640: Doubt That Douthat Edition

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Warning, this podcast contains profanity, because discussing modern America without using profanity is borderline dishonest at this point.

This week's episode of the Scathing Atheist is brought to you by BetterHelp and by the new leader in diseased meats, O Maha Steaks.

If you want your beef from sources that aren't encumbered by big science, show your commitment to RFK's agenda with some O Maha steaks.

Trust us, all that shit growing and writhing around on it is fully organic.

And now, the scathing atheist.

This is Jason W.

Brooks of yourvalley.net.

As someone who covers Arizona politics for a living, I can assure you that we did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey people.

It's Thursday.

It's June 5th.

And it's Festival of Popular Delusions Day.

Okay, we're doing a show about religion.

Every day is Festival of Popular Delusions Day.

White history.

I'm No Illusions.

I'm Eli Bosnick.

I'm Heath Enright.

And from Zach Brafts, New Jersey, Anover, Michigan, and Wake Cross, Georgia, this is the Skating Atheist.

Of this week's episode, Texas presumes its students can count up to 10.

We learn about a gold scam involving Donald Trump's bullion heir.

And I'll spend the rest of the episode jealous of that bullionaire joke.

Holy shit, that's really funny.

But first, the diatribe.

Here's how bad it's gotten, y'all.

I saw a headline the other day that said, scientists finally learn what makes plants grow stronger and faster.

So I clicked on that link about 35% certain that it was going to say electrolytes.

I mean, consider the all-out war against science that they're waging here.

RFK Jr.

is banning government scientists from publishing in respected journals, lest their penchant for peer review undermine his ideological crusade.

The budget that the House just passed would cut funding for the National Science Foundation by 55%.

Trump is enacting a personal vendetta against every college he was too stupid to get into, and that's cost the world's leading research universities billions of dollars already.

The state of Louisiana just passed a law banning chemtrails.

This is an all-out and unapologetic assault on the very concept of science.

And take a second to consider what science is, right?

Science is, at least ideally, an unbiased interrogation of reality.

So a war against science is a war against reality.

This is a war waged by stupidity against the intelligence that keeps telling it it's wrong.

I mean, consider the shit going on with the CBO right now, the Congressional Budget Office.

This is a nonpartisan agency.

It's been in operation since 1974, and its whole fucking job is to look at what Congress is proposing, run the numbers, and tell them how much that would cost.

But when the CBO looked at the big, beautiful bill and they said, hey, this is going to cost like $3.7 trillion added to the national debt, their answer wasn't to fix the bill.

It was to start a fight with math to claim the CBO is politically biased, which they're not.

But even if they were, that wouldn't stop two plus two from equaling fucking four, would it?

And look, as you may have noticed, I'm not the patriotic type.

I don't rah-rah my fucking country.

But the one thing America tends to get right, at least in my lifetime, is the science.

We get it right for the wrong reasons.

Sure, our national commitment to research science is born of the fucking Manhattan Project, but we get it right nonetheless.

We recognize in a bipartisan manner that leading the world in scientific research is to the long-term benefits of our country and we have since the fucking 50s.

And because of that, U.S.

government funding of scientific research has brought us shit like the internet, GPS, MRI, LASIC surgery, Doppler radar, smartphones, and the COVID-19 vaccines.

What's more, our commitment to scientific discovery and cutting-edge research has attracted many of the brightest minds in the world to our colleges and a lot of them end up sticking around.

That's good for us as a country, but that was all before Trump pulled the plug on the national talent pool and opened the brain drain.

It is an act of scientific suicide, national suicide.

I mean, he is now pushing away foreign students, trying to revoke the ability of our leading students to enroll them, banning whole fucking countries from studying at American schools.

This is an act of national sabotage that hostile nations could only dream of.

Even if we reversed this shit tomorrow, our nation and the rest of the world would still be feeling this 50 years from now.

Since their inceptions, both the skeptical and the atheist movements have positioned themselves as the sentinels of science.

Sure, a lot of people stumbled into them because they wanted to be right and snarky and cynical.

Present company included, but those of us who have stuck around over all of these years did so because we felt like objective objective reality was both worth defending and in need of defending.

But then a lot of leading voices in our movement didn't want to get too political and alienate conservatives, so they sat on their hands as the greatest threat to science that this nation has ever faced festered and grew.

They fucking both sides this shit and pretended we were still dealing with a classic conservative versus liberal dynamic.

And while our thumbs were so thoroughly ensconced in our asses, idiocy was fast at work consolidating forces.

Consider that with RFK's involvement, Trumpism has now amalgamated Christian nationalism and natural green mommy health woo.

The two strongest forces against observable reality are under the same umbrella now.

Make no mistake, the present state of American discourse represents a wholesale systemic failure of skepticism.

We had decades to make the case for our size, and instead, the nation chose to embrace a bigoted flavor of wishful thinking.

And look, I'm not going to say I know how to fix this.

I've certainly got some ideas.

And for those, I'd encourage you to listen to the other 639 episodes of this show.

But I am going to say that we need to own this as both our fight and our failure.

The battle lines are drawn and the ranks are ours to fill.

And I'm not even going to apologize for the war metaphor here because this fight will have casualties.

People will die in direct proportion to how poorly we do in this fight.

And we need that fact ever present in our minds, informing our decisions and doling out our motivation.

Reality is is under threat, and reality is all there is.

There is nowhere to retreat to if it falls.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Mike and Dusty device, Steve Harrington, Heath Edright, and Eli Bosnick.

Fellas, are you ready for things to get stranger?

Eggos are good.

That's the thing they are.

I had to gayton keep.

What?

What?

Actor's name is Gay.

I promise the jokes get better than this part.

We're recording very late at night.

But

we wrote other stuff.

Before they do, start at the beginning of the ramp.

We'll need to pause for a word from this week's first sponsor, BetterHelp.

Don't worry, Ela.

It was a good diatribe, though.

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And you're sure it looks tough?

Dude, so tough.

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We needed them for the ring of pain.

The ring of pain?

Yeah, it's where I'm doing my therapy.

So, okay, so you're doing your therapy in an impromptu wrestling ring in our living room?

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Okay, why?

Well, Heath was telling me how important mental health care is for men, right?

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All right, guys, thanks.

But I still don't see why you needed this to be like a wrestling ring, though.

I think Eli just got carried away by the metaphor a bit.

Gonna get my depression in a leg lock.

Yeah, you sure will, bud.

Sure indeed.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, Texas is a governor's signature away from passing a law that would require every public school classroom in the state to prominently display the Ten Commandments because of, you know, all the American history that they represent.

And I know what you're thinking.

Like, haven't we seen this one before?

And yes, we have a number of times.

After a couple of false starts around the South, Louisiana managed to actually pass a similar law last year.

It was, as predicted, shot down by the courts.

Arkansas also passed a similar law last month, and I guess it hasn't been sued out of existence yet.

But Texas is confident that they're going to succeed where others have failed, or more likely, they know that they'll fail, and that that'll get Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott, a bunch of good Fox News, embattled Christians fighting against state-sponsored atheism headlines.

Yeah, it's like if Lucy had the state budget for the power grid instead of a football in her hand, you know what I'm saying?

Right.

Yeah.

And if people ask about the rolling blackouts, they just hear like, what, what, what, what?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So this is

SB 10,

and it's been milling around the legislature for the last couple of months while Democrats tried to block it or water it down.

And then failing to do any of that, they slowed it down by at least attaching an amendment that wouldn't leave the individual school districts to defend this bullshit in court.

Now that'll fall to the state's taxpayers more generally.

But it did pass both the House and Senate, and Governor Abbott has already indicated that he will sign it.

The law requires that every classroom prominently display a durable or framed poster of the King James version of all 12 of the Ten Commandments.

None of that flimsy shit.

I want the good board from Staples in the back.

Okay, I have some very prominent, very durable, and very interesting frames available.

Oh, right, right.

Yeah.

And look.

Nothing good is going to come from this, but at least something entertaining did.

So there's this Democratic Democratic representative in Texas by the name of James Tallarico, a former middle school teacher who grilled the absolute fuck out of the bill sponsor so bad that at one point her answer to his question was, quote, I'm so tired, I'm just in a brain fog, end quote.

So the official claim here is that these are they're being not posted for religious reasons, of course, but rather because the Ten Commandments are so historically important to the founding of America, right?

They're a founding document.

A claim that's both bullshit and an even worse violation of church-state separation, if you think about it.

So, Tall Rico would kind of make her say the cover story out loud and then trick her into admitting that her real goal was to make kids more Christian and then point out that she did that and then make her do it again and again and again.

Yeah, before the speaker continues, I'd like to advocate strongly that Homo does say what.

What?

Do you want to make out, by the way?

I don't know.

Brain fog.

I don't know what's happening.

Do magic.

But as good as Tallarico's grilling was, I have to reserve the top spot in snarky responses to America's best congressman, Jamie Raskin, who suggested that the Texas legislators vote on each of the commandments individually.

Fantastic.

With the proviso that they can't vote on ones that they have personally violated.

Fantastic.

And then to emphasize how sarcastic that suggestion was, he added that even better, they could, quote, respect the establishment clause and get back to work and quote that'd be great that'd be great I'm cool with the 10 commandments poster if it's redlined to indicate violations by specific lawmakers oh interesting that a lot of asterisks and redlined for you know like contradictions and and the wording and even about the number of the 10 commandments

no way to get 10 out of 10 10 asterisk yeah yeah right so and of course When the subject is 10 commandment posters in school, our first question has to be what Florida active Chaz Stevens is up to?

And yes, he's already preparing to heat the shit out of this law.

Nice.

Fuck yeah, Chaz.

Well, they seem to have made it easy on him.

Apparently, they didn't chaz-proof it well enough to even specify that the 10 Commandments posters had to be in English.

So he could go with the tried and true donate posters printed in Arabic since Christians are afraid of their alphabet trick, which he's done before.

Oldest trick in the book.

Just look it up.

Right?

And it looks like he is doing that.

And because lawmakers also neglected to specify a a font size, he's also making up some new posters with tiny little lettering for every word except for kill adultery, steal, and ass.

That's excellent.

I mean, to be fair, kill adultery and steal ass is way closer to Texas morals anyway.

Okay, just everything in binary and comic sans.

I love this.

Yeah, get in there.

He didn't proof it at all.

Yeah, well, and because the idiots included a provision in the law that says classrooms without 10 commandment posters must post a donated one if that's all they've got.

At least a few of these might actually make their way onto Texas schoolroom laws, assuming that Jeff Blackwell doesn't have his way with this law before it's ever implemented.

Get in, Jeff.

Strong.

Get inserted.

Let her wow.

And in Joni Ernst is going to die news.

Senate Republican representing the state of Iowa, Joni Ernst, held a town hall to defend the Republican budget last week, and she accidentally said the quiet part out loud.

When an attendee expressed to her that if the bill passed and 10 million people were kicked off Medicaid,

people would literally die, Ernst replied, quote, well,

we are all going to die, end quote.

And as you can imagine, Ernst has gotten quite a bit of heated feedback about that comment.

So she took to Instagram this week to both double down on her comments and push her religion.

So we are going to talk about it.

Okay.

Obviously a terrible thing to say there, but she had the only certainty about life, like famously other than taxes.

And then she mentioned a thing that claims eternal life and doesn't pay taxes.

Oh, wow.

Truly impressive how wrong that was.

Yeah.

And look, I am not endorsing political violence, right?

I'm not.

But

I think we can all agree that if an assassin was going to kill Joni Ernst,

that would have been the funniest time to do it.

She says that and just plan.

Comedic timing?

Come on.

Yeah.

In theory.

So, first off, big thanks to Craig for being the first of, oh, so many of you to send us this news to scathingnews at gmail.com.

If you've got atheist news to send us, you can do so at scathingnews at gmail.com and ensure that we won't miss the moment when Joni Ernst dies and we can celebrate accordingly.

Scathingnews at gmail.com.

Scathingnews at gmail.com because our jobs are easier when you do part of them.

It's true.

It is.

We only get weirdly mad and yell at you occasionally.

It's a low risk.

Just the one guy.

Honestly, it was just the one.

Two, three, three,

seven.

Lazy puns will be yelled at.

Yeah.

So let's have a listen to that apology.

Quote, hello, everyone.

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for a statement that I made yesterday at my town hall.

See, I was in the process of answering a question that had been asked by an audience member when a woman who was extremely distraught screamed out from the back of the auditorium, people are going to die.

And I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.

So I apologize.

And I'm really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.

But for those that would like to to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

End quote.

Yeah, the tooth fairy is dumb.

Anyway, let me introduce you to the resurrected son of God, conceived by a pedophile, ghost, and a teenager.

I'm winning.

I'm winning.

The person who's winning now.

Yeah, losing your Medicaid will help you get to heaven faster, though, is a pretty bold strategy.

I don't think I've seen that one.

It's a bold strategy, Cotton.

Let's see how it plays out for him.

Yeah.

So yeah, not only is that in no way, shape, or form an apology, she somehow managed to make it worse, which I imagine will not help her re-election chances or her popularity.

But more importantly, I just want to say for the record, people will piss on Joni Ernst's grave when she dies.

I'm not saying they should.

I'm not saying they should.

It's just a thing.

It's going to happen.

And if Joni...

or anybody she loves or cares about is upset by that fact, I've got some bad news about the Easter bunny for you.

Well, okay, to be clear, I'm saying that they should.

Okay, good.

Two votes.

She sets up that grave before she dies.

There's also the chance for that.

I don't know.

And on that note, we're going to pause for a quick break and hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucy.

A man wrote the Bible, a horse, which marks it's a legitimate race.

Cooking can be fun.

Hey, I'm proud of a man.

This week in Mississauga.

Hey, folks.

So I'm trying to quit smoking right now and it just so happens that this record falls on my first day without a cigarette at all, which means I'm way too angry and frazzled to deal with the news cycle I normally have to dredge through to bring you this segment.

So I'll tell you what, instead of telling you about misogynists this week, I'm going to use my manic cravings energy to go find one and stab him in the fucking eye.

And on that note, I'll hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli.

Thank you, Lucinda.

Next up in headlines in Da Vinci Codex News,

as white smoke filled the sky over Vatican City and the world learned that Bob was our new pope, we wondered together what kind of pontiff we were about to get.

Well, I'm pleased to announce that our very first story, after the fact that Pope Bob has a racist Republican brother, is that the Vatican Library plans to restore and digitize over 80,000 manuscripts in their collection.

So until we find out all the other stuff that he has no doubt done and is currently doing, Pope Bob is currently at zero

in all the workplaces in the entire world.

The Vatican's days since, you know, whatever, are the most upsetting by far.

Yeah, there's probably like a whole row of them.

They're like, well, this one's really high up.

This one's a high number.

And we're like, well, yeah, that's that's days since you led a genocidal military

And

it's not that high for that.

It's not high in the Finn on your land.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So first off, big thanks to Tucker for sending both the link for this story and that fantastic pun to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Tucker, when the scathing atheist archive is built in gold plate into a mountain of iron, only you will bear the key to our

Google Docs.

Scathingnews at gmail.com.

Assuming you signed the NDE, Tucker.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A bunch of them.

So yeah, the agreement in question is a five-year contract with the Kulnagi Foundation to preserve 82,000 documents and 1.6 million books, some of which date back to before 1501.

And it also includes a architectural renovation of the library to be carried out by the David Chipperfield firm.

Okay, well, that sounds like the name of a really sleazy magician, right?

Dave

Chipperfield.

And all of that would be purely good news if it wasn't just the Vatican stopping doing a bad thing they've already been doing, right?

They've been hoarding these books for almost a thousand years.

Many of them are now badly decomposed.

And much of the information, history, and knowledge they contain will be lost forever because the people watching them have been untrained non-professionals whose job qualifications are exclusively loving Jesus a super lot.

Okay, this is me and my friend Dan in the 80s 80s all over again.

Fucking Dan with the full Cobra Terror Dome set from GIG.

And I never got to touch it.

We never played with it.

Fucker.

Yeah, look, hoarding knowledge is bad enough, but hoarding knowledge that you're not knowledgeable enough to know is fucking criminal.

They have squandered some of the most valuable historical resources in the world for centuries.

Right.

Yeah.

So this is super exciting.

And while I'm sure a ton of new like history and information and learning will come from this, it's important to remember that the only reason we didn't have this information hundreds of years ago is because the Vatican didn't want to share their toys.

Yep.

Let's hope in the reign of Pope Bob, these improvements and modernity continue.

Okay, but until he admits that God doesn't exist, he's not off the hook with me.

That's fair.

God, that would be so sweet.

He was just like, God,

like the fucking wizard?

Come on.

Don't.

And finally tonight, in pirate-wing conspiracy news,

Donald Trump wants to do a personal inspection of Fort Knox to make sure nobody stole all our gold.

And for helping his family profit from another giant corruption scam, as usual, it all tracks perfectly.

Obnoxious displays of wealth, abusive power, and insane conspiracy theories are like, you know, the raindrops and roses for this guy so despite having one of the most secure facilities in the world a meticulous auditing system and direct assurance from his own treasury secretary scott besson trump wants to go in there and check himself the gold with biting i guess he's gonna go in there and bite it

Okay, honestly, if he just got in there and started stuffing bars down his shirt while whistling loudly, it would not be more blatant than how he is currently treating our nation, right?

It certainly would not be worse than the crypto thing.

No.

No, not even close, actually.

So just for context, we have 147.3 million ounces of gold stored in Fort Knox.

And Trump's going to wait.

Yeah.

All right.

That's like one.

Give me a second.

And then I put like two back.

Give me a second.

I make sure that the same weight.

A little heavy here.

Yeah.

In terms of volume, that's about 260,000 cubic meters of gold.

And Trump thinks that somebody might have stolen it and also replaced it with 260,000 cubic meters of cheaper metal carried inside by that thief.

The origin of this theory actually goes back to the 1970s and a guy named

Peter Beter.

What?

I'm just going to pause right there.

It's based on Peter Beter.

Okay.

He had a wife, but he couldn't feed her.

What did you want him to do?

Starve?

So Peter Beter was pretty sure.

You need to stop saying it.

I'm going to say it full name.

For the rest of my life.

Peter Beter.

was pretty sure his name's Peter Beter.

It feels insane.

It feels like the sound is broken on our podcast.

He was pretty sure, Peter Beter, that the gold was stolen by the Bolsheviks, the political faction that seized power in Russia in 1917.

And according to Peter Beter, the Bolsheviks controlled an army of organic robotoids.

is a

yeah you might not have heard that term it's a popular technology from the early 1900s

that infiltrated the u.s federal government.

Peter Beters' day job was in the legal profession, but he also did a side hustle that was much more lucrative.

He sold a mail-order audio cassette series that explained all the stuff they don't want you to know, like apparently the communist organic robot army that steals gold.

Yeah.

And in case you're wondering, yes, I did try to collect all 81 audio cassettes off eBay in the early aughts.

And no, I did not manage to win even one in an auction.

Okay, even if it just means robot, robotoid is a word that needs to come back.

We were bringing that up.

I do like that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Feels like a slur against robots somehow.

So the paranoia caused by a person named Peter Beter got so ridiculous that in 1974, U.S.

Congress had to send a delegation with a few news outlets as extra witnesses to the delegation to inspect Fort Knox.

They all reported, yeah, there's a bunch of gold.

This is like a whole bunch of gold here.

We also got a new wrinkle in the conspiracy in 1996, thanks to a documentary that Eli probably tried to collect on VHS called The Money Masters, made by a guy named

Bill Still.

Oh, you famous

liar.

You making them your headlines for our podcast?

I'm pretty sure there's some weird lying going on like i'm in i just learned about peter beater and bill still

and when i tried to look up bill still

i found that his wikipedia page got deleted and that's interesting it is interesting thank you and then i tried to look into that but pretty much immediately i started turning into a neo-nazi and i had to close all my tabs in a pen yeah no that's a real big rabbit hole with red pilling if i disappear soon though you all know why it's important the deep state did it.

Just keep that in mind.

Safe.

So anyway, here's the big theory from Bill Still.

He's pretty sure that Ian Fleming, who worked for British Intelligence and famously wrote the James Bond series, was also the secret head of the UK's MI5 security service.

And according to Bill Still, Fleming knew about all the gold getting stolen from Fort Knox.

And if you read Fleming's work very carefully, you'll find subtle clues about the conspiracy embedded in all that fiction.

It's true.

If you count the racial slurs in all the books, it adds up to the total value of all the gold in Fort Knox.

Coincidence?

Yeah, no, but I will say that Ian Fleming, he sure was famously subtle about things.

Very nuanced, sure was.

So her name was vagina for fucking.

She was an Asian, Okay, but literally octopussy.

Yeah.

So it's not as funny as the thing died down for a while.

The panic died down for a while.

But then it came back in 2011 because

Ron Paul is a fucking person who was alive in 2011.

Yeah.

Who still is, I'm pretty sure.

Ron Paul, who named his son after Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, was a U.S.

congressman from Texas in 2011.

And during a hearing for U.S.

Congress, apropos of I'm pretty sure nothing, he said the gold in Fort Knox was secretly shipped away and sold.

He also named another version of the conspiracy theory, apparently hoping to bolster the credibility of his theory,

which again was, I don't know, they sent it away and sold it or something, and it's based on nothing and he never explained it.

The other theory says the gold is all a ruse and the bars are actually gold-plated tungsten and tungsten has a very similar density to gold.

So it's the perfect crime.

See, I feel like this is the thing where Ron Paul got ripped off in a ring that he was told was solid gold.

And then he's doing this like, well, actually, that's a super easy mistake to make thing to make himself feel less stupid.

I think it's that.

I can use my ring in light bulbs.

I don't know what that means.

So that brings us to the latest flare-up of the gold rumors from this year.

The conspiracy enthusiast website Zerohedge posted a tweet that said, it would be great if at Elon Musk could take a look inside Fort Knox.

Last time anyone looked was 50 years ago.

And

no, it's not.

No.

In 2017, then Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin went inside with Mitch McConnell and they took pictures.

Also, people look all the time while guarding it and doing regular checks and annual audits with even more detail.

Nonetheless, Elon responded that he wants to do a live stream walkthrough of Fort Knox.

What up, what up?

I'm here in Fort Knox.

And after Elon said that, planking,

Rand Paul replied, let's do it.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Oh, Gyler, I fell.

I fell off the gold onto more of the gold, Skylar.

I'm hurt real bad.

Tell everybody that my son did it.

You have to promise me.

I got punched by left-handed gold bars.

I don't know what happened.

Yeah.

So, of course, that led to

my costume.

That led to

insane segments about a deep state

hoax to pretend we have gold, qui bono, not clear, from both Glenn Beck and Alex Jones, who's apparently allowed to be alive and do stuff.

Alex Jones is still allowed to work, I guess.

Elon, while you're in there, can you grab me a spare trillion?

I'm hurting right now, brother.

Well, okay, so like if you do the live stream, they're just going to say, yeah, that looks like gold-plated tungsten to me.

I don't see what this would solve.

Right.

Well, that brings us us to another giant corruption scam by the Trump family.

Just the revived rumor about gold being missing is enough to make people think they should buy gold.

And when you add the fact that Donald Trump is actively ruining the value of the U.S.

dollar this year, people flock to gold even more.

And companies that offer stuff like gold IRAs become super popular.

Just a random example, top of my head, the Birch Gold Group, which calls itself Donald Trump Jr.'s Gold Company.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Another random example.

Lear Capital, a gold company owned by Glenbeck.

And in order to add to the hype, Donny Jr.

has been spreading rumors that his dad might use his presidential power to spike the price of gold in a couple of different ways.

I don't know.

Eli said something about buying on the bounce and I've been throwing these bars at the floor all morning and nothing's happening.

Did you guys hear about that time that Hunter Biden sold expensive paintings to people who probably didn't really want them because of their aesthetic beauty?

So crooked, am I right?

What a shameful time in our nation's history.

Yeah.

So in fairness to Donald Trump Jr.,

I can't believe I just said that, but

is it that his name doesn't rhyme?

Because that's the only thing.

He has so much credibility just for not rhyming insanely.

But in fairness to him, his dad does have the power to increase gold prices.

Tanking the stock market is actually one of those powers.

Sure.

So it's not a crazy notion, but just a reminder, if someone wants to sell you gold right now,

they think the price is going down in the future.

If they thought the price was going up, they'd fucking keep it.

That's the nature of buying and selling things.

It's tricky.

It's tricky.

I know.

So if you want to buy a brick of gold at Costco or Walmart, you actually definitely can.

That's a real thing.

You You can do that.

It's happening right now a lot.

But don't do anything because a Trump said it was a good idea.

Listen to Ian Fleming if you can crack the code.

Yes.

And quick before Eli can dispute that financial advice, we're going to wrap the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Cheer Maji.

And when we come back, we'll think of yet another way that literacy is overrated.

Hey folks, Noah here to tell you that we've now officially joined the Creator Accountability Network.

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And now, back to the show.

We hear the scathing atheists are men of our words, even when our words turn out to be, in retrospect, stupid.

We said we'd read the Book of Mormon, and even after realizing what a terrible idea that was, we went through with it.

We said we'd watch a new Christian movie every week for your entertainment.

And 509 weeks later, we're still regretting that.

And last month, we said that if we got more than 400 new and upgrading patrons in the month of May, we would read Ross Douthet's Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

So stupid.

And damn it if we didn't set that number too low because we got it.

So now we have to do that.

Okay, I was furious already, and then I searched for the book.

And the top result I got was the Google Books page.

And the very first thing it says,

truly a mere Christianity for the 21st century World Magazine.

Fucking fuck.

Guys, I'm sorry.

I just got this text from my cardiologist.

I actually can't read this one with you.

So I am going to have to put coffee in my ass and leave.

I got to go put coffee.

Can I put coffee in my ass?

Yeah.

And look, before we even crack this piece of shit open, I want to spend a second on that arrogant fucking title because he's not even claiming to make an argument for his religion, just an argument against atheism, right?

Everybody should just be religious, like in general.

Yeah, it's a book dedicated to devout wishy-washyism and right, yeah, exactly.

And the title is basically trying to rescue itself, like the second part from the first part.

The first part is a command, believe.

And then the post-kelonic is why everyone should adopt command doing as a philosophy.

That's part of my title works.

That would be great.

And look, normally I would skip the fucking acknowledgements for something like this, but in the acknowledgements, he acknowledges, quote, unsuspecting acquaintances for listening to me harp on these themes in recent years, adding in parentheses, quote, special thanks to everyone who sighed and settled in when I got going about ayahuasca or near-death experiences, end quote.

God, he's the fucking worst.

Right.

So look, as we talk about this book, I need you to imagine it being pompously formulated at you at a dinner party after you got cornered by the guy who like visibly adjusts his class ring while looking for excuses to use a six-syllable word he knows you don't know.

Yeah, we are negative four pages into the book.

And within the very first sentence, on again, page negative four, he uses the word perspicacious.

He tells us the the very next word that he went to Yale.

Yep.

And then he thanks a big group of Yale students who found him to be way too pretentious.

Right, right.

Yikes.

We should also mention that he says the book wouldn't exist without Webster Younce's enthusiasm and the editorial wisdom.

So

when we set out for vengeance, I want to keep that in mind.

Webster Younce defines bad book.

Okay, here we go.

I feel like that name did a lot of the vengeance work for us.

Well, that's fair.

Third grade, they call out their kid's name for the first time, and the bully's just like, well, that's my year.

That's my guy.

That's my fucking year, everybody.

Job is done.

Could have been Webster Yebster.

I don't care.

Young's pretty bad, too.

Hey, hey, gay kid, take a year off.

Me and Webster Younts are going to have a time.

All right.

So he also, of course, he acknowledges God because that dude will smite a motherfucker.

Wrote a whole book about how great you are.

Couldn't get a blurb, but thanks

for our guess.

Fuck.

And then there's this fucking poem, right?

It's Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, God's Grandeur.

Come on.

Yeah, this poem is hilariously awful.

It describes God's grandeur as gathering to greatness, quote, like the ooze of oil.

And then right after that, it asks why people don't wreck God's rod.

I think whoever wrote My Immortal came out of retirement for this poem.

It felt like that.

When he can't make the fucking meter work, he goes, generations have trod, have trod, have trod.

Are you doing epic boomy voice for your own poem?

Are you slowly backing out of your poem?

What's happening?

Okay, and just to recap what's already happened on pages negative one through negative four.

I went to Yale.

I know the word perspicacious because I went to Yale probably.

I'm writing a book about believing.

And here's a description of the largest possible delusion of grandeur in poetic verse in the title of that poem that I didn't write.

And here we are at page one, starting the book now.

That's what's happened so far.

Right.

So we finally get around to the introduction where he explains that part of his job at the New York Times, maybe you've heard of it, it's in New York, is to make religious belief intelligible to irreligious readers.

And I'm like, big fail, bro.

I'm here to stoop with the smarts, he said, tilting his fedora at himself in the mirror.

Yes.

Right.

And then he was like, okay, I'm up to sentence number three.

Should I say former Baptist?

No, erstwhile Baptist.

Erstwhile.

Look at my erstwhile former.

called erstwhile.

Wow.

I get a feather in my fedora for that.

Yeah, so, but he noticed more and more people that were growing up with no religion since we started this podcast, actually.

Now that I think about it.

You are welcome, Society.

And Ross, we are job creators for Ross.

There you go, buddy.

Yep.

But yeah, but the atheists that write to him are all real sad about having to be atheists just because there's no God.

Okay.

I think he's lying.

Do you?

I don't think those people wrote to him.

Sure, everyone called me an idiot and told me how outdated my beliefs are, but they also admitted that believing Jennifer Anniston is madly in love with you makes you feel really good.

So

who's the idiot, really?

Yeah, right, right.

We were on a break.

So he both sides the right and left by pointing out that, sure, the right has fascism, you know, but the left has wokeness.

So bad people on both sides.

Yeah, after religion was instrumental in breaking down society as we know it, many people who you don't know, they live in Canada, wrote to me to say that maybe what society was missing was more religion.

Yes.

Thai, left and right, tie.

Right.

Okay.

Real quote.

He goes, quote, relative to 20 years ago, there is more discussion of the obvious sociological importance of institutional religion, its crucial shaping role in human culture, and its foundational place in the development of the modern democratic order, end quote.

Okay.

And I'm like, yeah, man.

Yeah.

Hey, there's more discussion of all kinds of fucking untrue pseudo-historic right-wing patriotism fantasies these days.

Yeah.

There's more discussion of currency based on monkey JPEGs and lizard armies in lava tubes inside the hollow earth and eating tide pods.

That's not helpful.

There's more discussion of everything.

Right.

But the argument that he's getting from all these imaginary intellectuals, you don't know them, they live in Canada, is that a lot of people think that religion is necessary, even if it isn't true.

Yeah, it's like how we tell people we don't know if the theory of relativity is real, but we already printed all the science textbooks.

It's like that.

Yeah.

Okay, plenty of Bibles, plenty of tables off balance, plenty of shits to take,

plenty of joints to roll.

Atheism is green.

There you go.

But he's going to argue that, quote, the God of the old time sort of religion, supernaturalists and scriptural religion, angels and miracles religion, Jesus was resurrected religion, might actually exist.

End quote.

That's the argument he says he's going to make.

I just, I want to keep that in mind when he presents his vague ass, but the whole is exactly puddle-shaped argument later.

Yeah, and this is where he cites Derek Thompson, co-author with Ezra Klein of Abundance.

So, okay, first of all, fuck your face.

Derek and Ezra hate you.

Oh, yeah.

They just fake being nice around the office at the New York Times.

Also, the no-context quote from Thompson is just saying the community element of religion is good.

Like, that's what we're saying.

That's our argument.

Right.

Oh, hey, Ross, lunch.

No, we ate already.

But he explains in so many words that this is a book for people who desperately want to slap a veneer of intellectualism on a belief that they really wish that they could intellectually justify.

Right.

He admits that right up front.

Perspicacious point about erstwhile erstwhile believers and their veneer of a patina, of a facade, of cerebralosity.

That's right.

All right, but I put a sadish shot on the side.

Yes, he says you did.

Just for the record.

Yes.

I have a fedora

with feathers in it.

Yeah, but his book is a blueprint on how to un-atheist yourself, he says.

The secret is lying.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Well, so, okay, so he cites Karen Armstrong's argument here that it isn't fair to talk about religions being untrue if you haven't tried them out first.

Now, to be fair to him, he's trying to differentiate his argument from it when he brings it up.

You can't just watch telekinesis not work and learn physics.

You have to, yes, and the telekinesis for yourself.

Right.

Also, you just said moments ago, Ross, that a big part of who you're writing for is people who left religion.

Right.

Well, yeah.

So, but he admits that an act like you believe even if you don't approach is a rhetorical disadvantage, but he doesn't admit that it's also villainous.

Yeah.

I learned this particular move from a fellow named C.S.

Lewis.

Maybe you've heard of it.

C.S.

Lewis, the Ross do that of the 20th century.

Kind of a big deal.

Yeah.

But his problem with this approach is that A, it doesn't work, and B, it might encourage you to only accept the useful parts of religion.

Oh, close one.

Thanks for the warning.

Yeah.

Ross, appreciate that.

Right.

No, so, okay, but so notice how he snuck in the demonstrably untrue idea that religion serves a purpose and is socially beneficial based on nothing but you know a lot of people are saying right and now he's trying to move on from that right and worse he's acknowledging all the harm done to society when he says people are in desperate need of community and purpose and meaning but he doesn't admit that religion is largely the thing that did that harm.

Right.

Yeah.

So far, it seems like the entire book gets refuted by, hey, what about Friday night magic instead of Sunday morning magic, right?

Like, that's very similar.

Yeah, you're hearing it right, Ross.

Yeah, Jesus Christ is my commander.

You're perspicacious, right?

So he claims that the religious worldview, quote, grapples more fully with the evidence before us.

And I'm like, well, yeah, when you're telling the truth, the evidence doesn't fight back as hard, man.

You don't have to grapple.

Fucking science gets real uppity with us in the religious community.

But that's us being more scientific if you think about it.

Right.

Grappling.

Yeah.

Science is risk-controlling me.

He also pushes back against the common apologetic tactic of just being like, but have these atheists who rejected our religion just because it contradicts both logic and itself ever read this treatise on the Christian theology that was written in 1473?

I like how we have to read every book, but they only need to pretend to have read just the one, right?

It's real.

Yeah.

But he says he's not going to use that argument.

he's not going to resort to that either we're going to hold him to that then he promises his arguments will be unsophisticated and for the first time in the book i believe him well for the first time in his career i believe him and he's like so i'm going to argue that we actually we had it writer before we started all this methodical observation and intellectual humility

right

Got to trust you're good about the truiness of the universe.

Yeah, he's an apologist of the people.

He's like,

I'm just a simple caveman apologist

who went to Yale.

Did I mention I went to Yale as a caveman?

Anyway, I'm not going to make that fancy intellectual argument, even though it is definitely right, but I won't do that.

I won't.

Yeah.

Yale.

So, yeah, and so, and then he spends a paragraph just grossly misrepresenting a secular world as, quote, a cruel trick and secular consciousness as, quote, just an illusion woven by ourselves and atoms, and secular experiences as quote, a burst of empty pyrotechnics in an otherwise illimitable dark, end quote.

That is the straw man that he's going to be fighting against for the next 221 pages.

That's us, that's what we sound like.

And can I just take a moment to appreciate how awesome it is when Christians try to downplay the infinite, complex awesomeness of science as somehow more simplistic and less cool than

Sky Wizard needed to get loved back.

Sky Can't.

And again, that's our side.

Everything we don't know with science is an argument for doing science.

Sure.

If something that seems supernatural right now ends up being real, we'll know about that because of our team.

Not like me personally, but the fucking smart ones on our team.

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

The guys we root for anyway.

Yeah.

It's religion, though.

In his words, though, it's religion versus quote, materialism and pessimism and reductionism, end quote.

Those are the battle lines that he's drawing at the outset without providing any arguments or evidence in support of it.

Yeah, maybe all the atheists you meet are pessimistic because they're talking to you, Ross.

And again, you're not paranoid.

Everyone in the office does, in fact, hate you.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

They're so filled with hate.

Everyone that I talked to.

They were headed to lunch for us.

Yes, they were.

They did steal your baby bells from the fridge and they lied about it because they hate you.

They didn't even eat them.

So he's

that's crazy.

Ezra just spikes them into the garbage.

Yeah, right.

But then he says a slur.

Abundance, motherfucker.

Ezra's a vegan.

He wouldn't eat them, but he would spike them.

So, yeah, so, but he's already backing off the promise.

You may have noticed that by page seven, he's backing off this promise to provide an argument for Jesus's resurrected angels and miracles version of faith, right?

He admits here that he's, quote, not attempting a wholesale defense of Christianity here, end quote, but will instead just give an argument that religion itself is correct, even though no two religions can simultaneously be correct.

The argument I seek to make is that those guys in the meme on the opposite sides of the six and the nine are both correct because they both believe in numbers.

That's right.

Yeah.

I'm on team dress.

Maybe white, maybe blue.

Definitely made by a ghost team dress.

Right, yeah.

But importantly, though, it's not that he couldn't prove Christianity is true, right?

He's just trying to keep his book applicable to everyone who's religious.

Look, I would prove the eternal truths of my religion, but I'm not sure you could keep up, Kirito.

Yeah, right.

This is a 226-page book.

Right.

So you have plenty of time to say everything you're going to say here and then prove your religion true in the same book.

And even a moral obligation to do do so if you A, can, B, are correct, and C, we go to hell if you fail to.

Jesus.

Okay, so then he defines religion and explains that Pastafarianism doesn't count.

It's bullshit.

Yeah.

That was bullshit.

It's already copying off the Supreme Court's homework.

And he, though.

And he shows just how confused he is.

Apparently, Pastafarianism doesn't count because a levitating mass of spaghetti and meatballs that created the entire universe magically is not about anything supernatural.

That's why I just...

No,

if you don't have a symbol that we all agreed upon back in fucking 1987, then you don't have a religion.

So no making up new faiths.

Well, question.

Can a deep hatred of Ross be our symbol?

Because I feel like I've got enough followers already.

There you go.

Help our taxes.

Also, sorry, it's been a few pages since I said erstwhile.

I'm talking about religion quay religion.

Anyway, what were you saying about hating me?

You said

I couldn't hear you over my fedora.

Yeah, I've tilted it.

You can see, right?

So he breaks down the book's format, right?

He says the first three chapters will belabor the fine-tuning argument.

The next four will narrow us down from a something's out there worldview to a one of the major religions with a symbol is correct worldview.

And the final chapter.

Well, that one is actually about how Christianity is the correct religion.

Muslim reading the book throws it across the room.

Fucking spoilers.

Yeah, right.

And that's the roadmap for arriving there of your own volition.

I'm Ross Duthad.

Lots of people are actually saying Socrates is the Ross Duthad of the fifth century D.C., if you think about it.

Yeah, he says, he says, the time of the new atheist is passing.

And he's trying to like, which, you know, sure, yeah, that's true.

We've moved beyond those guys, but like, he's trying to present that as though it means that atheism is on the decline, which to be clear, it's not.

Like, didn't you see our fucking Matreon numbers?

No, he's just hurting because he heard that Marsha's abandoning QED.

And I get Ross Wars.

He's just mad that he's a DEI hire at the New York Times.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

But so he explains that the appeal of atheism, why people love it, is that it relieves you of that terrible burden of immortality.

What a stupid and obvious fucking, how do you say that with a straight-faced lie?

Yeah, people fucking hate it when their lives are unduly important and impactful and they don't have to die.

It's very hard to convince people of that.

You have a hard job.

And he's trying to argue that atheism is about life being meaningless.

So it makes us very sad.

But Russ, you're offering a life after death that's literally infinite.

It's mathematically impossible for your life on earth.

to be less meaningful if you believe

right right yeah no he's it and then he has this it's so weird that educated people disagree with me moment here's the actual words at the end of this fucking summary of his argument quote for some time now the educated world has cultivated the opposite perspective end quote but to them i say haberdasher

kilting the fedora even more now

i mean i'm in the dark i'm in the dark too fancy

so poke myself in the eye with a feather fuck i have pooped

actual quote here.

Quote, as its promises of liberation dissolve, as unhappiness and angst and regret take over, atheism defends itself by pretending to be hard-headed, extremely serious.

The price you pay for intellectual adulthood.

It is none of these things, end quote.

Feel like Ross needs to listen to the speech Wool Dasher Mizzel gives at the wedding of Sarah Huckleby Sanders and Big Balls before he diagnoses anybody as extremely serious, Ross.

Yes, we do take ourselves quite seriously here.

Scathing alias.

Yeah.

So, okay, so the three main lies in the introduction seem to be, one, religion and spirituality are making a comeback, baby.

Bullshit.

Demographically, demonstrably untrue.

Number two, religion serves vital functions in the continued operation of society.

Again, look at any more secular fucking country and try to argue that.

Good luck.

And number three, anybody ever wanted to be at all like Rouse Douthat?

I'm never going to pronounce that guy's last name the same way twice.

Eventually, I'll learn how to pronounce it.

But yeah, he is a

unusual size, he's bigger than a Tippet La Road.

So, okay.

So, with those lies on the table and plenty of room for more, we're going to close this fucker for the month.

But on next month's installment, we're going to talk about chapter one: The Fashioned Universe.

Huh.

I wonder what argument we're going to get in that one.

I bet it's new.

Everybody's got new shit to say.

I like that the Ross Duthat voice just kind of had to naturally be C.S.

Lewis.

Right.

Before we hit the coda, I want to thank everybody who came together to make Matreon such a big success for us this year.

Given the state of the economy, we really weren't sure what to expect, but we should have known better than to ever doubt our audience.

Thank you so much.

It genuinely means the world to us.

Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight, but 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 episode of our Sister Show's Hot Friend Got Off a Movies debuting at 7 a.m.

Eastern on Tuesday, and even a new episode of our Half Sister Show's Citation Needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't retain my host badge if I neglected to thank Heath Enray for being tough as nails.

I need to thank Eli Bosnik for being as sharp as a tech.

And I need to thank Lucinda Lusions for making it through the hardest part of quitting smoking, the part where you get up the guts to try.

I'm really proud of you, baby.

I also want to thank Jason W.

Brooks of yourvalley.net for providing this week's Farnsworth quote.

If you need more Arizona politics resources in your life, be sure to check the show notes for a link.

But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week's most marvelous mammals.

And this, this has the final week of Matreon.

So get ready for another long one.

Rocktoberfest, Kale, Karen, Jackie, Heather, the Forever, TM, Barrett, Stop That, Dana, Malcolm, Billy, Spring, Rogan, Phil, Richard, Bill, the best, Dave, Sammy, Just Call Me Joe, Will, Bo, Tragically Average Trans Woman in the Twin Cities, Chupy Cobra, Katie, Tony, Carl, Moore, Jacob, Solkar, Other Will, Chris, Terrence, Richard, Graydon, Kenny, Admin, Six, Miko, Tom, John, Samantha, Martin, Ohim, Old, Kirby, Stacey, Jennifer, Gail, Sugar Rush, Socio, Brandon, Erica, Haru, Leaf, Julie, DCS, L, Luke, Ruth, 11, Mike, R.C., David, Simmered, Catherine, Kaleese, Neil, Dirty, Shirley, Sharp, Kind of My Thing, Mickey, Jane Elin, Undercover, A, My Dog, Skittles, Aaron, Ban, Anirban, Tim, Other Tim, Jeremy, Terry, T, Matthew, and Tired, Ravenclaw.

Who are so big I can barely fit them in my mouth all at once.

Together, these 72 savory secularists spared simoleons to our scathing sacrilege this week by giving us money.

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

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