Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 621: Seth Andrews

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

Thank you to Seth Andrews for joining us and check out his book - paperback, audiobook, and signed copies available.   American Atheist Convention           Show Notes    

This episode of Cognitive Dissonance is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. recording live from gloryhole studios in chicago and beyond and beyond again. And beyond also. 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, mad, it's skeptical, it's political, and there is no welcome mat. This is episode 621 of Cognitive Distancy. So we got a guest, buddy. We have a guest in a very special and unique way. Yeah, we are doing a video recording today. And the cool thing is we, everybody got to watch him be quiet during that. I feel strangely married to your show.

I think I hit 600 right around the time you hit episodes 600. So I think we're just sort of like crawling along together and occasionally one of us rolls down the window. You know, hey, how's it going? How's show number 625, right? Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome.

Seth is here to talk about his new book. And his new book is called Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot. And I want to say, Seth, bought the book on Audible. Of course, because you got to buy the book on Audible. If you're going to buy the book, that's why we tell people to buy the audio book.

You can hear Tom read our audio book. But hearing Seth read this book to you, it's outstanding. It's just outstanding. I got to say, excellent book. I hearing Seth read this book to you, it's outstanding. It's just outstanding. I got to say, excellent book. I've had some people ask me, who narrates your stuff? And I stop and I'm like,

I'm a professional broadcaster. But I don't know about you guys because you guys know what it's like to publish a book, right? But I'm not at the point where I trust someone else with the material. Is that weird? Like there's a temperature

to the way the delivery should sound. There's a tone, the pauses, the inflections. I know how it should sound. And I'm terrified if I gave it to somebody else that I would hear like a foreign object, something that I did not write. Like, what is this thing? There's a dog barking in the background,

a siren goes off or whatever. I will tell you a boring story about when I used to read poetry. So I'm a poet and I used to do these readings in the city. And so you'd get together and, you know, you'd basically just wait your fucking turn and pretend you were listening to other people. And then it was your turn

and everybody would pretend they were listening to other people. And then it was your turn. Everybody would pretend they were listening to you too. And, but what we would do occasionally is everybody at the beginning of the night, you know, the organizer might say, okay, everybody's going to put their shit on the table. And then when you come up, you're just going to grab somebody else's material and you're going to perform somebody else's material. And it was actually a really fun exercise that made you a better reader and a better performer of written material. You had to do it on the spot in front of a crowd. And I always enjoyed doing the performance, but it was super weird when your material was read in a tone, in a cadence, with different pauses. And all of a sudden, that

material could almost mean something entirely different. And I can't imagine all the time and work and energy and then having somebody else read an entire. I was like a fucking poem is, you know, a page. And I'd be like, you read it wrong. You read the whole thing wrong. It's not. God damn it. Get out of my way.

Give me the mic. A whole book. Like with you and poetry, you know, I just picture Tom up there and he's just like, you know, he's snapping his fingers, you know, between like, hey, that's great, great, great poem going on here tonight.

You don't know what Chicago poetry's like. They scream it. It's aggressive, the most aggressive poetry readings you've ever been to. They just yell at each other. It's crazy. There's a reason I fit in. It was just belligerent grousing. It was just belligerent grousing.

I was brought on to read Dr. Josh Bowen's book called The Atheist's Guide to the Old Testament. And he's got a PhD in ancient Sumerian. And, you know, he's got a PhD in like ancient Sumerian. And most of the book is Sumerian towns, regions, kings, princes. And so, I mean, it's easily the most difficult voiceover job I've had in my life. And I told him so. I'm like, I'm honored to be a part of your project. Jesus Christ.

What the hell? What are you doing to me, Josh? So I had him on. Essentially, I would text him the Sumerian king's name and I would wait and he would read into the audio text. He would read back the pronunciation. I would stop. I would make a note, write it out phonetically times 500 until the book was finally done. But people don't think about that stuff. They don't think about the mispronounced words when you see something only in print and your brain has always pronounced it wrong. And then it comes time to say it out loud.

And you're like, well, is it potpourri or potpourri? Or potpourri? What is that word? For the first six months, Tom and I called it the Mueller Report. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.

So, Seth, let's talk about your book. I'm really enjoying it. I got to... So, reading this, I'm an ex-believer, right? So, I grew up a Catholic. I have a lot of the same memories that you sort of talk about in the book. It's a pretty vulnerable topic, right? You're kind of saying, I kind of, I believed in something that was really false and I feel a little stupid now. Was it a vulnerable experience for you? Was it liberating? Well, you know, people have asked me, who are you? I gave a speech based on part of the book recently at Iowa State University, okay? And inevitably, we had some Christians come to listen. And of course, by the end of 45 minutes, as I am just blasting through the crazy stuff that I used to believe, you know, wild, wacky, culty Christian traditions that I had once normalized that I talk about in the book.

You know, communion, right? We're eating flesh, we're drinking blood. In the Christian church, it's totally normal. In the Catholic church, they think you're actually cannibalizing Jesus because it transformed into flesh and blood and all those things. But, you know, when you're raised around it

and it's your normal, you know, you just get used to it. And then you hear about Heaven's Gate or some other cult and you're like, those people believe some crazy shit. How could those people ever fall? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, and I'm coming to a point, but you know, Heaven's Gate had that wackadoodle theory that if they committed suicide, they would go and rendezvous with the spaceship which was traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet. And we in the church were like, that's the craziest stuff I've ever heard.

But if you read the Christian end time story, we actually outgate Heaven's Gate. We've got 200 million horsemen coming down from the sky and a third of the planet's killed. And the whore of Babylon is riding a dragon with seven heads and ten horns. Holy God. But if Heaven's Gate had been pitching this stuff, I'd have been like, that's crazy. Who could ever believe such nonsense? If you're raised around it, it's your normal. So with the book, I am sort of exposing my own vulnerability. I'd like to think I've given myself a little more latitude in the fact that I was brainwashed as a kid. I was just straight up indoctrinated, never given a choice, never told I could do my own

thinking, threatened with hell. But as I tell my story now, I make sure to say I wasn't an idiot. I was not. My IQ did not change from then to now. Right. You know, and I think a ton of really intelligent believers have in their brains what I call the place where the weird shit lives, right? It's just bizarre. This is how you find PhDs who believe in aliens, right? Human beings have always done what human beings do. And I'm really hoping that I will sort of end up in the path of somebody who's starting to question. They're more and more dissatisfied. They're starting to finally tap on the glass. Wait a minute. I'm not satisfied with this stuff. The answers I'm getting make

no sense. And maybe they'll stumble upon this and feel affirmed and doubting the sense of it all. I don't know if that's how it's going to play out, but that was my goal. This is something I've been thinking about for a while now. My wife and I were just having this conversation the other day. I'm very, very curious. When you say you were a believer, how, this is going to be, I don't know exactly how to phrase this question properly, but how much did you really believe? Did you think it was true the same way you thought like a can of Coke is real? Did you think it was real in the same way? Well, I mean, not if it was new Coke, new Coke is never real. But you know what I mean?

New Coke was a false God. I have a hard time understanding how real, real is for believers. Is it, is it as real in your mind as the solid objects of the earth and the fact of gravity? Was it that real or was it a different kind of real? It's hard to describe. I lived a devoutly believing Christian life, but I also, if I was to be honest with myself, had tethered myself to the real world. I genuinely believe that God had counted the hairs on my head and totally cared about me and wanted to divinely protect me.

At the same time, I would lock my doors at night and I would, you know, my sisters were given a can of mace to put on their key chain to take out just in case. And so, you know, we lived this. It wasn't just lip service though. I mean, we really did think when we die, we'll go to heaven. Grandma is in heaven. One day we'll all be reunited. And I was a literalist.

I mean, there was an Adam, there was an Eve, there was a Noah, there was an Ark, there was a Jesus. And there will be a rapture. Jesus will literally come in the sky and there will be a literal trumpet that sounds. And so, but you gotta put it in this context, Tom. I mean, I'm four years old, right? I'm four.

The same people who fed me and sheltered me and taught me about the rest of the world lumped all the Jesus bat shittery in with all the other stuff I needed to survive. And as a child, I just couldn't partition that stuff out. It was all just the same. Then you add a reinforcement culture where we never associated with anybody who disagreed. Everybody, well, of course, everybody's a Christian. We went to Christian churches. We had Christian youth group,

Christian music, Christian apparel, Christian culture, Christian reinforcement everywhere. And so I was never challenged. And, uh, you know, that's why it took me long decades to finally say, Hey, wait a minute. Did donkeys really speak Hebrew in the book of Genesis? I'm, I'm embarrassed to say it, but that's, that's how long it took me. That's a, that's an interesting point. So you're not able, let's, let. So let's roll back to a newly atheist Seth. When was the moment? So I know when I shed religion, it was a lot of anxiety for me. I had a lot of anxiety about just like death and mortal existence and things like that. And I think I may

have hit it at a weird time in my life. So I didn't really think about it too much. But at a certain point, you realize, holy shit, that was like a blood god. What the hell was I thinking? Do you remember the moment where you were just like, what the hell was I thinking? For me, it was a long journey i say i always like to say it was two major events and then about a thousand small ones um it was just mostly getting the courage to keep asking because man when you you believe that torture in hell is awaiting the non-believer and that's a huge mechanism for controlling people and some never get over it, man. They carry that with them the rest of their lives. Logically, they know it's crap,

but emotionally, they're so wounded and scarred and damaged that they have a hard time letting go. You know, when I really began to question, and then I would ask the experts, quote unquote, to help guide me through, well, how does this make sense? And the more answers I got, the less sense it made. That was traumatizing because I'm like, wait, this isn't helping. They're actually pushing me further away. But I couldn't sleep. My gut was in a knot all night. My whole life was falling apart. I didn't know who I was. What are my values? What do I think? What's real? What's not? What will I lose? And that's a big question. Will my parents shun me? Will my siblings talk to me? Will my religious employer fire me? And that was a rough row. And I think

that's why I never take for granted people who say, well, I'm not sure I'm on a journey. I always tell them, take your time, take your journey, you know, don't ever let anybody push you where you don't want to go until you're ready. I want to encourage you that it's okay to take the journey, but you do this on your terms for your reasons. And I, I've sort of been beating that drum for the last 12 years. on your terms for your reasons. And I've sort of been beating that drum for the last 12 years. You made a comment about culture,

about Christian culture. And I was thinking about that while you were talking that I wonder how much, like there's the belief set, right? And then you, we all know at this point, it's preaching to the choir that the more you interrogate

that set of beliefs, the less it can possibly hold up to any of that interrogation, right? And so, but that's the easy stuff. That stuff, the sort of intellectualism and the logic, to your point, that stuff is kind of the easy stuff. You interrogate it, it starts to fall apart fairly readily under any interrogation. I mean, the Old Testament and New Testament aren't even compatible with each other.

So any reasonable interrogation of that religion doesn't work. And it doesn't work like right away. But that cultural element, that social element, that familial element, is that tied necessarily to belief itself? necessarily to belief itself? Or do you think that that sort of reinforcement mechanism exists outside of the sort of logical belief? You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I don't think a donkey ever spoke Hebrew, but I think these things are true in the sense that I love my family and my family believes them and I want to be a part of this cultural mindset. No, I think that's a hugely astute observation. I think- That's why I made it.

The vast, vast, vast majority of- Oh, shit. Did I just validate him? Is he going to make that his ringtone or something? Great. Wonderful. Think about it. Most of the people that we run into,

in fact, I would wager almost all of the people we run into who would call themselves Christians are theologically illiterate. Yeah. I mean, and they'll tell you, well, you know, I don't really know. Who wrote the book of Genesis? Hell if I know. Ten commandments, most people can't name even six of them. You know, any of the theological arguments that a lot of these sort of bigwig fat cat apologists come up with, the average everyday cultural Christian, they're not interested, right? But Christianity is the friends they have, the music they listen to, the community they enjoy, their Sunday routine, the music they love and share together,

their support group, their divorce recovery, addiction recovery. Their shared values. They're just divorce recovery, addiction recovery. They're shared values. And so when you've got tribal connections in that way, it goes beyond just the idea. And it does feel good to feel validated. We're right.

Everybody else is wrong. We'll live forever in heaven. Everybody else is going to hell. You know, those types of things. I don't know. I'm not saying all Christians celebrate that, but there's a kind of validation that you get a rush from, you know? Right.

I'm right when so many others are wrong. How fortunate am I? But I do a whole speech on this. I mean, Christianity is not relevant theologically. So it has essentially evolved to be relevant culturally, which is why we see all of these cultural reinforcements that have nothing to do with the verses of the Bible. But you'll see the cross tattoos and the Christian jewelry,

and you'll hear the Christian radio stations, and you have Christian singles group and youth group and childcare and fun activities and sports teams and all these other things. Make them all Christian and people don't really know. They don't want to know, but they do make them all Christian. And people don't really know. They don't want to know, but they do feel like they belong. And man, that's tough to walk away from. And I think if we're going to challenge this religiosity, we have to create a net for people to fall into. We're not asking them just to walk away from a bad idea. In many ways, we're asking them to potentially walk away from an entire network of support that they've known their entire lives. Did you go into some of the humanist church-type stuff that happens around?

Did you transition into that, or did you quit cold turkey with that community? Well, I took a cursory look at many of the other religions. I mean, it's not like I was going to become a devout Muslim. I mean, I'm a white-bred, corn Jesus town, Tulsa, Oklahoma Christian. You're not going to see me at a mosque. That was not a natural segue for me. But I did look into other religions and I very quickly realized that they are sort of doing an interpretive dance to the same tune, right? They each had a deity, They each had a villain. They each had a sacred text or holy book.

They had a posthumous existence, blah, blah, blah. You know, you know all that. I first came out as an atheist at, it was two years after I started my channel. I did the thinking atheist behind the scenes without ever showing my face because I was terrified that my boss was going to find out and fire me.

Well, thankfully you don't have a distinctive voice and nobody would think you're wrong. You're right. You're right. I mean, I sound like everybody else. Thank goodness for that. But finally I thought, well, fuck it. I'm going to pull the plug.

I just want to, I'm tired of being in the shadows. And so they scheduled an event in Tulsa in 2011 and asked if I would speak. And I reluctantly agreed, but I said, fine, let's just do it. And it was at a universalist church, one of those Unitarian Universalist churches. They opened the doors wide open. They had 300 atheists packed a place. We had a ball. And for that reason, I'm hugely thankful for the Unitarian Universalist. They make me a bit crazy because they sort of treat as equal all ideas that walk in the door. I had a Unitarian minister on the show years ago, and

I'd like, I appreciate your inclusiveness, but I mean, if a flat earther walks in and says that the earth has corners and cats could push their toys off the edge of the earth. If somebody actually said that, are you so inclusive that no one in your church is prepared to look at them and say, that's factually untrue? And she wouldn't answer the question. She's like, you know, that's a lively question. It's something I think worth discussing. And I'm like, holy shit, no, it's a flat earther. You know, that kind of thing. That's my only gripe with the Unitarian Universalists. But overall, one experience I've had with that sort of broad network of everything

and nothing religions is that they have opened their doors and been kind and welcoming to people like me. And I'm hugely thankful for that. It strikes me like, I totally agree. The UU church is too like their their arms are yeah their arms are open so wide that there's plenty of stuff they're hugging that's just nonsense right it's just absolutely wrong fucking crazy bread bullshit but yeah but like you know one thing it strikes me that they get right is they they divorce think, the idea of community from the sort of illogic of whatever it is

that brings people together. It strikes me as, in functional ways, not much different than a Trekkie convention. Everybody knows it's not true, but it's nice to get together. It's nice to agree on the clothes. It's cosplay religion. Yeah, but is it like, is religion, like religion kind of,

in 2022, religion feels very often like Trekkie convention shit. It's like, yeah, we're all here. We're enjoying this moment together. We've agreed upon this uniform. We've agreed upon

this sort of mythology. None of us really think this happened, but we also don't think that it not happening is very important. The important thing is being here and enjoying it together.

And the UU Church seems to get that. I like the idea in theory of, let's make it an arena of ideas. Bring what you got, we'll hear you out and we'll talk about it. And I think that's totally fair. But again, the one criticism I have is, I think at some point,

an open mind is meant to close on something, not to be welded shut forever. But if you look at flat earth theory, you should be able to discard that and just say, all right, let's move on next, and spend your time, energy, and focus on better ideas. But overall, I appreciate the attitude and the inclusivity of the UUs. Well, the problem with an arena is that

the arena, without a battle or a winner... It's got to have robot bots fight each other. That would be amazing. Religious robots that fight each other to see who wins, whose religion is the best. Okay, we can't air this because that's our million dollar idea. That's the greatest thing I've ever... That's it. That's amazing. Ian, edit this

from the show. That's what we need. I'm afraid to comment. Ian, edit this from the show. That's what we need. I'm afraid to comment because I've already been banned from Facebook for 30 days for hate speech. Poor thing. So if I comment about using battle bots on Christians

or on you, you people, I know that Facebook's just going to shut me the hell down. What Seth did to get banned was there was a guy who did something horrible and Seth said, this guy did something horrible and thenh said this guy did something horrible and then they said you did something horrible and they banned him i'm not

very far off here am i no no and it's this is a chain now i can't tell if these are religious malcontents or trolls who are falsely flagging and so then the bots kick in or it's just an algorithm problem who really knows and facebook customer service is just a fucking unicorn. Doesn't exist. No way to get ahold of anybody. Probably doesn't if you're buying data, but not if you're using Facebook. The thing is, you're not the customer.

Like I think if an advertiser calls Facebook, they get an answer, right? Like, Joe, I use this for free. It doesn't get shit. After the January 6th insurrection, we had a politician come forward, a Republican politician, talk about how, well,

he saw the footage and to him, it looked like it was nothing more than what you might see in an average tourist party or a tourist event. And so I posted a meme that showed the riots inside and the chaos.

And it said, show us where the gift shop is, right? I'm just tweaking the guy who was there cowering behind a desk who later just totally wanted to rewrite history. Facebook said, that's hate speech. And I got a three-day ban. Then I said something about how I think it's ironic that Christians get so mad about being, about acknowledging that they are animals. We're all primates. We are all connected. We're all part of the animal kingdom

and connected to all life. Well, I don't know if Facebook didn't like the phrasing, but what it heard was, Seth says Christians are animals. I've insulted them. And we are vegetables or minerals, God damn it. So then Emmett Metta posts a video clip of hate pastor Jonathan Shelley, who's saying the most awful, bigoted, hateful things about homosexuals, as I recall.

And I post this to expose hate speech. And Facebook says, aha, we will now give you a 30-day ban for hate speech. Oh, good grief. Someone hate speeched it and he posted hate speech and they said, you're the hate speecher. That's exactly what happened. And you know, in my mind, part of me would like to just divorce Facebook

and move on. In a perfect world, I'd like to be able to use a different platform. I've got Twitter, et cetera. But no, if you have a few hundred thousand people as part of a Facebook community that's been established for 12 years, they use it to get content.

They use it to know when the shows come out. They use it to connect with each other. Then it's not quite so simple as, well, screw Facebook. I'm going to pull the plug. Well, it's not that easy for me. Yeah. Well, you would leave all those people high and dry. Yeah. They'd have to go to Parler or Gab

or like all the maggots. It's interesting because we covered some stories a couple very recently about this and the too strong approach of taking people who are either debunking or decrying this awful stuff off is a

bad call by these organizations. And the two-week approach of just letting all content fly by is also bad. And the problem is is that it's a money problem. They just don't want to spend the money to make a better algorithm

or to, and very often, they don't want to spend the money because they know it's going to mean less users. And they want to have as many eyes on that data as they possibly can. They want to get as much data as they can.

They want to get as many eyeballs as they can staring at their screen. And that's super important to them. And so you getting a 30-day ban for this sort of thing is one of those examples of them just having an algorithm or something, some system that just makes it so easy for them to just, you know, ban somebody who's doing the right thing. You're out there trying to say that's hate speech. Holy shit, we shouldn't have that. Right. Yeah. I was a little worried about the book title, right? Christianity made me talk like an idiot. You've got Christianity and idiot in the same sentence. And I thought, you know, will the algorithms decide that I'm being hateful to

Christians? And of course, I think we all agree that, that, uh, you know, people in most cases, people get respect ideas have to earn it. Right. And Christianity is an idea and it's going to have to put up or shut up. And so I can tackle Christianity, uh, without, and I should be just fine, but we shall see. The book itself is just a litany of all the dumb things you used to believe, and it's sectioned out in a lot of different places. I'm curious, is there one that really just strikes you as super funny, something that you used to believe or that Christians in general believe that you think now you're just like, this is too hilarious? Well, there's one I talk about in the book that I actually thought was hilarious at the time. Now,

I said that I believed that Jesus was literally coming back. The skies will split, the trumpet sounds, and everybody shows up and Jesus appears looking like Yanni in the sky with puppy clouds and gold light and whatnot. Locusts with armor. And we all levitate up into the sky and he takes us out to a big shindig, a big kegger somewhere in space. I believe that, right? I believe that. But I was at my grandmother's funeral and we were outside for the last part of the service

and mom was totally agitated. She was totally like, you know, really upset. And I'm like, what's going on with mom? Why is she so freaked out? And it was brought to my attention that they had faced the casket west. And in Christian tradition, you're supposed to face the caskets east because when Christ returns, he will arrive as a lightning bolt comes from the east, is seen throughout the sky or something. Yeah, yeah. Are you kidding me?

Wait a minute. Don't we bury these things? I shit you not. If you go to a cemetery that is, I was going to say loaded with Christians, it sounds kind of, if it has Christian, if you find an overtly Christian culture with a cemetery,

you will notice that the graves, almost universally, all the Christians are facing east. And this is part of a Christian tradition. It's based on a scripture that I'm paraphrasing poorly now, but as lightning strikes, as the scene from the east to the west, so shall the coming of the son of man be. And so in Christian tradition,

you are supposed to be faced toward the big event. I had no idea. Face, meaning your feet, so that your the big event. I had no idea. Faced meaning your feet so that your face is because you're pointed up. Oh, no. You are just scratching the surface of logistical problems. I'm trying to make some sense. Tom, it's like

an ejector seat. Okay, so hold on. Let me explain it. So when you're laying in the coffin, it's like an ejector seat. And a big spring goes and it shoots you through the air in the correct direction. That's why coffins are so expensive, guys. It's like nine grand for a coffin.

You have to have an ejector mechanism on it. That's not cheap. You don't just make that. Now when you say it, I feel stupid. You should feel stupid, Tom. Beyond the idea that a Christ who would bend space and time to come and retrieve his children

would consider a shoulder turn too much trouble during the occasion. Get rid of that guy. We have this whole idea that grandma would need to be facing west or facing east

to orient herself for jesus's return where she won't notice based on oklahoma like christ is coming back east of oklahoma like it wouldn't it wouldn't be jerusalem everything is east of everything else on the sphere i mean you know what i mean like it's east right it's gonna be is it is it like east of what east of where what about the people who were located directly north and south i mean are they host i mean logistically the entire story falls apart well you know that's one of those things that it's you know it's just insane i have quite i have another bizarro world follow-up and this is this is the stuff i love because any

interrogation of these it just falls apart but but i know there's no answer to this but i have to ask it anyway because now i'm just fucking curious i guess i didn't realize that christians were hung up on like the body itself its disposal and its intactness so like it's a zombie apocalypse so So because immediately I'm like, well, what about people that die whose bodies are utterly destroyed? I mean, like, let's say I'm burned in a fire and I'm just a pile of ashes. You get squished by something or whatever. Like, how do I face a direction if I'm just. Sure.

If it's a closed casket. Right. I'm just smushed to bits. Like there's a lot of horrible ways people's bodies get mangled up. So it's fine if you die in one piece and then you're like, okay, I'm going to lay him in the ground

and I guess angle him slightly so he's facing something other than up and then they'll notice from underground that a lightning bolt was in the east of Oklahoma. Amazing. But like, what if you just get fucking vaporized somehow or smashed? Well, Tom, you're making astute observation there.

I talk about this in my book. It's not just the people who were vaporized in a thermonuclear blast, that kind of thing. I'm also interested, what about the people who the matter you know vaporized in a thermonuclear blast that kind of thing i'm also interested what about the people who's who the matter in their bodies has been reconstituted into other things all right yeah what happens to those things do they just break apart and then the matter grows little matter legs and runs back over to the original we rot to nothing at some point. Embalming slows that,

but yeah. Right. But like billions of people were buried that weren't embalmed, you know, like, well, they're just hung up on dumb shit. You totally get hung up on dumb shit. And,

and again, you're right. Even a cursory look at it, the entire thing falls apart. You know, we're talking about what does God reconstitute the bodies? What about the people already in heaven? Are they supposed to come back down, right?

The resurrected saints, let's say grandma's in heaven, her soul's already gone through the pearly gates and her body's still, I don't know, there's still a body. It hasn't totally disintegrated. Jesus comes back, does God say, okay, hey, you're up. And then he shoots her down the chute into her body, which reconstitutes and then she comes up facing east and then she flies back up to meet

Jesus. No matter how you slice it, the whole story just falls totally apart. It feels like you would want a teller tube. You drop the soul in there and it just sucks right down. All bodies just turn into those little pills that you drop in water. They turn into a sponge, like a big sponge.

You know, my favorite thing is like, and of course you're going to, like, you'd hear something. Well, that's not the point. The point of the story is, and then nobody finishes that sentence. No, it's not. You're taking. The point is. Right.

They'll be like, oh, you're taking it too literally. It's like, okay, then tell me what it fucking means. Yeah. Not literally. Tell me the figurative meaning of grandma having to look east and then get shot back down here in a teller tube. Because I don't know what the fuck that figuratively means either. Right. And then that answer is, well, just ignore that part.

Just set that part to the side and pick the parts that make figurative sense. And that's what's true. You know, that brings up an interesting question, Seth. You were a believer for how many years? Oh, about 30. I drifted out of fundamentalism after about 20 into a kind of vague disinterest, but I still called myself a Christian. But you're still a Christian. So now, during your time as a Christian, did you ever encounter non-believers? And did you ever feel like, so for example, I have been around many people

in my atheist years, and they pray, and I normally just sit there. I don't do anything. I don't do any cross-signing. I don't close my eyes. I don't cross my hands. I just sit and wait for them to be. I'm quiet until they're done. When you were a believer, did they ever have to happen to you? And did you ever feel weird being around non-believers? Did it ever feel like they were just assholes in some way? I just didn't have a lot. Here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I mean, you can imagine. I can throw a rock and I'll hit three churches. There's three questions you're asked when they meet you. What's your name? What do you do for a living? Where do you go to church? It's just normal. And the non-believer, the out non-believer is such an anomaly, such an aberration that when I was growing up, I don't remember. I think my

father's had a brother, my dad's brother, Steve, didn't want any religion in his house. I'm guessing he was an atheist and we acknowledged it. But I never had a moment of discomfort because I was always surrounded by affirmation, validation, somebody who looked like me and prayed like me and spoke like me. And we'd have little conversations about what this verse or that verse meant, but there was never any doubt that it was absolutely

true. And you know, it's, I was going to say, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say back in the day, like when I was a young man, like very young, there was a show on TV. I remember like Donahue would have on out atheists. That was like, they were like an oddity back in the day, like an absolute oddity. Now they would be on TLC right after the people that like fuck their cars and balloons. Now they're at CPAC. Yeah, now some of them are at CPAC.

Now OutAtheists are at CPAC, so yeah. Yeah, yeah. Just the shit ones. I'd like to... I was going to say ancient aliens. I'm talking about David Silverman. He's shit.

He's a piece of shit. That's specifically the person I'm talking about. Just so we're not... I don't want to be unclear. No, it's fine. Okay. Okay.

All right. Because he's at CPAC. No, moving on. Yeah. I feel... I have that check in my spirit and I feel you in the Lord,

my brother. That, you know, honestly, that's been a hard thing to watch, man. That particular dumpster fire has been hard to watch. That meltdown? Yeah, something else, isn't it? Something else. And I think this is one other revelation that I had coming out of religion into atheism. Back when I first walked away from the faith, I was very pissed off. I felt very abandoned. My parents were treating me like some shameful, broken thing. I knew it cost us most of our relationship. And my father passed away last year. And anyway, it was just a really tough time. But in my mind, naively, I thought, well,

atheists, they're rationalists, right? They are people and you know this is a culture of goodness and we're rooted in the real world and and then you meet more and more atheists and you realize that we've got our best and worst and everybody in between like every other tribe or culture or whatever you know and it was like now i'll see somebody and they post that meme what is it says atheist and it's an acronym and it's like A thinking something, something. And there are all these beautiful accolades. And I'm like, no, atheism means you got right

the easiest question in the universe. It does not mean anything else about you. I don't know that you're a good person. And in fact, I would take a wonderful, beautiful God believer who shares my values than some atheists who do not. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, yeah. So that's kind of where I've ended up now. I was a rude awakening. You know,

atheism is not a guarantee of goodness or humanism or intelligence, rationality, caring about the world, being a decent human being. Atheism is no guarantee of that. It's tragic, but it's true yeah yeah the uh the book itself my my favorite chapter is the chapter on easter because the all the things you bring out about easter you don't realize as a believer like when you grow up with it you're just like yeah it's just easter like it's easter but then when you start naming and you you go to great detail to list all the crazy shit about Easter. And it's all fucking crazy.

And there's a moment where you realize, I believed in a blood God. There's a moment where you realize that. And it's fucking, it's weird. But there's so much crazy shit about Easter that most people, especially atheists, don't even understand. Well, you know what? In the chapter, I was talking about an Easter passion play where they had these young kids and they dressed them up and i'm like so in the chapter all i do is i switch out the method of execution i'm okay christians let's switch out let's try this with a noose let's put a gallows up right instead of the stage with the galgotha stage with the crosses and let's bring a christ child out same story story, still Jesus,

still an atonement for our sins to cover us, blah, blah, blah. And instead of a cross, let's make it a gallows. And we hang the child and then we throw him in the tomb and he comes out. And instead of wounds on his hands and feet, he's got a scar around his neck. And I do a speech where I'm talking about a God. I think in the book I wrote about a God I just made up called Bron Bringer of Light. Bron died by guillotine, right? He's the same God as Jesus, except instead of crucifixion, they cut his head off with a guillotine.

So instead of a cross over the baptismal, we have a guillotine. There's guillotines out in the lawn. We have guillotine necklaces and tattoos. So funny. All you gotta do is switch out the method of execution. And all of a sudden it becomes immediately apparent how fucked up and bloody and culty and wrong the passion story genuinely is.

And how Christianity, no matter how mainstream, remains at its core a blood cult. And the cross is one of those weird execution methods where you can have a conversation with the person being executed because it takes four or five days. So you could be like, so how are you feeling right now? I hadn't thought about that. In comparison to the, you know, because like the other systems.

Chatting up the victim while he's hanging. It's hard to have a conversation with somebody who's currently being guillotined. Right. Or strangling on a rope. Having a conversation with someone who's being crucified is perfectly fucking possible. You know what I mean?

And that's... Cecil walks under Spartacus. He's like, hey, how's it going up there on the cross, pal? It's funny because... You got a minute?

It's perfectly possible if you believe the like crazy bullshit of the way that they tell it. But like, if you really walked up to somebody who had nails and shit, and they were... They'd be like, they tell it. But like, if you really walked up to somebody who had nails and shit,

and they were, they'd be like, oh, you'd be like, hey, so I've got, ah, geez,

ah, geez, that's me, that's me. Like you wouldn't be doing anything but screaming in mortal terror. and also you probably wouldn't be able to breathe because that, that like essentially suffocating and shit. Yeah,

right. Weird thing to do. Well, you know, the word crucifixion is actually part of where we get the word excruciating. I mean, we're talking about the kind of unimaginable pain that people can really, that language really doesn't do justice to. And this idea that we celebrated,

I mean, if you like the shape of the cross, the aesthetic of the cross, I get that, right? But if you are wearing it because you feel it as a symbol of beauty and goodness. And the whole reason Jesus had to come and spill his blood was why? I mean, if he's all powerful, he could have simply blinked atonement.

He could have forgiven us with a, he can conjure the universe with a breath, but he can't forgive people with a breath, but he has to come and become a super baby because the Holy Spirit knocked up an unwed teenager 2,000 years before the invention of the video camera. We don't even have video of it in the delivery room. Wouldn't the even easier piece be like, rather than like, oh, I got to forgive you, just be like, you know what? I'm not actually worried about that shit anymore.

I forgot about it. Because the whole idea is that sin is created and then you're automatically guilty of it. And now you're on your back foot all the time. So somebody has to forgive you. But you could also just, because we don't treat anyone else in our life like that. We don't treat our kids like that. We don't treat our friends like that. We don't treat our spouses.

You could always just be like, yeah, actually, that's not some shit I'm worried about. Yeah. And then it's not even anything to forgive. You can skip the whole sin and forgiveness phase. It doesn't have to shit I'm worried about. Yeah. And then it's just not even anything to forgive. You can skip the whole sin and forgiveness phase. There doesn't have to be any of that stuff. Yeah. Right. When I was talking to a couple of these guests, the Christians at Iowa State University's

Q&A a few days ago, I think we got into, I asked the question, is there anything that your child could ever do? Ever, ever, ever, no matter how disobedient, no matter how awful, that you would take a pyre full of wood and pour fuel on it, light it, wait till it got to its hottest point, and then throw your child into the wild. And they say, no, there's absolutely no way I would ever consider doing.

I mean, obviously they were morally, justifiably morally outraged at the idea. And of course, the next segue is, how do you justify then your heavenly father threatening to do the same to you? And boy, the tap dance that happens after that question is truly impressive. You know, we are, oh, well, you know, he doesn't want to, we choose to go there. I'm sorry. he doesn't want to, we choose to go there. I'm sorry. We choose to go there. Love me or I'll burn you is kind of a, that's somehow that's a moral thing. You know, all in all, that's a classic abusive relationship stuff. It is so textbook abusive. It is crazy. It's so textbook abusive. It's not even interesting. You know? That is the one thing, genuinely,

one of the one things that shook me out of religion so long ago was the concept of hell. Because the concept of hell doesn't make any fucking sense at all. And when you suddenly stop and just turn just for a half second and pull away, and you think, holy, I, wait, what? What's going to happen now?

And how could that possibly be a thing? It snapped, it just snapped me right out of it. That was the one thing that I remember like as a very much as a, as a turning point in believing or whether or not I believe. And it changed my whole perspective on life. Like it really changed everything about everything.

It changed everything about me. And it was. It's funny. It's such an effective mechanism for control. Yeah. That and controlling your sexuality. Yeah. And I spoke about this.

I did a couple of chapters on sex and purity culture. There's a whole section about the nipple. Very proud of that section in the book that just focuses just on the female nipple. Because American fundie Christians have a real problem with it specifically. And I asked the question in the book, all right, so what if I digitally map a man's nipple over the female nipple and then put those breasts somewhere in front of you? Is that moral?

Like, is that a PG or a PG-13? I have questions about that. But the larger idea is that, you know, the church scares you with hell, but also it, it sort of brands a kind of control on your sexual identity. Well, that's everything. That's who you are, how you think, who you're attracted to your relationships. You know, once they've got you in the bedroom, they have you almost every other area of your life. And, you know, the idea that we're taking sex advice from these bronze age, iron age, patriarchal primitives, when men ruled the world, tragically so, it's just pathetic.

But once you walk away, just like you walked away from health theology, all of a sudden you feel that there's so much light, air, and space. There's so much more goodness over here without all the guilt and shame. And you can explore the human condition honestly and without guilt. That's awesome. That's an amazing, liberating moment. When it's Catholicism, it's even worse, Seth, because you not only have all that baggage, but you also have a celibate guy trying to tell you how to get married. And he spends great detail trying to tell you about relationships that he's never had. There's a whole thing. It's like a whole class I had to take to get married in the Catholic church.

I wasn't a believer at the time. And I had left the Catholic church and I've never technically been confirmed, which is like the 12-year-old thing that they do. It's like when you're 12 or something, you do a thing. And I never actually technically was. And I was a believer until I was in my 20s. But then once I got married, I wasn't a believer anymore. And we went through this whole pre-c a thing. And I never actually technically was. And I was a believer until I was in my 20s. But then once I got married, I wasn't a believer anymore.

And we went through this whole pre-cana thing. And the priest looking at me and trying to tell me that my scores, because you have to take this weird test. It's like an aptitude test with your wife, your wife to be or your partner to be. It's wife because it's the Catholic church. You know, and then so you're taking it.

And it's, and he's reading the scores off and saying, well, you guys disagreed here. And it's like, fuck it all. You know, you've never touched a person. Go away. You don't know what it's like to, you've never legally touched a person. Let me ask you this Cecil, is it true that in your particular Catholic culture, you just kind of did whatever shit you wanted to do.

And then you just went to the confessional to reset. Yeah. It was very much like that. It was very much like a, like that was, I mean, you didn't do horrible shit, but people did stuff that was bad all the time. That idea that there was that, that, that was sort of drummed in that like tiny sins are okay. And you can tell the, you tell the priest, which is weird. There's some sort of weird voyeurism that the priest is involved in all that. Very strange. But yeah, that's how it was for me.

Well, because of the Catholics, they don't, they differentiate the sins into tiers. Yeah, there's like a whole, there's a tier list. There's an S tier.

Right. There's like an A tier. Yeah. There's a class system for sins. We should do the sin. We should do the sin tier list. Why didn't we think of that ahead of time? We're thinking of it now and that's what happens.

That's what we're going to do on a live stream, a sin tier list. Write it down. That's exactly what we're going to do. Amazing. I'll sign up for that. There's so, I don't, like almost all of them are S tier. Yeah. Like most of the sins, they're fucking bald.

All the sins are all S tier. Yeah. Seth, what's the name of the book and where can people get it? It is called Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot. There's a paperback hardcover. There is an audio book. It's on Kindle.

I'm doing signed autographed copies for anybody who wants any for a limited time. Just go to my website, sethandrews.com. There's a link there. And I've actually got some books here. And so I get the notification on those and I just sign them and personalize them and ship them out the next day. And everybody's been kind. I've sent out quite a few. And if somebody wants one, you know, it's not freaking Hitchens, but I'm proud of it. And I'd like to see, honestly, what I'd like to

see you do is to cast the stuff in mainstream, quote unquote, normal Christianity in a slightly different light. So we begin to acknowledge and communicate about Christianity as to how abnormal, how bizarre, how culty, and often how destructive it really is and how much better we'd be off without it. And that's my goal. So we'll see if we get that. I think you would say that it's a very funny book and it's also very informative. You can pick it up. We're going to have links on

the show notes. And this is a video that we recorded, by the way, in a YouTube video. So it will be in the description. We hope Ian will put it in the description. I mean, I'm guessing someone's what's going to happen is there'll be a comment there that's like, Ian, where's the book? And then I'll go back and then I'll do it. So yeah. Seth, thank you so much for helping me get the word out. I feel like I need to write you a commission check. Let me get you my Amex number. I feel very comfortable with that. Yeah. We're very confident. Seth, thanks so much for joining us and people can find you of course at the thinkingatheist.com. Is that correct? That's correct. And sethandrews.com. And it's been a pleasure. Thank you guys. Thanks so much, man. Tell me where the cool kids go. Must be to the library to read, to read.

This story comes from LGBTQ Nation. Idaho passes Russian style gay propaganda law that would jail librarians for objectionable books. Now we're going to talk about this story, but I want to clarify and apologize for my comments that I made last week. I think it was last week. So last week I made some comments about libraries. And I want to, I think I was very clumsy in the way that I phrased my point. My point, and I did a bad job, so I want to acknowledge that I phrased my point. My point, and I did a bad job, so I would acknowledge that I did a bad job. My point was that it seems like a very strange thing to center a culture war on libraries in 2022. Sure. And I don't mean to suggest with that comment that libraries are not wonderful, valuable, socially useful places. And I'll tell you,

libraries in my personal life have played an incredibly important and central role, especially as a young person. Sure, me too. Me too. My dad, all the time, all the time, I mean, into my teens, and I mean middle to late teens, my dad would drive me to the library and drop me off on a Saturday, and I would stay there all day long. All day. I would wander around as happy as can be. It got to the point where my dad would have limits on the number of books I could check

out. He'd be like, no more than six books, you know, like whatever the number was. And then you're there next week with new books, turning stuff over. And then they started selling books for like a dime at the library. And I'd be like, I'd come in with like $20 and I'd go like, literally like back. So, and then when I was a young person, I was visiting my mother. My mother used to live in Florida and then she lived in Washington. We live in Chicago. Sure. And I would go visit her and she would work and she would give us her library card and we would walk while she was at work to the library. We spent our afternoons at the library or we'd go to the library and get something and bring it back and spend our afternoons reading. So,

I don't- And me too. So I want to interject here too, because I have great memories of the library too. As a child, I remember I lived across the street from a library. So I grew up in a house that was in a different suburb. And then my father lost his job and lost the house and we had to move into an apartment. The apartment just happened to be literally right across Kitty Corner from the library. That's awesome. And so I grew up for maybe four years of my life. I lived across the street from the library. And so I would get up on Saturday mornings. I would get up in the summer, all summer long. And I would spend hours, if not many hours of the day in the library, just walking around,

reading, taking books, going to sit down. I read every single comic they had because they had the comics there. They had a comic section. I read so many comics as a kid there. I remember just loving the library. And I also remember they were the only place around that I was allowed to be in that was air conditioned. Oh yeah. Right. And it was outstanding in the summer. You'd walk in there and it was ice cold and you would just be perfect. It was, it was amazing. And I would read tons of stuff there, all the young adult stuff. I spent my entire young childhood in the children's section of the library. It was beautiful. So I recognize the value too. Yeah. But I know that I wasn't clear about it. It may have sounded disparaging. I don't mean

to disparage libraries. What I do know is that usage of libraries has declined dramatically. And in fact, reading books has declined dramatically over the last couple of decades. So it's a strange thing to center your culture war around, right? And that's the point I was very clumsily trying to make. And I still believe that. I think it's a weird thing to center your culture war around because it's not this sort of like hub of society the same way that it was when I was a kid. When I was a kid, the library was a big fucking deal. The library for many people, I mean, the numbers show like usage of libraries

has declined rather than stayed the same or increased. It reminds me of a lot of different industries that had to shift when things started becoming more digital. Right. Right. Right. And I think libraries are probably having to deal with that now. I don't know how they're dealing with it because I'm not a, I'm not a librarian and I'm not involved in that sort of thing. I work in higher ed and the library in my higher ed is a thriving place. Oh, I'm sure.

It's thriving because that's where people meet. They have created these brand new studios where students get together and create things together. And so, I mean, it's a really, like, the library is absolutely thriving at the higher ed institution, but I haven't been to another library in years. So, I don't know how they're coping with the digital divide because there really is, you know, a very, you know, you have to look at the way libraries are structured and change all your programming to be more digital friendly because people are more digital friendly nowadays. It's how many people consume information. I also, like somebody sent us an email, I want to point out too that

there is a strong element of privilege to what I'm saying. Sure. So I want to acknowledge that. That in many underserved communities, libraries serve an even more essential social function. Sure, absolutely. Because they provide a number of services in addition to just books and periodicals. They provide community services. They have job fairs, resume services. They have all kinds of educational materials for adults, children. They provide an essential community service.

I don't want to downplay that. And I know that I did. And I want to apologize. Somebody even sent a message and said that basically it's the one place that we have made in our hyper-capitalistic society where you can just be without having to buy something. And that's a thing that is uncommon. It's not, I mean, I don't think it's, I don't think it's, it's, I don't think it's, it's, it doesn't happen everywhere, but there's, you know, there's relatively few places where you can go to go and just not spend money. Right. And that's one of those places, one of those places, you know, like a public park or other places that, you know, are very specifically made.

So you don't have to purchase something. Right. And so, yeah, there's a lot of benefits to benefits. The libraries are huge. And I, you know, so, but I also am with you. This is a story we kind of touched on last week. And you know, what's crazy to me is of course, this is a Republican push, right? This is a Republican push, but this is the party of free speech that hates free speech. This is the party of small government that literally wants to track what they're doing and then

prosecute people for doing the wrong, what they consider the wrong thing, which is amorphous and hard to pin down. And the idea with this fucking bill is to hold librarians personally accountable as if every librarian that works at the library is the same person who chooses what. Oh, as a librarian, I chose every fucking book in this library. Every single book, yeah. I know I got hired into the library yesterday. But I actually, I got a list and I got to approve. Get the fuck out of here with that. These same stupid motherfuckers are the guys who are complaining constantly about being censored on social media, right?

Yep. Who the fuck is complaining about being, oh, you're censoring me on social media. Get the, and you want to censor what books are available? Yeah, yeah. Are you fucking kidding? We should be thrilled people are reading books. It's projecting, it's projecting to, because that's what they do, right?

That's essentially their, they just project. And that's the problem. I mean, I think that's the problem. So we're in an interesting position right now with all these new laws that are popping up. Idaho's one of them that don't say gay bill down in Florida. It's pretty crazy. There's like this, there's this push on the right

to try to force people to clutch pearls, right? So they're just, what they're trying to do with CRT, with the don't say gay stuff, with the books and the lights, all the same tactic, right? It's, look, I don't know what's going to make you clutch your pearls, but if I fucking touch on enough of these items,

if I poke enough of these fucking hot buttons, you're going to clutch your pearls and you're going to scream, won't somebody think of the children, right? So maybe it's not over here. Maybe it's not not, but I'm going to get your fucking hot button thing and I'm going to get you to clutch those fucking pearls and get freaked the fuck out. And that's, then I win. It's like three fucking things. It's like three things, but they, they just have every one of them by the short hairs. Yeah, man. It's, it's sex, it's race and it's abortion. Those are the

three things, man. Those are the things that they're... Those are those hot... Guns, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess that's in there. Right. But, you know, there's a... Crazy.

I can't imagine... Can you imagine if they banned, like, every book where somebody didn't have a gun? Like, it's just... I also wonder, too, because the bill very specifically states that it has to be if they're saying good things about the LGBT community. Oh, yeah. Right. Very specific. So what if it's like a bigot book?

You're totally fine if it's like a bigot book that hates LGBT. That's a fine book to have. Yeah, but you know, like I know you're goofing a little bit, but also you're not because that would be a religious book. Yeah. There's literally no way. It's very true. Yeah, because they can't say anything about it.

Right. Because then you take the Bible out because it mentions it. Right. So that would be protecting religious freedoms, Cecil. Yeah. And that's the thing. They hide behind every fucking time. That's fucking amazing, man.

Have you ever heard of an objection to like, well, I don't like gay people. Why? Well, it's not religious. It's always fucking religious. Yeah, it's always religious. It's always religious. I've never met a,

I'm sure they exist, but I've never met or talked to a secular bigot. No. About religion, about gay people. About sexual preference

or whatever. Never met anybody like that. No. Because literally, who fucking cares? It's a baby with a gun. Over. What?

It's a baby with a gun. Over. I will give you 45 pounds with a gun. Over. What? It's a baby with a gun. Over. I will give you 45 pounds for that gun. Or you could just have it. This is a mugging now. That's fine. Oh, this is...

Okay, so I've got thoughts on this. This story comes from CNN. Alabama becomes the 22nd state to allow people to carry concealed guns without a permit. There's 22 states? There's 22 states. I want to read them to you. Can I read them to you? Yeah, read them to me. Okay, hold on. Hold on. I without a permit. There's 22 states? There's 22 states. I want to read them to you.

Can I read them to you? Yeah, read them to me. Okay, hold on. Hold on. I'm going to make a list of the states out of the 22 that I want to go to. That you want to go to.

Okay. I'm going to grab my paper. Here we go. Hold on. Alabama becomes the 22nd state to allow people to carry concealed guns without a permit. Right.

As of March 14th, 2022, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa,

Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Hampshire?

North Dakota. Now that's residents only in North Dakota. Ohio, that's effective in June of this year. Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, handguns only, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Those are your 22. All right. I have five hash marks. Yeah.

Out of 22. Out of 22. Out of 22. Yeah. And most of those are because they're state parks. I'd like to say. State parks or something. Sure. It's like, yeah, I don't want to see any of the people.

It's so funny. I got five hash marks and they're really genuinely all for beautiful state parks. For places. Because I'm thinking like, I don't want, if everybody disappeared from Alaska tomorrow, I would be thrilled. I'd be like, gosh, I'm even if everybody disappeared from Alaska tomorrow, I would be thrilled. I'd be like, gorgeous. I'm even more excited to go.

Even more gorgeous. Right. What is crazy to me is that I had no fucking idea that that was true. Before today, I was blissfully unaware. I didn't know so many. You can just, I had heard from a couple people.

We had heard from like one state or two states where the guy will say, yeah, man, all you got to do is walk in and say something to a guy and you can get someone who's saying, in Pennsylvania, all you have to do is like walk through a cool room or something and then you eventually get it.

But I did not realize, I had underestimated our stupidity. Well, can you imagine? Okay, I just want to take you back. Tom and I got a concealed carry license. We were in the same class together. There was a guy and that guy was so fucking afraid of the gun

and it was a fake gun. It was a big rubber gun. Might as well be holding a giant rubber dick in your hand. It didn't look like anything. He's holding the gun and he's trying to pretend like he's- Trembling. He's doing something with the gun and he's trembling. Imagine that guy with no training.

No training. He just walks in. He sends the government down there a thing and they say, yeah, you're 18. And they probably don't even have to register. He can just walk into a place and be like, cool. Yeah, put it Yeah. All right. I'm going to put in my belt and then he just walks out

and that guy, that shaky, weird, twitchy dude now has a gun in your presence. In half the states in this,

half, almost half of the states in this country. And you don't need anything. Now, I also look to and on Wikipedia,

there's a map and on that map, it does show that, you know, all the green states where green is like, go, baby, go. And it's a bunch of them. But then there's light green. And those are with minor restrictions. Well, remember, we've gotten emails from places where it's like, yeah. And so Pennsylvania is one of them, right?

I don't have to, like, they're like, yeah, I had to go fill out a form. I filled out a form. I filled out a form and said, like, I promise I won't kill somebody with it unless they totally had it coming. I said I wanted to and they said yes. That's more restriction than Alabama has now. But here's the thing that I was thinking about, Cecil, is at first I was yelling

in my mind all the same things that we're yelling out loud now. And then I thought back to our training and I thought back to how fucking valueless it was. I mean, it's valueless for sure. And I thought, what's the fucking difference? I guess it's right. And the difference is

a background check. Yeah. Because in these 22 states, many of them don't even require a fucking background check. Also requires a FOID, which is essentially a thing that is a background check.

And then it also has a couple questions extra. So you can't get a concealed carry without a firearm owner ID card in our state, which also requires another series of questions that isn't involved. So there's an extra background check and there's

also just, there's also two, and I do think that this is not valueless. You've got to sit in a class for eight hours. Yeah. It's not valueless, not because the class contained- Useful information. It's just a barrier to entry.

Remember, our guy had a test. Yeah. But he said, well, there's no Nash or state mandated test. I just do this test. Yeah. I think because it allows him to kind of keep a paper trail that we were there and we paid attention. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In case anyone tried to take his fucking teachy license away.

But there's nothing. All you have to do is be present for the class. Be there. You don't even have to. You could look at your phone the whole time. You can. That's the, like, it's physically there. And the only thing is that it creates a barrier. Yeah.

And I think creating barriers is a good thing when it comes to carrying a fucking gun around everywhere that you want. Like when you, in Illinois, and we're the most restrictive state. We're the hardest state to get. We are the hardest state to get. And once you get your concealed carry,

you can drive with a gun on your hip. You could drive a car with a gun on your hip. Yeah, yeah. Do you remember that? Do you see that video from, I don't remember, it was like a few weeks ago

where somebody like shot somebody, like they were driving and they just reached out and shot. You saw that video front windshield. Yeah. Yeah. They just somebody like like passed them or like break checked them or fucking say they shot at them.

Right. They both shot at each other. They're just having fucking shot each other way. Yeah. That's crazy. Fucking terrifying that it's we shouldn't have guns in our hips. We should not have guns on our hips. We should not have guns on our hips. It's a terrible idea,

but I could not believe when I saw this story, the only thing that called out to me was, I didn't realize it was that easy in so many different states. It's funny because the NRA is quoted in this story as saying, well, that makes everybody safer. And this fucking Sheriff's Association is quoted in this story as saying,

that makes everybody less safe. Less safe, yeah. When the cops are like, and I think maybe we should pause, and you won't hear me say this very often, and listen to the cops here. Yeah. Right? Because we've talked about this on the show before. One of the things that makes cops jumpy and one of the things that they get to fall back on when violence escalates into in fatal ways is i thought he was reaching for a gun yeah there is there is an assumption and it's a valid one

that everybody might be armed sure and that assumption doesn't exist in other polite societies where people are not presumed to be armed yeah i don't know what I'm doing here. Let me in. Let me in. All right. This story comes from NPR.org. Garland says the January 6th investigation won't end until everyone is held accountable. And actually, there's some great quotes from this article from Merrick Garland that I wanted to read.

He says, we are not avoiding cases that are political or cases that are controversial or sensitive. What we are avoiding is making decisions on a political basis, on a partisan basis. We begin with the cases that are right in front of us, with the overt actions, and then we build from there. And that is a process that we will continue to build

until we hold everyone accountable who committed criminal acts with respect to January 6th. And I think that's a great sentiment, but also that clock is fucking ticking. Yeah. Because if we lose shit at the midterms, the January 6th investigative committee

is going to get disbanded. So we've shit at the midterms, the January 6th investigative committee is going to get disbanded. So we've got until the, like the clock is fucking running out. Yeah. We are under an enormous amount of pressure to get this done. The Department of Justice, if the January 6th commission

has completed their investigation, the Department of Justice can act. It can act after you lose the Senate or whatever. But the investigation, like we're on the clock, man. We got to wrap that shit up. Yeah. Like after you lose the house,

let's go, let's go. It feels like less, but you're right. They need to finish it before then. But can I just say like, I am sick of these platitudes that all these politicians and Merrick Garland

and all these people who, I've read so many fucking stories at this point about how this is going to be it. This is the one thing or these are the things. It's beginning to feel like Q. It really does feel like Q. You're absolutely right.

That's what it's starting to feel like where we're just chasing this around. It's either put up or shut up. And there's so much, there's already so much backlash against these Republicans who have been a part of this commission. There's people who want to get them completely out of party. We talked about Liz Cheney a couple weeks ago.

She's going to have to get primaried. They're probably going to primary the person from Illinois who's involved. So these people are people who know, these are people who hate that someone is digging into this. And we haven't seen anything really, nothing of substance, right? You've seen the jokers who broke in and like picked up a fucking painting

and walked around with it. Didn't they get those Oath Keepers though on Sedition? They did. And that's like nothing. Yeah, you're right. You're right. I'm not, and I don't want to, I don't want to sound like it's nothing,

but I'm talking about the people who were involved at a high level of government we haven't seen. Yeah. Right? So the people who, you know, there was allegations that people were getting shown around the Capitol. There's allegations that text messages are very damning.

There is allegations about all kinds of things. They've been calling in people and asking to talk to people, and they've issued arrest warrants for some of these people who won't come to speak to them. Right. And what's happened with that? I don't know. Again, that's another problem.

If there's no teeth on any of this stuff, it's just fucking jerking off, man. I know. Part of me is like, like if there's no teeth on any of this stuff, it's just fucking jerking off, man. I know. You know, part of me is like, all right, be patient. A proper investigation well done takes time. So like, sure. So like I, you know, part of me wants to like respect the, the, the time that a proper investigation takes to do its work. But at the same time, I hear you completely because I feel anytime I read these stories, one, I read them with less and less interest as time goes by because I'm less and less convinced that anything is going to happen as time goes by.

And maybe that's unfair to the investigative committee. You know, maybe the reality is that complex issues take time to unravel. You know, I'm a benefit of the doubt. Sure. But there is an enormous amount of time pressure. We are, we are one November away. Yeah. From the whole thing hitting a brick fucking wall. I mean, you're, you're eight months away right now. Yeah. You're eight months away. And you know, the way the wind is blowing, the, the, the disasters that are happening all over the world that are affecting our economy and that are changing.

I mean, look at how quickly the right latched on to gas prices. I know it's an aside. Fucking this shit makes me so mad. Sure. It makes me so mad. Like the inflation fucking problem is a glow. Like look around. Like economies across the

fucking globe. We do this fucking thing with the gas prices too. It's like, we just look at America and we're like, yeah, it's a problem here. Like we did the same thing with fucking with, with the goddamn pandemic. We just, all we do is, oh, it's an, it's an American conspiracy. It's an American look, it's, it's a fucking international problem. Yeah. You know, inflation, supply chain issues, gas prices, the fucking pandemic. These are international. They're global issues in scope.

Yeah. And America is so fucking crazily a fucking America centric that we are just we blame everything. We always only look inward. Right. And every problem starts here. Every problem originates here. We are just, we blame everything. We always only look inward, right? And every problem starts here. Every problem originates here. Oh, Russia invaded Ukraine. Well, America started.

America's not the fucking beginning and ending of every goddamn problem. It's so boring and fucking mundane and small and cheap. It's such bad thinking. It's so bad. It's terrible. And they make it feel like we somehow control so many different aspects

of global economy. Just the whole world. And you just think, yeah, man, you're a heavy player in it, but you don't control the whole thing and you can't just make

gas prices go up all over the globe. Right. Right. Global problems all of a sudden become America only. But you see the goddamn, you've seen the memes where it's like global problems all of a sudden become america only but you see that god you've seen the memes where it's like oh you know 2017 gas prices were $1.75 and now they're $4.50

or whatever and you're like yeah you know or or 2020 or whatever and you're like yeah well all right well everybody fucking stop driving because we're in a goddamn crisis, like supply and demand. But the idea of trying to look for solution or understand that global supply chains, global issues, the interconnectivity of economies, instead we're just like, America, my truck nuts said something changed and it was a president. What's funny, it's funny as I see these memes or whatever where they talk about the people who are complaining are driving the most gas guzzling worst economy cars you could possibly imagine these are the rolling coal terrible

gas mileage two miles a gallon giant truck and you're going to complain to me about how much it costs you at the pump and you didn't make any considerations about that up until this point come on get out of here get the fuck out of here. So, we'd like to thank our patrons,

but Ian didn't put up on the thing. And admittedly, admittedly, we had Ian working a lot today. Ian did a lot of extra stuff for us. He had to take a nap afterwards. Well, he was fucking exhausted from one-wheeling about. He had to take a nap afterwards. Well, he was fucking exhausted from one wheeling about. He had to one wheel his way over to the studio

and do two or three things. We recorded with Seth tonight as a video podcast. And so Ian was on doing that work. I'm sure he just did not get a chance to put all the patrons in the document normally. So we're going to do double patrons next week, but we do want to cover a little bit of email that we got in the last normally. So we're going to do double patrons next week, but we do want to cover a little bit of email

that we got in the last week. Lots of people, Tom, have told us that they really enjoyed the YouTube thing. So we're going to try to do it as often as we can. It seems to be a pretty easy process. There's not a ton of extra work to do.

There's a little more on my end, but not much. So we're going to try to do it as often as we can. So hopefully most of the shows that we record, some guests are going to be a little harder to do. And if it's a guest show, it might be that it's not anything at all. We might not record a video at all. We'll see how it works,

but people seem to like them. And so we're just, we're just going to try to keep doing it. I mean, we bought the cameras. Yeah. I will say this too. You know, like we're keeping the email try to keep doing it. I mean, we bought the cameras. Yeah, might as well use them. I will say this too,

we're keeping the email section only in the podcast because it feels weird to talk about email on the video podcast, especially because the screen is open and I just don't feel good about having email addresses. Yeah, I don't want to expose someone's email address on camera. Even on accident. So I don't want to do that.

So we won't do the email in that sense. We will not do the email in that format. It's only going to be available on the podcast. We want to mention that American Atheist Convention is happening in Georgia. It's happening in Atlanta, AA Con 2022. It is happening the weekend of Easter. So April 15th to the 17th,

you can show up. Bunch of people are going to be there. I know the puzzle guys are going to be there. So they're going to have a table. And then there's going to be, you know, a ton of other people. I know, I think Aaron Robbie from Embrace the Void pod,

he's going to be giving a talk there. A couple other people are giving talks. People you'll recognize. I'm pretty sure Seth, I think maybe Seth Andrews. I'm not sure. I didn't get a chance to really study the itinerary,

but there's going to be a lot of people there. So if you want to go, check it out. AACon was a blast when we were in Tulsa. I went to Tulsa and I had an absolute great time

hanging out with a bunch of atheists that showed up to that thing. So check it out. We're going to put a link in this week's show notes to AACon. Tom and I probably will not, almost certainly will not be there.

No, sorry. It's going to be very difficult for us to make it out there, but the Puzzle and the Thunderstorm guys will be there. Our lesser half will be there, so to speak. So if you're looking for like

the junior varsity version. Of us. Of us. Yeah. With an add-on, with a vestigial add-on. Right. Then yeah. Yeah.

They got a fucking alternate. Sure. To play. So we want to mention too, we're getting requests from people from outside the country. Please, please, please send me a bookmark. Let's figure it out. I have to fill out a customs form and it costs get this it costs $15

one slip through the cracks and we accidentally took money from somebody who was in Canada we didn't want to do the return rigmarole so we tried to do it it took me a long time

to mail it because I had to get a fucking customs form and then I had to fill out the customs form and then we had to do this whole thing and it cost $15

just to send a bookmark to Canada so I cannot imagine how much that's going to cost to the UK or to Australia And then we had to do this whole thing and it costs $15 just to send a bookmark to Canada. So I cannot imagine how much that's going to cost to the UK or to Australia. It's just not going to happen. Also, Tom and I are the ones who wrote the book. Tom and I are the ones who are involved in this podcast. We have no access to anyone else signing this bookmark.

We cannot, I can't conjole someone else like Thomas Smith to sign that. I can't do it Joel someone else like Thomas Smith decide that? I can't do it. He's not part of the podcast. And they don't even live around here. No one, literally no one is nearby at all to like just swing by. These are, they are thousands of miles away. So there's, we just can't, like we can't accommodate requests like that.

We would love to. It would be nice if we could. We would love to, but we can't accommodate requests that request somebody else to sign it or shipping it to another country. We would love to. It would be nice if we could. We would love to, but we can't accommodate requests that request somebody else to sign it or shipping it to another country. We just can't. But we promise if we ever show up in your country, we will happily sign your book. And we will bring bookmarks if we travel. That's no problem.

We will 100% do that. Just anecdotally, guys, you may or may not remember, there was a while back, a few years back, we gave away some citation-needed mugs, and we did not put restrictions on where we were sending them. And I'm not kidding. Some of those mugs we sent out cost a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars to ship them somewhere. Like no kidding. Like a little tiny box with some, with a one coffee mug and you just show up to the post office, 75, 80,

a hundred dollars. It was a hundred dollars to ship it. And then people would, and then somebody who you shipped a $100 mug to, got upset because it broke. And they're like, it broke. I don't know what to, I'm not giving you another $100. I'm already $100 in the hole. For a free mug.

For a free mug. So yeah, we just can't. We just can't do it, guys. I'm sorry. The audio book from Findaway Voices and a lot of places it's on, it's on auto, the audible version of nook right now.

It's on, uh, it's on Google play books. It's on Apple books. It's on scribbed. It's on several different places. As that list grows, we're going to keep adding that to our book page.

So check the book page. You'll be able to see some of the links as they come in. We don't have the link yet as of yet for Apple. At least it's not on my backend for the book, but I know it's available for Apple books. At least people are showing me it. So just as time goes on, it's going to be available in those other places.

Tom and I, of course, take a major serious cut in our any kind of profits of the work that we did and the hours and sweat that we put into this book, selling it through Findaway Voices, but we want to make sure it's available for people who just cannot deal with just a straight up download. But if you can deal with a straight up download, the best way, of course, we think to buy the book

is right from the website, because that gives us, of course, the largest cut because we did all the work. We literally did all the labor on that. We, we not only wrote the book, Tom read the book with Marsh and I, and then we edited it and then we host it. So all of those things are our labor. And so we get the most money out of that. If that's something that you care about. Also, the audio version of this book is fucking awesome. It's just really good.

So you should check it out. If you're into audio books, it is a great audio book. We got a message from Michael and Michael says, as far as the Florida don't say gay bill,

if they truly don't want gender identity in school, then we can't identify kids as boys or girls, right? Because that would be affirming gender identity. So we need to refer to them as they, them. That is so amazing. It is pretty funny. You have to call

every kid they, them. Every kid is a they, them. That's amazing. They're all confused. That's not me at all. So good. And we also want to mention too, I know we get a lot of messages like this and we got a couple of messages about this this week. The Puzzle and the Thunderstorm guys, Heath, Noah, and Eli, we do a podcast with them called Citation Needed, but we are not part of their business. We don't have access to anything

that they have access to. Right. And we're not partners in the sense that our show, this show here, and Scathing Atheists is something that we put out. We don't do anything at all

with each other's shows except for occasionally guest on them and then we collaborate for one show. There's citations. So I know people seem to think there's a very close bond there. We do record with them every week and we're cordial and friendly with them,

but we are not part of their business plan outside of one project that we do with them. So you can't read their email. We don't, we don't, we don't have any kind of contact with them about any of their show content. Like we don't, we don't deal with any of that stuff.

So we just want to make sure like people understand through. It's like, like they're not part of this business and we're not part of their business. We just do a collaborative project with them. Right. It's funny calling it a business too. I know. It's like a business.

I don't make money from it. It's like a hobby too i know it's like a business i don't make money from it's like a hobby yeah it's a hobby we want to talk about this joe uh sends in a message and he says i downloaded the free app book player from the app store went on to purchase the audiobook and downloaded the mb m4b file locally to my phone from the book player app i selected import file and it began playing and listening to it as a book and he says on android from the book player app. I selected import file and it began playing and listening to it as a book. And he says on Android, smart audio book player is what you want to have. And it does exactly pretty much the exact same thing. That's great. It lacks a lot of features, but it does remember where you are in a chapter. So it's, so there's a, if you're not a super techie person, there is a, there is, you can either download this book player from the iPhone app store

or you can download smart audio book player from the Android store and those would help. And I just want to say Joseph, thank you so much for letting us know about that. Ian was supposed to find that out for us and put together a fact sheet. Right, he was. So I'm grateful to you, Joseph, for doing that.

And Ian really is more grateful. There has been a fact sheet on the website ever since I posted it. Does it tell him to use those apps? It says exactly book player and smart audio book player. And it has been there before. I'm sorry. Also, the patrons are in the...

Why are you cutting in on this? I'm sorry. This is a recorded show. You're not supposed to cut in after the fact. I know. And it probably isn't even recorded. It is recorded. This is all recorded. You're in not supposed to cut in after the fact. It probably isn't even recorded. This is all recorded. You're in our studio right now. Get out of my head, Ian. Get out.

People keep... Also, you didn't do the patron thing either. I did. I'll read it after. I'll add it in. It was not there five minutes ago we started this segment just letting you know got it we got this amazing video this is so

good it is fucking amazing this is that guy I he's his name's James O'Brien and he does this show called LBC I don't know what LBC stands for leading Britain's Conversation. There you go. Okay, leading. I see leading an onversation,

but I don't see the rest of it. So Leading Britain's Conversation, it's James O'Brien. And he talks to this guy about anti-wokeism for seven minutes, trying to pin the guy down on one thing the guy thinks is he should be talking about when he talks about this woke culture. What are you talking about?

And this guy literally will never answer the question. He weasels. He weasels the whole time. And this guy doesn't let him out of it. He does not allow the conversation. It's beautiful. It's so good. It's so good. So check it out. We got a message from Don and Don put together

an image for us for Glory Hole Studios. He added, for some reason, Eli and Noah. I don't know. They're not part of Glory Hole Studios. Maybe they're visiting, I guess. They're hanging out. They're visiting.

So you can check it out on this week's show notes. We're going to post it on this week's show notes. We got a message from listener Andy, and he says, the infrastructure bill is supposed to expand broadband internet into rural areas. Am I the only person that sees the danger of doing this? Look at how bad the do-your supposed to expand broadband internet into rural areas. Am I the only person that sees the danger

of doing this? Look at how bad the do your own research crowd is now. Could you imagine if they had, they're like, we're spreading misinformation.

Super, super funny. That's hilarious. So we'd like to thank our patrons. Of course, we'd like to thank all our patrons. We'd like to thank

our newest patrons, Colin, Ted Cruz, Flesh Suit, Mark, Dino, Rumpel Foreskin. Rumpel Foreskin is great. Rumpel Foreskin is fucking amazing. And the people who upped our pledges, James and Matthew. Thanks. So thank you so much for your generous donations. We of course appreciate all the people who donate to glory hole studios, but you guys are the ones who pay Ian salary, even though he doesn't deserve

it. And you pay Sarah's salary. So thank you so much. We want to thank Seth Andrews for coming on. What a great guest. His book today. His book is called Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot. You can find a link in this week's show notes. He's a great guest as always.

We're huge, huge fans of Seth and Seth is just a genuinely wonderful person. Yes. We're always, it's always a joy to have him on, and we just love having him on and talking to him. So check his book out. I am listening to it.

I think the audiobook version is great. You get a chance to listen to that much more Seth Andrews. So I think it's really fun and really funny. He's a funny guy. So check it out. So that is going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to leave you like we always do with The Skeptic's Creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno Babylon bullshit. Couched in scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble,

pseudo quasi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night info docutainment. Thank you. aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody. Evidential.

Conclusive. Doubt even this. The opinions and information provided on this podcast are intended for entertainment purposes only. All opinions are solely that of Glory Hole Studios LLC. Cognitive dissonance makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information and will not be liable for any errors, damages, or butthurt arising from consumption. All information is provided on an as-is basis. No refunds.

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