The Scathing Atheist - ScathingAtheist 119: Stump the Atheist Edition

Episode Date: May 28, 2015

In this week's episode, we'll dig into the Duggar family, but not the way Josh did; we'll learn that with just one squirt of kosher lube, you can have eight crazy nights of butt play; and Tracie Harris will join us to see if we can still pull off "intellectual" after all that stuff.

Warning, the following podcast contains juvenile language, because let's face it, there's nothing adult about poop jokes. This week's episode of The Skating Atheist is brought to you by Moyle of Olay, post-mutilation skin salve. Whether or not you get herpes from the guy that cuts your penis, there's going to be some mild irritation. But don't worry, we've got the shaft bomb for you. Moyle of Olay, the number one nard cream for your midrash.

And now, the scathing atheist. This is Thelonious Sweetleaf of the Sweetleaf Swingers Fairy Orchestra and the Adventures of Sweetleaf podcast. And I'm telling you, you piggies, you all evolved from filthy monkey men. Not like fairies like myself. We evolved from butterflies. It's Thursday. It's May 28th.

And every spoon should be a spork at this point. We know the technology is out there. I'm no illusions. I'm Heath Enright. And from franchise-tagged Valdosta, Georgia, this is The Skating Atheist. On this week's episode, we'll dig into the Duggar family, but not the way Josh did. We learn that you only need one squeeze of kosher lube for eight crazy nights of butt sex. And Tracy Harris of The Atheist Experience will join us and possibly regret it as soon as she hears her name immediately following an incest joke and a kosher butt sex reference.

But first, the diatribe. Alright, so I know that we already dug into the recent pure religious landscape data a bit, but it's awesome. So we're going to revisit it again this week, because last week we kind of buried the lead. See, the real fun isn't so much in the numbers as it is in the Coribantic premortem autopsy that Christian leaders are responding with. So from what I've seen so far, you basically have two camps. You've got the conservatives and the progressives. So from what I've seen so far, you basically have two camps. You've got the conservatives and the progressives.

Now, the conservatives are arguing that the decline in American Christianity is the result of churches watering down the message of Jesus and being too willing to embrace evolving social mores. The progressives are arguing the exact opposite. They're saying that the church's outdated stance on homosexuality and premarital sex and contraception and stuff is alienating younger generations and driving people away from the faith. Now, both sides can turn to these same numbers and bolster their case, right? The evangelicals, the most traditionally conservative segment of American Christianity, they've seen the smallest decrease of the major denominations, so they would argue that the more traditional your message, the less potent the exodus. Of course, if you're on the progressive side, you could also point out that if people were leaving the church because it was too conservative, obviously the more progressive people would leave first. But as interesting as the questions that they're asking are, far more intriguing are the questions that they're not asking.

Because ultimately, this is like watching one group argue that they're not marketing the turd sandwich correctly, while the other group argues that they're putting too much ketchup on it. Because nobody in the entire religious landscape is saying, you know, it could be that we're just wrong. You know, look at the Catholic Church freaking the fuck out in Ireland. They're looking over this gay marriage referendum, trying to figure out where they lost control, and they're arguing about this marketing strategy and that mobilization effort,

and none of them are stopping to say, hey, maybe we're just wrong. Maybe gay people really are people that deserve equal protection under the law. Maybe we've devoted our entire lives to random, uninformed, antiquated concepts of morality that have all but crippled our ability to remain relevant in a world where anybody could just hop online and figure out how full of shit we are at the speed of light. Now, it's obvious why they're not saying that. They can't. Even if they thought that, most of them would just naturally assume that was the devil. He'd slip into their brain long enough to leave that horrible, blasphemous thought, and they would banish it without consideration. But they can't say that stuff out loud. They can't write it down. They have to suggest like a two-for-one deal on Turd Sandwich Tuesday or something, because otherwise they have to admit that they're in a battle they can no longer win.

I mean, think about just how wrong they are in this thing. We all know that correlation doesn't equal causation, but a complete lack of correlation can pretty much rule causation out, right? And the decrease in religious adherence doesn't track with liberal or conservative thrusts in the church's message. Catholics were hemorrhaging members under Benedict. They're hemorrhaging members under Frankfurter. It doesn't track with marketing strategies or talking points or political focus, but it does track with free access to information. Across the globe and across time, the less restricted the flow of information is in a

society, the less religious that society becomes. Again, that doesn't equal causation, but it's automatically a more plausible answer than all this nonsense that doesn't even correlate. Of course, this introspective futility is great for us, right? I mean, the black knight claiming his amputated arm is but a flesh wound is only problematic if you're on his side. The more time they spend debating between these two wrong answers, the longer it's going to take them to get to the right one, because the church still thinks that they're dealing with the same kind of problem they've dealt with in the past. You know, they've seen social progress outpace them before. In the end, they always begrudgingly cede a few of their long-held beliefs, they redefine their message, they start pretending that they were the ones

pushing for abolition this whole time, and they carry on as something a little less relevant and a little less obtrusive than they were before. And that's the kind of crisis that they think they're dealing with now. They're fighting internally about whether it's time to get on board with masturbation and cohabitation, whether they need a revival or a reformation. But ultimately, we're watching Nero Tuna's fiddle, because this time it's different. This time society hasn't just outpaced you, it's outgrown you.

They're talking about you, Jesus. We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight is my main man, Heath Enright. Heath, are you ready to clarify whether that was a gay sex reference? No, I'm not ready to do that. I'm going to leave that matzo ball dangling. Okay, well then clearly it wasn't. Damn. Very disappointing. In our lead story tonight, from the gropey Taylor file, we saw a disturbingly large number of media voices coming to the defense, the defense of the Duggar family this week. Which would have been true, by the way, if there was only one, and there was way more

than that. So in case any listeners are unfamiliar with these people and their recent controversy, well, I applaud you. But just for context, the Duggars are the stars of the hate-speechy reality show 19 Kids and Counting, which is no longer being aired by TLC, after it surfaced that parents Michelle and Jim Bob helped cover up for their son Josh, who molested several underage girls,

including four of his sisters, back when he was 14 years old. And apparently that's a great way to get a whole bunch of vocal Christian allies in the media. Well, right, but to be fair, a lot of the news coverage has downplayed the fact that he was underage when he was doing all this molesting

that we know about. And you know how sex abusers just grow out of it when they face no punishment and receive no legitimate treatment. So let's be reasonable about this. Bigoted, incestual molester? Yes. But pederast?

Maybe not. Well, let's be fair. So there. I came to his defense, too. So what kind of company am I in here? It's a pretty great company. Let's start with creationist Eric Hovind, who decided to use this story about a child molestation scandal

as a natural springboard for an attempt at debunking evolution. Of course he did. As far as I can tell, he went with a proof by contradiction, maybe? His logic went something like this. Of course he did. kids being made of molecules, therefore God must exist instead of the evolution thing, QED. So, yeah, that was the argument. I guess the takeaway here is that Eric Hovind thinks it's okay to molest underage bags of molecules, which is really weird. Yeah, a little scary. A little bit. I'll give him the Q.

I don't think he earned the E or the D. And for the record, as stupid as his argument is, it's easy to miss the biggest flaw, because even if evolution actually made molestation okay, which it doesn't. Let's be clear, it does not. No, but if it did, that still wouldn't make there be a God. For example, there's no way to prove biologically that tax evasion is immoral, but that doesn't mean we have to let your dad out of prison, bro. Let's see who else we got. Matt Walsh also

weighed in on the topic. He's the guy from The Blaze. He's got an article entitled The Duggars Aren't Hypocrites, Progressives Are. It's the old Bugs Bunny switcheroo. How dare you besmirch the good name of Bugs, sir, by

mentioning it in a sentence about Matt Walsh. Now wait till you get home. It's tricky. So apparently all the people that are criticizing the Duggars, according to Walsh, are just pretending to be offended by the sexual assault of young girls and the family cover-up. And it's really, it's all about, well, I'm not sure, but he thinks it's something besides that. According to Walsh, quote, I simply don't believe most progressives actually care that Josh Duggar touched his sisters.

I don't believe they are upset about it, or that it offends them, or that they are morally troubled by it. I think they're the real hypocrites. End quote. Switcheroo. Okay, so you don't see why... Okay, tell you what, Matt. Bend over for a quick object lesson don't forget to invite your sister by the way we're gonna need her finger the rest of her hand and you'll get this you'll get it quick so uh let's see we also had ray

comfort with some words of wisdom on this yeah oh i doubt that yeah well he had some words okay he was gracious enough to stop rolling condoms onto bananas for a few minutes in order to tweet his support for J-Duggs. Quote, standing by my friend Josh Duggar as a brother in Christ. This was in his B.C. days. Such were some of us. End quote. And in case it's not clear, I guess Comfort is saying that molesting doesn't count because Josh wasn't a Christian yet.

B.C. Before Christ. Before Christ. Which is both factually incorrect. Duggar was seven when he accepted Christ. And also extremely offensive. But more importantly, did Ray Comfort not very clearly just confess to also being a child molester?

Didn't he just? I mean, that's what it definitely sounded like to me. And for the record, Ray Ray didn't find Jesus until he was 22. Oh, so yeah, nothing before that? Definitely worse. Counts. And in more Duggar, I hardly even knew our news tonight. Among the cavalcade of damning dominoes destroying the Duggar dynasty this week was the realization that the air quote clinic, end air quote,

that Joshosh duggar attended to cure his sister diddling proclivity was a christian ministry with no psychological credentials that was founded by a pastor who recently stepped down from his ministry after nearly three dozen sexual harassment accusations came up against him wow yeah so josh clearly should have been sent to a real psychologist for treatment. But I'm guessing at least one of these incidents wouldn't have happened if somebody just gave the kid a penthouse and a banana peel back when he was in middle school. It could have saved a lot of people some trouble. Maybe.

According to the police report, after Jim Bob Duggar brought the bad touch, worst touch issue to his church elders, everyone agreed that his son should get some counseling. But they also apparently all agreed that it would be best if it didn't come from anyone who was qualified, so they chose a Christian program instead. Good choice. Enter the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a ministry founded by alleged serial groper Bill Gothard,

who was accused of improprieties with so many different teenage girls that even a panel from his own inner circle said he had to go. They said, by the way, that he behaved inappropriately, but not illegally. Oh, of course not.

And from the Caranal P-Robes file tonight, Muslim televangelist Mukahid Sihad Han fielded a question about masturbation ethics during a recent call-in show, and his answer was just what you might expect from the guy who has Pat Robertson's job, except in Turkey. According to Mr. Hahn,

there's good reason to believe that Muslim men who masturbate will have to deal with pregnant hands in the afterlife. What? Pregnant hands. You'd have to what? Oh, Pat, you're going to have to step up your game now, bro. I'm sorry.

You may never get a mention again if we can get a direct line to this guy. I'm not normally a super nationalistic guy, but even our best crazy zealot never said something like pregnant fucking hands. America can't be second fiddle. The turkey guys, Klingenspin, Fisher, Manning. Come on, guys. At least somebody danced back here so so as far as i could tell from the story some turkish guy called up the show and he hey uh mukahid first time long time listen i masturbate constantly even now that i'm married even in

public places i mean we walked to saudi arabia and back last year i was doing it the whole way so uh am i good or what? What was the rules of that? And Han said, no, absolutely you're not good. And then he explained about the hand babies. But it's actually not what I pictured at first. Apparently it's not one or two babies growing at the

bottom of your arms, which is clearly what I pictured. He's talking about legions of disembodied pregnant hands running around like the Addams Family fucking with you in the afterlife.

Apparently they're going to harass you for alimony and tell God about all the jerking it and all the bad shit. You know, I bet that exact sequence is in the deleted scenes

for International Guerrilla. I bet exactly what you just said is Salman Rush dealing with that after the Quran comes down and lightnings him to death. So, following reports of his remarks in the Turkish media,

Mr. Han received a few follow-up questions on Twitter asking about the details of post-mortem hand gynecology and, of course, the rules about hand fetus abortions, all that kind of stuff. Of course. As of yet, no response to those tweets, nor to my questions about how it works with feet, cleavage, couch cushions, socks, and expired condoms, because it's something I need to know. Yeah, because a harem of pregnant fleshlights

isn't necessarily a bad thing in the afterlife. Or hands, really. Or couch cushions, whatever. They follow you around, you can sit on them. They're pregnant, they're soft-crawling. And in flaggots news tonight, the Westboro Baptist Church continued their humorous backslide from infamous protesters to farcical Muppets this week when an attempted demonstration against gay marriage in Ireland missed the mark by about 3,000 miles

and a whole continent and turned into accidentally gay-bashing the Ivory Coast. Apparently, their mass-produced fag flag sign inverted Ireland's green, white, and orange flag, thus creating the orange, white, and green flag of one of the few West African nations that God doesn't clearly hate. All over the place on this one. Nobody knows better than these assholes

that God hates dyslexia and God hates gaffes, and they just made a gaffe. So you can expect a stern talking to sometime soon, I'm sure. I'm sure they can. Now, when their error was pointed out to them by almost all of Twitter simultaneously, they first tried to cover their asses by claiming that they turned it upside down on purpose

to symbolize the distress Ireland is now under, but the Ivory Coast isn't bizarro Ireland, so that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It doesn't make any sense at all, no. Now, luckily for the WBC, they double-checked, and it turns out that the Ivory Coast has slightly liberal positions on gay rights compared to, you know, other African nations, so they decided it was okay, since God probably hates them, too. And speaking of people, places, and things that God hates, we're going to take a quick

break from headlines to hand things off to my lovely wife, Lucinda. A man wrote the Bible? A whore is what she wants. If it's a legitimate race. It's a slut, right? Cooking can be fun. Hey! I'm proud of a man!

This week in Massage Talk. Well, I abstained for a whole week, but I guess it's time to whet your appetite once again with a little dead baby talk, or a dead clump of cells that has the potential to turn into a baby talk, whichever you prefer. And it's not that I want to talk about abortion so often, but sometimes I have to. Apparently I'm just like Scott Walker in that way. The Wisconsin governor who really wants to be president

has been dogged by questions about the pro-choice stance he took when trying to make himself electable in a left-leaning state. Taking a page out of the Mitt Romney plate book, Walker has come out in firm opposition to himself, explaining that when he said before that abortion was between a woman and her doctor, he assumed that everyone would know that the and Satan was implied, like the royal Satan. The editorial? Anyway, the point is he really hates dead pre-babies now and that's what matters in fact not only does he hate dead pre-babies he's willing to double down and hate female autonomy in ways that are only tangentially related for example in an interview with radio host dana lausch on friday he reminded conservatives that

he did sign a bill forcing women seeking abortions to get a medically unnecessary ultrasound, which he described as, quote, a cool thing out there, end quote. He justified the coolness of the ultrasounds by pointing out that even pro-choice people have shown him ultrasounds of their grandkids. Not sure if he knows

that pro-choice people also sometimes don't abort those kids, or maybe people just show him ultrasounds of their aborted fetuses because they want to remind him what an asshole he is. Either way, it's nice to see you edging a little further away from national viability, Scott. But it's easy to see why conservative politicians are so vocally opposed to abortion. After all, just look at all the harm it causes. For example, the Baltimore riots.

Don't see the connection? Well, that's why we have folks like Flip Benham, who appeared on Sandy Rios in the morning last week to connect the dots for us. He explained, quote, Just look in Baltimore and see what's going on there. It's just murder. God is saying, listen, you shed the blood of the most innocent baby boy or girl. You go ahead and do that.

That innocent blood has a voice that cries out to God. End quote. So yeah, apparently Flip Benham speaks fluent God. And according to him, temporary rioting over racially motivated police brutality is God language for all these murdered pre-babies asked me for some widespread property damage and a half dozen injured police officers as vengeance for their abortions. But, of course, civil unrest in an inner city isn't the only threat that stems from abortion. There's also the apocalypse.

That nugget of anti-wisdom comes to us from End Times author Joel Rosenberg, who was apparently Ted Cruz's opening act at the Watchmen on the Wall pastors' conference last week. So his basic argument is that Judgment Day is on its way because of legal abortion, which means that God needs legalized abortion in order to fulfill the prophecies of judgment he already laid out in the

Bible, which means that Rosenberg should go thank an abortion doctor, then shut the fuck up, or of course, he's completely entirely full of shit, in which case he should go apologize to an abortion doctor, then shut the fuck up, or, of course, he's completely entirely full of shit, in which case he should go apologize to an abortion doctor, then shut the fuck up. Either way, he needs to shut the fuck up. Which, unfortunately, is what I have to do as well.

I'll be back with more misogyny next week, but between now and then, I'll hand things back over to Noah and Heath. Thank you, Lucinda. And from the Pell Hath No Fury file tonight, the folks down under are completely over the underreported overpowering of the underage under the oversight of dark underlord George Pell. These underhanded overtures have undermined the overall underpinnings of the overvalued institution, and despite underwhelming efforts over time to undergo an overhaul, there's an understandable overarching undercurrent of overt hostility underscored by an effort underway to overturn the underlying overreach with a petition undersigned by over 55,000 people. Slightly overwritten, that paragraph, sorry. So they want these guys to be above board about the kids belowing them.

You can't get it up without a kid going up on you. There's a downside down under. You pretty much got it. The petition calls for Cardinal Pell, the former Archbishop to Australia, to testify in person before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, also known as the commission Australia had to impanel because of Cardinal George fucking Pell. The most recent grains of allegation amid the sprawling desert of transgressions are accusations that Pell responded to the confessions of an abusive priest

by trying to bribe the child molester to stay silent. Pell has officially denied these allegations, though he did so from the safety of Vatican City and has no intention of repeating the repudiation anywhere south of the equator anytime soon, I'm sure. Oh, good. The Vatican's graduated from fugitive Nazis to fugitive child molesters and their support staff.

I guess, yeah. It's really hard to decide if that's a step in the right direction. I want to goose step back the other way. It's not clear. Just a completely new direction for you guys. And from the more or less you know file tonight, after a few embarrassing months without a notable homophobic public remark, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore made news twice last week.

Well done, sir. He's back in the game. Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore made news twice last week. Well done, sir. He's back in the game. First time, it was when he explained that the right to the pursuit of happiness thing in the Declaration of Independence actually means you have to be Christian and gay people should have lots of trouble finding cake and pizza. That's what that meant.

The founding fathers were afraid of it. And he proved it with some airtight logic. Quote, you can't help but be happy if you follow God's law, and if you follow God's law, wait for it, you can't help but be happy. Oh, I see what he did. That's another one of those switcheroos. And then he proves it, too, because if I had to describe Roy Moore's mood over the past six or eight months, I would say happy.

That would be the first thing that would just spring to my mind. He's a very gay man. How happy he is. So the second mention came in connection with Moore's ongoing crusade to make sure some dude doesn't gay marry him right in the face, which is apparently a crippling fear of his and determines his actions for most of his waking hours, as far as I could tell. While speaking on Friday with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council,

Judge Moore suggested that Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be impeached if she doesn't recuse herself from the Obergefell v. Hodges gay marriage decision because she's performed a same-sex marriage before and is therefore not going to agree with Roy Moore. Right. He also pointed out that there's nothing in the Constitution that says you can redefine marriage like that. So laws made of words don't even count anyway.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. There's also nothing in the Constitution that says I can fuck you in the head, Roy, doesn't mean I can fuck you in the head. And if you disagree, by the way, call me. And Jesus is the reason for the treason news tonight. Do I call me? Call me. And Jesus is the reason for the treason news tonight. GOP presidential hopeless and person who would look out of place performing any function other than telling those damn kids to get off his lawn, Mike Huckabee,

appeared on Fox News last Sunday to talk with host Chris Wallace about his personal theocratic coup d'etat policy, which is apparently something other than never do that. Yeah. He seems to think the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage is trying to create a new law, which they're not because they never do that.

That's not how the branches of government work in the country where Mike Huckabee is running for president. In the interview, Huckabee explained that if he were elected president,

he would be under no obligation to honor a decision made by the Supreme Court if said decision conflicted with previous decisions by the Supreme Being. And while many constitutional scholars and people who have just kind of heard of the Constitution in passing have offered to correct Huckabee free of charge, I think it's worth slowing down and admitting that none of us know what the laws of physics would even be like in a universe where Huckabee could be elected president. So he may be right. How many angels can dance on the head of a fucking pin, right? And finally tonight, in Finding the Kosher G. Lotzbot news,

Israeli Rabbi Nathan Alexander decided it was finally time for someone to tap into the Orthodox Jewish sex toy market. So he launched a website called BetterTogether.com, providing Torah-compliant circumcised dildos and related products to the chosen people in discreet, tasteful packaging. Wait, circumcised? I would imagine. Do they mold them with a foreskin and then cut it off? Yeah, yeah. And more importantly, how do uncircumcised dildos work?

Are they like switchblades? With a little button at the balls or whatever? That would be pretty fucking awesome. Optional thing, yeah, I like that. So not only are all the items on his website made with 100% kosher ingredients. No pork. They have so-called orthodox Jewish sex gurus available to live chat with potential customers about all the great technicalities and loopholes in the sex rules

that most Jewish people aren't exploiting. And considering the ban on masturbation in his target demographic, Rabbi Nate was sure to point out that he intends for his products to be used by devout married couples, not single people. Of course, yeah. Kind of like Smith and Wesson has good intentions, too. Wesson did. Smith was a dick, but Wesson was. Alexander actually told Bloomberg, quote, it's not about my orgasm.

It's about our orgasm. Yeah, that's what they all say. Okay, in case Rabbi Nate is listening, and I'm sure he is, I want to pitch a product idea for you. Okay, so you're in a position to do this. How about, and this is going to sound weird at first, so just hear me out on on this but how about an uncircumcised mini strap-on for babies but but it would be like i know that sounds so bad but it would be like a moil foil for people who are court ordered to have parts of their baby's dicks lopped off in florida for example there's a market for this shit that's a thing for real well no sign of that but it looks like his website is fully functional, with about 200 different items available

spread out among the following categories. Inner, Outer, Kegels, Rings, Oils Slash Gels, Romantic, and Other. But he clearly hasn't put much effort into clever names for everything, so we decided to give

him some help, starting with the synthetic penis section. Inner and outer, I guess. We'll need 30 seconds on the clock. Names for the kosher dildo product line. Go. Start with the obvious one. The Hasidic. Complete with ultra-orthodox pubic paste.

Little curl, and you could, like, hold it by that if you had to pull it back out later. What about members of the tribe? Of course. Glands of milk and honey. Oh, nice. All right, maybe the trickle pickle exploding kosher dill? Dill dough?

Dill dough? Because the splatter matters when you're jerking that gherkin. Yes, it does. What about the Temple Mount Sittin' Spinagog? That'd be a fun one. Putting the sin back in synagogue. What about some kind of like a Russian nesting dildo from Orthodox Cox and Locks LLC? One circumcised fits all, depending on the size of your orifice.

Yeah, exactly. What about the Fallopian Tubalcain? Adam's ribbed for her pleasure. Maybe the mid-rash gash stash? Makes klitz schvitz. That should be his whole fucking tagline right there. Makes klitz schvitz. About the strap onanist.

The business-facing masturbation solution for kosher ladies. Why didn't I think of that? Okay, so how about the, you know, for the curious lady and six of her curious friends looking for a little group stoop, we have the seven-tipped Hanukkah, a.k.a. Menorah the Explorer. Doesn't quite rhyme. What about the let there be fleshlight reversible unisex toy? Good in the beginning, great in the end. The most fleshlight references.

100% kosher lube. No trafe, no chafe. It's good to know that if this podcast ever falls apart, we've got such promising careers in marketing ahead of us. And with that, we're going to close the headlines at least three minutes too late. Heath, thanks as always. Too much. And when we come back, Tracy Harris from The Atheist Experience

will be here to see if we can steer the show back to intellectual after the kosher dildo discussion. My guess is no. Part of being an out atheist, whether you like it or not, is fielding a steady stream of uninformed and often extraordinarily condescending questions fromworkers, family members, and friends who just don't get how you can not love Jesus. Now, some of us choose to avoid these discussions, and that's fine, but many of us welcome a genuine or even semi-genuine opportunity to explain and defend our worldview. But as we quickly learn, while these discussions can be very rewarding, they're much more likely to just be frustrating. So to help us maximize the former and minimize the latter, I've invited a friend on the show tonight that has

about as much experience fielding religious questions from believers as anyone alive on the planet. Tracy Harris is one of the many fine co-hosts of the Atheist Experience television show, and you may also know her as an increasingly sought-after atheist speaker. Tracy, so happy you could join us tonight. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. Oh, you bet. Now, so for those listeners who aren't familiar with your show, tell us in a nutshell, what is the Atheist Experience? The Atheist Experience is a public outreach vehicle of the atheist community of Austin. They don't have operators at the association, and so once a week, generally, on Sunday afternoons, they have the phones available and atheists available on the end of those phones where anyone can call in, any member of the public, while we're live on the air for one hour and ask us questions about atheism. Basically, experience talking to an atheist and ask us about how we navigate the world.

So, now, I'm dying to know, and I'm sure a lot of your fans are, are you the kind of person that finds yourself in these type of discussions in your day-to-day life, or is that just something that you reserve for the show? I really do reserve it for the show. I don't mind talking about it in my day-to-day life, but I find that it's more productive the more people who are exposed to the dialogue. Public dialogue, I think, is much more fruitful than private personal dialogue. And I am fascinated when I meet someone who has religious beliefs that will talk about them.

I love to ask questions and just see, you know, how they navigate things. Sometimes people get offended when I feel like I'm just curious, and I don't mean to be offensive, but I guess they just don't like the questioning. Well, I think that's something, it's very hard for an atheist, especially if you've been an atheist for a long time or you were never a theist, to understand what it is to hold something sacred. And these discussions really are minefields of potential offense. I find myself constantly offending people without even understanding what exactly they're offended by. Yeah. So now, obviously, there are a number of different forms of religious debates that you're going to find yourself in.

And the forum that you're in is going to inform the tactics that you'll employ. So if you're taking calls on a public access show, you're probably going to do things a little differently than if your co-worker comes up to you genuinely curious about your beliefs. So for the purposes of this discussion tonight, I want to talk about the in-person, one-on-one discussions. Maybe there's a few people listening, maybe there isn't. But let's say the kind of discussions that many of us found ourselves in at a cookout on Monday. You know, Cousin Bill saunters over, and you can just tell by the look on his face that he's finally got enough beer in him to play Stump the Atheist. He wipes most of the mustard off his lip, and he says, so you're the one that doesn't believe in God, huh? You're that atheist.

So before we get into some of Bill's go-to arguments, tell us, in your experience, what should we be looking to do first in this discussion? Well, so this guy's name is Bill, right? Okay. Well, first of all, Bill seems a little confrontational. Right. Okay. Well, first of all, Bill seems a little confrontational. He doesn't seem like he's coming at this necessarily from a desire for real honest conversation.

So you might be having to deal with a defensive personality in addition to trying to have a conversation, which can complicate things a little bit. Right. I've had some very interesting conversations with people who aren't defensive and who I always started the conversation by telling them, OK, you've come to me, you you're asking questions and you believe in God. And I just want to warn you that sometimes the answers to the questions can offend people. And it's not my you know, it's not my goal to be offensive to you or to insult your beliefs or anything like that. But if I if it starts to go down a path where you're not comfortable with the answers, or you think it's causing a problem, I'm more than happy to stop having the conversation. So I, you know, I try to start the conversation openly. And so when Bill comes up, and he's had a few beers beers and he's a little bit confrontational, I would probably try to, you know, set Bill at ease a little bit and maybe tell him that I don't mind talking about it.

But it's, you know, this is this I'm happy I'm open to discussing my worldview and answering whatever questions that he has. And as long as it can be a respectful discussion, we can continue the conversation. I definitely like that idea of sort of giving him an exit strategy up front. So what about somebody who's a little less confrontational than Bill? Somebody who is genuinely curious. Maybe they're still going to try to trap you or save your soul or whatever within the discussion, but they're just genuinely curious and not confrontational. Is there anything that you would be looking to establish before the

discussion really got going there? Well, actually, that intro is what I use even when somebody's not confrontational, because I think sometimes people don't, especially if they've never had a conversation with an atheist or someone who doesn't believe, they may not be aware of how they'll feel when you start to talk about rejecting the things that they think are, you know, clearly visible or not questioned or, you know, and when you start to question these things or you explain why you question them or why you find them unreasonable, I mean, you're basically telling them whether there's no way to dance around it too much. You're basically saying, I find what you're basically telling them whether there's no way to dance around it too much.

You're basically saying, I find what you believe to be unreasonable. And they may not have thought it through that far when they start asking you to tell them about, you know, why you don't believe in God. I mean, it's going to come down to a belief that you have subscribed to and devoted yourself to, I find unreasonable, and here's why. belief that you have subscribed to and devoted yourself to, I find unreasonable, and here's why. And so I like to warn people up front, you know, that this could be an uncomfortable conversation, even if they seem open, when they get into it, they might start to realize like, oh, wow, this is making me feel uncomfortable. Excellent point. All right. So now, obviously, nobody's really obligated to take all commerce. So are there any red flags for you that say like, okay, this person is just not going to be worth engaging?

Oh, yeah. When you're going through these cycles where you're explaining something and you have to explain it ad nauseum until the person gets it, and then five minutes later, they're right back to where they started. I've been there. they're right back to where they started. I've been there. And you're saying, okay, yeah, we've done this already, and we worked through this, and we agreed on this. Do you not remember that we had this conversation? And there are times when you realize that the person really isn't listening to you,

that they're not conceding any points, that they're just jumping from point to point. They won't stop and concede anything. They will not resolve a point. They just want to move right along to their next item, which generally indicates that this is a person that's preaching to you. I mean, they're just trying to convert you. They aren't really listening. They're not really having a conversation. Your side of the dialogue is non-existent to them. And in this case, you're just wasting your time. you're just wasting your time. And I think it's very fair to tell someone, I don't really see how this conversation is productive because I don't feel that, I feel like I'm listening and responding to your points, but you don't seem to be conceding any of my points. You don't seem to be letting me work with you to resolve any of these things before you're jumping to the next point. I mean, I'm not feeling like you're listening to me. I don't feel as though I'm heard. And I feel like

this is a monologue that you're having, you know, with me and not a dialogue. And if we can adjust that, and if you can show me that you're able to listen and to understand what I'm saying, then I don't have a problem proceeding with this conversation. But if it's going to just be a monologue where you are ignoring what I'm saying, not remembering what I'm saying, not paying attention to what I'm saying, and you're just simply plowing ahead with what you want to say, I am not going to continue to engage in this. Okay, so let's dig into their arsenal a bit, if you don't mind. Now, obviously, I don't have any stumpers in this list here, but these are all questions that everyone listening to the show has heard a hundred times.

They have their preferred answers, their go-to analogies. So I'm interested not only in how you prefer to tackle these questions, but also why you prefer that particular argument or that particular analogy, what you've done in the past that hasn't been as effective, and possibly what invalid answers you hear other atheists giving to these same questions. So I guess we should start by giving Pascal his day in court. So how do you handle the what if you're wrong question? You know, there are many angles to address Pascal, and I honestly don't think that any of them are that bad. Any of them can be fair responses. You know, I think the main one that I hear often is, there are so many gods,

what if you're wrong? Have you investigated them all? I think that the number one problem with that response is not that it's an invalid response, but that many religious people, when they hear it, just have other reasons for thinking that they're so sure that their religion is the right one, that the idea that they could be wrong doesn't really sink into them. So even though it is a fair question to say, you know, have you looked at these other gods? They're just like, no, I found this one. It's like, you know, God speaks to me, so I know it's right. And, you know, and so I've got the right religion. There's no need to keep looking. So they're already so sure about the rightness of their particular God, and that all other gods are wrong, that sometimes trying to get them to understand the problem as far as which God, it doesn't really sink into them.

And it's not a problem with the response, it's a problem with the recipient of the response. And so that's kind of one of the problems that you might run into if you utilize that one. Some of the others are that we don't control what we believe, you know, on the level of just simply arbitrarily being able to adjust our beliefs at the snap of a finger. So I can't make myself believe that if I jump off the top of a skyscraper, I'm not going to fall to the ground. jump off the top of a skyscraper, I'm not going to fall to the ground. I don't control my beliefs on that level. Beliefs are something that we come to as a result of being exposed to things that have convinced us that something is true. And if we are not convinced that it's true, then I don't understand what help it is to ask me, what if I'm wrong. I mean, that doesn't help to convert me.

If I'm wrong, then I, you know, according to you, potentially, depending on what your beliefs are, I'm going to hell. And there's nothing I can do about that because the thought that I'm going to go to hell if I'm wrong does not persuade me that it's true. Yeah, no, that makes so much sense. There's less for them to get ahold of there because obviously they have to admit that their beliefs aren't based on, you know, some divine wager that they're making. They're obviously based on more than that. They're certainly not going to want to pretend that they're based on less than that. So I can definitely see why that'd be a little bit more of an effective way to shut down that argument. Yeah. Another

thing that I sometimes point out is that the argument, because it is very often a first line, when you encounter somebody that's a Christian theist, that's almost, it's very often the first thing they ask. And I find it interesting that they lead with fear, right? I mean, this is what they're leading with, the fear. That's their best foot forward. with, the fear. That's their best foot forward. And when you tell them that this particular apologetic is rooted in fear, that it tells me more about the fear of the person offering the argument than it does about me, the reality is if you don't fear being wrong, what will happen to you if you don't believe, then you wouldn't expect me to fear it.

So you must be living in fear. That's an excellent point. Yeah, fear keeps you beholden here. Fear has got you so gripped that you actually sell your religion with fear first, like trying to frighten me into it. And again, you can't frighten me into a belief. Yeah, they're probably telling you a lot more about their belief system than they realize they are with that one. That's never occurred to me. All right, so what do you say when when theists ask you, you know, how can you be sure or how can you prove that there is no God? How do I prove there is no God? I would just simply say that for me, I mean, a lot of atheists, of course, will point out that they're not asserting that there is no God, that they're not asserting strong atheism. But for me, I actually would probably go the route of asserting that

comparable to how they might feel very comfortable with the idea of someone saying there are no leprechauns, that I feel similarly about the concept of God. And that to me, the concept of a God is just as unlikely as something like a leprechaun probably is to them. And that if they feel comfortable asserting there are no leprechauns, I feel comfortable asserting there is no God, probably for many of the same reasons. And so it's, it kind of,

it's a rough one because it can offend people. Right. But the problem is, you know, some people will say, well, use another God like Thor or use, and you know, some people will say, well, use another God like Thor or use, and you know, it's, to me, I have to use something that is like a clearly fantastical

thing that is something that is going to really portray to them, this is the extent to which I don't believe. And I will sometimes tell them that, that I'm not using this example to demean or belittle what it is that you believe or your concept of a God. But I need you to understand that this is the level of unlikely to me that you're going to have to deal with if you want to have this conversation. You have to understand my perspective. And this is my perspective, regardless of how that impacts how you feel about your own beliefs. I realize you believe in this thing, but to me, if we're going to have a conversation and you really want to understand my position on it, you're going to have to understand that. I definitely like that more than a long discussion of burden of proof there and the difference between agnostic atheism, etc. burden of proof there and the difference between agnostic atheism, etc.? Well, I think the whole idea of burden of proof when they're saying, you know,

you can't be sure there is no God, to me, I consider it a form of special pleading. Because the same people who are asserting that I should not discount God because I cannot disprove God will probably, will in all likelihood, because I cannot disprove God will probably, will in all likelihood, be willing to reject fairies, leprechauns, gremlins, like all manner of fantastical creatures, and be unable to disprove them. So they really don't hold that you should hold out that something is possible unless you can disprove it. They do not hold to that as a principle. But when it comes to their God, they seem to want to demand that I hold to that as a principle. And I like to point out that it's hypocritical, first of all, because you reject things you can't disprove and you feel very

comfortable with that. But when I reject it, you tell me I can't do that because I can't disprove it. And so what we seem to have here is some special pleading. Right. All right, well, I'll tell you what, I've got a ton more on my list, and we're obviously not going to be able to get to all of them, so I guess we're going to have to at least get to my least favorite, what I consider the most insulting, but probably the one I hear most often as a theistic challenge. If you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals? Oh yeah, this will probably just take about 30 seconds. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that's a long one. But let me see if I can wrap

it really quickly. For me, this is and this is for not certainly not everybody agrees with my positions on morality as you saw firsthand. Yes, I did. But I tend to look at morality as just like anything else. If it's not demonstrable, then I'm not sold on it. So to me, the demonstration of morality comes in the form of behavioral psychology, where they test especially on non-human social species in order to find whether these other species have morality or not, if they exhibit what's called moral tendencies. And these have been defined as things like empathy, equity, compassion, fairness.

If an animal exhibits these things, they are said to be exhibiting moral tendencies. If they don't exhibit those things, then they're going to have less and less moral tendencies and sometimes none. If they're an asocial species, they're not going to need a moral system because morality is useful only in species that interact. And the higher the level of interaction and cooperation, the more you need to be able to exhibit some sort of respect for the other. And you also have to have an acknowledgement of the other that separates and differentiates them from other species. So for example, if a pack of wolves could not define itself as wolves, right? And if they confuse themselves, for example, with deer, they would have a problem. So it's important that wolves recognize other wolves in a special sense,

and that they understand that they can communicate and cooperate in a way that other species will not offer them for the benefit of their survival. They have evolved to be this way and it means that they have to be able to view this thing as like me. The deer is not like me. This other wolf is like me. The other wolf, I can communicate with it. We can work together. We can cooperate together. And when they test on social species like dogs and chimpanzees and some other primates and sometimes even rats

and many other species, in fact, they find evidence of these metrics, the compassion, the equity, empathy, fairness. Different levels of it, too, which is kind of an interesting thing. Dogs have a different sense of fairness than chimpanzees, which have a sense of fairness more like ours. But they still, the dogs still have a sense of fairness. It's just different. So every one of these species has their own sort of morality that operates within the group.

So for me, this is what we mean when we say morality. And then when you pull away from that, I feel like a truly moral system has to be somehow based on this understanding of the individuals within my species are equal to me or in some way the same as opposed to other species which are different and so there is this value system going on where i value the members of my species as more equal to me than valuing other species which i would not see as equal to me they would be different than me right i cannot treat them like human beings it wouldn't work. And so we developed this intra-species sort of cooperation that relies on the ability to empathize and understand fairness and understand, you know, that when,

and have that theory of mind that you may think you probably think like me, you seem to communicate like me, we cooperate in similar ways. And this keeps our society going, just like it keeps a pack of wolves going. And if you have another system that is based on something else, to me, that's an ethic. That would be like an ethical system, not necessarily a moral system. When you have something like there is a fox, the silver fox experiment, people can Google that. But there was a species of fox, a fairly asocial fox. They come together for fighting over territory and breeding, but they don't hang out, they don't hunt together, they don't do things together as a group. So it's a highly asocial animal. And they were bred for fur in the fur trade. for fur in the fur trade. They wanted to make a more passive type of this fox because they're very hard to handle. Being an asocial species, they're kind of a ferocious little fox.

And when they started breeding for passivity, what they did is they would take the pups that were more passive and easier to handle, and they would breed those trying to make another, like a variant of this fox that would be easier to work with in the fur trade. But what they ended up doing was that in not too many generations, like in one man's lifetime, they ended up producing an animal that had a completely different look to it. It had like a curly tail and different colored coats. It almost had big floppy ears. It made little barking sounds where the other animal didn't make calls or barks because why would it need to?

It's not social. It doesn't need to communicate on that level. But these things did weird things like tail wag and, you know, I mean, all these communicative things. So what they ended up doing without meaning to was producing a more social version of this animal. And to me, what this demonstrates is that morality is actually something that can be bred. I can take an animal that doesn't require a moral metrics and I can breed it to produce a variant of it

that is social and starts to incorporate more communication and moral metrics. Without reading the Bible at all, yeah, somehow. And I mean, but that's an interesting thing to say that you can actually see how morality is genetically derived. Like a lot of these topics that could easily have turned into an interview all by itself. We're not going to have time to cover all of this, but hopefully we can talk into coming back on sometime and offering us a few more pointers. Okay, yeah, there's no problem at all. Excellent. Now, if you want to hear more of Tracy's intellectual badassery, check out The Atheist Experience,

which you're going to find linked on the show notes for this episode. Tracy, thanks again. Yeah, thank you very much. It was great. It's time for the part of the show that comes next, listener feedback. This is the part of the show that you greet with the bittersweet knowledge that the show is almost over. Sorry. Our first message comes from Dee in Canada, who wrote us with a brief rant about some local J-dubs who scared the shit out of her five-year-old with a bunch of the end-is-near propaganda.

Dee writes, quote, I know a big part of religion is about fear, but how dare they try to scare my children that they're going to die if they don't believe the right thing. There's a difference between fear and coercion, End quote. Sounds like a reasonable request. And if I was adding to Dee's point, I'd suggest that religions stop using fear-mongering to brain-rape adults, too. Just don't do that at all. But in their defense, that's nowhere near the worst thing Jehovah's Witnesses do. We also got a message from Jay, the letter, not the name, who fears that we're a little unbalanced on the subject of sexism.

Quote, love the show, you do a great jobs. That said, I could not help but notice your wife's This Week in Misogyny section never makes mention of some of the rampant sexism against men that happens in society what is there a reason for this by not holding her to consider a balanced perspective it comes across like you're just patronizing her end quote so yes i'm patronizing my wife when i don't tell her what to say i'll tell you what i'm gonna be over here just breathing slowly and audibly for a second while he takes Heath takes first crack at this. Okay, well, of course Noah's patronizing her. How else is he going to make up for all the rampant sexism against men that happens in society all the time? Like, just the other day, I tried to buy a God-hates-ovaries cake,

and I couldn't get it anywhere. It's ridiculous. Persecution, damn it. Well, look, and I asked Jay to send me some articles about this rampant sexism against men. We'll take a look at them. And he sends back, like, a 40,000-word rant about false rape accusations, possible inaccuracies in the reporting of rape statistics,

and the fact that men don't get the custody of kids as often, complete with links to a bunch of men's right YouTube videos. Okay, so look, first of all, you were wrong about almost all the points that you made in your email. But even if you were right, even if I accepted everything that you said, even the stuff that's demonstrably false, do you really think that that shit would compare to the stuff that Lucinda talks about on This Week in Misogyny? Where's the country where men aren't allowed to drive or walk in public without a chaperone? Where's the American senator who's forcing men to wait 48 hours and look at an x-ray of their balls before they're allowed to have a vasectomy or buy Viagra look I'm not saying that there's no sexism against men in the world there is but it's pretty fucking petty compared to the institutionalized sexism

that women face in this country and abroad it's like white people whining that they only have 11 history months left for themselves ridiculous but more than that like even if men faced equal amounts of sexism in the world that isn't what this show is about you know make your own show and talk about men's rights all you want i'm sure you wouldn't be the first but we talk about misogyny because it's such an integral part of christianity islam judaism and every other major world religion that i'm aware of this is a show about religion and why religion sucks, and one of the major reasons it sucks is that they shit on women. If religion shit on men, we talk about

that. When it does, we do. Or maybe we don't. I'm sure Jay and the Dude Squad would be able to handle it just fine if that happens. And I'm also no more obligated to talk about men's right shit if we devote time to women's rights than I'm obligated to give Brian Fisher equal time when I talk about gay rights.

And finally, we got an email from Josh, who was disappointed we didn't go into more detail when we were discussing colloidal silver with Professor Steven in episode 117. Josh writes, quote, Your guest mentioned that enough colloidal silver would turn you Smurf blue, but he never said how much that was. I've been sucking on my grandma's old spoons for over a week in hopes of getting closer to my dream of starring in a Smurf porn, and I'd like to know how much longer I've got.

End quote. Well, Josh, you're probably almost there, so just keep sucking is what I say first. But I think it's a little arrogant for you to assume you'd immediately make it into the business. I mean, a blue penis does not a Smurf porn star make. No, but enough practice sucking on a spoon probably helps. So one way or the other, you're getting closer. But your email did inspire yet another interesting Smurf porn discussion between Noah and I, as we often have. Which brings us to this week's top ten.

Things overheard on the Smurf porn set. All right, number ten. All right, now jiggle those Smurf berries. Number nine. I like it when they call me Big Papa. Number eight. We'll do a lesbian scene when you can find me a second female Smurf, damn it. Number seven.

They call me IBM, as in big blue megahertz. Navy squeals. Nutty royal. Blue puns with penises. Number six, well, I don't care how he gets it out. Tell Mr. Gear we need that Smurf back on set. At number five, once you go blue, there's no other you. Don't feel bad.

My balls always look like this. It's not you. It's me. Number four, gargle that gargamel, bitch. You hear that from time to time. Number three, now it smurfs when I pee. What do you think that is? Number two, huh, I always just assumed those were little tails sticking out.

I have no idea. Now that you're excited, it's obvious. Add that number one. Double Smurf, double Smurf is a thousand extra. Or two in the pink, one in the azure for $7.50. But I never go azure to mouth. You never go azure to mouth. It's always good to close with the audience pondering what the color of a Smurf vagina is.

Well done, sir. Well done. Well, it's pink. I just told you. And that's all the feedback you get. If you want more, keep sending us those emails, tweets, and Facebook messages. You'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingatheist.com. Before we smurf into the smurf set this week, I want to wish good luck to a friend of the show, Don, the Statesboro Atheist,

who started an 8,000-mile charity motorcycle ride this past Monday. I'm not sure how many miles he'll have knocked out by the time he hears this, but Don, stay safe, good luck, and good on you. This undertaking is an effort to raise money for his local food bank in Statesboro, Georgia. He set a pretty ambitious goal, but it looks like he might make it. If you want to help push him over the line and help out a good charity doing good work, you'll find a link to his GoFundMe page at the very top of the show notes for episode 119 at skatingatheist.com. We'll also link it on our Facebook page if they'll let us do that. Anyway, that's all the blasphemy we've got for you this week. We'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more.

If you can't wait that long, be sure to check out our sister podcast, The Skeptocrat, with a new episode debuting this coming Monday at 8 a.m. Eastern time. If you just can't wait that long, be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for occasional nuggets of bonus scatheism. Obviously, I can't wrap it up without thanking Heath for bringing the finest in cerebral scatology for 119 episodes and counting. I need to thank the lovely Lucinda for allowing me to continue to patronize her for all these years. Obviously, I want to thank Thelonia Sweetleaf of the Sweetleaf

Swingers Fairy Orchestra for providing us with this week's Farnsworth quote. It's the first one we've ever gotten from a fairy, if that snippet made you curious. You can find a link to more info about the Adventures of Sweetleaf podcast on the show notes. I also want to offer another big thanks to Tracy Harris for giving us some of her time today. Truly one of the intellectual powerhouses in the movement and one of the most original

thinkers that I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. But most of all, of course, I need to thank this week's most honorable hominids, Scott, Stacey, Zowie, Quentin, Jeff, Adrian, and Sam. Scott, Stacey, and Zowie, whose IQs are higher than their white blood cell counts. Quentin and Jeff, whose ejaculations are so voluminous that the city of Houston wants to know what they were doing last weekend. And Sam and Adrian, who are so badass that even death and taxes have to ask for permission. Together, these seven savory secularists have sustained our search to spawn sufficiently salacious and sacrilegious satire while still securing sufficient simoleons to satisfy our sustenance this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the balls and or ovaries it takes to give us money,

but if you think you're up for the challenge, you have a couple of options. You can become a per-episode supporter at patreon.com slash skatingatheist, and by so doing, you can earn slightly longer episodes every week, plus get access to slightly longer versions of the last 40 episodes or so, plus get some occasional bonus content, plus some other goodies. You'll find a link to our Patreon page on our homepage as well, and speaking of our homepage, you can also find

a donate button on the right side of it that will allow you to make a one-time donation in such a way that says, I don't need all that other shit, I just want to give you money. And if you'd like to help, but you bet all your money on black and realize you were at a craps table too late, you can also help us a ton by leaving us a five-star review on iTunes, Stitcher,

or wherever you go for your podcasts. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you'll find all the contact info on the contact page at skatingatheist.com. All the music used in this episode

was written and performed by yours truly, and yes, I did have my permission. ¶¶