The Scathing Atheist - 709: Communion Busting Edition

Episode Date: October 15, 2026

In this week’s episode, Christians remember how well the last public execution went for their image, Oklahoma takes another step towards approving the Eli Bosnick Charter School, and it turns out Heath did NOT forget we said we’d read the JD Vance book.---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/---Headlines:Christians react to calls for public execution: https://religionnews.com/2026/10/09/head-of-u-s-catholic-bishops-conference-condemns-public-execution-plans-as-promoting-a-culture-of-death/A pastor in an interracial marriage says he won’t let his daughter marry a Black man: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/a-pastor-in-an-interracial-marriageChristian nationalism in Britain driven by people who seldom go to church, says report: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/11/christian-nationalism-uk-far-right-people-rarely-go-to-church-reportSatanic prayer causes insane magic fight at city council meeting in Iowa: https://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/satanic-invocation-causes-uproar-at-city-council-meeting/article_47fecb72-be23-4269-a71a-4c95ed596413.htmlVideo of the Ottumwa City Council meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhnHU8YTitU&t=120sFederal judge clears path for taxpayer-funded religious school in Oklahoma: https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/federal-judge-clears-path-for-taxpayer

Warning, the following podcast, contains adult language in its most juvenile form. This week's episode of The Skathing Atheist is brought to you by electricity. Electricity. Shockingly good. And now, the Scathing Atheist. It's Thursday. It's October 15th. And it's National Pug Day. Oh, we show snort in solidarity.

I have no illusions. I'm Ilabaznik. I'm Ethan Wright. And from Can't Pump Their Own Gas, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and way across the This is the scathingist. On this week's episode, Christians remember how well that last public execution went for their image. Oklahoma takes another step towards approving the Eli Bosnick charter school. And it turns out Heath did not forget we said we'd read the Chethe Van's book.

No, we did not. But first, the diatri. Just imagine a world where we non-believers had as much political sway as evangelical Christians. What does that America look like? I mean, it's not like the math doesn't work out. Evangelical Christians make up something like 23% of the population. Nuns are something like 28%. We outnumber them.

Obviously, that nun category is way more varied than the evangelical one, but not as much as you might think. When we think of the evangelical voting block, it's easy to imagine this entirely homogenous group of carbon-copied button-down churchgoers, but only about half of evangelicals are going to church every week, and only about two-thirds of them every month. I mean, they're certainly more committed on the average to their faith tradition than the typical nun is to their lack of faith tradition, but it's not this like quarter of the country moving

in lockstep that we often envision it as. Now, of course, I'd be remiss not to admit that a fuck ton of the people we share the nun label with also suck, right? And their politics are awful. I'm sure it wouldn't take the average listener all that long name a prominent atheist with aberrant views on at least one subject, if not many. So, you know, pining for a day when atheists are in charge. might feel like it's just misguided tribalism.

But if you look at basically any survey about moral shit that breaks down people's stances by faith, you're going to find atheists, agnostics, and nonbelievers all clustered together at the moral end of that spectrum. Now, very often we might share those spaces with like Buddhists and Jews, but evangelicals are usually on the far end of the teeter totter. So yes, some atheists suck and some of the atheists that suck are very loud. But on the average, we tend to get the answers right way more often on questions of social equity, economic justice, scientific accuracy, conservation, economics,

all the type of morality that you want in your governance. Now, of course, we'll always be at a disadvantage when it comes time to motivate our folks to the polls because they can just fucking lie. I can paint a pretty accurate and terrifying picture of what's going to happen if the rationalist and atheists don't get out and vote in the midterms, but I'm never going to be able to threaten you

with literal demons issuing forth from the bowels of the earth to consume the sacrifice flesh of the innocent in an effort to bring about the end of the goddamn world. then again, of course, they'll never have the advantage of being correct. So we got that going for it. I mean, the truth stands up to a lot more scrutiny than threats of demonic armies and whatnot. So maybe that's a wash. But the other big advantage they have, of course, is that their group is pre-selected for authoritarianism.

I mean, the sort of top-down dictatorial submission that they need to get out the vote is baked into their worldview, whereas ours more often begins with like a rejection of authority. I mean, that's not universally true, right? People are just nuns because they were raised without religion. I would imagine some nuns probably rejected organized faith for not being authoritarian enough. But by and large, they are a demographic defined by submission and we are a demographic defined by independence, which is awesome when it comes time to parse out reality and morality. But it kind of sucks when it comes time to speak with one voice. But we could. We'll obviously never agree on everything.

But in the largely binary system that we've inherited, we usually don't have to. We can disagree on a lot of shit, like really important shit to substantial degrees and still recognize that Christian nationalism is the gravest threat to democracy that this nation has ever faced and that Donald Trump in particular is the greatest threat to global order since the Second World War. Look, nothing could ever restore my faith in the American electorate. I'm too old. There aren't enough years.

There aren't enough elections left to make up for re-electing Donald Trump. But we could at least start to start. to rebuild that faith, couldn't we? I mean, if the polling holds, and it turns out to be accurate, we could see one of the biggest electoral shifts in modern American history next month. Democrats have at least slight polling advantages in all seven battleground states.

Fuck, fuck, all eight. They've just moved Kansas into battleground status, and it's a dead heat. Democrats only need four seats in the House of Representatives to gain a majority. They could easily gain 20. Fuck, more than that, if the Republican dummy mandarin comes back to bite.

him. Now, that's not enough. Nothing short of time travel will be enough after all the damage that Trump has done. So no matter how high that blue wave is when it crests, we won't rekindle that naive belief that the American electorate was mostly made up of sane, ethical people. But if we all do our part, maybe we'll at least remember for a moment what it felt like to believe that. They're talking about your Jesus. I interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight are the USB and USBC of the podcast, Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick, fellas. Are you ready to get plugged in?

And I'm upside down again. Fuck, how is it every time upside down? It would have to be half. Yeah, and I do go both ways technically, but not well. Right. Yeah, and look, it was either that or make you micro and that felt weird. Yeah, I'm told people barely feel it at all, so you know how to feel bad at all. Yes.

And our lead story tonight, you remember that time when, literally any good guy in all the history of either fiction or nonfiction was on the side of broadcasting executions. I'll wait. Right. Like, fucking, even Thanos had the decency to turn Gamora's head away when they were doing the firing, but not the fucking Trump regime. So on Friday of last week, Pete Hanks said they were going to be live streaming the execution of Nadal Hassan, the former U.S. Army major who shot 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, because Trump's supporters want to watch people of color die. And you would think that that could be awkward for Christians, right?

The guys whose whole religion is founded on the zinian notion that a condemned man could be the falsely accused son of God to support something like this. That is, if you'd never met a Christian in your whole goddamn fucking life. Ow, why? Who's already throwing stone? We didn't even start yet. You're throwing, I'm just the camera guy setting up. The camera for the execution.

Got excited and you're kind of. Tam. It's in your book, though. Now, to be clear, a lot of prominent Christian leaders are condemning this shit, right? So Trump's getting way more pushback than I'd imagine he expected from his bread and butter Christian base. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the proposal as a, quote, barbaric promotion of a culture of death, end quote. And while I could find a few evangelical leaders condemning it, none of them were people I'd ever heard of. The Southern Baptist Convention's ethics and religious liberty commission was strangely silent, even when prodded by news outlets for a statement.

Ethics in Liberty Commission. Ethics in the title. What would they say they do here? They need a meeting with the bobs. What's happening? Actually, well, no, let me explain. They were really busy this week. Let me check their latest press release from October 8th here.

Yeah, see, they were busy saying that they are disappointed that the FDA wasn't lying about how dangerous abortion pills are. So, you know, it was a big week for them. A lot going on. Plan B in all the water. You got to get that out there. Obviously, yeah, you can tell them. But of course, there is no level of sadistic tyranny

Trump can descend to that won't come with the seal of approval of Robert Jeffress. He took to social media the night of the announcement to point out that, according to the Bible, God actually loves it when you kill his enemies. Quote, capital punishment is commanded by God in Genesis 9-6 to remind people of the sanctity of human life. The more people that can see the truth illustrated through a public execution, the better. quote. Okay, that's what, that's what we're saying. Yes. Your book is evil and that's a point for us. Also, it's stupid. You're saying that people are thinking themselves like, hey, I haven't been reminded

where are we on the sanctity of human life? Let's just watch what's going on on YouTube. Blam, blam, blam, blam. Oh, okay, got it, got it. Lots of sanctity. We're saying lots of sanctity. Good demo. Thanks. Yeah. If I were participating in what will almost certain be a momentary blip of fascism in the American historical record. The last thing I would be doing is advocating for the death penalty, right? Like, little foresight, people. Right. Now, to be clear, the Christian Post's roundup of Christian leaders reacting to this announcement

was overwhelmingly against. It included the executive director of the Catholic mobilizing network, comparing it to lynchings, the president of the Episcopal Church calling it reprehensible to the extreme, a Christian lawmaker calling it Bloodlest, a Methodist ethics professor calling it vicious theology and a Quaker calling it disgusting. Like even most of Christianity sees this as a bridge

too far and they're still not backing down from it which tells you a lot of shit, all of which is scary as hell. I like that the Quaker had to be like, yeah, no, we're against like the regular normal violence too. Nice to be interviewed though. Do you guys want

some oats? It's kind of a thing. Oats guy. I do want some Yeah, they're good. They're good. They're not good. Hey, before you eat those, they're not good. Got it. Gonna eat them anyway.

Cool. And in Wedding Bell Curve News, hate pastor Dale Partridge. You recently announced that he would never let his daughter marry a black person. Because black people have low IQ and Dale doesn't want to end up with dumb, grandkids. Now, Dale might be right, but not how he thinks. Of course, he's leaning into the part of the Bible that says you shouldn't marry outside the tribe. And being a hate pastor means you're basically a glorified teller marketer with a flowchart for like having a bigotry and then finding a Bible

passage to back that up. That being said, Dale claims he's not calling for a ban on interracial marriage. But he does think those marriages are, quote, not normative and not natural. Huh. Yeah. Apparently the problem with anti-miscegenation laws from like the 19th century, it's about the libertarianism angle. You got to consider that too. You got to let people be gross, but you got to tell them too. Dale's a nuanced man. So that's fun. Heath has included several pictures of Dale Partridge in our notes. And while he's not a bad looking dude, he does always

seem to be about to say, we agreed that if I beat you in Rocket League, you'd have sex with me. Yeah, as devastated as I'm sure that black people are at not getting to co-mingle their DNA with that of Dale Partridge, the fact that a hate pastor

is aware of the idea of holding beliefs and not forcing them on others is encouraging. Unless he beats you in Rocket it. Sure. Heels a Neil. And it's worth mentioning that Dale is not just a hate pastor. He's also a customer. He's also a client.

He also works as, quote, an aspiring general in the culture war. Those are his words. Or if you'd like that translated back out of Dushies. He's a social injustice lieutenant or sergeant. Aspiring to general. Right. I looked into his backstory because fuck me. And it's crazy.

It's like I was reading a training montage for getting a neo-Nazi black belt in a weird kung fu movie. He's going to end up calling for women to wear scarves while simultaneously panicking about Sharia law, which is weird. And also calling for white countries to recolonize Africa. But the story begins for him with just a kid who likes baseball and try to try to to become a professional player. Then he gets an arm injury, and now he's an adult whose personality is, I throw a ball.

Not great. So he pivots to entrepreneur, and he opens a business called Thresh hold. Sick, those are two words the way he wrote it. Thresh hold rock climbing gym. That fails, which makes him the perfect person, of course, to run a conference for Christian entrepreneurs. You can learn all about that at identityconference.com. Page not found. Okay, look, I get that, you know, threshold has the word hold in it, and in rock climbing,

you hold things, but... There's holding. Yeah, but Thresh all by itself means, like, to beat something so hard, you separate out its constituent parts. So I feel like we may have identified at least one of your points of failure, Dale. Oh, sorry. The threshold applies to what happened to his dreams. Oh, okay.

No, no, no. That's what that's full. I get it. So with that startup going under, Dale decided to start a site called startup camp.com. This time, the page can be found. Ooh. Yeah.

It's a blank white screen. But it's there. It's there. And I'd say it does maybe contain a message in there somewhere from Dale. But baby steps. Baby steps. He's got a site that's there. Well, it looks like that one actually went under two.

And now he's got several business failures under his belt at this point. His life. So he's ready to be a business author. That is how it works. That is exactly how works. That's how works. He writes a few stupid books about fucking synergy or whatever. But then he finally realized a very important truth.

The real money is in a growth sector called hate. pastor influencer. He's actually correct. So he's not wrong. Yeah. Now he has a digital ministry called relearn.org. The site seems to really exist. That's progress, more baby steps.

But yeah, it's just, it's just a retail store for books about Christian nationalism. It's closed borders. And he has a podcast called, I said, closed borders. I got the name. You mother fucker people. There was a bookstore. It was older than Barnes & Noble, which you also don't know about.

I crushed it just now for the record. He has a podcast also. Yes, they did. Yes, they did. Write in and tell me that you got that. In the comments. He has a podcast called Real Christianity as well. That's where he said the following last week, quote,

if a black man with an average IQ of, say, 82 marries a white woman with an average IQ of 105, their children's average IQ will be typically falling somewhere in the middle, 90 to 95. It's close. It would be 90 to 97 according to your own stupid thing. You can move the numbers wherever you want. You didn't have to set up 82. You could have said 85. Idiot.

Whatever. Continued. And for this reason, it is a serious consideration, not only for nations, but also for interracial marriage. and family formation. So people ask me often. They go, hey, Dale, would you allow your daughter to marry a black man

if you were a strong Christian? People often ask him that, which is insane. He continued, my answer is no. Hey, man, if you regularly find yourself in places where people ask, you know,

which races of people you would let your daughter marry, you're actually allowed to do a suicide bombing and it's not immoral anymore if you're in this. That's true. No, it's actually more ethical than a regular bombing. Okay, I challenge you at home to write something funnier than writing a sentence about how black people have a lower IQ than you and getting the average of two numbers wrong.

Like really, really take that homework. You're not going to do it. You're not going to do it. Okay. What other small detail about this? Dale is part of an interracial marriage. Sure is. But you didn't let him fuck.

and finish. He's such a good Christian that he's been able to overcome the genetic and cultural woes brought on by his wife, who is not white. Here's a post that he made and conveniently deleted explaining how this works. He was responding to fellow hate pastor Joel Webbin, who said, miscegenation is a problem. And Dale posted to agree, quote, as a Christian man happily married to a Mexican slash Spanish slash American woman, I actually agree with Joel Webbin. Interracial marriage is not the ideal. God gives those believers called to these unique marriages the endurance to overcome these hurdles. So while we live in a multicultural mess that has assumed that the melting pot mentality is just as desirable as sharing ethnic similarities and culture,

it's not. It's possible with Christ, but it comes with its own unique hardships, end quote. I want to be clear to everybody that I hate my wife at least as much as Joel Webin hates her, okay? Look, obviously, I value the preservation of the white race and I abhor the silent genocide of the caucus, but BB yells on my right, fellas, you gotta do what you gotta be. So, like, seriously, what the fuck else could that possibly mean? That's what that was. Yeah. So, okay, I know what you're all thinking.

You're worried about J.D. and Clarence. You're wondering, how are J.D. Vance and Clarence Thomas going to keep their marriages together? Definitely a concern for all of us. But hopefully, those two people are both amazing Christians. They'll get over those hurdles. It won't be a problem for them. There you go.

We'll see how it goes. And in the name of What's His Face News, if you've been paying attention to Christian nationalism for the last decade or so, it's pretty obvious that Christian has become ever more synonymous with bigot. Despite claims of spirituality, so-called woke churches and the same apologetics that progressive churches have been employing for their worst members since the days of John the Baptist, the people most likely to identify as Christians,

and especially Christian nationalists are way more the latter than they are the former. Well, this week, a British survey looked into the numbers on that, and it turns out that the most hardcore of so-called Christian nationalists are about as devout as cats as deli.

Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. If Christianity is going to give them the bigot card, they should have to at least go get it punched, right? Also, just circling back, if you bring your own pocket cheese, DeCatis, you're good. Just don't let anybody see it. Oh, nice. That's true.

But keep it on the cheese. But keep it on the Dio. Yeah, just keep it. So this survey comes to us from the think tank Theos. They identified five different groups within the UK in a survey that looked at their attitudes towards Christianity and Britishness. And in defense of the Brits, the group with views most closely resembling Christian nationalism termed identity integrationists by the researchers accounted for just a

11% of respondents, making it the smallest of the five groups. But here's the thing. While 81% of that bigot group identified as Christian, just 13% of them attended church weekly, which is only slightly above the 11% across the total population surveyed. Less than a third of those people, 31% prayed weekly, and just 47% expressed an interest in the Bible. So they believe in God 2% more than the average guy at the pub, but less than half want to talk to him or read his book. Yeah. Right.

If I had telekinesis, I would use it to scratch my ass. And I'm supposed to believe that people who think they can cast miracles don't bother with it most weeks. Okay. I get what you're saying. It's a confusing example, though. I feel like the best thing about telekinesis would be the ability to scratch your ass in any social situation. Okay. No.

Right? I knew I had a superpower. Nice. There it is. But it actually gets funnier because when that same survey asked the most religiously devout people who they called belief integrationists about their politics, they held, surprise, surprise, opposite beliefs from the people claiming their politics were most informed by their religion.

For example, only 18% of belief integrationists think that defending Britain's Christian culture and heritage is important for being Christian compared with 90% of what the Christian Nationalist group thought. Okay, but maybe it's just like how people think about food less when they're not hungry. It's another terrible example. Nobody's going to understand what's being said.

That's true. Confusing them. And look, before you think that I'm lending Christian apologists some true Scotsman for them to fillate with that last example, I need to point out that the integrationist numbers are still fucking awful, okay?

48% agreed that Christian values required welcoming and support asylum seekers, one of the only pieces of morality that the Bible clearly and repeatedly gets right. That's like if 48% of dungeon crawler Carl fans knew that the book had a cat in it. Well, yeah, to be clear, the number for all UK adults is more moral than the one for the people who regularly attend to the morality club. Yeah. And look, the point is this. And the article from the Guardian I read about this survey points this out. In a year where Christian nationalists are carrying crosses at hate rallies and right-wing politicians or defending their racist views

in the name of protecting Christian values. It's good to remember that these guys are just using religion as a cape for their bigotry. And can I say, as someone whose livelihood depends on the number of atheists going up, that's just fine by me. And in fighting your inner Des Moines' new fantastics, We have a story about Iowa and Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and a city council meeting. And one of the dumbest magic fights I've ever seen in my life. So good.

So fucking good. And I've been to Eli's Bachelor Party, I believe, when I watched Eli's Magic Troop tried to cooperate during an escape room. There was a dumb magic fight there. Yeah. Yeah. If there wasn't a time limit, we'd still be in there. We sure wouldn't. Rachel didn't tell us about a key she saw, and I think about it.

She palmed it and put it up her sleeve, and everybody was doing like countermatch. It was ridiculous. Yeah. Okay. So the city council meeting was in Ottumwa, Iowa, but Des Moines worked better for the team. Yeah, yeah. So just like we've seen in many stupid cities and towns over the years, people in charge of Atumwa decided back in January to have invocations at the start of their meetings. That means they have to allow anyone, regardless of belief or non-belief, to do one.

And last week, they got an invocation from a member of the Satanic Temple of Iowa. Well, the moment that invocation was finished, the moment it was finished, the meeting immediately devolved into insanity, complete insanity. But with like Midwest nice on top of the insanity, it became my favorite Christopher Guest movie somehow accidentally with no Christopher guest involved. Link in the show notes, this is worth a watch, five stars. Okay, so I shoot you not within 12 seconds of this invocation being over. It descends into an argument about whether anybody called no backsees.

So let's meet the cast of characters at this Iowa Council meeting. Matt Dalby is the person who gave the invocation, and it was perfectly reasonable in its actual content. He said things like, let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not their fealty, to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations. But he also said evil magic words like Satan during the thing. And of course, that led to a panic from a local pastor.

That pastor's name is Rick Bick. Oh, fuck off. Rick Bick. Yep, he's going to be our primary idiot for the story. our secondary idiot is the mayor of Ottomwa, Ben Foot. Who the fuck is making up these names in a hurry? These are real. I thought I actually did a double check.

These are real. And last but certainly not least, we have my favorite character. Kara Galloway is one of the council members. And here's the important piece of context for her. She's the only person on the council who voted against the idea of, of hosting invocations. And she clearly explained the council back in January

why this was going to be a problem. She will be Midwest furious the whole time and she's fucking great. Yeah. And so, okay, so listeners, I'm going to need you to picture all of these folks like shooting on this screen on two different sides with their stats coming up like the beginning of a dungeon crawl or call our boss battle.

Okay. Yeah. Or that ESPN thing where they make the football players say their name and the school they went to, but it feels like they're getting both of those answers wrong. Come on, Rick Bick, and I don't think you went to Ohio State. It's weird. You said, The also. Everything was weird about that. So here's the exchange we got at the meeting.

Mr. Dalby finishes the satanic prayer by saying, it is done, hail Satan. And Pastor Rick Bick is already speedwalking up to the front so he can fix the evil magic with his good magic. He gets to the podium and he really wants to start ranting, of course. But the council is doing roll call. So Rick Pick is just like vibrating with panic, sweating profusely. But he's a pastor from Iowa and he has to, by his nature, he has to let them very slowly finish the fucking roll call.

And just to make it extra silly, by the way, Rick Bick is wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt. just to add to it. I was going to Lou out after that's worst thing. That is the tone of this man

throughout. The roll call finally gets done and Mayor Ben Foot can see Pastor Rick Bick standing there just looking

insane and Mayor Foote reluctantly says okay it looks like we have citizen who would like to make a comment

but Kara Galloway or hero is already not having She explains the rules of the meeting and how the comment period is later. Mayor Foote, he lets out a big sigh, clearly thinking to himself like, yeah, no, Kara, that's actually true. But like, look, Rick's going to fucking explode.

He's literally going to explode. He's right there. So Mayor Foote looks over at Rick Bick and decides to let him say something real quick. Foot says, so yeah, Rick, if you could just end Rick Bick, can't. not wait any longer. He jumps in. He's like, let's just reverse that curse that was just put on our city. Let's just reverse it. Pulls out an Uno card. Hold

on a second. I got this. Okay, but here's a thing. If you live in Rick's City and you go to Rick's church, it is now your moral obligation to walk up after every sermon he gives and say that so that he has to start all over again. If that's how he

thinks magic works, he's going to do it. That is how he thinks magic works. and it just doesn't in any way. So Carrie Galloway continues to have zero fucks to give it. As Rick Bick is trailing off about the hail dark God being unwelcome here in Iowa, she cuts in and reminds the mayor again that citizen comments are at the end of the meeting. But Rick Bick, he knows that evil magic is just like snake venom.

The clock is fucking ticking. He says, it needs to be done now. It needs to be done now. I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is. saying, but that was a curse put on our city when he said, Hail Satan, and oh, dark God. And most of you know that. And we need to

just stop and reverse it. Exactly words. Yeah, but then the Satanist should get a second chance to, like, throw his draw four, right? Okay, but here's the thing. Imagine believing that the Prince of Darkness, enemy of God in heaven, had just been invoked over

your city and that you, as one who stood on the side of the angels, had the power to drive him back into the depths of hell. And then you don't do that because it's not your... They have to finish your roll call. Respect the roll call, but I am going to explode. So from there we get another big sigh from Mayor Foote.

He's clearly Christian, but he's not like as Christian as Rick Bick. He says, okay, so what I'm going to do now, I'm going to invite us into a 30-second time of prayer, time of silence. And once again, our hero, Kara Galloway, is not having it. She says, I'm sorry, but it's time to move forward. The invocation happened. But Mayor Foote clearly doesn't understand that he's illegally pandering to a Christian backsees invocation that's being requested here. And of course, they'd never allow a satanic rebuttal prayer after a Christian invocation. I Obviously. But I'd like to apply the curse.

I'd like to apply the curse. Mayorfoot is a very stupid person. So he decides to overrule Kara in his capacity as the leader of the council. He says, as the mayor of this city, I'm going to ask right now that we do a moment of silence to reflect on. Whatever it is, we need to reflect on at this time. Yeah. That's a real quote. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. And when he says prayer, right, because he realizes he can't say that. He says a 30 second time. of prayer, time of silence, right? He accidentally says it and then he, like, we could not have written a sketch where the guy more obviously violates the First Amendment here. I plan to use my moment of silence to tear this copy of the Constitution of that. You know whatever you're, but quiet. You want to do. I'm miming it. Shit, I said mimming it. So Mayor Foote calls for

the silence and everyone roused their heads, closes their eyes, except for Kara Galloway. She plays trombone. It's beautiful. She starts the moment of silence by so very loudly putting down her pen. It was like moment of silence, click. And then she just stares into the room with just burning Midwest rage. From there, the meeting was able to finally continue because I guess in some of these people's heads, the evil magic was dealt with during the moment of silence by Pastor Rick.

Bick. Password Bank. I just want to mention, I forgot his name for a second. I had just said it. I just want to mention one other moment right here at the end. After about an hour, Kara Galloway gave a quick speech

that I believe she titled, well, well, well. She explained how she told everyone this exact stupid thing was going to happen. Or in Kara's exact words, responding to someone's invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing for others to object or respond.

And this is exactly why I had concerns about having an indication when we first talked about it. I think I even specifically referenced having someone from the Church of Satan or a prayer about Satan that this could happen and we would need to allow it. Also, none of you bought any popcorn from Tammy's fundraiser and I had to buy 11 bags so she wouldn't feel like a fucking freak and I don't even like Kettlecorn. Eighty-three dollars a bag. Okay. Kettlecorn's awesome. So,

yeah, very... Not the school fundraiser. Just real... It's all really good. Shut up. Very simple lesson for... Great. I got a form to send it. For every city council out there, just bring it in. Take any. I know you're all listening to this show.

Stop having a public magic period. You don't need to have public magic periods. You shouldn't have. You shan't have those. And perhaps even more importantly, just more broadly for wisdom, listen to your Kara Galloway. You've all got one. You're dumb and your Kara Galloway is smart. Listen to that person. That's what makes her your Kara Galloway, in fact.

Yeah. And finally tonight, in a growing sense of Fed news, ever since the Trinity Lutheran decision, it has truly just been a matter of time till the Kool-Aid man of church-funds. schools, burst through that crack in the wall of church-state separation, creating what will almost certainly be the irreversible precedent of your tax dollars paying for bullshit. Well, we got one step closer to that moment this week as a federal judge has cleared the way for the first taxpayer-funded religious school in Oklahoma. Yeah, I'd say it's more than a step closer.

It's already happened. Like, the Kool-Aid man in the metaphor already smashed through the wall and then, like, fake apologized and slowly backed out through a different spot in the wall, fucking it up even more, smashed through again, backed out again. And then like a bunch more later, he now smashed into Oklahoma again. Yeah, right.

Fox News has infomercial selling fake chunks of this thing, like after the Berlin Wall fell. Exactly. Yeah, right. So for those of you who haven't been following along with this years-long effort, let me catch you up. Elena Kagan is a fucking idiot who we pretend is an ashamed to her position and the practice of law,

because she isn't Amy Coney Barrett or Neil Gorsuch. Listen, I got to, I'm going to do a nuance thing real quick. Don't do a nuance thing. It was a seven to two decision. She couldn't have changed it herself. What she did get for being part of the majority was a footnote that actually did change the law a little bit in the favor of good. That's what, that's what Kagan did there. Noah.

No one. That's official. That's what happened. Just be honest. We don't like the decision. We can be mad about Trinity Lutheran, obviously. Elena Kagan was doing a thing. That's an important detail

that needs to be in there. It's not important to me. Yeah, exactly. That's why it's important. Fucks his joke up. It fucks my joke up. And that's significantly more important. Yeah, no.

It's important. Supreme Court. I'm going to fact check all your stories now with my stuff that I know that you don't. Good. All right. Better not do any stories about the history of stage matching. You wait.

You wait until you, when you talk about the sandwiches I ain't. fucking coming down hard. First thing you thought of was sandwiches. Anyways, Elena Kagan, Heath's best friend, was pretty sure she could toss one to the bigot team and nobody would notice. So much more than we do about this.

Well, they did. She doesn't. And since pretty much, I challenge her to trivia right now. Anyways, since pretty much the moment we fixed up that church's playground, Christian theocrats have been floating some version of a taxpayer-funded Christian school. A few years ago, the statewide charter school board of Oklahoma

month gave a stamp of approval to the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which, as the name indicates, is a religious school. Well, in this era of weird allies, Attorney General Gertner Drummond, whose politics are as awesome in his name. She drums? Yeah, he sued to prevent the school from being approved specifically so that, quote, Oklahomans can be assured that our tax dollars will not fund the teachings of Sharia law or even Satanism, end quote. Translation, Theocratic Fascism is great if we never lose power as Christians, but we actually might here and there.

I'm Gentner Drummond, so I said it with Sharia law and Satanism, so Oklahomans could understand me, but that's what's going on here. Well, but in Theocracy's defense, which I don't say often, but in Theocracy's defense, all this, but if we do it for one religion, we have to do it for all the religions' arguments are getting less and less effective, the more that we just don't. Don't obey the Constitution. Just don't do that.

So the case went to the Supreme Court and we thought it was curtains for our plucky little First Amendment. But luckily for sanity, Catholic schools are evil and all evil things are tied to Amy Coney Barrett. She's basically their carbon, you know?

So she recused herself and that left the court deadlocked for that particular case at 4 to 4. Yeah, she had to recuse because she was part of the faculty at Notre Dame. And Notre Dame law school is basically Paris Island for Catholic Evil Special Ops missions. Yeah. So she was connected. Everybody's connected to everything. I bet Ann would be really good at Back to Barrett where you just, you name any evil thing. You have to get it back to

Oh, yes. Like six degrees. Yeah. Or Eileen Cannon, who went to Michigan. But if we've learned anything over the past four years, it's that nobody is more willing to be a useful tool for evil than conservative Jews. So the Ben Ghamla Jewish school stepped in for their turn, confident that nobody on the Supreme Court has ever met a Jewish person, let alone been financially tied to one.

Leaving this spot for us Gentiles to make a joke, there seems like entrapment. I'm just, I pass. We were all, we all had commentary earlier. I see the stick in the box. So this is where a little twist comes into this story. And I don't want to sound like a conspiracy,

theorist because I know everything I said so far and this story has been perfectly accurate. So take my suppositions with a grain of salt or two or and be able to add up to nine or four or five. Yeah. So back in February, it's a tiny amount of salt. It's a very, very small amount of salt. No matter how many. Even a pinch. I won't be significantly of grains.

Don't take a lot of salt. I'm a famous person. Tiny amount. Sell me your bird. Pocket salt. back in February, that same charter school board rejected Ben Gamla's application, but they did it in a way that was really weird. They essentially said in their rejection like,

oh, there's a bruntler problems with this, but the biggest problem is how Jewish you are. And I'm not saying that they specifically worded their objections so that it could be challenged as a religious freedom thing. But if you wanted to word a rejection to set up a lawsuit, that's how you would do it. I am saying the wording was very intentional. I'm definitely saying that.

Okay, well, okay. Well, intentional or not, it served the purpose it was intended to. Oklahoma Western District Judge David L. Russell, a Reagan appointee, by the way, ruled late last month that the state violated the First Amendment when it denied approval of the Jewish charter school due to religion, which means they can go to the board and appeal the decision. Or, as the lawyer for the school literally put it, quote, whoever doesn't like the ruling is going to appeal it to the 10th Circuit and so on and so forth,

frankly, probably all the way up until we break the 4-4 tie at the Supreme Court, end actual quote. What do you mean you can't put boeh-ha-ha-ha in the quote? That's the context for the whole damn thing. It don't make sense without the blah-ha-ha. Exactly, yeah. So one step closer to the first taxpayer-funded religious school. But hey, at least we've been warning you about it for, 10 years in counting.

100 than that. Yeah. And while we break it to Eli that we're actually just talking about more taxpayer-funded religious schools. Sure. We're going to wrap up the headlines for the night. Heath, Eli, thanks, as always. Elena Kagan. And when we come back, Jan Stance will ask why we would have called it a love seat if that wasn't the point.

Whatever we fret about decreasing literacy rates, we should remind ourselves that literacy has never been less important than it is in a world where J.D. Vance has two books out there. which we're going to remind you of yet again in this installment of God Awful Books. So now we're on chapter two here. Vance is going to pretend now that he's going to talk about something moderately interesting in a chapter he titles Semper Y. Really? Well, like, Moor Phil. What are you doing? Yeah.

Really makes you think about all. Pyr 5D. Pirates life from now. Really makes you think about all the young men. and women in uniform who've lost their lives who could have been J.D. Vance, right? It's really sad. Obviously the wrong ones. Yeah, well, he's a blogger in the Marines. So there was a little chance. I also had a blog. So just as you're thinking to yourself, well, perhaps a shift to war might at least make for an interesting, dramatic change in the book. He pours cold water on that shit by opening this chapter, still pondering the Terry Schiavo shit

that he was talking about at the end of the last chapter. Ridiculous. Okay. If J.D. Vance is secretly my mother, he has to tell me. It's like being a cop. All right. Keep we going for the chapter title. Any Marines out there? Cool. I want to talk about euthanasia.

Yeah, right. I tricked you. So he quotes Hitchens and God's not great talking about his idiot teacher that once told him God had the sense to make nature green since purple would be so ugly. Yeah, except for the nature that is purple. Fuck. Yeah, right. Also, I would love it if some of the grass was purple or blue.

or a rainbow color. Like, do a drug. Do one drug, you sad piece of shit. Absolutely. Open up. So much of this dark timeline could have avoided if like one drug dealer at Ohio State was like, here, have a drug. There you go.

There you go. Or UPenn. But of course, fans presents this as though that like that was Hitchin's excuse for rejecting Christianity, the fact that this lady got grass wrong. And then he's like, he's like, you know, some of my friends, they realized that religion was incompatible with objective knowledge. Those poor bastards. So one friend asked his religious aunt, if a patient in a hospital is dying and needs a blood transfusion, could you have a priest bless the wine and then put that wine in his body saving the patient?

Oh, interesting. And then J.D. explains, the aunt refused to answer, fucking moving on. Anyway, back to my book about Catholicism entitled Communion. Yes. We're moving on. Yep. Yep. That's what happens there. No more questions? And so he explains here that he also, he used to pretend not to believe in God, just like those silly atheists do now. And he admitted that part of his atheism stemmed from meeting Muslims and seeing just how evil a religion could be. J.D., I hate to break it to you. But if evil religious people were an argument for atheism, we would be mega fans.

Oh, buddy. Sorry, J.D. I got to jump in for a second. You forgot. Just a couple of details. I'm just going to add a little context. real quick. You're talking about your time as a Marine Corps blogger during the Iraq war. That's when you were an atheist and you were in favor of a stupid war with a country that starts with IRA at the beginning of the country. But then you became Christian and everything was different. And then you

broke the tie in the Senate to confirm Pete Hegsef. Okay, so go ahead about Islam causing problems in the world. Well, he's not going to watch the execution, Heath. He's not going to not going to watch it. He's going to do that. Yeah, right. Ew. So, but he goes, he's like, Christianity wasn't just a belief. This is an actual quote.

Christianity wasn't just a belief to us. It wasn't a judgment we arrived at after evaluating the evidence. It was a practice, a way of life. But, like, yes, because it hijacked your culture and made it contingent upon bullshit. That's one of the things that makes it evil. That's what we're saying. Yeah. Also, worth pointing out that religion is literally the only thing

people brag about arriving at in spite of the evidence. Yeah. The Bible's kind of like a yikyak for the creation of the universe. You're just all over my nuts today, huh? He's got this whole like, he's like, but without Jesus, us saying an amazing grace to my dying great grandmother wouldn't even be magical. And then he quotes a Pew survey about why people leave the church. And he sheepishly admits that, okay, the vast majority of them just realize that it's nonsense,

that it's not true. but there's other stuff too. Yeah, and it was such bullshit that it overcame the magic of singing a hymn to my dying great grandma. Wait, wait, wait, you know what? I'm just going to delete that.

That was crazy that I typed that in my book. He says that, quote, the critical inflection point for most people appears to be when they leave the home, often for college, end quote. But like another way of saying that would be like, as soon as it is possible

for them to do so. That's what we're saying. No, I've noticed that I win all the arguments with my wife when she walks out of the room, JD. It's the same thing. That's when I really am like, oh, yeah. Okay. The inflection point aligns with being a grown-up and learning facts about real thing. No, yeah, fuck, I'm deleting that part, too.

That's crazy. He knows about deletes? He does not. He's like, he's got a friend that pointed out to problem of evil. And since he can't answer that one, his friend also has some shit to say about babies. So here's the baby thing. He goes, you know, if babies go to heaven, wouldn't infanticide be a good thing? And J.D. tries to, like, counterapologetics this shit.

He goes, he goes, no, because it's about intent. But if, like, if your intent was to send them to heaven, then it is, you're saying that it is a good thing. Peter gets it up there and he's like, sorry, kiddo. This was kind of a thought experiment thing. Honestly, we should email that to him. We might make him pro choice again. I think he'd be anti-choice like the other way. Like you have to kill babies.

Everybody has to kill at least two babies. It's a net positive population growth problem of heaven. Yeah, right, right. Maybe that's what he's doing in a ring. I need to get a delete button. But he admits that his atheist friends actually did want to believe that they got to live for eternity and paradise with superpowers and all their dead pets, which is true of all fucking people. Yeah, which is impressive. when you consider what a small percentage of people include that in their religion.

A bunch of ancient Buddhists sitting around going, so nobody has wings in our things? Something's missing, right? But it occurs to Vance that most people only know things, right, because they've been told those things. And I'm like, oh, dude, that's dangerous to bring up in a book about religion. I don't think you want to. You mentions how a six-year-old child believes that crossing the street is dangerous.

because an adult told them. And you watch somehow in this book, you watch Jady realize he just described faith as being a six-year-old, but like for grown-ups. So he tries to save it instead of just using the delete button. And the best recovery he could think of was pointing out that lots of adults are idiots who just believe things without checking, much like his entire GOP voting base. Okay.

So he starts trying to give examples of those things that we just believe, you know, because we're told those things. But his second example is water boiling at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which is one of those things that we've all pretty much independently verified. I mean, like often with Celsius, but still, though. Sorry, does he think kettles that show temperature are just waiting to hear a whistle and then showing 212 like a conspiracy? And okay, yeah, that's insanely stupid. And even JD can sort of tell. He just said the boiling point of water is faith-based there. And here's the very next sentence.

Quote, keep reading. There's a point here, I promise. Exact words. Don't leave the book. He's like, you know, but he says, we know things because we trust what others tell us. And I'm like, dude, you are so bad at knowing things. I know things because I check multiple reliable, reputable sources. No, no, I'm with JD on this one.

We know. Yeah, right. But this turns into an argument about how increasing the minimum wage wouldn't actually help poor people, even though it has everywhere they did it. He's like, well, yes, but some argue it might reduce the number of jobs available. And I'm like, those people are lying so they don't have to pay their employees a living wage, though we have evidence of this. Hey, folks, I am so sorry.

We are working on those apps for you, but Craig got a big tip from Table 11, so we've had to close your table down to make up for that. And, okay, the minimum wage thing was another follow-up when JD accidentally said something even worse, even dumb. He wrote, spend five minutes in the darkest corners of the internet, and you'll find people who deny or downplay the Holocaust,

So, okay, first of all, no, I'm not doing that. Why would I do that? But our vice president clearly just did that. And more importantly, I don't think it took him five minutes. I think he had a bookmark. I have a funny feeling he had a bookmark for that, especially considering he was writing this book at exactly the same time that he was, you know, flying over to Germany

to give a speech in favor of the AFD neo-Nazi party that wants everyone to stop harping on that Holocaust thingy so much. So J.D. wrote that sentence. about the Holocaust deniers and he was like, fuck, AFD speech coming up. I'm gonna get out of this. I'm gonna talk about the faith-based epistemology of the minimum wage.

I guess. Yeah. Hey, look, I just, as a general rule, you should always be at least a little bit of suspicious when an author spends two and a half pages going, okay, so you know how that no one's shit, shit is mostly bullshit. That's what he does. And then he starts talking about evolution.

and he says, like, he didn't believe that evolution and faith were compatible because, you know, he had faith that evolution was true and faith that it was incompatible with the Bible. But, like, I know both of those things to be true without. Like, I have to invoke zero faith to get there. Yeah. I mean, the man just admitted that he can't be bothered to really dig deep into how hot water gets. So I can see how macro evolution may have evaded him.

Sure. sure. He says, quote, the problem for me and many others really isn't science and reason. It's trust or its absence, end quote. And I'm like, yeah, man, your problem isn't even fucking reason adjacent. I agree. Yeah. He's claiming you can learn about evolution from scientists or creation from pastors. And they're both using faith. So it's a tie. And what's left for the tie breaker? faith, except he says trust or its absence. You got to have faith in the faith leaders. Just going to diagram the logic real quick here.

Please. Faith and faith, both sides. So faith and faith cancel out. Sure. You got to do that. But then you add faith on one side. So you're left with faith plus faith is greater than faith QED. That's really, that's the, this is the vice president of the United States.

He went to Yale law. Right. The fuck is happening. But he does, he does throw at least a little cold water on the professor Kevin Sorbo from God's Not Dead stereotype of college professors as like atheism factories. He's like, you know, so, but why do college students lose their faith? And then he's like, well, first, let's reject this because they learn true shit stuff. Okay. Like that is not it.

That's not it. No, no. Everyone just gets atheism in their teens with the. Pubic hair and the voice changes. Yeah. Okay. So according to JD, the college classroom in this telling is a type of hostile, Socratic interrogation for students of faith.

The cocky university professor sporting a pipe and tweed jacket, beating down innocent Christians until they finally relent and give up their faith. And so JD, he's rejecting that story. But that's a great story. Like, I've seen approximately. The version I saw, I didn't have the pipe, but like everything else is pretty close. And it was super fun to watch. I watched a bunch of that.

He also, he talks about a book by one Rod Dreher that thinks that the solution to decreasing religiosity is more insular communities. So, cults. He's suggesting cults. I mean, look, women say they wouldn't date me if I was the only man on Earth. But if we tried that. Yeah. Okay. I know you're joking, but we get a quote from that guy, Rod Dreher, and he says that Christian people need to construct arcs so they can make it across the dark sea of time to a future

when we do find dry land again and can start the rebuilding, reseeding, and renewal of the earth during college that's reseeding a jerk sock. But a bit later, it's a cult with a few women who might touch your penis if you get married. Like that's what's being said there. Yep. It's funny that he doesn't want to tackle arguments against religion because, you know, they're really good and the rebuttals for them aren't. So instead, he's constructed a universe where it's not that, you know,

it's not knowledge that changes people's faith at all. That's irrelevant. It's just that institutions that are connected to gaining knowledge are doing it for entirely unrelated reasons. Also, secular people get to have fun and that's no fair. Okay, so like that could have been the first honest moment in the book, but JD couldn't do it. He pretends he lost his faith during college when he was, you know, drowning in Poon. And then trust him.

You don't know. Of course, because it was even harder because no Christian people wanted to go to church with him in the atheist stronghold of Columbus, Ohio and Ohio State University. Right. Yeah. I think he's lying. I think he might just be lying. But the end result was that when he was in the Marines, he wasn't very Christian at all. And we'll have to leave you in suspense as to how that's going to change for a future installment of Godawful books.

Before we slip below the surface tonight, I want to remind you to vote. Early voting has already started in 21 states and 14 more start next week. And I get that normally our international listeners get frustrated when I speak to the entire audience as though they were American. but given the importance of this one, I feel like they will forgive me. Anyway, that's all the blast maybe we've got for you tonight, we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, be on look out for a brand new episode of our sister show,

The Skeptocrat, debuting at 7am Eastern on Monday, an even newer episode of our sister show's hot friend Godafel movies, debuting a 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sitional citation needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I can't expect this series of words to reach full episodehood. And if I neglect to thank Heath Enright for being my Rock, Eli Bostic for Being My Scissors and Lucindilus,

for being whatever beats both rock and scissors. I also want to thank J.D. Vance for making it easy on us. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's last week's and the weeks before that's best people. Sorry, she gets way behind when I take a vacation. Steve B. Kenny, Page, Santus, Peter, Sid, Jason, Greg, something stupid. Daniel, Marty, Susanna, Marcus, Wiseass Wednesday went deep from Atlanta, Canada, Harold, Gage, Kara, Plam, Courtney, Lisa, Tote, Kate, Eric, Lauren, Malcolm, and Robert, who would have left me breathless, even if I'd only said one of their names.

Together, these 27, salacious, secularists secured our screed against sanctimodious stupidity this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the money it takes to give some to us, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation, which will soon be converted to a per-month donation because Apple is being a dick about it, but it'll be the same amount of money at Patreon.com slash scathing atheists, whereby you're on early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingaithes.com, which Apple hasn't fucked with.

And if you'd like to help but not in a money-given sort of way, 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 and Lily Bosnick handled that for us. Our cartoonist is Angelo Madrid from Madrid tunes, and our audio engineer is Morgan Kirk, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission.

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