The Scathing Atheist - Scathing Atheist 89: A Chaplain a Day Edition

Episode Date: October 30, 2014

On this week's episode we'll offer an alibi for the night that ten commandments monument in Oklahoma got run over, we'll call the jury back for the verdict on science, and atheist chaplain John Figdor will join us to begrudgingly admit that when it comes to atheist Chaplains, nobody beats Charlie.

Warning, we might just teach you some new cuss words this week. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new reality show, Ebolaing for Dollars, where we explore Ebola payola as we give a new billionaire the Ebola virus every week until we have a cure. Ebolaing for Dollars, because being intentionally injected with Ebola by a reality show is almost exactly as likely as contracting it any other way in America. And now, The Scathing Atheist. All stations, all stations, this is Whiskey Lima Bravo of the Ice Coffee Podcast,

broadcasting on Channel 16 to assure you that we did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey men. Whiskey Lima Bravo standing by. It's Must See TV Thursday on WNBC. October 30th. And Sparange does not rhyme with orange. No illusions. I'm Ethan Wright, and from yonder adjacent Podunk, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheist.

On this week's episode, we'll offer our alibi for the night that Ten Commandments monument got smashed. We call the jury back in for the science verdict. And Atheist Chaplain John Figdor will join us to begrudgingly admit that when it comes And Atheist Chaplain John Figdor will join us to begrudgingly admit that when it comes to Atheist Chaplains, nobody beats Charlie. But first, the diatribe. When it comes to the fear of hell, few American kids have it as easy as I have it.

My parents were religious, but as nominally religious as you can possibly be and still be considered religious. We didn't say prayers before bed. We didn't say grace before we ate. We didn't go to church. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to attend church with my friends. My mom and dad were both Christians, and they'd be happy to answer any questions I had about the afterlife or God or whatever, and they'd give me the standard Christian answers, but they made a conscious effort to keep my siblings and me from being brainwashed. Now, obviously, there's a lot of positive to this. Obviously, I thank them for it immensely, but there is a drawback as well. I had no idea what I believed. I was primarily aware of things like hell through jokes at the end of Bugs Bunny cartoons. I knew the devil as the stage-left part of Daffy's Psychomachia. Hell, I was 13 years old before I ever came across the bizarre Catholic tradition of symbolic Jesus cannibalism.

In other words, I knew enough about religion to be primed for the first person who wanted to manipulate me with it. And as near as I can recall, that time came in the summer of 1986. The oxygen-to-aquanet ratio of American air was about 1 to 1. Five million people had just stretched across the country, hand in hand, in the nation's most disappointing circle jerk, and my brother and I were counting the days until the new animated Transformers movie came out. circle jerk, and my brother and I were counting the days until the new animated Transformers movie came out. It's late afternoon, we're biking to the nearest store on an important mission to acquire garbage pail kids and generic soda when two kids several years

older than us waved us down. And these are big kids, they, you know, pimples and pre-stache big, so it would be socially irresponsible not to stop, so we did, and holy shit, was that the right decision? Because new cartoon dolls vomiting out their brains with rubber cement bubble gum be damned, these guys were inviting us to a pizza party. And as if that wasn't enough, there would be video games too. And I'm not talking about like somebody was going to bring their Nintendo. We're talking about full-blown arcade-style in-cabinet video games set to free play.

Video games and pizza, it's like the unlimited cocaine and blowjobs of my youth. But wait, it got even better because there was a bus that would come and pick us up at the end of our street and then drop us off again at the end of the night. We didn't even have to talk mom into driving us anywhere. How my brother and I had managed to spend a collective 21 years on this planet without realizing that such

wondrous events existed was beyond us, but we abandoned our plans and rushed home to secure mom's permission for our evening excursion to prepubescent Shangri-La. And she said no. And we couldn't for the life of us understand why the hell she would object to our happiness. Didn't she realize that we were talking about a combination of pepperoni and ghosts and goblins?

Did she simply revel in our misery? When we demanded an explanation, she told us that it was some religious thing and she didn't even know what church it was for, so no. And we explained that she was clearly mistaken. We're talking about pizza and video games. Religion is boring. Sure, it was going to happen in a church, but that didn't mean it was going to be religious. After all, the two kids that invited us, they didn't say anything about God or Jesus or anything. We talked about Transformers and Arkanoid and shit, but she held fast, and we found ourselves in the worst of both worlds. No awesome pizza party and it was too late to go get garbage pail kits.

So we dejectedly trekked back to the spot where we met the two party goers to shamefacedly admit that we had to miss out on all the awesome because our mother was a vile bitch who hated joy. And I guess at this point, when they saw that the carrot wasn't going to work, they brought out the stick. You see, it wasn't just that we were missing out on free video games and shit. We were also missing out on eternal bliss. Our choices, as they explained them, were to go to this pizza party or burn in hell for eternity. Well, once the steaks were laid bare, of course, we went back to Mom and gave her another try.

After all, she clearly didn't realize the vital importance of this pizza. She might have hated our happiness enough to shit all over our fun, but she wouldn't condemn us to hell, would she? And as it turned out, she would. So I went to bed that night and every night for the next couple of weeks terrified that I would burn in hell for not going to that pizza party.

I tried my damnedest to dissuade the fear logically. I tried to convince myself that hell was like Santa or the Easter Bunny. You know, it's just something that grown-ups told kids so that they would behave. So I asked my parents, like, come on, tell me really honestly, is there really a hell? And they said yes. And then I asked my aunt and my teacher and my neighbors and my bus driver and my friend's moms, and all of them confirmed that yes, hell was a real place, and yes, people burned there for eternity when they pissed God off. Now, they all assured me that I wasn't going to go to hell, of course.

It was reserved for people like Hitler. But even then, I was bright enough to know that, you know, probably Hitler's mom told him he wasn't going to go to hell when he was 10 years old as well. Now, eventually, the animated Transformers movie came out, and I was emotionally invested enough in the surprising demise of Optimus Prime to forget all about my hell fears. And while they would recur periodically through my childhood, they lessened with every cycle, and within a few years I'd come to grips with

the fact that my parents, bus driver, and teachers were perfectly capable of being wrong all at the same time. But even now, I remember that fear. And all I ever did was dip my toes in the water. I can't imagine what it's like to suffer through that for an entire childhood, let alone into your adulthood. I hear from listeners often that gave up on religion years ago and still occasionally wake in a sweat with the fear that Satan's warming up that barbed anal sibian for them somewhere.

They know it's not true, but it's just so deeply ingrained, and fear works on a different level than logic. Again, my parents weren't zealots. Hell, they weren't even churchgoers. But even the millimeter and a half of faith they had was enough to leave a small but permanent scar in my memory. They inadvertently participated in the psychological torture of their own child through nothing but the inertia of tradition. And even now, they wouldn't recognize the problem with what they did.

They would agree that it's downright evil to tell a kid that there really are monsters, but somehow it becomes okay if you tell them that the monsters are really far under the bed. They're talking about you, Jesus. We interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight is damn Yankee Heath Enright. Heath, are you ready to yank? That's backwards. That makes me a yanker.

The Yankee is the lazy handjob getter, and yes, I am absolutely ready. Oh, damn it. I should have thought this one through. Sorry about your elbow. Hold on, hold on. Let me get some hand lotion. We'll be here. In our lead story tonight from the I'm not a gynecologist, but I'll look into it file,

University of Miami PhD student David Schiffman recently published an excellent article on Slate discussing the egregious use of the phrase, I'm not a scientist, but. As in, I'm not a scientist, but, as in, I'm not a scientist, but I'm still going to express my strongly held beliefs on the subject based on absolutely nothing, but far too infrequently, as in, I'm not a scientist, but I've consulted with people that are highly studied on the subject, and here's what they have to say based on relevant data. No, no, you never get that.

You always get, you know, I'm not a scientist, so how can I possibly trust a conclusion of more than 97% of the experts in a particular field, along with the overwhelming consensus in all other relevant fields of study? So I propose that we go back to that four humors thing. Conspiracy. I'll tell you what, guys. I'm not a prostitute, but fuck you. And much like a prostitute, politicians come at this phrase from both sides. In one case, it allows the lazy,

unstudied politician to soften the impact of stating a blatant falsehood and later being corrected. Think Mitch McConnell, Rick Scott, and Marco Rubio on climate change. In the other, perhaps even more offensive case, it allows a perfectly intelligent politician to feign ignorance about an inconvenient truth in order to appease the

fear of academia portion of their audience. Rachel Ford makes this point in a response article on Friendly Atheist and gives the example of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who used this sort of cop-out as an attempt to avoid expressing his real opinion on evolution. Why would he have to be evasive on that subject? I mean, I can't imagine any group that should be more pro-mutation than Bobby Jindal's constituency. more pro-mutation than Bobby Jindal's constituency. Why have you noted my sister cousin's extra nipple just mean that we's more evoluted than y'all?

And in case anyone's wondering, Jindal's real opinion on evolution was duped out of him by Huffington Post reporter Howard Feynman at a publicity breakfast held by the Christian Monitor last month. After the GOP governor accidentally volunteered that he was a biology major, Feynman quickly jumped on this and asked him direct questions about his thoughts on evolution. Finally, recognizing the clever ruse, Jindal immediately started backpedaling,

claiming he wasn't an evolutionary biologist. He was one of those other ones, I guess. What the fuck are they talking about? Is he a Lamarckian biologist? A Saltagian? A fucking Hobbit biologist? What else is there?

That's like a historian declining to answer who the first American president was on the grounds that they weren't a chronology historian. Not an observational

historian. Now I'd like to think this point was already completely obvious with regards to science but clearly it's not. We had to have this article, which makes it even harder to explain to people that it's also at least somewhat relevant in the field of politics, yet never seems to be mentioned

in that field. I mean, when a group of people discuss astrophysics, and there's one person in the room with a PhD in astrophysics, and nobody else ever studied the subject, the PhD is regarded as the expert, at least in most circles. Usually, yeah. But when a bunch of people start arguing about politics, a PhD in political science teaching con law at Harvard could thoroughly explain the gross ignorance behind somebody's stance,

and everyone in the room with that stance would still think their opinion is perfectly valid. Right. Absurd. Absolutely. And for the record, remind us what you majored in. Being right. That was the technical termored in. Being right. I got you.

And in Marr or Less news tonight, students at UC Berkeley have taken a bold stance against honest discourse this week by circulating a petition to block the scheduled commencement address by comedian Bill Maher. Demonizing Maher as a, quote, blatant bigot and racist, end quote. The petition explains that if any place should be insulated against the free exchange of controversial ideas, it should be institutions of higher learning. Yeah, if you let college students in places like Berkeley, California, start hearing radicals like Bill Maher, they'll end up turning liberal and smoking pot. You better just nip that in the bud before anything goes wrong. Here's a quick example of Maher's bigoted hate speech. Quote,

Those who consider themselves only moderately religious need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort religion brings you actually comes at a terrible price. End quote. Now, this is not, by the way, me cherry-picking the Maher quote that best exemplified how reasoned and rational his criticisms of religion often are. That quote was actually listed on the goddamn petition as an example of Marr's hate speech, right along the egregious insinuation that, quote, at least half of the Ten Commandments are stupid, end quote. Now, these completely benign statements that all but lend themselves to geometric proof are being categorized alongside God hates fags and Heil Hitler. It's unbelievable.

Well, first of all, none of that was even remotely close to hate speech. No. But even if it was, it's a. Well, first of all, none of that was even remotely close to hate speech those things yet. But even if it was, it's a fucking roast, idiots. You can't assume that every crude thing a comedian says for the audience at a comedy club means anything when it comes to his actual nuanced opinions on

politics or the way he would express them in a commencement speech at a university. Right, I don't really eat babies. But again, all he did was criticize what he believes to be bad ideas. He didn't even criticize the people with those bad ideas. Right, exactly. He's pretty nice about it. And for the record, your wrong isn't hate speech.

Obviously. You know, despite all the high-minded rhetoric in the petition about protecting a historically marginalized group, nothing further marginalizes groups than conflating the honest criticism of shitty ideas with bigotry. Right, so the borderline illiterate defamation of bill maher definitely stupid but what's even worse is crying hate speech wolf like yeah that's awful exactly and i think it's worth noting by the way that i disagree with bill maher at least half the times that he opens his mouth and makes sounds come out you know like his public statements about vaccination and medicine are uninformed and dangerous. His movie Religious,

I liked parts of it, but it also contained plenty of stupid, undefensible statements that hurt our movement as a whole. And if they'd started a petition to block him from this commencement address over those statements, they'd still be cowardly assholes. The proper way to deal with ideas that you disagree with is to counter them, not censor them. Exactly.

Go ahead and hire a really famous Muslim comedian, too. Get the guy from Last Comic Afghanistan. All the good jokes about atheists. That's great. Whatever you want. But don't ban Bill Maher, too. Right.

Ridiculous. And in that anthropomorphic Bible, better have 50 shekels on him news. A recent article on cnsnews.com claims the FFRF will be handing out atheist pamphlets in Orange County, Florida high schools, claims the FFRF will be handing out atheist pamphlets in Orange County, Florida high schools featuring an illustration on the cover of a cartoon Bible reaching its hands under a woman's dress. And clearly thumbing her asshole. Like, in a bad way, too. Like, not in a consensual way at all. It really does look like that. And that would be an accurate, albeit disturbing, demonstration of the enormous misogyny problem built into the scripture of not just Christianity, but nearly

every single major religion in history. But certainly still questionable as the cover art for literature being distributed in public high schools. And that's why the FFRF has not handed them out despite legal actions that won them approval to do so. Nor did they make a press release claiming they would pass out that

particular pamphlet in the future, despite the normally airtight fact-checking over at cnsnews.com. This whole fucking article was so off-base and full of shit. They even had a hyperlink that leads to an FFRF page that had nothing at all to do with the cartoon Bible finger-raping the chick. It was just about handing shit out at schools. Exactly. Now, here's what actually happened.

You may remember this story from when we covered it last year, when it happened, about the distribution of Bibles and Christian literature in these schools by World Changers of Florida, Inc. The districts got around complaints at the time by claiming all religious groups were welcome to participate in the Propaganda Day thing they were doing. This, of course,

is a stupid solution, and the FFRF was trying to point that out by submitting materials that compete with the absurdity of the solution and the ffrf was trying to point that out by submitting materials that compete with the absurdity of the bible and the tables full of satanist and cult literature they're also forced to allow because of this stupid solution but rather than risk having a school without jesus brochures the district still insists on the pan-religious clusterfuck instead right right with that so in a way the whole point of this thing is to illustrate that the school is so hell-bent on passing out bibles that they'll even do so if it

means that they have to permit cartoon Bible rape porn to be handed out alongside it. Exactly. Now, let me make this clear with an analogy in case this wasn't already clear. Basically, the FFRF walked up to a really weird scene in the forest and said, you know, hey, you guys

probably shouldn't keep shoving that Bible up that puppy's ass. And the puppy rapers are like, no, no, no, it's cool. You can shove whatever book you want up there. You got next. You got next. And the FFRFs are like, no, no, no. We'd rather nobody's got next, if that's okay.

And the puppy rapers are like, no, no, seriously, it's your turn. You got to go ahead. FFRF said, okay, but, you know, we don't have a book. We're atheists, so we're just going to fuck the puppy. They said, yeah, no problem. That's what the Satanists did, too, even though they did have a book. So, you know, whatever. Do what you want.

FFRF said, you know, the puppy in this analogy is children's brains, right? And still no response from the puppy rapers on that last one. So you guys get it from my really clear analogy? Dude, that is my new second favorite puppy ass rape analogy. Congratulations. Now we're going to get a bunch of feedback. You're going to have to tell the story of the first one. Yeah, well, we'll have a top ten for next week.

And from the Murdoch in the first degree file, Fox News host and bitchy girl from a low-budget ski movie, Ainsley Earnhardt, dug up a couple of Texas rednecks that made her look intelligent in comparison last week while discussing the FFRF's effort to get a couple of blatantly unconstitutional plaques removed from two public elementary schools. Among the nuggets of wisdom elucidated in the deliberation was this inane morsel from Earnhardt, quote,

These atheists in other cities need to understand the culture in the South and how church is a very integral part of our childhood and growing up. End quote. Yeah, great. Thanks for that new information. Fascinating stuff. It's pretty much irrelevant, though, unless the FFRF was trying to remove plaques from a church. Yes, exactly.

Schools are also an integral part of childhood and growing up. There's just a different integral part. Anyway, describing the FFRF's effort as part of an ongoing war on Christianity, Earnhardt invoked the they-ain't-even-from-round-here defense when she pointed out that Madison, Wisconsin is really far from Texas. She then went on to explain that atheists in Texas don't have rights because they're vastly outnumbered by the Christians. And then one of her guests elaborated, well well at least thought she was elaborating on this

point by explaining that quote i am bothered by the fact that a group can come into our community which is a strong majority christian community and say what we can and cannot have end quote like slavery and nuclear weapons like with the many number of things that can't have a thing was about on the now on the rare occasion that Earnhardt in this interview actually allowed her guests to do more than offer yes-no responses to her summaries of their opinions, the totally impartial pastor that she was interviewing dropped this pearl of wisdom, quote, We want to see Christ in our schools, end quote. Of course, this followed the actual spoken sentence with implied period and everything, quote, We don't want to take things away from.

End quote. Like, that was his whole... Right, so it's entirely possible he wasn't expressing an opinion so much as just listing the words that he knew. And don't counts as two. Yeah, it has one of them catastrophes in it. It's a double word. And in Repent House Hustler news, porno mag veteran and adult film star Teresa Carey has been making headlines recently

after an alleged religious epiphany caused her to quit porn and pursue a career preaching the word of Jesus at churches and schools instead. She was fortunate enough to transition conveniently from porn star to Christian preacher. Right around the age many women transition from porn star to low-priced escort. So that was good timing for her. Christian preacher, low-priced escort, tomato, tomato. Splitting hairs. So her new live act,

which involves far fewer ping-pong balls than her old one, goes by the title Porn Again Christian, which is actually pretty clever. And if we had an extra 30 seconds this week, we'd make a bunch of awful suggestions for alternative titles, but let's just pretend we're skipping it because we're more mature than that. Right, right.

That was probably a better strategy pre- puppy rape analogy, but you know, whatever. In case they're just joining us. And reversing the arrow on that last story, we've got one from the priest with the least file. Pope Francis Boomba announced last week that he's sending a special got one from the priest with the least file. Pope Francis Boomba announced last week that he's sending a special envoy

to put the Diocese of Albania Imperia on double secret probation. The Percy Harvin of Italian Diocese, their exploits include but are not limited to priests sexually harassing parishioners, stealing communion money, organizing and operating a child prostitution

ring, and then there's the benign shit like living with gay partners, getting tattoos, and posting nude photos on gay dating sites, along with, of course, fucking children. And the beginning of that stuff, all the not benign, that's straight from their online dating profile. Straight from it. Exactly. Now, while details of the investigation aren't being released at this time, rumors that release of the 2015 Albania Imperia Friarsars of desire calendar will be delayed are likely true unfortunately and in vehicular command slaughter news the extremely controversial 10 commandments display on oklahoma

city's capitol building lawn was recently plowed over by a motorist who then fled the scene not it given the historical pattern of persecution against Christians in the Bible Belt, and the way the world is, of course, out to get them in general, many Oklahomans assume this was just another act of sinister secularism. And as usual, many Oklahomans were incorrect. After a very brief investigation that ruled out the village atheist, police eventually brought in 29-year-old Christian-turned-Satanist Michael Tate Reed Jr. of Rowland, Oklahoma. Yeah, and I'm sure our Satanist listeners would want us to point out that he's not a

real Scotsman. No, of course not. That would be impossible. Now, according to the suspect, who is in custody for much-needed mental evaluation, Satan made him do it. Turns out the bright red pitchfork-wielding goat man that Justice Scalia was talking about actually is a real person, just like the judge claims. And the desolate one routinely demands acts of anti-Christian vandalism from followers in flyover states, because it's a huge part of his evil campaign.

Now, despite the highest court in the land being fully aware of this master criminal at large, no attempts have been made to apprehend the fugitive demon mastermind behind this monument incident, as well as perhaps all the evil. He's also suspected of all the evil. He's already been heard by the highest court. And I'm sure beyond that, Scalia's probably got the whole Satan Rico chart scrawled in human feces on the walls of his subterranean lair if somebody would just follow him down that torch-lit winding stair.

And if that's not tempting enough, by the way, there's also some good Amontillado in it for you if you go. So, as much as this does make Oklahoma slightly more constitutional for the moment, I'm still obviously against being stupid about it like this. There are classier ways of doing things.

If you want to desecrate stupid Christian monuments, you do it symbolically without breaking shit. You know, you pretend to dick-slap Jesus in the face and post the pictures online. That's class. That's class. Even a 14-year-old kid knows that. Exactly, exactly. I can't imagine anybody getting pissed off over something like that. And in Brazilian Potter and the Order of the Penis news tonight,

Kentucky youth pastor and freakish mutant whose head is wider than it is tall, Rex Allen Murphy, is facing charges of sexually abusing a child after allegedly molesting a 16-year-old Sunday school student a number of times over a six-month period. No, not this part. But this part is kind of funny. The victim said that he would have sought help sooner, but he feared Murphy would use his warlock

powers against him if he did. Which warlock powers seemed like they would be noticeably worse than being raped by a pedophile? It already sounds like a warlock. Some clergy ass raped him. That's a warlock. That's a terrible one.

So apparently he told his victim that he came from a family of warlocks, and since that's no less nonsensical than the stuff that youth pastors are supposed to say, the kid thought it was worthy of concern. How's he going to know? All right. At this point, I think it's safe to say that, well are supposed to say, the kid thought it was worthy of concern. How's he going to know? All right. At this point, I think it's safe to say that, well, if nothing else, teaching your child atheism instead of religion, at least it makes them less likely to get butt raped. Right.

At the very least. If you've got nothing else. As long as we're wagering with Pascal over here, let's not forget to consider the price of ass insurance. It's a relevant thing. Actually, you know what? Now that you mention it, I need to double-check my ass policy. So while I'm doing that, we're going to hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucinda.

A man wrote the Bible. A whore is what she was. If it's a legitimate race. If it's a slut, right? Cooking can be fun. Hey! I'm proud of a man. This Week in Misogyny.

As the election draws closer, I feel like I need to extend a congratulations to Republicans this year for their concerted effort to appeal to female voters by actively avoiding all topics that relate to female voters. I know it's been hard for them not to publicly select shame women on birth control or to try to differentiate between the various shades of rape, but damn it, they've more or less managed it. Of course, that's only part of the Republicans' two-pronged strategy to woo women voters, because if they can't talk the majority of women into voting for them, and they can't, they might at least be able to talk them into a relaxing night at home. Media Matters posted an excellent article this week detailing a number of appalling statements

by conservative media personalities in the run-up to the midterms, including Tucker Carlson's wondering aloud who would want their country run by people whose favorite TV show is Say Yes to the Dress, as though this is somehow worse than a country run by Duck Dynasty fans and the shit dribblers that watch Tucker Carlson's show. Fox 5 co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Kimberly Guilfoyle explained that young women lack the wisdom to vote correctly, even going so far as to suggest that they shouldn't be allowed to serve on juries and should instead, quote, go back to Tinder or Match.com, end quote. But I can tell you one of the reasons you should vote, and hopefully it'll be the only one you need.

It's called HB2625, and it comes to us from the mecca of unapologetically bigoted state legislation, Arizona. So, from the state that brought you stopping people for looking Mexican and empowering businesses to discriminate against the queers comes firing women for taking slut medicine. If passed, this bill would allow employers to force any female employee that receives birth control through her insurance to prove that she isn't taking them

just for the zygote-free fucking. And because Arizona is an at-will employment state, as an extension of this law, the employer could then fire the little whore. The bill's sponsor, Debbie Lesko, explained that this was all about freedom and apple pie because, quote, we live in America, end quote, at which time she probably farted the national anthem while jacking off a bald eagle. And we'll close tonight with a recent announcement from the Seventh-Day Adventists that they'll soon be publishing their first women's study Bible. Not sure what the difference between a man's Bible and a woman's Bible is,

besides the pH balance, but I'm betting that they just redact all the sexist bits and put the remaining 11 pages together with a frilly cover or something. And with that, I'll wrap it up for the night, but don't worry, I'm sure there'll be more vaginas in need of defending next week. Back to you, Noah. Thank you, Lucinda. And in asbestos I can tell news tonight, the school board in Monroe, Ohio,

has raised some secular eyebrows this week over a proposal to sell a $1.2 million city-owned property to a local church for the bargain basement price of a dollar. The local board of education, one-fifth of which belongs to the church that would be buying it, explains that renovating and asbestos removal of the defunct high school would cost more than a million dollars, thus reducing the value of the land to approximately nothing, which would make the sale sensible if I didn't go on record publicly right now offering a generous $2 for the 29-acre property in question.

$3! Do we hear $3.06? And in these fractions is blasphemous. Wheezes and integer family news. $3! history textbooks include world events that didn't directly involve Jesus. Weird. In particular, they both violently objected to the suggestion that something called iSlam exists outside of Denny's. And WWE. Right. You see when he grabbed and fell by his eye?

It was awesome. Now the first blow-up was Anthony Janino of Revere, Massachusetts, who I'm fairly certain was the meth-addicted Christian Bale stunt double in The Fighter. Here's what he had to say after he saw the word Allah on his kid's homework. Quote, no religion should be taught at school. And right there, I'm reading this, I'm thinking, you're doing great, meth-head.

Keep it up. Keep it up. But then he continued. Unfortunately. And he said, in their paper, it says Allah is their only God. That's insulting to me as a Christian who believes in just Jesus only. That sentence structure is offensive to me who believes in just syntax only.

Okay, so we've been over this guys. There's a difference between teaching kids about the Holocaust and then teaching them how to perform a Holocaust. The existence of religion can be acknowledged in schools. That part is okay. Even the atheists agree with that. Unbelievable. Now,

the second incident, which I originally assumed had to be just a follow-up on the first one when I saw another dad goes ballistic over history lesson headline. It was not, though, separate incidents. It was former U.S. Marine Kevin Wood of Charles County, Maryland in the second one. This guy took it even further and

threatened to show up at the school to disrupt any class that continues to mention Islam, prompting the school to issue a no-trespass order against the lunatic, which was probably a good idea considering Wood's personal account of his response to the school's vice principal when she had offered his child an alternate curriculum.

Quote, I told her straight up, you could take that Muslim-loving piece of paper and shove it up your white expl expletive deleted, end quote. That's what he said to her after she offered an alternate curriculum. That sounds bad, but in his defense, he was a Marine during the George Bush Jr. presidency, and back then, take that Muslim-loving paper and shove it up your expletive deleted. That was our officially stated foreign policy for a number of years.

Wasn't that the name of the mission? Yeah. Operation shove that Muslim name of the mission? Yeah. Operation shove that Muslim-loving paper up here. Explodive. Well, they didn't. Freedom. Deleting. Explodive.

Jihad. It was ass, by the way, in case you were curious. That's what he was going to shove the Muslim-loving paper up was her ass. So, bottom line, no pun intended. These people can't discern the difference between Middle Eastern history class and jihad boot camp, and if you're that stupid, you honestly don't get to have strong, loud opinions. You have to pretty much shut up. But you know what? Stupid or not, there is no situation where you're justifiably offended enough to disrupt a middle school class to shove assignments in the teacher's ass, even if you're really, really smart. Even if she asks. Well, now that would change it, at least a i mean it depends you know this and in spears and queers news baptist gop texas congressman louis gomert appeared on

the christian radio talk show point of view last week expressing his nuanced opinion on the now repealed don't ask don't tell policy specifically the tactical disadvantages to having gay people telling without being asked in the military and wait And before Heath gets to the big reveal here, I want you to just close your eyes if you're not driving and think about the dumbest thing that Gohmert could possibly have said was the tactical decision. And there's no way, there's no way you're going to get as dumb or dumber. Okay. Not a shot.

The floor is yours. Sorry. So calling upon his self-proclaimed completely accurate knowledge of history, Gohmert suggested that gay soldiers getting happy endings all day might have worked in ancient Greece, but, you know, for modern warfare, that would be absurd. That's absurd. Quote. Well, you know, they did have people come along who they loved that was the same sex

and would give them massages before they went into battle, but you know what? It's a different kind of fighting. It's a different kind of fighting. It's a different kind of war. And if you're sitting around getting massages all day, ready to go into the big plan battle, then you're just not going to last very long. End quote.

Now, before you go casting asparagus on his claims here, I think it's important to point out that gay people love parades. So back in the day, you used to fight in parade formation. They were better at it. Plus, in a phalanx, you can basically use your shield hand to stroke off the guy next to you, and that's good for morale, unless you get the guy all the way on the

left. So all of this shit makes sense if you have a perfect understanding of history as Gohmert has. You have to really coordinate that type of thing in unison or fuck it up. It would be a fun piece of Broadway music. Everybody likes to practice. Now, just to tie up all the loose ends, again, no pun intended,

he added, quote, as people have said, Louis, you've got to understand you don't even know your history. Oh, yes, I do. I know exactly. It's not a good idea. This is a member of the United States Congress. It's not even funny. It's not a good idea. This is a member of the United States Congress. It's not even funny.

It's just sad. But just in case Gohmert piles right, we come up against the homosexual ISIS phalanx sometime soon. Let's be prepared, I guess. Obviously, we'll need 30 seconds on the clock while we brainstorm ideas for the military massage parlor. Go. Okay, good. I knew we were saving it for something good. All right, maybe a quick trip to the PXXX, where they've been knocking the boots on the ground since 1776.

About Happy Ender's Game, working the joystick from behind the front. Maybe counterterrorism. We give better head than ISIS. There you go. Get better head. Paul smoking the Joint Chief's Staff. Full release with honorable

discharge. You're averaging like four puns a thing. Oh, completely unrelated, but I wonder if Marines say, when they come. Anyway, how about the Bunkers? I say, Jarhead! How about Bunkers Spunkers? Where we blow dicks dirty till 0630, and then you gotta

get up and march and shit. All right. How about you got to eat somewhere? Welcome to the hot mess grub and tug. Where sloppy GI Joes beat the meatloaf sandwich. And blowing is half the battle. How about, I got one for our Australian Jarhead listeners. Silver bullet chasers going down under.

I'm assured by Australians that that's funny. I don't get it. I'm sure it is, though. You were assured. Yeah, exactly. About rules of engorgement. Don't ask, don't swell. Policy.

Fox hole fuck holes. The best wenches in the trenches. Pulling out of my whack the squirt locker exit strategy. All right, now we've gotten complaints that there's not enough Alfred Lord Tennyson in our dick jokes of late, so how about discharge of the white brigade? All right, excellent. So erudite dick joke for the week, check. Good work. All right, my turn again.

How about, well, let's not leave out the lesbians. We're forgetting the lesbians. So what about the gash mash for Buffalo Soldiers, where your private pile gets a full metal jackal? A lot to that. It's a good thing that you said that. Otherwise, the lesbians would be offended that we'd left them out. All right, so now if we got all this fucking going on, we're going to need to ramp up our venereal response squad as well. So we're going to need some kind of entourage of massage triage.

All right, what about the floating VDVA hospital? The wanker shanker kanker spanker. From the balls of Montezuma to the sores of syphilis. Oh, nice. Interesting side note here that you just missed DVDA with that one. It's always a painful and embarrassing moment when you just miss. I just need a look on your face. You didn't realize it was the D and the V.

It was three and one, unfortunately. How about a visit from Colonel Internal to check your prostate of readiness? How about a visit from Colonel Internal to check your prostate of readiness? About jagging off naval semen. All hands on deck. Sounds like the deleted volleyball scenes from Top Gun. You spunk my battleship. Jagging off naval semen.

The best way to get the lint out. Belly button. I guess while that sperm joke simmers, we'll close the headlines tonight. Heath, thanks as always. Boom shakalaka. And when we come back, we'll lay off the sperm jokes for at least a little while. I'll be ready in about ten minutes. I'll be ready in about ten minutes. Really excited to welcome our next guest to the show.

John Figdor is a humanist speaker and author. He serves as the humanist chaplain at Stanford University, holds a B.A. in philosophy from Vassar, and a master's in humanism and interfaith dialogue from Harvard Divinity School. Wow, that's a hell of a pedigree. And his new book, Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart, offers a fresh take on a decalogue that I think we can all agree has far outlived its usefulness. John, welcome to The Scathing Atheist. Thanks for having me on. Now, obviously, I want to talk about the book and your job for that matter,

but let's start off by defining our terms. In your book, you define a humanist as, quote, one who thinks they can lead a life of meaning and value without a belief in God or the supernatural, end quote. So by that definition, can a person be an atheist and not be a humanist? Sure. Well, so here I think the definitions are a little bit more precise than that. So an atheist is just someone who says, I don't have a belief in God or gods. That's it. It doesn't tell you anything about what their positive beliefs are. It doesn't tell you what they think about charitable works. It doesn't tell you what they think about human rights. All it tells you is that they don't believe in God. So it's a pretty limited label. That said, most human, sorry, most atheists actually end up being humanists at the end of the day. They end up being people who also believe in the idea that humans can create

value in the world and that we can live lives of meaning and value as a result. Okay. And I guess as near as anyone, you are a professional humanist. You serve as the humanist chaplain at Stanford. So tell us, what exactly does a humanist chaplain do? Great question. So humanist chaplains are a fairly new phenomena. There's six of us right now. There's one at Harvard, one at Stanford, one at Yale, one at Columbia, one at Tufts University, one at Rutgers, and one at American University. And as I go through that list, I'm realizing that's actually seven humanist chaplains. I wasn't going to argue with your math. We're growing every year.

Well, math is not my strongest suit. Anyway, humanist chaplains are similar in some ways to a religious chaplain, but in other ways very different. So we obviously don't believe in God. We're not people – we're not like secret religious people who just found this sweet atheism gig. The reality is that we basically serve as a mixture of counselor and kind of offering guidance to students, offering emotional support when they're in times of stress, and then community organizer, where we organize large-scale public events, educate people about humanism, and bring those issues onto the campus at the university. Awesome. Awesome. Well, excellent. Glad to know that someone's doing that work. Now, the term humanist chaplain seems a little odd to me. Seems like a bit of a contradiction

in terms. So why do we use that term? Fantastic question. This is one of these things that is always challenging for atheists. And our answer is this. So in order to operate from within the office of religious life, like we do at Stanford and we did it and I did at Harvard, we have to call ourselves chaplains to have parity with the other religious life professionals. If we invented some new term, it would take quite a while for that term to gain acceptance as the same thing as a chaplain or a rabbi or a minister. And so we find that just by using chaplain is a fairly effective tool.

And also there are already non-religious chaplains. There are Unitarian Universalist chaplains. There are secular Buddhist chaplains. There are Unitarian Universalist chaplains, there are secular Buddhist chaplains, and there are just Christian atheist chaplains, which you'll find. They're usually not outwardly so, but you'll find a fair number of these college chaplains who are actually closeted atheists. Well, I think that's awesome. I think there's probably some pushback to the use of the term, but I think it's great. I think that means that we are sort of redefining that term chaplain and taking some of the religious connotation out of it. That's great. So let's move on to your new book. It's called Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart. And before we start talking about the specifics, tell me what prompted you to write the book? So over the years, I've had

a number of students approach me and say, look, I've given up my belief in God. I just lost my faith. I started thinking about things from a non-religious perspective, but now I'm trying to figure out what's worth believing in. I'm trying to reconfigure my moral and ethical system and my understanding of reality. And these students are not asking for just the answer. They're not like, John, just tell me what to believe and I'll believe it. What they're looking for are thoughtful discussions of these things. And in the past,

I could refer them to a chapter here, a blog post here, a video here, but there wasn't really a cohesive attempt to answer the question, what's worth believing in after you give up your belief in God? So that's why we tackled the question. Okay. So would you say the book is more for people who are formerly religious or would it still have value to a person like myself that was raised without religion? So it's actually for pretty much anyone. It's targeted people who are giving up their faith, or who have recently given up their faith, but it's also applicable even to religious people. I mean, I may not agree with some of their starting assumptions, like perhaps that God exists, but that doesn't mean that they can't be thoughtful about their other beliefs in life.

And sorry, that's not to say that their belief in God isn't thoughtful. I just think they should give it a little bit more analytical approach. Okay, so now the primary theme of the book is basically a rewrite of the Ten Commandments, but, I mean, we already have Ten Commandments. What's wrong with those ones? Can't we just, we secularist people just use those? So calling it a rewrite is an interesting way to look at it. In our view, it's not our answer of our ten. That's the most important thing. It's the process of writing down your core beliefs, thinking about them and asking yourself, are they consistent? Do they make sense? Do they make sense to other people? It's that process of writing it that we go through in the book that is really of the most important.

But I think the other difference is if we look at the original Ten Commandments, first of all, they're written before the invention of, before the discovery of evolution, before the invention of modern computing, before an understanding of genetics, before even an understanding of how electricity worked and basic things around us. And so the answers that it comes up with are extremely outdated and, you know, very difficult to relate to the modern world. If you look at the list, a staggering number of them have nothing to do with humans or human morality at all. They're about how to satiate God. And in my

view, that seems like a wasted opportunity. If I'm just coming up with a list of 10 things that you have to obey, I don't know, I would put don't rape on my list. I don't know, don't genocide. But apparently God took a different approach, and we're trying to help out with a re-edit. Excellent. Well, you say you made mention in the introduction to the book of George Carlin, who I think has the best Ten Commandments rewrite of all time, reduces it down to the one. And that's what I really, I think I really liked about your approach, is that it is a bottom-up approach. It's not what people shout and shout not do.

It's more about the process of finding, you know, what's moral. And one of the things that you stress as well is that these are any, as you call them, non-commandments that you come up with are not static. They will change over time, and they have to be allowed to change over time. Exactly. Our beliefs do evolve, and they evolve as we gain more evidence. So imagine a time before we understood the germ theory of disease, and people are getting sick and no one knows why it's happening. We're going to do all sorts of silly and stupid things as a result of that. But the reasoning isn't because those people were nasty and mean and awful.

It's because they were ignorant. They didn't understand how it worked. So it's clear that over time, our beliefs evolve as we learn more and we get more evidence. But a lot of people are really nervous when they hear that, especially religious people, but even atheists as well, because people like to believe that morality is static, that there are absolutes. You know, X is always going to be immoral. We don't have to go back and re-explore that. So how do you come to grips with that idea of, you know, that fear that people have of a subjective morality? So that's interesting.

We actually believe that morality is subjective, and we think this fear is misplaced. So if we think about it, there's two kind of broad views of understanding morality. One has it that this is like the Kantian objective morality view. This has it that there are these things called moral facts that just exist in the world and they're true and are discoverable by reason. But they're true regardless of whether they're human beings or not. So part of this view has it that before human beings evolved, or any beings evolved that were capable of being murdered, murder was wrong. And thousands of years after, you know, imagine if the Earth got hit by a meteor or something like that,

and every human being died, they'd be committed to the idea that identity theft is still wrong even after there are no organisms in the universe that could possibly be identity thieved. And so that just doesn't make sense to me. Our view, on the other hand, is that morality is subjective. It's based on the preferences and views of individuals. And so one of the examples that we use to illustrate this is this famous story by Jean-Paul Sartre about a young man choosing between going off to fight in the resistance against the Nazis or to stay home and take care of his ailing mother. Now, our view is that, look, there's not a right and a wrong answer. It's not that

it's right to be the soldier and it's wrong to be the caretaker or vice versa. Our view has it that depending on that person's beliefs, preferences, experiences, talents, these things will inform their choice. And so if a young man is brought up to value caring for other people, if he's brought up to value learning and is taught to get an education and learn how to help people with medicine, he's probably going to be inclined to care for his ailing mother. And that's a great thing. for people who can't defend themselves, then maybe he's going to be inclined to be a soldier who's going to fight in the resistance. And it doesn't seem to me like that's a worse choice in any way than being a caretaker. So our view has it that morality is different in different places because people are different in different places and people have different preferences and values. And what morality is, is ultimately the balancing of people's happiness and their preferences.

Excellent. Well, that certainly gives us quite a bit to think about there. Now, can you give us... Can I just add something real quick? I think what people fear a lot is this idea of relativism, is the idea that as soon as we say that there is no absolute standard of morality, that that means that we can't say to a child molester, don't be a child molester, or to an arsonist, don't be an arsonist. And I just think this is silly. There's no reason to think that if there's no absolute right answer that,

oh, we just throw up our hands and all answers are equally good. It seems more reasonable to me to say that, look, even if there's no one right answer, we can agree that some things are worse than other things, right? Right. Sam Harris talks about this in The Moral Landscape where he talks about the metaphor of health. Like we don't have the perfect definition of health, but we do know that it involves not vomiting all the time, like he says in his book. all the time, like he says in his book. And so, just because there's not an absolute standard doesn't mean that we can't have a coherent argument about things and differentiate right from wrong.

Well, excellent. Once again, the name of the book is Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart. It's currently available as both an e-book and one of those old-school things with pages and stuff. You can find a link to buy your copy at scathingatheist.com. John, thanks again for joining me, and thank you for all the work that you're doing to move the conversation forward. Can I just add one more thing, Noah, before we end?

Oh, please do. Which is, Lex and I are really excited. Lex is my co-author on this project. We're excited to offer this thing called the Rethink Prize. It's a $10,000 prize to get people to rethink their beliefs. The way it works is people can log on to our website at atheistmindhumanistheart.com Thank you. including people like Adam Savage from the Mythbusters, the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Hemant Mehta, the friendly atheist. So we're encouraging all of your listeners to go out there and visit our website

and submit their beliefs after October 30th when our book launches. And we hope that they'll take part in the contest and maybe win some money for themselves for thinking about their beliefs in a thoughtful way. Excellent. That's a very interesting project. And of course, I'll have a link to that site and more information on that on the show notes as well. Thanks again, man.

Thank you so much for having me, Noah. Have a wonderful day. Yeah, you too. It's time for the part of the show that comes next, listener feedback. This is the part of the show that comes after this sentence. Our first email comes from Sean, who thinks we were a little bit too hard on C.J. Worleman in last week's episode. Now, a little background for those who don't know. C.J. Worleman is an atheist writer that's written articles for Slate and Alternet. And last week he admitted to plagiarism in six of his articles.

The same six that were caught with plagiarism, coincidentally. Both Lucinda and I made a couple of jokes at his expense, prompting Sean to write, quote, way to kick a guy while he's down. I'm disappointed that you were so willing to jump on the bandwagon and ignore all the contributions that C.J. Roman has made to the atheist community in the past just to turn him into the butt of a couple of bad jokes, end quote. But look, first of all, we didn't ignore all the contributions he ever made. We made a few jokes.

And when you're a professional writer confessing to plagiarism, I think a couple of jokes about air quotes and mythological bylines is pretty lightweight as far as criticism goes. That being said, from what I hear, he's got a new podcast coming out. So if he wants to make jokes about us, he's got the venue for it. Really? CJ Roman has a skeptical podcast coming out? I believe he does, yeah. Is it called Citation Needed? It's going to come up with a good title. We could use

30 seconds on the clock. No, the actual title... Atheists on Air quotes? Is that it? I'm sure it'll come up with something clever. No, actually, it's Foreign Object. And I am biting my tongue until it bleeds not to make an anal joke right now. So there you go, Sean. This is what I do for you.

I hope you appreciate it. C.J. Worldman's foreign object. Internal citation needed. Maybe he prefers them in the end. Notes. Quick notes. You know, whatever. Whatever you can put in there.

Now, that is kicking a man while he's down. In the end. Our next email comes from Janet, who felt she was unduly teased on while he's down. In the end. Our next email comes from Janet, who felt she was unduly teased on last week's show. In reference to the story we covered about Pat Robertson and Kenyon AIDS towels, she writes, quote, Noah, you teased us with Douglas Adams jokes in the introduction and then never actually made with any Hoopy Fruit references.

What the hell? End quote. Yes. No, I'm sorry. All I'm going to say in my defense here is that the humorous crossover between AIDS and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wasn't as robust as I thought it was going to be when I started writing the story. How robust did you originally assume it would be? More robust than that, at least.

But I'll try to do better on the next towel story. got an email from Brooke who sent a link to this insane screed from a seemingly real website about how Halloween is really about fucking demons and worshipping Satan so Christians should refrain from buying candy until November, and then the demon fucking will be okay, I guess. But I only bring it up because

she said in the email that if I did, she would squeal with delight like a teenager after masturbating for the first time, and I'm going to be honest, it's been a while since I've made a woman squeal. I thought I did the other night honest, it's been a while since I've made a woman squeal. I thought I did the other night, but it turned out that Lucinda was actually watching Walking Dead over my shoulder

and a scary part came that had nothing to do with what I was doing. Oh, my God. By the way, didn't you also get a request for some naked pictures of you in that email

for masturbatory purposes? She didn't say naked specifically. Don't worry, Brooke. I will loan you some of mine. You're all set. Pictures of you in that email for masturbatory purposes. She didn't say naked specifically. Don't worry, Brooke. I will loan you some of mine. You're all set. Pictures of me naked. Masturbating. In the mirror.

To myself. Masturbating. Of course. Are you sure? All right. Now. All right. All right.

Didn't take long at all. And finally tonight, I want to acknowledge the many listeners that sent well wishes to Heath on his move. Are you sure? All right. Now. All right. All right. All right. Didn't take long at all. And finally tonight, I want to acknowledge the many listeners that sent well wishes to Heath on his move. We got a lot of really funny ones and a couple of really moving ones. Really appreciate all the well wishes, of course. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate it. And of course, the major recurring theme of the messages, other than jokes about Heath

having a purty mouth, were questions about what the transition's been like and what kind of Bible Belt insanity he's encountered so far. And that is our top five for the week. These are my top five genuine Georgia experiences since I've arrived. And in case you're curious, we didn't have enough time for a full top ten this week, but we did record a full ten for the per-episode donors over at Patreon.com. I'm not trying to rub it in or anything. I just wanted to point that out in case you...

Fair enough. All right, number five. My first Georgia gas station experience. So I drive up to the first Georgia gas station. I see a pickup truck. It's clearly been finger-painted, camouflaged by a five-year-old. No exaggeration. We should have taken a picture of this.

It should have been the... Then I spent about ten minutes waiting on the cashier line. The line had one person besides myself. From what I could tell, he's trying to scratch together the exact change to buy a single chitlin using a pile of pennies. It's coupons worth fractions of cents. It was ridiculous. I would have been extremely annoyed by this delay, but when I finally paid myself, I quickly found out that New York City is running a giant scam where every single price for everything is at least quadruple.

And I've been living there for a whole bunch of years in a row, so that was fun to find out. At number four, my first religious pamphlet. So this one took less than a week. Six days after I got here, I came out of a restaurant to find one of those, are you going to heaven? Flyers stuck under my windshield. And the funniest thing here is that it's not like every car in that row in the parking lot had one of those pamphlets.

It was just your car. So what had to have happened here, somebody's driving by, and they saw the New York license plate, and they said, you know what, I bet they don't have Jesus where he's from. I'm going to cheat the devil out of another one. Give me one of them pamphlets. The cavalry was probably right on the way. Call the Jews, too. Call the Jew. Yeah, singular around here. Give me a shot at pamphlets. The cavalry was probably right on the way. Call the Jews, too. Call the Jews.

Give them a shot at this, too, just to be fair. Alright, at number three, my first shopping cart. The very first time I step into a Walmart, I take a cart out of the big rack thing, and almost as if spring-loaded, a tin of Skol tobacco comes flying out on the floor and bling, bling, bling, right next to me.

Quick second, I actually thought maybe a thousand of them are about to land on my head, like I had been a thousandth shopper and was about to win some giant skull promotion for life. And I was so Georgia-fied that I saw the skull and everything, and I still had no idea what you were laughing at. You know, just like, something funny. Oh, yeah, that's redneck-y and funny, isn't it? My bad. That's Georgia.

Number two, my first atheist gap. So, same trip to Walmart. Last thing the cashier lady said was, God bless. Whatever,, my first atheist gap. So same trip to Walmart. Last thing the cashier lady said was, God bless. Whatever, it doesn't bother me. But I started to say something like, you too, or something normal. But my atheist asshole shoulder demon wouldn't let me get the words out. And all I could come up with was, cheers. I mean, that's like the normal thing for me to say.

Judging by the look on her face, I might as well have said a la Akbar to the lady in response. She's not happy about cheers. Well, I got to say, I will personally give you $1 every time you say a la Akbar to the cashier at Walmart. It's going to be a fun game. You underestimate how armed Walmart shoppers are. Okay. And at number one, my first Georgian road trip. All Georgian road trip.

So I got a friend I used to bartend with in New York. He lives a couple hours from here. I drove over to see him. Here's a mile-by-mile recap of the trip for anyone curious about the cultural wonderland that is the South Georgia Interstate Highway System. So it started out with a Jesus sign, Jesus sign, Jesus sign, anti-abortion sign, church sign, rundown bar, rundown gas station, rundown neighborhood. Really nice church. Out of nowhere. Jesus sign, Jesus billboard, giant cross, rundown library, rundown housing project, immaculate multi-billion dollar high school football stadium.

Out of nowhere. Lucas Oil, retractable dome, asinine, right next to the rundown high school that they play for. Jesus sign, bloody fetus billboard, giant cross, three giant crosses, church. Jesus sign, Obama with a Hitler mustache sign. Jesus sign, church. And then I got there right after the church that I passed. Cannot believe that out of five things you had on that list, the Papa John's delivery we got didn't make it. Absolutely not.

That's blasphemous. We did not. Everybody listening in New York absolutely never ate any Papa John's delivery. That's ridiculous. I don't even know what set of pizza plays. And that's all the feedback you get. If you want more, keep sending us those emails, tweets, and Facebook messages. You'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingatheist.com.

Before we sign the armistice tonight, I want to let everybody know that tickets for ReasonCon 2015 in North Carolina go on sale on November 1st. It was an awesome time last year, and the speaker list is even more impressive this year. It's taking place on Saturday, April 25th, and next year, but there's also a VIP dinner on the Friday night before, and Heath, Lucinda, and I will be providing the entertainment for that. Now, we haven't ironed out exactly what we're doing, but I think we're going to be roasting God, though God has yet to RSVP. Anyway, the VIP dinner sold out early last year, and it will almost certainly do so again this year. So if you want in, get those tickets early.

Again, they go on sale on November 1st, and you'll find a link to pick yours up and find out more about the event and everything on the show notes for this episode at skatingatheist.com. That's all the blasphemy we have for you this week, but we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more. If you can't wait that long, you can hear me guesting on not one, but two episodes worth of the Imaginary Friends show with Jake Farr Wharton, which you'll find linked on the show notes. Obviously, I need to thank Heath once again, along with all the people that helped make his move possible. I need to thank Lucinda for pretty much everything that she does.

I want to thank John Figdor one more time. He's doing yeoman's work to really advance the atheist movement. He's put together a very useful book, highly recommend it. Find out more about that on the show notes. Also need to thank Matt from the Ice Coffee podcast for providing perhaps the most dramatic Farnsworth quote to date. His sporadically published show details the history of human activity in Antarctica, which obviously isn't strictly atheist in nature, but I know a lot of our listeners are big history buffs like myself. So if you'd like to check his show out, you'll find that linked on this week's show notes as well. But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week's most dominant hominids,

Conrad, Robert, Dennis, Ben, Mark, Magnus, Lee, David, Michael, Stargazer, Danny, Kaz, Blaine, Jacef, Christopher, Halcat, Andrew, Wayne, and Alec. Conrad, Robert, Dennis, Ben, and Mark, whose ejaculations will still be detectable millions of years from now through the microwave background radiation, Magnus, Lee, David, Michael, and Stargazer, who are so legendary that Norm yells their name when they walk into a bar. Danny, Kaz, Blaine, Jason, and Christopher, whose cytotoxic T-lymphocytes would totally make Ebola their bitch.

And Hal, Kat, Andrew, Wayne, and Alec, whose erections forced the Londoners to rename their clock tower Just Ben. Together, this score of scruffy skeptics have scaled up with the scope of our scatological scorn against the scourge of scandalously scabrous, scamming scoundrels of Scripture this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the series of alliterative qualities necessary to give us money, but if you think you can handle the sudden surge in sexual prowess that often coincides with donating to our show, you can make a per-episode donation on patreon.com slash skatingatheist, which you'll find linked on our website,

or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage. And if you'd like to help us out but not bad enough to lose money on the deal, you can also help us out for free by leaving us a glowing review on iTunes. And remember, every time we get a five-star review on iTunes, an angel gets its wings ripped off by an angry ginger kid with a magnifying glass. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingatheist.com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly, and yes, I did

have my permission today's episode today's episode you're starting strong tonight