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This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by BetterHelp, Sometimes Illness Wins by Carrie Black, and by the fact that I was able to convince Eli that that wasn't the kind of ice that pic was meant for.

And now, the scathing atheist.

Superstition requires gullibility just as true religion requires faith, end quote.

500 years on, and they are still no closer to hearing themselves.

All of this is to say that we are still in the process of evolving from filthy monkey men.

It's Thursday.

It's October 9th.

And it's National Pro-Life Cupcake Day.

Well, I believe batter is already a cupcake, so grab a spoon.

I have no illusions.

I'm Eli Bosnick.

I'm Heath N.

Wright.

And from Mitch Albums, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Wake Ross, Georgia, this is the Skatin Atheist.

On this week's episode, The Nuns Are Emptier Than We Thought.

A Trump video about med beds gets recognized as AI because of complete sentences.

And Ross Douthed will ask how we explain all the alien abductions if Jesus isn't our Lord and Savior.

But first, the diatribe.

Despite what us mediocre white guys might lead you to believe, thinking objectively is really hard.

I used to think it was easy and that I was great at it, but it turned out I only believed that

because thinking objectively is really hard.

And it makes sense when you think about it, right?

Shit gets weird when you suddenly have to hammer a nail into your hammer.

But the entire problem is that you don't think about it, or at least I didn't, not until I was prompted to repeatedly by people smarter than myself.

Over and over again, I realized that what seemed to me to be the logical and objective truth just turned out to be a reflection of my bias.

Of course, the intellectual humility that comes with that realization can be crippling.

I've met a lot of people crippled by it, actually, people who are unable or at least unwilling to formulate any strong opinion about anything for fear that their intellectual faculties are too polluted by bias to be trusted.

Instead, they hold other people's opinions like you might hold another person's cat, right, firmly enough to provide comfort, but light enough to let it go the second there's a struggle.

And when we succumb to that state, we've traded thinking poorly for not thinking at all.

Now, as we all know, the way out of this dilemma is to do the actual hard work of reasoning.

to honestly engage with the arguments on the other side, to re-examine your biases as they relate to the subject, to seek out the opinion of those with different biases, to allow yourself to change your mind and to admit when you're wrong.

And as easy as that list is to rattle off, it's really fucking hard to do.

Each step along the way is harder than the last one.

So what ends up happening for a lot of people is that you mostly outsource that shit.

And for a lot of you, that's where I come in.

Right?

I'm not saying that I'm doing your thinking for you, but unlike you, I've got the time and willingness to stay current on the Christian news sites, learn what they're freaking out about, dive into it to see what, if any, merit is there, and report back to you.

And you trust me to be honest with you and myself and tell you whether or not their latest tirade is valid, and if not, what they're getting wrong.

But that adds in a whole new layer of bias, doesn't it?

Because I'm kind of duty-bound to side with the atheists here.

I mean, I'll be as objective as I can be, but I'm never going to come back and say, yeah, so I looked into those claims by the Holy Sepulchre Baptist Church in Pottawood Palmy or whatever.

and it turns out that Christ is our Lord and Savior.

So how could you ever trust me, an atheist podcaster whose whole fucking job is to conclude that there's no God, to objectively assess arguments for the existence of God?

Now, to be honest, I doubt this is a huge concern for you since I'm not thinking for you.

Right?

If I was full of shit, you'd probably be like, huh, he's full of shit on this subject, but it's something that I'm challenged with constantly by emailers and shit like that.

How can the scathing atheist ever be objective if the title states the conclusion?

Now, of course, the short answer here is there already wasn't a God when we named this show.

Right?

Ours isn't a show about exploring the possibility of God.

It's about exploring the reality that there isn't one.

So I don't really need a defense for this.

But that doesn't mean I don't have one.

And it's a pretty definitive fucking defense.

I

desperately want to be wrong about this.

I mean, the other side has fucking immortality, not just for me, but for my loved ones.

Hell, some versions even have it for my dead cats.

Jesus died for their sins too, apparently, selectively.

So holy shit, if I could convince my brain for just one goddamn second that even one of religion's arguments wasn't horseshit, If I could find one iota of credible evidence the science couldn't explain, if I could find even a hint of a suggestion of an influence by a benevolent God, I would be all the way in.

I would love to convince myself that there's a heaven everlasting.

Even if I was wrong, it would be genuinely really nice to be able to pretend along with everybody else, to put the thoughts of the yawning void of nothingness at bay and believe I still have another million, million years to figure shit out, that I actually will get to read all the books I want to read and finish all the video games I want to finish, that I actually will get to give my dad another hug.

You think I don't want that shit?

And Christian apologists, for their part, recognize this gaping hole in their argument.

They've got all the motivated reasoning on their side, which makes it really hard to argue that we atheists are in it for ourselves, right?

We just want to protect ourselves from the thoughts that our loved ones live on and that we're not doomed to be forgotten by a cold and uncaring universe.

Tough to sell, right?

So what they do is they pretend that our side is tied with their side because, you know, as much as we all want the immortality in the paradise, we want our sinful butt sex and pornography even more.

But if that were true, right, if we really just needed an intellectual out to accommodate all the sins we wanted to indulge in, we wouldn't give up believing in God.

We'd just stop believing in a God that thought butt sex and porn were sins.

There are, as it turns out, plenty of those gods to choose from.

Hell, we don't even need that if you offer up a God who's infinitely forgiven.

But even now, like even 12 years into being a publicly outspoken atheist, I find myself reading Ross Douthett's idiotic book thinking, man, it'd be awesome if he convinced me.

You know, and not just because there's a lot more money to be made if I find Jesus at this point in my career, but because I genuinely want him to be right.

I want eternity and I want a world governed by a just and loving God.

But I have the world I have

and I have the intellectual humility it takes to admit that.

They're talking about your Jesus.

Creator of this broadcast bring you a special news bulletin.

Joining me for headlines tonight are the Smash Burger and Impossible Burger to Mike Quarterpounder with Cheese Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick.

Fellas, are you ready to slide between them buns?

All right.

In and out.

Hell yeah.

And I am way worse for you than promised.

So this all turns out

animal style.

All right.

Well, quick before I lose my Gen X cred for not coming up with a where's the beef joke here, we're going to pause for a word from this week's sponsor, BetterHelp.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

Hey, podcast listener.

You know, October 10th is World Mental Health Day.

And one of the many benefits of being an atheist is our firm and prominent belief that mental illness is not ghosts in your blood.

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No, it's not.

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Therapy, because mental health is real and ghosts in your blood are not.

And now, back to the headlines.

In our lead story tonight, normally we pick the top story based on which story we think is the most impactful to the largest percentage of our audience.

But as you may have noticed, that can get really fucking depressing.

So, because of that, and the fact that he sort of just rolled all the Supreme Court stuff into one story before I got to the notes, I want to open on some good news.

Greedy.

And I get to be a demographic nerd about it as well, which is always a plus.

So, it turns out that the vast swath of of nuns that demographers like to write off as still religious, even though they say they aren't, you remember them?

The ones that they describe as spiritual, but not religious?

Well, new research casts serious doubt on just how spiritual this vast array of nuns really are.

Yeah, they're yes-handing spiritual in hopes of having sex.

We've all done that.

Exactly.

Yes.

And in my experience, any single question usually does the trick to destroy this narrative.

So I'm glad they finally got around to doing it.

To asking one question, yeah.

So this new research comes from the unofficial demographer of Puzzle in a Thunderstorm LLC, Ryan Burge at Al.

And it looks into the question of just how spiritual the nuns are.

So the prevailing theory among demographers is that, yes, Americans are walking away from religion at an incredible rate and have been for decades, but they're not becoming atheists so much as they're finding new spiritual practices to sort of fill the religious void, right?

These vaguely defined spiritual practices include stuff like meditation, yoga, crystal healing, astrology, and cultural appropriation.

And like already that's problematic, right?

Because you don't have to be spiritual to meditate.

A lot of people, myself included, do yoga and just hold their noses at all the spiritual stuff.

But another thing that's problematic about that view is that according to Burg's new research, it's also just wrong.

Yeah.

And sometimes with cultural appropriation,

you got to just let it go.

Like if my culture had crystal healing and astrology and obnoxious people started taking it, have fun.

That's like

stealing my insured car that doesn't work.

Like, please steal my 05 Subaru right now.

What Heath is saying is you should be grateful for cultural appropriation, Brown people.

It's a compliment.

It's a compliment.

Sometimes it is.

So Burge and his team surveyed 12,000 nuns and asked specifically about their spiritual activities.

Do they do yoga?

Do they meditate?

Smudge their homes or whatever the hell that's called.

And it turns out that by and large, the answer is no.

Only 27% regularly did yoga.

Only 15% meditated or did astrology, whatever the fuck that means.

And fewer than 10% used drugs to obtain spiritual experiences.

You did astrology.

Do you do it?

Do you do it?

Yeah, I did stars.

But the key is, despite what the religion is vital, universal, and inevitable crowd will tell you, the overwhelming majority of people who walk away from religion don't replace it with a damn thing.

All right, I got my boil lanced off.

I guess I could get a new sack of pus for my body

or maybe just no sack of pus now.

I don't know.

Hard to tell.

There you go.

I'm going no sack of pus.

We'll see how it goes.

And also, keep in mind that the minority percentage of spirituality we're keeping is only because we're counting completely unrelated shit, right?

Like if you counted jerking off as exercise, I work out 11 times a day.

Right, right.

Now, of course, this is a weird way to yes and the sack of pus, man.

No.

Now, of course, look, this leads to the question of why so many nuns will take the mantle of spiritual when it's offered.

And Burgess's new research doesn't actually go into that.

But if I may speculate a bit, I think one of the possibilities that we've under considered is I have a whole fucking show for me to speculate, goddammit.

But I think one of the possibilities that we're not giving enough credence to is the fact that admitting to some form of spirituality is often like a compromise, right?

A cultural compromise.

If I say I'm spiritual but not religious, I'm leaving room for you and your stupid beliefs, right?

Like I'm not contradicting you as directly.

So some people see that as the proper or polite answer, even if it isn't true.

Right.

And in docket full of kryptonite news,

the Supreme Court fired up their new term this week.

And the important lesson on constitutional theory is,

You should have voted for Hillary Clinton.

They've got a docket lined up with a long list of theocracy-building bullshit.

And pretty much every case is going to be affirming that Christ is God or reversing a lower court that said Christ is God, but not enthusiastically enough.

That includes the religious rights of conversion therapy, spreading disease, and skipping over state courts when those state courts are all secular and gross.

You just want to go straight to federal.

Also, a Rastafarian plaintiff wants a religious freedom for Rastafarianism.

So good luck to that guy, I guess.

Hey, wacky minority religions.

Let's pop back down while the high papal court declares Jesus our national God like they're picking a state bird, huh?

Not really the time to do your bit.

I'd say, okay,

I'm not going to say Rastafarianism isn't wacky, but I'm going to strenuously object to the idea that it's wacky for a religion.

Weed is so much better as a god than a fucking cracker.

Come on.

This is true.

That's true.

I didn't say bad.

I just said wacky.

And a big thanks to Nick for sending a link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Nick gets to be first in line to take a mission accomplished victory photo when we do that thing with the guy in the place.

So I'll start with the case of Chiles v.

Salazar.

The plaintiff, Kaylee Chiles, is challenging a Colorado state law that bans conversion therapy because

Because it's not therapy.

That's why they have that law banning it.

It's actually anti-therapy or abuse, I guess you could say, or malpractice or stupid and evil.

Lots of words for it.

Much like a doctor giving a patient a hiege doesn't cure the lady vapors, the data shows that conversion therapy doesn't cure the made-up illness of LGBT or Q.

And even if you do the hiege Christianly, it's still a no.

It doesn't do anything.

And that's why Colorado has a law about licensed healthcare professionals only being allowed to do real stuff that works.

Kaylee Chiles, of course, is a Christian therapist who claims that being forced to only do real stuff is violating her First Amendment rights of speech and religion.

Right.

So to be clear, she's suing for her religious right to torture children into pretending to be straight.

And she's going to fucking win.

She's absolutely going to win.

Because elections have consequences.

This is one.

You guys remember how L.

Ron Hubbard had to change Dianetics from a therapy to a religion because religions don't have any rules or laws.

You guys ever, for a fucking second, thought those would turn out to be the good old days?

Yeah.

Good times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's worth mentioning that Kaylee Childs is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom.

I mentioned that because they are liars and they did a bunch of lying again.

They cited multiple studies in their filings.

trying to claim support for conversion therapy in those studies, but immediately two of their sources released official statements saying, fuck your face.

Or maybe it was like, the ADF is profoundly misrepresenting our study or something like that.

Yeah, it's a same statement, different intensities.

Just

sound very similar.

And the ADF is fully aware of their lying.

They quoted a study as saying, Respected researchers of LGBT issues have long observed that longitudinal population-based studies show changes in the same-sex attractions of some individuals over time.

But the ADF very conveniently left out the sentence that introduced those longitudinal studies and explained: the context here is not conversion therapy.

And don't use this for your bigot lawsuit and remove this sentence.

You have to include all of this.

Yeah, I love that they literally cited, and when my kid left home, he turned gay as evidence for their side.

Yeah, but also, it's like saying that because some people eventually become astronauts, therapy can turn you into an astronaut, right?

Like, no.

Yeah.

All right.

Next up.

Next up, we have First Choice Women's Resource Centers v.

Platkin.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin is fully aware that First Choice, whatever the fuck, is one of those Christian liar facilities called a crisis pregnancy center.

And pretty much all they provide is anti-choice propaganda.

So the AG's office issued a subpoena to First Choice as part of an investigation into their practices.

In response, they sued Platkin in federal court, claiming they were targeted for their anti-choice views.

And yes, a fucking course they were, and they should be.

They also argued that responding to a subpoena violates their freedom of speech and association

by chilling donations to them.

I'm not driving.

I'm traveling.

Traveling on the land.

Yeah, I'm just going to guess that the donations were not chilled.

Yeah, nothing chills donations quite like publicity.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Either way, two different federal court rulings said,

no, you can't just skip to federal, go and argue in state court.

What the fuck are you doing?

So now the Supreme Court is going to decide if you can just skip to favorite theocrat court if it suits you.

Yeah, it's like how four out of five doctors say I'm fat, but the fifth doctor is Doctor It Liz Rosenberg, my mommy, and she says I have big bones.

And I have a note from her that gets me out of whatever.

That gets me out of gym class or into whatever.

Susceptible to colds.

Whatever I want, my mom said.

And

just to be clear, the ability to challenge a state subpoena right away in federal court, it might be a good thing in certain cases.

Like, I don't know, just top of my head, if a fascist red state AG tried to go after a,

I don't know, like a list of enemies that they might be handed.

Sure, sure.

But that's only helpful if the new principle was applied consistently, regardless of Christianity being involved.

And it won't.

No, none of them are.

Yeah, the only fucking thing consistent about Discord is Sam Alito's asking price.

Adjusted for inflation, of course.

Yeah.

And that brings us to the Christian freedom to plague your local school.

Obviously, this topic was pretty big in recent years.

It's going to be decided at the highest level in a case called We the Patriots USA Incorporated the Ventura Unified School District.

I wonder who the bad guys in that area are.

Yeah,

I'm going to say

pretty much all the context you need, built right into that title.

A California parent was using the religious exemption on vaccinating kids for public schools and claiming that vaccines have a ground-up aborted Dutch baby from 1973 inside the syringe at least a little bit.

And not the delightful breakfast.

They weren't talking about that.

There's no interpretation of those words that wouldn't make for a delightful breakfast, Eth.

This is true.

This is true.

Definitely true.

But then California realized it was homicidally insane to have exemptions for magic to vaccination rules.

So the family was told they can continue worshiping the Bible passage about stem cell biotech, but not with unvaccinated kids inside public schools.

And now our current Supreme Court is going to decide if that's anti-Christian anti-Christian persecution.

Are they?

And to be more specific, they're going to rule whether the imagined incorrect objection to something she doesn't understand is more important than public health.

And again, the answer will be yes.

I just don't want anyone to be confused.

Sure will.

And I'm just going to go ahead and give you my picks for your fantasy SCOTUS league.

Yeah.

This is a real thing, by the way.

There's like a fantasy SCOTUS league that like they're taking seriously on a site.

Here's mine.

For the conversion therapy case, that's going to be 6-3 in favor of Christ is God.

For the Crisis Pregnancy Center's religious right to end run state courts, that's going to be 9-0 in favor of the Christian plaintiff, or maybe whoever else wants to use the rule, maybe.

And when a non-Christian plaintiff tries to use the rule, we'll get a six to three ruling that Christ is God.

So interesting.

Let's know.

And in We the Patriots USA, Kakaw, or whatever the fuck it was called,

that's going to be 6-3 in favor of super spreading Christ is God.

Also, there's no more bodily autonomy, and trans rights are being attacked all over the place.

But Hillary wasn't exciting enough, and Dems are just like Republicans.

So identical parties.

Happy pumpkin spice latte season, you fucking idiots.

Okay, well, okay, Heath, don't take it out on BSLs.

That's all we have left.

Okay.

All right.

Well, while you get those bets locked in, we're going to take another break from an ad for one of you.

Hey, podcast listener.

I'm Eli Bosnick.

I'm Ethan Wright.

And I'm No Illusions.

And the next sponsor comes from one of you.

That's right, knuckle fuckers.

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Really got to start reading ahead.

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I should have been way too hot.

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Sometimes illness wins, a really lovely book that Eli should have probably read about.

No, no,

no.

And finally tonight, in medbed redemption news.

Nice.

Nice.

The president of the United States is promoting a magical healing device that fixes all the ailments called a medbed.

Or is he?

We've got multiple levels of stupid confusion, so it's kind of hard to say.

Trump shared a video of himself promoting this technology on a Fox News segment, but the video was made with AI, and so it never actually aired on Fox.

It was AI.

And then Trump quietly deleted his post the next day.

So that's a real post of a fake video of a real person who made that post promoting a fake technology, but with real companies that sell it on a fake segment from a real channel that does fake news.

Oh, interesting.

It's a bed that cures everything.

So you decide.

Okay.

But we know that this actually means that Trump saw himself promoting something and was like, that's me.

I love that guy.

Re tweet.

And then some intern had to run into the Oval Office and be like, not you, sir.

Count the fingers.

Count the fingers, sir.

It's not you.

It's the only way that you know how to count in the first place.

Count the fucking fingers.

So the medbed idea dates back at least as far as the UFO craze following World War II.

Conspiracy theories emerged about the U.S.

government finding alien ships full of amazing technology and then reverse engineering a bed that cures any disease and regenerates lost limbs and it even reverses aging.

And of course, the government is keeping that a secret this whole time, especially now that John F.

Kennedy is being kept alive using a med bed.

And the lie around John F.

Kennedy got way too big to like walk it back now.

Not Not clear what JFK is doing for us in the med bed, but that's a real part of the conspiracy narrative.

Well, yeah.

So every conspiracy theory that existed between 1963 and 1987 had to have John F.

Kennedy in it by law.

There was like a

my theory, by the way, he's regenerating so he can come back and kill his nephew.

Okay.

I like it.

Support.

Support.

Tick-tick.

I mean, tick-ted.

Really conflicted, my friend.

He's just there with that.

No, I wasn't conflicted.

I was just thinking about how to say how I'm very happy about that, Ada.

So the medbed got some renewed attention lately, thanks to the QAnon movement and some notable celebrity endorsements.

Like, for example, Romana DeDulo, that would be the queen of Canada.

You might remember her from a Who's Who segment.

Also, Aaron Rodgers,

the anti-vax dolphin fucker who lives five minutes from Eli's house.

Sure fucking does, baby.

Dolphin voyeur.

And then most recently, we got the AI-generated president being

re-bleated on Truth Social by the actual president as an endorsement.

The video had Donald being interviewed by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, with the president claiming that we're entering a new era of med bed facilities and promising a medbed card coming soon.

Got to look at Davin Buster's hospital scenario he was describing.

But then Trump deleted that post, which made people even more certain there's a really big secret being kept about the medbed.

No, no, no.

Sarah, they're not ready for the medbed yet.

Let's just shoot another lady in the face and say she tried to run us up alive.

Well, we did.

I'm sorry.

Wait, so the conspiracy theorists think that there was a secret segment on Fox News?

AI made up a secret, but not, but double bluff?

Not clear what they're thinking.

So obviously, when anon people start believing something there's going to be stupid lies for sale and med beds are no exception one of the companies is called tesla bio healing no connection to the car company other than being named after nikola tesla who allegedly built a med bed in a top secret lab somewhere in new york city he did not that did not happen nonetheless they're selling a med bed product that anyone can use in their home just by

adding a bed just to add bed The thing you get, it looks like a can of paint, and it's called a biophotonizer.

And of course, it generates a biophoton healing field from under your bed that increases cellular energy in case it's too low in your cells.

And then, you know, this would heal anything.

According to the company, the can contains, quote, fine, naturally active stones, activated fine metal, grout, sands,

and proprietary polymers.

So, okay, they're describing cement.

That's cement.

And people open this thing up.

It's a can of cement.

It costs $11,000.

Christian dollars

for the biophotonizer M model.

Well, but I like that they painted it gold, though, right?

Illusion of value.

Okay.

Do you guys think when you're painting a can of cement gold to sell sell for $10,000 to the

elderly and infirm, you have a moment where you're like, ah,

I might not be a great guy, huh?

I don't think you do.

I love that it's $11,000 instead of $10,000 because they found out how expensive it was going to be to ship, right?

Or something like that.

Oh, there's tariffs on the cans.

Yeah, I put some pictures here in the notes.

Don't be fooled by that second photo I put in there there that shows two cans under the bed with the really happy lady on the bed.

It's probably just her bed, but

you get one can for the 11 grand, but you're going to want four cans.

On the order page, it says, asterisk, this device is sold individually, but maybe shown as a pair.

If you'd like to purchase more than one, we suggest four if possible.

Please contact us in the chat box or by phone to get the best price.

It's so the bed doesn't tilt, right?

Is that what it is?

It seems to be holding the slats up

nice and even.

So, okay, if you're not ready to drop 44 grand on cement cans, I'm not coward.

Tesla Biohealing does have

resort facilities available.

Oh, of course they do.

One of them is, it's so sad.

It's a Ramada, and it's in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Fucking wow.

I would like to get off, please.

Yeah.

That's where the ear thing happened, by the way.

Interesting.

Oh, that's probably why he doesn't have a scar because they rushed him to the medbed facility.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I didn't want to say it, but Noah understands.

I thought I was going to sound crazy, but no, that's clearly what had a lot of buzz about this.

So I went on wyndhamhotels.com, and this is real.

It's listed as Ramada/slash Tesla Biohealing Resort.

Continental breakfast includes.

It does have a continental baffle.

They don't have the waffles, but the waffle station's broken.

The station's not there.

So I wanted to get the real scoop, though, you know, not just what it says on their site.

So I checked them out on Yelp.

They have an overall rating of three stars out of five.

Not great.

It's based on two total reviews.

One is a five-star, the other's a one-star.

Here's the five-star from Ashley of Butler PA.

Quote, absolutely loved our stay.

By far, the nicest hotel pool we have been to and so warm.

Staff were all very friendly.

Rooms were clean.

The restaurant is incredible.

We have ate here a few times for breakfast, but finally had dinner.

My husband had the pork chop.

and I had the steak.

I'm a steak snob and I loved it.

Best in Butler, Definitely a hidden gem.

Can't wait to return.

I am going to kill myself and this revenge is the news.

They live in Butler and they go to this Ramada.

To the Ramada in Butler.

What the fuck?

Who are you fucking, Ashley?

But they finally had dinner there too when they stayed there at the

Ramada in their own hometown.

Because it was her 40th birthday.

Maybe they didn't stay there.

Maybe they just had dinner and snuck into the pool.

And they're like, we should at least leave a five-star review.

Yeah, the pool was warm and that steak.

Come on.

Yeah.

Okay.

So she's a steak snob.

She's a snob and she likes it.

So that was a five-star review.

Here's the one-star review from Monique of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania.

Quote, if I could give this place zero stars, I would.

We went here to try something different with no expectations of miracles.

It's a good first step.

We found out when checking in that we did not have an energizing room.

Why else would we have booked a room there if we just wanted a regular hotel?

One star.

I wish I could give zero.

But did she even try the steak?

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

It turned out when we got there that energizing rooms don't even exist.

I'm an idiot.

I'm an idiot.

Okay.

I also,

that review went on for a while too, and it described the pool.

And the pool has the energizing, stupid fucking cement cans, like just sitting in the pool.

Oh, that must be why it's so warm.

Yeah.

Bunch of drowned kids who tried to pick them up like the pool twice.

Okay, well, if the offerings from Tesla Biohealing aren't working for you, I have one more option.

It's a quantum med bed.

Much like the biophotonizer M,

you have to provide your own bed.

And in this case, you provide your own particle waves too.

But the quantum medbed company provides the entanglement services.

You upload a photo of your bed and they entangle it with the concept of a healing bed.

And then you're good to go.

It's only about three grand for the quantum medbed.

Do you think when you're charging someone three grand to quantumly entangle a photo of their, you know what?

Never.

We have our answer.

We have our answer.

Yep.

All right.

Well, it's time for us to rethink our monetization strategy again.

So we're going to wrap the headlines for the night.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Doomanji.

And when we come back, Ross Dalthot will see if he can change our minds with chapter.

Fuck, we're only on three.

It's that time of the month again.

The time we're forced to crack open Ross Dalthat's effort to make even the most ridiculous possible claims seem plausible by injecting obscure enough literary references.

That would be the book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

And we're going to talk about it again in this installment of God-awful books.

All right, so just to catch everybody up, in chapter one, Ross pretended that the God of the Gaps argument was valid.

In chapter two, it was the fine-tuning argument.

And now that he's established that the people still reading this don't know about refutations, it's time to move on to miracle claims.

So this week, we're going to start, but not finish, chapter three, the myth of disenchantment.

And we're going to fall short of the full chapter this week because it's almost twice as long as the last chapter.

And damn near every sentence cries out for a refutation.

It sure does.

Or at least like, why do you have this sentence here?

That's right.

I don't know.

It It doesn't like it's N slash A on refuting it.

It's just dumb to be here.

Right, right.

Or why this word choice?

Yeah.

So, okay.

So we start with an obviously bullshit, unevidenced ghost story about a broken radio that proves the existence of miracles.

Yeah, when Noah told me we would need two segments for this chapter, I will admit I was skeptical, but then Ross starts it by ushering us into the Midnight Society, and I kind of got it from there.

But he's like, wait, do you doubt the veracity of the story?

Well, what if I told you that it came from none other than

Michael Shermer, that bastion of integrity whose words should never be doubted?

Finish your drink.

Oh, no.

So, okay.

So stop for a second and consider a God who would hide his existence in all ways except for turning on Michael Shermer's wife's broken radio at exactly the right moment.

Yeah, got to admit, not the message I would choose to send to Michael Shermer's wife.

I'm not gone.

I'm not gone.

Okay.

My first thought, like, maybe stop worshiping a God who can't pee while you're looking.

But it's worse than that.

You're worshiping a God who can only pee when Michael Shermer is looking.

And that's so terrifying.

Yeah.

In so many ways.

All right.

So now we're going to be asked how the rubber duckies would be so unsinkable if they weren't true in a subchapter titled The Resilience of the Supernatural.

He goes, the idea that modernity means the death of miracles and magic is shared by writers who welcome disenchantment and those who lament its progress.

That's the opening quote.

And I'm like, yeah, man, pretty much all the writers who know about photography.

Yeah.

Notice how he had to group miracles, you know, the proof that his religion is true, in with the fucking smile of a child on Christmas to make us the grunts there, right?

And he explains that maybe the Dark Ages were bad and science is good, or maybe the dark ages were fucking amazing and magical and children smiling on christmas or

maybe it's pros and cons that kind of work out to a tie the score is not important it's neither here nor there we all agree that disenchantment is a great word to describe modern science and that's the framing disenchantment it might be good And well, and then he makes references to the realm of capitalized official knowledge, right?

Which is the fucking intellectual equivalent of talking about the lamestream media, you know, what the lamestream media would tell you.

I don't know things.

I don't have custody of my kids.

Right.

Never had sex with a woman.

Yes.

But we have five kids, so I'm not sure how that works, but we do have five kids.

I don't know what happened.

I'm Ross.

But yeah, his argument here is like,

even as we've learned more, many of us remain selectively stupid, which is true, right?

Got us there.

He's like, even as we've rejected the supernatural claims, people kept having them.

And I'm like, yeah, the claims, right?

Like, people kept having claims.

You're championing credulity here.

Yeah.

And he listed the very serious people from, you know, big official knowledge capitalized who rejected supernatural claims.

That list would be journalists, academics, and Wikipedia editors.

He's still pissed about that one time.

Yeah.

So he says, you know, non-religious people have religious experiences all the time.

You don't know them.

I'm not going to say they're from Canada, but there it happens.

Really?

You're going to call me a moron?

That's your argument.

Oh, Oxymoron.

Yep.

No, you got me there.

You got me.

So, you know, he does admit that there are no large-scale miracles on the order of the parting of the Red Sea anymore.

But then he tries to sneak in the hilariously disprovable miracle of the sun and Fatima in 1918 as a possible possible contender.

If you want to know more, see Scathing Atheist 154 for more on that one.

Yeah, when your first miracle is Michael Shermer and your second is North is tricky, it's a great sign for your argument.

A bunch of people staring into the sun saw weird shit.

Also, also, let me finish.

There was a dress that was blue and black and white and gold at the same time.

Only through wizardry was this possible.

Sinbad played a genie in this movie, Shazam, with like Nelson Mandela and Shaquille O'Neal.

A lot of miracles have happened.

Now, okay.

So there's also, there's a point where he's like, you know, okay, okay, we can all agree that Mormonism and Scientology are bullshit.

But what about the religions where we don't have the arrest records of their founders?

Those ones are probably real.

Ah, bad news, Ross.

The New Testament is like 90% Jesus' arrest records.

Oh, it is, though.

You found out.

This was Ross trying to seem reasonable.

So he's like, no, okay, granted, Joseph Smith and L.

Ron Hubbard were con men making money on supernatural claims.

And then he just moves on like nothing else was to be said.

You're Catholic, Ross.

You're Catholic.

We've noticed.

Biggest landowner in the world.

Vaults of Nazi gold.

Come on.

Also, hey, Ross, just a professional note, man.

If you're trying to establish how reasonable your thing is, maybe don't equate it with people who say they were abducted by aliens.

Especially when the abduction people have a story that's like infinitely more coherent than yours.

Yeah.

Aliens are possible.

Well, one of his actual arguments, page 73, if you don't believe me, is okay, but what about all the real psychics?

How do you explain them?

Still don't believe me?

They're a very serious group of real psychics, and they're called the Premonitions Bureau.

That's what he tells us here.

That's the name of the book.

Like, maybe don't give the name if that's the name.

Yeah, right, right.

Well, then in his search for credibility, he turns to NDEs.

Now, to be clear, NDEs are, by and large, dreams, right?

Often dreams had on really potent drugs.

Nobody is claiming that dreams don't exist.

Yeah, and they also correspond to religion by region.

So if we're doing this democratically, Ross, NDEs prove that Islam is true.

Sure.

So, yeah, also there's this moment where he's like, well, you know, and who would want to make a supernatural claim given all the negative attention that you're showered with when you make supernatural claims?

People are always so negative.

Yes.

So everybody at the bar is like, boo, this guy sucks.

Who has an accurate story about the materialistic universe that ignores the numinous?

I want to hear a mundane, accurate story.

This guy's credulous.

Boo.

Also, there's a point here where he's like, and also, hey, by admitting that religious experiences have a psychological root, we, the atheists, the secularists, are moving the goalposts from the, it's all a bunch of lies, lie that he started the chapter pretending our position was.

So who are you arguing with?

Imagine if a science textbook chapter ended with, and hey, even if evolution isn't true,

I think we can all agree it warms the cockles of our heart to believe it's true, right?

Or in this case, the science textbook would be saying, and hey, even if evolution is wrong, you said fossils are a Ponzi scheme.

And

that's right.

Yes.

So I win, I think.

And then he talks about the varieties of spiritual experience, by which he means whatever wacky claims don't seem too wacky to include in the book, right?

So he starts with he's got three different levels that he's going to tell us about.

He starts with level one, which is generic mystical experiences, i.e.

looking at a sunset, but really looking at it.

But really, yeah, that's exactly what he means.

But it takes him so fucking long to to get there without even getting there because getting there would make him sound like an idiot.

Instead, we get like a thousand words about the interconnection of dissolution and the soul's independence from mortal flesh.

And I have some resin we could scrape out of a pipe.

Please have sex with me about that.

So it's the worst.

But importantly, his first category is a thing that would be unverifiable and we just have to take people's words for it, right?

Oh, by the way, artistic epiphanies also count.

That's religious.

Dibs, dibs, licked it.

Don't you try to take Randy the raw dog from us, Rusty.

That's our work.

Our work.

Damn it.

Yeah, we also learned, this was interesting, that reading Proust makes you Christian and possibly Hindu.

You eat a Madeline and you remember your soul's independence from mortal flesh in a Christian and or Hindu way.

Clearly.

Dualist cookie.

Yeah.

So, but now the second type of experience is when you can tell God's looking at you.

Again, unverifiably, entirely internal.

Perfect example of what I'm talking about.

This is a quote that he offers up from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience:

God had neither form, color, odor, nor taste.

God was present, though invisible.

He fell under no one of my senses, yet my consciousness perceived him.

End quote.

That is what he's offering into evidence at this point.

I'd like to enter exhibit B.

It is this

vial of iocane powder.

Also, that's God, that I am pantomiming.

No, it's not, it's invisible, but I am, it's God, and it's here.

Okay, guys, I was pretty religious.

Admittedly, I was Jewish, not Christian, but I don't remember this particular God-specific snipe hunt.

Yeah.

Do you have sleep paralysis while you're awake, Ross?

Because it explains your writing.

It does explain your writing.

It does.

Well, then he also quotes a Yale-educated writer who I swear to you turns out to be his goddamn fucking mother.

It really does.

Who was at a charismatic healing service?

So the looniest of religious gatherings.

And holy shit, did that read like she got molested by the Holy Ghost?

Okay, it is sexual.

Can I read a little bit?

Can I read a little extra?

Okay.

Please.

Yeah.

It just came into me with a roar.

It clamped onto both sides of my face and over my thyroid and gripped my arms down down into my hands that were still hovering over my waist and vibrating.

But I was vibrating in many other places too by this point.

And I couldn't breathe right because my diaphragm was really tight where this power was pouring into me and my stomach was quaking up and down.

So that's not even the whole thing, but it goes on like that.

I read that and I thought like, okay, did I somehow like click into a different book?

Yes, right.

Now, Eve Ensler is doing an erotic poem about sex with a xenomorph.

This is a cool book I clicked into.

I don't know what happened.

But then, then I'm pulled right back out of it because Ross dut that is like, my mother, ladies and gentlemen, that's my mother.

And then I was like, ah, I'm sad for his super cool mom.

That's sad.

Yeah.

Also, I just want to chime in and say that using your mom and her credentials is actually totally fine.

He didn't know

being ridiculous.

He didn't say it it wasn't his mom.

No, he didn't.

He admitted after the fact that it wasn't.

Ad mom and image.

So stupid.

That's awesome.

So, but it's important to note that all religious encounter with a god or gods count for his thing, regardless of their religion or origin, right?

Huh.

Well, that's lucky.

Yeah, no, it makes something so much easier for him.

But then we get the third category of religious experience and that's the one where god shows up and says hi okay still not clear how any of this matters ross people reported a feeling that that's nothing and nobody's arguing with that and now you're explaining all the details of the categories of the nothings i don't get any of this yeah well and it's also like make it so that like the one claim that he has any evidence for he's like what's it maybe you have to multiply by three because there's two categories that have no kinds of evidence right so my evidence gets tripled.

And importantly, all claims of meeting the divine or even an alien or an otherworldly being

count for his thing too.

Well, isn't that lucky?

Well, look, I get it.

When, but my thing is true counts as an explanation for everything, you get a lot of stuff in your explanation basket.

Yes, right, yeah.

Voices in your head also count.

He does say that, yeah.

As do any number of other symptoms of mental illness that we really shouldn't be diluting.

It's cool if it's mostly like my voices, right?

Nope.

All my different wacky character voices.

Oh, well, there you go.

Yeah.

Okay.

Honestly, if you're walking around your apartment with Sarah Huckabee Sanders being like, toast, I definitely am sometimes.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that, yeah, we should talk to somebody.

I approve.

This episode's brought to you by the way.

She's usually judgy about food choices.

That is.

I bet she works.

Yeah.

You can get a cheese plate anywhere you want, though.

You should have joined that gunfight.

you got to be a patron to get that joke, but it's

a patron listening in reverse.

So, but then he tells the story of a British lady that God started talking to like her brain was a cell phone, but then it turned out she had a brain tumor, which was removed, and then she stopped hearing the voices.

Like, I'm like, how the fuck does that help your claim?

Are you saying the tumor triggered the hearing God secret messages portion of her brain?

Yeah, okay, just to review, you're worshiping a god who, first of all, all, can only pee if Michael Shermer is looking and your God invented a cell phone made of brain tumor.

Like maybe stop telling us about your God.

I don't know.

Let those ways be a bit more mysterious.

Do you ever notice that nobody who ever hears God has like an original thought or a decent magic trick out of it?

Like if I thought I was talking to God, but he sounded like my hippie aunt after three glasses of white wine, that would be an indication to me that it maybe maybe wasn't God.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, God spoke to me.

He didn't really have much to say, but banalities, yeah.

But he's, he's desperately trying to marry together these vastly different, culturally dependent religious experiences under one umbrella, which he achieves by offering no details about any of those experiences or what they entail.

He's just vaguely talking about encounters, right?

He's like, well, like maybe, and I, again, I swear he actually makes this argument.

Maybe Christian God just disguises himself as a Hindu god sometimes to get the point across when he really needs to talk to a hindu about some shit did you ever think of that okay seriously this part was so sloppy he's describing how everyone's you know god vision is clearly determined by their personal experience in the region of the world and the culture they grew up in and then he remembers he's fucking up his own point and we watch him try to make an argument against himself and he loses to himself in his book here it's great he says that non-christians do have visions of the one true Christian God also.

And they quote, he said, this is exact words, quote, eventually realize it's Jesus or the Virgin Mary or Saint Michael, end quote.

And like, what the fuck does that even mean?

What does he even think he means?

They eventually have a realization about their hallucination?

Yeah.

Well, what is that?

Except, except for the ones who don't.

Right.

Well, at one point, again, the argumentation takes such such a turn to the south in this third chapter right like he clearly blew his load in the first two because at this point he starts saying well and demons are clearly real because all the cultures have demons and if you don't believe in them just ask people having bad acid trips they see them all the time sure yeah

he points out that trickster gods elves fairies and ufos they all count even though they have no equivalent in Christianity.

Isn't that like?

The stuff that Eli says about politics on the phone to Heath,

the way he uses a backup camera.

Anyways, the arrows and the trickster gods, they're the ones who keep making me put counterexamples to my own ideas in my book.

So someone, it's the fucking gremlins.

Someone sees them.

All right.

And then he tries to explain away the glaring lack of evidence for his side with a subchapter he calls the disreputability problem.

Right.

So he admits that people are more skeptical of that third kind of mystical experience than the other two.

And I'm like, well, it's not that we're more skeptical.

It's the other two don't describe a thing happening, right?

Like, we're equally skeptical about all three as evidence for God.

Yeah, nobody's calling your mom a liar, Ross.

Like, I fully believe that she fully believes that her greatest sexual experience was a facehugger with a God inside.

I just, I don't have a theory of the universe emanating from that without being sane.

Right.

I do have a theory of the universe emanating from that, but Miss Dutat emailed and asked me not to say it out loud.

Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, exactly.

Now, so, okay, but he admits that lucid hallucinations and deliberate deceptions are things which really shoots his whole argument in the fucking foot, I think.

Yeah, look, and keep in mind, I'm the one saying this.

If you have to caveat your worldview with, now I admit that lying does exist, you probably don't have a great worldview, huh?

Well, see, but the problem is that the researchers that learn the truth about spiritual experiences are drummed out of academia.

Like the people who speak the truth about climate change or evolution or herbal remedies or med beds.

Yeah, exactly.

I like that Ross tends to pop into every chapter to remind us that he's a dangerous idiot.

This kind of gives me the strength to go on, right?

Right.

But hey, look, hey, I will admit that when professors at prestigious universities prove themselves gullible enough to fall for UFO accounts, they do and should lose academic credibility.

I will concede this point to you.

He makes that point.

He gives an example.

This guy, John Mack, and he's like, there are countless other examples, far too numerous for me to list any of.

Yeah, okay, point for Ross.

Fine, but I'd feel better about giving him the point if Yale University would stop employing a professor named Ross Douthett.

Yeah, so

at one point, okay, I shit you not.

He literally cites experiences that his mom told him her friends told her they had at her church.

And then, in case you're in any danger danger of taking this shit seriously, we get this actual line, quote, some of the spirits most eager to be summoned may not have your good in mind.

End quote.

Also, remember, always end your Ouija board session by saying goodbye.

I'm a correspondent for the New York Times.

And then he laws the work of Tanya Luhrmann, who apparently can write about religious people doing religious stuff without being a dick about it.

And then he offers this long quote from Lerman about her spiritual experience, which amounts to, one time I was on the train and I got really hot and I thought it was God, but I realized that one of my bicycle lights caught on fire in my backpack.

I swear, I am not making that up.

He quotes that on page 84 as though the spiritual feeling of warmth caught the bicycle light on fire.

Yeah, you know what they say stop dropping holy rolls.

Yes.

So the way the pages broke in my copy made this moment even better at the very bottom of a page she says i began to feel power in my veins i grew hot i wanted to sing and then i turned the page fuck my backpack's on fire

my bike light is melting i think it's on fire

i could not stop laughing

it's the great it's the greatest oh and and it's the perfect place to stop so that that gets us about halfway through the chapter so we're gonna wrap it up there for the time being and we're gonna going to tackle the other half in the next installment of God-awful books.

Before we fold ourselves back into the zeroth dimension this week, I want to announce that this year's QED will feature a live record of the final episode of one of my favorite podcasts of all time, Incredulous.

And Andy Wilson has made the mistake of inviting all three of us on to be part of it.

So Eli, Heath, Andy Wilson, and myself will be seeing the show off in style.

Tickets to QED sold out months ago, of course, but they do have online tickets available where you can watch in from home and keep track of all the action.

They're very reasonably priced.

You will find a link on the show notes.

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

If you can't wait that long, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister Souls' Hot Friend God Awful Movies Daping at 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and an even new episode of our Half Sister Society's Haiti and Debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't fulfill my obligations as the host until I thank Heath Enright for all the right he does, Eli Bosnick for all the ick he does, and Lucinda Lusions for all the uns she does.

Yeah, it didn't work out the way I had hoped.

I also want to thank Cass for providing this week's Farnsworth quote.

Hey, quick reminder that Cass is presenting at Skeptic Camp, which is a free event put on the day before QED by Skeptics in the Pub online.

Check the show notes for a link for more information.

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's and last week's and the week before.

That's best, people.

Michelle, Angie, Alan, Audrey, Spencer, Darling, Callison, the canonical debate, Nash, Jillian, 60 Seconds is too long for a theme, Tune, Louise, Melissa, Paul, Robert, Will, Justin, Genevieve, Blue, Gemini, Cavs the Size of Cantaloupes, James, Chessel, Arthur, Mads, Ripe, Ivy League 710, Charlie, Richard, Dan, Kevin, Katie, Peter, Jason, Stephen, Aaron, and Dennis, who are so hot they give the ocean an orgasm when they surf.

Together, these 33 people, arguments, leagues, and important reminders for podcasts came together over the last few weeks to give us money.

Not everybody has the money or patience to hear their name in the outro of those fine people, but if you do, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheists, whereby you'll earn only access to an extended Afrier 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.

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But then he's just like, I guess at this point, he's like, all right, that's all the smart stuff

that there is for my side.

And I got a whole fucking book to do.

Surely these first few chapters where I used the biggest words I know did all the work I possibly could need.

Everyone's done reading by now because that was obnoxious for new chapters.

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 in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved.