638: Livin' on a Prager Edition

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Warning, they don't dot leaflets in advance of F-bombs.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new line of fake pontiffs for the Pope open to use a lifelike stand-in to avoid some meetings, Papal Miche.

Papal Miche, because meeting with J.D. Vance isn't just boring, it'll kill a motherfucker.
And now, The Scathing Atheist. Hi, this is Daddy.
from Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

I'm the host of the Black Fault Podcast, a podcast focused on black metals past, present and future.

And if there's one thing that investigating Scandinavian Satanistic arsonists stabbing, torturing and downright killing each other has taught me, it is that we did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey man.

It's Thursday. It's May 22nd.
And it's Canadian Immigrants Day.

Right. I'm No Illusions.
I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Heath Henright.
And from Sarah Vaughns, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Waycross, Georgia, this is the Skatin Atheist.

On this week's episode, Gen Z thinks this Jesus fella's pretty skibbity, Ohio. The new Pope takes a long look at the story of Cain and Abel.

And we'll turn to Dennis Frager for some very questionable answers. But first, the diatribe.

Lucinda and I lost a friend this week.

He's a friend that we made through the shows. He came to a couple of our live shows, but then we wound up friends online, and then we got to know each other's cats.

And once you know each other's pets, you're all the way friends, right? But the whole time I knew him, he had very serious health problems.

So last week, he decided that he'd come far enough and he chose to stop treatment. And just a couple hours before we were set to record, I got the news that he had passed.

Now, of course, he was an atheist. And that matters at times like this, right? Because the decision to end end one's life never sits quite right with me when it comes from a religious person.

And don't get me wrong, I'm a strong supporter of death with dignity. I think every person has an innate right to decide when it's their time to go, regardless of what they think is going to happen.

But when somebody is making that call with the expectation or even just the vague hope of a paradise on the other side, it's not exactly an informed decision.

But Richard walked offstage with his eyes wide open. He knew it was the end.
Now, I don't know the man well enough to eulogize him, but I know that he had a great third act.

He found love again late in his life.

It was a love, if I recall correctly, that was based on the mutual appreciation of a well-placed semicolon, which is appropriate since semicolons bring clauses together and tell you that something important is coming.

And she was a lucky woman because he was one of those people that just always seemed thrilled with every minute that he got to participate in the world.

And from what I hear, he kept that up all the way to the end. He was still making jokes as long as he still had enough breath to carry them.

And in that, he was a shining example of how wrong religious people are when they talk about atheists.

Right. This is so often we hear Christians use atheism like it's the antonym of joy.

We're supposed to be these grumpy, miserable, miserly fucks debauched by our lack of moral compasses and contorted with rage by our temporal insignificance.

And sure, that might be my tinder profile, but it definitely isn't true of all atheists. It definitely wasn't true of Richard.
See, that's what they don't understand in so many ways.

Religion robs one of meaning in its attempt to impose bullshit meaning.

How often are we asked some variation of, if there's no God, then what's the point of existence? The implication, I guess, is that because you'll be forgotten, you're pointless.

Because in the grand scheme of things, everyone who knew you will die and everybody who knew them will die.

And even if you manage fame on the level of Shakespeare, your name is eventually going to burn up when the sun stretches out to the Earth's orbit.

And the only thing that that could rescue you from this melancholy void is an eternal afterlife.

But purpose doesn't need to be eternal to be valid.

We don't measure marathoners against infinite distances. We don't measure billionaires against infinite fortunes.
And if we did, their accomplishments would seem pretty goddamn meaningless.

So why would we measure our lives against eternity? Why should we uniquely employ this impossible standard only to the single most important thing that we could measure?

Lives are meaningful one moment at a time, so their meaning should be measured in moments.

And if you can keep making meaningful moments right up to the end, congratulations, you won.

Put your initials in the fucking high scoreboard and don't let anybody try to tell you the lack of afterlife somehow robbed your life of meaning. Life doesn't need a point.
Life is the point.

And think for a second about how callous and clouded one's worldview would have to be to miss miss that. You get to be.

You get to have been. You get to be one of the parts of the universe that knows about itself.

You get to prevail upon the ceaseless curiosities of the world to learn and to teach and to wonder and to make and to appreciate art, to sing and to hear songs.

You get to be a note in a symphony that's been playing for billions of years. You get to love and to be loved.

That may be the greatest lie that religion religion ever sold us, that something as beautiful as life needs a point.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Luna and Mail, Tamaya CL, Heath N. Wright, and Eli Bosnick Fellas.
Are you ready to expedite?

When one falls, we

point and laugh. I haven't played the game

because he's too busy working to bring you entertainment in these dark times, listeners. He doesn't have time for himself.
He's too busy slaving away in the fucking pun minds for you on your behalf.

And if you want to show your appreciation, May is the month to do it. May is Matreon, where we beg you extra hard for money.

Just like that. Our listeners and their generosity is what makes this show possible.

So if you can, please go to patreon.com/slash scathingatheost and make a per-episode donation or increase your pledge or go to m-ay-y-t-r-e-o-n.com to follow along. And now,

on with the headlines. Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

In our lead story tonight, it's very likely that you heard something or read something online in the past week about how Gen Z men are becoming more religious.

And while true, I feel it's a little overblown in the media, so I want to throw some water on it.

So, this buzz isn't coming from a new survey, as near as I can tell, but rather from an article in Vox.

And what the article is really highlighting is an increase in the gender gap of religiosity in Gen Z.

And rather than marveling at the increasing rates that Gen Z women are leaving the church, the framing that most media has chosen to go with is about the decreasing rates that Gen Z men are leaving the church.

So to be clear, they're still leaving. They're just not leaving as quickly as the generations before them.
And that's what passes for a fucking revival in Christianity these days.

Well, good luck with that. Lots of untapped tithing from incels in their mom's basement who can't chip in for Capri sons and lunch events that they use.

Solid growth sector for the church. I mean, to be fair, the church has been promising to fight for the rights of young, able-bodied white men for

ever. I mean, they're betting very targeted.
25 years. Yeah.
So, okay, so first of all, quick thanks to Vincent for sending this one to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Vincent, see Eli about your possum nipples or whatever. But to understand this story, we need to back up a little bit and talk about this much bellyhood reversal in the religiosity trend.

Because yes, the rate at which religiosity is decreasing in America has slowed considerably, but it's still decreasing.

And you don't need to invent a victory for Christianity in order to explain it, right?

So as American culture has shifted away from Christian as default, right, as an expectation, atheism scooped up all the low-hanging fruit. Eventually, you run out of low-hanging fruit.

That explains literally everything in the demographic shifts. Right.
But so many Christian people heard decrease in acceleration and they were like, the atheists are coming back to us. We win.
Yes.

Yeah. Because what comes right after not losing as much?

Winning. That's right.

Zero is a Muslim concept. I don't understand why they don't get sinful.
Calculus, also Muslim.

Now, that being said, There is a disturbing resurgence of religiosity among Gen Z men, particularly the younger end of that generation. But it's not a resurgence of just religion in general.

Gen Z men aren't flocking to fucking Unitarianism in the Anglican church.

They're moving towards the heavy homophobia churches and the heavy misogyny churches, which admittedly are most of the fucking churches, but those are the ones that are seeing the resurgence.

Red-pilled young men are sold the patriarchy. They're lured in with talk about male loneliness epidemics and reverse racism, and they're staying for the eternal salvation and the gay hate.

And to be clear, we're not talking about most Gen Z men, but we're talking about a significant enough number number to start popping out of the demographic data at us.

I love how much they're misunderstanding it, though. Like, what do we want? An inflection point from concave up to concave down, but it's still going up.
When do we want it?

I like Andrew Tate. Yeah, like it's stupid, but still scary for sure.
Well, right. Yeah, exactly.
Enough to swing a close election, right? Yeah.

Now, it's worth noting here, though, that the development is concerning, but it's not surprising. It is part of the inevitable backlash to me too.

Every major surge of feminism in all of American history was followed a few years later by a religious revival aimed at men and emphasizing the good old days of barefoot pregnantness or whatever, right?

But what's truly unprecedented is the data on women that this concern for religious men is obscuring because Gen Z women are leaving organized religion at a rate we've never seen before.

They're steadily becoming more liberal, more secular, more accepting of LGBTQ people, more pluralistic, and more feminist.

In fact, we've actually reached a point where with the youngest cohort of Gen Z, men attend church more than women.

That's something that we've never seen before. And it's not even clear if the current model of Christianity is even sustainable with that shift.

Christianity has always relied on women calling men back to the church after marriage. No idea how they plan to perpetuate the fucking sausage fest that they're building now.

And in witness me news, be it Scientology or the Catholic Church, there's almost no clearer sign that the bad guys are getting caught than when they start suing everybody.

Sease and Desist is basically the theocratic version of, and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids.

So it comes as no surprise this week that the Jehovah's Witnesses are suing a reporter and whistleblower for wiretapping them because he attended a Zoom call that they accidentally invited him to.

Just Jeffrey Goldberg hanging out in the newsroom, weeping with laughter. Guys, you're not going to believe what just fucking happened.

So, first off, big thanks to Window Mirror Goon for sending us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

If you send us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com, we promise not to think too hard about the terrifying implications of your screen names, no matter how deeply they haunt us, Window Mirror Goon.

Okay, I'm not getting haunted. I'm picturing like a hockey goon golden retriever seeing himself in a mirror and dropping the gloves.
Oh, interesting. I like to take the reflection.
Interesting.

I like that he had gloves on. So I'm picturing Possum Nipple Pizza.
Eli said it once, and now every time I hear scathing news at gmail.com, that's in my head. So sure.
Right. So here's the story.

Back in 2020, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office opened a grand jury investigation into JW congregations across the state because A, there was good reason to believe that JW leaders were committing crimes against children, covering them up.

And B, the JWs kept internal records about people accused of sexual abuse, but refused to share that list publicly. Oh, wow.

And 16 people have since been charged in these investigations, thanks in large part to former Jehovah's Witness Mark O'Donnell, who had been sounding the alarm from within the organization for years.

Now, naturally, the JWs were deeply concerned for

their legal standing when this was announced. So they arranged a private call with their lawyers.
A call to which they accidentally invited Mark. Who invited him? How? Not clear.

But they sent him the invite. He attended the meeting.
He reported on what he heard.

And now the Jehovah's Witnesses are suing him for wiretapping, citing, quote, invasion of privacy and reputational harm caused by other people knowing the things they said.

We're also suing for libel, by the way. I'm not a cat.
That guy's a liar.

So I want a judge to throw this case out based on the fact that the reputation of Jehovah's Witnesses is already as low as it can be. Yeah.
Right. There's no, you can't harm this.

You can't get any lower. You can't dig on this ground.
You can't murder a dead man. And look, the JWs know they have no shot in this case.

But as Mark revealed this week, their intention was never to win a wiretapping lawsuit against a guy they invited to a zoom call it was to expose his sources within the church many of whom i will remind you are goddamn sexual abuse victims and some of them are children according to mark quote in the litigation the jws have demanded that i name every jehovah's witness i have communicated with in the last five years regarding the faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Obviously, that would reveal my journalistic sources, and I will not do so. End quote.
Well, good for him.

And look, I know it's hard to find silver linings about child abuse cover-up stories, but at some point, a guy who testified on the J-Dub's defense is going to talk about it in church.

And that's technically going to be the witnesses, witness, witnessing, which is fun, right? Like just grammatically. It's fun.
It is a buffalo, buffalo, buffalo situation. Yeah.

So yeah, let this be a reminder that the Jehovah's Witnesses are not just the little old ladies who knock on your door or the overheated teenagers by the magazine rack.

They are a cult, a litigious one, and the more evil stuff you know about them, the more litigious they get. So head on a swivel, everybody, now that you've heard this story.

And in stroke them if you got them news. Hell yeah.
Republicans are trying to take away the porn that's happening. Shut the fuck up about the Qatari bribe jets and the Salvadoran gulags.
Nobody cares.

We're talking about this now.

A new bill sponsored by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Representative Mary Miller of Illinois, and the death of joy would effectively ban all pornography nationwide.

Not to underplay how horrific this bill is, but I think these folks don't understand the sheer volume of things I'm capable of jacking it to. Right? I did my pubesing pre-internet.

I jerked off the women's names in the credits, guys. Exactly.
Thank you.

So the bill is called the Interstate Obscenity Definition Act, or IODA,

and it would officially define obscene material at the federal level. Here's the strategy behind that.

We're a country founded by creepy dudes in chastity coats with lots of buckles and ruffle accents. So the First Amendment of the Constitution doesn't protect anything that's considered obscene.

With that in mind, the creepy dudes in chastity coats with buckles and ruffles who wrote Project 2025 made this exact plan for legislation, and now these Republicans are trying it.

The new law would make it possible to prosecute anyone who possesses or sends obscene material, and obscene would be defined by three components.

One, it appeals to the prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.

Two, it depicts, describes, or represents actual or simulated sexual acts with the objective intent to arouse, titillate, or gratify the sexual desires of a person. And three,

it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Okay, not only do those definitions already exist in better forms, all they very clearly added was shit porn.
Right. Yeah.

And look, the end result of this, if they got away with it, would be the same porn, but there would be like a fucking math problem on a Blackboard in the background, right? There's education. Yeah.

And I'm so curious how Mike Lee and these other sponsors think we'd police this thing, especially the appealing to prurient interest part.

Like I'm picturing a cop smashing down my door while I'm watching porn, and then I just like immediately start acting disinterested. Like

what I was doing.

Give them a big snip, talking about my lack of prurient interest in this, but I will reluctantly finish. Lock eyes with me.
Like it seems like it would be fun to deal with that. Right.

Or, or, or we could just solve all of this by, will it go with a very erudite podcast about the mise-on-sen of different porn videos on fucking porn hub or whatever. Right.
So, here's the good news.

The bill is very unlikely to pass. Similar bills were attempted in 2022 and 2024, and they failed.
That being said, The fact that it's even conceivable to try this indicates a problem.

The country is swinging toward theocracy more and more. And at the same time, a big block of ridiculous dude bros is having a huffy anti-feminist backlash.

And angry incel content creators are getting absurdly large followings. Andrew Tate, one obvious example.
Another is a popular Twitch streamer called Asmon Gold, who likes to talk about hoflation.

That's the idea that women are allowed to make money now.

And because of all their OnlyFans riches, which Asmond Gold thinks is the only way they make money, the economic cost of, you know, owning a woman has gone way up. It's inflation.

That's a real thing they're whining about. Because it's no fun when they're exploiting themselves.
Yeah.

Women would rather do sex work than be financially dependent on me does not say as much about women as some men seem to think it does.

So yeah. IOTA is probably going to fail, but I was thinking about what it would look like if they pass it.
And I kind of like where things might go, artistically speaking.

We might get a new evolution of the art form with a strong focus on literary, political, and scientific merit. And that sounds amazing.

Like Shakespearean sonnet porn and Lincoln Douglas porn, fucking a beaker, lots of my vision board finally getting a lot of representation.

Also, if the bill did pass, every Democrat could just run on a platform of come and nothing else in the upcoming elections. So

I think I'm actually rooting for the bill now. All right.

Well, since we never seem more important than we do when we're defending porn, I guess this would be a great time to pause and tell you a little bit more about Matreon.

Hey, podcast listener, just popping in to remind you that there are only a few weeks left to donate to Matreon, that time of year where we beg you extra hard for your money. Please, please.
Like that.

This year, a bunch of you asked for us to set nice goals for our new and upgrading patrons. And who are we to argue with you?

If we get enough new and upgrading patrons, we'll do a month of secular movies on Gam for me. An Alaskan cruise for me and Lucinda.
And much, much more.

Stuff for the patron-only pajama party, stuff for the shows. And you can follow along at matreon.com.
That's M-A-Y-T-R-E-O-N.com. Matreon.
Great stuff for you and nice stuff for us for a change.

I put coffee in my butt last year. Yep, you sure did.

A man wrote the Bible? A whores, which is fun. If it's a legitimate race, an intrusion, right? Cooking can be fun.
Hey, I'm proud of my man. This weekend, Mississauga, I dot.

Y'all, my I told you so's are never any fun. So I'm sure you've already heard about the latest holy shit, not even Margaret Atwood thought of that shit situation brewing in my home state of Georgia.

But in case you haven't, the state has turned a brain-dead woman into a flesh incubator for the sake of a nine-week old fetus.

This is a story of April Newkirk, a 30-year-old Georgia woman who went to the hospital in February for severe headaches.

But showing nowhere near as much compassion for her as they later showed for her unborn fetus, the hospital didn't run any scans or tests. They just gave her some medicine and sent her home.

The next day, she was found gargling and gasping for air. Turns out she had multiple blood clots in her brain.
By the time they could get her back to the hospital, she was already brain dead.

Now, to be clear, brain dead is dead. It's go ahead and harvest the organs levels of dead.
But Georgia's medieval abortion laws make no provisions for that.

And Newkirk was nine weeks pregnant when this happened. And look, I want you to pause for a second and consider just how pregnant nine weeks isn't.
We're just barely out of the embryo stage here.

It's the size of a fucking fingernail. But it has a heartbeat, or what passes for one according to these bullshit laws.

So medical personnel have no choice but to keep her alive with machines until the fetus is viable, which is 34 weeks.

So her family has to prolong their grief by months and then presumably raise the kid the state burdened them with.

And look, the obvious victim here is New Kirk's family. Her mother is furious about the lack of choice.
And when this motherless child is forced into the world, he'll be the victim too.

But you also have to consider the scale of this kind of shit. How much life-saving medical equipment and finite attention of medical personnel are we going to devote to this case and cases like it?

I mean, if I was a doctor or a nurse and the state consigned me to participating in this inhumane torture, I'd be tempted to find another job.

How much medical personnel are we going to sacrifice on the altar of forced birth before we right this fucking ship?

And another ancillary issue we should never forget about is the danger that occurs when we empower the misogynist.

After all, I have a sneaking suspicion that this fetuses or humans lie is also behind the recent bombing of a fertility clinic in California.

Now, at the time of this writing, they're not officially offering up a motivation, but when a car explodes in the parking lot of American reproductive centers, you can take a pretty good guess.

Either it was a Christian terrorist trying to save unborn clusters of cells, or else it was a Tesla. But I'm not only bringing you bad news this week.

See, as you may know, dear leader is going to be celebrating his birthday with a fascist military parade through the streets of D.C. on June 14th.

And officially, it's because that's the Army's 250th birthday, but it's also Trump's birthday, and that's absolutely why they're doing it.

But that's also why the Women's March chose that date to revive their efforts and possibly ding the shit out of Trump's precious news cycle.

It would be pretty awesome if every story about his parade ended with a reminder that way more people showed up to march against him.

So be sure to check out womensmarch.com to see where the closest march is to you or just check the show notes.

So with that and a quick thanks to Peter and Zachary for sending a couple of these stories to me at scathingnews at gmail.com. I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Heath, and Eli.

Thank you, Lucinda. And in Freedom Isn't Free News.
One of the things that's hard to convey in the moment of a terrifying news cycle is that crazy religious rulings rarely last.

Now, I want to be clear, the harm done, the money wasted, all of that is very real.

But almost always when you read a headline like, Trump appointed judge sentences Jews to be Christian, that ruling goes away on appeal.

Long after the damage it was meant to do has already been done and forgotten.

And I'm not saying we shouldn't be panicking, by all means, continue to panic, but sometimes it's helpful to remind ourselves that the shit storms do pass and we got a reminder of that this week when an appeals court ruled that no southwest airlines's lawyers do not have to go through a right-wing religious freedom training for firing a bigot we're not doing a government imposed bigotry equity and inclusion training no oh hey can we use that time to send them to a class on how to book a fucking flight at Southwest?

No, they refuse. Okay.
So regular listeners might remember this story from way back in August of 2023 when optimistic rubes like myself were looking forward to a Kamala Harris presidency.

And our biggest worry was that Maui was on fire.

The case itself goes all the way back to 2017 when Charlene Carter, a batshit anti-choice flight attendant, was justifiably fired by Southwest for harassing her union rep via email because the rep attended the women's march and then for accusing the union president of murder for supporting abortion rights.

So yeah, she got fired. She filed a grievance with her union.

She lost that grievance because, of course, then she sued Southwest and her union and won because the jury system of just regular folks figuring out this law stuff is fucking idiotic.

Okay, juror number eight just hit himself in the eye with a boiled peanut. I feel like he's not a peer.

Objection? Objection, Your Honor, of this lady? Yeah.

Sustained. I was appointed by a president 40 years ago.
She's also holding a bag of boiled peanuts. Yeah, exactly.
It's a very small one from Southwest.

Yeah, so the jury gave her her job back and awarded her $5 million,

later reduced to just $800,000. Yeah.
It's Southwest again.

And they ruled that Southwest had to issue a statement to their flight attendants affirming that they would not violate Title VII rights to religious freedom. And this is where things get wacky.

Southwest did as they were instructed and released a statement saying, we don't discriminate based on religion. But that wasn't good enough.
U.S.

District Judge Brantley Starr ruled that they were supposed to say that they may not discriminate, not don't. And their statement didn't mention Title VII by name.
Come on. He wrote, quote,

It's hard to see how Southwest could have violated the notice requirement more.

Oh, oh, call on me. I know how they could have violated it more.
I have so many ideas. Here's his example.
Real quote: I'm quoting from his decision.

After God told Adam, you must not eat from the tree in the middle of the garden. Imagine Adam telling God, I do not eat from the tree, while an apple core rests at his feet.

Or where Gandalf bellows, you shall not pass, the Balrog muses, I do not pass, while strolling past Gandalf on the bridge of Ghazad to Om.

Yes, that is a real quote from a real federal judge in his decision. Okay, and that federal judge is about to sentence the Balrog to bridge sensitivity training with HR.

Yeah, as weird as those examples are, neither of them even makes your fucking point or any point that I can discern. Yeah.

So Starr holds Southwest in contempt, writes his own version of the memo for them to send out and citing a quote, chronic failure to uphold federal protections for religious freedom, ordered that three of Southwest's lawyers undergo religious freedom training.

And who did he suggest provide that training?

Why, the Alliance Defending Freedom, of course, a registered hate group with a history of arguing that gay people should be criminalized and that women shouldn't have jobs unless it's birthing.

Also, I sentenced the company to die and then come back whiter like Gandalf.

Well, making things come back whiter is the ADF's specialty. So if you don't, I know it.
Yeah.

So that decision, of course, got appealed. An appeal that drew briefs from the Freedom from Religion Foundation.
And I love this.

The ADF itself, who just made sure to note that they were like wide open on Thursdays, was finally this week, two conservative federal judges ruled that no, you don't get to send lawyers to religious freedom re-education school, no matter how many board games you have lost to Heath.

So, yeah. I would never play a board game with those people.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars later, the almost kind of sort of right thing has happened.

So tune in for 2026 when Americans start getting their rights back retroactively, everybody. I think that's been pushed back to 2029.
Yeah. minimum yeah

and finally tonight in big brother is botching news

when pope francis took over in 2013 we didn't hear much of anything about his four siblings frankie was from argentina so i was just picturing like four beautiful smiley people wearing little messy jerseys teaching surf lessons in a very calm really voice okay obviously that's not everyone from argentina but my stereotyping American brain at least conjured something positive.

But when Bob from Chicago became the new pope and I heard he has a brother, I had a much different reaction. More like, fucking yikes, here we go.
And that was about the right reaction. Yes, it was.

Pope Bobby Southside has an older brother named Louie. And Louie is a 73-year-old Florida man who enjoys line dancing on honky-tonk Thursdays and hosting slurs on social media.

Yeah, and I bet I know which ones Catholics are more upset about, too. Yeah, right, right.

The only thing that distinguishes him from the previous pope on the slur front is his acumen with social media, I think.

Well, apparently, the conclave doesn't do much in the way of vetting family members ahead of time.

So, we got to watch the Catholic Church's PR team in a panic for the last two weeks trying to deal with Florida man Louie. It started with Louie's social media posts.

Some guy at the Vatican had to go on Louie's Facebook and immediately see Nancy Pelosi is a drunk C-word exact quote. Oh, God.

And that was right next to the claim that Nancy's husband, Paul, was in a secret relationship with an extremely violent male sex worker who then attacked Paul with a hammer. That conspiracy theory.

Oh, wow. And of course, some posts about just general homophobia and transphobia.
So it was a tricky moment for the Vatican.

Lots of good points that agree with their Catholic philosophy from Louis, but Louis wasn't great with the phrasing of the bigotry. And that's an important core tenet of the church.

You're supposed to say it in Italian, Louis. God, read the manual.

So what's the PR plan after too many offensive comments? You do an interview with Piers Morgan. Sure.
Perfect.

Media personality for signaling progressive values. During the interview, Louis said, I'm a MAGA type and I have my beliefs, but I don't need to create heat for my brother.

And he added that he's gone quiet online and that he's biting his tongue.

Now, I'd love it if Louie would maybe learn something, but honestly, learn absolutely nothing, but also shut the fuck up is so much better than we get from most people who need to learn something.

The only positive thing I've read about Louis is that he does the wordle with his brother every day. The Pope is doing the wordle every day.
And I like that.

Yeah, it's all very sweet until manga is the word again. Then all of a sudden, he's throwing out excommunications for ruining his street.

Hey, the only point of having a pope is excommunicating whatever asshole world editor chose manga. I thought we were going to lose Noah, everybody.
I thought we were going to lose him.

So later in that interview, Piers Morgan asked Louis if the Vatican had called him to talk about social media strategy.

And Louis said, no one has contacted me yet, but I'm pretty sure he's lying, or maybe we got some contact after that comment because all those posts are gone now.

Somebody got Louis to delete pretty much everything he's ever said on the internet.

And I'm guessing that involved some old Italian bishop and a 73-year-old Florida man just smashing computers and phones and fucking VCRs with a baseball bat and yelling at each other.

And then finally getting the Vatican's like one IT guy under 50 years old to walk him through it. And thanks for doing this, Chris.

Hey, when you die, do you want us to put you in a box and cut out your heart? No? Okay, I was just asking.

We ask, we ask.

And while I lament the fact that I didn't think of a way of working Pope Leotard into the story that doesn't sound like a slur against the mentally handicapped, we're going to close the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always. Chewing Haji.
And when we come back, back, we'll beat Dennis Prager's kids in the total number of times we've checked in on him this year contest.

Hey, podcast listener. Sorry, just popping in again because we didn't have any ads this week.
And while we were on break, I learned about pay pigs on TikTok. Yeah, it's true.
He did.

And look, this seems like a scam or something wildly exploitive and problematic. But if it's real and you are a pay pig, you can absolutely give us your money as a sex thing.

Give us your money as a sex thing. Yeah, what was that?

Was that it? Did you like that? I'll say it too. Give me your money.
Give us your money. Give us your money.
Pay pig. Paypiag.

Money.

Guys, what are you doing in the booth?

Rhythm circumstance.

What? Oh, okay. I thought maybe we could record a second Matreon ask where we tell PayPigs maybe that they could give us their money.
Oh. You did? No, man, I could hear you in the hall.
Ah, man.

Give us your money.

David, cut it out. They could, though.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Pip here.

Boop.

One thing I have to hand it to Christians for is their ability to squeeze feature-length stupidity into short form video, which is why we're here to present yet another

God-awful mini.

So tell us, Heath, what will we be breaking down today? We watched two different videos from Prager University.

Oh, a tasting menu. Yeah.
Almost there on getting my degree asterisk.

A masters of race is what we're going to talk about. The first of those videos is called

The Two Ways to React When Evil is Done by a, quote, religious person.

It's the story of how the world would be too boring without pedophiles. It is, though.
That's the argument that he makes.

in the video the video and the second one is called a message to the christian left it's the story of how black people don't like dennis prager and he wants a law to fix that yes yes he again seriously that's the argument We watched the first video and I'm like, well, the second video can't possibly be better than that.

And it starts off with him going like, here's what I got to say to the blacks. And I'm like, oh, Dennis.
Yep. That's where he started.

That is where he starts. And Eli, how bad were these minis?

Well, if you love the religious apologetics of the Christian right, but you wish it had all the delicacy and sensitivity of your grandma being escorted out of bingo by church security,

you will love. this movie.
It's not so much the horrifying things that Dennis Prager is saying so much as he is saying them in the voice of an allergist telling you Claritin doesn't work.

right right all right so is there anything you guys want to nominate this one for being the best at being the worst at yeah i'm going to go with best worst

i honestly can't tell if these are real videos like i know dennis prager so i know they're real but like if we made deep fakes of dennis prager as a joke this is exactly what we'd have him say as a joke Yeah, and speaking of which, I was going to go with best worst anger, right?

So at one point, Dennis has to calm himself down, right? As he gets very emotional, but he's completely devoid of emotion throughout. He's just, he's ordering a fucking sub-sandwich throughout.

We've all seen Jews be angrier about how many pickles were brought to the table than

Dennis Prager will claim he is about child rape.

And I'm going to go with best, worst. Trust me, someone behind the camera agrees with me.

We'll talk about it when we get to it. Oh, I love it.
Megan. Megan was great.
Oh, Megan.

All right. So we're going to open up with a video that's called The Two Ways to React When Evil is Done by a Religious Person.

And we should point out that the word religious is in quotes in the title.

So even the title is trying to sneak in a no-true Scotsman fallacy. Right.
Exactly. But he's answering a question that one of his viewers sent to him.
Yeah.

So what they do for these videos is they have these like long live streams that are called fireside chats where Dennis Prager just fucking vamps.

And then they break them into little videos so that we have C-segments for our podcast. Yeah.
And this, then that's what we're watching. We're watching.

We couldn't handle the whole fireside chat. But yeah, so but he's answering the question, how can we help heal the wounds of people hurt by bad or unhappy religious people?

But yeah, but this, the person asking the question, they have a friend who is an atheist because a member of his mother's church molested him.

Yeah, we watch Dennis Prague, he keeps digging himself these huge holes. He's reading this thing off his iPad, and it's the person who wrote a letter or an email to him, whatever.

And it says, My friend is an atheist because, you know, a loving God wouldn't let him get sexually assaulted as a child. And then Dennis Prager's just like, fuck, that's a tough one.

I'm against sexual assault. I'm all the way

against it. I don't know what else to do here.
Yeah, this is where he has to calm himself down. He's like, he's like, oh, I just, I really, I have to, I need to take a minute.

I really hate. I have to contain my rage against child molesters.
I'm like, or what, Dennis Bragg, you sloppy piece of fucking shit. You're going to go all take in on the child molesters.

I would love that. Contain yourself.

Dennis, I will single-handedly fund your Liam Neeson turn into I'm an action action movie star now. I feel like Liam Neeson has some lectures at Dennis Prager's University too.

Yeah, but despite like this email goes on for so long going like, now, despite my friend's atheism, he is a good person.

He's very bright, courageous, polite. Polite to others.

This is a weird list. It's such a telling thing about Christian values, though, right?

Because they have to be like, no, no, no, I know when I say atheist, atheist, you're picturing just face down in a baby torso, just eating all the flesh they can get his teeth on.

And cowardly and stupid. He says, please and thank you.
But he's happy when he does. He does that politely with the torso.
Well, okay, but then it ends.

The end of the email says, even if I can't bring my friend to God, I want him to be happy. Okay.
Like, if you had to add that first part, you're terrible. Right.

You just want people to be happy.

Like, i want my friend to be happy it doesn't have extra hurdles in atheism right but apparently it does for dennis prager and we should point out that all the way through this the ed like he's being constantly edited right like he'll be he'll be like mid-sentence and they'll just edit it which is a fairly common thing that you know people do on youtube when they're doing long monologues but he cannot get through six fucking words without an edit through any of these videos at this point he he finishes the question and he goes well i i i i have a i have i have a an emotion-based answer so that is lit i transcribed that into our notes my closed captioning just said foghorn leghorn not sure

this was the best he could manage with an edit but yeah he says he has an emotion-based answer and a reason-based answer he doesn't No, what he actually means is you're being too emotional about your molestation.

He sure is. I have a rational way for you to look at that.
Yep. He says at this point, he says, you know, the fact that the molesters seemed to be religious was irrelevant.

And I'm like, seemed to be really? It was a HIPAA violation to even mention the fact that he's a church member and a pedophile.

And he says, look, look, I get it that you were molested by a so-called religious person, but we don't hold things against a whole group of people. And I was like, are you sure, Dennis Bragger?

Because I watched a hit and I

was in the second video, Dennis Prager. So, yeah.

But that's a strong start, right? He's like, okay, so first of all, I think this child rape victim is being very irrational. Very judging.
Jesus Christ, man.

He goes, look, if you wanted a fucking world without the occasional child rape, maybe you should have thought of that before you were descended from Eve. Hmm.

So, and then he gives this. bizarre fucking example.

He goes, okay, look, if there was a machine that made you happy by manipulating your nerves all the time, you wouldn't live in that machine, would you?

Yes. Why would you not? My dude, my dude, my phone is a machine that makes me unhappy and I live in it all the time.
We can fucking talk about that. That would be such an upgrade.

What's great is I feel like he read the first half of the utilitarian pleasure monster argument.

Yeah, pleasure monster sounds great. I want to be one of those.
But he has to have stopped mid-sentence. Like, he can't have made it all the way through the sentence.

You wouldn't want to have pleasure all the time, would you? Why would you not want that, tennis? What the fuck is wrong with you?

I get it. I get it.
Yeah. Machine that makes you happy, bad.
I don't need to read the predicate.

Yeah. He also makes the argument.
that

we need to have pedophiles around. Yes.
Because otherwise, you know, we need the free will. Otherwise, we'd be robots.
God could totally stop all of the pedophiles, but then we'd be robots.

And I was like,

and you would find that boring? And that's the is that seriously your argument? I feel like robots is better than rapists, right? Right. Yes.
Also, no.

We'd be people who don't do raping, not robots. We would just not do that.
And we would choose among other options besides that one.

It's amazing that they seem to think that once you take child rape off the decision tree, well, there's really no decision tree left, right? Yeah.

Like God's being like, if I stop all the crimes, that would remove free will.

I need somebody to yell from the background, hey, what if you just stop the child, just the one thing, just the child rape, just get rid of that one.

Well, but also, like, I don't have the free will to eat the sun. Yeah, right? Like, there are, you know, like, obviously, there are things that we can and can't do.
So, like, yeah.

I don't have the free will to lick my elbow. I don't feel like a robot.

Yeah, but so he bumbles his way through that. But then he explains that like,

if you really want to answer this question, it all depends on how rational your atheist friend can be about their molestation. Right.
So then he like does away with the very idea of atheism.

He's like, he's like, I mean, come on, does your friend really believe that the universe created itself? That's not a rational view. Ron Howard, it did, though.
It did create it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. No.
And he makes an accidentally good argument right next to his worst argument immediately. It's great.
So he traps himself in a corner.

He goes, look, I would rather your friend be happy than your friend believe in God. And then he realizes he says that, and that's not his brand.
So he goes, but what about revenge?

Well, yeah, okay. So, yeah, right.
It would be quantifiably untrue to say that if hell was a thing, right? He says it's more important that your friend is happy than that they believe in God.

That would not not be true if hell exists or if you remotely believe that hell exists. Right.
But then he's like, no, no, no, but he would be happier if he did believe in God.

And I'm like, oh, really? He'd be happier knowing that there was an all-powerful being that could have stopped his rape, but didn't because of a vague notion of free will. Take me there, Dennis.

Yeah, that makes sense for that victim to be thinking something along those lines. Wouldn't want people to be all boring and consensual, so I took one for the team.
That's your serious argument.

Yeah, I took one for the team. Exactly.
Right. But yes.
But then he goes, he gets to his final argument, his revenge argument, right?

Where he goes, like, well, hey, if you believe in God, you get to imagine this guy burning in hell forever that molested you, huh? That's psychologically healthy, right? For you to do.

And then, because he realizes what a terrible argument it is, he looks off camera and goes, Megan nodded. This guy gets it.
Megan. He's literally this guy gets it.

The one person who's in the room that he's paid to be.

megan off camera agrees with you wouldn't know megan she's she's there though she's from canada yeah where

where the brothers at so that's the next video here

here's the thing though if you believe in christianity

then the molester guy oh like he just told his brain that he was sorry later and got into heaven anyway yeah right so in fact if if your bullshit is true and your atheist guy finds god he's going to to probably run into his molester in heaven eventually, and that's going to be super fucking awkward.

Or he doesn't believe in God, then he ends up burning in hell while the molester goes to heaven. Also, Dennis Praker doesn't believe in afterlife punishment because he's fucking Jewish.

Yeah, so I was on

the plus he is talking about.

He claims only God could punish the terrible rapists, but we could do it right now. Also, sure.

If only there wasn't a church covering it up.

So, okay. So that's video number one.

But somehow it gets even worse because video two is called a message to the Christian left, but that's only because somebody managed to talk him out of his original title idea, which was a message to the blacks.

Gentlemen, may I quote? Please.

I wish there were leaders in America today saying to black America, you cannot hate a white.

That is

the opening fucking line. Okay, so I

cook. Let him cook.

He's got this. So, okay.
So, quick peek behind the scenes. The first video that we chose was about the Fed.

We thought that would be a really fun one about like a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit, but it was just explaining how the Fed worked. It was no good.
And I called the late Audible.

I was four minutes into it. I'm like, guys, this isn't going to work.
This isn't funny. And Eli sent me another video.
And he's like, will this one work?

And it was this second video that he sent me first. I am nine seconds in, and I'm like, yep.

Yep, this one will do it.

That'll do, pig. That'll do.

So, yeah. But he explains to us that there's a law in the Bible that says in Deuteronomy that says, do not hate an Egyptian.
Right. So even though the Egyptians enslave the Jews,

they're not allowed to hate them. Much like the whites.

enslaved the blacks. Right.
And we all know historically that Jewish people have never hated an Egyptian person. No.
So you should try to do the same thing here in the United States.

And hey, hey, Dennis, does it feel good to be the Egyptians in your metaphor? Yeah.

Right.

So yeah, but then he explains that the only reason that other people aren't agreeing with him publicly is because they're a bunch of fucking cowards. They're afraid.
Yeah.

He says, and I quote, there is no other explanation. And I'm like, well, maybe you're a bigot, Dennis, but I've got one.

It's so funny because he's like, you know, there's all this hate against whites from the black people and also resentment and anger and jealousy. It's a lot of negative emotions.

And I was like, oh, okay. So they don't get to have any negative emotions towards white people.
It's not just hate.

They don't get to feel like sorrow. Right.

Right. They're just bringing up old shit.
Yeah. It's been so long since slavery.
He actually says that. Literally where he goes, he goes, it's been 160 years.
Get over it, the blacks. Yes.

His actual quote is, so the thing he said about the Bible, he was like, this was one generation later, and they had a law that was, don't kill. And he goes, guys, it's been 160 years after slavery.

It's not one generation. And then I wrote in my notes.
It's six.

Yeah. Wow.
Unless you don't count from the beginning of slavery or if you count Jim Crow, in which case.

It's none. Right.
Well, he realizes that he skipped that. He's like, oh, fuck.
Well, there's there's also Jim Crow and like a bunch of racism ever since. So I guess they're bringing up new shit too.

Fucking

stop bringing up white people died in the civil rights. And then he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I found it. I found it.
We've been so cool to the black people since World War II.

So cool. Yes.
Yeah. He's like, since the civil rights era, he literally says, since the civil rights era, there's really no excuse for all this resentment.

Woo! Now there's no one in his life that's willing to tell him no, that he can't put that video out into the world.

Just finish spraying someone with a hose and then you help them up and you're like, we're good, right? Like, this is, this is

gross.

You're okay. Okay, that was going so fucking badly.
And then he made it worse.

He made all of those arguments. And then he's like, hold on, I got another one.
I got another one. The Civil War ended slavery.
And so many white people died during that war.

That was an actual point he made. Yeah.
Yep. An actual point he made.
Well, if you think about it, a lot of white people died to end slavery too. Yeah.

And I'm like, but they're not the ones that started the war.

Right? Like it was the fight. It was the white people fighting for slavery that started the war.
The other white people were just finishing a war. Some racists started.

And now that I think about it, Jewish people are afraid to talk about this, but 8 million Germans died while the Holocaust was getting ended by that war.

You're welcome.

No.

Wow.

They're afraid to face it, Heath. They're afraid to face it.
Yep, yep. Their number is only like seven, allegedly.

But then he tells the blacks that God is pretty serious about this reverse racism stuff. So you might want to back off all of that white white hate that y'all are known for.

And then he fucking sundowns.

Dustin, though. Okay, gentlemen, this is like 1% off what he does.
Nobody hates white people like white people. They live on hatred.
And now, China classes, courses,

business schools. Right.
Yes. Yes.
Yes. He's like, yeah, you know,

you shouldn't lump people in all this one group because that's what the Chinese did.

Okay. He actually says that.
He says, wokists are obsessed with all these, I think exact words, Chinese revolution-like classes. Yes.

And like the hated classes during the Cultural Revolution in China were literally called

black classes. Yeah.

Those were like the cap, the rich people, but still, like, you need to know that detail, Dennis, before you say that. Yeah.

He also says, we're the biggest, you know, us, the wokists, we're the biggest fomenters of hating white people is the white wokists. And I was like,

we're the biggest fomenters of hating you, Dennis. It's like a little different.
Right.

Well, and I'm like watching him going like, yeah, man, you're making a lot of people hate white people right now. So I guess in that sense, maybe.

Yeah. And then he tells us, he's like, and, you know, if you're white and you deny you're a racist, you're even a bigger racist.

Okay.

So Dennis clearly had to do one single HR thing for like two minutes. And immediately he got in there and he yelled, I'm not a racist right away.
This video is what he learned from that experience.

Yes, exactly. He was told about subconscious racism in like 2001 and he still hasn't gotten over it.
Yes. Through a telephone game he played with Matt Walsh.
Right.

Well, and also he goes, he goes, you know, you're racist just for being a white. And I'm like, dude, you just used the term a white.

Okay, like, that's a pretty big red flag that maybe you're a racist.

And then I love this so much. He says, look, that lie, which is the lie of racism existing, is as bad for black people as it is for white people.
And we're supposed to be like, oh, that's really bad.

That's seriously. That's the argument.
Like, hating a white guy is actually racist against black people if you think about it.

Because you can't. So

black people are the real white supremacists, if you think about it. Oh, yes, that's what he said.
That's the end of this video. Yeah.

Sorry, Heath, I hate to argue with you, but the actual end of this video is you can't be a happy or healthy person if you feel like you're a victim and you're filled with hate. I'm Dennis Prince.

Yes, yes.

Oh, all right. Well, much like Dennis' family, we've got nothing more to say to him.
So we're going to wrap things up there and start digging around for the next god awful many

i'm not a racist

before we close our pedals back up for the night i want to thank everybody who's already donated to help make matreon a success again this year laughing at the world around you is one of those things where the harder it is to do the more important it is to do And without our patrons, we genuinely wouldn't be able to keep helping you do that.

So with all sincerity, thanks, patrons. Anyway, that's all the blast movie we've got for you tonight, but we'll be be back in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait that long, be able to look out for a brand new episode of our sister shows, Hot Friend Got Off a Movies Day, debuting at 7 a.m.

Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our Half Sister Association Nita debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't expect the RSS feed to accept this episode if I don't thank Heath Enright in advance for helping me crush it. Code names this weekend.

Eli Bosley for getting to Portland early and picking up weed for me because I land after the weed shops close. Yes, that's how good a friend Eli is.

I need to thank Lucinda Lusions for not ripping anybody's face off over the news she had to cover this week. Although, depending on the face, I would forgive you, Lucinda.

I also need to thank Danny from the Blackfold podcast for providing this week's Farnsworth code.

Incidentally, if you want to know more about the history of Black Metal, check the show notes for a link to his podcast.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's most marvelous Matreons.

But I can't do it by name just yet because we're recording way earlier this week.

Sorry, we're all traveling to Portland for the live gam record, but I will make sure to get you properly named and complimented next week.

Together, this indeterminate number of people heard the Clarion call for new and upgrading patrons in the month of May, and they responded with the kind of alacrity we've come to count on.

And it's not too late for you to help swell their numbers.

If you want in on the Matreon action, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash scathing atheist, whereby you own early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode.

Or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingadious.com.

And if you'd like to help, but money's too expensive right now, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show, and following us on social media and speaking to social media.

Tim Robinson handles that for us, and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission.

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

What is Big Big? I don't know what that is, actually. The whole thing, it's actually

a shock right now. Yeah, so it's like Fin Don.

I don't know. Oh, wow.
Yikes. Yeah.

Jesus.

This content is can-credentialed, which means you can report instances of harassment, abuse, or other harm at their hotline at 617-249-4255 or on their website at creatoraccountability network.org.

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