626: Alarm Belle Edition

Start your journey toward the perfect engagement ring with Yadav, family owned and operated since 1983.

We'll pair you with a dedicated expert for a personalized one-on-one experience.

You'll explore our curated selection of diamonds and gemstones while learning key characteristics to help you make a confident, informed decision.

Choose from our signature styles or opt for a fully custom design crafted around you.

Visit yadavjewelry.com and book your appointment today at our new Union Square showroom and mention podcast for an exclusive discount.

Warning, I've been storing up extra profanity over the last few weeks.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Factor and by

Product, the much less divisive mail delivery service.

And now, with apologies for hitting you with a bad map joke that early, The Scathing Atheist.

Hi, this is the bastard from Gate Theory, and during my time as a neuroscientist, I observed unspeakable levels of aggression among my science colleagues, allowing me to conclude that we did indeed evolve from filthy monkey men with oversized limit systems.

For more nerd metal, go to gate theory.com.

Mom, where's my fucking guitar tuner?

It's Thursday!

It's February 27th, and it's the UK's National Toast Day!

Yeah, I'll keep things as dry as possible.

Not possible, Marshall.

I'm No Illusions.

I'm Eli Bosnik.

I'm Michael Marshall, and from Indiana Joneses, New Jersey, Liverpool, England, and Way Cross, Georgia, this is the Scathing Atheists.

This week's episode, Nevertheless, We Existed.

British bishops will make an illegal move

and we'll learn who succeeded Cardinal Pell as Australia's worst living person.

But first, the diatribe.

There is only one takeaway from the latest Pew Religious Landscape study in the U.S.

that's good news for Christians.

So you can bet your ass it's the one that is virtually everybody's headline for this story, including Pew's.

So yeah, so the headline is that the decline of Christianity in the U.S.

and to a lesser extent the rise in religious non-affiliation may have leveled off.

May have.

And despite the survey being chocked full of indicators that atheism and secularism are still on the rise, that's the big takeaway that every major news outlet has chosen to run with.

If you just read the headlines, as oh, so many of us do, your takeaway might be that the decades-long decline in American religiosity has finally reversed, which which means that you'll likely hear moderately informed religious people parroting that dubious claim in the near future.

So, before they do, let's take a deeper look at the numbers.

So, the religious landscape study is a survey that Pew started doing back in 2007 and then again in 2014.

COVID kind of delayed the intended follow-up in 2021, but on the day that we're recording, they finally released the data from their 2022-2023 survey.

And so, between 2007 and 2014, the number of Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 78.4% to 70.6%.

And in this latest survey, the number dropped even more by like a lot.

It's down to 62%, which is approximately the same percentage drop as there was between the first two surveys.

So how the fuck are they claiming this represents a leveling off?

Well, other surveys that Pew did in the interim show the number of Christians continuing to decline precipitously, and the current number isn't significantly lower than it was in 2019.

That's the good news that they're doing a victory lap around.

Sure, their numbers are down another 8% over the past decade, but they're not down over the last four years.

At the same time, the number of people identifying as religiously unaffiliated also seems to have steadied over that shorter period of time, though it's still up a ton since the 2014 survey.

So if you stop right there, it looks like relatively good news for Christians.

But you really have to stop exactly there because almost every other datum in this fucking thing is good news for us.

Like, for example, the age cohorts.

Like for the oldest respondents, that is the people over age 74, 80% are Christian.

With the youngest respondents, those aged 18 to 24, that number drops to 46%.

That's not even a majority.

Hell, it's barely higher than the 43% of 18 to 24-year-olds who identify as religiously unaffiliated.

And I want to be clear here.

Yes, people do tend to get more religious as they get older, but that only happens to religious people.

There's plenty of evidence to show that Christians pray more and go to church more and believe in God more as they get older, but there's very little to suggest that non-religious people become religious as they get older.

In fact, the trend in this case is decidedly the other way.

So even if the decline of Christians and the rise of nuns has leveled off, there's no reason to suspect it could stay that way for long unless we invent some kind of immortality and stop having babies.

And by the way, when it comes to stuff like church attendance and daily prayer, a far more meaningful measure of one's religiosity than self-identification with a particular faith group, there's been no leveling off at all, even in the short term.

In fact, the decline in those measures may well be accelerating.

So, not only do fewer people identify as Christians, but even the ones who do are less Christian.

That's not the only good news we non-believers got, by the way.

Another very encouraging takeaway is that both atheism and general non-religiousness seem to be getting significantly less white and significantly less male-dominated.

In fact, right now, only 63% of American nuns are white.

The percentage of Americans in general who are white is 62% or 75%, depending on how you define it.

Now, most of that growth comes from Asian and Hispanic non-believers, and the percentage of African Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated is still far lower than like their corresponding percentage of the population.

So there's clearly still work to be done at making our spaces more inclusive and welcoming and reaching out to those communities that we tend not to reach out to.

But the survey shows that the work we are doing seems to be paying off.

It's just that we're not doing enough of it.

Similarly, the gender gap is moving in the right direction, possibly even quicker.

When they did this survey in 2007, the percentage of women identifying as nuns, that was 13% versus 20% of men.

Now, in 2014, both percentages were higher, 19 and 27% respectively, but the gap was about the same.

Well, in this survey, it was 31% of men and 27% of women, which means that the gap damn near halved.

Now, of course, those are numbers for religiously unaffiliated people rather than atheists specifically, but our numbers seem to be following following similar trends.

We're still too male and we're still too white, but we're trending in the right direction.

And we should keep in mind that all of these numbers that we're talking about so far, those are the numbers before you factor in whatever acceleration is going to come from living in a quasi-theocracy for the next four years.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Elizabeth and Mr.

Darcy of this podcast, Eli Bostic and Michael Marshall.

Fellas, will you?

Won't you?

Yeah, what I mean, emerging from an English pond in just my long johns, is actually how I got this cold that I've got in the first place.

So that makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I did all those prank websites because I'm in love with you, Marsh.

It was love all along.

All right.

Well, clearly we have a blossoming romance here.

So I need a minute to break it to Anna and Nicholas.

So we're going to pause for an ad for this week's sponsor, Factor.

You don't need to break it to Anna, she knows.

I'm fine.

I'll i'll have some cream chip beef okay do you hear yourself right now only two of those were food words marsh chips of food hey guys uh what's the matter marsh is spending so much of his time on the show rogan show that he's not feeding himself properly okay first of all it's the no rogan experience it's just the name of the show with no replacing joe so i'm sorry wait it's the show rogan experience It's the no Rogan experience.

We get to know Joe Rogan.

Oh, wow.

Well, that sounds like it takes a lot of energy.

Why don't you try Factor?

What's

Factor?

Factor has chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.

They're dietitian-approved and ready to heat and eat in just two minutes.

So you can fuel right and feel great, no matter what life throws at you.

Even a three-hour episode about Tuka Carlson.

Three hours?

You should have just started selling pictures of your feet, man.

But yes, with 40 options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week, it's easy to pick meals tailored to your goals.

I don't know.

Have you guys actually tried it?

I sure have.

I love that Factor helps me keep my heart-healthy diet without breaking the bank or my back with all that work in the kitchen.

That's why I, No Illusions of the Joe Shogun podcast, personally endorse Factor.

Wait, wait, wait.

What's the Joe Shogun podcast?

Oh, it's Noah's Alt History podcast where the Japanese won World War II and Joe Rogan is a feudal lord of a part of Austin, Texas.

Okay, no, that actually sounds pretty great.

It's great.

Yeah, I'm still crowdfunding the second season.

Eat Smart with Factor.

Get started at factormeals.com slash Factor Podcast and use code Factor Podcast to get 50% off your first box plus free shipping.

That's code Factor Podcast at factormeals.com/slash factor podcast to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box.

So, what is creamed chipped beef anyway?

Oh, yeah, look, here's a photo of it.

Oh, my, that's the worst-looking thing I've ever seen, man.

It tastes all right, though.

Does it?

No,

broken experience.

See, you've got it.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, Pew Research would like to remind Americans that we're nowhere near as Christian nationalist as you might guess based on our government and national policies.

In fact, in a survey of 37 nations, the U.S.

showed up in the top half of least religious nationalism, which means, among other things, that Pew isn't defining it correctly.

Yeah, like Pew, I get it.

We're not Iran or anything, but, you know, not for lack of trying.

Yeah, really.

But like, maybe when they say least religious nationalism, they mean that your nationalism is the least like religiously based.

Oh, because a lot of the folks that you're detaining at the border, they're probably Christians.

No, that's not the same thing.

They are Christians.

Interesting.

So, yeah, so this survey comes in response to the global rise of religious nationalism that's kind of defined the decades so far.

And basically, what they're trying to do is find a metric that we can use across nations of different faiths and see how nationalistic they are compared to one another.

So to find out if you're a Christian nationalist or Muslim nationalist or Hindu nationalist or whatever, they ask four questions.

How important is belonging to the historically predominant religion to being truly part of your national identity?

How important is it to you that national leaders share your religious beliefs?

How much influence do you think the historically predominant religion's sacred texts should have on the laws of your country?

And when the sacred texts conflict with the will of the people, which should have more influence on the laws of your country?

And if you answer very, very a fair amount or more and sacred texts over the will of the people, you are a religious nationalist.

Okay, well, those questions either taught me that I'm now a devout atheist nationalist, or you can only trick me on three out of four questions.

I'm not sure what I learned.

But when it says historically predominant religion, how much of history do they actually mean?

Because I really want your country to like trick itself into installing a Native American theocracy.

That would be amazing.

Like, there's going to be a taunt and poll in every classroom.

They've been there a long time.

There you go.

I love it.

Now, so by this standard, only 6% of Americans qualify as Christian nationalist.

Compare that to Kenya, the nation in the survey with the most Christian nationalism where the number was 32% or literally any of the Muslim countries they measured where the number went as high as 46 and never lower than 11%.

And like I said, I think this standard is flawed, but it's at least equally flawed across all the various countries, right?

So this is sort of encouraging, but it's also sort of terrifying because it's a stark reminder that even shifting the will of the populace doesn't matter that much, right?

Since the people in charge aren't remotely representing that populace to begin with.

I feel like I had gotten a few of those reminders this year already.

It's good to say it again.

Now, to be clear, it isn't just that Christians have outsized control over the government, though that is the biggest problem.

But when you plot out the results on a graph, right, where the y-axis is percent who think that their sacred text should strongly influence the nation's laws, and the x-axis is per capita GDP,

the results create like a diagonal downward line.

That is, the more money people make, the less important it is that some bullshit religion govern their country.

The only major outlier from this otherwise pretty much linear graph, of course, is the U.S., which just sits in the top right of the graph all by itself.

Yeah, almost never good to be alone, dart airplane levels of scale above the rest of the ground.

Yeah, but I do wonder what would happen if you plotted the median income instead of the GDP.

Oh, interesting.

Because like in the U.S., that's about half as much as the GDP, because it just means that the presence of a few ultra-wealthy billionaires can really skew things.

For example, that can install a Christian nationalist government in your country.

Example, yeah.

No, that's interesting.

But honestly, I think the biggest takeaway from this survey, at least for the U.S., is a reminder that the biggest problem in our country is disenfranchisement, right?

Whether that comes from deliberate voter suppression or simple apathy, if the politics actually reflected the populace, America would still suck, but it would at least suck different.

And in nevertheless, she, her insisted news.

A bit of a follow-up to Noah's first story this week.

See, it turns out that in addition to being unable to legislate people into their batshit religion, the Christian nationalists who currently run our country can't actually legislate people out of existence either.

And as a result, a new Gallup poll shows us this week, people are now gayer than ever.

Yep.

In my case, you can blame Tom Hardy.

And in my case, you can blame the thought of Noah with Tom Hardy.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So first off, big thanks to Erin in the morning for bringing us this news to our attention.

If you're not aware of the amazing reporting Erin is doing about trans rights, I highly recommend you sign up and follow her work.

She's often way ahead of other media when it comes to threats to trans rights, as well as debunking anti-trans garbage in the opinion columns of otherwise reputable news sources.

You can check her out at aarinthemorning.com.

Now, according to the poll, 9.3% of U.S.

adults identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or another non-heterosexual identity in 2024.

For those keeping track, that marks a nearly two-fold increase since 2020.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Also worth noting, among those surveyed, 1.3% of U.S.

adults identified as transgender, up from 0.9% in 2023.

Yeah.

And if you read the papers, every single one of them compete in high school, swimming, or wrestling.

Right.

Yeah.

That's what they love about it.

It's so weird that the number of people identifying as attack helicopters has remained steady.

I was assured that those two moved together.

Yeah.

That's cut to the defense budget.

That's what that is.

But what's amazing is that wasn't even the most significant increase.

Gay and bisexual identification rose by 0.6% and 0.8%, respectively, which might seem small like percentage-wise, but that's an extra 2 million gay people.

A Houston, Texas-sized population of extra gay or bisexual people, if you will.

Oh, now I don't even need Tom Hardy.

So let me put this another way.

Just using those numbers, at that rate, the entire population of America would be LGBTQ by like 2075.

But like an extra Houston, Texas worth of gay or bisexual people.

Okay, now if you can just convince them all to move to Houston, Texas, you might finally get rid of Ted Cruz.

Oh, there you go.

One can hope, Marsh, one can hope.

And look, it's hard to find unequivocally good news these days, but this is it, right?

No matter how much official power the bad guys hold, they aren't actually in charge of who you get to be as a human being.

And the more people like us there are, the less time they have in power.

And that's something that they are all too aware of.

Yeah.

And in here, no evil, see of E no Evil news.

If, like me, you live in the north of England, firstly, congratulations, you live in objectively the best part of the country.

No, I don't know when the next bus is due.

And don't worry about that fiery ball of warmth in the sky.

You won't have to see it too often.

But more importantly, pull up a chair because you've got a front row seat to the collapse of the Anglican church.

Yeah, I never thought I'd see a day where I was unironically jealous of people living in the north of England, but here we are, Marshmallow.

Here we are.

Dude, at this point, I'm jealous of the ones in the 1100s.

Oh, man.

So 2025 has gone very badly so far for the Church of England, right from the very off, with its most senior bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigning after it was revealed that he'd failed to investigate decades of abuse of young boys by a senior associate of the church.

And in his final speech in December before leaving the House of Lords in January, he suggested, quote, If you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary, who has seen weeks and months of work disappear in a puff of resignation announcement.

Mondays, am I right?

But seriously, folks,

I'm sorry about all the child rape.

Who's drinking tonight?

Won't somebody think of the poor people who have to fill out all that child rape paperwork?

They never get any sympathy.

Exactly.

And before that...

puff of resignation even had time to waft away, the C of E were caught in another scandal when the Bishop of Liverpool resigned from his post at Liverpool Cathedral, a mere two miles from this very back bedroom-turned podcasting studio.

That's the right Reverend John Perembalath, who stood down claiming that he didn't want the mission of the church getting distracted by the allegations of sexual assault and harassment made against him.

I see.

We must refocus our efforts back to our all-important task of rearranging the nation's elderly on various church benches.

I feel like at this point, all the Jesus stuff is just a distraction from dealing with the sexual assault, isn't it?

Very much so.

Because Perembalath was accused in a Channel 4 news investigation of kissing and groping a woman without consent on separate occasions between 2019 and 2023 while he was a bishop in Essex.

And then he was moved to be the bishop of Liverpool in 2023.

And the allegations arose then.

And the allegations were looked into by the church's national safeguarding team, who cleared Perembalath of all charges, which might seem like a failing from that team, but bear in mind that at that very time, they were busy dodging calls for an investigation into the abuse claims that would eventually see off Justin Welby.

And there's only so many hours in the day for you to get stuff done.

Yeah, I feel like if you're at work and someone in your office asks about the abuser you're covering up and you have to say which one,

you should probably quit that job, right?

Yeah.

Well, when it rains, it paused, just hours after Perembalath issued his resignation statement, a state which was, quote, not occasioned by fault or by any admission of liability, unquote, news broke that a second accuser interviewed by Channel 4 News was actually Bev Mason, the Bishop of Warrington, a town 20 miles east of me right now.

And I've got to point out.

that the Catholic church are doubtlessly watching this right now and taking away exactly the wrong lesson about having female bishops.

Yeah, no, no, the Pope did a whole Snitches Get Snitches speech to the nuns a few months ago.

He covered it.

He covered it.

So Bev Mason was actually the former acting bishop of liverpool prior to perembalath's appointment and she released an open letter accusing the church of england of not properly and satisfactorily addressing concerns about perembalath we've since learned that the church actually did take swift and decisive action to pressure Bishop Mason into take an extended leave of absence while they slow walk their investigation that's the action they took wow all right so as bad as that sounds it's really the only way we could keep her safe from us i mean we're not gonna be saw what we're doing right nothing Nothing.

So as a result, Mason said in her letter to the diocese, quote, my prayer is that now things have been brought into the light, there'll be no more defensiveness, but an honest scrutiny of what we're doing, how we're doing it, where the gaps sit, and how we address them, unquote.

Yeah.

To which the Church of England replied, my, you are new, aren't you?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I'm sure that'll be as effective as we've come to expect from prayers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is hard to know what that honest scrutiny looked like, but two weeks later, the person nominated for the open seat as the Bishop of Durham anonymously withdrew from the process of appointment.

There's no word as to why, but given the timing combined with the anonymous nature of the withdrawal, it looks way more than coincidental.

And also, Durham, I'm going to point out for the sake of completion, is the town that I grew up in.

Okay.

I don't think Marsh is implying he was molested by whoever was running for the Bishop of Durham, but if he is, it's weird he left this gap in our notes for us to write jokes into.

I just want to say that right now.

And all of this has now led to calls from Julie Connelty, the Bishop of Birkenhead, which is the town on the opposite bank of the River Mersey in a place I can practically see from my office window.

And she's now called for the Church of England to be disestablished as a result.

And if removing the officialdom from the church organization headed up by the king seems like an extreme move, I should point out that Bishop Connelty was made the church's deputy head of safeguarding in 2022, and she's the one calling for it.

Wow.

Yeah, if you're driving and you see a crossing guard guard trying to dig up the road, he's meant to be watching, it's not a great sign, right?

So, what have we learned from all of this?

Well, firstly, you should definitely hold on to your Church of England commemorative teapots and tea towels.

Because it could be worth so much more on eBay once the church has been disestablished.

Good to know.

Good to know.

But also, apparently, you just need to move me around diocese in the UK and crimes committed by bishops will just like spill out into the open.

Apparently, all right.

Well, it looks like we've got a little travel to arrange.

So, we're going to take a quick break and hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucy.

A man wrote in the Bible?

A horse, what's your mind?

If it's a legitimate race, an interest,

right?

Cooking can be fun.

Hey, I'm proud of my man.

This week in Mississauga,

you know, this time last week, I'd have told you that there's nothing Trump could do that would inspire his Christian base to speak out against him.

But it turns out I was wrong.

All he had to do was a single non-evil thing, and holy shit, did they find their voices in a hurry.

I'm talking of course about Trump's executive order last week that sought to lower the cost of in vitro fertilization.

IBF is a subject with overwhelming support from the population across all religious denominations and it especially has the support of billionaire ketamine addicts that subscribe to white replacement theory so it's no surprise that Trump supports it.

But that didn't stop evangelical Christians from freaking the fuck out when he actually tried to do something about it.

Now, to be clear, he hasn't actually done anything and he won't.

The EO is aspirational.

It calls for a list of ways to lower costs in the next 90 days, which is exactly nothing.

But even that was too much for the U.S.

Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities.

They released a statement condemning the order and blathering about life beginning at conception and IVF freezing innocent prefetuses.

Now, to be clear, the Trump regime is eviscerating Medicaid and government spending in general.

So there's no fucking way they're actually going to lower IVF costs.

If anything, they're going to raise them by throwing so much of the medical industry into chaos and defunding relevant research.

So at this point, it seems like this executive order is all downside for him, which is, ironically, its only real upside.

And believe it or not, that's not where the good news ends today.

I'm also happy to report that the Supreme Pontifical Court of the United States of Jesus has declined an opportunity to further restrict abortion access.

A lawsuit out of Southern Illinois was challenging the practice of creating legally protected safe zones around abortion clinics.

And much to my surprise, the SCOTIS didn't take the chance to eliminate them.

Now, this is only good news in a very narrow sense.

It's likely that they declined this case because they were waiting for a better challenge.

The law at issue in this one was actually repealed last year.

And even with that, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas still wanted to hear the case.

But for now, at least, those buffer zones will remain in place.

Of course, given Trump's hard on for pardoning people who violate them, I'm not sure how meaningful that will be in the long run.

All right, enough with the good news.

It's time to hit you with the scary shit.

Have y'all heard of the SAVE Act or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act?

It's one of the House Republicans' highest priorities now that they've squeezed their budget through.

And the ostensible goal of the act is to protect against voter fraud.

But since voter fraud all but doesn't exist, you kind of have to ask what the real goal is.

Well, when I explain how it'll work, I feel like it'll be fairly obvious to you.

See, the SAVE Act would require all voters to present documentation like a passport or birth certificate that matches their current name in order to vote.

And gee, which segment of the population changes their last name most often?

Now, this may not disenfranchise all women.

But all it does is disenfranchise women and trans people.

That's the entire result.

And it's plenty worth being all the way terrified over.

And with that reminder that the countdown to Gilead has just got that much shorter, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Eli, and Marsh.

Thank you, Lucinda.

And in Leave It to Deavers News.

If you've been listening to our show for a while, you know a few things are always true.

Noah's the smart one.

I'm the funny one.

Marsh brings the raw, uncensored sex appeal.

and when dusty deavers proposes a political bill it's gonna fail miserably because he's too crazy for 2025 america wow dusty dvers and and that isn't a reality show where the stars of rupaul's drag race have to like renovate old houses

because it could be it definitely

absolutely yeah yeah

dusty divers is a name that should be reserved for the comic relief henchman in a western and here he is fucking comic relief henchman in a tragedy it just doesn't work it doesn't work

yeah first off a big thanks to friend of the show hammet meta for bringing these truly glorious failures to our attention over at the friendly atheist blog i subscribed to hammet's email list and then he personally sent me this story to scathingnews at gmail.com where you can also send atheist news but if you think about it we're dating scathingnews at gmail.com and don't worry sending us stories doesn't necessarily mean eli will develop a stalker-esque obsession with you as long as you don't bring those sexy cruciph cruciverbalism skills that Hemant does.

That's what I'm talking about.

Just let me put your whole foot in my mouth and I'll leave you alone.

That's not what that.

That's not what that means.

Okay.

So as regular listeners of our show might remember, the last time we checked in with the Double D, he was trying to pass eight bills with goals like abolishing abortion, making pornography illegal, and establishing a super special Christian-only marriage called covenant marriage, in which you're not allowed to divorce Dusty Deavers, no matter what he wants you to call him when you peg him, Michelle.

Dusty Deavers, honestly, you know, full makeup, huge wig, carrying a sledgehammer, knocking down an old drywall, steel-talled platform shoes.

It's a million-dollar show idea.

Well, it's

way better than the existing Dusty Deavers, at least.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Well, good news, almost all of Deavers' bills turned out to be dead on arrival this week, with his anti-abortion bill, his covenant marriage bill, and his no-fault no-fault divorce bill all failing in the Judiciary Committee by a vote of six to two.

Okay, and one important detail that Eli's left out of the story so far, if you don't remember, Dusty Deavers is in the Oklahoma legislature, right?

That committee is 75% Republicans, which means that most of the no votes came from his party.

Come on, man.

You're fucking stop.

One other thing about how Dusty's month is going.

So we didn't get to cover this on the show at the risk of changing our names to the Deavers Devious Deeds podcast.

Which can be the name of my spin-off show.

Oh, they're good.

Yes.

There you go.

But last month, Dusty proposed a bill that would have all but eliminated special education.

The bill would have removed the ability to put things like speech therapy and occupational therapy on a student's IEP and would have made things like eye exams for those students ineligible for Medicaid.

Jesus.

But that bill was so atrocious and met with such voracious outcry that he pulled it himself two weeks ago.

I mean, plus they're getting rid of Medicaid anyway.

So what would be the point?

That's fair.

That's fair.

Anyways, all this is to say that Dusty had a bad week and is having a bad month.

And whenever Dusty Deavers has a bad time, it's a good time for the rest of humanity.

It is.

It is.

And in lessons, lessened news tonight.

We've had about enough good news out of Oklahoma, damn it.

So it's time to be reminded what Texas's hat really is.

And for that, we're going to turn once again to state superintendent and guy desperately trying to get Trump to check one of his Do You Like Me boxes, Ryan Walters.

So you'll remember him from trying to buy Bibles for all of Oklahoma's classrooms and requiring that each one contain the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Pledge of Allegiance, the lyrics to proud to be an American, and an endorsement from somebody whose name rhymes with Ronald Dump.

Well, now, and he did buy the Trump Bibles, by the way, now he's soliciting bids for Bible-based character lessons for elementary schools.

But, like, yeah, he wants these character lessons.

I assume he also wants character lessons from infinite jest and a brief history of time while he's on the subject of books people lie about ever having read.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Now, for those of you who have read the Bible, actual Bible-based character lessons would be fucking horrifying, right?

They'd show Goofus hitting his slave too hard, but Gallant hitting them just right, or they'd show a rabbi and a husband forcibly aborting an unfaithful wife with floor sweepings or whatever.

But even if we assume that the lessons will be the sanitized, anti-biblical Bible type shit that Christians pretend exists for their kids' sake, it's still pretty fucked up.

Anything that reinforces the fiction that morality and Christianity are intrinsically linked serves their Christian nationalist agenda.

Right.

And even if all the lessons were amazing, which they won't be, the fact that non-Judeo-Christian kids exist in a public school system would be a pretty great reason not to be teaching out of their holy book.

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

And if you doubt that at all, try pitching some good character lessons source from a different holy book and see how easy Walters and his cronies are to accept those.

Exactly.

So the soup is hot.

What

are they specifically looking for is, quote, supplemental instructional materials that effectively integrate the Bible and character education into elementary level social studies curriculum, end quote.

It's also, by the way, restricted to companies that have a track record of working with government agencies, a stipulation that certainly exists to keep folks like us from putting together a bid.

Now, of course, God damn it.

Right?

It also says that it should contain, quote, age-appropriate biblical content.

And if you want age-appropriate shit for elementary school kids from the Bible, you're mostly restricted to articles, pronouns, and conjunctions.

Okay, so then Noah loaded all the animals onto the boat, and

he had a boat with animals on it.

So, the stated goal is to teach children, quote, honesty, respect, responsibility, and compassion, end quote, presumably so that they can grow up and vote for a political party entirely defined by dishonesty, disrespect, buckpassing, and callousness.

And of course, all of it is in blatant opposition to the state constitution, which still forbids spending any public money to promote religion.

The only silver lining here is that there's already a lawsuit against Walters for violating that same constitutional clause.

So this one should slot in nice and easy as like fucking exhibit W or whatever.

And finally, tonight, in collegiate news, if it wasn't bad enough that white supremacists are now doing open Nazi salutes on the world stage, while the inappropriately monikered free press of Barry Weiss reassures us they're just naughty little rebels, it's nothing more than that.

Well, last week we were treated to the sight of an elected MP in the UK having a cozy center-stage chat about racist conspiracy theories.

Yes, they're Nazi salutes, but what's more punk than fascism?

People hate fascism.

Believe me, I know.

I'm Barry Watts.

Right.

Also, check your privilege, Marsh.

Fucking center-stage chat about racist conspiracy theories is an agenda item in our Congress.

That's true.

Yeah, that's fair.

That's fair.

But for anyone who missed it, the Reform UK MP and walking nicotine stained Nigel Farage attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference in London, where he was interviewed by Canadian Christian supremacist culture warrior Jordan B.

Peterson.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

And during the crystal fascist chinwag, the subject inevitably turned to the degradation of British identity.

Obviously, we've all been there in an open conversation, but which particular part of British identity do they think has been degraded?

I think you all know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm honestly, I'm not sure who people like Nigel Farage and Jordan Peterson think they're scaring with this whole there will be fewer people like us tactic, but they stick with it.

They're sticking with it.

Honestly, the most disappointing part of this talk for me was that for once, Jordan B.

Peterson wasn't dressed like a Batman villain someone crumpled up and threw in the trash halfway through the sketch.

So according to The Times, Peterson pressed Farage on the importance of, quote, long-term, stable, married, monogamous, heterosexual, child-center marriages, suggesting that homosexuals, divorcees, and single mothers were deviations from the norm, unquote, to the apparent applause of the crowd.

Right.

And Marsha's only saying apparent because we don't know that everyone in the room didn't start furiously masturbating at the mention of homosexuality.

And we like to be open about that.

Well, or perhaps because the very idea of applauding an attack on single mothers is so anathema to decency that his mind just cannot fully accept it without further evidence.

Right, exactly.

Perhaps they were just slapping themselves as much as they deserve.

Oh, God, look at the room I'm in.

So to that prompt, Farage responded that he, quote, may not necessarily be the best advocate for monogamous heterosexuality or stable marriage, having been divorced twice, unquote.

And like, okay, I get the stable marriage part of that, but feels like Nige is really outing himself on the first one.

Yeah, he's not a good advocate for monogamous heterosexuality.

That said, we already knew that monogamous heterosexuality wasn't his thing, given how often he throws himself at any fascist world leader willing to flash ankle Farage's way.

Nigel, we don't need to call out our hypocrisies like this on stage.

That's what other people are for.

Fuck out my whole bit, man.

So Farage continued that in the West, quote, we've kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture.

If we recognize that and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that.

So yes, of course family matters enormously.

Of course, we need higher birth rates.

There it is.

Yeah, it's weird that country by country, the more we've forgotten that, the wealthier, healthier, better educated, and happier the people have gotten.

But yeah, we better not forget it.

So this is a sitting British MP doing a lot more than flashing his ankle to the great replacement theory, which is also known as the Calergy Plan, like in the headline pun from quite a while ago, if you remember.

Yo, Marsh had a footnote on that joke in our notes in case we were in danger of not realizing how clever it was.

It's a niche reference.

No, it's really good, though.

It's really good.

It's the infinite gest of this podcast.

Yeah.

So the Calergy Plan is the idea that wealthy elites are deliberately driving mass migration in order to weaken the white race.

Sorry, I mean the Judeo-Christian culture.

So the only thing that we Judeo-Christians can do to save us is to have more Judeo-Christian babies.

Maybe they'll even give a special badge to the Judeo-Christian Brits who have the most Judeo-Christian babies.

Maybe it could be a cross symbol, you know, because Christian.

It could even be made out of gold because after all, we know Farage knows a gold guy.

Podcast listener, if you're not from the UK and you're not paying for patron access to our script, Marsh has brought hyperlink receipts to that last sentence and they are buckwhat.

Come on, French here.

All I'm saying is Marcia's jokes are way funnier when you have the footnotes.

They're good one way or the other, but they're way better with the notes.

Much like Infinite Jest.

Yeah, I refuse to embrace an audio-only format.

I'm sorry you're trying to show me.

The DFW of podcasting, Marsh.

That's what I say about you all the time.

And, you know, silver lining, once you're done giving out all those gold crosses to all the Judeo-Christian parents who outbred the non-Judeo-Christian migrants, you now have a ready-made production line for making a different type of gold badge, maybe with more of a star mortis.

You can hand out when you've decided that the Judeo bit of Judeo-Christian wasn't the bit you were trying to preserve.

Yeah, right.

And with that reminder that sometimes history does way more than rhyme, we're going to close the headlines for the night.

Eli Marsh, thanks as always.

Doomanji.

And when we come back, Marsh will show you that your opinion of humanity could do get lower.

There's a pervasive belief that even the worst people have have some good buried in them somewhere and that a concerted effort to connect with them on a deep level might draw it out.

Which Marsh will help us disprove again in this week's installment of

Who's Woo?

So who do you have for us this time around, Marsh?

So often when it comes to who's woo, we've kind of got to walk a bit of a delicate line.

Because even when the woo is incredibly egregious and damaging, we can't know for certain if the Wooster is a true believer or an absolute faker.

Well, for this week, throw that line away because today we're going to talk about Belle Gibson.

Oh, yeah, a hoaxer so evil that the questions about her are surely nobody could be that bad.

Yeah.

So Belle Gibson was likely born Annabelle Natalie Gibson, probably on the 8th of October 1991, and in all likelihood in Tasmania, Australia.

According to a news.com.au profile, she was an introverted six-year-old who, quote, teetered on a chair over a stove making dinner for an autistic younger brother and a mother who had multiple cirrhosis.

Unquote.

The same profile describes her as being a severely obese 11-year-old who used her sheer gumption and willpower to stop overeating and, with her brother in tow, take sunset strolls around their Brisbane block.

Well, see, now that's a mistake as the obesity will stop that chair from teetering.

It's much safer.

And at the age of 12, and quote, depleted from years as her mother's carer, unquote, she left her family home to live with a classmate and then later with a family friend she dropped out of school around the age of 15 or 16 at which point she may or may not have been homeschooled yes but first she had to build her house out of used chewing gum the bottles the local children threw at her on her daily paper route yeah yeah exactly or maybe none of that was true not Belle's name, not her caring for her ill mother, not her childhood obesity, not her autistic brother.

We don't even know for certain her name or her date of birth.

And that might seem like an oddly uncertain way to start what is essentially a biography, but details of Belle Gibson's early life are pretty hazy, mostly because they come from interviews with Belle Gibson.

And as we'll see, those aren't always to be trusted.

And look, Belle, I get it.

I forgot on air the other day what my opinion about drinking milk was supposed to be.

But if you don't con people about cancer, that just makes you the adorable heart and soul of the podcast.

Well, to be fair, dude, you're being more honest about your name than any of this show's host, and that technically includes Mark.

Thank you.

That's true.

That is true.

So, what we do know for sure is that by 2008, Belle had moved to Perth and was involved in the local skateboarding community where she began to post on the message board there about her health complications.

And she explained that at the age of 20, she was vaccinated with the Gardasil HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer and start to experience extreme side effects, including vision, memory, and walking problems.

Oh, that explains the inconsistencies in her bio.

Okay, the memory shock.

Then she says she suffered a stroke.

Then she told the forum that she needed surgery to remove fluid from around her heart.

And then in one post, she said she just woke up out of a coma type thing and had no idea what was going on.

The doctor comes in and tells me the draining failed and I went into cardiac arrest and died for just under three minutes.

Best three minutes in Australian history.

Okay, I know she's going to turn out to be all evil and wooey and full of but so far we're just making fun of a sickly teenager from a broken home and i'm going to need you to speed up that evil part a bit marsh

okay fair fair well how about this noah we can say fairly certainly that her coma claims were not true partly because there is no link between the hpv vaccine and any of the kind of side effects that she claims to have had and experienced there but also because This was in 2008 when she said she was 20, despite the fact that her birth certificate clearly shows she was born in 1991.

And so she wasn't even 20 in 2008.

Oh,

leave it to a man to call a girl out for lying about her age and whether or not a vaccine side effect literally kills her.

Still, that illness made for quite a compelling story, and it would only get more so.

According to multiple interviews around 2013 and 2014, after that stroke, she was diagnosed with, quote, a stage two malignant tumor of the brain, unquote, which she says was apparently caused by the vaccine.

And she said she was given six weeks, four months tops to live.

So she says she moved to Melbourne to have two months of cancer treatment before she then had an epiphany that if she only now had a few weeks left to live, she wasn't going to spend them on chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

So she gave up all conventional treatment and instead put her trust in herbalism, craniosacal therapy, meditation, Ayurvedic medicine, oxygen therapy, and a cancer-fighting diet.

She became a vegetarian, non-dairy, non-gluten, cut out preservatives and refined sugars, cut out GMO foods, and it worked in the sense that she didn't die of cancer.

Yet, the universe still has a chance to do an incredibly funny thing.

That's true, yeah.

It's amazing how much more effective those treatments are when your maladies are made-up bullshit, right?

Yeah.

So, needless to say, this whole story makes absolutely no sense.

For one thing, there is no such thing as a stage two malignant tumor.

Wow,

She wouldn't even be bothered to Google right off the bat.

She did not Google.

Brain tumors are measured in grades rather than stages.

Okay, maybe she'd misreported that minor detail and she meant to state like a grade two malignant tumor.

But the bigger point here is that a grade two tumor would be relatively slow growing and therefore would be highly unlikely to result in a life expectancy of four months.

Specialists interviewed by the Australian newspaper said the only brain tumor severe enough to cause death within four months is a grade four glioblastoma.

And there was no known record of anyone surviving such a tumor for five years without treatment.

Well, there's one, but it's the one that the specialists don't want you to know about, Marsh.

And you know what?

Those medical miracles, they just kept coming.

Despite, according to Belle, being told by her doctors that she'd never have children, in 2010, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

No, Belle, the doctor said he hoped you would never have children.

So she knew at this point that she just had to share her story.

And so she set up the Healing Bell Instagram account and began to share her resources on, quote, superfoods, organic living, nourishing recipes, and inspirational pictures and quotes, unquote, which included promoting gersome therapy and raw milk.

Oh, for fuck's sake.

I mean, her kid was drinking it.

How bad could it be?

You know?

Her incredible story, literally incredible story, amassed more than 200,000 followers in the first year.

And by 2013, she was so popular that she launched launched an app, The Whole Pantry, which included recipes, exercise tips, and an upbeat, inspiring, and energetic tone.

It developed a huge following.

It was downloaded like more than 200,000 times in the first month and went on to become Apple's best food and drink app of 2013.

Okay, but to be fair, the app store also recommends the only slightly less predatory than Bell Gibson Kingdom Clash Clan.

You're right.

No, I feel like it's a good time to point out that Eli Marsh and I also didn't die of cancer over that period of time.

Hell, we didn't die of even less cancer than she didn't die of in case any of the people want to give us money for our app.

And we ate dairy, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But then tragedy struck in March 2014.

Her cancer returned and she was being tested for two neurological cancers, according to Bell Gibson.

Worse was still to come.

In July, she told Instagram, quote, It hurts me to find space tonight to let you know with love and strength that I've been diagnosed with a third and fourth sick cancer.

One is secondary and the other is primary.

I have cancer in my blood, spleen, brain, uterus, and liver.

I am hurting, unquote, which was truly awful timing because it was at the exact time that she just launched a cookbook, The Whole Pantry, and she was right in the middle of negotiating a deal that would see her app added as one of the default apps at the launch of the Apple Watch, earning Gibson in excess of $1 million.

So, the herbal diet and raw milk are multiplying her cancers that's the only explanation you'd think right

and somehow despite her crushing health diagnosis belle remained upbeat and positive and motivational telling instagram quote i live in an accepted place where i try not to hide the realness of living with cancer and pain but also choose every day not to play a victim unquote posts like that drew a huge amount of praise from her ever-growing legion of fans right Finally, I can't tell you how many people I've unfollowed for being a pussy about their cancer.

It's like, um, I'm here for skateboard tricks.

Get your KofundMe out of my fucking face.

Now, a lot of people were pointing out that for all of this, she looked pretty healthy throughout all of this journey.

Even that 2014 news.com.au profile, which is incredibly positive about her, describes her as a healthy-looking young woman with luminous skin.

But it turns out that actually she was just trying to break down stigma around diseases that don't have obvious physical signs and that she was brave and inspirational.

Actually, you just couldn't see any of her memory lapses or slurred speech or seizures because they're symptoms that don't show up in Instagram photos nor in any of the times that she was being interviewed or filmed.

Yeah, nor in any of her medical records.

It's so weird.

Yeah, exactly.

And she explained in interviews at the time that she's not scared of death, saying, quote, I don't feel like I'm dying.

I don't feel like you're dying either.

But she said, but I've acknowledged that it might happen.

If that's in a year or 20 years, I don't have fear, unquote.

And on top of all of this, she never stopped giving back.

She gave multiple interviews where she explained that she donated $300,000 to up to 20 different charities.

And she even updated her LinkedIn page to describe herself as a philanthropist.

Okay, look, you can defraud the American people, create a fake app and a fake cookbook, but LinkedIn is sacred.

You do not buy it.

LinkedIn.

But as she grew more and more famous, cracks began to emerge in Belle's story.

So in the preface to her cookbook in November 2014, she said she'd been, quote, stable for two years now with no growth of the cancer, unquote.

But just three months earlier on Facebook, she was claiming the cancer had now spread to her brain, blood, spleen, and uterus.

And in media interviews, she'd said that the cancer had reached her liver and kidneys.

She also claims to have undergone several heart surgeries, including at one point, dying on the operating table.

But as you can clearly see in her Instagram pictures, she hasn't got any surgery scars.

Serious heart surgeries tend to come with scars.

In interviews, people would sometimes ask the name of the doctors who diagnosed her or who treated her, and she couldn't tell them.

Until you answer these riddles, three.

Yeah.

My doctor, doctor.

Cancer.

Then in February 2015, one of Belle's close friends, Chanel McAuliffe, confronted her about her cancer being a massive scam and urged her to come clean.

When Belle refused, McAuliffe went to an investigative journalist who began to pull at the threads and the whole thing began to unravel.

That huge donation to charity turned out to have been a complete lie.

Rather than giving $300,000 to 20 charities, Belle had given $7,000 to just three charities.

some of which only after she was aware she was being investigated.

Oh.

Yeah.

Instead, she spent the money on luxury cars and clothes and holidays and renting a fancy house and office.

Well, but all true charity starts with being charitable to yourself, Mark.

Yeah.

That's like make-o-wish shit if she's dying of cancer, right?

All of that.

That is fair.

It wasn't just her own cancer that Belle had been cashing in on.

In March 2015, it emerged that she'd befriended a young child with brain cancer and had been fundraising to get that child further treatment unbeknownst to the kid's parents.

who hadn't got any awareness that she'd been saying anything about that and certainly hadn't seen any money from said fundraising.

Oh, wow.

But they did suspect she was using the information from their experiences to underpin her own claims of having brain cancer.

Jesus.

Yeah, yeah, kid.

We're going to get you a pony any second.

Now, now, when you cough, is it more of like a

or is it like a

yeah.

And that same month, Belle admitted she didn't have cancer, claiming to have been misdiagnosed by a medical team using magnetic therapy from Germany.

And asked to name the leader of the team, she declined and said she wasn't certain whether he was a medical doctor.

Quote, it's hard to admit that maybe you're wrong, she said in the interview, and that she felt confused, bordering on humiliated, unquote, but she stood by her claim that she's used alternative therapies to survive an aggressive malignant brain tumor for five years without any conventional medical treatment.

Finally, a condition we all agree alternative therapies are perfect for.

Yeah, right.

To be fair, she did survive a malignant brain tumor.

It just wasn't hers.

It was that other kid.

It was that other kid's.

But then even that line and lie, that would not hold.

And a month later, she admitted she never actually had cancer at all.

I don't want forgiveness, she told Woman's Weekly.

Good news then.

Yeah.

And above all, above anything, I would like people to say, okay, she's human.

No.

She also added that she was speaking out because it was the responsible thing to do.

Though, to be clear, she came to this sense of responsibility only when her entire story had been rumbled and she was being investigated for fraud wow in a 60 minutes interview bell eventually confirmed that in 2011 a brain scan at the alfred hospital in melbourne showed she was perfectly healthy she says she'd actually believed she'd had cancer up until that point claiming to have been wrongly diagnosed in 2009 by a german alternative medicine practitioner another unnamed one obviously oh really yeah but presumably not the one she went to several years later who told her that the cancer had returned but even if that was true which definitely isn't it doesn't explain why she launched her app after getting the all clear from the scan.

Yeah, well, it also doesn't explain why she didn't start off by saying, I was diagnosed with cancer by a guy with a pendulum and a chakra chart on his wall.

Like, I feel like people might have responded differently from the jump had she said that.

Yeah, if that was even what happened.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, right.

And notably, in the interview, she wouldn't even confirm her own age accurately.

And when asked, this is a really simple question.

How old are you?

She replied, quote, that's probably a question we'll have to keep digging for, unquote.

We?

How tall am I?

Great question.

One of life's little mysteries, isn't it?

So, when pressed on why she made this whole thing up, she put it down to her troubled upbringing, the neglect from her estranged mother, having been forced to take care of herself and her autistic brother since the age of five, being her mum's carer.

A month later, Belle's mum, Natalie Dal Bello, told the Australian Women's Weekly that while she does actually have MS, Belle was never a carer to her.

Jesus.

Nor to her brother.

And also that she isn't in witness protection, as Belle had also claimed.

And in a further interview, her brother clarified, he's not autistic either.

Well, not, so she cured him with all that juice and that raw milk, Marsh.

I just like trains.

God damn.

So one thing worth keeping in mind through all of this is as much of a liar as she unquestionably was, Belle Gibson was, by 2015, when all this unraveled, 24 years old.

She was responsible responsible for everything she said and did, but a 24-year-old doesn't give herself a book contract and an exclusive deal to have her app installed by default on every Apple Watch.

Right, yeah, it's really fucked up how little we shame the motherfuckers that cash in on these charlatans alongside them.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Apple, for their part, initially declined to remove the whole Pantry app from sale, saying that their only concern was about the functionality of the app and not the content.

But eventually, it was removed from the Apple Watch launch and deleted from the App Store without giving any reason as to why.

And then Penguin Books publishers of her cookbook, they told reporters that they hadn't checked the validity of her cancer claims because she was writing a cookbook and that level of checking wasn't required for a cookbook.

However, that claim was somewhat undermined by the book's preface, which is a 3,000 word essay on her cancer diagnosis and her healing journey.

Well, and also that they were selling us a cookbook of fucking recipes that would cure cancer.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

And worse than that, footage later emerged of Penquin giving Belle media training ahead of the release of her book, which included asking her about what her cancer treatment is and how she takes it.

And her response could not have been clearer that she's making it up.

The publishers had this conversation with her and then thought, yeah, this story totally checks out 100%.

Okay, podcast listener, Marsha's put a link.

to this video in our show notes and it's not clear she knows what a machine is,

let alone cancer.

She literally says at one point, I might have to do some more reading on it.

And the question at that time was, how do you take your medicine?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So Belle's cookbook, The Whole Pantry, is no longer on sale, though interest in secondhand copies has somewhat spiked since she became the subject of a new Netflix drama series.

I have a signed copy.

Understandably, the books page on Goodreads is filled with comments on how her whole story is a sham and a scam.

But I do want to give you my absolute favorite review of her book on Goodreads from someone called Emma.

And the review reads, despite the author being accused of faking her cancer, the book is still really good with some delicious recipes.

Four stars.

Is she a con person who victimized thousands, including literally a dying child?

Yes.

But I can't get enough of this three-peat chili.

You gotta try it, everybody.

Yeah, so I'll leave you all to think about how many people an author has to kill for Emma to take away that elusive fifth star.

But I'll see you next time for another browse through the pages of Who's Woo.

Before we lower the flag tonight, I want to remind everybody that American Atheists' annual convention is less than two months away.

It's Easter weekend, which is the weekend of April 19th and 20th.

It's in Minneapolis this year.

So if you'd like a chance to spend 420 with Lucinda and me in a wee legal state, be sure to check out atheist.org for more details or just check the show notes.

Anyway, that's all the blessing we've got for you tonight.

We'll be be back in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait to be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister Shows Hot Friend Got Off a Movie State being at 7 a.m.

Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our Hap Sister Shows Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't hold my head up with pride if I neglect to thank Eli Bosnik for always being original, Marsh for always being a reganal or however he would pronounce it.

I want to thank Heath for taking a week off and enjoying himself.

He needs to do that from time to time.

I also need to thank the lovely and talented Lucinda Lusions for all her help this week.

I also want to thank Gate Theory for providing not one, but ultimately three Farnsworth quotes.

Be sure to check the show notes for links to more of their shit.

It rocks.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people who I will thank by name next week.

Sorry, my throat's killing me and I'm trying to shave words where I can this week.

Together, these people with plentiful patience paid penance to our impious provocations this week by giving us money.

Not everybody has money, but if you do, we'd like some of it.

And you can give us some by making a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheist, whereby you'll earn early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode, or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingadeist.com.

And if you'd like to help, but you're not giving us money if you might have to wait an extra week for your compliment over a a little strep throat, you can also help a ton by leaving a five-star review, telling a friend about the show, and following us on social media.

And speaking of our social media, Tim Robertson 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 words, you find all the contact info on the contact page at scathingadius.com.

Matreon goal.

We get the inflatable sumo costumes and we have a sumo tournament.

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.