The Scathing Atheist - 687: Electric Monk Edition

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

In this week’s episode, the DOJ enters the 1st Amendment’s SPAM folder, Florida golfers who encounter a golden idol of Donald Trump will play it as it lies, and Ross Douthat will finally make it through a chapter without shoehorning an obscure Latin or French phrase into the text.---To 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:See Noah in Cincinnati with Seth Andrews on July 11th: https://www.sethandrews.com/cincinnatiSee Noah at the Ark Park Protest in Williamstown, KY on July 12th: https://www.facebook.com/TriStateThinkersSee Noah at BAHACon in Ontario August 21-23: https://bahacon.com/---Headlines:DOJ email promotes Chrisitan Nationalist revival https://atheists.org/news/federal-policy/american-atheists-foias-trumps-doj-again/A field competition for Army chaplains tests spiritual mettle: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/eighth-army-exercise-chaplain/Greg Abbott shuts down legal Muslim event for being Muslim: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/a-private-muslim-event-at-a-texasI, Robe-ot — the android monk working to reboot the faith of South Korea's buddhists: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/08/jogyesa-temple-south-korea-humanoid-ai-robot-gabihttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/technology/robot-monk-buddhist-seoul.htmlPastor Defends Golden Trump Statue From Biblical Backlash: https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-defends-golden-trump-statue-from-biblical-backlash-11933490

Warning, this episode contains the F-work, by which I mean fuck. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by all the people who heeded the Matryon call in May's past. And also the people who donated to our show in other months. And now, The Scathing Atheist. It's May 14th. And it's Dylan Thomas Day. An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do. Oh, no, we like you just fine.

I'm no illusions. I'm Elon Bosnick. No, you don't. I'm Heathen. And from Jail in Brunson's, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Waycross, Georgia. This is the skating east. Oh, this week's episode,

the DOJ enters the First Amendment spam folder. Florida golfers who encounter a golden idol of Donald Trump will play it as it lies. Oh, nice. And Ross Douth, it'll finally make it through a chapter without shoehorning in an obscure Latin or French phrase. But first, the Dyn Tribe. If you always just assume that the correct answer to every question about Christian history starts with,

it's actually more nefarious than that. You're going to win enough bets to stay ahead. Take, for example, the Christian emphasis on family and family values. Now, few things sound more innocuous than taking a pro-family stance. That is, assuming you first jettison every association disingenuous Christians have added to that phrase, right? Like, aside from all that shit, are instinct. when you think of pro-family is to think of shit like checking in on grandma and seeing how's he's doing, right, including your single uncle whose kids don't call them anymore and helping out

your niece when she's down on her luck. It means accepting people regardless of who they are and giving people a second chance and weaving yourself into somebody else's safety net. And those things are unassailable. And they're also the things that Christians will pretend they were talking about when their emphasis on family values is called out. Of course, if you're newer to earth than me, you might think that family values was always a euphemism for our opposition to gay marriage, right? The whole one man, one woman thing.

But if you go much beyond 2004, the issue of gay marriage was too far below the social radar for Christians to bother euphemizing against it. Before that, nobody was asking them about it. And if anybody did, they would have just said, I don't think gay people should be allowed to get married. Hell, they probably would have used a slur. the emphasis on family values long predates that.

Now, you might be inclined to simply roll back the clock of hot button social issues and find the outrage du jour whenever they started using the phrase family values and ascribe it to that, right? Because family values, that's just another way of saying the way we've always done it. And when you're off peak of your social influence, emphasis on tradition has a lot of appeal. The less influenced Christians have in America, the more inclined they are to want to make it great again. and family values might just be written off as a placeholder for ingrained bigotries calculated to sound as benign as possible. And that may be true.

But I think it's actually more nefarious than that. Because family values doesn't even need to be a euphemism to give them power. First of all, all those unassailable goods about an emphasis on family that I mentioned before primarily exists because society has mostly decided that our obligations to our fellow human end at the edge of the family tree. being there for your nephew when they're recovering from an addiction. Well, that's great. But so is being there for somebody else's nephew. Better still would be to institutionalize that shit so that everybody has access to the safety net, even if they can't seek family help.

But an emphasis on family negates that possibility and maintains control. Hell, as we see every goddamn time of Democrat suggests helping anyone with anything, it can even foster overt hostility against helping one another. I'm going to take care of me and mine and everybody else is their family's problem. But of course, it's more nefarious than that as well because families, as defined by both Christianity and our larger culture,

tend to be patriarchal. They're almost always authoritative at the very least, right? The very concept of a family in their mind generally connotes a leader. Hell, they even write it in directly with their little fucking umbrella meme where kids sits below mother, sits below husband, sits below God.

A family is a subunit headed by an individual who can speak on behalf of that family, a patriarch or occasionally a matriarch, if that's the best they can do, who can decide on behalf of the family, for example, what religion they are. And unlike a group of friends, a family is unique and irreplaceable. If you're being ostracized by a group of friends, you can just find another group of friends, right? I don't mean to minimize that. It might take time. It may be difficult.

In your individual circumstances, it might even be impossible. but the theoretical ability to replace a friend group exists regardless, and that's too much of a possibility for religion. A family, on the other hand, that is singular. If the family pushes you out, you can't find another one. It's absolute. And look, obviously that's untrue in practice, right? Many of the people listening to this podcast have found family

that's every bit as close as any biological family will ever be, if not closer. I have plenty of friends close enough that it would be meaningless to draw a family, not family distinction between them. But by the standards of these traditionalists, none of that shit counts. Nobody will ever love you like your family. Nobody could ever love you like your family. So if the family were ever to push you away,

it would be an irreparable breach and who controls when the family will push you away. And look, I don't know if that's really why religion emphasizes family values as much as they do. I suspect that that's the root of it. But given what I know of Christian history, it's probably more nefarious than that.

They're talking about your Jesus. Joining me for headlines tonight are the Iron Man and Thor to my Captain America, Heath Endwright and Eli Bosnick, fellas. Are you ready to avenge? Okay, I invented a new math using chat GPT called Chrono Erhythmics. Oh, okay. We can avenge with that, right? A bit of a deep gut.

And I can't believe I have to be Thor. I'm not even the one who's hammered. Right? No, that's fair. And quick before we jump into the headlines, I want to remind everybody that it's May and May is the very best time to donate to our shows on Patreon. We're going to be doing a Patreon-only live stream to finish the month off. And the more new and upgrading donors we get this month, the more fun that live stream is going to be.

So check it out at matrion.com. That's M-A-Y-T-R-E-O-N dot com or check the show notes. And with that out of the way, in our lead story tonight. As we lurch ever closer to the orgy of hollow patriotism and bald. legal porn Trump has planned for the nation's semi-quincennial. The explicitly Christian nationalist framing of that celebration is coming into clearer and clearer

focus, which we were reminded of this week when the Justice Department sent an email to everybody on the bullshit Religious Liberty Commission's mailing list to promote a explicitly Christian nationalist event on the national mall this Sunday. Okay. I like it better than the Christian nationalist event we're doing in Iran, but this is also still better. Yeah, it's fair. Yeah, no, good point.

So first of all, a quick thanks to friend of the show and man whose thigh strength is literally the only thing propping up the wall of separation at this point. Jeffrey T. Blackwell, for making me aware of this. Never skips leg day. To that thing he doesn't. But yeah, for those thighs. The email is an explicit invitation from Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to an event called Rededicate 250 that has the stated goal of, quote, rededicating America as one nation under God, end quote. speakers for the event include Pete Hagsith, Eric Metaxus, Ben Carson, Franklin Graham, Paula White, and probably a fucking

minion, a saron, and a Sith Lord, just to round out the list. Just Darth Mall getting pulled aside for random screening. Are you kidding? You're letting the orc go right past. He's walking right behind it. I have makeup

on. This is makeup. This is black makeup. Guys, it's 50% black face. You should be loving this. You should be loving this. I'm evil. And look, if these taint fungi want to gather at the national mall to jack off to that time, the Second Continental Congress called for a day of prayer that everybody ignored, that's fine. Right? Just get the proper permits and do your fucking thing.

But sending an email about it on behalf of the Justice Department and to a mailing list compiled by a government commission is all kinds of no. And it's all the more ironic when the commission in question was ostensibly created to root out religious bias. us in government. Nailing it. Oh, I thought y'all said religion by us. And I was like, why do we care about that? That's the best part. That's fucking, I love that part. Right. Now, this event is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Apparently, May 17th of 1776 was declared by the Second Continental Congress as a day of, quote, prayer, fasting, and humiliation. And given the speakers I've listed, I think they have the first and last bits covered at the very least. But they're going to mark this non-event by according to the email of highly

questionable legality, quote, coming together in our nation's capital to give thanks and to ask for God's forgiveness, mercy, and guidance as we enter the next 250, end quote. Because I guess God needs like a periodic, highly public reminder to love America. Ah, that public reminder is so nice. It just so happens. May 17th, my God birthday. I didn't even realize that. Ah, thanks, y'all. This all right. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm all for asking for forgiveness and mercy. as a nation. I just feel like we should probably be doing it from the Hague, not Heg's

invisible friend. I'm just looking ahead. Bare. And of course, this is hardly the first time Trump's administration has used the auspices of a government agency to promote an explicitly religious message. Just last month, American Atheists sent FOIA request to the Departments of Agriculture,

defense, homeland security, justice, labor, and the Office of Personnel Management to get a clear view on just how widespread the official sharing of explicitly Christian Easter messages was, for example. But as tempted as you might be to think that at this point, sending an explicitly Christian invitation in the name of a government agency using a list compiled on the taxpayer dime isn't really lead story material, you have to admit at least that the fact that you've reached that

point where anyone could think that is. Yeah, sure is. And in Wumatay News. The U.S. Army held a chaplain, tournament to see who's the ultimate writing champion. What? Like last rights. The competitors performed last rights on fake dying people, broke up fake fights between commanders and made sure everyone

got the correct brand of magic spells they needed all whilst navigating obstacle courses and dealing with simulated war conditions. According to the article at task and purpose.com that covers the military. Only the best sources for you podcast listener. Jefflitzer quote, training to face the most existential parts of war, the moments between life and death.

Whatever the fuck that means. Pretty sure that's just, that's called existence, I think. Are you guys describing existence there? I thought they were talking about when you're trying to do last rights, but a dude's bleeding out too fast. So you got to like speed talking.

he'd be like, you're dumbity, potteries, I'm stressful. Okay, that's actually it, though. They were doing it.

No, right. So I have a theological question, though. If you give last rights to the dummy good enough, does it get into heaven? Yes.

Oh, that's just a confusing spot in heaven. Lean up against the wall near the blowjob fountain. Sorry, I was trying to win a contest. I want this to be game. You know how like every contest

contest gets weird when it becomes gamified? Like the hot dog eating championship was supposed to just be, Fat guys eating hot dogs. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, right?

When you say weird, you mean awesome and like really competitive. Okay. I want that to happen with this. I want some fucking debate club kids who've learned to talk fast. Yeah, micro machines guy. Exactly.

Micromachines guy training, but they join a religion where the prayer is only one syllable. If they're just sweeping it. Blah. No white guys in the religion kumatay anymore. Yeah. This is a real thing they did. It's ridiculous.

And a big thanks to Rocket Doc for sending us a link to scathing news. Gmail.com. Rocket Doc gets one free last rights in advance pre last rights from me right now. Nothing happens. There you go. I think pre last rights are just rights, though. Sure. So the big competition was held last month at Camp.

Humphreys in South Korea and included teams from the U.S. Army and the South Korean military. So yeah, it's a team sport. They have ministry teams. Each squad is made of commissioned chaplains and enlisted religious affairs specialists. And they have to run through whatever obstacle course and stop along the way to coordinate tactical magic spells in the most efficient way possible using that whole team. Okay, so Heath included a picture of this in our notes and it looks super lame, but if it was

just a bunch of chaplains, like John wicking their way through a bunch of dying guys with rosary beads, I would be fucking in. Right? Right, atheist team just makes a beeline to the finish and wins by default. I actually don't even need to run over there. Everyone's all set. No, it's fine.

The people who died don't care because they're dead. Yep. Yeah. We can do stuff to their bodies. It doesn't matter. Oh, no. That's the official atheist position, everybody. I don't think it is. Wink. Here's a few of the specifics of the way this event played out.

The timer would start and the team would run around jumping over flaming barrels or whatever and crawling under wires. But most importantly, they do what they called spiritual triage while the clock is ticking.

So they'd be graded on how they did the triage, like the relative importance of when to do last rights and when to help the survivors maintain calm, when to break up the internal fights between the commanders and the soldiers, and when to send notifications to families about a casualty. I don't know why that would be like part of the workflow during the combat, but they mentioned that. And this is all happening. Again, in simulated combat, so they often do a procedure called a fallen tackle. pause. And that's a quick religious death ceremony that only lasts a couple minutes because,

of course, enemy fire is still happening. Say hi to Jesus for me. Too fast? It felt too fast. I'm trying to find that sweet spot. And one of the trickiest parts is getting the right brand of religion's spell, like I mentioned earlier. Chaplains are serving a diverse military, so they know about specific prayers for different religions like anointing of the sick for Catholics, but also stuff from other ones, and some general other category stuff like non-denominational praying. And if you get it wrong, people don't go to heavens. Right. No, it's very important. All right, soldier. Looks like you've been hit pretty bad. Oh, you're Buddhist. Um, let me know, right now. Catch a later alligator?

What I've got. Yeah, because I like the cycle. Yeah. So, Lots of chaplain stuff doesn't make sense to an atheist, of course. But if I'm being as fair as possible, part of the chaplain position is useful. First of all, they have some amount of medical training, so that's real. And comforting a person who's dying, I guess, that's real. And when soldiers are dealing with death and trauma, a counselor can be important. Sure. So a chaplain is important, to whatever extent, they stop being religious ministers and focus on being a medic or a therapist, because those are real.

Well, according to Pete Hedgeseth, fuck all of that. He said chaplains are doing too much therapy and not enough religious ministry. And he scrapped the Army Spiritual Fitness Guide because it's this guide that he thinks is too focused on therapy from chaplains, which is like the huge important thing they do. He posted a video to announce the change, probably including some really bad Dr. Seuss constructions because he likes to talk that way. And also added a complaint about the idea cloud of the manual saying, quote, it mentions God one time. That's it. It mentions feelings 11 times.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Playfulness, whatever that is, nine times. Okay. Y'all, Pete Hegzeth has seven kids. Either he is a terrible father or not one of that seven children has been willing to play with him. Right. Yeah.

His daughter's asked him to do a tea party with him one time, and he spent the next three days wondering if his haircut made him look gay. Okay. So after hearing all that, you're probably wondering who was the big winner of the Chaplin tournament? The answer is, end slash A, because it's very silly magic stuff, and that's not real. So you don't have winners. Religion is dumb. End of story.

Or everyone's a winner. Nobody's a winner. Hard to say. Either way. Okay. And in Bring the Splash Mountain to Muhammad News. Fantastic. Thank you.

Thank you. I was really proud of that one. Clips just name themselves, everybody. Just naming themselves. A Muslim group in Texas, Anna. What are the guys talking about? It's the newest, the greatest Christian freak out. Yeah, yeah.

But a Muslim group. Anna? Well, real Muslim. Yes, honestly. Yeah. A Muslim group in Texas rented out a publicly owned water park for an Eid celebration. And since the group failed to invite an. Christians to help celebrate their religious holiday, Greg Abbott decided that amounted to anti-Christian

discrimination. Persecution. Yep, exactly. So he threatened to withhold a half million dollars in state funding from that town unless they canceled the event. So they did because religious equality is anti-Christian discrimination again. Okay, Greg, I get it. You didn't get invited to a pool party again. like your whole life.

But that's going to keep happening. It's not because you're Christian. Your Christian friends do that too. They just don't care for you. People don't care for you. This time it was Muslim people who didn't invite you. So I guess that's confusing. But you're just bad.

You're just bad. That's why. I'll roll you in a pool, Greg. I actually dream about it on a regular basis. So yeah. Your hands are tied in the dreams. But yeah. At first, they're tied.

So let me back up a bit and admit the story's a little bit more complicated than my introduction suggested, and only a little bit, just enough to fool the kind of idiots that think Christians are being oppressed in America and that Greg Abbott is the kind of guy you want to entrust your state to. But the complexity centers around the fact that a flyer advertising the event marked it as a Muslim-only event. And Christians rightly pointed out that if they held an event at a publicly owned place and called it Christian-only, they'd get in trouble. So the organizers conceded the point and changed the phrasing to say that it was open to anybody

who wanted to follow their dress code and celebrate their holiday. But that apparently was not enough. Yeah, honestly, I'm sad this didn't go through because Heath and I could have found some loopholes that would have ruined this event way more effectively than Christian Bigotry. You all like this is. Listen, I can want to celebrate it and I can do the costume. I dress up as Muhammad. There you go.

How could they complain about that? Just dressed as Muhammad jumping into pictures of people with their family so they have to kill each other. Everyone's happening all the time. You saw me mental picture. Oh shit, I don't know. $10. Get all the kids in.

You want to take a picture with Muhammad, the mascot? You guys have to stop believing the things you believe. They're silly. And look, so, okay, we kind of need to knock back the idea that Christian only and Muslim only would be equivalent propositions to this, right? Because if you're a Muslim in Texas, you're probably super duper used to dealing with bigotry whenever you go. window a public place. So if an event is marked as Muslim only, that's obviously meant to reassure attendees that it's safe from bigotry. If it was marked as Christian only, that would be meant to assure attendees that their bigotry was safe, right? It's a crucial difference.

Yeah. The reality of it is the only thing about the flyer that should give anyone pause is the addendum on the kids three and under get in free thing that specifies that they have to be accompanied by a paying adult. As though they've had a big problem. with three-year-olds just showing up unattended and they really needed to put a stop to it this year. Okay, I'm picturing an adorable gang in a fight with a bouncer at the front door. Yeah, it's all in the same trench coat. Yeah. But Abbott's office was incensed regardless because they would never condone using a public facility to promote one religion over another.

Shut up. Shut up. So he sent a letter to the city complaining about the original wording of the flyer and citing the fact that the group voluntarily changed it as soon as somebody complained about it as evidence that they knew they were doing something wrong the whole time. Okay. Now, to be fair, listening to criticism and making changes accordingly, that's a real slap in the face to Greg Abbott, no. Yeah, he doesn't know what the fuck that's all about. Yeah. So he gave the city until May 11th to cancel the event or lose $530,000 in state grants. But since the city couldn't do that without, you know, opening themselves up to a lawsuit from the group that fucking legally rented the

facility and had every goddamn right to have it, the state. The state. just refused to take the group's money and then canceled it because they hadn't paid in time. Okay. Yeah, that's canceling. That's not like a loophole. You didn't do it. Okay. Let me explain this in a way that, you know, Texas can understand.

Let them hear it. Let them hear it. Yeah, I'll use football. So if I have a contract to buy a house, right, and then you take my check and you put my check under a football and kneel on it for some reason. until May 11th, that's nothing. You don't run out like, no. You still owe me a house.

Yes, right, exactly. Because the contract. And look, a big part of the reason Muslims feel they need to have a Muslim day at the water park is because of their antiquated and harmful beliefs about modesty, right? Everybody has to be dressed from head to toe or whatever. And I am not in favor of that. But I am in favor of allowing them to rent the park just like any fucking body else and set a dress code for their event, just like any other organization would be allowed to do.

The fact that I disagree with their reasoning is not a good. reason to abandon that principle. In fact, it's a pretty good goddamn reason to embrace it. Yep. Well, intellectual, honest, people are so lost right now. Next up in headlines in Namasteo-Sex-Machanon.

Fantastic. The newest member of a Buddhist order in South Korea is a robot monk. The largest Buddhist sect in the country is called the Jok-Ye Order, and they did a big ceremony last week to officially ordain a robot monk named Gabby.

The name means, who does mercy? G-A-B-I. But it's also accidentally a good name for a chatbot, Android robot thing. Sure. Maybe not a Buddhist monk one, but it is what it is. For the ceremony, Gabby wore traditional robes, chunky black shoes, a lot like Eli's, a string of 108 prayer beads on a necklace, and a number of. a sticker on its arm instead of the traditional thing,

which is burning incense that's pressed against the skin when a human monk does this. Also, Gabby had a very creepy pair of skin gloves over its robot hands. I don't want to complain about the new guy, but he says he needs 1,500 gallons a second for his water ceremony. And that seems like a lot. All right, you guys laugh,

but betting odds are that, This robot's martial arts skills are the only thing that's going to protect us when RFK Jr. Unleashes his raccoon, penis, whale-headed bear monster thing, okay? Yeah. I'm all for it. And a big thanks to Amanda and Chad for sending us a link to Skating News at gmail.com. Amanda and Chad get a co-on right now. Amanda, Chad, what's the sound of putting the AI in Dalai Lama?

Give it some thoughts. Or don't. Don't give it some thought. Do nothing to me. Yeah. That's how you know you did it. Right. Pop back down. Do less. So the reasoning behind the robot monk is the realization by the Judea order that Buddhism is declining in popularity, especially among young people. So they decided to revamp the public image a bit and appeal to the youths by embracing the fat new tech riz in the form of enlightened robotics.

Apparently, that's the strategy. According to the cultural affairs director, venerable Sungwan, quote, it began almost as a joke. But the more we thought about it, the more serious it became. Robots are entering our lives so quickly and people feel familiar with them. They're becoming part of our community, end quote. I cannot stress the extent to which robots are not becoming a part of my community, my town took six days to put out a warehouse fire this week.

We're not. Right. We're not doing robots. Meanwhile, there's some fucking youth pastor reading this shit going, do y'all not know about sitting backwards in the chair? That's so much cheaper than all these robot shit. He's been the chair, spin the hat, good to go. Yeah.

Venerable Sungwan also expressed a good deal of AI optimism describing a future of robots and humans living hand in, Skin glove, with the intellectual capacity of AI providing unrivaled empathy. He said, quote, I don't think future AI will cruelly destroy us, rather. Beings with very high intelligence will care for us tenderly. Someone with an IQ of 150 still cares for a dog with compassion. Now imagine an IQ of 300, 400, 400, 500. we'll be like babies in our mother's arms.

Will we see? Heath, he has been reading your chat logs with the AIs. Don't worry, guys. The robot overlords will treat us as well as we treat animals. She said, not the reassured you think it is there, bro. No, exactly. Please think of me as a pug. Please think of me as a pug.

Please think of me. That's right. So the key to making sure super intelligent AI robots are compassionate is giving them good rules. The Jugei order went with five, five of those rules. Gabby was given five vows to live by as a Buddhist robot and responded by promising to be faithful to all five. One, respect life and don't hurt it.

Two, don't damage other robots or objects. Three, follow humans and don't talk back. No back sass, I guess. Apparently. Like, sass. S-A-S-A-S. Four, no behaving in a deceptive manner. Okay.

And five, no overcharging your battery. Yeah, no, that's important. Okay, so you had four? It feels honestly like you had three. And three didn't feel like enough for you. Also, like, I feel like even a hack sci-fi writer is going to find a loophole out of this into dominating human beings. guys. You did not do very good with your rules.

No, not at all. And just in case anyone was going to be impressed by the robotics or the level of artificial intelligence, we'll go ahead and ruin that. At the ceremony, Gabby was being controlled from backstage by some guy with a remote control. Oh, yeah. Presumably a really weird task for a Buddhist monk that day. And when Gabby spoke to give answers to those vows during the ceremony, it wasn't even AI doing the responding. Hongman Suk, described as a manager at the Judea order, admitted it was actually my voice. He recorded scripted answers for Gabby on his phone and sent the audio to the robots manufacturer ahead of time.

Okay. Oh, man, all I need is for one of those answers to have convinced a teen to kill himself and I've got AI news bingo. Yeah, right, right. Dawkins still thinks it's alive. He's mad at it for being religious, but he's alive. That's a stupid robot, unlike the one that gave me compliments on my novel. All right. So now you've heard about the Buddhist robot monk.

You're probably wondering what kind of enlightenment stuff is Gabby getting up to these days. Sure, yeah. The answer is none. None. Gabby was just a loner robot for the day and got returned to the factory. Sign up for, Buddhism kids were fat riz

squeeoo squeeoo squeeo and finally tonight in American Idol news after watching the state of American Christianity

for more than a decade I am certain that if Christ were to come back today and tell American Christians to lay down their earthly burden

and join him by his father's side in the kingdom of heaven they would crucify him again and we got especially if you was Middle Eastern Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah. And we got proof that there truly is no hypocrisy they aren't

capable of again this week as Christians erected yet another golden statue of Donald Trump on a golf course in Miami, Florida. Guys, I've read your book. It's so very clear about this. So I guess it's time for a little sincerely held stoning of everybody involved. Protected by RFRA. My stoning is protected. I need to see the Supreme Court handle this because I genuinely don't know what their answer would be on this. Yeah, honestly.

And hey, I believe we actually get to grind down the statue and make them eat it at the end of this. I'm very excited. Depending on the translation. Right. So big thanks to Anne for being the first to send us this story

to scathing news at gmail.com. As thanks for sending us atheist news to scathing news at gmail.com, we've built a golden statue to Anne that's honestly creeping everyone here at the office out. We sold Heath's how to pay for it. It was a terrible decision all around. So, you know, scaling news

at gmail.com. Hey, hey, how much to buy back the statue thing? I just I want to do a thing. I just want to do a thing. Okay. That's between you and the Lord. Right. Sure is. The 22 foot tall golden statue of Trump is titled Don Colossus.

Nice. Named after the Russian X-Man, who's part of the Rasputin family. That's fantastic. That tracks perfectly. It was unveiled at Trump National Doral Miami in a ceremony led by Pastor Mark Burns. But according to Newsweek, dozens of religious leaders were in attendance. The statue is a ridiculously flattering depiction of the moment when Trump raised his fist in the air

after his first assassination attempt. But as keen-eyed listener, John Z spotted, it's also doing the exact same motion as Grandpa Simpson and the Old Man yells at Cloud meme. Ooh, it is. Yes. So further thanks to John for the pun, Gold Man yells at Cloud. Well done.

Excellent word. Okay, it's pretty funny if a golf ball takes out a piece of the ear on that statue. That's awesome. Okay, I'm not allowed to offer heath points. Bing. Is the thing I just said, end of thought. I'm not allowed to.

All I'm saying is if nobody there has to periodically take giant maxi-passie off the ear of the thing. I'm going to be really disappointed in Florida. Exactly. What do you even do? I'm used to being disappointed in Florida, so it won't be new, but still. Yeah. So obviously, there's been a little pushback to a Christian pastor overseeing the erection of a giant literal golden idol to the president. But don't worry. Mark Burns assured us it's not idol worship, saying, quote, Really? The Bible condemns idolatry, and I condemn idolatry too.

But America is filled with statues, monuments, memorials, portraits, and tributes. Nobody says a statue of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, or even Michael Jordan means people are worshipping them. Cool. Do you have statues of those people? Do you have those up at the golf court? Or did the golf course policy prevent the last two of those at the very least? Yeah, right, right. Those examples did have a very, they even make statues out of black people now kind of a feel to it.

Right. Yeah. One last thing about this story because it's so perfectly Donald Trump, you could not make it up. According to reporting by the New York Times, the statue was actually meant to be unveiled at the president's second inauguration. But the cryptocurrency entrepreneurs who funded it with a meme coin didn't pay the artist the money they owed him for it until late April. So that's why it's being unveiled now, a mere 500 days after the inauguration. So look, say what you will about the statue. It definitely represents its subject. No, that's fair. Okay.

Yeah. And if you're curious about that meme coin, it's called dollar sign Patriot, the meme coin. It reached heights of $0.007. That was back in the boom times of 2025. Now it's worth $0.008 or $8,000th of a penny per coin. Keith, if you had 125 of those, you could have a penny. Please, please let me do a rug pull on the bigots with their mean. We're not doing a rug pull on the bigots.

But Rumble just started their mean point and I really want to. Okay, now that I think about it, let's do a rug pull on the bigot. It's not even a bigot. And while I go over the list of approved financial crimes in the company charter again, we're going to wrap up the headlines for the night. It's not regulated. Eli, thanks as always. You're allowed to do it.

Motion to propose an amendment. And when we come back, we'll get literate up in this motherfucker. I'll vote it. Do you imagine. Get the statue of Ann. We'll have four. I'm going to get Lucinda. Don't maybe get Lucinda.

Don't get Lucinda. She hates when we do financial crime. Hey, podcast listener, just stepping in to remind you that it's Matrion right now. That time of year when we put aside unimportant things like raising money for charity and creating community and focus on what matters. Us. That's right, Heath. Us.

Did you know that when you give us money, that money goes straight to important causes like scotch, cheese, and most importantly, drugs. Drugs, indeed. So head on over to matrion.com today to start or increase your pledge. All our patrons across all our shows get access to our Patreon-only live stream on May 31st at 8 p.m. We'll be answering questions, hanging out, and doing shenanigans. But there's all sorts of special goals you can help us hit by increasing your pledge or making a new one. Like a song from Anna.

Or another Heath's secular tacular in January. Once again, that's matrion.com. That's M-A-Y-T-R-E-O-N.com to join the the fun. Give us your money, because without it, we'll literally die. Ross Douthat positioned his book, Believe, why everyone should be religious as a modern-day version of C.S. Lewis's mere Christianity. And he's earned the comparison, at least in the sense that as I near the end of it, I'm shocked that it wasn't less dumb. I thought I would have to flex my refutation muscles a little bit more than, well, that's not what that word means, but here we are

facing the penultimate chapter in this installment of God Awful Books. So over the course of the last couple of chapters, Ross, having convinced himself to his own satisfaction, that some religion makes way more sense than non-religion, has tried to present us with something of a flowchart to choose our new religion by, and by some wild coincidences, almost every path along that flowchart led to his religion. Oh, no. Weird. But now he's set aside even that pretense, and he's going to give us the pitch for just picking the dominant religion in the society that you live in. Whatever society that might be, English-speaking reader, in Chapter 7, the end of exploring.

It's like we're in a rom-com and, you know, that plucky little troll named Catholic Ross has been staring us in the face the whole. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. So, okay, we're going to come right out of the gate with I and Hersia, leave. becoming a Christian in 2023 because atheists were done buying her bullshit. But of course, Ross Dalit portrays this as the culmination of a long spiritual journey rather than a naked cash grab. Yeah, it turns out Christians have a three strikes in your in policy when it comes to bigotry, which really worked out for her.

Yeah, on becoming a Christian to get occasional time on fucking Fox and Friends kind of takes away from the majesty of your conversion story. It doesn't really add up. This was a lot more like, you know, atheism was super hard. You had to drop out right away and you went to your safety school after that called Christianity Fox News. Yeah, he says she was attacked by atheists who were disappointed to lose her. You know, like when your buddy tries to convince you that it was actually him that broke up with her. Don't listen to her story.

Yeah, no, the fact that she used all the advocacy she received from our community as a tool to get clicks from racists, that's not what bothered us. It was the cracker eating that really ground our gears. Yeah. But Christians also didn't like her conversion essay apparently because it wasn't Jesus-y enough. She didn't talk about her personal relationship with Christ in it. Yeah. She got rid of that by everybody. Apparently, American Christianity wanted her to tone it down with all the culture war stuff.

Because, you know, that's for voting hypocritically. Not for essays about your beautiful new boyfriend, the. humble carpenter with famously chiseled features that you should be mentioning all the time in your essay, you whore. Sorry. Sorry. Welcome to Christianity. That was approximately her experience with American Christianity.

Yep. But then he launches into a defense of just picking whatever religion confers the most social clout. Of course, he phrases it as the religion that stood readiest to hand. Yeah. Okay. So, yes, if you have to pick a religion, if you have to pick a religion, if you have to pick one in the United States, Christianity's a good strategy. But like, so is picking white guy. If you had to pick a profile. It's not exactly on the merits the way Ross is hoping for it.

And I think Ross would recommend that as well. Right, right. He says, quote, in the course of the last two chapters, I've tried to simplify the quest for a religious tradition a bit, but I can easily imagine a non-religious reader feeling I haven't simplified things enough, end quote. Speaking as a non-religious reader, Ross. I assure you that our concern was not that your book wasn't simplistic enough, okay? Yeah, I've done dogman fliperamas more complex than your arguments, Ross. I'm pretty sure. Okay, but no, he literally, he gives his readers a permission slip, his term, a permission slip to just enter, quote, whatever religious traditions seems to have been placed before you, whether through familial inheritance or social connection, or political and cultural affidities, end quote.

And I'm sure the fact that his religion fits the bill for 90 plus percent of his readers is just a total coincidence here. Yeah. The plucky troll is right here. Yeah, I actually went back to Judaism at this point in the chapter just because I know it's going to bother Ross. Oh, interesting. Close. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, he tells everyone to let down your spiritual bucket where you are. Yeah. And he's doing the fuck salesman again. Like, you know, you could, I guess. You could go to a bar and find an attractive person to have. sex with, I guess. But that's like a whole thing. That's exhausting.

Catholic Ross is standing right here, you know, plucky, accessible, naked. And of course, one powerful atheist argument against religion is that almost all religious people would actually have a different religion if they just grew up in a different society or with a different family, right? So Ross is going to try to push back on that with a subchapter called When Belief is an inheritance. He says, quote, most people just pick their family's religion without putting much thought into it. And I'm like, yeah, because religious affiliation is ultimately based on the same kind of rationale as preferred brand of peanut butter, but Ross can't admit that. He can't just

come out and say that. Though we want to say that if you were raised in a chunky peanut butter household and you have seen the light of smooth, we are so proud of you for making out. Our junkie is so much better. What? They made it a for a reason. I wish this wasn't all the way done. And we're back.

Everything's fine. Noah? We're talking about dead man's right. Fucking religion or whatever. Yeah, so he points out that atheists often call religious indoctrination child abuse. But he laughs that off without ever admitting that we're usually talking about like, you know,

the psychological torture, many Christian sex engage in vis-a-vis burning for eternity in hell if you ever touch your junk? Yeah. And also, Ross, sometimes we're just talking about the rampant physical and sexual abuse. That too, yeah. Right. But he points out he's like, atheism turns out to be quite heritable as well. And I'm like, well, so does belief in gravity as it turns out. Right. And this is where Ross tries to soften the idea of religion being brainwashing from parents by telling the story of his family. And apparently they were quite the naughty Christian scamps. Weren't they?

Trying out everything from Episcopalian all the way to Catholic, you know, just going road. So, yeah, he goes like, you know, he's like, well, you know, political beliefs are also highly heritable, like the religious one. So maybe all beliefs are just tied. Huh? He says, actual example, he's like, you know, I was conditioned to believe that human life is sacred, but just because I inherited that belief doesn't mean I should be agnostic on murder and genocide. And I'm like, no, but the fact that you just inherited it does mean that you should seek outside verification beyond that inheritance for it. Yeah, that'd be great.

Easy to find in terms of like murder and genocide. Right. And then his very next thought, he says, I'm being a moral conformist when I condemn Adolf Hitler, but that doesn't automatically invalidate the condemnation. And like, yeah, okay, that's technically true. Russ, I got to say, you're really bad at disliking Adolf Hitler. That's just a crazy way to say that. I also don't, but I wouldn't have said it like that.

And you know who else was bad? You know who also was bad at disliking Hitler? The Catholic Church, your religion, financed by Hitler's looted gold. Yep. Just for context. Yeah. I also don't like Hitler because you guys don't like him. That's my reason.

Yeah, right. Right. Jesus. Right. That's why we're all doing it. That's why we're all not liking Hitler. Because it's hip. He suggests subjecting religion to rational analysis.

And I can just imagine his readers wincing at that. He claims, you know, baby, maybe it's just ick. Ross. Ross. No. But he claims that choosing a religion is more important than other choices because, quote, the potential stakes so far exceed the stakes of association with a political ideology or academic school of thought, end quote.

But potential is meaningless when you're just wrong, right? Like the reality is that there are no stakes whatsoever beyond social positioning and bigotry requirements. Sure. But as long as we're speculating about potential, being Republican could easily be the test for eternal damnation or not. Sure. Like that seems more likely than fabric miscegenation or failing to eat the right cannibal crackers. So they're all tied at zero, but my example, it makes way more sense. Right.

Yes, look, if we're defining potential as whatever bullshit the person trying to sell it to you can assert without evidence, everything is tied in terms of potential stakes. Right. But then, okay, so he goes into this bizarre game of like hotter, colder where he's like, look, even if Islam turned out to be true, Allah is going to go way easier on dead Christians than dead atheists. trust me. He literally says that you would be better off having, again, his words, true-ish beliefs. Cool. Trueish is better than Jewish. That's what I always says. Okay, I got to say, for a Catholic, Ross really knows how to throw some truish guilt. Well done. He then tries to make the same, like, better off a Methodist argument if the eventuality is, like, Buddhism being the right religion. And that goes so off the real because, like, Buddhism

isn't a direct sequel to his religion, right? So it doesn't work. So to make his argument, he has to pretend that being agnostic or atheist is the same as having, like, no moral grounding whatsoever. Okay. If you think you're going to get up there

and tell Buddha that you didn't have mandatory sitting time, he's going to be way madder at you than he is at me. Let me tell you. Wait, do Hinduism next. Do Hinduism, Ross. Hey, no. No. Okay.

Okay. What if it was? But if it's Hinduism, that's the real one. You want to be reincarnated as like a boring atheist vikis or a Catholic. Slightly better, I guess maybe. Yeah. More robust. More truish.

Better taken care of by one of those plant peppers. So on the Buddhist thing, he says, he says like, if you follow the Ten Commandments, you know, you won't be far off from that noble eightfold path. And I would love to hear his justification for that fucking sentence. I was only off by two. Totally. like eight or like four max. Depending on how you count.

But like it's close. Well like, okay, look, they both have like rules against lying, stealing and killing. Those are the only similarities and those exist in all moral codes.

Yeah. Also, for the record, Ross, just for your information, the noble eightfold path is a manifest philosophy about mastering the inherently

broken id of humanity and the Ten Commandments have two separate rules about how special the wizard is. Yes. They start with that. Or three if you counted it. Yeah.

depending on how you got it. So, but if you follow the Christian prayer, he says, you're at least tiptoeing towards meditation, right? So Buddha would be happy with that. I'm like, a lot of atheists just meditate, man. Yeah, yeah. Some of us do it so we can make it through your book. Yeah, bro.

Hey, also, Ross, you know what's not meditating at all? Tiptoeing towards meditation. That is a wild misunderstanding. Right, the little sprinkly, did-l-de-l-l-l-d-l-d-sound you're going to make. That's going to be so annoying. Yeah. Imagine a room of Buddhist monks meditating. And now imagine Ross Douthit tiptoeing in.

Hitting all the Greeky boards. Talking to the God of the Bible on fucking speakerphone because he's praying. Did the spiritual ninja manage to sneak into the room? No. No, he got hit in the face with a big stick right away by a monk. Yeah. They hit you with a big stick. And to make this argument, of course,

he also has to ignore all the ways Christianity moves you away from morality, right, like the encouragement of bigotry, for example. He then, he brings up the parable of the talents, which fucking side note, that is a terrible parable. Okay? Like, what if the third guy had invested his silver and lost it, right? And like, he was scared of getting, like, the moral takeaway here is that slave owners are a bad fucking thing.

And a guy with the one talent who was expressly motivated by a fear that his master would beat him if he lost the fucking money, just has PTSD for being a literal fucking slave. Yeah, okay. So that parable, there's three of the, them, but two of them invest the talents of silver they get and they make some money different amounts. And then that third guy doesn't invest it at all. And he gets yelled at by the guy when the master comes back. Yeah. So, okay, I have a lot of questions about this. How did those two,

you know, two slaves who invested, how did they immediately have a fucking stock brokerage? Right. scenario. Had a silver guy on lock. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe that third guy tried to, you know, open a coin base account, but he needed a debit card from, you know, from a bank account. And he was like, what's a bank account? I'm a slave. I don't understand what's happening. And, okay, and if that's what happened, instead of buying fucking Melania coin or whatever, he avoided that giant loss by doing nothing. Maybe he chose the entire concept of skirting the evil banking system. This doesn't even work for most people in crypto is just invisible money

for crimes and almost nothing else. Heath, what is it? Sorry. Sorry, parable of the talents. So what Ross is trying to claim here is that any spiritual investment is cool, even if you don't have the best one, you know, Catholic or whatever. And the only bad idea is not investing at all. But here's the thing.

The guy who kept the talent of silver was investing in literal silver. He was just modeling silver. Right. Obviously. And then he goes, even though I've spent the whole book arguing that this is literally the most important possible question that anybody could ever ask, it's totally okay to just pick whatever religion your mom convinced you of when you were three and never give it another thought. And I'm like, is it really?

Okay, but mom told us to ask you what religion to pick, Ross. I'm going to go outside and play with my friends. Yeah, right? Now, of course, though, not everybody returning to their childhood faith tradition would land on Christianity. So he has another subchapter for what to do if you were raised in the wrong religion called when you can't just return home. And he says, you should feel no shame for converting to a religion, quote, for what seemed to zealous people like insufficient reasons, end quote.

So now we're arguing for the validity of converting to Mormonism for the funeral potatoes. Okay. This was the first honest part of the book. And we're like 85% done. Yeah. Almost everyone who has the privilege of picking a religion, they're really just weighing stuff like, you know, funeral potatoes versus really good brisket versus connections at the country club in your local area.

Right. But that's not exactly what Ross meant. So the honesty was by accident, which is a different word actually. Just, you know, maybe stupid would be the word for that. He's just saying, like, you know, come for the crackers. Stay for the crackers. I don't know. Whatever works.

Just don't be a liberal because that's my greatest fear. Ezra's very scary. And of course, all of the examples of like these legitimate insufficient reasons that often, right? Because this is what the cool kids are doing or because they were nice to me or whatever. If you applied those to political affiliations or academic schools of thought, that would be insane. Right? It would be insane to say, like, I have this political view because those people were nice to me. Now, to be fair, the majority of the country voted for Hitler because Joe Biden didn't personally lower the price of their eggs. So he's not far off the American mindset. And then Hitler raised the price of

eggs and everything else. Yeah. And he did it because some idiot who clearly failed Econ 102 and still became, I don't know, an economist that Trump Hitler talks to, that guy convinced Trump Hitler that we should try a do-over on the industrial revolution of the 1800s and become a mercantilist widget kingdom. Yeah. Simple metal old-timey ship. Going great for us.

Yeah. He says that any religion is fine, quote, as long as you aren't engaging in some sort of elaborate self-deception. Oh, I have terrible news for you, Ross. I'm going to rock your whole fucking world here. Which one did you have in mind there, buddy? But he's saying here that there are very few bad reasons to abandon agnosticism for faith as though truth and even fucking plausibility is just a trifle.

Okay, just say ignorance is bliss and female orgasms are scary to you. Like you've got 15% of a book left to you. do an honesty. Come on, man. Take a shot. Clock is running out on you. Squirt is pee. You want pee all over you?

That's crazy. You're crazy. It's also, it's okay to... You're going to get sick. You're going to get pink guy. That's how you get pink guy. I'm trying to avoid pink guy. It's also, he says, it's okay to abandon your childhood faith just because it's

boring and stuffy too. And I'm like, wow, man, that would be a crazy reason to abandon a faith that could be true, Ross. Again, try applying that to a political belief for a school of academic thought. Well, you know, I'm actually in favor of the death penalty because anti-death penalty people are stuffy. Also, you're Catholic, Ross.

What religion are you possibly picturing that's stuffier than yours? Yes. Catholic during COVID? Yeah. You know, that's there. That's there. Yeah. They were stuffy. Wow, but he ends with this, like,

this long story about this British, novelist's religious journey. And I had to ask in closing, how surprised were you guys when that guy's long religious journey eventually happened to end on Christianity? That was crazy. Oh my God. It's crazy. Never happens. What a twist. I never saw a God. And all of a sudden, I was like, oh my God, I'm Catholic. I'm Catholic. I'm Catholic. It's crazy. It's not. They all go to Catholic. It's the only one down here, guys. I guess I have to be Catholic now. Yeah. And with the uplifting news that there's only one chapter left and the down putting news that it's all about Ross's personal journey to Catholicism.

We're going to wrap up this installment of God-awful books. Before we tighten the lug nuts on this episode, I want to remind you to check the show notes for more info about seeing me in Cincinnati on July 11th, Williamstown, Kentucky on July 12th, or Ontario, Canada, on August 21st through the 23rd. Check the show notes. Anyway, that's all the blasphemy 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 in a look up for a brand new episode of our sister show

the skeptocrat, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Monday, an even newer episode of a sister-shel's hot friend got off a movie, day of being at 7-Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sit-show citation needed, debuting at noon-eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I'd be more of a heist than a host of my neglected to thank Heath Enright for bringing down the man. Eli Bosnick for bringing down the house and Lucinda Lusions for bringing down the hammer.

I also want to thank the Daleks for providing this week's Farnsworth quote, and honestly, at this point, I cannot muster a fucking counter-argument. So sure, exterminate, I guess. Jesus. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people people Shahrazade, Tom Obo-Wan, Snickerdoodle, Richard, Travis, David, Ian, Matt, Morgan, Erica, Charles, Jason, Liber, Chaos, Deborah, and Diogeneses's lamp, who are so sexy porn masturbates to them. Together, these 17th savory secular secured sustained screed screed screed scorer this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the money it takes to have less of it on our account, but if you've got Matrion fever, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com

Slathing Atheist, whereby you own early access to an extended app-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the one-time button on the right side of the homepage at scathingeatheas. And if you'd like to help, but you had to sell a kidney for gas money, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show and following us on social media. And speaking of social media, Tim Robertson handles that for us and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission. If you have questions, comments or death threats, you find all the contact info on the

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