The Scathing Atheist - 676: "Paddy, Did He?" Edition

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

In this week’s episode, American Christians wonder if they can be Nazis with an S this time, a new reality competition show looks a lot like game night with Eli and his magic troupe, and we’ll put the “ain’t” back in “saint.”---To see us live in San Francisco, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/god-awful-movies-live-in-san-francisco-california-tickets-1976632374642To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheistTo 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] check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticratTo check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-moviesTo 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/Report instances of harassment or abuse connected to this show to the Creator Accountability Network here: https://creatoraccountabilitynetwork.org/---Guest Links:Learn more about Bahacon 2026 here: https://bahacon.com/---Headlines:PRRI Analysis shows just how much Christian Nationalism has taken over the Republican party: https://prri.org/research/mapping-christian-nationalism-across-the-50-states-insights-from-prris-2025-american-values-atlas/Church ‘prophetess’ indicted in $50M money laundering, forced labor scheme: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/church-prophetess-indicted-50m-money-174500311.htmlDisplay of St. Francis of Assisi's bones: https://www.ncronline.org/news/display-st-francis-assisis-bones-confirms-enduring-appeal-relics-christiansFormer atheist neurosurgeon gives ‘case for existence of the soul’ in talk at Cornell: https://www.thecollegefix.com/former-atheist-neurosurgeon-gives-case-for-existence-of-the-soul-in-talk-at-cornell/South Korea's "top 49 fate readers" battle for soothsaying supremacy on new Disney+ show: https://www.herworld.com/life/battle-of-fates-contestants-disney-plusTrailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmc7LYUaho0&t=3s---This Week in Misogyny:TN lawmakers introduce bill to allow death penalty for women who have abortions: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/pro-life-tennessee-gop-pushes-amendmentScottish government runs ad campaign urging boys not to share sexist content: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp9mxgldmp0oWomen’s Hockey team turns down White House invite: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/sport/hilary-knight-president-trump-distasteful-joke

Warning, this podcast has fucks in it and shits. This week's episode of The Skathing Atheist is brought to you by Modern Dentistry. Modern Dentistry, the thing that immediately kills all long-term time travel fantasies. And now, the Scaving Atheist. Hi, this is Chris from Newman Lake, Washington. And as somebody who lives on the border of Washington and Idaho, I can tell you that some of us more than others did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men. It's Thursday. It's February 26th.

And it's tell a fairy tale day. Is it? Explains a lot about the state of the Union. I'm no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Keith Henwright. And from Jack Hughes's, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Waycross, Georgia.

This is the skating atheist. On this week's episode, American Christians wonder if they can be Nazis with an S this time. A new reality competition show looks a lot like Game Night with Eli and his magic Troop. And we'll put the eight back in Saint. But first, the Dietride.

I have no sympathy for Trump supporters whatsoever, of course. But you have to imagine it's fucking exhausting. Because you've obviously long since divorced yourself from any sense of reality or morality. So whatever shit he says or does, you know you have to defend it. And you just kind of figure that there are some days when these people wake up in the morning, they look at the news and they go, well, fuck, how the hell am I supposed to pretend that isn't evil? Now, of course, there's a whole industry that exists to churn out ready-made excuses for these people. If you've ever engaged with them online, you're going to find that within a few hours of the latest Trump outrage,

they're all making the same arguments using the same words. And so as those arguments don't have to be tied to any facts or internal logic, it's not that they're hard to come up with. But in terms of that interpersonal, my blue-haired niece is going to challenge. me on this one two type shit, right? Where there's no Trump official or bot army to provide you with the right answer. It's just kind of wear you the fuck down. So anyway, so I was reflecting on that the other day as I'm scrolling through social media and seeing the reactions from Republicans and their bots to Trump's litany of overreaches. And I put up a post that just said, man, defending fascism looks exhausting. And somebody left a comment on there that I thought was

really insightful. And I'm just going to, I'm going to quote it directly here. They said, quote, well, a lot of folks have decades of practice at defending tyranny and genocide from their God, so defending it from their political party isn't much of a leap, end quote. And that's just it, isn't it? That's why, in so many ways, Trump was inevitable. Since the new atheist movement started to challenge the taboo against pointing out how blatantly foolish shit religion is a couple of decades ago, a lot of Christians suddenly found themselves constantly having to defend authoritarianism. Is it any wonder that so many many of them slipped into defending actual authoritarianism?

I mean, I don't want to overstate the case here, right? Like conservative Christians have always been high on markers for authoritarianism. I mean, either they've been big supporters of corporal punishment, capital punishment, cultural conformity, top-down authority, boring herities. It's not like a coincidence that theirs is a God who exhibits all those authoritarian traits, nor is it a coincidence that they adhere to the branch of their faith that emphasizes those aspects of their deity. So it's not like Christians wouldn't be primed for authoritarianism, regardless of how much arguing they did online.

But at the same time, the problem is self-reinforcing. If you submit to a top-down authority that tells you to submit to top-down authority, you can see how that develops sort of a feedback loop. And, of course, this whole need for a separate media infrastructure, well, that largely grows out of the mainstream media's unwillingness to pander to religious delusions in the first place. There are only so many times that a good Christian is going to abide casually being told by some smarmy, newscaster they evolved from a monkey before he demands his own news without all these pesky facts in it. So these authoritative sources, your church leaders and the news, they reinforce this message of obedience and submission and divine authority all the while arming you with both the means and the need to justify immoral actions all the fucking time.

And then they say, hey, look, here's this divine authoritarian figure you should obediently submit to. and suddenly you got an army of seasoned genocide defenders at your fingertips. And I don't bring this shit up to pin the blame on the people who are picking those online fights or fighting back when those fights were picked with them. The fact that we have an equivalent amount of practice arguing against authoritarianism is coming in awfully handy at the moment after all. But it does offer a terrifying window into how far this can escalate. I mean, the question among the rational contingent of American voters has for a long time been

how far can he go? What could he do that would finally break the spell? What level of moral depravity would he have to sink to before his supporters would finally recognize that he's been the bad guy the whole time? Well, the authoritarian they cut their teeth defending drowned a large boat shy of the entire world one time and that didn't do the trick.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the aperture and ISO to my shutter speed, Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick, fellas, are you ready to bring things into focus? I do feel a bit ISO sometimes, Noah, but perhaps our audience could open the lens of their hearts to let me in? You got a F-stop, man. In our lead story tonight, a report out last week from the Public Religion Research Institute sheds new light on exactly how fucked we are as a nation.

There's a lot of nuance in their numbers, but the top line summary is that about three and 10 Americans are either Christian nationalists or Christian nationalist sympathizers. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah. And importantly, that includes the majority of self-identified Republicans, if you can believe that shit. And those numbers actually haven't changed significantly

over the last couple of years. The number of people in the study that identify as firmly rejecting Christian nationalism, though, has fallen by almost 20% in just the last three years to anemic 26%. You don't love it. Also ask about Nazism, you coward. Well, do it.

Okay, they did, though. Right. I know. I know. But like, used to work. Or NACRI, knockri, if we're using the same etymology formula as Nazi, you know, nationalist Christian knockery.

And just for the record, if you were a NACRI sympathizer, you're a NACRI. Sure are. That's what that is. Yep. Yep. So this all comes from an annual survey that PRRI developed back in 2022. They used a short series. questions to divide Americans into one of four categories. Adherence to Christian nationalism,

sympathizers, which Heath has already dealt with. Adherence. Skeptics and rejectors. So in the most recent survey, they came up with 11% adherence, 21% adherence light, 37% skeptics, and 27% rejectors. And no, that doesn't add up to 100. There's a 4% bucket for DK and skip the question. But the important takeaway is that more people in the country either adhere to or sympathize with Christian nationalism, then reject it. Yeah. And that right there is the crux of like nine out of ten problems that we talk about on this show. Okay. Election 2028 idea. We just run a big wooden cross.

Oh, there you go. Draping a flag around it. Also, just for the record, if you don't know if you're a knockley sympathizer or you skip the question even worse, you're definitely. Inaugri. Probably. No comment. Now, surprisingly... You have to have a comment.

You have to have a negative comment. My negative, my comments, no comment. Too slow. Wink. So, not surprisingly, the biggest indicators of Christian nationalism were party affiliation and media preferences, which that's just two fucking ways of saying the same thing at this point, right? Republican membership pretty much requires a fact-free news stream these days.

So among other strong correlations were old age, which is encouraging. Nice. And lack of education, which is not encouraging because we're actively and intentionally getting worse at educating people every fucking day. Okay, but the old age thing kind of works itself out in payroll. Yeah, eventually. You know. Yeah, apparently the prototype of the, the knockery, it's a boomer yelling slurs at a VCR.

They haven't learned yet. Yes. But, yeah, sadly, lots of younger people are doing that with a phone camera. They have already learned. And then posting that on their very popular YouTube. YouTube channel. On their podcast that's bigger than ours. Yeah, right.

Now, another big takeaway from the data was that Christian nationalists are the fucking worst in every imaginable way. In addition to just being Christian nationalists, they're also way more likely to reject vaccine mandates, hold racist views regarding immigration, sympathize with authoritarianism, and they're also far more likely to endorse political violence than those who rejects Christian nationalism. Okay. but Mom Dani refused to call that snowball fight the next 9-11.

He did. So, you know, we got people on our side too who need work. Okay, just going to zoom out for a quick reminder about kind of our whole thing here. I hate when you do this. No, this is important, though. If you believe there's a magical afterlife, you cannot be trusted to do anything right in the real one. Yep. Like maybe some people use that delusion for good, but.

Not enough of them. Yeah. And even then, it's bad. Best case scenario, you're good for a stupid fucking reason. You're just not dangerous yet. Yep. Right. Exactly.

And by the way, the numbers on violence are actually way worse than they appear if you ask me because the question was phrased as agreeing or disagreeing with this statement, quote, because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, end quote. Now, if you're on the reject Christian nationalism side of this, the correct answer here is yes. Right? Like, I mean, given Trump's move to nationalize elections and seize election infrastructure and all this shit he was saying in the state of the union about how Democrats had to cheat on that,

like, the odds that we're going to have to use violence to save the country. I think he's not going to be used violence to save this country. I would get like a 50-50 at this point. You sunny optimist, no illusions. Exactly. And yet. You ruby cheaped. And yet it's the side that it's the Christian nationalist side that's most likely to answer yes to that question.

The side that controls every level of government is still more likely to say that they're going to have to resort to violence to get their way. By almost 20 points in case you don't have enough shit keeping you up at night. I do, though. Oh, plenty. Well, never mind then. And in profit for profit news, if you're a churchgoer in the state of Michigan, first of all, weird podcast, Joyce, but welcome, welcome.

Hi. But secondly, you are already intimately familiar with the subject of this week's story. The Kingdom of God, Global Church, a prosperity gospel church that makes the sellers of extended car warranties look like rank amateurs in the sheer volume of phone bothering they've managed to do.

And as if getting a call from a tax-free institution receiving free money from their flock, asking for money wasn't enraging enough. It turns out they were forcing literal slaves to do it. So we're going to talk about it. And think about how bad churches have to be for you to need to use the literal qualifier there, right? You know, we're not just talking about the run-of-the-mill practices that could be rightly classified as figurative slavery that they're so well-known for doing.

We mean the literal kind. That's about as damning as a qualifier can get. Okay, that being said, those people were provided with important vocational training for a job in telemarketing. So it's an opportunity if you think about it. That's what you said, and I thought about it. He's insane. Yeah. So first off, big thanks to Dr. Dave for sending us this story to scathing news at gmail.com.

I didn't bother to check what kind of Dr. Dave was. But as a reward for sending us atheist news to scathing news at gmail.com, I sent him some pictures of my lumps. So act accordingly. So when you say you're lumps? Textured soy protein, I'm pretty sure. That's what I call them. That is what I call them.

Right. So if you haven't heard of David E. Taylor and Joshua Media Ministries, of which Kingdom of God global churches apart, oh man, I am so excited to tell you about him. He specializes in paid healing and dream interpretations from God. He once claimed to have raised a woman from the dead via Facebook message and unrelated, but still important, he dresses like a general in Michael Jackson's army. That he does.

So, listen, Eli has included a bunch of photos in the notes here. And as bizarre as the outfits are, I can't really tear my eyes away from the one where he's holding several dozen crutches that, like, presumably the people he healed don't need anymore. That is what those are, no illusion. Maybe he just, like, cornered the market on a high. I demand item. Low elasticity of demand. Yeah, I knew that one when we get you.

Smart. So David was actually arrested for this back in July of 2025, but two co-defendants have now also been arrested, including his prophetess, Kathleen Klein. The three are charged with forced labor, conspiracy to commit forced labor, and money laundering conspiracy, all of which they deny.

According to Yahoo Finance, quote, prosecutors say victims were forced to work grueling hours, sometimes exceeding 20 hours per day. According to the federal indictment, soliciting donations by phone without pay. Workers were assigned aggressive daily, weekly, and monthly fundraising targets that the DOJ described as unattainable. Given what you're selling, I feel like the target could be 250 and be unattainable.

Yeah, what do they need benchmarks? It's just free money. Yes, yes. They're not even paying for the person who's getting the free money. Yeah. Right? All profit. It continues, according to the indictments.

workers were instructed to tell donors that their money would be used to build wells in impoverished parts of the world and to fight human trafficking. While the organization was allegedly trafficking, the very workers making those calls. No, no, trust me, a trafficked person will get off early today if you just buy it. So I wonder, though, if oil companies ever solicit donations for wells that they want to build in impoverished areas by saying that? I mean, it would be technically true in their sense. Well, yeah. I mean, the U.S. military is one of those oil companies, right? So if David was paying his taxes, he wasn't technically lying.

So he was lying, I guess. He was lying. He was. Yeah. So if the money wasn't going into building wells and freeing the slaves that they were, where did the money go? Well, once again, Yahoo Finance has the answer. Okay.

When are you? Yahoo Finance? You can also ask Jeeves about this, I guess. I'm citing by sources, Heath, like a proper journalist just above Ben Shapiro on that one time people accidentally put us on a graph. According to their report, Taylor and his co-conspirators spent nearly $50 million that they gathered on an $8.3 million mansion, Mercedes, Benz's, plural, Bentley's, plural, a Rolls-Royce, multiple bulletproof vehicles, a $105,000 boat, jet skis, ATVs, airline tickets, and a yearly designer clothing budget of $30,000. Jesus Christ.

A budget which are longtime listeners will actually remember Taylor first explained back in 2015 because he, quote, sweats through his clothes when he travels. That's right. Yeah. I got honestly, the only surprising thing about any of this is that someone got arrested over it. Yeah, that's the change. Yeah. And this was Pam.

Bondi's DOJ running the case. It's a federal case. Look at the Dow. She clearly called up Trump being like, hey, Don. So I know we don't go after Christian crimes. But here's the thing. This is tricky. The ringleader guy, David is black.

So the flowcharts kind of in a fight with itself. What are we doing? It's tough because it's like with that one, choose your own adventure where you always got eaten by the snowman. We just trying to figure it out. I keep getting eaten. One last thing about this story. Big ups to Yahoo Finance, my prestigious and very relevant source for this story.

That's not even the source. They're like they're a aggregator. Isn't it money-wise that the story? I don't know what you're talking about. The reason that Taylor and his cohort were able to get away with this for as long as they did is because there's virtually no financial oversight of those churches. Right. In fact, one of the ways that takes.

may get away with his crimes is that there are very few laws around the hours that church workers are allowed to work. Point is, wherever you find religion, you're going to find the worst version of a bad thing. So, you know, wardrobe included, by the way.

Your wardrobe included. Yeah. And in Hot Crossbones News. Fantastic. The Catholic Church is fucking weird. Yeah. They're weird. They're freaking me out. They're doing stuff with dead bodies again. Oh, no. Honestly, I'd almost rather they were fucking them. They're not.

But it would make more sense. Like, I don't actually want that to be true, but I'd understand it better. But no, they're just inviting people to look at the remains of a really old dead guy. As a follow-up to their harvested organs of a Brazilian child exhibit from last year that they did with that guy, Carlo Acutus. they're now showing the bodily remains of St. Francis of Assisi at his basilica in Umbria. And about 400,000 crazy people registered in advance to look at the dead guy's bones. Yeah, which is too bad because you know that the ticket snipers got in there and they're going to jack up the prices before the real Assisi fans can get their seats. Oh, but they are, though. They are.

if you will. And hey, in one of the weirdest hybrids of cutting edge and barbaric prehistory I've ever seen, you can apparently tour this display in VR. God, that's scary. Who suggested that? Which priest walked out in his meta-head set and was like, guys, I have an idea. All right, well, a big thanks to Steve for sending a link to Skathing News at gmail.com. Steve has the option to do one weird thing to the remains of whomever of us dies.

first five minutes, no questions asked. Oh, wow. It's me, Steve, plan accordingly. I'm my head on heart attacks, one nothing. Yeah, but it's funnier if it's me. So it's me. So the bone viewing event is meant to celebrate the 800th

anniversary of the death of St. Francis in 1226. Among other things, he's known for being the first documented case of a saint getting stigmata. Oh. Which means he had somebody fuck up his hands and feet to look just like Jesus during the crucifixion at some point. And of course,

by having hundreds of thousands of people look at the skeleton, asterisk, we'll circle back to that, that's going to revive the spirit of peace and fraternity that St. Frankie was all about. That's the point of the exhibit for them. Okay. So I feel like we could just fold yours crystals to shit out of those bones, right? They're not going to know. How are they going to know? You sound like a 15th century monk. Spoiler alert. Oh, no. Okay, so here's the details on that asterisk. They're making a big spectacle about showing the bodily remains of possibly their most famous example of corpse robbery and corpse losing.

When St. Francis died, one of his followers was especially worried about the body getting stolen because this was the peak of the body stealing age, apparently. There's a lot of that going on. So that follower buried St. Francis in a lot of that. a secret place. Nobody knew where the body was for about 600 years. And then somebody was like,

here he is, found him, I found him. And everybody went along with that. They were like, yeah, cool, you found him, I guess. So the Vatican has genuinely no idea whose bones they're showing right now. It's probably just some guy. All right, well, I should have known when I wrote

the fucking Folgers Crystall's joke, that there is no scam I could joke about that the Vatican wasn't already turning a buck on Jesus Christ. Also, I have questions about that original guy's intentions. He was so worried about body stealing that he stole

the body of St. Francis. Also worth noting, if you're thinking about making the pilgrimage to a CZ and pulling off some kind of violent heist, think again. Security is tight. That includes metal detectors

for everyone entering the basilica, an array of visible and hidden cameras, sniffer dogs, and a huge team of extra cops. And these are Italian cops. So it's very serious. And the glass around the skeleton is bulletproof. You know, in case there's a shooting. An assassination attempt.

Yeah. All of which feels, can I say, slightly unnecessary, given that if you do manage to steal the body, they're just going to go, oh, here it is. We found them again. Also, if you were going to steal them, you wouldn't fucking shoot them first. Honestly, I don't understand the point of the bulletproof vitrine unless they think Francis is going to try to shoot his way out. Yes, it feels like a vampire situation. Yes, exactly.

It feels like a thing that Dracula is about to escape from for the plot. Also, just circling back to that 600-year gap in the chain of evidence here, here's the story of what happened, according to Brother William Short, a professor of Christian spirituality at the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego. A lot of fake jobs this week. So, yeah, according to that guy, when Francis died, he got quickly canonized, and the Vatican wanted the body moved from Assisi to Rome. but the night before the transfer,

a devout follower, that's who I was talking before, named Brother Elias, took the body and buried it inside a column at the basilica in Assisi. It was never seen again until it got discovered by excavations in 1818. And that's confirmed, by the way.

Pope Pius the 7th confirmed it was, in fact, the 600-year-old bones of St. Oh, Francis. Like he licks him considers it for a second. Yeah. Yeah.

That's just like it. That's a Francis. Trust me. Oh, no. Cocaine. Maybe cocaine. And bones. And rob some Francis on the couch.

Here's where brother short from the theological seminary kind of gives away the game. He said, quote, it was a matter of safety and economics. If you have a big saint, a new saint. And this guy had the potential. to be a really big saint. Whoever gets the body gets the pilgrims, end quote.

Okay, so in the game of sainthood, you win or you win a little more money from merch sales? Yeah, that's about right. Yeah, selling weird, you know, openers with the guy's face on it and stuff like that. So, yeah, whenever I learn about stuff like this from the

Catholic Church and its people, you guys, you feel like you're watching a show on Nat Geo, you know what I mean? Sure. Narrative being like, Look at how they instinctually line up for the bone ritual and bob their little hens around and a sign of social bonding. You can see the people in the picture being like, oh, bones, bones. Truly a fascinating species.

They really are. And while we observe quietly, we're going to take a quick break and hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucinda. A man wrote the Bible. A horse what she was. If it's a legitimate race. It's a slut, right? Cooking can be fine. Hey, I'm glad of a man.

This week in massage. So in case you're keeping track of the ever-receding, but they would never, lines that the moderates on the abortion question have had to keep retreating to. The latest citadel that they had to abandon was but they would never try to execute women for having abortions, but Republicans in Tennessee tried to do exactly that this week. So this story starts fucked up and gets way worse. Apparently, the state legislature approved funds to build a memorial to the unborn so that they can get together and weep for all the zygotes that weren't. And now they need to pass a bill appropriating funds to maintain it once it's unveiled this summer. So they've got this routine.

We promised to periodically wash the pigeon shit off of it type bill that they've got to pass. But then an SS-level misogynist named Jody Barrett tried to tack on an old by-the-way amendment that would allow for imposing the death penalty on pregnant people who get abortions. Now, the technical wording in the amendment does its best to disguise its intent. It doesn't just come right out and say, I want to murder women for refusing to carry my seed. But when it was pointed out to Barrett that the bill would allow people to be executed for getting abortions, he didn't even try to deny it. Instead, he gave a very, come on, type answer about how the death penalty is super rare in Tennessee

and that they've never executed a lady before. And look, the amendment failed and it was never close to having enough votes. So a lot of people would try to write this off as a single extremist. But here's the thing. Republicans in Tennessee sure the fuck didn't treat it like the rantings of a single extremist. It actually got a lot of support both inside the legislature and out. Hell, Clint Presley gave it a full-throated endorsement. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the president of the Southern Baptist Convention,

the largest Protestant group in the fucking country. See, it used to be that when a lawmaker brought something like this up, everybody worked to quickly distance themselves from that person and maybe even strip them of their committee assignments or something like that. But in today's GOP, it's treated like a reasonable proposal that just doesn't quite have the votes to pass. But not every country sucks as bad as mine. I just saw a news alert the other day about an advertising blitz to Scottish government is funding to try to discourage boys 11 to 18 from sharing sexist content online. The program was developed by a group called White Ribbon Scotland,

and the project lead pointed out that pretty much any man-related thing a boy looks up, whether it's how to get fit or how to dress or how to tie a tie, is likely to draw them down a misogyny rabbit hole. And it's easy for kids at that age to lose track of the fact that the shit that they do online has consequences in the real world. So good luck to Scotland with that campaign. And if our American listeners are a little bummed about Scotland and getting all the good national pride this week,

I have one last story for you, because yes, the head of the FBI misappropriated funds to fly a taxpayer-owned jet to Italy to watch a hockey match, then posted videos of himself partying in the locker room just as his handlers were insisting that wasn't why he was in Italy. But the U.S. women's team also beat Canada in a gold medal match. And when Trump invited them to the State of the Union address so that he could single them out,

they told him to fuck himself. And on that patriotic moment, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli. Thank you, Lucinda. And in sole subject of expertise news, when you specialize in religious bullshittery, you notice a pattern to religious con artistry.

Failing celebrity, Christian movies. Bad musician, Christian music. And the end. ever popular, expert in an unrelated field who thinks knowing about his thing means he can prove God is real? Christian book. Yeah, like honestly, after seeing what Ross Douth got away with, I'm convinced that we get a bestseller out of just look at the insert naturally occurring noun here 11,000 times.

Just look at the noun. Done. Well, yeah, but that's not going to meet the word count minimum. Keith is a postcard. Yeah. Consider the lobster. Exactly. Right.

So first off, a big thanks to Skis. Skeptic Buffalo 420 for sending us this story to scathing news at gmail.com. Skeptic Buffalo knows that no matter what sauce you put on him, those are chicken wings. See through the lies, skeptic Buffalo. See through the lies. Also, by the way, Skeptic Buffalo 420, if your name goal was to make me want to hang out with you as much as possible in 17 characters, you fucking nailed it, dude. Right? If you had added more characters and been like, Blue Cheese, not Ranch, fuck Ranch, you would have had me even better.

That's how you would. To be clear, you just would have had him more. You had me at Hello Buffalo Wings. Right. So this story comes to us from The College Fix, which I should warn listeners at the outset, is the news equivalent of all the kids who used to remind the teacher that there was homework, getting together to create a website to remind the teacher to be racist. So I would take any story from them with a big old grain of salt,

let alone one that bears the headline, former atheist neurosurgeon gives case, the existence of the soul in Talk at Cornell. I don't think our audience was in danger of taking that headline seriously from any source, Eli, but thanks for the warning. Exactly. We all knew that headline was fake and was a metaphorical racist nerd, I think. Yeah.

So if you're wondering, already so many lies in that headline. Like, yes, Dr. Michael Agnour is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University. He has served as the director of the pediatric neurosurgery. He is an award-winning brain surgeon, and he was named one of New York's best doctors in New York Magazine in 2005. But, been a while. A, as I said at the top, he's not going to talk about brain stuff. He's going to try to prove the existence of the soul related to brain stuff. And B, Stony Brook is a safety school for kids who can't get into NYU. Stony Brook is a safety school for people who can't get into their safety school, man.

Okay, NYU is a safety school for Columbia. Everybody knows that. And NYU Tish is a safety school for like people who want to work on carnival cruises. Get the fuck out of here. For the Disney Magic Experience? How dare you? Yeah. But the lies in the headline don't end there.

Ignor is not a former atheist in any way that matters. He didn't grow a particular religious. and he says that he dedicated his life to the religion of science, by which he means knowing true things to become a neurosurgeon, I guess. Oh, and also one other lie before we get to the meat of his argument is that Egnor is a speaker brought in by Cornell. So Egnor was brought in by Heterodox Academy, a Nazi youth club funded by right-wing dark money,

with the express purpose of bringing idiots like Egnor to prestigious universities so that Nazi youth websites like the college fix can say they gave their talk at Cornell and technically not be lying. Right. Yeah. Like I could show up there and talk. Yeah. I've performed on Broadway. On Broadway, the street. Exactly. In New York. Heath and I performed in fucking Madison Square Garden. God damn it. Mm-hmm. As did I. Also off Broadway. Yeah.

Off Broadway. On it. Lexington. Right. So to Ignor's point, which, and I'll point out that you can actually watch this entire lecture on the link in the show. to check my facts here. But honestly, we might need to bring in Stormy D for a special guest report to really get into the weeds on this one in the future. So his point seems to be that the soul is real because it isn't located in the brain.

And he knows that because the very narrow and mysterious set of behaviors that he defines as soul-like aren't affected by brain damage. What? So the soul is mostly, involved in like regulating body temperature then? Okay.

Quote from the talk here. There is no seizure that will make you do a motor sport. What? Or there are no free will seizures where you will contemplate moral law against your will. Isn't that odd that most of the stuff that goes on inside our mind is never evoked by an electrical discharge in the brain? Adding, never in the medical literature has there ever been a report of brain matter that evoked reason or free will, end quote.

So, yeah, a couple of problems. Just a couple? With that. Sure. Yeah, he's making the claim that an active behavior after a seizure would disprove his point. But that's not how damage and dysfunction works. That would be like saying language doesn't come from the tongue

because nobody's ever bit their tongue so hard they speak can't mean. Well, also, but like, there is brain damage that would make you want to do a motorsport, though. It's meaningless and wrong. Yeah, there's also brain damage that makes you think the scientific justification for a soul or for anything would include the word motorsport. He could have used anything. Yeah, we have that evidence now. One other thing about this argument, it's important that if someone's making a positive claim for God or the soul. It's only worth addressing if the opposite would disprove their belief, right? Now,

I don't want to speak for Dr. Agnor. The college where I work has more than one dining hall, but I have a hunch that if someone had a seizure that did make them contemplate a moral law against their will, he wouldn't stop believing in the soul. Right. Yeah. Which for those of you following along makes this whole thing a hypothetical argument during a Republican lie talk. reported on in a Republican lie magazine, draw me a maze. Keith, I am lost. No.

Okay. And finally tonight. Impressage your luck. Fantastic. There's a new game show out of South Korea in which contestants vie for sooth-saying supremacy to determine the best fortune teller in the country. Spoiler, they're all tied.

They are all tied. It's called Battle of Fates. And it just released earlier this month on Disney Plus. According to their description, Korea's top 49 fate readers. Not clear how they ranked that seating. Well, also, but like the 50th rated one has to be so pissed. That's tough. You got to assume they're going to bring 50 and you're at 50.

You think you're making the cut. I worked so hard to get to 50. I learned my crystals. I'm in the top. 50. With the talk, everyone goes by tens. Korea's top. This is like being in the Olympic qualifiers, but not the Olympics.

I knew this would happen. This description. Korea's top 49 fate readers from tarot readers to shamans, fight for pride. Who will be the winner? And weirdly enough, nobody seems to know the answer yet. Right. All 49 fate readers seem to think they have a chance at a big briefcase full of

Cash. Okay, but if on episode one, one guy had just been like, it's her and then walk out the door, does he win? Does he lose? All right. I want to make a prediction. None of them gets the pride. I win. I called it. And a big thanks to Ian for sending a link to Skating News at gmail.com. Ian gets one free soothsaying from the cast member of their choice. And let me add, I think I know who he's going to pick. Mim-M-M-M-M-M-M-M-A-M-A. Hey, podcast listener, I know there was a big gasp this now, but it was because Heath and I screamed mem-M-M-M-A at each other for 12 minutes, and Noah likes you. So I watched a bit of this show,

and it is everything you'd hope for and more. We might need to give it a full episode on GAM, or at least a full segment at some time. So I won't give you any, uh, on spoilers about the future, but I'll give you the general idea. The action starts with a legal disclaimer. It says predictions made by contestants in this program are made by them independently based on methods that are not scientifically proven and should not be considered a substitute

for professional advice. I feel like if your TV show needs to start with this is all bullshit, you shouldn't make that show. You should just go back. I also, I think not scientifically proven is way more generous than we should probably be, right? Like, as those science had just hadn't gotten around to checking to see if tarot cards were getting. Not scientifically plausible is the phrase you were looking for in Netflix. Or possible maybe.

That's what you're looking for in Netflix. So, yeah, just based on the montage of contestants at the very beginning of the show, you can tell it's going to be an amazing wizard battle. It kind of feels like a trailer for like soul caliber with each fortune teller wielding their favorite weapons. I spelled soul differently. That includes lots of the stuff you'd expect like tarot cards, crystal balls, tea leaves, dowsing rods, but also a few new ones for me. That includes a magical marching bass drum that appears to be mounted on a like a little toboggan. Oh.

That's a magical item. And also a comically oversized sword. that lets you see the future when you apparently lick the edge very sexually and make hard eye contact with the camera during the thing at the beginning of the show. I want to be clear that if licking the edge of the sword the way the gentleman does in this opening sequence actually allowed me to see the future, I still would not do it. Well, hey, look, if I see you licking the edge of a comically oversized sword, I feel like I can tell your future from it. And your internet history. You're going to cut yourself. Yeah.

So let's meet a few of the soldiers of fortune telling. Also, you're going to get chlamydia. You're going to get chlamydia. Very possible. Very possible. So here's a few of the characters. We get a feel for the vibes. We have Lady Wish.

She comes from a long line of shamans. And before she got into shamanry, she was a competitive archer. It was awful. She'd walk out and then start yelling, fuck, throwing a tantrum before she shot anything. We also have Yun Daemon. He was a musician for 23 years.

And apparently that's a tough way to make a living, much like competitive archery, I would imagine. So he pivoted to the emerging sector of scrying. About five years ago, that's when he started. Okay. I'm sorry, but psychics that have had previous failed careers are fighting an upheaval. Hill credibility battle, I think.

Yeah. Just one more of my favorites. We have business sage Kim. And much like one of Eli's best magical protégés, this guy does fortune telling for the corporate sector and really has that as a job. To be fair, still better than hiring McKinsey. And just in case you're not already watching on Disney Plus right now. Why? Why aren't you doing that?

Exactly. It is delightful. A big component of the tournament format involves the fate readers getting squared off into one-on-one battles. So they sit across a table in very large chairs made of climbing vines, and they each have their magical soothsaying items on the table in front of them, and they magic fight. And then this is my favorite part. The panel of judges, they have judges. So the panel sees them magic fight, and the judges go fucking buck wild about the like, whatever happened, the magic apparently happened. He's got her on the ropes.

Yeah. He's got her on the ropes. And for reasons unrelated to me needing to watch something real quick, we're going to wrap up the headlines there. Heath, Eli, thanks as always. Jumangi. And when we come back, Heath will tell us the story of his people. When you're already credited with sexual perversion, drugs, and rock and roll, even by your enemies.

You're clearly doing fine in the PR department, but we're going to chip in on Satan's behalf anyway with a segment called The Devils Advocates. I forgot it had Flammy sounds. Yeah, yeah, that's how you know it's not how bullshit is it. Right, yeah. Got it.

Exactly. So what are we going to be devilishly advocating for today, Heath? Today we're going to be talking about the leader of my people, St. Patrick. Oh. Wait, I thought this was a segment where we talked about miracles. Yeah, but it turned out there aren't any of those. Oh. I'm expanding it out to include saints. No, yeah, that's a good call.

So, okay, so who was St. Patrick? He's the patron saint of Ireland, or the primary patron saint, actually. There's a backup patron saint of Ireland named R rigid. Huh. And the Irish were like, boo girl, she's the backup, boys. He's also the patron saint of Nigeria. Is he? Which gets a lot less press.

To be fair, he's not doing great work over there. Now, technically, he's never been canonized by the Catholic Church. But since he was already considered a saint before the canonization process was finalized, he sort of got grandfathered in. He's also a saint in the Lutheran Church and the Church of Ireland, obviously. And in the Eastern Orthodox Church, not only is he a saint, but he's considered to be equal to the Apostle. Ooh, big spenders.

Okay, so when does his story start? Like most of the details of his life, we really don't know. Probably around 385 C.E. We also don't know exactly where he was born. Might have been Wales, might have been England or maybe even Scotland. Okay. So what do we know? Nothing for certain, really.

We have two main sources, both written by Patrick. One is the Confessions of Patrick, which is, biographical but obviously full of shit. And the other is a letter he wrote, chastising people for being too pagan. Beyond that, all we have are hagiographies from centuries after his death. So I'm going to tell you what the stories say, but just keep in mind that almost none of this is true. I always do, Heath. All right. So the first salient detail of his life comes at the age of 16. According to the account in his confessions, he was kidnapped by Irish pirates.

and sold into slavery on the Emerald Isle. Irish Pirates sounds like a thing I would make up to fuck with Don on Bible B. Spirit, right? No, this one's an Irish pirate, Don. But remember what I said about everything in the story being a lie? Yeah, that was probably one of the lies. Really? It turns out that Patrick's dad held an office called a Decurion.

It was a high Roman office that obligated his son to a position on the 10th. council where he lived, a job that was pretty universally hated. So it was pretty common for their sons to disappear abroad for five or six years around the time they turned 16. And apparently abducted by Irish pirates wasn't significantly more plausible than it is today. Okay, so safe to say the abduction is bullshit. Yeah, it's not just the implausibility and convenience of the whole thing. All the details about it are very silly.

He says he worked for six years as an enslaved shepherd before escaping, talking his way onto a ship, making it home to England, wandering with his shipmates in the wilderness for 28 days. And then he prayed a herd of wild boar into existence when all his shipmates got hungry, had some more swashbuckling adventures, of course, and eventually returned home just as his town council obligations were expiring. Crazy. Okay, I feel like being a shepherd for pirates requires a lot of faith. You're just watching these sheep thinking to yourself, I mean, eventually some guys are going to pull up in a boat and eat these things and pay me or not? I don't really know. Okay, so, but eventually, like, he did go to Ireland for realsies, though, right? He did, yeah.

The myth says that Patrick was the first person to introduce Christianity to Ireland. That's another definitely not true part of the story. We have historical records of Christianity in Ireland at least four decades before Patrick was born, and there was a dude named Palladius already stationed there by the Vatican when Patrick showed up. Okay, so, well, if the enslaved by pirate story was a lie and he hadn't been there, why did he end up getting sent to Ireland? Because he couldn't stay in England. The confessio we have from Patrick is largely a defense against a bunch of unspecified charges of corrupt.

against him. We don't know the limits of what he was accused of, but we get a sense of it when he insists that he returned all the gifts that wealthy women gave him and never accepted payment for baptisms. Yeah, a lot of protesting. So again, we don't know all the details, but it seems likely that he was sent to Ireland when he fucked up so bad that he got sent to an early version of that sinner's relocation program they still use today. Well, it was women not girls. So it's not exactly the same as it was. Yeah. Okay, so when did he get to Ireland? As far as we can tell, he shows up in 432 CE. And when he gets there, of course, the first thing he needs is a church. And he decides the best hill for it was in this place called Arma. But a pagan chieftain named Dyer, or named Kramm, in some later

versions of the story, he tells Patrick that he can't have the best hill. So Patrick had to build his church on a smaller crappy hill. But then, Dyer's horses die when they graze on the grass from the crappy hill he gave to Patrick. And when Dyer gets mad about that and sets out to kill Patrick, Dyer suddenly falls deathly ill. Yeah, God was going through a poison phase. It's a whole thing. So Dyer's men all rush to Patrick, who is the only game in town wielding Jesus magic, of course, and they ask him to heal their leader.

So Patrick takes some holy water over to Dyer's Manor and uses it to not just revive him to perfect health, but also bring his dead horses back to life too. Dyer is obviously so impressed that he gave Patrick a bronze cauldron and permission to build on the Better Hill. Hey, how did you know that my horses had died? Oh, I read it on Facebook.

So all of this sounds, so you post about him. Forgive me, but unlikely. Yeah, yeah. But not as unlikely as the other version, which I like even more. In the later version, Patrick asks Crom to send him something to eat.

But Crom's like, fuck you, and sends him a bull that he's sure will kill Patrick. But the bull, knowing a messenger of God when he sees one, acquiesces to Patrick, bows down before him,

and lets himself be slaughtered. Patrick eats the bull, and when Krom asks for the bull back, Patrick brings him the bones. Oh, that's bold. Yeah, well, don't worry. He then busts out his trusty holy water, which I imagine he keeps in a hip flask.

Yeah, because Irish. Okay, he sprinkles it over the bones, and he brings the bull back to life. And then, depending on which version of the myth you prefer, either Krom is so impressed, he becomes a Christian, and lets Patrick have the best. Hill or the bull kills crumb and Patrick builds his church wherever the fuck he wants,

any boy I want. All right. Well, I got to admit, St. Patrick is a little more badass than I was giving him credit for. Did you hear what he did to the snakes now? Yeah. Patrick is a very martial figure in a lot of the lore. By the 7th century, a lot of stories have him leading great armies against pagans and Christianizing people by force.

and he might have even actually done some of that. All right, definitely fuck those snakes up. Yeah, yeah, no, we'll get to that part. So first, the reality, there's no record of snakes in post-glacial Ireland. As long as there's been a distinct island that you could reasonably call Ireland, it's been free of snakes.

But the idea that a Christian saint ran them off goes back to the 8th century, and the idea that Patrick did it goes back to the 12th. Okay, so what did the snakes do to earn his wrath? They talked while an old guy was singing Danny Boy. So it starts with this legendary fast on the mountaintop of Kruakhan Eigl. Allegedly, he spent a very mosaic 40 days. We're just letting that pass.

That's fine. I nailed it. I'm pretty sure I got it. It does pretty much perfect. Okay. Yep. I have no idea. I knew that.

I knew that. And I nailed it. He spent a very mosaic 40 days on the mountain top, communing with God. And the local wildlife intervened a couple of times on Satan's behalf. At one point, he was harassed by a flock of demonic birds from Satan,

which Patrick banished by ringing his magical bell that he had. Saint Patrick has a magical bell. He does. He does. It's his second main weapon after the Holy Water. Holy Water is the first one. Okay. Anyway, it was during this fast,

on the mountaintop that a snake tried to bite him and as revenge he used either a magical staff or a magical drum in one of those two to chase them all into the sea. Okay, this is too many musical instruments. It's giving Bard instead of cleric.

Okay, you get more inventory spaces you've level up and he's a saint, so it makes very sense. That's all the way leveled up. Anyway, as I was saying, he successfully defeated the birds and snakes and made it through his 40-day mountain fast. So as a reward, God agreed to spare Ireland from the final desolation

and let Patrick judge all the Irish people at the last judgment. Okay. Everyone who's not a baby, just take the ding for public drunkenness, okay? We're going to do everyone at once for that one. I'm not doing individual ones. Well, that's not bad for 40 days work. Are there any other relevant legend? Like, where did the shamrocks come in?

Okay, yeah, the shamrocks, they're boring. Sometime in the 1700s, somebody added a story where Patrick plucked a shamrock to explain the Trinity and that story stuck. The symbolism of Patrick with a shamrock goes back further than that, but not for any interesting reason. I got a four-leaf one? Well, you have to be Mormon. I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you. All right, so anything not boring? Okay, there's a legend when he goes to an inn and sees the innkeeper being stingy.

when she pours drinks at the bar. So, of course, he springs into action. This is how you win over the Irish. This is how you beat out Bridgett. Racist. Moving on. He tells the innkeeper that God is going to put a demon in her basement. And the demon is going to feed on her dishonesty.

Sometime later, he comes back, sees her filling people's whiskey glasses all the way to the brim. So he takes her to the basement. The demon, which had apparently been there just, I don't know, doing demon stuff in the basement the whole time. The demon had withered away because of the generosity with the whiskey, I guess. And while they were both standing there, he disappeared in a flash of light. Afterward, Patrick decreed that everybody should have a drink of whiskey on his feast day.

And according to Wikipedia, this is said to be the origin of drowning the shamrock on St. Patrick's Day. Demon gets down to hell. Well, that was fucking bullshit. I thought I was going to get to possess someone. or a hauntabye. I didn't need to bring my steam deck. I was just fucking hanging out. I've got you eugenics on there.

It's great. All right. So does he have any non-alcohol exploits? Well, one of the few things we can say for certain that he actually did was convert a lot of Irish people to Christianity. We don't know much about his methods, but in his own writings,

he talks about converting wealthy women and talking them into becoming nuns. A lot of stuff about wealthy women. He puts it. stuff. There's also a lot in there about whether or not he was taking gifts from King's sons. So the most likely explanation is that he hobnobbed with the Irish elite. No such thing. I don't believe in my story. I'm reporting you to Ken. He was probably influenced peddling to rich people who could force a lot of people to convert along with them. Okay. So how does our story end?

Well, St. Patrick died on March 17th, probably in 461 CE, but possibly much like later of natural causes, as far as we know. But after his death, getting dibs on his corpse would touch off an armed conflict. Or at least that's the account of a very unreliable source that claims the battle was stopped when God caused a flood and then tricked both sides into thinking they had the body. So they all just left. All right. Well, I know that this is a different segment and all with like flammy sounds under the introduction and everything.

But given the veracity of the sources, I feel like I should still wrap up by asking, how bullshit is it? Okay, well, it's the kind of bullshit that sounds way more plausible after several whiskeys. Well, now you did it too. I'm reporting you to Cam. No, I'm allowed to say, it's my people. I can say I'm a whiskey person.

No, only if you have Tourette's. Those are the rules now. Okay. And on that note, we're going to wrap this segment up and I hope we don't forget about it for as long before we do it again. Before we run out of minutes here, I want to remind you that I'm going to be speaking at Baja Khan this year. That's August 21st through the 23rd in Beautiful Point, Edward, Ontario. Ideal if you're in Canada, because it's in Canada.

And ideal if you're from the U.S. because you won't have to be in the U.S. for that weekend. Check the show notes for more information. Anyway, that's all the blast way we've got for you tonight. We'll be back in 10,000, 22 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout for a brand-new-in-D-old episode of our D&D-D-Mindus, day being on 7-Eastern tomorrow. A newer episode of our sister-so, The Skepto, Doing, Doing, being a Summ Eastern on Monday,

and an even newer episode of our Citruso's Hot Friend Got Offaul Movies, doing a seven Eastern on Tuesday, and somehow still even newer episode of our half-sistercial citation needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, this show wouldn't show right if I'd like to thank Heath Henry for always showing up.

Eli Bosick for always showing off and Lucinda Lusions for always showing the way. I need to thank Chris for providing this week's Farnsworth quote, and yes, the people suck, but holy shit at the views, have it right? But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's most memorable mammals. Daniel Patrick, Koku. this is legal advice and draft october fest matthew heather lea tyler and willow daniel patrick koku

and legal advice whose brains defeated a mental bowelrog and leveled up to white matter but not like all like myelinated nerve fibers just like leveled up gray matter and draft october feste and matthew are so bright they needed that pedantic correction to my last joke and heather lea tyler and willow who are so hot i had to write their names on asbestos together these 11 people false claims music festivals and fantasy and beginning beverages help keep this show alive for the next ex-Christian to find it by giving us money. Not everybody has the sexual magnetism it takes to give us money, but if you do, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheists, whereby I own or only access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the one-time

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