660: A Hunter and His Pray Edition

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To be associated with ASU, both as a student and alum, it makes me extremely proud.

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Learn more at ASUOnline.asu.edu.

Warning, most of the words in this podcast aren't fuck, but some of them are.

This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by the new over-the-counter pharmaceutical for spiritual attacks, Hexedron.

Hexedron, trust us, Jordan Peterson.

It'll be medicine that we send you, we promise.

And now, The Scathing Atheist.

Hi, my name is David.

I'm a pharmacy technician in Atlanta, Georgia.

I work for a major hospital chain.

I won't tell you which one, but you've heard of them.

And I'm here to tell you to get your vaccines.

All of them.

Yes, even that one.

I tell you this because I already have enough people to take care of, all of whom did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey men.

It's Thursday.

It's October 23rd.

And it's National Slap Your Irritating Coworker to ow, ow, ow.

Favorite day of the year.

I'm Noah Lucia.

I'm Eli Bosnick.

I'm Ethan Wright.

And from Dave Thomas's, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Wake Cross, Georgia, this is the Scathing East.

On this week's episode, the most hurtful part was that I slapped me also.

We learned that Ohio is round on the ends and fucking stupid in the middle.

And Ross Dalthat will go searching for a miracle example and pass right over his career as an intellectual.

By which I meant Columbus.

But first, the diatribe.

First of all, let me assure you, this isn't a diatribe about football, just like last week's diatribe wasn't about Mint Mobile.

But I do have to talk about football for a second to get there.

So, with that warning to all the sports ballers in mind, there's a kid that plays for my favorite football team, a rookie Phenom by the name of Travis Hunter.

And ever since he got drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars, he's been going out of his way to very publicly be a good guy, right?

Like, he recognizes that he's going to be a role model for a lot of kids, and he takes responsibility for that seriously, which is good, except that he's mostly doing it wrong.

Like, you know, like publicly donating $250,000 to a charity, that's good.

But when the charity is Charlie Kirk's family, not so much.

Regardless of where you fall on Kirk's reprehensible politics, I feel like there's probably some non-millionaires that could have used the money more, or maybe some millionaires that didn't get rich by selling racism and transphobia, at least.

That's just my opinion on it.

And of course, there's all the fucking religious shit.

He's trying to sell the image of a good guy, which means for most Americans, trying to sell the image of a churchgoer super publicly.

Like on the weekend before last, when hours before the home game against the Seahawks, he went to a local church to get baptized.

Now forgive me for the cynicism, but I feel like maybe a 22-year-old Christian who is raised Christian probably already had time to get baptized at some point and he was just using this as a publicity sign, but maybe not, whatever, doesn't fucking matter.

The important point is that after getting wet for Jesus, he went on to have a terrible fucking game.

Only caught four of the seven balls thrown his way for 15 fucking yards, and he had a boneheaded penalty that cost the team a 54-yard touchdown.

Jags lost 20 to 12 and snapped a three-game win streak.

So anyway, after God rejected Travis's soul so publicly, a few of the sportscasters, whose job it is to say controversial shit, pointed out that maybe the dude should have been more focused on the upcoming game instead of doing a publicity stunt at a church hours before taking the field.

Especially considering he's got a fucking bye week two weeks later, right?

And also God takes souls on non-Sundays, it turns out.

But of course, any suggestion that anything Christian was a bad idea brings out the Jesus freaks in force, so they came out.

And what that means, I know, I'm getting to the point, I promise.

What that means is that any atheist whose social media algorithm has been trained to show him all things Jacksonville Jaguars was bombarded by angry Christians defending Hunter's timing and insisting that some things are more important than sports ball, damn it.

And I didn't respond to most of them.

But here and there, I just couldn't help myself.

And when I did comment, I pointed out what a shitty game he had and suggested that maybe he should try a different religion before we play the Rams.

This suggestion was not, generally speaking, appreciated.

But it did lead to one interaction that I thought was worth telling you about after this insanely long, unnecessary preamble.

Some guy decided to take me and my whole career to task over that comment.

I guess he clicked on the comment, like went to my profile in search of ammunition to use in his rebuttal.

And the gantra he landed on was something like this.

I can't quote it directly.

I couldn't find it anymore.

I don't know if he deleted it or if I just just couldn't find it, but I couldn't find it.

Something along the lines of, though, he says, you know, Mr.

Atheist Man, since you've dedicated your whole life to antagonizing Christians, you've made Jesus Christ the center of your life the same as I have.

I don't know what the fuck that's supposed to mean, but consider the depths of this dude's spiritual arrogance, right?

As if atheism was a rejection of specifically their God.

I mean, that's part of it, right?

It's like one, 250 billionth of it, or however many fucking gods there are, something like that.

But it's not like I've I've gone down a long list of all the gods and rejected them one by one.

I've rejected supernaturalism as a whole, and your brand of your faith is just one of the drops in the bucket that I tossed out.

Now, granted, I do talk about the Christian God more than the other ones, or I should say the Christian gods, you know, since they have as many as they have denominations, but that's because he's the one that keeps showing up, you know, with you assholes trying to shove him into my government all the time.

So it's not that I'm rejecting this asshole's God so much as I'm rejecting this asshole.

If he was trying to force Allah into our public schools, I'd be talking about Allah.

If he was trying to get references to Vishnu added to the Constitution, I'd be talking about Vishnu.

If he was trying to teach faith healing in science class, I'd be talking about faith healing.

But of course, there's also a reason why we've got terms like knife fight and gunfight, but not grenade fight.

Because this idiot's argument also works the other way, right?

Like if responding to Christian bullshit online with a counterpoint constitutes putting Christianity at the center of my life, wouldn't countering an atheist point online be putting putting atheism at the center of yours?

And look, I'm sorry to spend this much time dwelling on a brief internet fight, but this assumption that atheism is a specific rejection of Christianity rather than a commitment to a rational worldview sits at the root of so many of the biases we face.

But Christians almost have to keep perpetuating it because the alternative is to admit that they've been in the same bucket as Muslims, Hindus, and faith healers the whole fucking time.

They're talking about your Jesus.

We interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news moment

Joining me for headlines tonight, quick before we duck out to England for the final QED, are my fellow jet setters, Heath Enright and Eli Bozick.

Fellas, are you ready to set jets or whatever the hell that means?

Whatever gets me to the Pug Cafe in Manchester.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm not sure what QED you were talking about, Noah.

I'm going to a Cup of Pug convention.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, you guys have never been to that place, but I have.

In our lead story tonight, an estimated 7 million Americans, or about one out of every 50, turned out to protest Donald Trump's catastrophic mishandling of the country last Saturday.

Organized under the headings of No King's Day, these may have been the largest protest in the history of earth.

And they were all organized around one simple message.

Inflatable frog suits have now done more to protect America from tyrants than the Second Amendment.

But of course, Republicans can hardly admit that, so their strategy was to rebrand the protest as I hate America rallies.

and as evidence of that fact they pointed out the involvement of atheists seriously the goddamn majority whip of the goddamn U.S.

Senate backed up his claims of anti-Americanism by pointing out that one of the organizing group's supporters was American atheists Right.

Which, I'll remind you, in any culture that didn't automatically villainize atheists would be as absurdly bigoted as saying, these rallies got fucking Jews in them.

Yes, right.

Also absurdly bigoted in this culture, for sure.

And we didn't get any of the cool Jewish stuff.

We're just like

atheists, we got nothing.

Also, those frog suits were so good.

The videos of

the vantage point of ice, and they're like, they're in frogs.

I don't know what we do.

People in frogs.

What do we do?

So here's the quote.

Wyoming's own John Barroso, flush with free time now that he doesn't have to worry about operating the fucking government, was condemning Chuck Schumer for encouraging people to attend the No Kings rallies.

And he throws in the I hate America rally rebrand like he's the underside of a pillow in Brave New World.

And then he adds,

All these rallies are going to be held by far-left activists, and all will be calling on the Democrats to keep the government closed.

And the Democrats in this body are beholden to every single one of these far-left activist groups, groups like hashtag Resist Trump and American Atheists, end quote.

And at the head of the far left, famous far-leftist Chuck Schumer.

By the way, John Barrasso is the biggest DEI hire in the entire U.S.

government.

Yes.

We let Wyoming have two entire senators.

It's insane.

Definitely not on Democratic merit.

That's not why Wyoming gets two senators.

He is one of them.

Yes.

And he's bigger than the other one.

Exactly.

And I'm sure it'll come as great relief to Nick Fish to learn that the Democratic Party is beholden to him.

I got a lot of requests next time we see you, bro.

Oh, me too.

Unblock me on Facebook.

That's never going to happen.

I also think it's damn telling how far right you have to be standing before American atheists look far left to you.

But of course, the real story here is that Barroso and his cronies went pouring through the list of affiliates of No Kings to find the scariest sounding ones.

And what they landed on was the word atheist, right?

Because the FFRF, Americans United for Separation and Churches State, and American Humanist Association, they have also partnered with No Kings to the precise degree that American Atheists has, but Barroso didn't bother to scaremonger about any of them.

Yeah, I bet they felt a little left out, huh?

Like, I was upset our podcast didn't give a shout-out.

Yeah, we'll persecute a Christian whatever you need.

I don't know.

Yeah.

And I should point out, by the way, doing it right now.

That none of these groups had anything to do with organizing the protests, right?

They didn't even financially support them.

All they did was sign on to No Kings mission statement, which reads, quote, this country does not belong to kings, dictators, or tyrants.

It belongs to we, the people, the people who care, who show up, and the ones who fight for dignity, dignity, a life we can afford, and real opportunity.

And I guess when you're trying to make that sound scary, Jeff Blackwell's thighs of otherworldly might are probably the best you're going to do.

And in, well, what do you know news?

When Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters quit his job to join an anti-teachers union group funded by the Koch brothers last week, I'll admit I worried that it might be a whole episode before something bad happened to him again.

How would I handle a lack of what I've lovingly come to know as Walter Watch?

Would I go through actual physical withdrawal symptoms?

Well, it turns out there was no need to worry as Oklahoma Attorney General Gertner Drummond is calling for an investigative audit of the Oklahoma State Department of Education based entirely on the way Walters mishandled state spending.

Okay, well, it's Gentner Drummond getting it.

Yeah, get it right first.

Also, just to be clear, Ryan Walters, who people are saying got caught having a threesome in his office with a sentient pile of flour and a Jackie Chan fuck robot.

I heard people are saying that.

I did hear people say that.

I've seen it written.

It's been written too.

That's true.

A lot of buzz about it.

He's quitting his job with the public school system to continue his job with the anti-public education group funded by the Koch brothers and the Walton family that was paying him triple the salary that Oklahoma was paying him to help publicly educate kids.

So to be clear, the evil sabotage job was already on the CV and now it continues.

And it's also worth noting that Drummond isn't going after basically all the shit we've talked about on this show, right?

Like many of those things constitute crimes, but Gentner's going after other shit so far, other crimes.

Yes, exactly.

So first off, big thanks to Gen Mu Mu for sending us this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Genmu, sending us atheist news to scathingnews at gmail.com implies the existence of our podcast within the Rise of the Shield Maiden anime universe.

And I just want to say that if you are in that universe, you should not be listening to our show if you can turn into a snake, okay?

We are way off base on this podcast about your lived experience, Genmu.

Scathingnews at gmail.com.

Don't listen to him, Genmu, or don't conduct vibrations with your bones at him or whatever it is that snakes do.

Don't just don't do that to him.

Keep listening.

In a letter to Oklahoma State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Bird on Wednesday, Drummond said,

You are well aware that the former superintendent has a documented history of mismanaging tax dollars, as it was your office that exposed Mr.

Walters from granting blanket approval for families to purchase non-educational items.

Like fucking X boxes and shit.

It was so bad.

Given the former superintendent's well-established history of mishandling tax dollars, combined with the new and ongoing allegations of misspending, I am now ordering an investigative audit of the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

End quote.

Also, he might have hired a team of cyber ninjas to find the criminals who hacked into his TV and programmed a Jackie Chan movie to be playing exactly when it was also playing for everyone else in the world watching that same channel at the same time.

Just as long as we're checking on money stuff, that one might have been a stupid one as well in terms of spending public money.

Well, I love how Drummond basically just gave us legalese for just look at that motherfucker.

Come on, tell me that asshole's not misappropriating funds.

He's following up his tenure as superintendent the way you guys follow up when I use a public bathroom.

Just like, I'm going to, I'm going to check in there for a second before other people go.

Where do you get that sentient pile of flour and that fuck robot that people are buzzing about?

So it looks like Ryan might not get a chance to spend his sweet, sweet new salary until he works out how often he visited the office supply closet with his old boss.

And that's hilarious.

But it's also a reminder of something important.

It's easy when we watch Trump get away with absolutely everything to become very like fatalistic and nihilistic about laws not mattering.

And look, I get it.

I get it.

But what you got to remember is that Ryan Walters was not the president.

Justice is slow and careful because it's supposed to be, but that doesn't mean it never happens.

And I think that is a glorious truth that Ryan Walters is about to find out.

Sure, hope so.

Next up in headlines in what did we say about consenting adults news?

We have

got the story of what I'm guessing is the third least immoral thing that a Peruvian bishop ever did.

Number one was putting shoes on, number two was brushing his teeth, and the third was getting caught having 17 secret lovers despite his vow of celibacy.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's definitely immoral to lie to your secret lovers about how many other secret lovers you have, which he very clearly did.

But when you compare it to the shit that Catholic priests do for a living and the stuff that they're usually doing with their dicks when they're not doing their job, that makes the news, like this is downright ethical.

Yeah.

Yeah.

HR guy's about to flip it back to zero on the

most terrifying days since poster of all time that they have.

And he's like, wait, adults.

All right.

Fuck yeah, father.

Nice.

Great.

Get out there, you scam.

Come here.

First of all, thanks to John for sending this story to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Always happy when I see a subject line that includes 17 secret lovers.

Makes my job that much easier.

For your effort, you get the pleasure of hearing me say your maximally generic name on the air.

Also, quick clarification: if you are one of my 17 secret lovers, please stop writing into the show.

You deserve your shame for being my lover.

So, anyway, so this is the story of Ciro Kispe Lopez, a 51-year-old ostensibly celibate bishop who wasn't always talking about a cracker when he was feeding body to his parishioners.

And this story is so goddamn delicious that I kind of want to let it explode all over the place like it did for me just by directly quoting a Peruvian journalist as quoted in the Times of London.

This is Paolo Hugas summing things up to the Times.

Quote,

a nun who is one of Kispe's lovers was jealous of a lawyer the bishop was also seeing and sent information about his affair to a third lover who got into a fight with the lawyer.

Okay, can we fly down there right now and make like hunting sisters of Christ or whatever?

That sounds amazing.

No, of course, the soap opera nature of this thing could easily obscure what is actually a pretty fucked up abuse of power.

Apparently, a number of these women wanted to come forward before, but they were afraid that Lopez would retaliate.

So the Vatican opened up an investigation after this hit the local news, during which they interviewed at least three of the women he was sleeping with and his cleaner, who probably knew something was up already, but her testimony got all the more important after Lopez's dumbass accidentally sent her a bunch of sexy videos and shit that he meant to send to one of his lovers.

Hey, hey, if you're a 51-year-old bishop and you're sending out dick pics, you are trying to lose your job, my man.

Okay, maybe it was just like, hey, cleaning lady, you see all this right here?

Clean those areas and then

and then delete this please

i don't want to point with my finger because i hear that that is a microaggression now for his part lopez denies the allegation which i should remind you includes video and audio recordings and says that they're a defamation campaign by quote dark hands end quote but dark hands or no lopez has since resigned though to be fair that also could have been because of the embezzlement allegations that he's been investigated about before one way or the other my guess is that the Vatican is doing its best to maximize the visibility of this story in hopes of starting a under Pope Leo, our inappropriate sexual relationships are with adults kind of vibe.

Just AI deep fakes getting, you know, quote, leaked of priests having, look, look at all the consensual sex with extra old people.

Yes.

Shit, dead body.

Too far.

That one's on us.

That one is on us.

And by the way, there was no way to fit this into the flow of the story, but it would be goddamn comedy journalism malpractice to leave it out.

The embezzlement thing included accusations that he removed chairs from church property to use in a chicken restaurant that he had a financial interest in.

The name of that restaurant is Patas Ariba, which literally translates to legs in the air.

So

I thought I'd throw that out at the end.

What's going to say?

The man had a brand.

He had a brand and he stuck to it.

A lot to learn from this story.

Yep.

Next up in headlines in Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk's Ghost, Dinesh D'Souza, and a farmer fucking a sheep on the side of the highway news.

What?

Those are the elements, the actual elements of a story.

And I said them out loud just now.

And now I feel crazy, but I'm sure they're part of the story.

Well, and I feel embarrassed for the sheep, right?

Really seems like we're in the matrix and the robots are putting sex pranks into the simulation to test us like

more than usual.

And a big thanks to Sam for helping me feel that way and sending the link to scathingnews at gmail.com.

Sam gets one of those very deliberate, slow nods of respect.

And I'm doing it right now, like really slow.

We all are, Sam?

A little squint.

We all are.

Yeah.

No, I'm not sure if I'm nodding at Sam or the prankster bots who snuck into the simulation room while the headmaster was powering up, but I am doing the nod.

We're doing the nod, and that's what matters, Sam.

Indeed.

So here's the truly insane yarn that got spun by our allegedly indifferent universe.

It starts last week with conservative commentator Candace Owens telling the story of being visited by Charlie Kirk during a dream.

It was a vivid dream, and Candace predicted a pregnancy one time using a vivid dream that she had back in the day.

So this is very serious.

Yeah, this is science.

This is science right here.

Charlie's host said to her that he was betrayed.

Well, yeah, I mean he was shot in the neck.

Yeah, it was a betrayal, unless he was specifically asking somebody to help him out with something, which I know.

Ah, it doesn't matter.

I'd like to die while saying the most ironic sentence possible.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, favor, check.

So he didn't elaborate during the vivid dream about the betrayal, but clearly he was talking about how his murder was actually orchestrated by the state of Israel.

That's the theory from Candace anyway.

And that tracks with a text exchange from two days before Charlie's death in which he indicates that his organization, Turning Point USA, was thinking about shifting to an anti-Israel stance.

So according to Candace Owens, Netanyahu had Mossad do a murder.

Okay, so for those of you who are confused what the direction of this grift is, let me explain.

I am.

I've read all about it.

I am still confused.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, okay.

So Candace didn't get the memo from her fellow right-wingers that they're pro-Israel for this 11-second period of time.

And so she's taken a bunch of heat from the right for criticizing Israel.

So her newest grift for like the last, say, three months or so, has been pretending that Charlie was secretly on her side as well.

And this is the Ouija board version of that tactic.

Got it.

Just a bunch of female right-wing pundits driven out from the movement for having opinions, sitting in a bar with a bunch of faceless leopard wranglers going, I know, I know.

I know.

Yeah.

I know.

And just for extra context about Candace Owens, she's currently being sued for defamation by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron.

Candace made an eight-part podcast series claiming that Brigitte is secretly a trans woman who's a close blood relation of Emmanuel and they have an incest relationship.

And also claiming that Emmanuel became president in France thanks to a mind control program operated by the CIA, much like MKUltra.

Cuibono, not clear on this, but that's

who the fuck advised him to sue over this?

Was it Barbara Streisand?

She is still alive.

Maybe he called her.

I've listened to this thing, and I have to say, if you're wondering how stereotypical it is, yes, there's a, but look at her hands, though, episode.

Wow.

Gross.

Okay, well, apparently the podcast series about the Macrons was no big deal to Dinesh D'Souza, but he was not going to stand by and listen to Candace talk about insane conspiracy theories like B.B.

Netanyahu orchestrating a murder.

Dinesh made the documentary 2,000 Mules about the 2020 election getting stolen from Donald Trump, and Dinesh, of course, cares about the truth.

Yeah, the argument in that movie, quick reminder, was way too many people walked near voting drop boxes for things to be on the up and up.

I do remember that, yeah.

So

in his capacity as a defender of journalistic integrity and truthiness, Dinesh responded to Candace Owens and her theory by saying,

well, by saying he can't respond, but then responding and invoking, let's pull out that pin bestiality.

He posted, quote, I can't comment on Candace because it's quite obviously a freak show.

It's like driving on the highway and seeing a farmer having sex with a sheep.

You don't want to look but you can't look away either but the problems begin when you try to analyze it it is what it is and the exact quote hey dinesh that is not the reaction i have when i see someone a sheep yeah i feel like dinesh is spending way too much time around sheep but hey uh dinesh our go-to analogy for that is a car accident man the rest of us have just been using car accidents how often are you seeing sheep fucking versus car accidents that you're like, I'm using it for analogies?

I need a bone market.

You know what people will relate to.

Okay, so that's what Dinesh said.

From there, we got the following exchange.

Candace,

who openly admits they wouldn't look away if they're watching a person having sex with a farm animal?

Oh, don't love that.

We were all on the same page as Candace there.

Yeah, when she's right, she's right, she's right.

She nailed it.

Dinesh, I am being humorous, or at least attempting to be.

Candace.

Humor is typically landed upon with relatability.

I don't know what's on your laptop, but most people cannot relate to feeling fascinated by farmers having sex with their sheep.

Hope this helps.

Dinesh.

Surprise is a key element of humor.

I was going for the adult swim thing, you know,

random.

You almost can't help but read that as surprise is a key element of humor, right?

You know what else is a key element of humor, Dinesh?

Delineating your joke's key elements afterwards.

Always a sign of a joke well laid.

Yeah.

He actually said, but he definitely said it that.

It was like, surprise is a key element of humor.

But then like trailing off basically being like, okay, note taken, I'll wash my mouth out with soap.

Yeah, or something like that.

I fed our tweets into ChatBGPT and they said that this is a good response to you.

Yeah, right.

yeah.

Okay, so moral of the story, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it a shot.

Okay, first of all, we don't need a fancy conspiracy theory to explain why someone might hate Charlie Kirk.

Sure.

Also, if you want to criticize Baby Net NYU for doing murders, you don't need to make up any news stories.

Right, yes.

And most importantly, Yes, Dinesh and Candace, humor is all about surprise and empathy, like bestiality, and then explaining how that wasn't funny.

Surprise, empathy.

You both nailed it if you put yourselves together.

Got it.

Yeah.

This is a pretty fucking funny story.

So, yeah, okay.

And finally, tonight in born Narcan News.

No, that's close.

That's close.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's a born again, born Narcan.

In today's times of political tumult, it's nice to see that occasionally we can all band behind something good together.

Like with Ohio's House Bill 57 this week, which would allow schools to stock Nexolone, an overdose reversal drug that goes by the name Narcan and has saved countless lives, especially in areas with heavy opioid use.

The bill passed 96 to zero with not a single crazy person in sight.

But then, like always, Christians had to try to sneak some theocracy into the mix and ruin it.

So we're going to talk about it.

Well, to be clear, it's the Ohio legislature.

So There was a crazy person inside, right?

Or it was late night and the lights were off.

But they voted yes on the bill as well.

That's true.

That's fair.

So after the bill passed, Republicans inserted a measure allowing public schools to give students even more time to attend Bible study during the school day.

Now, to be clear, students in Ohio are already allowed to skip two periods a day.

Oh, fuck you.

Yes, this completely unrelated measure would just allow them to skip an unlimited amount of knowing things sessions to spend their time not knowing things.

But anti-knowing things.

versus words.

At the end of every sermon and like Bible study lecture, I'd be hearing, everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to that.

Yes.

Than Billy Madison.

Yes, exactly.

It's also worth pointing out that while this release time is supposed to be neutral for any kind of religious instruction, there are all kinds of hoops to jump through to be approved.

Hoops that giant Christian organizations like Lifewise Academy are prepared to jump through that say your local mosque or Hindu temple definitely would not add to that that you aren't allowed to release your kid from school for secular time two periods a day right and this adds bigotry to the uselessness that this policy already was sure but that would that would be like taking away two periods of education to to give them two periods of education so it's a weird ask on the secular side like secular learning it's often just called learning yeah we just say learning a lot of the time yeah that's just straight up learning it's damn telling though that christians are going okay look missing 33 of the classes wasn't enough to keep them dumbed down for our religion, right?

We're going to need to ramp that up to like 100.

And they did.

Yeah.

Secular learning is the narcan of the masses for sure.

But of course, none of this is actually about getting kids release time.

It's about trying to sneak theocracy into a universal good and then accuse the other side of holding up overdose drugs when they don't play along.

It's the reason why everything is harder than it needs to be these days.

So when it comes to politics, it feels right on track.

Yeah,

yeah.

And with that reminder of what a genuine hell dimension Republicans really have made of this place, we're going to wrap the headlines up.

Heath, Eli, thanks as always.

Tumultuous.

And when we come back, we'll see if Ross Delta was heightened the coherent argument in this chapter.

If I've learned anything from doing this show, it's that literacy is overrated.

Sure, it allows you to digest the knowledge of ages past and experience the brilliance of Shakespeare and the insight of Nietzsche and all that shit, but it can also lead to reading the Book of Mormon and the case for Christ.

And reminding us of literacy's downside again this week will be Ross Douthett and his book, Believe Why Everyone Should Be Religious in this installment of God-awful books.

Now, I know that we just did this segment a couple weeks ago, but we only got halfway through the chapter, so we're gonna finish it off tonight.

It's a real page turner.

We have to.

Yeah, exactly.

Could not stop.

But yeah, so when we last left off, we were talking about the varieties of mystical experience.

Up to this point, we'd covered number one, with thinking a rock is too pretty for there not to be a god.

Number two,

being pretty sure there's a God in the room with you.

And number three, actually seeing or hearing from a god or an angel or a demon or a ghost or an alien.

It all counts.

And now we're going to dive into the fourth type, and that is miracles.

And so he says that these are the ones that, quote, from the point of view of official knowledge, are the most disreputable of all, end quote.

Yeah, but no, they're just, they're the ones that make testable claims.

Yeah, basically, he's like, the Ivory Tower elites, they're super mean to me about category four.

Very obvious lying.

It is what category four is.

They call it disreputable.

Here's our basket of disreputables.

And he lists exorcism hauntings, poltergeists, Michael Shermer, and of course, the lady who started a fire in her backpack, but it was definitely also a ghost miracle or something.

Well, the ghost started the fire in her backpack.

That was from earlier in the day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Callback.

So, okay, so, but he backs away from miracles, though, to include things that are, quote, uncanny or simply really, really weird.

End quote.

Oh, guys, I'm pretty sure that makes David Schwimmer's plastic surgery a miracle.

If I'm following the logic, they were on a break.

Well, and then he poo-poos us for dismissing the miracle of the sun at Fatima in 1917, which, again, consists of a bunch of people staring into the sun and saying they saw weird shit.

Not the same weird shit, mind you, just weird shit.

And nobody outside of that town who hadn't been primed to think there was going to be a miracle saw anything that was weird.

Okay, it wasn't just that, Noah.

Some people were also facing the wrong direction when they looked at a compass.

Nope, that's also that also happened.

Remember when Trump Trump stared at the eclipse?

My God, it was fucking green.

And he's like, and he's like, also, hey, what about all those very detailed accounts of saints flying in the 16th and 17th centuries?

I'm like, wow, it's weird that they would stop doing that right as we were getting good at documentation, huh?

Weird to bring this up, man.

Yeah.

And Ross, he puts a little title drop and a footnote here for his source of evidence about those guys who were flying in the 1500s.

It's a book called, They Flew.

That's the title of the book.

And when the title of your book is already in a fight with someone, it's not

a great sign.

Not great.

Not a good sign, no.

I guess Yahoo was taking it.

Yeah, right, right.

And he's like, and what about all the miracle healings that exclusively happen with maladies that sometimes go away on their own?

He insists that there are a lot of well-attested miracle healings that go well beyond just people getting better from things that people get better from.

He doesn't cite any of them here.

No, but there are.

No, he says it's about a third of Americans who claim they saw a miracle healing with higher shares in other regions of the world, meaning that hundreds of millions of people believe they witnessed a concrete supernatural intervention.

And it does not mean that at all.

Like, also, hundreds of millions, I think over a billion Catholics, believe their Lord and Savior is inside a cracker and they eat him every week.

Yeah, right.

Also, Also, Ross, you got that from a book called Miracles, the Credibility of the New Testament Accounts.

So again, not a great source.

Yeah.

Also, Ross, if you think those numbers are convincing, wait till you hear how many people tell their kids Santa Israel, it's a unified front, my man.

It is, yeah, I know.

But he points out that there's an objective team of dedicated skeptics that are actually examining these various miracle claims for veracity.

Maybe you've heard of them.

They're called the Catholic Church.

Church.

Come on.

No, he literally says that the Vatican, that their quote, process of saint-making depends on scientific investigation.

Okay.

Just a reminder, their scientific investigation has a checklist for stuff the saint has to do after dying.

There's a checklist for stuff to do after dying to get sainthood.

But here's the thing.

I was thinking about this.

Any of those post-mortem miracles could be just like a different ghost ghost who like misheard the praying i don't know there's like a lot of oh yeah it doesn't make sense within their dumb sense it's bad vetting okay and i swear to you at this point he really he genuinely makes this argument he's like if there weren't real miracles how would the catholic church keep making saints

it's the best yeah he's he's saying modern science should make us hit a threshold for miracles in saints and then very next sentence he says perhaps that threshold awaits us in the future future, but the last 50 years have seen instead a dramatic acceleration in saint-making, driven especially by Pope John Paul II's enthusiasm for canonization.

Right.

The most generous interpretation of this argument is, if miracles weren't real, we'd be a laughingstock.

And my response is,

yes, yes, nailed it.

And the very next sentence after that, where he admits it's just like a pope who wanted to make more saints, right after that, he says, says,

it's true that as part of this enthusiasm, the Polish pope dropped the threshold for confirmed miracles from three per saint to merely two.

Right, yes.

It got even easier, just like with the system.

God's got a lot less bandwidth these days.

Right.

It's like

add games to the season.

Like the per season.

stats don't mean the same thing anymore.

Yeah.

Now, he does eventually, though, he provides one supposed healing miracle, which could also have been a case of misdiagnosis.

It was one of those two things.

And we should note that the case report that he cites is from a journal called Complementary Therapies in Medicine.

I checked.

It has an impact factor of 3.6.

Cool.

Yeah, for comparison, the Lancets is 88.5.

Gaining on him.

Gaining.

So creeping up there.

That story, it's about a guy who had a feeding tube.

And a Pentecostal preacher did one of those laying of hands things.

And the guy felt a burning feeling in his like tube area.

And then his stomach eventually started working again.

And he didn't need the tube.

Guys pressing on.

And Ross concludes: the experience is consistent with prior accounts from scholarly practitioners who have noted that about 50% of people who are healed feel something.

Huh.

So that's a miracle because it's consistent with a very serious statistical trend of somethingness with

practitioners.

Keep a track of it.

Oldie gets 50%

for something wow yeah how would you disprove this argument someone someone has to say no when I was healed I felt a medium-sized banana being pushed into my wrapper

throwing off everyone's numbers well no he's literally arguing that there must be miracles or churches would have had to close up shop by now as if he's unaware of the possibility that churches just lie yeah right and here's the close to this section he says there are more things in heaven and earth than can be measured and distilled by scientific materialism.

A Shakespearean wisdom, Eli, that stands undefeated by four subsequent centuries of supposed disenchantment.

But, like,

how would that stop being undefeated?

That's me.

That's right.

Yes.

What would that mean?

We discover the end of discovery as a discovery.

We feel out a thing from like a fossil that's like, that's it.

Also, just because I've heard that quote used before, Hamlet and his friend have just seen a real ghost.

Right, yes, he says critically.

Yeah.

Unless Ross just saw a ghost, I need him to keep Shakespeare's name out of his mouth.

And now he's going to deal with our counter arguments to his, but where did the saints come from assertion in a subchapter called Romancing the Numinous.

Or at least, sorry, he's going to promise to do that.

He's not actually going to do it because the first and only objection that he's going to deal with is he's going to claim that we reject miracle claims because they're not repeatable and therefore don't lend themselves to laboratory testing.

Yeah, no, that's my big objection to the concept of sainthood.

Not enough double-blind studies are involved.

Yeah, this is such a stupid misunderstanding of how science works, right?

There are so goddamn many scientific questions that can't be studied in a lab, but are still studied.

The existence of miracle healing could be proved with nothing but population statistics.

But his counterpoint, of course, is that sometimes God doesn't feel like healing the cancer baby despite being prayed to in the same way by the same person who claims to have miracle healed before.

Right.

And then he moves on like that argument was done because he presented one of ours and one of his, and he was like, I have one.

But I have some follow-ups.

For example, why can't God take a phone call about baby cancer while we're looking?

Why can't you pee while we're looking?

Yeah.

And why was he killing that baby with cancer?

That's my question.

That's a great question.

Yeah.

The answer is

I'm ending the section.

And he ends the section by saying, Miracle healing is just not the kind of thing the scientific method is designed to measure or test, nor is it the kind of event to which it makes sense to assign definite probabilities.

So, okay, one more follow-up.

Is it cool if we assign probable probabilities to stop frost?

Are you cool if we do any?

Also, whenever anyone says something like that, if you replace the scientific method with just checking if something is fake, which you can and should, that sentence does not hold up.

Yep.

Yeah.

Now, but his central analogy is, I swear to you,

he's saying that like trying to get God to perform miracles is a lot like trying to get somebody to fuck you.

This is the best.

The same approach doesn't always work, even with the same person.

Yeah, if you're an atheist and you're not finding miracles, it's because you're not getting out there and trying out that miracle dick.

You got to try a little just the tip of the miracle dick.

And according to his logic, by the way, science is incapable of testing anything that involves beings with agency, right?

He says that at one point, that, well, you know, once you add agency, it is, I'm like, wow, the field of psychology is going to be devastated by this news yeah and without them who will the sociologists go to right also atheists we never have mystical experiences because we're not looking for them right right it's like you know how earthquakes only happen if you're looking for them

having sex with a lady is all about trying really hard and it's just like a miracle Ross doubts it's only slightly different than his exact quote yeah and an exact quote from heath's vows so it's sort of a a dump works two ways.

Well, and his analogy on this, like, you have to be looking for it to find it thing is still a romantic relationship, which is so fucking sad.

Because, like, I've had a number of romantic relationships where I wasn't like seeking them out, but apparently Ross never has.

And I don't think any of us are surprised.

Try as hard as you want, but having sex with a lady is going to need some intervention from Aphrodite, Ross.

Doubt it.

Again, really close.

That was even closer to the exact quote.

It really says, like, you're going to need Aphrodite.

Good luck.

Also, but his, his whole like romancing different people is different thing kind of falls apart since we're all supposed to be praying to that same one God, right?

Like, and he's been the same God the whole time.

Like, you would think we would know his kinks by now.

And then there's also a part towards the end of this chapter where he's like, now, admittedly, girlfriends and boyfriends can be proven to exist.

So it's different than that.

Not mine.

She lives in Canada.

But girlfriends are not meant to be proven by the scientists.

Yes, right.

They weren't designed to be.

Fuck you, Ezra.

Now, so actual line, quote, if you want to meet a demon, practice Satanism.

And then in parentheses, please don't.

End quote.

He clearly wrote that without the parentheses part.

And he stared at it for a second.

He got a little scared and he panicked.

And he was like, please don't.

Also, he also points out that the Bible says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

So God gets test anxiety.

That's all it is.

Needs extra time.

Yeah.

Then he tries his hand at introspection with a subchapter called, Is It All Inside Your Head?

And at this point, he's backed entirely away from miracle claims, and he's now asking about testing the first three types of spiritual experiences, which all boil down to person made a claim that would happen entirely in their head anyway.

Yeah.

Luckily for Ross, his test is going to be, did a person make a claim?

Yeah,

they all pass.

They all make it.

Yeah, yeah.

But we, the skeptics in the at this point are asking ross why he doesn't explain those types of mystical experiences through psychology and he admits that yes those types of mystical experiences can be recreated and studied entirely through neurophysiology but counterpoint

i already said not us so it doesn't count

okay this part was fun he starts the section clearly just planning to bring up one argument from a skeptic, but then we get to watch him get swept up in all the excitement of saying logic stuff from the skeptical perspective.

And he accidentally gives us almost two full pages of extremely reasonable explanations for all the mystical stories he's been talking about.

And then he finally snaps out of it.

And he's like, God damn, that felt good.

Fuck.

No, it's brain chemicals plus a demon.

Plus a demon.

Yes, yeah.

The New York Times makes Ezra Klein talk to me and our chairs are the same height.

What?

Yeah.

No, but he's arguing these like, you know, hey, maybe the ayahuasca ayahuasca and the shrooms aren't making you see hallucinations.

They're just loosening your not seeing the spiritual stuff muscles that were all clenched up.

You know, and maybe mental illness is just loosening your not seeing the spiritual muscles too.

He says the same thing.

No dice, Ross.

I'd be fucking pen pals with God if that was the case.

Yeah, and Ross quotes one of his favorite experts here who said, the most credible and dramatic examples of the paranormal occur only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion.

So just translation, you know how Mormon missionaries look for baby funerals and show up with pamphlets?

It's like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, his argument here is, sure, you can explain it all with brain stuff, but how do you know it's only brain stuff, right?

Which is, it's like asking how we know it isn't gravity and fairies pushing on shit.

And he literally argues that if you assume he's correct, he seems correct.

Shit, you know, this is on page 93.

He's talking about Darwinian explanations for spiritual experiences, and he cautions that those theories presume materialism and atheism.

But of course, if you presume otherwise, then we probably have spiritual experiences because a God exists.

So like he's literally, he's like, if you presume a God exists, then you can conclude that a God exists.

Yeah.

Basically, he's saying, if you assume a God created everything, and then you think about a strict evolution-based explanation.

Well, that's a weird thing you'd be doing at that point, but you'd realize that a monkey must have mutated a God neuron.

And then he started talking to a ghost using the God neuron.

And then he started fucking other monkeys way more because of his talks with God.

And that's how we got obnoxious Christian people.

Meanwhile,

that's where Ross Dalthy comes from.

You know, he seems to think we have to explain why spiritual experiences aren't more like dreams if there's no God.

I mean, they are boring, and I definitely don't want to hear about them unless we're fucking.

So he's got me there.

Yeah, right.

There's that.

No, but he's like, he's like, but spiritual experiences aren't like dreams because dreams fade away and you forget them, but spiritual experiences linger.

And I'm like, well, right, because you tell people about them, right?

If you keep talking about the same dream, you'll remember that for a long time too.

And he's also, he starts talking about how ayahuasca trips maybe really do divert through heaven.

And he actually says, quote, notably, users often report seeing the same kinds of beings, angelic, demonic, extraterrestrial, or elvens, seeming.

End quote.

Yeah, that's like, that's almost all the types of, it's everything but vampire, right?

Uh, question.

Does Ross think elves are part of his religion?

Because I've not been

aliens, yes, right.

A lot of somethingness to all those descriptions, yeah.

And very clearly, Ross Douthett tried to hang out with people doing drugs like ayahuasca at a party or something, but he's Ross Stouthet.

And everybody's like, get the fuck, you're going to ruin the trip, man.

Oh, yeah.

Nothing would ruin our trip more than Ross's face.

so this is where we get a footnote that tells us to check out the illustrated field guide to dmt entities

machine elves what trickster i don't know

is that a thing i've yeah machine elves tricksters teachers and other interdimensional beings it's the name of the field guide book that he learned about all that stuff from that's what ross learned about some good evidence for his religion also

side note, can I say how much of a fucking cop are you that you meet the machine elves on a DMT trip and you're like, I'm going to create a fucking field guide so that everybody else can write some pickets when they meet them?

Terrence McNally would spit in your mouth, right?

And then he desperately flails around in a subchapter called Imagine There's No Mystical Experience, right?

So he challenges us to explain NDEs without resorting to mystical explanations.

And I'm like, dreams.

Took me one fucking word, bro.

Hey, you nailed it.

Yeah.

You're lying.

Two words.

Well, yes, double.

Yeah.

Right.

But he's like, no, it can't be dreams, though, because it's intense and memorable, just like dreams that you think have significance.

You're lying, Ross.

Three.

There we go.

So fun fact, shortly after becoming an atheist in college, I had this incredibly vivid dream that I was saved by Jesus.

And when I woke up from it, I remember thinking, damn, I wish I was raised in the right culture to monetize this.

Okay.

I'd be on a book tour right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So according to Ross, NDEs can't be a random magical dream, just like totally random like that, because that's like a cathedral being created as a byproduct of a mudslide.

Exact words from Ross.

So we have to explain, we being skeptics, we have to explain NDEs as part of natural selection.

But I don't think we do.

I don't think we have to do that.

Like, okay, when a chicken gets beheaded and it still runs around for a little bit, that doesn't mean the chicken brain and spinal cord evolved when chickens almost got killed after being chopped off their heads.

And then they ran around and like fucked one more time and spread that gene more than the chickens who just died right away from the headshot.

Like that little bit of running is just a thing that can happen when something goes wrong.

Yes, exactly.

And a weird NDE dream about Jesus Christ is not a cathedral, It's a sloppy pile of mud and rocks inside the almost dying brain of a Christian person.

It's the mudslide thing, man.

Or

far more often, inside the mind of a drugged up person who almost died, but then was in a hospital on powerful fucking drugs for a while.

Yeah.

He also sells the lies that NDEs are consistent across cultures.

Again, like

this from the guy who's like, they all see the same thing, either a demon or an alien or a vampire or an extraterrestrial or an elf.

Yeah.

And also they don't even fucking happen in most cultures.

Oh, okay.

Side note, one of my favorite Christian lies is like isolated tribes have NDEs about Jesus, but they always fuck that lie up and make the person telling the story like too ignorant, right?

They'll be like, and this Jesus man had hair growing from the bottom of his head.

And it's like, they have beards.

And they go,

I forgot.

Well, right, it's

this entire fucking subchapter and the last one, they're all predicated on a phenomenon that cannot even be shown to exist.

He also, he mentions mentions a study that tries to explain NDEs.

This is from the journal Brain Communications, impact score of 4.7.

And to be clear, the study dismisses his bullshit.

Ross, we're dangerously close to citing journals with a lesser impact score than our podcast.

Right?

Scathing atheist has been cited in at least one academic paper.

So our impact score is non-zero.

And we have a master's thesis, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so, okay, so Now he's roping in shit people felt when they thought they were going to die under the heading of NDEs without being really clear to his reader that he's doing so to make it seem like NDEs are more frequent.

Right.

Because like when most people hear NDE, they think of like people who almost die, go to heaven, have an experience where they talk to Jesus and come back.

But now he's just talking about people who like had the light flash before their eyes thing when they thought they were going to fall off of a building or something.

Right.

And then he asks us to imagine a world where NDEs don't exist.

and then desperately tries to convince us that that's not just opening our eyes.

Yeah, and he argues that a materialist world should have NDEs that are just a random dreamlike jumble.

But again, no, it shouldn't.

You can't just like say stuff.

The brain, the human brain, is wired to have thoughts that happen in the shape of, you know, other thoughts and information that you already had.

Like, okay, so if

like a pasta maker starts running out of power, it doesn't start spitting out random wheat plants.

Like it's still

going to be something shaped like pasta for a little bit.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

And then if

you zap the pasta maker with a defibrillator and ask the pasta maker to describe what just happened, it might say Elvin spaghetti or some stupid shit, but that's nothing.

That doesn't mean anything.

Okay, Elvin spaghetti sounds delicious.

It's a

example.

I follow your metadata.

Jesus spaghetti.

There you go.

There you go.

Nice.

Okay.

Well, now that also sounds delicious.

Okay, fuck.

I just like it.

Yeah, so you can't end with spaghetti and make it not sound good.

Yeah.

No spaghetti.

So, And then we get a horrifically suggestive subchapter called Michael Shermer's Residue.

Yeah, Ross, this was more of a problem for the skeptical community than the religious one.

I appreciate you taking this on, bud.

But he's like, but even the best neurological explanations for spiritual experiences can't explain lies.

And he insists here that we need to explain all the miracle claims, and our explanation has to go beyond, quote, the persistence of fakery and fraud and misremembering, end quote.

Now, he doesn't give us a reason, right?

Like, we have to go beyond that because he said so.

No, you do, Rod.

You

explain your shit.

Your shit's crazy.

Yes.

And then he begrudgingly admits that coincidence does exist.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

He gives a nod to the law of large numbers and he's like, yeah, okay.

Okay.

With enough.

nice ladies on bikes and enough bags full of hot light bulbs, you might get a fire in your book bag and a lady saying she felt hot in her body that was the miracle i described earlier it could be law of large numbers so he mentions that and how it could also be large numbers and coincidence and just like earlier he gets all swept up in the logic talking and he gives us a few more examples but then he remembers he has to talk his way out he says okay but what if it's large numbers versus

extra large miracle exactly that seriously that's all

yes that's all he's got that was his whole thing.

And also, hey, why do these people never think they need to explain away the failed prayers, the miracles that didn't happen despite the intercessory prayer, right?

Okay, okay.

Name one person who died all the way and then didn't have an NDE.

You never talked.

Yeah.

They all.

He challenges us at one point to point to the subconscious in the brain.

It's like to be clear, the guy arguing for an invisible God in an invisible heaven, judging your invisible soul with invisible angels, suddenly needs to see it to believe it.

Show me on the doll where you're secretly in love with Jesus, whose body exists invisibly inside crackers.

Show me now.

Also, it's weird that the part of your brain that loves Jesus also accidentally says Volvo when people ask what type of car your mom drives, right?

Okay, that's a bad example.

Everybody's confused.

Volvo spaghetti.

So we go to Michael Sherbert's radio story, the one that supposedly started working and playing love songs at the exact instance that he got married.

No, it didn't.

And Ross relays the convoluted, like, even this would be more plausible than explaining it as God explanation that Shermer gave, kind of as a joke.

Yeah.

Right.

And he says, see how hard it is for them to give an explanation?

But Shermer's point here was that even that ridiculous explanation didn't invent supernatural beings and was therefore a more likely explanation.

Exactly.

Yeah.

We get the absurd joke explanation that has the broken radio getting turned on by a dead grandfather who's alive in like a different dimension of the multiverse using a tesseract and a wormhole.

And Ross scoffing at the idea being so much more absurd than just believing in God, which it wouldn't be.

Like the chapter might as well end with like a tesseract and a wormhole.

Some idiot's going to keep reading this part too.

I know somebody named Haywood Jablomi.

Fox.

I'm getting kicked out of a DMT party again.

Yeah, honestly, a tremendous amount of this book.

And Ross's career is just saying, actually, I'll have you know I don't get it.

Right?

Jesus.

Well, damn it.

Now that Eli successfully summarized the whole fucking book, I'm not sure what we're going to talk about on the next installment of God-awful books.

Ah, we might have to shut it down.

Before we burrow our way into your hippocampus, I want to remind everybody that we're about to start the third season of D ⁇ D Minus.

I don't plug it on every episode because I can never remember when it's coming out.

But if you haven't checked it out, you definitely should.

Eli Bosnick is one of the best DMs in the business, and there's already two full ARCs available to listen to.

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

If you can't wait along, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our Sister So's Hot Friend God Awful Movies debuting at 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our Half Sister So Citation Needed debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday.

Obviously, I can't cue the music until I thank Heath Enright for being my buddy, Eli Bosnik for being my pal, Lucinda Lusions for being my best friend, and David for providing this week's Farnsworth quote and public service announcement.

I'm not friends with David, but like I feel like we would be if we got to know each other, right?

But most of all, of course, I want to thank this week's best people, even though I don't know their names just yet.

We're recording this episode in advance because we're traveling this week, but I promise to get you properly thanked by name and effusively complimented next week.

And if you'd like to hear your name alongside theirs, there's still time.

If you'd like to help keep this show going until the Trump administration shuts us down for making fun of his comover, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathing atheists, whereby you'll earn early access to an extended afri 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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And speaking of social media, Tim Robertson handles that for us, our audio engineer is Morton Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission.

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

Now it's a macro aggression.

Now it's an edit.

Yeah, right.

Macroaggressions are an edit.

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