The Scathing Atheist - 383: Babbling Crude Edition

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

In this week’s episode, Ohio will get dumber on purpose, one of the Supreme Court hijackers gets temporarily talked down by the real pilots, and we’ll do a deep dive into a pile of crap. Which you’d think we’d have learned out lesson about by now. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist To buy our book, click there: http://www.amazon.com/Diatribes-Godless-Misanthrope-Scathing-Presents-ebook/dp/B00J53FZFI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396141562&sr=8-1 To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ To hear more from our intrepid audio engineer Morgan Clarke, click here: https://www.morganclarkemusic.com/ --- Headlines: Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/us/gay-transgender-workers-supreme-court.html Trump Administration Gets Rid of Healthcare Protections for Transgender People: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/13/trump-administration-gets-rid-of-healthcare-protections-for-transgender-people/ Religion aids in Coronavirus comeback: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/15/to-no-ones-surprise-more-coronavirus-outbreaks-are-traced-back-to-churches/ and https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/13/governor-lovingly-addresses-covid-spreading-churches-be-a-little-more-careful/ and https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/12/new-covid-hospitalizations-in-u-s-occur-mostly-in-heavily-religious-states/ The GOP’s 2020 Platform, Copied from 2016, Is a Wishlist for the Christian Right: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/12/the-gops-2020-platform-copied-from-2016-is-a-wishlist-for-the-christian-right/ Terrifying Ohio “religion in the schools” bill a signature away from law: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/11/ohio-lawmakers-pass-bill-allowing-religious-expression-in-school-to-run-wild/ Three Christians Are Suing the Mayor of D.C. Over the “Black Lives Matter” Mural: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/12/three-christians-are-suing-the-mayor-of-d-c-over-the-black-lives-matter-mural/ Believers Who Worshiped on Biblical Site Got High on the Lord…and on Cannabis: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03344355.2020.1732046 Matt Powell claims “99% of School Shootings Are Done by Atheists”: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/05/31/lying-christian-hate-preacher-99-of-school-shootings-are-done-by-atheists/ Islamic Scholar issues fatwa against alcohol based hand sanitizer: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/14/haram-an-islamic-scholar-issued-a-fatwa-against-alcohol-based-hand-sanitizers/ --- This Week in Misogyny: Instagram pissy with woman for doing squats near religion: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/16/young-woman-scolded-on-instagram-for-doing-squats-as-hindus-congregate-nearby/ Texas anti-abortion group sued for calling opponents “criminals”: https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/06/14/texas-anti-abortion-group-sued-for-defamation-for-calling-opponents-criminals/

Warning, we're using a lot of sanitizer lately, but our language is still filthy. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by HIMSS and by White Privilege. White Privilege, proudly sponsoring every single podcast I'm aware of where the hosts actually make a living from it. Because you don't have to be a racist to benefit from racism, but you do have to be a racist to deny that. And now, The Scathing Atheist. Greetings, it is I, Lord Freeza, and I am here today to assure you that your pathetic race did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkeys. It's Thursday. It's June 18th.

And it's International Panic Day. Huh. It feels like we've been warming up for that one all fucking year. I'm no illusions. I'm Heath Enright, and from Cincinnati Swing State and Good Husband Georgia, this is The Scathing Atheist. On this week's episode, Ohio will get dumber on purpose. One of the Supreme Court hijackers gets temporarily talked down by the real pilots.

Right? Just for a second. And we'll do a deep dive into a pile of bullshit, which you'd think we'd have learned our lesson about by now. But first, the diatribe. I get why religious people always pretend that morality is fundamentally different than every other field of study, but I've never understood why atheists are so willing to play along with them. Right? Like when Christians say, well, if you don don't believe in god where do you get your morals

from that's not substantively different than asking if you don't believe in god where do you get your pickles from and god made all things pickles and morals alike and both are equally in need of explanation when you shift from a theistic to an atheistic worldview and yet we treat the one as different why and the religious apologists would argue that the difference here is that like one could theoretically derive morals from a god even if that god didn't exist belief in this case would be sufficient but to think that one can derive their morals from such simplistic bullshit is a grave disservice to moral philosophy right like don't do that or god will melt you when you

die is the fucking moral equivalent of geocentrism but of course religious people can't do that or God will melt you when you die is the fucking moral equivalent of geocentrism. But of course, religious people can't admit that because they literally can't admit that our morality has advanced at all in 2000 years. At least the Christian ones, right? And fucks up their whole notion about Jesus being the perfect moral teacher. So they have to maintain this delusion that humans aren't more moral now than they were centuries and even millennia ago, even though you can literally observe the advance in the span of a single human life. Right. The evidence, to the contrary, is overwhelming and might be best exemplified by their own fucking book. Of course, we're used to fucking religious people holding the belief in spite of overwhelming contradictory evidence. That's a prerequisite. But I've seen plenty of atheists who do the same thing they look at the bible and they're like

wow how could anyone ever have mistaken this is for a book of morals or even a moral book as though the study of morals hadn't advanced about as much in the last 2 000 years as the study of physics right or astronomy now in a sense moral philosophy is a victim of its own success because it's so vital to the proper functioning of our or any society. It gets an educational primacy afforded in no other field of study, right? Because like, we're not going to put you in jail for fucking up physics, no matter how bad you fuck it up. So by the time you're old enough to form full sentences, you've already been inundated with moral philosophy. You've been spoon fed it through

every medium. By the time a kid reaches puberty in the modern world, they've spent thousands of hours on this subject through their stories, their comics, their movies, their video games, their schoolwork, their music, and of course, their actual day-to-day navigation of the world. By the time most of us learn that moral philosophy is even a thing, we are steeped in it, and that leads many of us to think that it's innate. And sure, this is kind of like the way that we look back and laugh at all those ignoramuses who thought the sun revolved around the earth as though we would have puzzled it out if only we had a chance to tackle the problem before Copernicus, or the way we all seem to think that every invention is obvious once someone else went to the trouble of inventing it.

But it goes deeper than that because our culture, especially the religious aspects of it, are actively selling the fiction that your morals are written onto your heart by the hand of God Almighty. Nobody has a vested financial interest in convincing you that you and Galileo are intellectually interchangeable. Now, as atheists, we're often inclined to defend the dubious notion that morality is innate, right? I'm sure I've done it on this show myself. And to a certain extent, that's correct, right? A lot of pretty simple animals exhibit morality. But basic shit like reciprocity and not eating your neighbors young

are a long fucking ways from what we humans do when we evaluate something ethically. And like any other field of study it's advanced continuously since about the enlightenment and that matters for a lot of reasons beyond academic accuracy right consider how hard it is to believe that we as a society as a species can improve ethically if you think that morals are innate again there is copious evidence that this is not the case i'm 44 years old and i've seen us advance our understanding of shit like corporal punishment and bullying is enough to make the

systems i grew up under seem barbaric our understanding of things like gay and trans rights well by no means perfect are orders of magnitude better now than they were when i was a kid and sure not everybody is on board with these advancements, but we still haven't convinced everybody that the Earth orbits the sun. That hasn't stopped us from walking on the moon. But this error doesn't just fail on a societal level. On an individual level, it forgives our obligation to learn. Most of us think of ourselves as being pretty moral.

We have our moral failings, sure, but we try to improve them. And this view of morals as being pretty moral. We have our moral failings, sure, but we try to improve them. And this view of morals as like prepackaged software leaves us believing that we can both recognize and overcome all of our moral failings without ever bothering to learn anything from an outside source. We have everything we need to achieve moral perfection built in. Virtually all of us could benefit from studying moral philosophy and getting expert perspective on all the latest and greatest and cutting edge ethics. And yet even many rational people dedicated to self-improvement don't bother to drill down on this subject at all. See, the real root of all of this is the same, whether you're religious or not, it's arrogance. Morality is quite literally the way we measure one another. It's so fundamental to our being that to say

someone is a good or bad person is a reference to their ethical behavior. According to our linguistic conventions, being good at being a person is a question of one's morality. Given that, you know, it's kind of hard to admit that maybe you don't know all there is to know on the subject. Look, if you spend your life thinking about physics, you might hit on some of the fundamental concepts that define our modern understanding on the subject, but that would be a huge fucking waste of time when they're already written down for you to read somewhere.

And when you consider how much more important it is that we as a society get better at morals than it is that we get better at physics, one might argue that you're downright obligated to they're talking about your jesus interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin joining me for headlines tonight is the hobs to my calvin heath enright heath are you ready to transmogrify okay well i have a closet full of transmogrifiers that I'm never throwing out because I am my father now. I'm an old man, and I might need each one of those at some point.

You know what? I like to think of this show as a transmogrifier for the brain. Speaking of which, we need to pause for a word from this week's sponsor, HIMS. Hey, Heath, you giving yourself a buzz cut there yep yep it's my favorite haircut that i choose because it's my favorite of all the haircuts i like this listen man i can see that you still have some hair you can actually do something about that before it's all gone i like having it like this noah i like it do you um did you just swoosh back your long lustrous hair to make a point when you said that did i did you apropos of nothing have you heard

of four hymns.com oh what's four hymns.com it's a one-stop shop for hair loss skin care and sexual wellness for men it's time to write a new chapter, one in which one has hair. Whomever I might be talking about. The royal you. All right. Really. HIMSS connects one with licensed physicians who can prescribe FDA-approved products to help treat hair loss. And it all happens online, which could save hours.

Completely confidential and discreet. Okay, so if one wanted to get started with that what should that one person do all right that's a great question for a friend right now our listeners can get their first month free just go to forhims.com slash scathing that's forhims.com slash scathing prescription requires an online consultation with a physician who will determine a prescription as is appropriate. Offer valid only if prescribed. Three months minimum subscription. Additional restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Okay.

Well, unrelated question. You don't like the buzz cut and beard look? Eli says you look like a cartoonist stopped drawing halfway up your face. Yeah. Yeah, he says that. But what do you think? What do you think? Oh, I think it's great.

Right? Like WWF attitude era. Great. Thank you. And now back to the headlines. In our lead story tonight, we have some good news and we have some bad news. The good news. On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that it's illegal for employers to discriminate

against LGBT staff members. The bad news, we needed the highest court in the nation to make a ruling in 2020 that it's illegal to discriminate against LGBT staff members. On June 14th of 2020, it was perfectly legal

in more than half the states in the country to fire someone for being gay or trans. That could be the official reason for the firing. Yeah, yeah, no, yeah. You didn't even need any fucking sincerely held religious beliefs to do it then. Yeah. Ridiculous.

So again, just the ruling, definitely good news. But it's also an embarrassment it took this long and an embarrassment when you look into some of the details. So the ruling centers around Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin or sex. which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, or sex. And apparently that last part was somehow confusing for the majority of our states, where it was understood that, you know, for example, you could fire a person of the female sex for being sexually attracted to the female sex, but you could not fire a person from the male sex for being sexually attracted to the female sex now i'm not a legal scholar but i could definitely circle the parts that mention sex in that sentence

i just said yeah there's like six sex is there pretty simple like this is like firing a black person for marrying a white person and being like no it's not racial discrimination because it's about the spouse i'm fired a spouse that's different yeah yeah no look as a guy who was repeatedly told i'd have to cut my hair for a job i always questioned how committed we were to this sex discrimination thing and holy shit does that underscore how hard it is for trans people to get employment absurd right wow okay but you know somehow until june 14th of this year again this was complicated for people it still is for a lot of people it was complicated for the supreme court until then we needed the top legal minds in the country plus alito thomas kavanaugh to explain that firing a woman when you wouldn't fire a man might count as sex discrimination.

In fact, we needed the top legal minds to coax Gorsuch and Roberts over to the non-bigot side of history, shaking a bag of food and getting them on this side for one fucking second. The ruling was 6-3 with Neil Gorsuch writing the enlightened majority decision. Yeah. What? Except it wasn't enlightened because they let fucking Neil Gorsuch write it. We even managed to get being right wrong because we let him do that. He started okay.

It was actually this part anyway, it was a beautiful example of a high intelligence asshole getting trapped by his own logic because he is intelligent. He's just a fucking bigot. Also, Gorsuch wrote an employer who fires an individual for being gay or transgender fires that person for traits or actions. It would not have questioned in members of a different sex. It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being gay or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex, obviously. But he also went out of his way to mention that according to the law, religion doesn't have laws. Let's also mention that any employer who finds a way to claim they're a religious employer can continue with employment, hate crimes as much as they want.

That's what basically he added to that. Well, yeah, he Mr. Incredibles it, but for evil. A friend of the show and attorney for American Atheist, Jeff Blackwell, pointed that out to me like two minutes after the decision was released. He's got a whole fucking section that says, yeah, technically impossible for us to pretend this isn't sex discrimination. So sure would be a shame if somebody were to fill out a form 2614-B and file it with Larry down at customer complaints. You know, like that's essentially the decision.

worth mentioning that Alito, Thomas, and Kavanaugh are still allowed to be on the Supreme Court despite not understanding how sex discrimination means discrimination based on sex. Alito wrote the

dissenting opinion and claimed there is only one word for what the court has done today. Is there? Legislation. Oh, for fuck's sake. To be clear, he's talking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 using the word today. He also added, a more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall. Well, only because your brain's fading.

Yeah, right. Absolutely. No, it's not. Alito decided in Citizens United that corporations are people. This week's ruling decided that sex is sex. A equals A was a brazen abuse of authority to the guy who decided that corporations are people recently. Well, that's because God made A and B. He's not A and A.

Right? Fuck. Because God made A and B, he's not A and A. All right? Fuck. And speaking of 2020, I mentioned the good news and the bad news at the beginning, right? Well, we also have some bad news because that's how that goes. As if intentionally dedicated to pre-ruin any good news that might happen with the Supreme Court, three days before that ruling, the Trump administration made it perfectly

legal for doctors to discriminate against trans people. So the net effect over those three days, you can't get fired for being trans, but you can get passively murdered by a bigot doctor who refuses to treat you. Well, right. But you might have insurance though right oh jesus yeah well we still have to see how those two interact legally the doctor might have to be religious now yeah right so here's how trump managed to do it his unelected cabinet member in charge of the office for civil rights at the department of health and Human Services effectively changed a rule in the Affordable Care Act and now anti-trans discrimination officially doesn't count as sex discrimination

in that act. And there's only one word for what the executive branch did that day. Legislation. No, no, Heath, I have a lot of words for that. Lucinda warns people about him at the top of the show and everything. That's weird. Alito didn't say anything about that.

He never mentioned how the executive branch was legislating that day. Weird. I don't know. Bottom line, this is a tangible, dehumanizing, life-threatening issue for the millions of trans people across the country and something that'll continue if Donald Trump doesn't lose in November and we get a different cabinet.

If you're not going to vote for the only person who might beat him in November, your reasoning has to outweigh this extreme, life-threatening, dehumanizing bigotry plus outweigh the distinct possibility of i don't know rbg getting replaced by someone who agrees with alito thomas and kavanaugh on stuff plus a whole bunch of evil we didn't even mention in this particular story yeah reasoning has to beat all that right and there's a lot of it all right oh speaking of which and in second coming news tonight the trump administration

has hit on an unexpected but ultimately foolproof plan on how to prevent a second wave of covet 19 never wrap up the first wave genius yeah and as news of the already here back continues to roll in it's hard to ignore the central role that churches continue to play and yet most of the media continues to do so which is where we come in i guess because seven of the eight states that were reporting increased hospitalizations this time last week were among america's 12 most religious states right and given the number of cases we see tracking back to churches that ain't no fucking coincidence okay so you know how those like dystopian future novels have the u.s in three

zones a lot of time it's always like the northeast the west coast and the fucking blight maybe we just get ahead of this right why not just start the process get ahead of that problem i'll happily move if ohio is part of the blight that we're making a bubble around or whatever let's just get it done so yeah to be clear a bunch of people sitting in an enclosed space yelling and singing for an hour plus at a time remains a really solid way to transmit coronaviruses especially if said rooms are disproportionately filled with elderly people and despite the best efforts of christian pundits and legal advocates to say it can be done as safely as going to the grocery store it can't and even if it theoretically could it isn't and

even if it was grocery stores have things in them that people need eat you have to eat yeah right until we find a fucking human that eats lies that will not be true of churches okay but most importantly we're ignoring the clear message from god he doesn't want people going back to church yet right have a little humility ass yeah he's acting like we just caught him watching porn people and of course since religion is religious nobody is willing to step in and correct anything here even where specific exemptions aren't carved out for churches virtually nobody's willing to enforce any of the existing regulations on them which is why you get scenes like west virginia governor jim justice the hut who took to the lectern to obsequiously suggest maybe churches

think about doing better if they find the time, but if not, that's fine too, no big deal. Jesus fucking... After detailing how goddamn many local outbreaks could be traced back to religious congregation, he issued no stronger a condemnation for their flagrant nonchalance about public health than, quote, be a little more careful, end quote. Of course, he didn't even put sugar on top, so churches will doubtless continue to ignore both him and the public good fuck we're doomed we're doomed all

right next up in headlines i might have found something about the republican party that's distinctly different from the democratic party now i know this is a tricky thing to parse out for some people. So I really did some digging and I found a pretty nefarious thing the Republicans are planning to do. It's called the Republican Party platform. It's their whole fucking thing. It's a secret public list of things they want to do. And it turns out it's exactly the same as the list of things they've been actively doing since trump took office like seriously they were too lazy to do the homework of writing a platform for 2020 so they just copied the 2016 platform verbatim really that includes the part where they criticize the current president why i'm in quote the gravest peril originates in the white house broken fucking clock yeah no i mean i know i feel safer since we surrounded him with a big ass fence

yeah lafayette park is a small price to pay so yeah so here's a list of reasons why the democratic party despite all its flaws we can talk about its flaws, but despite all that, the Democratic Party is drastically better than the alternative. We'll start with the GOP pillar of removing marriage equality. Their platform says, we condemn the Supreme Court's lawless ruling in Obergefell versus Hodges. They also specifically added the exact words of Antonin Scalia, who called that ruling a judicial putsch. Jesus. That's a German word that means a secretly plotted and suddenly executed attempt to overthrow a government. Hitler literally attempted a putsch to take power before he eventually just took it by getting elected and trying to take over the

world with his eugenics cult you know just like same-sex couples in the u.s yeah you know who disagrees with all that merrick garland and every single judge who might get nominated by a democrat i mean i'm i'm not saying this isn't dangerous and shit but how gop is it to have an item on your platform that says and we'll continue to be all pissy about x right because it's not like they can like campaign on overturning it no exactly all right next up we have the republican pillar of hate crimes don't count if you're Christian. And they take it even further by claiming that the U.S. government has to give tax breaks and government grants to bigoted religious groups, or else that's removing their freedom of speech.

They can't speak unless they also get paid by everyone for being bigots. This includes adoption agencies that refuse to allow same-sex parents to help an orphan the republican party wants to give taxpayer money to those bigots the democrats do not real simple one yeah yeah no no punkin democrats also didn't just slide a piece of paper across the table the black lives matter protesters that say all right police only kill a medium number of black people. Yeah, there might be a few other issues that we're not going to mention in this exact story. There's a lot of ways to parse that out.

Anyway, moving on to an obvious one, the GOP wants to make it illegal for Planned Parenthood to receive government funding. Their state level efforts have already had a huge negative impact on women's health by removing access to not just abortion but also a variety of other extremely important health care needs they're also working to stop our whole sweeney todd stem cell pie operation which is amazing and delicious right and of course they've already put hundreds of anti-choice judges on the federal bench this already set us back decades and only gets worse

if Trump stays in office. Assuming enough of us survive his second term for that to matter. Yeah, seems like a big assumption. And that brings us to an extremely important section of the Republican platform. It's called ensuring safe neighborhoods, criminal justice and prison reform. Insuring Safe Neighborhoods, Criminal Justice, and Prison Reform. And as they learned in recent weeks, at the heart of that issue is pornography. What? Yep. According to the GOP, in their section about criminal justice and prison reform,

quote, Pornography has become a public health crisis that's destroying the lives of millions. Public health? Yeah. Like from the chafing or like? Yeah, we're getting really chafing. Okay. And that's an issue.

And, you know, just get some fucking lotion. And just in case anyone's still on the fence about whether Democrats and Republicans are different enough to weigh on your voting behavior. I'll just add a few more quick examples. The GOP is in favor of conversion therapy torture. They believe that basic human rights for trans people is un-American. They actually have language in their thing about that. And this last one isn't a religion thing, but they enacted a giant tax cut for rich people in big corporations. The Democratic tax plan is not that. Read the platforms.

Well, Heath, though, but neither of the party platforms include me getting a karate unicorn. And until one does, they are both the same on the issues that matter to me. Un-fucking-believable. Like, the Democratic plan isn't a big enough tax hike, in my opinion. I want more progressive taxes, but it's way better. It's just so clearly way better. Read the platforms. So, with all these theocratic, bigoted, reprehensible stances of the Republican Party,

this is my favorite part of the story, friendly atheist and personal hero of mine, Hemant Mehta, decided to contact Republican atheists to see if they had any thoughts on this. They're the group that got really mad when we made fun of their cognitive dissonance themed organization without contacting them to defend themselves on our show.

Well, they responded to Hemant by saying, we don't have time to assess the republican platform because they're so busy you see the republican yes right right don't have time to evaluate the republican platform which by the way just to be clear again is an exact copy of the 2016 platform fucking been around for a while amazing and in schoolhouse crock news donald trump recently suggested again that we could get rid of all these confirmed cases of covet 19 if we just stop testing for it and as who entrusted that man with shoelaces levels as stupid as that is it also seems to be a perfect encapsulation of the state of Ohio's new approach to public education.

And that's exemplified in H. Jim Jordan. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. But also in HB 184, a bill that would prohibit teachers from penalizing a student whose sincere religious beliefs contradicted the ivory tower bullshit in their science books okay in fairness when the founding fathers wrote the first amendment it was all about the liberty of

being wrong with no consequences that is the american way apparently in that yeah well in ohio it is and you're in ohio so sure most certain to be clear the bill sponsor is pretending that it won't do a lot of the stuff that the language of the bill very clearly says it'll do so let me just read directly from the legislation quote no school board shall prohibit a student from engaging in religious expression in the completion of homework artwork or other written or oral assignments assignment grades and scores shall be calculated using ordinary academic standards of substance and relevance, including any legitimate pedagogical concerns, and shall not penalize or reward a student based on the religious content of the student's work. End quote. Which, when you strip away all that moderate sounding language, says, hey, if they think God made the earth 6,000 years ago, who are you to tell them otherwise just because you can prove it?

Yeah. So it's going to be like, all right, carbon dating shows that the Bible is A, right, B, wrong, or C, all of the above. And the official answer in Ohio is going to be C, both right and wrong. Yep. Yep. Now, like I said, the sponsor is pushing back against the idea that this bill will protect creationism and it's a sort of entourage of bullshit, despite the language in the bill. But the important question then is, what the fuck does the bill do? Right. Was there a rash of Ohio school teachers flunking children for writing a man after their essay questions were teachers docking extra points for muslimness because if nobody was doing that that quoted section cannot serve any purpose

except to allow creationist kids to put 6 000 years old next to the paso on the worksheet right absolutely but just to be clear you should get corrected on your essay for writing amen at the end for no fucking reason. Well, yeah. That's stupid. Like, if I finish an oral report and then yell, God is dead, that's stupid too. Points off. Unless it was an essay, an oral report about God.

Yeah, fair. And it turns out that there's more wrong with this bill than just the aforementioned exemptions from fact. There's also a section that says students, quote, may engage in engage in religious expression before during and after school in the same manner and to the same extent that a student is permitted to engage in secular activities or expressions before during and after school hours and quote what well yeah that's fucking insane because secular activities include taking a math test or a shit right or existing in the time dimension what the hell are they talking yeah exactly other provisions serve no purpose but do prop up the fictional narrative of a fucking war against christianity by like making it legal for students to start religious groups in school

which has always fucking been legal yeah all religions are equal but some religions are more equal than others i think that's the the text of this yeah great but despite this law's complete lack of both purpose and constitutionality it passed out of the state house in november on a near party line vote last week it passed through the state senate with a unanimous vote because apparently even their nine democrats can't be seen to be holding christianity to the same legal standard as every other fucking thing. The bill now only awaits the governor's signature.

So unless our plan to lower Heath into Mike DeWine's office, Mission Impossible style works out, this is pretty much a done deal. OK, but we should still do that. No, no. Yeah. So while we do another walkthrough on that, we're going to take a quick break and hand things over to my lovely wife, Lucinda. A man wrote the Bible. A whore is what she was wants if it's a legitimate race you're a slut right cooking can

be fun hey i'm proud of a man this week in massage all right quick pop quiz for you before exercising on a beach a woman should a look around to make sure there are no religious people whose sensibilities her exercises might offend. B, dress modestly so that conservative believers won't take offense. Or C, not give a fuck about any of that bullshit and just exercise. If you answered C, congratulations, you did better than Instagram. So this one comes to us from Terry Firma over at the Friendly Atheist blog, and it involves a social media influencer who had the audacity to not only wear a bathing suit to a beach, but the additional temerity to squat down.

All this despite the fact that a mere couple dozen yards away, religious people were doing religious stuff. So somebody takes a video where they shift the camera back and forth from religious people setting up for religious thing and sexy lady in a swimming suit squatting. It was posted to Instagram with the title ignorant sirs in the wild, which is a terrible fucking pun, and racked up scores of comments from people who couldn't believe she didn't treat those people's religious observances with more respect. But here's the thing, and it's a nuanced argument, so I'll forgive you if you have to pause and look up some of the terminology here, but fuck them.

I know this happened in Indonesia where social expectations are different, but there's no taboo against women wearing bathing suits there. The video and all the holier-than-thou commenters that shriek about how disrespectful she was being were nothing but slut-shaming cloaked in cultural sensitivity. And for whatever it's worth, by the way, disrespectful she was being were nothing but slut shaming cloaked in cultural sensitivity. And for whatever it's worth, by the way, the people doing the religious thing in the video seem entirely unaware that this woman is even there. So this is 100% a case of other people being outraged on their behalf. And if all you need is something to be outraged by, you could have just asked. I've got plenty of that. Like, how about Mark Lee Dixon, leader of Right to Life

East Texas? That's a group that has been running around encouraging local governments to pass ordinances that declare Planned Parenthood and the Lillifund to be criminal or unlawful, as if that's decided on the local ordinance level. And because people are stupid and local governments are made up of people several cities have actually adopted those ordinances but it turns out that there are actually laws against labeling somebody criminal when they're not that so the lila fund an organization that helps low-income women in texas pay for abortions is suing them for defamation and look i am a long ways from a legal expert here but if defamation laws don't prohibit drafting legal documents that have you declared an accomplice to baby murder, I feel like they aren't doing their job.

Anyway, there's obviously plenty more misogyny where that came from, but nobody who lived through the first half of 2020 needs more bad news. So I'll do my part by closing it here and handing things back over to Noah and Heath. Thank you, Lucinda. And in, hey, I found something archaeological news. All of Judaism, and thus all of the Abrahamic faiths, make a little more sense this week after a recent study analyzed two 8th century BCE Hebrew altars and found that they contained traces of cannabis. Nice.

And while it's hard to imagine anyone ever read any portion of Ezekiel without suspecting that this was a drug-induced religion. It kind of had to be. Yeah, according to this study's authors, this is the first time we've identified physical evidence of cannabis use in the ancient Near East. Yeah, this feels pretty obvious. I agree.

Like, Ezekiel's just walking around Babylon telling people about his prophetic dreams what the fuck else is he gonna do right like getting up early getting in a jog before work tomorrow no you're telling people about bullshit of course you're smoking pot now it's worth noting that the cannabis traces were found along with and from what i can gather in similar amounts to the traces of frankincense so most likely weed was being used as an incense that just tended to work way better than the other ones in terms of prophetic visions it also meant that the three wise men story was almost very different which but actually to be honest though there is evidence

that cannabis was used to reduce child pain birth in ancient jerusalem too so like it's entirely possible mary just kept one of the gifts for herself there were four wise men and she just told you about the three. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. I mean, to me it feels like it was a last minute argument with the three wise men. Like they all pulled out their gifts and one guy was like,

nice. I brought big bag of weed. And everybody's like, what are you doing, man? What? So like frankincense guy was like, dude,

fucking put the weed away. Are you serious? You're going to take some of this, this frankincense. You're going to call it my it myrrh yeah it's the same fucking thing i know this is stupid we're bringing gold and two of the same thing we're naming it two things though we're not bringing drugs for the messiah all of it makes so much more sense when you add a little weed yeah so just another important reminder here one of the things that the people who wrote the Bible thought was God was actually weed. Right.

Other things in that category later turned out to be wind, vapor and statistical certainty. And while I guess it's possible that they did know and commune with the one true God of the universe and occasionally just got high and thought they were communing with god i think occam would tell you it's way more likely that they're just fucking stoned next up in headlines a group of christians is suing the mayor of washington dc because the newly unveiled street mural that says black lives matter is part of a religion that's being forced on them in their christianity a different religion that thinks black lives matter is conflicting with their thing and i think they have a pretty good case the message of that mural does directly contradict the bible and directly contradicts the sincerely held beliefs of millions of Christian people.

No, that's true. That's true. Isn't it amazing how even the legal arguments they make are always arguments against their own existence, too? They are not aware of that, and it is amazing. So let's meet the plaintiffs in this very real federal lawsuit. First up, we have Pastor Rich Pankoski of the Warriors for Christ DC chapter. And joining him is accidental friend of the show, Chris Sevier. He's the very sad lawyer who sued Apple because they enabled his porn addiction. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

Then he filed a lawsuit insisting that if two men or two women can get married, he should be allowed to marry his computer. Which is apparently a man computer in his mind. He also has a penis shaped exactly like a CD. Yep. And is still afraid to sue us despite eli's desperate begging and finally we have plaintiff number three tex christopher he's a lobbyist who described himself in his own lawsuit as quote a former bull rider it's hard to imagine the context in the lawsuit where that comes up but okay i want to be clear about this though when your name is tex christopher you don't have to also tell

people you're a former bull rider you just told us that and uh here's the exact words from their official complaint quote defendant bowser's it's muriel bowser mayor of dc defendant bowser's paramount objective was to convey to the plaintiffs and all other taxpayers that the black lives matter cult which is a denominational sect of the religion of secular humanism oh is the favored religion of the city and the nation and that anyone who disagrees with their gospel narrative is a second class citizen end quote oh super sorry tex at all we didn't mean to imply that you were only one class away from the people who think black lives matter no no not a second we have a whole basket for you guys you might be wondering what official remedy they're seeking in this lawsuit i was wondering to make up for how we persecuted christianity into black lives mattering

don't worry they have a list of demands they want the street mural to be replaced by three banners that say blue lives matter green lives matter that's for the National Guard, apparently. I'm glad you clarified because I was assuming Martians until you did. And the third one, all lives matter. Of course. Fuck them. I guess they want those banners just, like, laid on the street.

Also, Chris Sevier wants the Fleshlight Company to finally make a model shaped like a disc drive and stop being bigots. Right? Thank you. And finally tonight, in impurel news, as many of our listeners know,

human cells only make up about 43% of the body's total cell count, and the majority of the DNA inside of you doesn't belong to you. And this is, of course, because of your microbiome, a microscopic ecosystem that each human being hosts within and to top them and this leads to a lot of deep philosophical questions about what exactly a human is right are we individuals hosting microbes or are we a collective that includes our microbes are we merely a vehicle

for a superior form of life that's tricked us into doing all the hard work? And most importantly, if our microbes get drunk, will Allah blame us for it? And of course, it's that last question that is vexing the Islamic scholar that just issued a fatwa against goddamn alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Just a Muslim guy at a juice bar abusively yelling at the bartender, like, my hands aren't clean yet. One more pump, come on. Just before the last one, just give me one more pump. One more, I'm fine.

I'm fine. I'm fine. And then, like, the fatwa pops up on the TV news. Fuck, okay. You know what? That's reasonable. All right, so the question here. Fuck. Okay. You know what? That's reasonable. All right. So the question here

obviously revolves around the fact that alcohol has been declared impure by no lesser authority than Mo fucking Hamid and you're not allowed

to offer up your prayers when there's anything impure in the vicinity. So now Indian Muslim scholars are arguing over whether or not it counts if the alcohol is just there to kill bacteria. And, by the way, the fact that the goddamn human body literally continuously produces alcohol,

thanks to those aforementioned party animal bacteria, that's the only way to offer fucking prayer not in its presence would be to carve out your digestive tract and leave it outside doesn't settle this for them all right guys so yeah the belly carving thing is not going great i'm willing to admit that now here's what we're going to do no more c2h5oh just in the body at all. None of that stuff. That's ethanol. None of it. So just we're going to stay away from carbons and hydrogens and oxygens. That's the new fatwa.

Got it? No carbs either. Right. Yeah. From one angle, this is just another silly story where Muslims ban something stupid like the time that they issued a fatwa against the ocean for touching ladies in the privates or the time they issued a fatwa against phallic vegetables for the same fucking reason um if you look at it in a slightly different way though it's a reminder that experts in religion can look at the same situation

measure it against the same criteria and get opposite results thus proving religion to be at least useless it's d all and none of the above they're like fucking ohio right but from pretty much every other angle this is the story of a bunch of reckless assholes sowing doubt about an important aspect of public health in the most densely populated country-sized country on earth so just a reminder that even at its silliest religion still kills people and with that reminder echoing in your ears we're going to close the headlines for the night he thinks as always blight bubble and when we come back we'll learn what kind of boring shit you have to do with your tongue when you follow christian sexual mores. When you tread religious ground as often as we do, there are certain questions you find yourself asking over and over again.

And among the most common is, what the hell is on my shoe? A question we like to answer with a little segment called, how bullshit is it? So tell me, Heath, what morsel of manure do you have for us today today we'll be talking about xenoglossy the alleged ability to speak or write in languages unknown to the speaker slash writer okay and why did you pick this one because we do these alphabetically and almost no words start with x but this one does oh okay yeah no that makes sense but wait isn't it uh speaking in unknown languages called glossolalia it's like glossolalia but we'll get to it but the important thing is this totally fucking counts cool yeah no i wasn't saying it didn't count. Just feel it. No, it feels like you were implying

that it didn't count in some sense. No, I was. I was implying it. Yeah, no, that's fair. Okay. So why do we have such fancy words for a thing that obviously doesn't exist? Well, credit for that goes to French parapsychologist

Charles Richet, who ostensibly coined the term xenoglossy in 1905 to describe the paranormal phenomenon in which a person is able to speak or write a language they could not have acquired by natural means. Gotcha. And I'm assuming he's just some typical whack job. No, he's he's more of a whack enthusiast. And he was anything but typical. When he wasn't busy coining terms for shit that doesn't exist, like xenoglossy or the far more familiar ectoplasm, he was a pioneer in the field of immunology who actually won a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in recognition of his work on anaphylaxis another term he coined huh he was also a very active white supremacist and presided over the french eugenics society for a number of

years wait what's the opposite of a compliment sandwich a nobel covered in ectoplasm. I don't know. Yeah. So for whatever it's worth, Richer believed in ESP, but rejected supernatural explanations for it. He didn't believe in life after death or spirits or a spirit realm. He believed there was

some physical explanation for supposedly supernatural phenomena, which is correct. Unfortunately, though, he passed right over the i'm a sucker who gets fooled by a lot of charlatans explanation and landed on some convoluted shit about a sixth sense that picked up thought vibrations yeah yeah you can't really be smarter than your ability to

recognize your own stupidity chuck sorry. Sorry to tell you that. So, Richer coined the term xenoglossy, but he didn't really do much in the way of research on the phenomenon, or lack thereof. For that, we have to fast forward to the middle of the 20th century and meet Canadian-American psychiatrist Ian Stevenson. He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for over 50 years and even served as the chair of the Department of Psychiatry for a decade. And if you're wondering how serious to take this guy, he also founded the university's

Division of Perceptual Studies to investigate the paranormal. That's okay. I rarely take Canadians seriously. Shots fired. So Stevenson was a big believer in past lives. Over the course of his career, he investigated over 3,000 cases of children who claimed to remember past lives. And rather than concluding that it was all fake,

he convinced himself that reincarnation was real and explained a lot of phobias, philias and illnesses. And of course, in his effort to support this nonsensical hypothesis, he presented several cases that he believed to be genuine examples of xenoglossy. And are these cases fucking hilarious? Fucking hilarious? Yes, they are, Noah. Oh, good. Yes, they are. Great question. Let's start with an American housewife that Stevenson refers to in his research as T.E. and who, under hypnosis, exhibited the persona of a male Swedish farmer named Jensen Jakobi.

According to Stevenson's report, Jakobi could speak Swedish, though not fluently. Seems like Swedish people would generally be fluent. Okay, but you live among Georgians whose ostensible first language is English, just to be clear.

I'm withdrawn, Your Honor. That being said, critics who looked back over Stevenson's research were quick to point out that T.E.'s entire Swedish vocabulary seemed to consist of around a hundred words. Oh, wow. What's more, she never really put them together in sentences. Mostly, she'd offer one or two word answers and that's it. Wow. And that was enough to fool Stevenson.

It's amazing how little it takes when the subject wants to be fooled. Which leads us to the even less impressive case of Dolores J, who claimed to be channeling the personality of a teenage German girl named Gretchen. When researchers looked back

over his notes on that, they found that, much like T. te jay rarely used more than a couple of words at a time her pronunciation was bad her vocabulary was minute and even worse there's every reason to believe that she just spoke a little german oh really he explained it she owned at least one german book and watched some German TV shows, which is kind of an odd thing to do if you don't understand any German at all. Okay, so these subjects were all just fucking with him? Yeah, probably.

It could be that. Or it could be that they're just telling him what they think he wants to hear. Keep in mind that this, quote, research was done under hypnosis, and the questions he was asking would be considered leading questions, even under normal circumstances. But as every good skeptic should know, you don't have to be lying to be completely full of shit. Which brings us to Christianity.

Yes, it does. Excellent segue. So the form of xenoglossy our listeners are most likely to be familiar with is the Christian practice of speaking in tongues. And of course, that has biblical roots.

A couple of lines in the New Testament are linked to it, but the most notable one occurs in chapter 2 of Acts where all the apostles were in Jerusalem and started randomly speaking in every language in the world. Yes, all of them. All of them. The Christian celebration of Pentecost

is a commemoration of that nonsense event. Right, no, isn't that one of the superpowers Christianity is supposed to give you, like snake charming and immunity to poison? Yes, exactly. Okay, all right, but since there are like zero confirmed cases of anything like xenoglossy ever happening anywhere in the world at any point, doesn't that like disprove Christianity?

Yes, it would if religion were subject to disproof. But in religion, you just change definitions until it all works again. And this is where we get into the difference between xenoglossy and glossolalia. Now, there's no definitive source on nonsense, unless of course you're Catholic. So, some Christians disagree with this classification,

but generally, xenoglossy is understood as being a miraculous ability to speak a language you never learned, also called a sign of tongues. But glossolalia is a gift of tongues and refers to a nonsense language that nobody can understand except you. Okay, but hear me out. That's fucking useless. Yep, yepers sure is useless. And that's why a lot of believers reject that

classification they still want to pretend they're like i'm gonna i'm gonna hone a shit that they're doing really is a language somewhere in the world and since we have over 6 500 languages in the world a third of which have fewer than a thousand speakers, it's hard to definitively rule them all out. All right, but it seems to me like you could rule out a genuine language without having to actually like compare their blabbering to every single language in the world. Yes, and you would be right. Linguists have studied the type of glossolalia you typically hear in American churches, and

it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of variety, or types of repetition you find in real languages for example there's really no instance in any language that's real where you just keep saying the same three syllables over and over again a whole bunch of times right right and yet that's almost the signature go-to move for Christians, quote, speaking in tongues. And there are some other tells as well. People always use the phonemes from their native tongue or a language they speak when they try to do this kind of

bullshit. They get more repetitive the longer they talk. They have a persistent habit of rhyming things, which is, you know, hilarious when it's like Percy Stone, but clearly it's fake. And if you want to dedicate actual scientific equipment to the study, which you should not, but you could do that, and you'd learn that the areas of the brain associated with language

don't really get involved in the process. Okay, so what's actually happening then when people speak in tongues? They spout complete gibberish well no i i know that i bet like isn't there some kind of like like brain mechanism that happens or something brain mechanism i don't know man some kind of like psychological phenomenon oh yeah yeah it's called spouting complete gibberish. Oh, the psychological phenomenon. Okay. So what do believers think is happening? Well, according to the true believer, they're being possessed by the Holy Spirit and being given a transcendent gift that affirms their baptism in the name of Jesus.

Okay. Wait, wait, wait. Isn't speaking languages you don't know also supposed to be a sign of demonic possession, though? It is, yes. Okay, so what's the difference? If a Christian starts speaking in an unknown language, how do they know if it's a demon or the Holy Spirit? Oh, that's because demons are raspy, Noah. Wait, wait, are you fucking with me or is that real?

No, that's real. If you compare the utterings of a person who says they're possessed by the Holy Spirit and one who says they're possessed by a demon, the two are pretty much identical, except the latter sounds like it could, you know, kind of use a lozenge. Jesus Christ. Okay, so why do people do this? I mean, it's religious, so I don't really need a reason. But there is some evidence that when people speak in tongues, there's a sharp decrease in frontal lobe function,

which is the part of your brain that does stuff like reason and self-control. And shutting either or both of those down seems like a pretty useful skill to have at church. Oh, okay. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. All right. So I guess the only question left to ask is... How bullshit is it? I'm going to say it's recording a weepy video about the wait time for your egg McMuffin because life is hard for cops. Levels of bullshit.

That is some high level bullshit. Okay, wait, wait, wait. So wait, we just did X. Does that mean we're only two bullshits away from doing the whole alphabet and just... Wait, wait, when did we do the first one of these? It was actually January 1st, 2015. In just five and a half years? Well, actually, no.

We somehow missed K and L. I don't know how that happened. And we never did come up with a Q. Huh. All right, well, then I'll hold off on any congratulations. We'll wrap the segment there. And when it makes its return, who knows? There's a pretty good chance we'll have some quantum bullshit for you.

Yeah, we're definitely doing some quipac quopra something. Yeah. quipac quopra something yeah before we duck back into our burrows this week i wanted to give you a baby bosnic update the baby's doing great mom and dad are learning that projectile shitting is a thing apparently and dad will be back to work soon we won't have him on the next episode but he will be back for the one after that and he misses you too 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 that long, be on the lookout for a brand new episode of our sister show, The Skeptocrat, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern time on Monday,

an even newer episode of our sister show's hot friend, Godawful Movies, debuting at 7 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sister show, Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, I'd be an embarrassment to my generations if I neglected to thank Heath Enright for all the heathens he wrought and Lucinda Luzens for all the delusions she lucent. I should also thank Eli, even though he didn't do any of the stuff this week and his name doesn't fit into the theme I had going.

So I'm not going to. Most of all, of course, though, I want to thank this week's most delightful diploids. Peter, Michael, Ryan, Nate, Braille Brain, Milton G2, Bill, Conrad, Kirby, Elizabeth, Lord Alpis, and my ignorant relatives make me sad. Bill, Conrad, Kirby, Elizabeth, Lord Alpis, and my ignorant relatives make me sad. Peter, Michael, Ryan, and Nate, whose ejaculations occasionally get named by the National Weather Service. Braille Brain, Milton, G2, Bill, and Conrad, whose IQs are so high, binary

needs twos to express them. And Kirby, Elizabeth, Lord Alpis, and sad relatives who are better than cheese. Together, this dozen delightfully doubtful disbelievers delayed our destined descent into degeneracy this week by donating us dollars. Not everybody has the dollars it takes to give them to us, but if you do, we'd love to have them. You can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com slash scathingatheist,

whereby you'll earn early access to an extended ad-free version of every episode. Or you can make a one-time donation by clicking on the donate button on the right side of the homepage at scathingatheist.com. And if you'd like to help, but not in a, like, having less money at the end kind of way, it also helps a ton when you leave us a five-star review and when you follow at P-I-A-T-P-O-N on Twitter, which will hook you up with all the latest and greatest in Puzzle in a Thunderstorm news. Legal services for this podcast are provided by the Law Offices of P. Andrew Torres. Tim Robertson handles our social media and our audio engineer is Morgan Clark. We'll also roll the music that is 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

ScathingAadeus.com. One of my favorite memes that I saw recently, I think APOF sent this and it says something like, nobody told me that one of the biggest parts of adulthood would be staring at your garage full of boxes trying to make cuts and throw one out and being like this is a really good box though right the preceding podcast was a production of puzzle in a thunderstorm llc copyright 2020 all rights reserved