646: Gone With the Sinned Edition

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Warning, it's gotten to the point where failing to use profanity is borderline dishonest.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by stamps.com, Mint Mobile, MySheets Rock, and by God Awful Movies Live in Cleveland, Ohio.

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today

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It's Thursday. It's July 17th.
And it's National Dole Whip Day. Fuck.
When Frozen Younger just isn't disappointing enough for me. I have no illusions.
I'm Eli Bosnik. I'm Heath Enright.

And from Judy, Blooms, New Jersey, Ann Armor, Michigan, and Wake Ross, Georgia, this is the Scathing East.

On this week's episode, Texans thank God for drowning their children. The weather in Oklahoma is cloudy with a chance of space lasers.
And we'll put the fun and funeral once again.

And first, the diatron

Hey guys, is this what it looks like when two face-eating leopards both eat each other's faces at the same time?

Because like on the one hand, you have all these Trump voters who voted for lower inflation, no foreign wars, transparency, and racism, and got inflationary tariffs, bombs in Iran, stonewalled, and racism.

But at the same time, Trump's circus leveraged the conspiracy theories of unhinged lunatics to get into office, and now they're all fucked up with the fact that their supporters are all a bunch of unhinged conspiracy theorists, which brings about this gloriously poetic situation where the first thing to dent his fucking armor is getting caught in the truth.

Now, I want to be super clear on the reality here because way too many voices on the left are promoting conspiracy theory logic now that they think it's Trump's kryptonite.

So for the record, there is almost certainly no client list for the underage sex trafficking ring.

Okay, I spent a lot of years dealing drugs. I never had a customer list.
It's just, it's not how illegal shit generally works.

What I did have, and what Jeffrey Epstein had, was an address book full of contacts. And that exists and has been published.
Gawker published it back in 2015, along with logs from his private jet.

Those are the closest things we're probably ever going to see to a client list, and Donald Trump is on both of them.

There are also a myriad other reasons to believe Trump is a pet arrest, including reports that he would regularly barge into the dressing room of the Miss Teen USA pageant that he owned.

But Trump has denied this officially, of course, but he also confirmed it officially on the Howard Stern show before he had fucking presidential aspirations.

So it's not remotely conspiratorial to suggest that Trump was a client of Jeffrey Epstein. The evidence is overfucking whelming.

But to argue that Epstein had a specific blackmail list that had all his clients' names on it, let alone the implication that we could just trust the veracity of a professional child rapist's blackmail list, and that Trump is withholding it now to avoid implicating himself in a crime that he could not possibly be more implicated in.

Did I mention that there are pictures? Is

the whole idea that there was a secret client list was a cudgel that conspiracy theorists created to beat Democrats with.

And to be fair to the Trump administration, they did manage to successfully pivot away from the whole issue early on in his presidency.

Even after his idiot of an attorney general said, yep, I'm looking at the list of known pedophiles that includes the political and business elite right now.

Going to do something about that any minute. They did manage to bury it beneath so many controversies du jour that his fan base more or less moved on.

And then Elon Musk decided he wanted his bridges burning as bright as a Tesla in a parking lot, so he tweeted out the now infamous accusation that Trump was on the Epstein list.

Now, of course, there's no list, so there's no way to prove otherwise, right?

You can't publish the lack of a list, and the subsequent claims that there never was a list are severely undercut by the fact that the person saying that is on the record saying the opposite, like earlier this year.

So the MAGA base is like, oh yeah, haven't you had that on your desk for like five months now, Pam Bondi? Weren't you going to release it and or arrest any of the known child rapists on it?

And she was like, what list?

Cue all the Trump people now who are out of power or on the periphery lining up against Pam Bondi because the other choice is to give up their best cudgel.

And obviously they can't go after Trump directly because the emperor can never be responsible for his own nudity. So they're calling for Bondi's head on a stick.

And unlike almost everything else that's ever happened to Trump, this scandal managed to persist through multiple other scandals.

So

he takes to his fucking Kmart Twitter and he releases this verbose missive about how Bondi's doing a great job and she's going to get all them Adriana Chrome harvesting kitty diddlers any minute now.

And then he gets ratioed on his own fucking website that he owns and is entirely peopled by fans of his and bots of his, but that's the whole audience, right? And even they're like, interesting.

So far from putting the issue to bed, he accidentally created this highly visible thermometer of just how much his fans aren't buying his bullshit now that he's telling the truth

now i i don't want to go counting any chickens here just because lucy's holding the ball doesn't mean i'm going to start running at the motherfucker again but there are almost no evil and despicable things that could be true about a person that are not provably true about donald trump

and none of those have moved the needle right maybe a load of shit is what we've needed all along or maybe as a tweet i saw the other day suggested the the reality is that a lot of disillusioned Trumpies were just shown an exit from MAGA where they don't have to admit that their blue-haired niece has been right the whole time.

Either way, it's at the very least currently stirring deer leader into a catch-up-flinging rage, and knowing that is an endorphin hit all of its own. They're talking about your Jesus.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Mayo and catch-up to my mustard, Heath Enright, and Eli Bosnick. Fellas, are you ready to put the condemn and condiment?

Yet another way I support raw dogging, Noah. No connies.
Okay. All right.
And that's why you need Express VPN with Eli.

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Oh, it's a real bad.

More stank. Really? Even more stank.
Like way more stank. Hey, fellas.
What you doing? Oh, hey, Noah.

We're just getting ready for our 30 second live show in cleveland this weekend wait hold on a second wait the the show this weekend is only going to be 30 seconds yeah that's right eli and i are so busy mailing stuff that we're going to be able to put like 30 seconds into this thing max absolute max but don't worry we're going to put some stank on it i mean we're going to try we'll try guys guys if you need help with your mailing and shipping needs you should try stamps.com Oh, what's stamps.com?

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That's stamps.com slash scathing. All right, Noah.
Thanks. That would have been a ball.

Oh, now that's a lot of stank on it. Please, please stop saying stank on it.

No.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, I talked in last week's diatribe about all the weather modification conspiracy theories Republicans have to invent and promote these days to explain away the consequences of climate change.

But because of our focus on that, we really didn't get a chance to talk about any of the religious bullshit surrounding the flooding in Texas, right?

Like the part where Greg Abbott was pissing away time in the immediate aftermath of the storm, declaring days of prayer and insisting that that was working.

And all the time, money and effort were being spent rushing Bibles to the scene while bodies were still being fished out of the river. So this week, we're going to talk about that for a bit.

By killing a Bible camper ourselves. Wait, what? Okay, listen, I know from Lee Strobel that Bible truth is measured in stacking height, but it's not even a good levee material.
Right, exactly. Right.

Yeah. So, okay, so let's start with that day of prayer.

So, as so often happens in Texas, the elected officials in charge saw a disaster where people were dying on their watch and thought, well, this is a great way to promote my religion.

So, on July 5th, the day after the catastrophic flooding took the lives of 137 Texans and counting, Greg Abbott used a press conference to declare the following day, July 6th, a day of prayer.

And then he spent like a minute and a fucking half talking about the power of prayer and how the kids who didn't die probably didn't die because they prayed better.

I mean, he didn't say those exact words, but that was the unmistakable implication of it.

And he also pointed out that, hey, for all we know, it was prayer that stopped the water from rising any higher. Right.

And the implication, of course, is that all the kids who did die didn't pray well enough there. It's monstrous

from all angles when you think about it. Yep.
Worth noting that pretty much zero Muslim people died. I feel like that could be a clue about God for the Christian.

Yeah, right. Right.
So, yeah, so I'm sure theologians are hard at work on the God hit the divine snooze button and forgot the faucet was on theory.

But it's damn telling when the leader of the state that's most known for both deregulation and people dying in natural disasters insists that prayer is too a viable disaster mitigation strategy. Yeah.

It is. And hey, maybe the Bible with a giant flood on like page fucking seven, not the best idea for the flood survival.

You know what they need? Texas Senator Ted Cruz, on the other hand, was devastated by how the flooding impacted his enjoyment of touring the Parthenon in Greece.

Hard to appreciate the architecture when all those texts kept blowing up his phone, but okay.

Upon his belated return to the U.S., he took an interview about the flooding where he was asked why a loving God would kill so many innocent children at a camp that was dedicated to glorifying him, to which Ted Cruz answered in part, quote, we have a good and benevolent God, but God allows things to happen sometimes that defy human explanation, and that's where we need love and where we need grace, end quote.

So there you have it. God allows things to happen.
Next question. We found it, everybody.
We figured it out.

And in Jesus Take the Squeal news, the omnipotent creator of the universe nearly murdered two kids in a row this month because he really needed them to repeat the exact religious beliefs that they and their families grew up with.

Feels like it would be more impressive to do that somewhere where.

That wasn't the case, like India, but wherever there are kids being blatantly used by their parents, there might be a book and a god-awful movie. So we're going to talk about it.

Yeah, guys, guys, your God can't bring somebody back from the dead without killing them first. That's the problem that you have with the whole monotheism, right?

This is a net zero proposition and always will be. Can't even create a really thick baby that he can't lift.

Your omnipotent God is stuck in a zero-sum game. Just think about it.

So first up, big thanks to Brandon for sending us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

If you send us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com, we'll ignore if you spell your name wrong, just like I just did now with Brandon, except for now.

And also this, scathingnews at gmail.com. Okay, it's one of those spellings where if I told you what unusual letter was in it, you would go, where?

And why?

Exactly.

Okay, that's all the funnier because it's a why people. Yes.
Okay. So the news source I could find credulous enough to cover this story was klfy.com, which builds itself as Acadia's local news outlet.

I believe them. They brought us the story of DJ Parker.

According to DJ's mom, quote, I saw DJ sitting by the pool with his feet in the pool, and I was kind of okay with it because DJ, he's scared of the water, so he's not going to just jump in the water.

Oh, my God. He was playing with a plastic bag, but I figured it's fine.
He's more of a paper kid, so he's not going to.

We got scissors everywhere, like lousy with scissors all over the house, but he's not going to run with them.

he's a he's a paperman we're good it's all good yeah so this six-year-old kid falls in the water that's why there's a news story everybody and of course we need the obligatory they weren't even religious which is weak even in this case with kfly telling us quote for parker and her husband who believed in god but didn't have a stable church home at the moment hearing what dj witnessed deepened their faith end quote right but their faith was so shallow like that they're like well these people had the absolute minimum depth of faith, and this deepened it.

Well, of course it did, right?

Right.

But that's even more ridiculous when you compare it to the mom's statement where she says, quote, we just started screaming God's name first and we kind of panicked, but something told me to wait.

Let's do CPR. Let's try to revive him.
Yeah, there you go. And while I'm reviving him, I'm just praying, God, please call your angels.
Cover them with my son, Lord, in the name of Jesus, Lord.

Cover my baby with your blood in the name of Jesus, Lord. Please give me my baby back.
End quote. Angel zoops in.
Yeah, just keep doing the CPR. You got to do the BGs thing.
Stop praying.

I think it's the BGs to stay on. Peace.

So, yeah, turns out that when someone is in a semi-conscious state and you yell Mickey Mouse's name at them a bunch of times, they see Mickey Mouse because

here's what DJ saw, according to his dad, quote, he looked at me and my husband. He said, no, daddy, no, mama, God is real.
I saw him. I saw him and Uncle Quimain.
What?

Oh, well, hey, if you can't trust an adolescent's dreams, what can you trust, right? Yeah, so Uncle Quimain was like, hey, don't almost kill my nephew, please. And God was like,

I'm

getting a Sorbo movie. It's good.
I'm making this happen.

And I know what you're thinking, podcast listener. Okay, has this six-year-old made any deep and affecting life changes as a result of his experience all by himself? Why, yes, he has.

According to KLFY, to mark a second chance of life, DJ wants to change his name to Avir, which means heir in Hebrew. And according to his mom, quote, why do you want to name yourself after the heir?

And he was with God in the air. Sick.

Also, mommy, you should change your name to the Hebrew word for brimstone. God said you would know why.

Wait, wait, one more thing. He's telling me one more thing.
He said, unlimited yogurt melts?

I don't normally like to eat too many of those, but like God said, like unlimited. All right.
You say so. I'm a Christian.

Okay, but my favorite part of this story is that on top of how ridiculous it already is, part of its popularity, if you've seen this on Facebook, is based on people getting confused with another different kid who got in a skateboard accident and saw his dead dad.

That story is going viral on TikTok. That kid's name is Kaysen.
And the fact that God didn't send him back with the message to also change his name is all the proof you need that his story.

There you go. Yeah.

And in here comes bunny laboo boo news. Oh, yeah.

For anyone who doesn't have their finger on the pulse of the doll industry like I do, there's a new craze over the last few years called laboo-boo.

They're little stuffed animals that look like rabbits with big eyes and a toothy grin, and they're all the rage.

Big-name celebrities like Rihanna, Cher, and Kim Kardashian are hanging the dolls from handbags, and people are doing crimes to get their hands on a laboo boo.

Some of the dolls are going for thousands of dollars, and a couple in Singapore actually got caught breaking into a claw machine to get one. Highly prized these things.
Go for it, though.

Those things are a fucking scam. Go ahead.
Break in. That's not fair.
It's fair. That's fair.
That can't be a crime. But even more importantly, they might be hiding a sinister secret.

There's an ancient Mesopotamian demon named Pazuzu. That's right, the one from the Exorcist.
And Pazuzu might be smuggling demonic energy into the human realm, one laboo-boo at a time.

Okay, so honestly, I've said this before, but the main reason Mesopotamian mythology never caught on in the West, the way that like Greek and Norse did is that all the names sound silly.

Pazuzu, Khalili, Humbaba. Really hard to get scared when when those are the demons coming after you.
Yeah, but an excellent way to start the Lion King on Broadway.

All right. And a big thanks.
Pazu.

Humbaba. Pazuzu.
Khalili. Humbaba.
Right.

Perfect.

And a big thanks to Daniel for sending a link to scathingnews at gmail.com. If we ever acquire a laboo boo, very difficult.

Daniel can hold it for one minute and try to absorb the demon powers or just hold it and play with it. So how did we learn about the nefarious plan?

TikTok. But not just any TikTok.
I'm talking about the journalists over at Christian TikTok. They started by realizing that Labubu

has very similar mouth noises to Pazuzu. It does.
That's true. Yeah, it does.

Also, they look the same. No, they don't.
The traditional depiction of Pazuzu, the demon, has the body of a serpent with wings, bird-like talons, the horns of a goat, and a lion face.

But that does include eyes and teeth, which are also present on labubu. Interesting.

It is.

And demon stuff is happening. That's the important part.

According to one Christian talker named Fisher, quote,

warning, labubu is not a toy. It's a cult, a plush vessel for the demon Pazuzu.

Everyone who brings it home signs a contract, especially when they give it to a child.

So Pazuzu has fucking terms of service then?

Look, I think we can all admit the only thing more demonic than whatever Pazuzu does is the people who actually read the terms of service.

So in response to all the anti-demon backlash, the toy company that makes Labubu acknowledged the possibility of the soul scourge and issued a recall notice just to be safe.

That notice was published on April 1st, but it's important to remember that we all had a warning about this danger long before this year

from

The Simpsons. In their 2017 Tree House of Horror episode, Homer thinks he's ordering a pizza, but he actually orders a pazuzu because the letters in the mouth noises.

And that brought the demon into The Simpsons' house.

And we learned about that Simpsons prophecy from another citizen journalist who posted, Labu Buu toys look cute until you realize they're Pazuzu-inspired demons, just like in The Simpsons.

Homer brought one home and it possessed him.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, at this point, The Simpsons has a better track record than the Bible, at least. Like, if we're going to interpret prophecy out of something, sure.

And The Simpsons has only glorified one unrepentant child rapist. There's a lot to like about that.
Yeah, right? Cool. Cool.
Well, after reading all that, I just, I didn't know what to believe.

So I checked out Snopes. Oh, good.
And they have a dedicated article about this. Turns out that theory about The Simpsons was wrong.
It was... Maggie who got possessed by Pazuzu, not Homer.
Stupid.

Dumbasses. That being said, Snopes did not weigh in with an official rating of the truth value behind the broad theory of lububoo having a connection to Pazuzu.

They reached out to the artist, Kasing Lung, asking about any relationship to that Mesopotamian demon, but they have not heard back.

So

if you've got a lububoo right now, maybe

put it inside a circled pentagram made of salt, sage, and blood, and wait for more information. Just to be safe.
Don't burn your investment until you have all the facts, but also be safe. Obviously.

And while I run out and grab some sage, we're going to pause for a word from this week's other sponsor, Mint Mobile.

Okay, what about Cold Babes Big Brews? Why would Cold Babes be appealing?

They want like snuggles? Dude, what? Hey, guys. What was with a paper? Oh, hey, Noah.
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Why does it need a poster? Oh, because our cell phone plans are killing us. Yeah, every call and text is costing us an arm and a leg, thus posters.
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Thanks.

Hey, if I tell you a party's going to have cold babes, are you more or less excited? Well, less, dude. Definitely less.

But they want snuffles. Do they?

A man wrote in the Bible? A whores. What's your mind? If it's a legitimate ring.

Cooking can be fun. Hey, I'm proud of my man.
This week in Mississauga.

So, first things first, based on the messages in my inbox, the answer to your most burning question is yes. I am still cigarette-free, 43 days in.

That puts me past the Jesus time scale of 40 days and 40 nights and onto the Noah time scale. Either the boat guy or my husband, I guess.

But yeah, I'm sticking with my commitment so far, no matter how hard the new cycle tries to change my mind.

Speaking of which, let's do one of those that's great and all, but how the fuck are we just now getting around to it type stories?

Because in a rare story about this Congress doing something right, they passed a law called the She Drives Act. See, as it is now, women are 73% more likely to be injured in a head-on collision.

And the main reason for that is that safety testing for cars is primarily done with men as the default.

But this act will, among other things, require that vehicles use both male and female analog crash test dummies in their testing.

And I should say the history of crash test dummies is a fantastic lesson in sexism and the value of representation.

See, the crash test dummy was first invented in 1949 and they were designed around men of average height and weight. We'd first start using a female version in Drumroll Please, 2003.

Now, for the earliest part of its life, these dummies were only being used to test jets, and all the jet pilots at the the time were men. But they started using them for cars in 1968.

They'd get around to making one based on average women in 1976, because how else were they going to test the passenger seat, right?

They wouldn't start moving that dummy into the driver's seat for years afterwards, and even now they aren't required to. So yeah, great job to the most evil legislative body in my lifetime, I guess.

I'm glad you took a break from taking the rights away from women long enough to do that. Anyway, enough of the good news.
Let's get to more of the kind of evil you come to this segment for, no?

Well, then let me introduce you to Lorraine Zelensky.

She was a member of Grace Community Church in California, and she had a serious problem with a husband that was physically and emotionally abusive to both her and their daughter, to the point where the kid was scared to go to sleep.

So she goes to her church counselor and says, hey, I need to get a divorce. Here's why.
What do I do? And of course, you already know the answer, right? Submit to your husband.

Despite her telling them that she feared for her own life, they told her that she was bound to stay with him. And if there was a problem in the marriage, it was up to her to solve it.

And after it became clear that this was the official position of the church, she decided that she would leave altogether and go to a different church. But they said no.

How the fuck does a church tell you that you can't leave, you might ask?

Well, in this instance, it was by threatening to expose all the private information she shared during her counseling sessions with the church.

According to a lawsuit she's now filed over this shit, they basically blackmailed her with the exposure of her personal information unless she resolved things with her abusive husband.

And here's the most fucked up thing, y'all. The lawsuit will probably fail because the church's rules that she signed on to explicitly allow them to do shit like this.
So yeah.

If you want good news, all I can tell you is that the guy who ran that church died right after this story broke. Other than that, it's par for the course.

And on that note, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli. Thank you, Lucinda.
And in this one's a banger news.

You know, we've been known to be a little harsh on the church here at Scathing Atheists, probably because of all the kid fucking, but it's also because when they aren't raping kids, churches are a little lame.

Well, We'd like to officially retract that statement about Banger Cathedral, which, after the retirement of the Archbishop following two inquiries into the misuse of church funds, turns out to have been a pretty hard party.

So we're going to talk about it. Okay, spoiler, I am going to disapprove of their drinking here.
It is not a percent.

Well, I don't know, Heath, I haven't had a drink in years and you don't approve of that.

See? See? So, first off, big thanks to Michelle, who sent us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Thanks to atheist news sleuths like Michelle, we sound refined international and able to pronounce words like indigenous on our very first try side note podcast listener i know you didn't hear it but i did not manage to do that while reading that line in our script scathingnews at gmail.com said genius eight times

in a row seven the eighth one was me using it ironically but yes thank you

so for those of you only aware of its neolinguistic pretender to the throne in the u.s banger is the oldest city in wales And not to indulge stereotypes, but it seems like they were being awfully fucking Welsh about their church.

Wow.

According to the BBC, not only were casks of beer being blessed at an October event back in 2022, but some priests and choir members at the cathedral, already mired in controversy, did a seven last shots of Christ drinking game at a pub on Good Friday after service.

The Never Have I Ever game went very badly, like right away. Oh, my God.

Are we sitting there on the precipice of alcohol poisoning going, damn it, somebody do one with adults?

But of course, we wouldn't be reporting on this story if it was the case of just one church turning out to be fun. Some churches are fun, some have dirt bike shows sponsored by a Baldwin.

But Alec, if you were gonna shoot somebody anyway, my mother. Exactly, exactly.
No. Get your brother Stephen on the set, man.
Exactly. Yeah.
He's been asking you to. It's a win-win winner.

No, all this drinking merriment led to what churches actually export. Sexual impropriety and danger to young people.

One anonymous parishioner who spoke to the BBC said she was sexually assaulted by a priest in training while he was drunk, and a former choir member left the church because she felt the environment had become unsafe for children.

It's gotten to where you can't get a pedophile to psychologically abuse your children with stories about a demon torturing them because a ghost watches them touch themselves safely anymore.

So I had to pull my kids out. Yeah.
So I know the press is playing this like drunk church was really wacky.

And sure, that does seem wacky, but you can also be drunk and wacky without sexually assaulting people. Sure can.
And you can definitely do it without abusing your status as a charity. So,

yeah, probably for the best that this news got out there and that this is being

taken care of. Yeah.

And finally, tonight in Wethering Heights News. Oh, well done.

In order to help out God in his ongoing battle against big meteorology, people are attacking and vandalizing radar towers used by local news channels to track the weather.

The latest example was in Oklahoma City last week. And, you know, weather stuff doesn't really matter there for public safety, but still,

don't do what this guy did. Local weather underground activist Anthony Mitchell hopped a fence and smashed up the power supply unit for the Doppler Tower at News 9.

Then he got arrested for a different crime and eventually charged with vandalizing the tower, mostly because he did that entire vandalizing crime right in front of a security camera. Yeah.

Posed for a picture doing a crime is not an overstatement. Oh, God.
Okay, I'm not excusing what he did at all.

This is terrible and stupid, but I can see how a few years of living in Oklahoma would cause a person to side with a tornado.

Right.

And a big thanks to Kevin for sending the link to scathingnews at gmail.com. Kevin gets to play with Eli's space laser for 10 minutes if we're not using it.
But I am Kevin. Read a newspaper.

I've been very busy with my space laser lately. Yeah.
So following the arrest of Mitchell, an anti-government militia group called Veterans on Patrol claimed responsibility for the radar attack.

Group leader Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer is pretty sure the U.S. military and the media,

I guess the weather media, like the weather people, are trying to control the weather and attack American people or something. And the radar towers are part of the secret weapon.

According to Meyer, quote, when the military plays God with the weather, they're mocking our heavenly father.

Nothing could mock a God more than you speaking for him, bro.

He He also added, eliminating directed energy weapons that are embedded in our infrastructure is not going to harm a single American.

Our goal is to take out 15 energy weapons in the state, and we want to do it simultaneously. Okay, so you just did one and stopped, or you're announcing your plan like a less likable Riddler.

I'm confused what happened here. You're supposed to wait until you have the good guy in your clutches to tell us that.
Do you even have clutches? You feel clutchless, man. You feel clutchless.

Thank you, no. That's true.
So you might be wondering why Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer is not already in jail. So am I.
Uh-huh. So am I.

Especially after he showed up at a police station in Oklahoma City two days after that vandalism at News 9 to explain how he's the ringleader. And he made a selfie video of his time.

at the police station. He walks in and he tells the front desk, I'm the one commanding the the operations.

Eventually, two cops come to speak with him, but almost immediately they go back inside the office, clearly refusing to listen to his manifesto that I'm sure he was really hoping to deliver.

And then he's just standing there in the lobby by himself and he looks directly into the camera and he tells his audience, You're doing God's work if you're eliminating the military's capabilities of playing God with the weather.

Jesus fucking Christ. You guys, you remember how the day before yesterday, their line was that it was silly to think that centuries of human activity could affect the climate.

And it's worth noting that Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer is far from the only person doing stupid shit like this and using God's work as their rationale.

There's been a weird spike, just very specifically in radar attacks all over the country, and groups like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service are being forced to ramp up security at radars.

It even led to some conspiracy busting action by Lee Zeldin, the anti-environment head of the Environmental Protection Agency that Trump put in charge.

Last week, he put up dedicated pages on the EPA website to explain that chemtrails are

nothing and that the U.S. military is not trying to kill Americans with weather weapons.
But that's exactly what the EPA would say. So, militia groups don't appear to be swayed by the new information.

See also the diatribe. Yeah.

And with the clock ticking ever closer to the time where they start tearing up robes, because that's how the government gets to you, we're going to wrap up the headlines for the week.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always. Jumanji.
And when we come back, we'll tamp down some dirt with our happy feet.

Also, I feel like the EPA thing was just smokescreen for Epstein. Pretty sure that's what's happening.
Yeah, for sure.

Honestly, this seems like a ton of work. Yeah, but it's free.
Hey, guys, what you doing? Heath is telling me how he gets his free air conditioning. Free air conditioning? How do you do that?

Okay, so I buy an air conditioner on the days when it's hot on Amazon. Right.

And then the next morning, I just refund it at Kohl's. Boom.

I'm sorry, you buy buy and return an air conditioner on all the days that it's hot? Yeah, I know it's a lot of work, but like, what else am I going to do? I'm a warm sleeper.

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Thanks, Noah. All right.
I'm uh I'm off to Kohl's. But I thought you were gonna try the regulator sheets.
Oh, yeah, I am, but uh, I gotta return last night's pajamas.

You return your pajamas

every night.

There are plenty of segments on this show that I kind of dread doing, right?

Like, I obviously love my job, but when I know that I'm going to have to read a chapter of Ross Dalthat or watch a short film by Ray Comfort, it kind of bums me out regardless.

There are other segments that I really look forward to, like How Bullshit Is It? or Bible Peace Theater, where Heath and Eli do all the work.

But there's none I look forward to more than a segment we debuted only a couple of months ago, and we call that segment

Son of Obituary.

Okay, to be fair, if we were reading Ross's book because he had died, I'd be way more cheerful about it. Fair, right? Okay, he's got the chronic Lyme disease, so it's true.
Maybe that's a real thing.

Survivor fingers don't cure it.

And for today's dance, we're going to gather on the grave of the recently deceased icon of 80s televangelism, Jimmy Swaggart, who was always doomed when he didn't get to be a playable character in a dance-themed Street Fighter II knockoff.

He didn't get to be that yet, right? Not in his lifetime. Play that so much.
So I have no choice but to sort of open with the bad news.

And that comes in the form of this guy's birthday, because I have to admit that this guy got 90 fucking years of life in this story.

Like, imagine if we just trade 45 of those years for like 16 more minutes of Robin Williams or Dr. Seuss or something.

Chris Farley, just Chris Farley for like five seconds to side-tackle Rob Schneider off, you know, a Trump rally stage. Oh, there you go.
Yeah.

You're not funny. And then he dies again.
That's fine. Yeah, there you go.

We'll give away 90 years of this guy's life. And we've been 10 seconds, Chris Riley.
All right. So Jimmy was born on March 15th of 1935.

He was born in Faraday, Louisiana, a place where poverty was so endemic that most folks probably didn't notice the Great Depression happening around them.

Hey, sales sales are way up on my house boxes. This is actually great.
People are being weird about the economy right now.

Now, his dad's name was Willie Leon Swaggart. And if you're thinking to yourself, wow, that's the redneckiest possible name, that's only because I haven't told you yet that his nickname was Son.

Though it is, there's some confusion, I guess, about whether that's S-O-N or S-U-N. Because I feel like confusion about spelling was sort of the resting position for the Swaggart family, right?

That was neutral. But I'm going to call him Willie because A, son is a stupid nickname, and B, I don't want to talk about son's son.

So, Willie was a sharecropper and a fiddle player, so you know he was rolling in dough.

Wow, attack both our wives. Why don't you?

Now, he was also a Pentecostal preacher, and it was through that profession that he met Jimmy's mom-to-be Minnie Belle Heron. And yes, the two were related.

It was by marriage, yes, but still, first cousins, like Giuliani, it's cool, yeah, right.

Yeah,

Actually, I think he was related by blood. Yeah, you're right.

So according to Save by Song, a history of gospel and Christian music, as cited in the Wikipedia article about Jimmy, in the Swaggart family, quote, cousins and in-laws and other relatives married each other until the clan was entwined like a big, tight ball of rubber bands, end quote.

I feel like the word incestuous belongs in that sentence somewhere, but yeah, okay, whatever.

Okay, but good on whichever Wikipedia editor was like, I should point out that these genes are fucking recessive. It's really gonna make the rest of the story make sense.
Right, yeah.

Let's just say they did wrist control to establish recessiveness. That's how it worked over there.
Also, I think they spelled clan wrong.

But Jimmy was born with all the typical number of fingers and everything in 1935. Jealous.
And he followed his dad into both preaching and music. Apparently, the Swaggart clan had a heart for music.

Counted among Jimmy's cousins are country star Mickey Gilly, who I'd never heard of, and rockabilly legend Jerry Lee Lewis, who I obviously have heard of, and who is a child raping cousin fucker.

Literally, I know we call people that sometimes on this show, but he actually did those things to everybody, just so you know.

Okay, maybe we list the people in Louisiana who are not his cousin to make it.

That's important. That is important.

But like his more famous and more talented cousin, Jimmy would also marry a teenager, though this is mitigated in his instance by the fact that unlike Jerry Lee, he was a teenager himself at the time.

At the ripe old age of 17, he would marry 15-year-old Frances Anderson. The two remained married for 72 years, and something tells me it's not because they loved each other so deeply or anything.

If you don't know the rest of this story, I assure you, my reasoning will be clearer as we go. Yeah, because right now you're just taking on teenage marriage and sharecroppers.

And I'm like, what did Lucinda do this?

So early in their marriage, the Swaggarts lived in a kind of poverty that's rare in America these days.

Unless you're listening in archives, feel like that statement's got a four-year shelf life at best.

But according to Swaggart, well, according to his autobiography, they lived on $30 a week, which would be equivalent to about $340 a week today.

And this was before we had all the generous social programs America is known for now, unless you're listening in archives.

He and his wife and the one child their seemingly loveless marriage produced spent that time living in church basements, friends' homes, and motels while while Jimmy tried to earn his way as a pastor and a gospel singer.

I feel like if you're destitute as a preacher, you're getting a pretty firm sign from your boss to pick a different line of work, right? Right. God keeps giving him tips.

Jimmy, I know a guy at Cutco Knives. I think.

So, now also, according to a story that's almost certainly bullshit, at one point during this period of terrible, terrible poverty, the music label that his cousin Jerry had signed with reached out to him about being their first gospel artist but he turned him down because he felt a calling to preach the gospel and that's such a fucking insane story to make up because if it was true it would mean that he intentionally subjected his family to starvation level poverty because he wanted to tell people about jesus in a non-musical way right gospel music is so goddamn preaching the gospel that they call it gospel fucking music Right there in the name.

Right there in the name. But whatever.
Yeah, Jimmy, you could have been as famous as Jerry Lee Lewis if you'd wanted to. You just didn't want to.

Yeah, they originally offered me the Joe Rogan experience, but I said, nah, give it to the guy with the name that matches. I feel like it's not.

But yeah, but he preached his way through the 50s doing tent revivals and shit like that throughout the South.

And to be clear, tent revival is what preachers do when they're not honest enough to stay in one place, you know, where they could be held accountable over time.

It was and remains a notorious circuit for fraudsters. And I'm comparing them to typical Baptist preachers when I make that accusation.
So, like, fraudsters to the second power.

Yeah, he's selling a prize that you only get after dying, and he still had to leave town because he, like, added too many other lines.

Right. Yes, yeah.
Now, despite turning down a chance at a Jerry Lee Lewis-like gospel career, in the 60s, Swaggart would pursue a gospel career. Between the gospel music and the road bilking, he was

too late to get to congress. Now I'm singing it.
God couldn't get me the cutcoat.

Yeah, so between the gospel music and the roadbilking, he was successful enough to purchase his own AM radio station.

That was in 1971, and that would quickly grow into a Christian broadcasting empire. By 1975, he would move to television in what is generally considered the golden age of televangelism.

Oh, you mean the time when political conservatism needed a new weapon against the progress widespread media was spreading? What a coincidence. Yep.
Yeah.

Luckily, we had a Jimmy Swagger to the left called

just news. Yep.

Good times, happy days.

We also had good times and happy days. We did, yes.

So in 1980, Swaggart would start the vehicle that would make him a household name.

He started a daily telecast with Bible study and preaching and music on the weekdays and a full-blown hour-long church service on Sunday.

By 1983, more than 250 television stations were carrying some combination of those broadcasts. Which is hard to do because there were only four channels back then.

Well, there were four networks, right? So these are different like local broadcasts. So if you're thinking to yourself, why the fuck would 250 stations play that shit?

You have to understand that these broadcasts were generally reserved for the, we were just going to have a holding pattern there anyway hours between like 1 and 6 a.m.

I guess this is probably hard to imagine for you youths, but back in the 1980s, television just ended, right?

like if you didn't have cable there was just a point where all the networks were like anyway and then they would play the national anthem and they would sign off so the cost of sticking one more broadcast on the end of that was negligible the same can basically be said for sunday morning broadcast time as well yeah the algorithm was a little simpler it was just be anything that's not vertical color bars with a long beep yes yeah they barely cleared those color bars just cleared those color bars yes sometimes a news guy would come on and say an overly romantic thing about the country before they put on the bars.

That was weird. It was weird.
Oh, fuck this country right now. Yep.
And then it would be like

for the rest of the night. Yep, sure would.
What did Walter Crockett say? No, of course. The people who are watching TV at 1 a.m.

or the people waking up early in the morning to watch Jesus shit on Sunday morning TV have a lot of overlap with people who are insanely gullible.

So Jimmy Swaggart's God would really like it if you gave me more money pitch worked pretty well. Okay, I paid off my college loans when I was about 40 years old.
I am still paying off Girls Gone Wild.

And Biden never helped. Damn it.
Never. No, he didn't.
He tried. He tried.
Yeah, he did. Now, by the mid-80s, his ministry was pulling in upwards of $140 million a year.

That's $340 if you're listening in the archives.

Well done, sir. So at this point, Jimmy finds himself quite influential.
So what does he do with that influence? Why, evil, of course.

And look, we're about to talk about the scandals that he's mostly known for.

But throughout the 80s, he invested a lot of his time and effort in supporting a South African rebel group that did a lot of war crimes.

This group was called Renemo, and they were one of the belligerents in a 15-year civil war in Mozambique. And they were created by the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organization.
Yikes.

Yeah, talk about a group that you already know is evil the first time you ever hear about it, right?

They were created as an anti-communist counter to the ruling party, and they were known for raping and torturing and looting and the indiscriminate use of landmines. Right?

And Jimmy Swagger raised money for them and gave them publicity and offered spiritual and material support way after all that shit was known about them.

And the fact that that isn't the scandal he's most reviled for says a lot about how callous, racist, and prudish Americans really are. Yeah, here's the thing, though.

We didn't learn about the evil politics of colonizers in southern Africa until that

big documentary came out,

Lethal Weapon 2, but that was in like 1991. Yeah, I know.
Oh, you're right. No, that was afterwards.
Yeah.

So, okay, so when he wasn't raising money for war criminals, Swaggart spent his time keeping the local sex workers employed, which is fucking nothing, right?

Like, I mean, it's not nothing if you're his wife, but hey, the dude was born into a culture where they told him that making the lifelong decision to marry at the age of 17 was perfectly acceptable and divorcing wasn't, right?

It's a fucked up space for anybody to be in. And for all of the reasons I hate Jimmy Swaggert, cheating on his wife with sex workers is like number 147.

But the American public at large strongly disagrees. Yeah, if anything, we're mad he didn't share the sex workers.
Jimmy Swaggart was probably terrible at sex. You can imagine.

Okay, just to review, Jimmy Swaggart bought himself a giant media platform, spread propaganda, did a bunch of evil shit in southern Africa, and paid women to have sex with him.

I feel like his estate could sue Elon Musk for stealing his IP.

Right? Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so the story of his public downfall starts in 1986 when Swaggart accuses a member of his parent church, Assemblies of God, of having several affairs.

Now, that guy, Marvin Gorman, gets defrocked and his ministry is reduced to nothing. He sues Swaggart for defamation.
He wins. He gets $10 million.
That's reduced to $1.75 million on appeal.

And this guy inherits a very understandable lifelong grudge, especially since he happens to know good and goddamn well that Swaggart isn't exactly monogamous.

So Gorman gets his son and his son-in-law to stake Swaggart out. And it takes him about 15 minutes to get photos of him going in and out of a motel room with a local sex worker.
All right, guys.

Good weekend. Hey, hey, guys.
You remember when I caught your dad committing adultery? That was so, and your whole family got ruined. Oh, hey, Sally, the sex worker.
Let's get a selfie, guys.

Will you actually get a picture?

Now, at first, Gorman just tries to use the picture as leverage.

He tells Swaggart that if he goes out and he publicly apologizes for the accusations and he gets Gorman reinstated by Assemblies of God, the pictures will just disappear.

Swaggart's like, yeah, I'll get right on that. He does nothing.

A year later, Gorman goes public, but Swaggart, knowing that this is coming, tries to get ahead of it with his iconic I have sinned speech.

This is the famous speech where he summons an absolute fucking automatic car washes worth of tears while he blabbers about how sorry he is for his grievous sin, which he never specifies.

I have a wet dream. Yes, no.

Yeah, never says what the fuck it is that he did. Yeah.
And look, I know this was like a big moment in Christian culture, but as a Jew who was raised in the 90s, this is such a bizarre fucking video.

This is like finding out that the time Mr. Belvedere sat on his balls is the reason we celebrate Kwanzaa.
I'm just really

taken aback by the footage. Is that what happened to Mr.
Belvedere? Mr. Belvedere sat on his balls.
He did, yeah.

Quite famously. Read a book.
Love that show. So his supporters, though, forgive his lack of specificity in this speech by saying that it was just material that was unfit to broach on television.

His detractors say that it was, you know, for plausible deniability in a a court case if one should arise.

Realists, though, recognize that he probably just didn't want to have to come out and do a whole new apology weep for every fucking pass sin that came to light in the media.

And he needed sort of a blanket. Yeah, no, I was talking about that one too thing that he could point to in the future.

I'm so sorry for those offenses against the United States that I committed or may have committed

during the entire period from 1935 through today. Yeah.

So sorry. Don't use the auto pen.

So Assemblies of God now turns around and suspends Swaggart.

And they eventually, they turn that into a full drafrocking when they realize that either A, he's not actually repentant or B, he's such a poster child of the immoral televangelists at this point that it would be devastating for their brand if he continued to be associated with them.

Or maybe both, could be both. Yeah, and then he was like, assemblies of God is in the Epstein file.
That's right.

They are.

But that's the thing, though. Unlike Gorman, Swaggart still had a megaphone, right? He had this massive TV audience.
He owned the infrastructure around it.

So he just removed Assemblies of God from the name of his shit and went non-denominational, and he continued the same scam.

Now, he did it to an admittedly diminished audience, but his core audience, the one that was paying him, they were still there.

And that would last for another three years until his next sex worker scandal, which would come about in 1991.

Yeah, I swear, if this guy turns out to be the origins of Love Island and you guys didn't tell me.

Now, I should note here that there's at least some evidence that the sex worker he was caught with in 1988 was a setup right now most of that evidence is bullshit right the most cited evidence is literally a polygraph that was administered on behalf of the national enquirer now that's like double definitely nothing that was bullshit on board yeah does it turn out to be true is it like a theory

well exactly useful but there's also plenty of circumstantial evidence that gorman sons kind of hurried up the process of catching swagger by paying a sex worker to entice him Kind of hard to make that argument the second time, though, when he just happened to get pulled over by a police officer and had a sex worker in the car with him at the time.

Hey, hey, I'm back.

I'm crying. I've been crying so I'm so sorry.
1935 through today. I met

this one today. I have and will

continue to. Yeah.
So that sex worker, by the way, is named Rosemary Garcia, and she is, in my opinion, the hero of this story.

Because at first, Swaggart tries to explain it away by saying that he was just giving her a ride. And when he realized that she was a sex worker, he was appalled.

That's probably why he was driving so fast that they pulled him over, right? And she probably could have got a solid shut the fuck up payment for him by playing along.

But instead, Garcia contradicted his claims in the press by saying, quote, he asked me for sex. I mean, that's why he stopped me.
That's what I do. I'm a prostitute.
End quote.

Also, by the way, it looks like a Koopa Trupa. Check it out.
Yeah, right.

After the shell pops up. Yeah, right.
So from here, the world braced itself for another set of waterworks.

But in this instance, Swaggart deflected press inquiries with a divine nunya saying, quote, the Lord told me it's flat, none of your business, end quote.

He temporarily stepped down as head of his ministry for like counseling and prayer or fucking whatever.

But at this point, the people who were with him already knew he fucked sex workers and they were clearly undeterred, so it didn't actually slow him down that much, despite the fact that he was the literal poster child for insincere, corrupt preacher.

That being his role in the universe, he would continue to make more money every year than you and I will ever fucking see. So, if you want a silver lining, all I can tell you is that dying hurts.

And with the fervent hope that terrible Christians die in threes, we're going to wrap up this installment of

Son of Obituary.

And John MacArthur just died. Oh, awesome.
Fours then. Fours.
I had one in mind.

Are we magic?

Before we lower the flag tonight, I want to remind you one last time to get tickets to see us in Cleveland, Ohio this weekend.

There are still general admission tickets available at godawfulmovieslive.com. And look, I've already watched the movie that we're reviewing, and it is spectacularly bad.
It's going to be a fun one.

So if there's any way you can be there, you should be there. Anyway, that's all the blessed movie we've got for you tonight.
We'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister Show's Hot Friend God Awful Movies debuting at 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and even a newer episode of our Half Sister Show Citation Did debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't shut the fuck up until I thank Heath Enright for being the glue that holds us together, Lucindelusions for being the tie that binds us, and Eli Bosnay for helping the pages stick together.

I also want to thank Jimmy Swaggart for dying. I want to thank Jeffrey for providing this week's Farnsworth quote.

Quite a challenge to do the tune justice and still come in under our time limit for Farnsworth quotes. Well done.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's most magnificent mortals, Gene and Danny, Jeremy, Adam, Jennifer, and Caleb.

Gene and Danny, who are bright enough to fuck up nearby astral photography, Jeremy and Adam, whose dicks are long enough to double his lassoes in an emergency, and Jennifer and Caleb, who are so cool their sunglasses have little sunglasses on.

Together, these six sexy secularists secured scathing scorn for the sacred this week by giving us money.

Not everybody has money, and if you'd like those people to not be us, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheist, whereby you'll earn 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 scathingadheist.com.

And if you'd like to help, but come on, money? You can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show, and following us on social media.

And speaking of social media, Tim Robertson handles that for us, and our audio engineers Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission.

If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at scathingatheist.com.

I felt so bad,

Eli, for making you catch up. I mean, obviously, Heath had to be Mayo, right?

Like, so there was like, I mean, that's insulting, but like, making you catch up, I was like, I have to be mustard, though. I'm spicier.
You're the mustard. You are the mustard.
So

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The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved. Six friends, one dinner, and then the bill.
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