number 42. And I'm going to quote your book. You say, I'm angry that in Salt Lake City, Utah, 40 percent of homeless teenagers are gay. Most of the kids who have been kicked out of their homes by their Mormon families. That is just a stomach turningly awful. It is. It is. I agree. And that's it. It's funny, the different things that get to different people, the different horror stories that get to different people. Obviously, that's a very personal thing.

But that was something that really upset me too. And part of it is just, first of all, who kicks their teenager out of the house? Who does that? No kidding. Who says, this is like my beloved offspring, the product of my loins. It's like I spent years loving this child and raising them and nurturing them. And because they have a kind of sex that I don't approve of, I'm going to throw them out of the house. I'm going to make them homeless. Homelessness is horrible for anybody, and it's especially horrible for a teenager.

And the idea of doing that, so that's incredibly upsetting to me. And then you look at the fact that the Mormon church is – they revere the family. They make a huge deal about how important family is. They're big on the whole family values thing. And the idea – they practically fetishize it. you know it's it's they practically fetishize it and the idea that you would fetishize this ideal of the family and yet when it comes down to the question of do you love your children do you support your children even if they're doing something you don't approve of do you not for fuck's sake throw them out of your house to live on the street

what kind of family values is that? It's just so appalling. It's so hypocritical. And it's funny, that leads me into a little bit of something that, you know, people will ask, you know, why are you atheists so angry? And they'll often say, well, anger is such a bad thing. Anger is, you know, it's like anger, you know, it clouds your judgment, and it, you know, gives you ulcers, and it, you know, it's like anger, you know, it causes your judgment and it, you know, gives you ulcers and it, you know, gives you high blood pressure. And why would you even want to be angry? And, you know, what's so good about anger? And I think, how can you hear these stories and not be angry? isn't, you know, peace or serenity. To me, the opposite of anger when you hear a story like this is complacency. And I don't ever want to be complacent when horror stories like this are happening. You know, I want to be angry because I want to be motivated to do something about it. And that's, I think, the thing that I hope that people who read the book get most out of it is,

I am now motivated to do something about it. And that can be almost anything. I think that, you know, atheist activism can take a lot of different forms. It can take the form of, you know, writing angry blog posts and writing angry books and, you know, picketing and, you know, doing, but it can also take, you know, forms that are more community building. You know, I think that if you read this book and you're really motivated to do something about religion and to try to persuade every single person on the earth to not be religious, and what you're motivated to do is join your local atheist community and organize a potluck, what you're motivated to do is to vote, to get politically active and to support candidates who support separation of church and state, if what you're motivated to do is to just come out as an atheist and just tell people, I don't believe in God, I think that that is all awesome. I want people to take whatever action they're motivated to take.

And that's what I want. I want to get people angry, not so that they'll be violent or whatever. Obviously, I'm very much opposed to violence. It's like that's one of the reasons I wrote the book is that there's so much violence committed in the name of religion. But I want people to take whatever action they're inspired to take. And I think that this is a big movement. I think that it has potential to be a much bigger movement

than it is now. And there's jobs for everybody. And there's a lot of different things that need to be done. And one of the things that I think is really important about activism is that people need to do whatever kind of activism they're inspired to do, because that's what they'll be good at. And it's what they will stick with. You know, it's, it's, I want people to do what the kind of activism they are inspired to do and will enjoy. You talk about in your book, you have two scenarios that are sort of in your utopian vision of the world with religion in it, or at one point without it. One of them specifically is

no religion at all. You say it would be great if there was no religion at all, but you say you would settle for a world where religion at least, all religions at least coexisted and they played nice in the public sphere and didn't try to insert themselves. In the book, you make a claim that that is actually less likely than no religion at all. Why is that? I do think that and you know, I could be persuaded out of that. But it you know, but I do think that that's the case. And it keeps coming back to this idea that we've been talking about which is that because religion has no reality check because is an unfalsifiable proposition you know it makes

some many religions do make falsifiable claims but then they ultimately move the goalposts and the core religious belief the belief in god and the supernatural. It's an unfalsifiable proposition. And because of that, disputes about it actually get more aggressive. They actually get, people get more deeply entrenched in it and they are more likely to very ferociously defend their beliefs. Daniel Dennett talks about this in his book,

Breaking the Spell. It was something that really crystallized a lot of ideas for me. It's a wonderful book generally and this particular idea really stuck with me which is he points out that there are actual psychological studies showing this, that when people

have a belief that they don't have good evidence for they actually hold onto it more fervently and more stubbornly than they do a belief that they have when they have good evidence. You know, it's the analogy that I make in the book is, you know, if people come over the hill from the tribe over the hill and they tell you the sky is orange, well, you don't have to get into a big fight with them about it because you can clearly see they're wrong. No, look, sky is blue.

And you might even have a discussion about it or a debate about it and the question can be settled. But when people from the tribe over the hill come over to your tribe and they say that God is completely different from what you say God is, they say that God's name is Allah and that Muhammad is his prophet, or they say that God's name is Zeus and he throws thunderbolts or whatever it is that they're saying, there's no way to settle that question. And so paradoxically, because there's no way of settling it, if you're attached to that belief, then you're going to get more deeply entrenched in it because you have to settle that cognitive dissonance that you're having over the fact that, gee, I believe this thing, somebody's questioning it, and I don't have any real good reason to believe what I believe. So paradoxically, if people are going to hang on to the belief, they actually defend it more hotly. And so I think that while I would certainly settle and be entirely happy with a world where I don't not entirely happy.

I'll get to that in a second. You know, I would be fine with a world where people had religious beliefs, but they weren't violent about it and they weren't oppressing each other about it. And they weren't throwing their kids out of the house because of it. And they weren't trying to enshrine it into law and so on. I would settle for that. But I think that's less likely. I think that religion has inherently in it this tendency to get very deeply entrenched and to get very hostile to criticism. And so that's why I think that it's actually more likely that we will persuade the world out of religion entirely than that will persuade the world to be religious but to play nice.

And I will say, I was going to say I'd be perfectly happy with a world where people had religious beliefs that they didn't force down each other's throats. I would not, in fact, be entirely happy with that because the bottom line is, you know, we can talk about all the different reasons why religion is bad. The bottom line is it's wrong. It isn't true. That's kind of the whole thing for me about religion

is there's no reason to think, there's no good reason to think it's true. It's almost certainly false. And therefore, it's a bad idea just on the face of it. And it leads people to make bad decisions. You know, people who believe in the power of prayer, you know, to cure their illness, they don't go to heaven after they die, they don't necessarily live this life to its fullest. I used to believe in reincarnation, and I let go of a lot. I passed on a lot of opportunities in my life,

and I would always say to myself, oh, I'll do that in the next life. And now that I don't believe that I'm going to be reincarnated, now that I think this life is it, I make sure to really grab opportunities that come along. And that's, you know, and so bad ideas cause bad actions. What is it that the data processors say? Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have a bad data, it's going to lead you to make bad decisions. And so even if religion is tolerant and ecumenical and groovy and everybody's holding hands and singing kumbaya, it's still wrong. So you have a book and you have a blog. Could you tell our listeners where to find those things if they wanted to buy them or read your blog? Sure, absolutely. I would love to do that. My blog is called Greta Christina's Blog and it's at freethoughtblogs.com slash Greta. My book is called Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off The God List. Right now it is available in ebook formats. You can get it on Kindle. You can get it on Nook. You can get it on Smashwords and Smashwords has it in pretty much every format imaginable. So if you're, have some, if you have a format you want, you can get it on Smashwords.

Um, uh, the physical print book has just come out, uh, and it's available at the Richard Dawkins Foundation website. Uh, they have a bookstore and it's available through there. You can buy it directly from the publisher,

which is Pitchstone Publishing. Uh, it will be sold through Amazon, but the physical print book is not at Amazon yet, it won't be at Amazon until the fall, so in the fall it'll be available the physical print book will be available at Amazon and bookstores

and the usual places and it's coming out as an audio book in August. That's wonderful, we'll post all that stuff on our website for this episode, so if you're interested and you want to get Greta's book, all you have to do is go to our website for this episode and you can click on the link and buy it. Tom and I, I know I highly endorse this book. I think this book really is a lot of how Tom and I both think and I really enjoyed reading it.

Tom, I'm sure you did too. It was a great read. It was a tremendous $8. I would buy it again. Eight out of ten, buy it again. I enjoyed it very much. Great book. Greta, it was wonderful to have you on, and we're so happy that you were able to come on and talk to us about your book today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed it. I appreciate it. Appreciate it. So we got a Google voice from Desiree.

Desiree's Google voice was cut off and it was like four minutes long. So I'm actually going to condense it down a little bit so that you guys can get the main idea from it. I don't want to play the entire thing because like I say, it's cut off. So I'm going to edit it down. Just remember if you're calling us and want to leave us a Google voice, one minute, minute and a half, that's kind of the sweet spot for the show. If you leave like really excessively long ones, we really can't play the whole thing. But anyway, here's Desiree's. Desiree, thanks for calling. Hey, this is Desiree from Sim-A. I'm a black LGBT woman, and I have a difficulty with this situation. It's like, one instance, I know the Boston Mayor, legally, I don't

think he can ban Chick-fil-A from setting up a business. At the same time, I'm kind of glad that Chick-fil-A is going through all this. It's like all the shit Christianity and those zealots have put me and people like me through, it's like for once, it kind of feels

nice that we get to punch the bully back, that we get to play dirty pool with them. That's all the techniques they've been doing. It's like, you know, I know we're supposed to be the better people and don't stoop to their level, but it's so hard. It's really hard to do that and see the progress. It's so slow.

And them calling me and people like me abominations that I should be in concentration camps or that the government should execute me. And it's like, you know what? Fuck it. You know what? I'm sorry, but you know what? Chick-fil-A and all those other organizations like that, NOM and the Family Institute and all those places, it you know what i'm sorry i have no sympathy for them we got another voicemail i'm not going to play for you uh but it was a really uh interesting idea i don't know how we're going to be able to implement it if we can even tom but they're talking about actually donating to the doctors without, but instead using their cell phone. Yeah, it's a great idea.

If we can figure out how to do it, cool. As long as it's not a ridiculous amount of work to set up and administrate. Great idea. Thank you for the suggestion. If we mention that it's out and it's available, that's because it was easy. Yeah, and if it's not, then it wasn't easy. Right. But it was a great idea and we appreciate it.

Thank you. So we got an email from Sonny and Sonny says, have we heard about the Jesus take the wheel day? And basically it's this – I don't believe it's true. But supposedly on March 31st, 2013, Christians are supposed to take their hands off the steering wheel for a full five minutes on the highway. I do not believe that that's a real thing. I don't think that that's actually going to happen. That's not going to happen. I personally won't really pay much attention to that date. No, no one's going to do that.

And what is that? That's like a faith test, right? That's the whole – but it's so far in the future that even if it were real, which i don't think it is from looking at the facebook page even if it were real it's like yeah i'll agree to do that a year from now hey you know you're getting a fucking alert on your phone while you're driving oh i forgot oh well it's really easy to take my my hands off the wheel now i'll just text i take my hands off the wheel to eat a fucking Dairy Queen blizzard every now and again. Yeah. We got an email from from Brian and we want to make sure we read it because we want to make sure we didn't mischaracterize his thoughts on homosexuals last time.

So Brian said, I wanted to write to clarify my feelings on homosexuality since I think you spoke about my comment in the latest podcast. I respect you guys and your views, which is why I want to be a bit more clear than I was in my post. I don't look at homosexuals and think about them having sex. I think the act is disgusting, as in I would not enjoy it. I think eating liver is disgusting as well, but I don't look at people who like it with the thought that liver is disgusting. In my comment, I was putting forth that thinking the act of homosexuality is

disgusting doesn't make me a bigot, but acting on that would. That I'm aware of. I've never treated a person differently because of their sexual orientation, but I also only know one openly gay man. Thanks again for the great podcast. If we misrepresented you in any way, we apologize. It certainly was not our intention. We just using your uh email as a springboard to discuss other ideas so it certainly was not my intention and i i thought i was careful about that but i if i misinterpreted or mischaracterized your comment i i certainly apologize so we want to thank greta christina for coming on our show she was great to have it's happy i'm really happy tom that we actually got a female voice on the show. We've been talking for a long time, trying to be as feminist as two guys can be.

And I'm just really happy that we were able to actually have a female voice on the show. If you want to get Greta's book, it's called Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off The God List. It's available at richarddawkins.net. It's also available on Amazon Kindle. It's going to be coming out in the fall as a physical hard copy. You can buy it from Amazon then. Also, you can visit Greta Christina's blog. Greta Christina's blog is conveniently named Greta Christina's blog. You can find it at freethoughtblogs.com slash Greta. And it was great to have her on. It really was. Thank you again, Greta, for being on the show. So, Tom, this wraps up another week. Now, I want to mention to people this. We're recording this on a Wednesday. We won't release it probably until Friday, maybe Friday morning.

So you're getting the show a little early. However, I'm going on vacation. Tom's going on vacation for the following week. So we are not going to record until Monday the 13th, which means the show probably won't go up until the afternoon maybe the evening of the 14th now if I have time in the evening

to mix it I might do it on the 13th evening but I doubt it so if you're going to be listening make sure you pay attention and don't post on our Facebook page hey guys where's the fucking show on Sunday because we're not going to get it up until Tuesday because Tom and I aren't even going to check the Facebook until Tuesday.

So just be patient. We'll get it up as soon as we can. But we're, you know, both of us are going to be on vacation. So we're going to have our mind on other things for a week. And real quick on that note, I am bringing my laptop on vacation so I can keep sending stories via Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus. So continue to check that out because I'm going to try to do something, if not every day, every other day, just to keep those things active while we're on vacation.

Well, with that, we're going to leave you with the Skeptic's Creed and we'll catch you guys in a little over a week. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quasi-alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water,

downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox reflex, foot massage, death in towers, tarot cards, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches

mosques and synagogues, temples dragons, giant worms Atlantis, dolphins, truthers birthers, witches, wizards vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, doublespeak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this.

The opinions and views expressed in this show are that of the hosts only our poorly formed and expressed notions do not represent those of our wives employers friends families or of the local dairy council Thank you.