The Scathing Atheist - 581: Con Crud Edition

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In this week’s episode, we’ll present some gently used headlines, we’ll relive the glory days of last weekend, and we’ll learn that recording audio for skeptics is way harder than it is for the other team. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click here: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ If you see a news story you think we might be interested in, you can send it here: [e-mail] To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ To hear more from our intrepid audio engineer Morgan Clarke, click here: https://www.morganclarkemusic.com/ --- Guest Links: Check out the Anthems podcast here: http://anthemspodcast.com/

Warning, this week's episode contains gratuitous Eclipse references. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Factor, and by the new app that guides you through conversations with Eclipse-obsessed friends when you don't give a shit and don't want to be rude, Eclipse Service. Eclipse Service, because Heath and Eli might as well monetize the skill. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Hello, this is Patrick from The Anthem's podcast, where I tell the story of a song that tells the story of a nation.

But no matter what nation I'm talking about, all of those people evolved from filthy monkey men. it's thursday it's april 4th and it it's National School Librarian Day. Shh! Sorry. I'm Noah Lusens. I'm Heath Enright. And from Ann Arbor, Michigan and Waycross, Georgia, this is The Scathing Atheist. On this week's episode, we'll miss Eli Early. Area people have

illogical beliefs that lead to bad behavior. Oh, good one. And we'll learn that recording audio for skeptics is way harder than it is for the other team. But first, the diatribe. If you're thinking to yourself, what's wrong with his voice? I should remind you that American atheists hold their annual convention on Easter weekend. So I got to spend the weekend amidst throngs of heathens and heretics having conversations in loud rooms until late into the night. By which I mean 11 p.m. or so because I'm old.

And as ever, we had an amazing time. Every year we had a few more people to the crowd that spends the whole con hanging around our table. to the crowd that spends the whole con hanging around our table, and it's gotten to the point now where American atheists just put our table next to a big seating area with couches and shit so they wouldn't keep stealing all the chairs from the other nearby tables. Though, to be fair, we still did that. So apologies once again to the Creator Accountability Network, the Military Association of Atheist and Freethinkers, and the Burning Eden Podcast for the perpetual chair shortage. Of course, this meant that my voice was working way harder than usual,

seeing old friends, meeting new ones, having interesting conversations, and best of all, having good arguments. I mean, don't get me wrong here. I really don't like to argue. I'm defensive, I'm emotional, and I'm way better at sounding smart if I get to write out what I'm going to say in advance

and then have Morgan edit it. That's why I don't do debates, no matter how goddamn many times I am challenged to them. It's just not my thing. There are other people for that. That being said, when listeners have a single opportunity to actually interact with you, very often what they want to do is argue with something you said once. And at least to a certain degree, I feel like I owe that to them. After all, in our relationship. I usually monopolize the conversation So among the most memorable interactions I had this weekend were arguments I argued with a listener about whether agnostic atheist is a useful distinction

I argued with several attendees at once about whether scathing atheism is ever the best approach I argued with a transphobe that seemed genuinely reachable about trans women in sports. I argued with an ex-Amish listener who took me to task for acting like I knew way more about Amish culture than I actually do. And at the end of every one of these arguments, as I looked back over it, I thought to myself, man, I'm really glad I had that conversation. Contrast that with your normal day-to-day experience with arguing, right? Where everybody is just digging their heels in, defending ever more preposterous positions in defense of an ever-receding point, drawing battle lines, getting personal, hiding behind platitudes.

These often useless competing tirades dominate the landscape of disagreement, whether it's online or in person. Uncle Maga and Aunt Karen fucking up Thanksgiving with ghost stories about litter boxes in schools. Your wooey co-worker promoting the company's vaccine policy. That friend from 11th grade showing up on your Facebook post to assure you that Jesus does, in fact, love the little children. Arguments that you get dragged into and then dragged through. But these arguments that I had at AACON, they were the polar opposite of all that shit. Because what brought us there in the first place was an agreement to place rational thought foremost among our authorities.

So unlike a religious conference, where our only common point of agreement is the world's most ambiguous book, which neither of us have actually read. is the world's most ambiguous book, which neither of us have actually read, or a witchy-witchy-woo con where the fucking common agreement is to accept everybody's bullshit as equally valid even when it's contradictory, or even a political gathering where the commonality is that all the arguments,

regardless of how they're constructed, have to lead to pre-approved outcomes, right? Unlike all of that shit, our conference actually can have meaningful and productive disagreements we have an agreed upon means of adjudicating them that membership in our club demands adherence to and not from some strict enforcement from above either it's it's fucking definitional you can't be a rationalist if you're not rational and that's one of the many reasons it's so easy to laugh off the accusation that

atheism is just another religion or just like religion, right? What you venerate matters. Yes, we're gathered under a mutual banner of truth, just like religious folks claim to be, but our truth has a lowercase t and it's not preordained. I mean, I wasn't going to change my mind on scathing atheism. I wasn't going to change my mind about trans women in sports. So it would be disingenuous to say that I was willing to change my mind in all these arguments. But I was willing to at least have an honest and open conversation that took the other person's argument seriously and didn't dismiss them with magical phrases or appeals to authority. This is also why I find it so easy to laugh off the accusation that atheism is an echo chamber. Yes, atheists, especially the kind of atheists that would show up at a national atheist convention,

they do show a marked similarity over a broad range of political issues. But that's because when you first agree to let rationality determine your belief, there are a lot of political issues that necessarily lined up a single way. We live in a world where somehow is the temperature getting higher and do vaccines work are political issues so obviously we're going to share a lot but anybody who thinks atheists just sit around agreeing with each other has clearly never been around to atheists look i get that atheist doesn't necessarily equate with rationalist right i'm using the terms as though they're interchangeable,

but I'm aware of plenty of gatherings under the auspices of atheism that land on far less rational conclusions to basic questions, right? You don't have to be a rationalist to reject theism, but the people I'm talking to, the people who might show up at AA con and feel like they belong there, for whom we don't have a linguistic shorthand, unfortunately, are worth arguing with. And when you hate arguing as much as I do, that's saying a lot. Joining me for headlines tonight are nobody. We're all still recovering from the con and

Eli's off this week, so we've been stocking up some extra headlines over the last few weeks for just such an occasion. And we'll get to those momentarily. But first, a word from this week's sponsor, Factor. You naughty little minx. Hey, Noah. You lusting over a cheddar cheeseburger hot pocket? What? No.

Yes. Yes. Okay. My doctor says I have to eat healthy. And she said that nearly every single ingredient in a hot pocket is bad. Blah, blah, blah, yes. Okay. My doctor says I have to eat healthy, and she said that nearly every single ingredient in a Hot Pocket is bad, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I still like to look. Sure, sure.

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Am I allowed to do that? Yes. I think they would have to let you. Have to let me. Nice. All right. I'm sold. Where do I sign up? Head to factormeals.com slash scathing50 and use the code scathing50, that's scathing50, to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next box. That's code SCATHING50 at factormeals.com slash SCATHING50 to get 50% off your first box plus 20% off your next box

while your subscription is active. All right, great. Thanks, Heath. No problem. So, mind if I grab that hot pocket? Well, yes, I do mind. But your doctor said to avoid those. What are you going to do?

Don't worry about it. Okay. Okay. Sorry. Don't even look at her. I'm not. And now we'll join headlines already in progress. And in Guess LGBTQ news.

One of the most dangerous and disturbing guests. Guess who? Guess who? Guess who? Yeah! Can you guess who? It's a mystery. One of the most dangerous and disturbing things about the legislation coming out of states like Texas against healthcare for trans youth is that once they pass, they don't just sit on the books

like, you know, a transphobic New Year's resolution. Law enforcement attempts to, for lack of a better term, enforce those laws. And the results are terrifying. Pretty sure enforce is the term. Why is everybody using for lack of a better term weird today? Say, you sure it's not enforcehood?

Enforcery, maybe, yeah. Bigot minister. I guess there are better terms theoretically we can make up, sure. Thank you, yes. And we learned how terrifying that can be this week when the LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG was forced to sue Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for asking them to turn over the names of their members in Texas. Yeah. Never great when one side of a lawsuit is saying, hey, pretty sure that's McCarthyism one side of a lawsuit is saying, hey, pretty sure that's McCarthyism. And the other side is saying, yeah, pretty sure that's McCarthyism. Terrifying.

Yeah. So look, we're going to get to the story in a second, but I have something far more dire we need to address right here at the outset. PFLAG stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. And that initialism is a hate crime. Far worse than anything the gay community has ever faced. Ever? Are you sure you're factoring in the 1987 Kim Cattrall vehicle mannequin when you say that, Eli? Ooh, that's a good point. That is a good point.

Okay, fine. Back to something almost as bad as the using or not using the and thing in PFLAG. So a little backstory here. When Texas passed its dumbass take your kid away for being trans law, one of the heads of PFLAG submitted an affidavit saying that many PFLAG members had set up contingency plans should their child's medical care be cut off, ranging from finding resources to moving out of state to find alternative care outside of Texas. And Ken Paxton, who looks like he's becoming self-aware one eyeball at a time, requested, quote, documents and communications related to that statement. In other words, oh, parents told you they were planning to break my fugitive slave law? I'd like you to name them, please. I'm the state's attorney general.

Also about the eye, I was playing hide and seek and I got hit with a berry. So that's why I look like this. That's a real story. That's what happened. It's true. It is true.

How do you get hit with a berry? What's happening in your version of hide and seek? Because you're Ken Paxton and he knows how you're going to turn out and he tries to kill you with anything on hands. All of his friends were like, you're the fucking worst. All I got is a berry right now.

Bink right in the retina. Whatever. Let me ask you this, Heathen, right? Ken Paxton's in front of you. All you have is a berry. You're throwing it as hard as you can at his eyeball, right? No, that's the move. See?

That's all you got there. That's the choice the Lord made. Now, in Paxton's defense, there is an interpretation of this request that's just Paxton trying to catch one of the heads of PFLAG in a lie. But fucking defense retracted because even if that was his intention, and it's not, you don't get to use your power as attorney general to make people prove they really think their dog is the bestest boy. Right. Well, and also, that's not his fucking intention.

Given his track record, it would be silly to assume anything but the absolute worst from Ken Paxton. Right? If you're working the counter at McDonald's and he comes in and orders a large Coke, you should probably follow him long enough to make sure he wasn't planning to drown a puppy in it. Yep. I mean, let's be clear. Paxton has already requested the names of Texas patients from gender affirming medical centers in different states. And there is every reason to believe that Paxton is collecting a list of trans youth for prosecution. And he's hoping that people are too scared or too helpless

to fight back. And keep in mind, we are only hearing about the people with the resources to fight back against these requests terrifying so uh hey texas you're all in p flag now and you're all uh plafardicus or whatever yeah right hey ken wait until you hear what we've said about how we were going to respond to your fascist transphobia law bunch of bunch of subpoena those documents and communications i got them right here. Come get them. Easy for you to... No, don't do that. No illusions. Some of us have

committed very real felonies. We're taking one for the team. We're distracting one for the team. You didn't do any felonies. I'm deleting a lot of things. Anyways, this is awful. And it's also, may I remind you, the result of voting. And if you would like people like Ken Paxton not to be upheld at the Supreme Court level, okay, well, you'd need

a time machine to go back and vote for Hillary Clinton. But if you would like to not long for the days when people could sue Ken Paxton to stop him, there is one solution and one solution only, podcast listener. That's right. That's to vote for Joseph Robinette Biden in November. It was nice of him to have a middle name that sounds so much like you just made it up on the spot. It's almost as good as Bethesda. I agree.

It really is. And in space pareidolia news. I'm so happy. If you're a big fan of college football and astronomy, like I am, we have some great news for you. After years of complete silence on the subject, we finally got an official statement about the dimensional nature of the universe. Thanks to the science journalists over at Bleacher Report, the sports thing. at Bleacher Report, the sports thing. During the NFL Scouting Combine last week,

Brent Cebleski, who covers the science desk at Bleacher Report, I guess, was able to catch up with aspiring NFL defensive back Tyler Owens for an interview about celestial geometry. And according to Owens, space is

actually a hoax. But specifically the outer part. We definitely still have inner space here on Earth. So don't be too alarmed. But the outer part, that is an atheist lie. Ah, this alma mater of Texas Tech must be so very proud. Yeah. Just to clarify for the non-sports people this is the draft report so they were like

so here's texas tech graduate who got his education in texas tech i think the moon is jewish all right okay texas tech might actually be proud of this it's not yeah well that's i mean look there aren't any important space institutions in Texas, guys. Where was he going to learn the truth? You know what I'm saying? So according to Owens, at least from what I could gather, the spatial dimensions here on Earth stop somewhere in like the troposphere, you know, just like God intended.

Here's the exact words. Quote, I don't believe in space. I'm real religious. So I think we're alone right now. I don't think there's other planets and other stuff like that. End quote. Like planet, like, well, like, like Pluto, I guess. Okay.

So I don't know how many more times they can formulate sentences along the lines of I'm real religious, so abject stupidity before we're just out of a job, right? Yeah. To be fair, we would never accuse someone of being that stupid just because they said they were real religious. People need to volunteer for this level of designation. We would never presume. And by the way, yes, if your alarm just went off, that's because Tyler Owens is about to say the earth is flat and reject the oppression of big heliocentrism. Fuck yeah, he is.

He added, quote, I thought I used to believe in the heliocentric thing where we used to revolve around the sun and stuff. But then I started seeing flat earth stuff and I was like, this is kind of interesting. They started bringing up valid points. No, they didn't. So, I mean, I don't know. Could be real.

Couldn't be. End quote. I'm sorry. Back this up a little bit. You thought you used to believe. Yep. So time doesn't exist either. Because space time.

Okay, no, this all makes sense. Yeah, it's all connected. Right space time. Okay. No, this all makes sense. Now, Noah, to be fair, if I was unsure about the existence of space, I think it's actually honest to describe all your thinking is hypothetical. I'm pretty sure I'm a philosophical zombie. Y'all can Google it. and so i think this is what i think my lived experience is but i might not be having one these words might just be the machinations of the automaton that is my flesh based anyways we're good go blue go be blue red red yeah so the exact opposite fucking color so So close. So close. There's only three. It's actually in the name of the team.

Yep. Tech? The Texas Tech Tex. Yeah. I like it. Okay, so we're making jokes, but just to be clear for a second about something serious, when athletes speak their mind, depending on the subject, a bunch of bigots end up saying something like, shut up and dribble or shut up and football verb.

Those bigots need to shut up and die. Point being, this has nothing to do with Tyler Owens being an athlete. It's about him being wrong and about our entire education system failing us, especially when religion gets in the way. But most importantly, it's about our severe lack of funding for a large team of hecklers that goes around the world and yells, that's fucking stupid from the background when people say things that are fucking stupid.

If God was real, that would already exist. That's what angels would do. So we don't have angels and in putting the bus in abuse news tonight we have yet another story of a christian boarding school in missouri turning out to be a thinly veiled faith-based torture dungeon and we learned that when larry and carmen musgrave the owners of the lighthouse christian academy in piedmont missouri were arrested for kidnapping earlier in the week. Or, I'm sorry, we actually learned about it months ago when two students ran away, flagged down some lady on a nearby highway,

and begged her to call 911 to report their abuse. Or maybe from several previous times kids ran away and said they were being abused. Or from the years of former students openly detailing their abuse at the facility. What we learned this week, I guess, is that the police have belatedly decided to do anything about it. What the fuck has been happening? The cops were like, hey, guys, we've had like eight or nine

The Hills Have Eyeses recently. Yeah. Wait for a nice round 10 and then we'll do a little investigation-y thing. I feel like if a documentary beats you to your case, you're not doing an awesome job as a cop, right? Probably not.

You're not doing... Right. So, quick thanks to Mark, who was the first to send this one to us at scathingnews at gmail.com. Thank you for making me read about child abuse, Mark. But yeah, this shit is apparently a goddamn epidemic in Missouri,

where, to none of the regular listeners' surprise, Christian schools are barely regulated by the state under the demonstrably false assumption that their very religiosity somehow insulates them from immoral action. In fact, there was virtually no state oversight until 2021, when back-to-back high-profile cases of abuse came out of the Circle of Hope Girls Ranch and Boarding School and the Agape Boarding School, the latter of which takes its name for the Greek term meaning unconditional unconditional sacrificial love but shares its spelling with the far more accurate and disturbing agape all right uh porn hub our school has the same name as one of your categories i guess one of us needs to change it right yes yeah and they're like no

no we read the report. It sounds like our brands are pretty similar. I think we're... Listen, our category is way less problematic. You change your name. Right, yeah. Now, there are a lot

of open questions about the situation here. The questions are agape, I would say. Yes. Right. That's right. The Wayne County Sheriff's Office

released a statement saying these arrests came out of a months-long investigation that was still ongoing adding that the sheriff quote anticipates more charges as the investigation continues with more alleged victims coming forward end quote so far they're just charged with kidnapping and it's not super clear where that particular charge comes from the school is apparently in the habit of forcibly apprehending kids and taking them to the school in handcuffs and shit but that's disturbingly legal when you have parental consent i guess what there is a case

where a mother asked a school to do that shit to her son after the son got a court order barring her from any contact with him due to past abuse that was from a different school that the aforementioned ed gape won but since the director of their ministries one julio sandoval was the dean of that school it's possible that the musgraves actually have some direct involvement in that kidnapping. Or maybe they kidnapped some other kid too. We're going to find out soon, I would imagine. Right. this super insidious industry of basically kid prisons, which people are just now starting to recognize and speak about as the horribly abusive places they are.

Especially when you consider that a lot of the time, the things that kids do to get sent to these schools are like being gay or smoking cigarettes. Right, or masturbating, yeah. Right. It is an internet rabbit hole that you do not want to go down lightly i will say that yeah no shit and it's worth noting by the way that sandoval isn't the musgraves first

highly questionable hire in 2009 they were sued after their principal craig w smith groomed and molested a student the musgraves were told about the shit in 2007 and did nothing. That lawsuit resulted in a $100,000 judgment against Smith and a $750,000 judgment against the Musgraves. And after that judgment was rendered, they continued to run a fucking boarding school for 14 years. Because even the new and improved minimal regulations Missouri implemented a couple of years ago didn't include basic shit like, don't let people run schools after they've covered up for sex pests.

Yeah. Feels like that should be eliminating. You think so? And I'd love to say I'm going to lighten the mood at this point, but instead we're going to hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucinda. A man wrote the Bible. A horse was smart. If it's a legitimate race. If it's a slut, right?

Cooking can be fun. Hey, I'm proud of a man. This Week in Misogyny. About one out of every 12 abortions that take place in the U.S. happen in Florida. And that's not because Florida has one twelfth of the population or because Floridians are more likely to get abortions than people in other states. It's because for a long fucking time, it was the one state in the South that consistently protected abortion rights. I know that's hard to imagine when you're looking at the state through DeSantis tinted glasses, but that used to be the case. Well, no more. As I'm sure you've heard, the Florida Supreme Court

upheld a six-week abortion ban last week, which is effectively a zero-week abortion ban since most people wouldn't even know that they were pregnant until it was too late to abort. Now, if you live in Florida and you want an abortion, you're in for at least a 15-hour drive to North Carolina. And they ban abortion after 12 weeks. So if you miss that deadline, you're looking at at least a 17-hour round-trip drive to Virginia. And of course, that's why the Supreme Court case about Mifepristone is so damn important. With Florida falling, now the entire southeastern U.S. has effectively banned abortion clinics. But they're after so much more than that. In a chilling piece that Dahlia Lithwick wrote for Slate, she points out that in oral arguments for that case, the anti-abortion lawyer

straight up admitted to the endgame. See, the basis for the suit is the idea that if medically induced abortions goes wrong, the pregnant person might rush to the hospital and require an emergency abortion. And these doctors who are suing said they don't want to be forced into doing this emergency procedure that goes against their religious beliefs. So much wrong with that. But that's their argument in a nutshell. But as Lithwick points out, Aaron Hawley, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs here, argued for so much more than that, because she didn't just talk about instances where the fetus

was still alive. They also objected to instances where the fetus was aborted but incompletely evacuated. So it's no longer about some sacred line in the sand against terminating an unborn pregnancy. It's about not providing medical care for someone they see as sinful. It's an argument against helping the unclean. Of course, the silver lining of this devastating ruling in Florida is that in addition to upholding the six-week abortion ban, the Florida Supreme Court also dismissed a challenge to an upcoming ballot measure that would have passed enshrined the right to abortion in the state's constitution. And polling gives that a really good chance of passing. Of course, even if it does, it can't take effect until January of next year, and that leaves a lot

of people in dire straits for most of the year. And lest this segment turn into this week in abortion yet again, I want to outrage you with one last story out of ghana this is the story of a very influential priest with the pompous and wildly exaggerated name numo borchetti laway suru the 33rd who is facing criticism throughout the country after announcing that at the age of 63 he would be marrying a 12 year old girl. This is terrifyingly common in Ghana. The legal minimum age for marriage is 18 there but according to the NGO Girls Not Brides 19 percent of girls in the country are married younger and a full five percent are married off before they reach the age of 15. But that doesn't mean the majority aren't still pissed off about it which was evident in the

social media backlash that Suru saw when the video of his wedding went viral. We're still waiting to see if the government will respond, but based on the outcry and the law, that seems likely. But even if they do, it will be too late. Shit, guys, I'm sorry. I know this is a comedy show, y'all. I swear I do. But there's just nothing funny about where we are in terms of misogyny in this country. So with the hopes that they've got something way less depressing to talk about, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli. Thank you, Lucinda. And in a hearing investigating baby organ harvesting black market live stream news. Marjorie Taylor Greene hosted an event this week called

a hearing investigating baby organ harvesting black market live stream. That's a real thing that happened with a sitting member of the United States Congress. I feel like Mike Johnson gave her that task and told her it was a committee assignment, right? Yeah. And then he was like, so what are you thinking of wearing a literal clown costume. All right. Way ahead of me. Thanks so much. All right. So here's how we arrived at the existence of this very serious event. MTG did some thinking after a big set of cattle prod pull-ups, and she realized that abortion isn't just about the joy of killing babies. That wouldn't make any sense. abortion isn't just about the joy of killing babies. That wouldn't make any sense.

Que bono. So to answer that question that she asked herself in a language she doesn't understand, Madge did a little bit of her own research and found a 2015 video by anti-choice activist and self-proclaimed citizen journalist, David Daleiden. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yup, that one. Here's the basic gist of that video, if you're not familiar.

While posing as a representative from a fake biomedical firm that he set up, who wears a mustache and glasses, Daleiden meets with a real employee of Planned Parenthood and makes a deal to buy a pallet of dead babies in exchange for a briefcase of gold Krugerrands or something like that. And they agree to meet at an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. And that's how MTG knows about

the black market for fetal tissue. One other detail on this. None of that. Nothing I just said. The video has since been proven to be drastically edited by Daleiden for deceptive purposes. The only shred of truth is that fetal tissue is useful for medical research, but Planned Parenthood doesn't profit from selling it. One way of knowing that is the fact that Planned Parenthood is a non-profit.

Right. Well, okay. Now, to be fair, based on how Republicans treat their non-profits, I can see why MTG was confused, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, it's worth pointing out too that like this video is the third most debunked thing

of all time after hydroxychloroquine and trickle down economics. She has the fucking library of Congress at her disposal. And yet here we are. Yeah. Yeah, and just for the record, a quick search for David Daleiden will show you a long series of criminal charges against him in multiple states and also a $2.2 million judgment in

favor of Planned Parenthood in their civil trial against him. But MTG's fact-finding ability is well below the level of casual Google. So she invited Daleiden to this hearing as a special guest. MDG also invited Teresa Bukovinac, another anti-choice activist, who was involved with stealing aborted fetal tissue and eventually getting caught when the evidence was found by police

in her accomplice's refrigerator and had to be taken away. Apparently, they couldn't find a good fence despite the rampant demand of the alleged black market for that stuff. Right. And to be clear,

we should point out that there's definitely some evidence to suggest that Tessie B is an idiot who was actually just trying to sell fetal tissue on the black market. And when she got caught,

she was like, no, I have, I love, unborn babies. I was love unborn and it worked it worked yeah no what we're saying is that of the various reasons one might steal aborted fetal tissue she may have been doing the worst one right exactly so yeah the whole thing horrible, yes. But nothing is worse than the photograph that MTG tweeted to announce this ridiculous hearing. It has the title of the event. Just a reminder, that would be Investigating the Black Market of Baby Organ Harvesting.

And right next to those words is Marjorie Taylor Greene's stupid fucking face just beaming a smile directly into the camera like a fucking lunatic. Yeah, look, she's super excited about harvesting those baby organs. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Hey, Miss Greene, what did you mean when you said, do we still have that Canva template from the spaghetti dinner fundraiser. I just wanted to check how you're using it. Yeah. So the hearing was all about exposing the truth as presented by known liars and reviving this made up scandal to get more Republican idiots all riled up during an election year. If you have any such idiots in your life, I know many of you do. The House Oversight Committee made a dedicated site for debunking the whole thing. So link in the show notes if you're interested, if you think,

you know, showing facts to those people might help. Yeah. Dubious. You go ahead and try that. Good luck. And in Hind don't news tonight, it's got to be hard when laws against lying to people make you have to stand up and say, hold on just a minute, but that's the position that Christians in the Indian state of Assam find themselves in after that state's government passed the Assam Healing Practices Bill, which makes it illegal to offer or participate in magical healing for the treatment of any disease. Specifically, it prohibits, quote, inhuman evil or magical healing or propagation or promotion of such practices or black magic acts, end quote. Is there alien stuff going on? Inhuman was weird in that list. Well, regardless, it's a real hard sentence for Christians to have

to stand up afterwards and say, yeah, you're doing that to persecute us, though. But that's where we are. Right. It's like how you're allowed to mark your food in the break room as yours, but you're not allowed to write, everyone knows you steal our food, Larry. Fuck off. You got to love it when the liar fight breaks out and everyone has to argue in mumbles,

being like, come on, guys, we're all... Don't fuck it up. You're ruining it. You're ruining it. Yeah. No, so in defense of Christians who are labeling this common sense law as persecution,

this common sense law is totally persecution. And we know that because the people who proposed the bill publicly said shit like, man, we sure aren't going to be able to use this law

to persecute a lot of Christians. Hemanta Biswasarma, the chief minister of Assam, said that the law was passed because, quote, we want to curb evangelism in Assam, adding, quote, whoever is Muslim, let them be Muslims. Whoever is Christian, let them be Christians. Whoever is Hindu, let them be Hindu, end quote. And that guy is bad. My co-hosts are nodding. Yes, he is bad. The inability to reject your parents' religious beliefs, yes, that is bad. My co-hosts are nodding. Yes, he is bad. I also- The inability to reject your parents' religious beliefs.

Yes, that is bad. Hey, Hemanta Biswa, also Eli, what did we say about face talking? Your thoughts out loud? That's mumbles only. Mumbles only. I checked in. I checked in.

Can't get in trouble. So yeah, so this all stems from the fact that it's apparently a pretty common tactic among Christian missionaries in India to offer magical healing to desperate people in exchange for conversion, or slightly more subtly, offering magical healing for free to diseases that just tend to get better over time and then waiting for those conversions to roll in. And there's every reason to believe that the Hindu Nationalist Party controlling the state is way more concerned with the threats to Hinduism than the threat to poor people's health. Right.

So it is a bigot law. But the only people being affected right now are Christian con men who prey on the sick. Noah, are you sure we're against this one? Are you sure? Yeah, people can still reject their parents' religion, just not towards Christianity. It's like gutter guards for deconversion. Yeah. No, look, if the rule is no more lying to people to change their religion, that's a fair fucking rule, regardless of who's being targeted.

So, yes, to the extent that they maintain the spirit of the law is written, it's a good thing. That being said, we're talking about Narendra Modi's party here. There is every reason to assume that this law will be abused. Christian leaders in the state are concerned that even praying for somebody to get better will be dubbed magical healing under the act and be used to shut down churches. You got to stop selling, man. We're on board. Well, the law also, it allows cops to enter any place they suspect of doing magical healing, which could super easily turn into a license to harass churches whenever the fancy strikes a Hindu cop. Yeah, the Christian's got to learn to turn it around on them, though, right?

You can be like, oh, officer, hello. Can't help but notice you were doing some magic stretches for the gods this morning. That's right. Live and let live. Okay, but that's like a black guy in america calling the cops on a white guy like already side tackled before he even hangs up the call so that's true yeah i understand look it's it's easy to have this knee-jerk yeah but fuck those faith-healing christians reaction to this thank you no it is easy i did it yes well done yeah

i'm not even saying it's wrong, right? But our nemesis in the world of atheist activism isn't Christianity. It's religious oppression. So to whatever extent this law represents oppression against a minority religion and that extent is clearly

way above zero, we should be opposed to it. Boo. Boo subtlety, Noah. Noah's siding with the Christian faith healers. Boo, boo, get him. Nuance is always wrong. Thank you. Thank you. And before my good name is further

impugned by Eli's superficiality, we're going to close the headlines for the night. Heath, Eli, thanks as always. Jumanji. And when we come back, we'll wonder what the hell they've even been feeding these bulls. Depending on how you count them, there are upward of 4,000 religions in the world. Some estimates put that number as high as 10,000, but even that's just the tip of the bullshit iceberg, which is why we'll never have to worry about coming up with new topics for How Bullshit Is It? And I should say, as much as Eli loves to reintroduce himself to bits,

I should probably acknowledge, since he was in the headlines, that he actually isn't here for this bit. So this will mark Eli's first outreduction, I guess. Or is he? He might just be really silent and sulky we'll see it might might be that he just doesn't have anything funny to say he might be sitting right here trying to think of something the whole time and he's just got nothing that happens so tell us heath what shiver of drivel have you chipped off that iceberg for us today today we're going to be talking about electronic voice phenomena oh good ghost hunting bullshit might be my favorite bullshit.

So what are electronic voice phenomena? Electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, are artifacts in electronically captured audio that true believers claim are voices from the dead, or aliens, or spirits, or demons, or any of those things, but from another dimension. Okay, so it's when idiots listen to static and pretend they're hearing ghosts? Well, not necessarily. That's part of it. But sometimes it's actually even dumber. These days, they generally use a device that sweeps up and down the AM radio band playing random snippets of noise from random frequencies. So yeah, sometimes it's just the audio pareidolia you're talking about. But other times, it's just different radio stations

lining up in a parody of meaning. Like, you know, when Google Maps interrupts your podcast in such a way that the word of the day is use the left two lanes to turn left or something like that. And still other times, it's just straight up fraud, as you might have guessed. Okay, so EBP is more of like an umbrella term for audio recording bullshit? Correct. Okay, so where does this start?

At pretty much the exact minute that audio recording starts. The oldest quote about the concept comes from none other than Thomas Edison, who was asked by Scientific American if he thought ghosts could use his phonograph to communicate with the living. And he resisted the temptation to say get fucked long enough to instead give a real

well, but snarky answer. Quote, It is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and wraps and Ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication, end quote. And despite the fact that if ghosts exist, this might be better than a Ouija board, not exactly a ringing endorsement, EVP supporters like to trot this quote out as though Edison is saying he thinks this nonsense would work. Okay. All right. So I guess I actually, now I want to back up a little more because why the fuck would an interviewer

from Scientific American even ask that question? Yeah, because bullshit was cutting edge back then. The technological revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s was growing up in tandem with the spiritualism movement. And as silly and backwards looking as it seems to us now, that's only because we're looking backwards at it. At the time, spiritualists saw themselves as part of that scientific revolution.

It's just that they were pushing the boundaries of a thing that didn't exist. But to their credit, their experimental attitude was a huge step forward from the religious orthodoxy that preceded them. Okay, so how does this apply to ghosts was just sort of a standard question about new technology back then? Pretty much, yeah. I mean, not every new technology, but more than just the phonograph. Consumer photography was about 13 minutes old the first time somebody said, I bet I could take pictures of ghosts with this thing.

And it was about an hour and 13 minutes old the first time they said, yep, here's a picture of a ghost that I got. They call it spirit photography. And the oldest known example comes from 1862. It's no coincidence that the use of glass plate negatives, which made double exposures possible for the first time, came in 1859, right before that. Oh, all right. So it was just some well-meaning dude who double exposed a photo and said, holy fuck, I done caught a ghost in this here box.

Well, kind of. I feel like well-meaning is extremely generous there. He actually started charging for pictures of people with their dearly departed family members. One of his clients, quite famously, was Mary Todd Lincoln, who got a picture of herself with her husband's ghost

several years after his assassination. Wow. Okay, so did Thomas Edison ever build his ghost recording machine? No. There's no evidence that he gave this any more thought than was required to formulate that snarky answer for the Scientific American Reporter.

Okay, so who pioneered that one for us? I believe that would be American photographer and, yes, spirit photographer, Attila von Selle. In the early 1940s, he decided to augment his efforts to photograph ghosts with a parallel effort to record them. He started in 1941 using a record, but apparently he didn't have that much luck. It wasn't until he switched over to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in 1956 that he was finally able to capture, well, nothing, but an ambiguous enough nothing for him to claim success.

Oh, wow. Okay, so I bet the spirit world, at long last freed from millions of years of dimensionally enforced silence, had a lot of interesting stuff to say to Attila, huh? No, not really. Not really, no. For reasons he was never able to adequately explain, the technology only allowed spirits to speak in short little snippets okay so what little snippets of wisdom did they have to offer well the examples listed on wikipedia are this is g

with an exclamation so like this is g hot dog art and it was like addressed to art so saying that to somebody named art hot dog art and merry christ Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's fair to expect a little more from them, right? It's also weird that they speak in 1950s slang, right? Yeah.

You'd think they'd speak in the slang of their day, right? But no, apparently, you know, they've been keeping up with the slang. Sure. Sure. As ghosts. So, okay. So, I'm assuming that despite the banality of the messages this sparked some interest well to be fair given the authorities on the subject it's entirely possible that white

noise is the most profound thing that evp enthusiasts will ever hear true so it was plenty to get published in the prestigious at the time Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1959. Von Zele would later expand that work out to a 1979 book entitled Phone Calls from the Dead. Okay, so now is this a strictly an American phenomenon? No, not strictly American. The second example comes in 1959, the same year Von Zele's research was published from a Swedish painter and film producer named Friedrich Jürgensen. He was recording bird songs, but when he played back the audio, he could also hear the voice of his dead father and dead wife calling his name. He went

on to make several more recordings, some of which he claimed contained messages from his dead mother. Okay, so did dead mom have anything more interesting to say than this is G? If she did, it wasn't interesting enough to make it into any of the sources I could find, but it was enough to get the interest of a guy named Konstantin Rodiv, who you could probably call the father of EVP. He was a Latvian professor of psychology at a Swedish university, and when he heard about Jorgensen's work, he dove all the way in. He'd gone to make, by his count, over 100,000 recordings

in which he claimed to find communications with, quote, discarnate people. Okay, so I'm going to go out on a limb here and say, A, that discarnate means ghost, and B, that he doesn't have 100,000 recordings of ghosts. So what does he have? He has white noise. See, from its very inception, one of the keys to capturing EVP is to crank up the gain as high as it can go in order to maximize the amount of electronic distortion you're going to get in your finished product. In other words, step one is to make sure you have the shittiest possible recording. And what you'll find when you crank up the gain like that is a bunch of sounds of the machine itself, artifacts of the recorder rather than the environment that you're recording. Yeah, no, I interview people who don't know how to use Zoom pretty regularly.

Right. So if you listen to that kind of random noise long enough and you want to hear ghost voices bad enough and you lower the bar to like three syllable phrases, for example, this is G, eventually you do hear voices. So wait, so do people even hear the same thing when they listen to these? Only if they're told what to hear voices. So wait, so do people even hear the same thing when they listen to these? Only if they're told what to hear beforehand. When you see EVP presented on television,

it's usually subtitled so you can hear what you're supposed to hear. So this is an example I found online when I Googled EVP examples. Okay, that sounds like absolutely nothing. Okay, are you sure that it doesn't sound like a child counting to three?

I'm pretty sure, yeah. Maybe you should listen again, one more time. I'm sorry, it still sounds like nothing. Okay, yeah, that one, shit. I got another one. What about this one? Almost nothing? Are you sure that it doesn't sound like cut it out? I'll play it again.

Okay, yes. Now I hear that, yeah. Right. But if I told you it was other clouds or I'm a clown or buttered trout, you probably would have heard that. Okay, but I think we can all agree that I'm a clown would be the creepiest thing for it to be. Right, but that's what we're doing here. It's called auditory pareidolia. Our brains are, first and foremost, pattern recognition machines. So if you give us an inkblot, we'll give you a butterfly or a giraffe

or Liz Warren giving her stepsister a back rub, stuff like that. What was that last one? Just random examples. No, just random examples at the top of my head. The point is that even when the stimulus is completely random, our brains can find something there. So you said at the outset that not all EVPs fall into this category of translating static. So when do things change there? you know, translating static. So when did things change there?

Yeah. So the problem with mining static for creepy messages is that no matter how generously you interpret the noise, most of it is still nothing. So as EVP gained popularity, a few pioneers set out to update the technology. The first was a self-proclaimed psychic named William O'Neill, who in 1980 created an electronic audio device that he dubbed the SpiritCom. And he said he could use it to hold two-way conversations with dead people. Wow, that sounds like it would be hard to invent. Yeah, yeah, maybe for a regular person, Noah. But O'Neill was a psychic, I'll remind you. Self-proclaimed psychic. He learned how to build it through psychic communication with the very ghosts he would use it to talk to.

But they could already talk to him. Why would they need the SpiritGum? That is a great question and therefore not the kind of question that an EVP enthusiast would ask or talk about. But to his credit, O'Neill published the blueprint of his device. He made the plans for how to build your very own SpiritCom freely available. And several people even built one themselves. But nobody seemed to have the success that o'neill did an enthusiastic supporter of o'neill named george meek claimed that the reason they failed is that o'neill's

clairvoyance was part of the loop that made the system work so it was a psychic powered machine for psychic communication communication exactly That is impressively stupid. It is, it is, but only because I haven't told you about the Ghost Box yet. Oh, even the name alone has me sold. Yeah, so the Ghost Box is what really kicks this bullshit into high gear. It was first created in 2002 by a guy named Frank Sumption. Wikipedia describes it as, quote, a combination white noise generator and AM radio receiver modified to sweep back and forth through the AM band, selecting split-second snippets of sound, end quote. So ghosts modulate amplitude rather than frequency,

though? Indeed they do. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with which one tends to have more talk radio on it more often. Obviously not. No, yeah. So this thing just plays you random words from different radio stations in hopes that three or four of them will line up to say this is G? Well, they don't even need three or four to line up.

So imagine that you ask a ghost, what's your name? What are the odds that the first discernible word you're going to hear from your random AM radio sweep is a name? Relatively high, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And then add to that anything that could sound like a name. Like one example, the EVP enthusiasts crammed into the Wikipedia article as a guy asking a ghost what her name is and being told Annie. But as the more enlightened wiki editors point out, think about how many words, phrases, and word parts have the sound Annie in them. Like many, anyway, nanny, and he, company, all different ones.

So in this case, all it took was two syllables lining up for the EVP idiots to claim victory. Interesting. So, okay, so do ghosts limit themselves to just electronic recorders and tape recorders then? Not at all. These bullshitologists felt the need to coin the term Instrumental Transcommunication, or ITC, to encompass all the different technologies that ghosts might use, including, but not limited to, tape recorders, telephones, fax machines, TV sets, and computers. Okay, so how did something so stupid get so popular? Well, we have a lot of people to thank for that, but perhaps nobody more so than Sarah Estep, who founded the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena back in 1982 to popularize the practice and to standardize the methodology behind it. She started investigating EVP as early as 1976 and ultimately made hundreds of recordings that she said included messages from dead friends,

dead relatives, and extraterrestrials. Huh. Alive ones or dead ones? She didn't say. Okay, well, how does she know whether she's listening

to a dead person or an alien? Well, the aliens don't speak english okay so wait so any i'm sorry when she can't make any sense at all of the noise she gets she says well that must be an alien that's exactly right yep oh my fucking god okay how does she eliminate all the human languages that she doesn't speak? That is another one of those excellent questions that people who devote their lives to listening to static don't generally ask, I guess. So, okay, so this whole took off because of her? To a degree. But its popularity exploded in the wake of shows like Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, which debuted in 2004 and 2008, respectively.

and Ghost Adventures, which debuted in 2004 and 2008, respectively. Today, if you search Ghost Box on Amazon, you'll find variations on the radio sweeping device ranging in price from $90 to $275 American Christian dollars. Fuck! Oh, okay, what makes one worth more than the other? The new breakthrough ITC technology now. For example, the PSB7 Pro Spirit Box, quote, delivers superior EVP quality and the highest ease and frequency of communication due to a special blend of up to 40 frequencies. Identified as the sweet spot for EVP communications.

End quote. Is it finger licking good as well? Right, exactly. So, but, but, but, can it scan at 17 different sweeping speeds from 30 milliseconds to 350 milliseconds on FM and AM bands? It sure can, Noah.

Oh, wow. Okay, well, I can almost not afford not to buy one okay so i guess the price tag of this device alone is enough of an answer that i don't really have to ask the what's the harm question do i know you do not but it's worth emphasizing that the people who get taken in by this aren't just like divorced dads having a few beers and goofing off at the haunted house people sell evp services and their victims are pretty much exclusively the grieving and the mentally ill the promise of hearing from a dead relative is enough to convince a lot of uninformed people to part with very large sums of money yeah yeah all right well i guess the only question left to ask is how bullshit is it

well much like the gain on their audio this bullshit goes to 11 fuck yeah it does all right well we've both got open microphones so if any spirits communicating electronically from beyond would like to offer a rebuttal now would be the time nobody but in the absence of that nothing well i won't know until i play it back well i'm right i'm crying hold on i'm cranking up my game yeah right but in the absence of that we're gonna wrap up things here and we'll promise even more bullshit to come was that g before we duck back into our burrows this week, I want to apologize to anybody who delayed in getting tickets for our Salt Lake City show.

Those tickets are sold out. But we did open up a special Iridium Night ticket. If you want to hang out with us and play games the Thursday before the show, check GodawfulMoviesLive.com for more details. Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight. We'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout

for a brand new episode of our sister show, The Skeptocrat, debuting at 7 Eastern on Monday and an even newer episode of our sister show's Hot Friend, Godawful Movies, debuting at 7 Eastern on Tuesday

and an even newer episode of our half-sister show, Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I can't call this one an episode if I neglect to thank Heath Enright

for his Ellie Sattler-esque willingness to dig through huge piles of shit for us. I need to thank Eli Bosnick, but not for huge shit for us. I need to thank Eli Bosnick, but not for huge shit pile reasons. I need to thank the lovely and talented Lucinda Lusions for bringing down the hammer. I also want to thank Patrick

for providing this week's Farnsworth quote. Incidentally, if a podcast about national anthems seems like as awesome an idea to you as it did to me, look for the Anthems podcast wherever you found us or go to anthemspod.com. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people. Conrad, heroes come cheap. Mung Sung,, of course, I want to thank this week's best people. Conrad, Heroes Come Cheap,

Mung Sung Hero, David, Eric Clapton's Open Window, Night Owl 1090, Atheist Floridian, Rohin, Vincent, Chris, Susan, Agra Jagawi, Jim, and Sean. Conrad, Hero Come, Mung David, and Clapton's Window, who are so hot their orgasms technically count as coronal mass ejections. Night Owl

Floridian, Rohin, and Vincent, who are so sexy the sun gets shy and hides behind moons when they're around. And Chris, Susan, Ager, Jagawi, Jim, and Sean, who are so bright the eclipse will need special glasses to look at them. Together, these 14 formidable freethinkers forewin a fork full of fortune and furtherance of our fuckful fulminations

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Well, now I have and you're out of excuses. Incidentally, you can also help a ton by leaving a five star review review, telling a friend about the show, and following us on social media, and speaking on social media. Tim Robertson handles that for us, and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingads.com.

Hey, Heath, I haven't checked in on the brackets that we did for the fan group how's that going you went first i go really i did i was unaware that i had the preceding podcast was a production of puzzle in a thunderstorm llc copyright 2024 all rights reserved