644: Insufficiently Apologetic Edition

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Suffs!

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Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

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Warning, this sentence is pretty much the longest we're going to go without profanity in this show.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Mint Mobile and by the new lunch beverage for Christian kids, Capri Son of God.

Capri Son of God.

It's like a regular Capri son, but the straw never stabs in no matter how hard you try.

And even if it did, there'd be nothing in the pouch.

And now, The Scathing Atheist.

Hi, Gerald.

Hey, hey.

What are you doing in the podcast diverse?

Just hanging out in the recording recording booth with myself.

How about you?

I'm going to do the Farnsworth quote.

What's the Farnsworth quote?

Haha!

Two points for Gerald on the board!

Because I was in the GAM audience in Toronto.

Okay, so then you're going to do it?

Oh, right, right, right.

We did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey men.

It's Thursday.

It's July 3rd.

And it's stay out of the Sunday.

All right.

Still a pasty podcaster.

SPF Roof, done.

I'm no illusions.

I'm Eli Bosnik.

I'm Heath Hen Wright.

And from Jeff Van Druze, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Wake Cross, Georgia, this is Scathing East.

Oh, this week's episode, the Supreme Court establishes la la la, I can't hear you as a parental right.

The Tuck Your Face segment is about Tucker Carlson, but also Ted Cruz's skin mask.

And Raw Staltha will ask how a universe that wasn't divinely ordered by a brilliant deity could create Raw Staltha.

First, the diatribe.

Once in a while, I'm called upon in my normal day-to-day life to defend the atheist position.

And you would think that would be my superhero moment, right?

Like if the dude who took karate classes for years actually got attacked by a ninja for a change.

People around me even assume that sometimes, right?

Somebody who doesn't know what I do for a living will go, here's my problem with atheist.

And somebody who does know what I do goes, oh boy, they're in for it now.

Because yes, I know way more about Christian apologetics than the average Christian, right?

I I know the Bible better than most of them.

I know their theology better.

I know their terminology better.

I know the church's history better.

I've listened to hundreds of hours of formal religious debates.

I've spent a dozen years immersed in this shit full-time.

I know the most popular counter-apologetics, and I've got snappy comebacks to every one of them at the ready.

But, you know, for all the fancy counter-apologetics I know, the one that I use most often, In fact, the one I pretty much use exclusively in these actual in-the-wild encounters is no.

right because nobody ever comes at you with the Kalam cosmological argument or even the first mover argument if you're if you're lucky you might get Pascal's wager but what you generally get in my experience is just unhinged nonsense

maybe something like well didn't they find Noah's Ark back in the 90s Or isn't there a nun from the 1800s whose amputated leg grew back?

Or wasn't there a Chinese doctor who took pictures of people's souls leaving their bodies when they died?

You get shit like that.

And the correct answer when you're offered that kind of bullshit is just no.

Right?

No, I'm not wasting my time with your nonsense.

You haven't bothered to do enough homework to be wrong correctly.

You don't deserve my black belt counter apologetics.

You deserve some fucking internet troll copying and pasting shit they've never read into your comments.

I'll reserve my vitriol for high-class asshats like Ross Dalthat.

But that's the dirty little secret at the heart of apologetics, isn't it?

Right?

They've constructed their intricate lies and justifications in hopes that they can lose you somewhere in a knot of illogic, but it's not why they believe.

It's not why their co-religionists believe.

And so what the hell is the point of arguing with it, right?

They've already shown that refuting their arguments doesn't change their minds.

Hell, it doesn't even stop them from using that argument.

Apologetics are, generally speaking, an effort to keep intelligent people busy.

They're a delaying tactic, like when somebody suggests that you form a committee to look into the question.

As long as they pretend there's some unrefuted apologetic still out there, they can try to slow down the intellectual progress that begins with the words, so now that this religion thing has been disproved.

At the same time, they're roping us in in hopes of leeching a bit of our intellectual credibility.

Well, not my intellectual credibility, but like the smart people's, like who know things.

They repackage one of the seven arguments that they've been using for the last 600 fucking years, just enough to require our side to tweak the refutation a bit.

And then they say, see, look at all of us engaged in an intellectual debate like a bunch of intellectuals.

But the real reason people believe in religion is stuff like, I don't want to make my grandma sad.

I'm scared of dying.

And people are less mean to me when I believe as they believe.

Those motivations need no counter-apologetic, do they?

Just say it them out loud as a refutation of their validity as a way of arriving at your worldview.

So at the same time that apologetics are giving atheists a frisbee to chase, they're also serving as a hard layer between religious people and the flimsy bullshit reasons they actually stick with the family faith.

Now, none of that is to fault the atheists who go out there and debate apologists.

I think it's great that they do that.

And I'm glad that we've got a couple of well-informed ones out there representing us so that the idiots and trolls can't have that banner to themselves.

And as unconvincing as I find these ideas, that doesn't mean that they won't trick anybody.

So it is important that somebody's out there, you know, soundly refuting them.

Hell, I'm going to be fucking refuting that Ross Dalthat book again before the episode's over.

So what I'm saying isn't that nobody needs to debate religious people.

I'm just saying that you don't.

You can if you want to.

A lot of people enjoy the shit out of it, I guess, but you aren't required to.

It's perfectly all right to shrug off any challenge to your beliefs with no.

And nine times out of ten, that's going to be the right answer anyway.

They're talking about you, Jesus.

We interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news moment.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the spelling bee and wordle to my connections, Heath Enright and Eli Bosnik.

Fellas, are you ready to puzzle this shit out?

Let's get cruciferable.

Ready?

And maybe?

All right.

Well, I need a quick break to solve Eli, so we're going to pause for a word from this week's first sponsor, Mint Mobile.

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You hear that heat?

Turns out I'm ready for the beach after all.

Sunscreen on me.

SPF 50.

Oh,

you knew it, baby.

Nice.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, in Forillary, you should have voted for Hillary News.

Great name of the listener on Patreon.

The Supreme Court finished up their term last week, and they ruled that Christianity.

Yep.

Yeah.

So Jill Stein and the Green Party got some ballot access, maybe?

I don't know.

Yeah, no, I remember seeing them this year.

Democrats got delivered a very stern message.

That's cool.

But also we have a Christian theocracy.

Even more.

Pros and cons.

Here's a quick list of the latest cons, which are going to continue for decades.

I'll start with a reminder that bodily autonomy is gone.

That was three years ago from this court.

And more recently, we got rulings that said states can defund reproductive health care if it's not Christian.

They can set up a nanny state for porn.

Birthright citizenship might go away.

RFK Jr.

is officially in charge of medical science.

And the existence of LGBTQ people as a concept is optional in public schools now.

Yeah.

Honestly, I'm surprised they didn't just go ahead and appoint Trump to the position of emperor from the Warhammer games.

You know what I'm saying?

They're gone,

but taking away all our rights at once is less fun.

It's a cram it all in your mouth at once versus savor every bite proposition, you see.

That's what it is.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

And a big thanks to Joshua and many others for sending emails about the news to scathingnews at gmail.com with subject lines that say things like, why voting correctly matters, you stupid fucks.

Joshua gets the prize of idiots being mad at him for his correctness.

And let me tell you, Josh, it's fun stuff.

Enjoy.

So I'll start with the ruling in Medina v.

Planned Parenthood, South Atlantic.

The 6-3 Christian right majority ruled that South Carolina is allowed to exclude Planned Parenthood from their list of approved Medicaid providers because,

well, Christianity again.

That means people on Medicaid do not have the right to choose their doctor if that doctor provides anything that Christian theocrats don't like.

The state can also ban coverage for non-abortion services at places like Planned Parenthood, like cancer screenings, because that might happen in a building, that cancer screening, in a building with un-Christian stuff like bodily autonomy in a different room.

Yeah, I mean, wait till they hear about all the out-of-wedlock babies roaming free in America's hospitals.

Well, right, yeah.

But so here, we need to be clear that South Carolina already effectively banned abortion, right?

They passed a heartbeat bill back in 2023.

So they're not even going after abortion with this.

This is legitimately about like fucking contraception access and poor people having medicine at this point.

Yeah, sure is.

Next up, we have Kennedy, the Braidwood management.

This was about a public health panel called the Preventative Services Task Force, which said that companies have to provide insurance that covers, you know, all the real medicine.

But the plaintiffs, a company owned by Christian bigots, got mad because that included drugs to prevent HIV.

So the ruling said that public health advisory boards are, in fact, real and you have to follow them.

Sounds good, right?

Wrong, idiot.

All those boards are run by RFK Jr.

now.

Yeah.

There's no winning this case.

And literally two hours before the ruling, Secretary Whale Chainsaw dismantled another advisory panel, the one on vaccines called ASIP, and he handpicked a new panel of anti-vaxxer lunatics.

Okay.

I know I've said this a lot since Trump was elected, but that terrible outcome was unrelated to the Supreme Court.

I mean, we just can't blame them for everything, Keith.

Yeah.

Well, right.

So anytime the SCOTIS is trying to determine like which part of the government is in charge of something, their decision has to land on something evil now.

Yeah.

Yep.

All right.

Next up, we have Free Speech Coalition v.

Paxton.

And yes, that would be Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the abortion bounty guy with an eyeball that I would describe as nomadic, I think.

So the court was ruling on a Texas law that requires every porn site to have official ID verification in place.

Lawmakers claim it's to prevent kids from seeing porn.

Well, it's not accomplishing that.

Kids

finding porn is like life finding a way.

They'll make the Jurassic Park of porn if they want, regardless of the law.

Yes, they will.

Given that fact, and also the problem of making everyone provide government ID that connects them with any of the porn they watch, the plaintiffs want the law removed.

And of course, the Christian Right majority ruled, once again, six to three, that red taping porn is totally legit.

Right.

And look, even if you agree with porn ID laws, which you shouldn't because they're stupid and dangerous and do the opposite of what you're hoping they'll do, It's worth mentioning that all of these laws require IDs for explicit material, not just porn, which means they are very openly preparing to use these laws to collect the information of, and then eventually arrest, people who look for other things like being gay or trans

or whatever they are.

Mail-ordering condoms out of wedlock is where we're going.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

All right.

Last but not least, we have mahmoud v taylor yeah and once again we got a six to three ruling that christ is in fact god that was ruled by the court again basically this one centered around the curriculum at public schools in montgomery county maryland bigot parents got mad about books that were teaching gay indoctrination that's not what was happening the books were actually just having the existence of non-hetero characters once in a while.

Well, that's religious persecution.

So the bigot parents demanded the option to remove kids from any class that might have conceptual existence persecution in it.

Not clear how many books contain hetero characters that are persecuting the church of gay stuff that we all just joined, but regardless, the ramifications of the ruling are completely absurd.

A single period of biology class would need like 20 different timeouts to swap out kids, might have their religion persecuted by exposure to things that are are true.

Right.

Green and yellow leave the room.

Blue, red, and orange can come back in.

There's no reasonable system for this.

Tyler, stay out in the motherfucking hall.

Your family are Jehovah's Witnesses.

None of this.

You're out for all of this.

Should you even be in the school building?

You're expelled, Tyler.

I don't know how to tell you this.

You're fucking expelled.

Jesus.

And keep in mind that this ruling sets no precedent about how to handle that withdrawal.

So with this as groundwork, look forward to my kid never went to science class but still deserves an A V Texas next summer.

Yep.

And just a reminder about how truly detached from reality the Christian right majority has become, during oral arguments in Mahmoud v.

Taylor, Neil Gorsuch brought up an example of a persecution book for kindergarten ages called Pride Puppy.

He felt He felt persecuted by a puppy.

And he said, isn't that the book where the kids are supposed to look for the leather and bondage?

He also claimed the book featured a sex worker.

And that's when a lawyer for the school district had to explain that, no, no, Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court justice, the kindergarten book does not have a sex worker in it.

And in terms of leather and bondage, are you talking about?

The lady in a leather jacket in that book.

There's a lady in a leather jacket.

Is that it?

You brought this with you, man.

Yeah.

So that's the Supreme Court of the United States, everybody.

Looking forward to the next term.

Good times.

Yeah.

Well, look on the bright side.

Heathers a salad cheese.

We get nuked before that happens.

It's true.

Hey, it's true.

Vote better.

Yeah.

And in show me your dick news, as we battle against American absurdist theocracy here in the U.S., it's easy to forget that we are not alone.

There...

are religious nuts everywhere.

Their demands are just as insane.

And we got a great example of that this week when, as part of rising tensions with the church, the prime minister of Armenia offered to literally show the church his penis.

Okay, Eli.

This is deep fake by Senor Pets to glorify his native Turkey and discredit his rival.

Don't get ahead of me, Heath Enright.

Do not get ahead of me.

Yeah, so first things first, big thanks to Stuart for being the very first to send us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Stuart, I would totally offer to show you my dick as a prize for sending us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com.

But those hard asses over at the Creator Accountability Network take all the fun out of everything.

Scathingnews at gmail.com, Stuart.

Wink.

Yeah.

So, no, hey, if you too want assurances that Eli won't show you his dick, be sure to send us some news stories, right?

That's the only way to know for sure.

My wife starts sending it a bit.

Right, so this story actually goes back quite a bit.

And if, like me and Heath, you've had to unfollow senior pets on Facebook long ago based on the deeply problematic things he said about Armenia, you might be unfamiliar with the situation.

So let's fill you in.

All right, asked and answered.

Got it.

You guys remember when you could follow this show without a lexicon and a pedigree chart?

I did.

I sure do.

Seven new listeners an episode.

Seven new listeners an episode.

The Armenian Apostolic Church and the nation's prime minister, Nicole Pashnian,

have been at odds since this election in the so-called Velvet Revolution that took place back in 2018.

Then, P.

Dog lost a war against Azerbaijan in 2020, and the church has become a symbol of anti-state resistance ever since.

But this particular fight started back in May when P.

Dog accused the head of the church, Catholicus Karascan II, of breaking his vow of celibacy and fathering a child, demanding the church leader's replacement.

Government-affiliated media then circulated photos and the names of K-Dog's alleged daughter, while the PM established a coordination group to organize the election of a new church leader, despite the Armenian constitution, very explicitly saying he's not allowed to do that.

Okay.

Well, the Velvet Revolution, I like that title.

It sounded pretty cool, but now it's

rubbing me the wrong way.

Velvet.

Unfortunately, the revelatory pictures of a lady existing didn't turn out to be as as damning as P.

Dog thought.

So he just detained 16 people, including Archbishop Bagrat Gestlian, a senior cleric who leads the opposition's sacred struggle movement, and accused them of plotting Hunger Game-style terrorist attacks against him and the country of Armenia.

Why don't you just accuse him of raping children?

Like, who the fuck wouldn't believe?

A priest raped a kid, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Why go make it hard on yourself?

Just trying to come up with the best possible lie.

It's so easy.

Exactly.

Anyways, all of this led to a, I'm not joking, Facebook post by a priest in the southern town of Massis who alleged that P.

Dog had been circumcised, comparing him to Judas and implying that he wasn't a Christian.

So in respond, the prime minister of the country told his 1.1 million followers on Facebook that he was prepared to expose himself to the head of the Armenian church and his spokesman to prove that they were wrong.

You see, my dick, I'll show you my dick.

Yeah.

And then repeated his challenge about the illegitimate child in the same post.

Really?

I don't think the illegitimate daughter is going to have foreskin, but also that's not, it's not very helpful either.

It's a weird challenge.

That's a weird challenge.

It is a weird challenge.

So yeah, this is all very silly.

Oh, you just meant the okay.

I understood.

I did.

I got it.

It took me a second.

I was holding you up.

I was yes, Anna.

Just repeated the illegitimate child lie thing.

Got it?

Yeah.

So, yeah, this is all very silly, but it also has very real political consequences for the future of a country.

So, you know, like all theocracy, it's hilarious and it's also terrifying.

Yeah.

They're not always hilarious.

And in Iranomonopoeia news.

That was the official military strike plan from Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and the warmonger wing of the Republican Party when they set up Operation Midnight Hammer to attack Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities.

Donald Trump sat down in the war room.

He mimed a falling bomb, I'm assuming, and he was like, boo!

And then Pete jumped in to help with more explodey noises, or maybe Pete vomited because he was Midnight Hammered, not clear.

Hat tip to G.

Mork on Patreon for Midnight Hammered.

Well, the topic of attacking Iran led to an idiot fight on Tucker Carlson's little vlog that he has on Twitter between Tucker and Ted Cruz.

So we got to watch these two intellectual luminaries duke it out about Iran, anti-Semitism, and the prophetic meaning of the Bible.

Spoiler, everyone lost in that debate.

Okay, well, maybe if the rest of the crowd had joined in when I started chanting fight, fight, fight, you know, there's no crowd.

All right.

So let me set the stage for everyone losing everywhere.

Tucker Carlson is considered a journalist.

Let's start there.

There it is.

And he has a show.

People watch it, apparently.

Ted Cruz is a senator.

Also, Texas, where he is a senator, Texas is a place that we have.

Well, we're trying to do something about that due lack of regulations.

Just let it work itself out.

So Tucker and Ted sat down on the set of Tucker's vlog.

with, I think, a Renaissance oil painting of Ronald Reagan giving a speech in the background of that set.

So we're looking at Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, and Ronald Reagan in an oil painting.

Not a good start.

Yeah.

I know it's a weird nitpick, but it's a triple panel painting of Ronald Reagan giving a speech like the way Monet did with water lilies over seasons.

I just, I really want to watch his signature getting worse and worse in each panel.

You know what I'm saying?

All right.

Well, here's how they got to a discussion of the Bible.

Tucker's been part of the anti-war camp among Republicans, and his isolationism lands him on the correct answer of, don't just bomb stuff.

And Ted Cruz believes in just bomb stuff, I guess.

Keep in mind, these are both outspoken Christians.

So I feel like that source of absolute morality might have some flaws.

It kind of doesn't work for everybody in the same way.

Well, Cruz justified his position by referencing the Bible verse that says, Those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

Apparently, that was God telling

American politicians from the future, who are going to be part of a religion called Christianity from the future, to bless a war criminal from the future named Benjamin and help out with bombing a country from the future called Iran.

Yeah, right.

It cut to God going, fuck, dead, I meant supporting the Highways and Byways Beautification Act kind of shit.

What the hell are you doing?

Yeah, if the Bible was written today, the New York Times headline would be like, IDF employs controversial tactic towards Ammonite baby skulls.

Right.

Yeah, so that led to a debate about the correct interpretation of the Bible verse.

It started with Tucker asking, hey, what verse is that?

Name the part of the Bible it's from.

The answer is Genesis, by the way, famously, the first book.

But Ted had no idea.

He just said, I learned it in Sunday school.

So just to be clear, Ted Cruz was using Bible study for kids from like the 1970s to justify a military strike in 2025.

Tucker pushed back on that and wondered if that verse is talking about the modern state of Israel, or perhaps instead it's just a vague, nice thing about the people of ancient Israel in a book written by people from ancient Israel.

Except Tucker's an idiot, so he didn't mention that last part.

Regardless, that's apparently an ongoing debate.

in the Christian community.

Some people, like Ted Cruz, are pretty sure that you have to support the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, or else you're anti-biblical and anti-Semitic.

Right.

Unfit to be mayor of New York.

Yes, exactly.

They only want to be one of those two things.

Right.

We also got a fun moment when Tucker had some very basic questions about the country that Ted Cruz wanted to attack with bombs.

Tucker asked Cruz to describe the majority religion and ethnicity of the people of Iran.

And Cruz was able to correctly identify the Persian ethnicity and the Shia branch of Islam.

But then Tucker asked for percentages and Cruz had no idea and Cruz got mad.

Tucker also asked, how many people live in Iran, by the way?

Cruz said, I don't know.

And Tucker said, at all?

You don't know the population of the country you seek to topple?

And that's when Ted started flashing red like the end of a boss fight.

How dare you ask me to know a basic fact?

You guys remember when Ted Cruz was going to be like the intellectual Republican and then he realized that was like trying to be the loudest mime, so he got a mullet.

Remember when he tried to go viral for his Simpson impressions?

God, no.

What?

God tall.

YouTube were dying.

I really don't want to.

It's the best.

Yeah.

Remember when he liked some porn on 9-11?

That was fun.

No, that I get.

Okay.

So yeah.

It wasn't 2001.

Doesn't matter though.

So yeah, 2025 is a weird fucking time.

Trump's done so many insane things that I found myself agreeing with Joe Rogan on anti-fascism this year, Josh Hawley on healthcare, Elon Musk on the stupidity of a budget bill, and a violent five-year-old on punching your dad in the face.

And even Eli was on board with that stuff whilst being punched in the face by a five-year-old.

By a violent five-year-old, it's true.

And now we can add Tucker Carlson to the list of agreements i don't like it but when you're sitting across from ted cruise with oil painting ronald reagan in the background you kind of just back your way into being correct sometimes at least in relative terms but also tuck your face like you're terrible too tucker and now i'm agreeing with ted cruise i hate right yeah there's no right way to go everything

and finally tonight In pride from his cold dead hand news, there's a common claim among strongmen dictatorships that their countries don't have any LGBTQ people in them.

It's part of the cultural emasculation that props up those types of leaders to begin with.

We've seen that from Castro, Ahmedajad, Lukashenko, Mugabe, Vladimir Putz.

The list is depressingly easy to put together.

And so it should come as no surprise that Hungary's autocratic Bowser Jr.

of a prime minister, Viktor Orban, declared this year that he was putting an end to Budapest's annual pride parade.

Well, it looks like gay icon Barbara Streisand loaned her effect to LGBTQ rights for the day, and his declaration led to the largest pride parade in the nation's history by far.

Fantastic.

Yeah, he candymanned himself, but with the gay community.

Yes.

And I got to imagine he's a lot more scared about the gay community sneaking up behind him than he would be candyman.

Gay candyman shows up.

Hey, Victor, you're just.

What are you doing?

You're just stuck in a briar patch and you're covered in tar.

Did you just do that?

You got to read that more carefully, man.

Anyway, I'm going to go to the pride parade and do some Molly.

I can figure it out.

So, yeah, so as is usually the case when strongmen dictators start picking on minorities, this is all part of a larger effort to distract the populace from what a shit job he's doing and his administration is doing running their country.

The economy is shit.

So he tries to stir up anger at gay people with the promise that he's going to do something about that instead of the economy.

Now, this resulted in a resolution in March that amended the nation's right to free assembly to exclude things like gay rights demonstrations.

And they use the tried and true, they're trying to corrupt the children defense that works so well here.

Anyway, so they rammed through this law and the law said no gay pride parades.

Just so many loopholes, idiot.

Yeah, well, exactly.

So in the first of many glorious fuck you's in this story, Budapest's mayor just renamed the Budapest Pride Festival Budapest Pride Freedom.

And he said, what?

No,

this is a celebration of the freedom that we have to celebrate not having an autocratic government that happens to use rainbows.

Nice.

And so Orban's government is like,

who the fuck are you?

Heathen, right?

That doesn't count.

We're doing a shame parade.

We're very shameful about our pride.

It's the opposite.

Fuck you.

So, yeah.

So Orban goes on TV.

He promises that he's going to fine anybody who marches and he's going to throw the organizers in jail.

And in the second glorious fuck you, the parade that normally draws like three or four thousand people brought a hundred thousand attendees from all over the country.

Love it.

And now those fines are going to fix the economy.

So

everybody wins, right?

It's like tariffs.

Yeah.

So, two other glorious fuck you's that I want to highlight.

One is that state media went out hoping to get like video of the typical Pride Parade Bacchanalia for their look at what they're showing to kids B-roll.

But the organizers knew they wanted to do that.

So they asked the attendees to dress conservatively.

And it's a really conservative country.

So they did.

So instead, the best that the TV networks could do was like, look at all this traffic that they've created.

Look at these gay people in their pleated dockers.

Damn it.

Yeah.

And so, and the other fuck you was when a bunch of Christian counter-protesters thought that they could bring the whole thing to a halt by blocking a bridge.

But

the parade just used a different bridge.

They just went around.

And when they did, they had to push through a bridge that was a little bit smaller.

So that created this like incredible, iconic photo that's running with every international story about how badly this backfired for Orban.

Christians are standing there on their bridge.

Plenty of room on this bridge.

And

I am very unsteady for the record, if anyone's wondering.

Okay, I love that these Christian idiots thought a parade has to, you know, follow the route from ways.

That's like a rule or something.

Yeah.

So they tried to set up this big showdown and the parade just walks anywhere else.

And they're like, fuck.

Three dimensions right.

Damn it.

Right.

Really only two matter right now.

It's like, it's like bigot Gandalf yelling, you shall not pass.

And then Rainbow Balrog just walks over to the next block.

And it's like, all right, now

I got Kazadim over here.

So in the end, it doesn't look like anyone was fined for marching or arrested for organizing.

And Orban looked both weak and petty in the media.

So he lowered his standing with both his supporters and his opponents.

And he drew international attention to how repressive and backwards his national policies about LGBTQ rights are.

And his attempt to divide Hungarians them against him.

What I'm saying is it's hard to fuck up worse than that, but I still have confidence that Trump will find a way.

And on that note, I hope we're going to wrap the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Chumaji.

And when we come back, we'll doubt that, doubt it once again.

The other day, I described my job at a party as making bad decisions for a living.

And when I said that, I was specifically thinking about the fact that I had to read another chapter of Ross Douthett's Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, and this week's installment of God-awful books.

So now it's time for chapter one, The Fashioned Universe.

And I cannot tell you how disappointed I was when I saw that title, right?

Because as silly as Douthett is, I was assuming that he wouldn't bother writing this book if he had nothing to say.

But the fact that his opening bid is a full chapter on how puddle-shaped puddle-shaped the hole is, one of it, like the most refutable of all the standard apologetics, is all but an admission that this book is going to contain no new ideas and we will not have to engage our brains for anything other than the construction of humorous analogies.

Yeah, Ross is too intellectual as, no, he's not.

Is too analogy.

Well done.

Well done.

Well, he's what the New York Times editorial opinion reader thinks is a smart Christian.

Sure.

This is all coming together.

Yeah, right.

So he starts off taking us back to a time when the burden of proof was on the skeptic of God.

That's not how the burden of proof was like there was never a time when the null hypothesis was the one that needed justification.

It's just saying it's a little unfair.

I'm already bringing the claim.

Feels like you have to bring the proof.

He's trying to steal no, there's not by saying, no, there's not not.

Ha!

He's the atheist now.

That's nothing, buddy.

That's nothing.

Hope you don't spend a whole chapter on it.

Good luck.

Yeah.

He's like, try to imagine what made beliefs so reasonable back then.

And I'm like, ignorance, Ross.

But it is telling that the first thought experiment in the book is, let's go back to a time when nobody really knew anything.

Think how motivated your reasoning would have been when the child mortality rate was 50%.

Yeah.

Seriously, no, I wasn't exaggerating.

To start this entire argument, Ross says, this is not rigorous theological history at all, but

just let me fucking do it anyway.

Just roll me anyway.

Oh my god, we're on page 16.

We're all of 16 pages in before he has to bust out the argument from stuff sure is pretty sometimes.

May I read the quote?

I love this quote so much.

Please, yeah.

In your own embodied existence, you find yourself surrounded by complex machines of flesh and bone, filament and fiber, animals and insects, trees and flowers, their individual operations woven together in still more complicated ecosystems.

And these systems don't just manifest a crude functionality.

They often seem beautiful, graceful, and sublime, offering visions that even on an ordinary day can stir extraordinary awe that both inspire and exceed the human capacity for art.

He jacked off to that paragraph.

Well, apparently Ezra Klein was watching Ross type this over shoulder at the New York Times office and just laughing hysterically.

Ross immediately jumps from that to, the Bible says, though, like right after, stuff is pretty sometimes.

Very next sentence.

The Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God, Ezra.

Fuck you.

Yeah, right, right.

And then he's like, now you might think, why would a loving God make a world with childhood cancer and Jeff Dunham?

But hey, calm the fuck down.

This is chapter one.

Okay.

Okay.

Child cancer is woven it's woven right i say yeah it's a weird admission here where he's also he's like also religion makes you feel more special yeah he mentions all the evil in the world and then he says it would be strange not to wonder about its purposes or where you fit into them so to be clear ross thinks about like baby cancer and wonders

what's my special role here yeah how do i fit into that maybe i should interview peter teal

which he did recently.

Yeah.

So he's like, you know, we're obviously more special than other animals.

And I'm like, no, we're not, though.

You're already wandering into one of the chief destructive concepts of your religion as though it's a priori knowledge.

Let's begin with the understanding that I could beat up a gorilla all by myself.

I'm lost too passive.

Yeah, so actual quote.

So if pondering the seeming orderliness of the cosmos points to the existence of some divine intelligence, pondering the nature of the human mind points to the possibility that we are just a little bit divine as well, end quote.

Which is a statement factually equivalent to, well, if a buffalo is a tiny pink mailbox, then cockatiels have x-ray vision.

That's not fair, Noah.

Your statement made way more sense than all of my

plain English, at least.

I swear I'm not making this quote up.

Okay, so he's talking about humans being made in God's image, and then he says, quote, these seem like boasts, but in our reimagined world where religion seems reasonable,

they are also just logical inferences.

If we reimagine the world as Christian, ergo propterhawk, Christianity,

a priori, ex,

well, quid pro.

I win.

Well, and then he talks about the existence of spiritual, mystical, or numinous experiences.

And he's like, yes, you may never have had one of these.

But remember, the ground rules are no-knowing stuff for this part of the chapter.

So you have to imagine that you believe other liars when they say that they've had spiritual experiences.

Just Ezra weeping.

You're going to get water on my science.

How's your book going, buddy?

You're doing really good on your book.

I am.

It's going to be a bestseller.

Uh-huh.

So, okay.

So having established that it all makes sense if you're stupid and have no knowledge of how anything works, he's going to knock science down to size with the subheading, what really changed with Copernicus and Darwin?

Oh, nothing.

Nothing changed.

We just learned the Bible was wrong the whole time.

And yep, it had been the whole time.

Yes.

He points out how this, like, you know, the whole is exactly puddle-shaped argument is very common across many cultures and is still believed today.

And I'm like, oh, yeah, like the flat earth or the existence of ghosts.

Okay.

I'll never understand this one.

If there's a design, it is not intelligent.

Like female hyenas have a pseudopenis that stabs the baby in the face during birth sometimes.

Jesus.

The babarussa stabs itself in the skull with its own tusks sometimes.

They grow into its own skull and it stabs itself.

Like, just in terms of self-stabbing, this whole thing.

Right.

Just admit your God is a bad designer and your argument is so much easier.

It's still wrong, but it's a lot easier.

Yeah.

Also, they never describe what a non-created universe would look like, right?

Right.

Would there be random laws of physics?

Would there be different biological constants every day?

Why would that make a universe less godly?

Right, right.

And again, even if you gave them that universe, they'd be like, well, clearly this one was made by God.

Look, there's pretty stuff in it.

He says Copernicus and Darwin, that is heliocentrism and evolution by natural selection, are the chief things that moved us away from God-belief.

Now, that's a rhetorical trick, right?

Because no, they're not.

He will now focus, though, on those two things rather than all the logical fallacies at the heart of his argument, i.e., without the orderly universe, we couldn't be here to ask where the orderly universe came from in the first place.

Also, Ross, I feel like you're giving away way more ground than you mean to when you admit that the core of your belief system about the eternal truths of the universe got the sun wrong.

Please stay away from that one.

So, okay, but his argument is that those revolutions, those scientific revolutions, only destroyed the conception of faith back then.

So, God belief, according to Dalthat, just needed to be adjusted rather than abandoned.

So

God gave us a book of wrong beliefs as a test

to help us grow?

Is God the dad in a boy named Sue?

Well, look, this is an argument that's really easy to make when you ignore all the specific ways that the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions undermined your belief system.

Yeah.

If that's your argument, then stop using the Bible.

Write a new one.

Get some amendments on the books at least.

Come on.

Sure.

So here's another real quote.

Quote, the scientific revolution has repeatedly revealed deeper and wider evidence of cosmic order than was available to tether the senses of the reasoning faculties in the pre-modern world, end quote.

Okay, how would the opposite of that work?

We looked into it and fuck, it's a mess down there.

Well, right.

So he's trying to or he's he's trying to argue.

Well, he's not even trying to argue this.

He's just pretending that the assumption is that God belief would make everything more orderly, that you would expect expect things to be orderly if God created the universe, right?

I don't know where the fuck he got that, but he's pretending that that's true.

And his first example is: well, I used to think that the planets were entirely chaotic, which nobody ever thought and wouldn't help your fucking argument.

Also, everything looks chaotic until you figure out a pattern for it.

And for this example, we found that orbits are an ellipse.

And Ross was like, Stewie's head equals God.

That's a God thing.

Yeah.

Like, right.

Hey, Ross, what shapes mean atheism?

Just so we know for future stuff.

Yeah.

Do some of them give us the win?

Big shout out to Ancient Eli, though, when Ancient Heath was like trying to use a stethoscope or whatever to track the planets.

And Ancient Eli was just like, no, man, it's all fucked up there.

Don't please.

I'm telling you.

Wasting your time, man.

No point.

If I find a scalene triangle, there's no more God?

Like, what works?

Well, they neither

like orbits.

Like, if they went in squares, right, science would have a lot lot of trouble with that.

But yeah, so okay, so but this descends into a non-argument that could be best summarized as the more we know about the world, the more sense it makes, right?

But he ignores the fact that all that's, at least for now, he ignores the fact that all that sense-making started when we began ignoring religious proclamations and mystical thinking, right?

He's ignoring the thing that made the scientific revolution, the scientific revolution.

Right, Ross, things make sense is only surprising to you because your belief system had managed to make less sense as we went on.

Yeah.

I can see why you're impressed, Rob.

Well, so, and then he gives us this docsy, quote, the progress of science has been guided throughout by assumptions initially instilled by the religious perspective that the world at every level should be governed by predictable systems, end quote.

To be clear, again, that is the exact opposite of what the religious perspective would have you believe and what it had people believing, right?

And he does nothing whatsoever to justify that insane assertion it's governed by predictable systems except for when god's son dies then uh-huh the sun goes out for an afternoon right and then god photocopies his dead son's ass into a sheet made of fabric from the future and eventually gets it to turn predictable mysterious ways i guess is what that is yes exactly systematic so okay so now we're on to darwin we're done with cosmology apparently we're on to biology And he's like, sure, it would be easier on us religious people if all of the animals had sprung into existence fully formed instead of evolving over billions of years.

But hey,

maybe God is incredibly lazy.

Oh, he's coming around to your points, Biefleton.

Yeah.

He's coming around.

Yeah, okay.

He describes Darwin's work as life's ascent from bacteria to bach, which Ross definitely over, but he was like, Bach for sure.

Yeah, oh, sure.

Even though he was typing, he somehow said.

Bacharella.

yeah and that means ross believes that god wanted beautiful music and this omnipotent being was like algae

there now we wait yeah right not all of you give it give it a couple billion years just let it go let it go let it cook like me and noah helping heath set up the fucking step and repeat it in a live show

well that bag is unzipped we'll let you take it from here

Okay, but he points out that Darwin did not explain the fundamental ordering of the universe.

And I'm like, yeah, man.

He also didn't explain what people saw in Glenn fucking Powell.

That's not relevant to this discussion.

Right.

But his point here is, if you're going to disprove the thing that I use to answer every question I've ever had, you have to answer every question I've ever had while you do it.

Right.

Yeah.

Or else it doesn't count.

Yep.

Yep.

Quote, it, that is evolution by natural selection.

did not explain the law-bound material substructure required for evolution to take place or the equations governing the cosmic superstructure or the enduring evidence of mind as matter's ultimate foundation.

End quote.

So the first two aren't biology and the and the third one isn't anything at all.

That's just bullshit.

Yeah.

And if by the time you've read this book,

it has found the answer to those things.

I have a different God to fit my gap into.

Give me one second.

A different gap to fit your God into, but yeah.

It's the failed magician argument.

Like double that.

According to Ross, God was

God was like, okay, stay with me.

God was like, okay, gonna conjure humans on day six.

Poof.

Fuck.

That's it's algae.

That's algae.

Okay.

But where did the algae come from, everybody?

And when science explains abiogenesis, he's like, fuck, okay, okay.

But where did the coming from come from?

Yeah, right.

So, okay, so, but keep in mind, guided evolution is irreconcilable with evolution by natural selection.

He's defining neither of those things because that would entirely negate his argument, but that's kind of important here.

But he seems to think, or at least wants his readers to think, that the only thing that heliocentrism and natural selection did was kind of knock humans off the pedestal of specialness, right?

I just have one question for Copernicus and Darwin.

Are we human or are we dancer?

The killers.

If the whole book feels like a bad stump speech.

You know, like, I think motors are smarter than science, mumbo, jumbo.

Like, that's the whole tone.

Yep.

And then, okay, on page 24, I shit you not.

He literally gets what planet he is on wrong.

Right?

I had, I stared at this for so fucking long.

I was looking at charts of the fucking solar system going, I'm right on this, right?

But he describes Earth as, quote, the fourth planet from a minor sun, end quote

Ezra weeping with laughter

this is the guy who's doling out wisdom on how the universe functions maybe he's counting how bullshit his book is as a planet

It has a gravitational force.

What does that mean?

It's a TV show called Fourth Rock from the Sun.

Yeah, Fourth Rock from the Sun.

Yeah.

And then he finally gets to the point of the fucking chapter with the subheading, A Cosmos Made for Us, right?

So he opens with the Big Bang.

Now, I want to be clear.

The Big Bang does not demonstrate that time and space have a beginning they demonstrate that there is a point past which science cannot rewind right might have been the beginning but there are plenty of theories that also have a universe extant before the big bang right and we should say all that stuff is super cool and super interesting in any conversation except

But maybe that was when my wizard friend did it.

Maybe that was the moment.

Right.

And that's every conversation about like every topic with Ross Dowsett.

Also, by the way, if the Big Bang is being presented as evidence for your theory, you have to explain what your God was doing for the 12 billion years between that and the emergence of multicellular life on Earth.

He doesn't like texting.

He's just primordial oozing by himself.

I guess, yeah.

He enjoys that.

So again, he sneaks in his claim that religious belief would leave us with, quote, the expectation of lawful structure and mathematical beauty, end quote, at every level of the universe.

This is, again, the opposite of what a God did it all with miracles worldview would lead you to believe.

This is such disingenuous bullshit.

And in fact, it's so disingenuous that I feel like we can safely discount the idea that Ross Dalthat is arguing in good faith.

Yeah, if the God of the Bible existed, he's clearly chaotic evil, not lawful good.

Obviously.

Also, I was disabused of that notion when the man with the cell phone set out to write a book about how God is real.

But it's nice to have backups, right?

Well, right.

Yeah, that too.

Yeah, so, but he claims that it was, quote, by no means the expectation, end quote, that we would find such a universe so perfectly balanced for our existence.

That's his actual claim.

It has to be true, right?

There is no imaginable scenario.

You cannot even imagine a scenario where we are exploring a universe that we cannot exist in.

What if you're Tom?

Feels like Tom might be in a universe he can't exist in, right?

Honestly, if you told me the time variance authority is constantly showing up to arrest Tom, and then Tom just like punches him out of the time dimension somehow, Nick's rival,

that would track with lots of the data we have about

right?

Yeah, fair.

Grab his neck.

You don't offer me.

But he delineates a few of those precisely tuned elements of the universe, right?

The cosmological constant, the strength of the strong force, the relationship between gravity, the electromagnetic force, et cetera, et cetera.

And then he says, quote, However you draw up the list, it seems clear that our universe is held together by a set of seemingly excruciatingly carefully chosen values.

⁇

Now, that assumption can only exist, though, if you start with the assumption that humans are the end point of the universe and someone is choosing values.

Like, you have to begin by assuming your conclusion is correct for this to be evidence of your conclusion.

Yeah, you know how in America, we sort of teach world history as leading up to the discovery of America, and then from the rest of it, we just teach modern history.

Yeah, right.

This is the philosophical version of that.

For sure.

Right.

And at the end of it, he concludes that the universe was clearly designed for humans.

Otherwise, why would 0.90001% of it be habitable?

Yeah, man.

There's like so many Sudokus that are wrong.

Like, especially when you've got billions of rows and columns, that's nothing, man.

Yeah.

The solved one isn't God now.

So then he tries to argue.

that the overwhelmingly inhospitable nature of the universe is evidence for his position.

God wanted us to have room to to stretch out a bit, but not too much.

Yeah.

He's like, it would be presumptuous to say the end point of the universe was us, but

I mean, come on.

Why would it look at Rome?

Why is it so big?

Yes.

So God created humans on earth to be the point of the whole thing.

And God's watching us sitting at the head of a giant dining room table that's like 46 billion light years long.

Like,

I think I got too much house.

I got too much house.

How am I going to decorate this thing?

And then he goes quantum, right?

He opens with, quantum physics suggests our minds are making physical reality take shape.

So not a great start.

Now, Noah.

See, now if we get a headline by next week that Ross's balls exploded, I am

convinced quantumly.

There you go.

Yeah, but no, but our abilities to collapse the wave function means our brains are magic, apparently.

But we can collapse wave functions with tools, though.

Like, no physical observer needs to be there.

We just need a way to measure it.

Yeah.

Also, our brains could be magic, and there's no God.

But everyone reads a paragraph about quantum, whatever the fuck, and they're pretty sure they know kung fu in that.

Yes, this was that moment for Ross.

Yeah, yeah, right.

He was like, Ezra, let me show you something.

I'm going to show you some kung fu.

Stand still.

Give me your wrist.

Let me hurt your buddy.

Try to punch me like this.

I fell into a split.

Punch me like this call 911 tell them it's me again

so

for

yeah but to get us a little perspective on quantum physics he quotes spencer clavin who is an expert in greek literature i looked him up and then to wrap the chapter up he tackles the question of why people who know more about the stuff that he's talking about than him universally disagree with his conclusions about him.

The subheading for that one is, why don't more scientists believe?

So here we go.

Quote, even supposing that many scientists would agree with how I'm characterizing their findings, clearly many would disagree with the religion-friendly implications I'm drawing.

End quote.

Does it matter?

Cause they wouldn't agree with how you're characterizing the findings in the first place, bro.

If scientists also thought we should pretend religion is true for the sake of argument of chapter one, well,

God, that would be fucking awesome.

I agree so much.

He's like, you know, well, for hundreds of years, all the scientists were still Christian and they thought that they were actually just looking into God's design.

And And I'm like, Yeah, man, they were trying to prove your point and they accidentally proved mine.

How the fuck do you think this helps you?

Yeah, and then he accidentally makes a list of how it doesn't help him.

He's like, Right.

Okay.

Orbits are because angels really like flying in ovals, maybe.

Nope.

Science fuck it.

Science got it.

Okay.

Fossil gaps were God disproving the fossils that he made.

No, okay.

Science got that.

Got that too.

Then

Darwin really fucked up our shit.

Ah,

why did I write this part?

Yeah, right.

Fuck you, Ezra.

And then on page 31, he finally admits that moving away from religious thinking is what made science possible in the first place.

But the point is, so it's fucking amazing.

So the point is, science can't work if you're all religious about it.

And his argument is that this isn't proof that the religious worldview is wrong.

It's just a rule of thumb that scientists are getting carried away with.

Yeah.

Science is basically a religion now.

And that's bad.

That's bad.

I'm getting killed over here.

Oh, see, I feel like he was going with the formerly toxic roommate defense, right?

Like, look, I understand God was a problem during heliocentrism, but now he's just chill.

He's sitting back.

He's doing his thing.

You're doing yours.

Yeah, right, right, yeah.

You discover science while he's around.

Do the dishes.

Won't even know I'm here.

He dismisses the multiverse here for being way more complex than an infinite, timeless, atemporal, omniscient, omnibenevolent being that can create universes with his thoughts.

But what he's missing is that the multiverse concept is more popular in the scientific world than the God hypothesis because it's more feasible.

Even with all of its weirdness, it's still more feasible.

Yeah.

And he criticizes the multiverse concept by saying, it posits an infinite system that by definition cannot ever be studied from within our material existence.

Oh, no.

Also, notice the argument from like, that's our thing.

No backseason.

Yeah, you can't.

We get that.

Okay, so that, and that's where the chapter ends.

And I got to say, the truly stunning thing about this chapter to me is that he never even acknowledges the anthropic principle, right?

Like, how could we be here if we couldn't be here?

So, like, most apologists will at least admit that that exists, and then they'll try to pretend it doesn't count for this reason or that.

But Dalthat just ignores it.

And that tells me he's not aiming this book at atheists.

This book is not out to convince anybody.

It's a book meant to rescue religious belief for people by wrapping intellectual-sounding words around the thing they already believed.

Yeah, like Peter Thiel, but hinged.

That's his business card.

Yes.

I feel like he got mad when Ezra's Abundance came out and did pretty well.

He's like, fuck

Catholic.

All right.

Well, with the promises that the next chapter is going to explain how brains are magical, we'll wrap up this installment of

God-awful books.

Before we return to the construct this week, I should remind you that there are still tickets available for the God Awful Movies Live in Cleveland, Ohio this month.

That's on Saturday, July 19th, and you can find those tickets at godawfulmovieslive.com.

Anyway, that's all the blessing 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 Godawful Movies debuting at 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our Half Sister Show's Citation Needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I'd be an insult to host hood if I neglected to thank Heath Enright for being amazing, Eli Bosnick for being incredible, and Lucinda Lusions for being uncanny.

I also want to thank the Geralds for providing this week's Farnsworth quote, but most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best bipeds, Mark Shannon, that one math teacher, Sarah, Scott, Robert Logan, fancy Ursa, Other Mark, George W.

Feather, Snow, or Feathers Now, Punch Your Local Nazis, and Cole.

Mark Shannon, Math Teacher, and Sarah, who mirror or mirror on the wall was clearly overlooking.

Scott, Robert Logan, Ursa, and other Mark, who are too hot to catch a cold, and George W.

Feather, Punch Your Local Nazi, and Cole, whose names I didn't shorten down to one word, as I usually do the second time that I say them in this segment.

So weird, but they said them all the way out.

Together, these 13 people, lizard people, overlords, and instructions I don't think I'm allowed to directly endorse helped keep the lights on in the podcast reverse this week by giving us money.

Not everybody has the money it takes to give some to us, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation to patreon.com slash scathing atheist, whereby you'll earn early access to an extended ad-free version.

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Kirk also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used for permission.

If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you're funded the contact info on the contact page at scathingadious.com.

The Armenian apostetic.

Apostolic.

Apostolic.

The Armenian.

Obviously, that didn't work.

Hey, that usually doesn't work with his story.

That was the problem.

Now I forgot again.

Apostolic.

Apostolic.

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The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle and the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved.

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home!

Winner, best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We the man to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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