The Scathing Atheist - ScathingAtheist 132: Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia Edition

Episode Date: August 27, 2015

On this week's episode, we'll double dip in the anal p-robing; Evangelicals are once more foiled by Satanic kryptonite; and Susan Gerbic of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project will join us for a tricky wiki quickie.

Changing a light bulb should be simple. Whoa, whoa, whoa! Uh-oh, that's not supposed to happen. Quickly submitting and tracking a claim on the Bel Air Direct app actually is simple. Bel Air Direct. Insurance simplified. Warning, the following podcast contains adult themes, strong language, offensive material, off-color jokes, profanity, and this warning. That's pretty much it. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Williamsburg's new kosher burger joint for Hasidic Jewish people, White Tassel Sliders. Do you need to replenish some

calories after walking through Brooklyn, New York in the middle of August wearing a black Gore-Tex body cloak and a huge wool hat? Are you still terrified to go outside the string? Are you looking for a place where everybody's shirt makes them look like a little girl's bicycle? Well, we've got you covered. White tassel. What you crave. Except bacon.

And now, the Scathing Atheist. This is Ryan, coming to you recorded from Bumfuck, Pennsylvania. You've heard it more times than you've heard Tom and Cecil call Bobby C old, but we did truthfully evolve from filthy monkey men. It's Thursday. It's Heath's birthday. And if you rearrange the letters of Westboro Baptist Church, you get sharp cut boob twitcher.

Funny, I got a white Bob's crotch spurt. You're not going to play the anagram yet? I'm no illusions. I'm Heath Enright. And from another one overbites the dust, Valdosta, Georgia, this is The Skating Atheist. On this week's episode, we'll double dip on the anal pee robingbing, evangelicals are once again foiled by Satanist kryptonite, and Susan Gerbic will be here for a tricky wiki-quiki. But first, the diatribe. If you've listened to this show long enough to catch me slipping into Shakespearean insults and alliterative scatology, you've probably picked up the fact that I'm a bit of a word geek.

And if you hadn't, that introductory sentence probably did the trick. So with apologies, I have to address some issues of grammar. And I know that there are plenty of topics in atheism that are far more impactful than word choice and capitalization. But damn it, I've made it 131 episodes without letting a grammar Nazi and me take over a diatribe. And a recent email I got from Lamar made that a trend that was probably impossible to continue. Now, Lamar falls into a category that I call zero-sum atheists. These are the folks that tackle movement atheism with the attitude that we should only focus on the biggest problems and all the efforts to work on the less impactful issues are counterproductive.

Now, his email was too long to read the whole thing on air, but I've got a couple of quotes that'll give you the gist of it. Lamar starts his email by chastising us, both Heath and me and atheism in general, for not showing a proper sense of proportionality between the important and petty issues, his words. And then he lists some examples, quote, Perhaps the two most egregious manifestations of this that I see in the new atheist movement are the insistence on using CE in place of AD and the refusal to capitalize the word God. Here we have issues that are not only petty, they're not even logical.

If we're not trying to take the Thor out of Thursday, why take the Jesus out of a Christian-based calendar? Skip ahead, skip ahead, skip ahead, and then he concludes, quote, End quote. So in response to Lamar, I'd like to start by agreeing that yes, atheists are not immune to illogical and emotional arguments, and then I'd like to thank him for demonstrating that fact in his email. Because it doesn't matter how many people are on your side on this, Lamar, you're wrong. I mean, maybe your overall zero-sum point is correct. I don't think that it is, but I'm not in a position where I could, like, definitively prove that it's wrong. But I can definitively prove that the examples that you chose to support it are wrong, and

then I can leave it to you to decide what that says about the larger argument. So first of all, it's Thor's day, not Thor is the one true god day. The term Anno Domini means in the year of our Lord, our Lord, and thus when attached to the fictional birth year of Christ, when one says 2015 AD, what they're actually saying is 2015, and I accept that Jesus is God. Yeah, I mean, if there was a month called Christober, or if we called Hump Day, Odin could beat up your God Day, the analogy would hold, but there isn't, and we don't, so it doesn't. And while we're on the subject, by the way, the term CE was popularized by Jewish scholars, not atheists, and it dates back to at least the early 19th century. But even the modern push to use CE in academic circles is

far more motivated by religious pluralism than by atheism. But that's just an appetizer for the one that really chews on my nuts, and that's the capitalization of the word God. Set aside all the silly shit they do with the pronouns for the moment, because I think we can all agree that that's stupid, but the idea that God should ever be capitalized when it isn't leading off the sentence is just grammatically incorrect. The term God is not a name. It's a title. Compare it to the word president. If you're using it in direct address, as in, hey, President Sanders, glad you got elected, yes, you would capitalize it. And if you're talking about presidents in general, you wouldn't. But even if you're talking about a

particular president absent his name, you wouldn't capitalize it. If I wrote, I would teabag the president if he asked nicely, I wouldn't and shouldn't capitalize it, even though I'm clearly talking about one particular president. I think we all know which one I would teabag. But the point is that the same thing holds true with the word God. The fact that there's a bunch of assholes that think their God is named God is their own fucking problem. It's not even right according to their own religion. His name is Yahweh or Jehovah or Jesus or Allah or something like that. It's some other fucking name. The idea of capitalizing the title God comes from the same nonsensical construct that has them capitalizing pronouns and shit. But if I say, hey, bro, God is bullshit, I'm talking about a concept and it does not earn

a capital letter. Even if I say the God of Christianity is bullshit, again, I'm using a title and it doesn't earn a capital letter. Even if I'm talking about a God whose name was God at that point, the grammatically consistent thing to do would be to use a small g. Now look, I know this isn't the sexiest topic I've ever devoted a diatribe to. Normally we prefer to hit something with a little bit more emotional heft, or I should say something that has emotional heft for other people.

Obviously I get pretty emotional about this, but for good reasons. The way we communicate matters. And more and more of our communications are done in writing at this point. And it's also worth reflecting on the fact that Christian privilege is so ingrained in our society that it's even embedded in our language so deeply that an atheist would come to its defense. And if nothing else, I also think it's worth taking a minute to appreciate the fact that we can add grammar to the increasingly long list of things that Christians are on the wrong side of. They're talking about you, Jesus.

We interrupt this broadcast and bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight is my soulless mate heath enright heath are you ready to start finishing each other's sentences yes i am in our lead story tonight host of last week tonight and man who proves that faking a british accent works with american audiences even if you're already british john oliver has ruffled the feathers of more than a couple of evangelical swindlers after airing a segment that called them out for their flagrant con artistry. In a comedy sketch more biting and informative than all of American television journalism put together, Oliver highlighted the excesses of some of America's most successful televangelists, as well as the IRS's intentional blind spot when it comes to all things religious.

And also, he didn't mention this exact number, but even if you take away the tax cheating part, for which churches will apparently never get caught, the cost of religious tax exemptions is close to $100 billion a year. Wow. Put that in perspective, that's enough money to fund the entire Russian military and have enough change left over

to also fund the entire Israeliraeli military you know or we could just have that money right like for roads and police and teachers and whatnot well and the segment pointed out too as previously reported on this show that the total number of church audits conducted by the irs in 2014 doubled over the previous year all the way to two that's right one in 2013 two in 2014 and of course the one in 2013 was an increase of more than infinity percent over the prior four years combined. Cracking down. Good.

Now, Oliver stopped short of pointing out that this insanely low number of three audits in the past five years has left churches so confident of their immunity to audit that they've made an annual tradition of sending the IRS video of them breaking the law and then daring the irs to do anything about it in a holiday yeah if you're new to the show by the way google pulpit freedom

sunday but keep your meds close by when you do fucking ridiculous i mean if we started an atheist non-profit organization got tax exempt status and then sent the irs a video of us like handing bernie sanders a briefcase full of tax-exempt, opaquely-sourced cash, something would happen. Not nothing would happen. We'd clearly get investigated or something like that and end up owing a bunch of taxes. And we didn't even rape any kids. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Of course, you need only scratch the festering surface of the IRS's criminal refusal to audit churches to bring an army of parasites mustering to Jesus Coe's defense. So the segments focus on the prosperity gospel and the concept of seed faith struck right at a lot of powerful wallets. And while they can't seem to agree on, you know, what, how many people Jesus is or whether the cracker violates a vegan diet, one thing that all the Christians agree on is that God loves it when you give him money. And that's all John Oliver did. All he had to do to expose the insane levels of fraud going on is send one of these prosperity churches a small donation, and their automated bilking system took over from there. Right, and it was fucking hilarious. Now, for those unfamiliar with the Christian parlance,

seed faith is the idea that if you give to the church, God will reward you with blessings far greater than the dollar value of the donation. And the way this works in practice is that people with really big hair convince elderly invalids that the only way to pay their bills on a fixed income is to give that money to God via them so that God can multiply that money and then send it back to them eventually. And the good news, by the way, is that this also works with terminal illnesses like cancer and AIDS. So God will decancer you more dollar for dollar than those money-grubbing scientists will think we come from monkeys. Yeah. So as long as you don't die from untreated cancer, eventually God multiplies your donations

by a bunch. Right. Yeah. Before he can send you all that nice nigerian money you'll just need to wire him a few hundred dollars on western union to prepay for all the service fees that can't come out of the millions exactly the same fucking thing is that only religious so in summary here a national television program exposed an entire industry of people fleecing money from the poor by telling them that they're going to cure their cancer with magic the guilty parties

admitted their guilt publicly, and not only is nobody going to get charged criminally, but we're not even going to stop subsidizing their efforts with our tax dollars. Because America. Fuck yeah. And from the taskbar-pinned anal P-robes file tonight, host of the 700 Globe

and wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing tube corpse, Pat Robertson's skin once again brought to life with that ass bellows to give his expert opinion on several important topics in the world today one of which of course was imaginary linguistics specifically he addressed the question of what language is spoken in the spirit realm and based on his 20 years as a clinically dead person, he's pretty sure it's no talking up there. Thanks for that visual, by the way.

I can just see the jowls going with the wacky waving thing. But okay, first of all, this is stupid because we all know that angels speak Enochian. Duh. But it's also, you know, it could be that he's just so hard of hearing at this point in his life that he can't tell when the angels are speaking to him?

Because I would imagine the Grim Reaper's probably been following him around for years now trying to give him a status update, and he's just, what? What? So they're about halfway through their bring it on segment, and Robertson fielded a shameless, humble brag of a question from a listener named Carrie, who's probably a bitch, that basically said, dear Pat, I only speak 26 languages. I got nothing on 3PO.

I only speak 26 languages. Is that enough to guarantee I'll be able to talk with angels when I definitely go to heaven because I'm a great person that knows 26 languages? And here's the response from P-Rubs, quote, Listen, I don't think you're going to be talking language. You're going to be talking language you're going to be talking thoughts and interesting well I'll agree that they won't be talking language after they're dead so okay apparently P. Robes has no idea that humans think in languages which means which means by

extension Pat Robertson is so unfamiliar with the act of thought that he doesn't even know what thinking is made of. This should surprise no one. Yeah, so it was an insanely nuanced answer, though, that he threw out there by accident. I mean, I was expecting him to just laugh at the lady. They speak American, you idiot. Quit learning all them commie languages. But no, he says they're a-lingual up there apparently heaven is just one big awkward silence then occasionally some stupid noob starts to say something hey deodic no shut

the fuck up jesus fucking heard you the first time who brought that guy and in why the long face news tonight ken the hamster ham has finally gotten around to definitively disproving evolution and taking down big biology once and for all with a scathing reinterpretation of some data that the undiscerning eye would mistake for yet another straw of evidence bearing the camel of creationism at oceanic depths. Responding to a recent paper published in PLOS ONE that demonstrated common ancestry through the similarities between the way humans and horses communicate through facial expressions, Ham offered his rebuttal in the form of a syllogism premise a no premise b

conclusion i can't hear you okay that's actually better than i was expecting i figured he was about to say then why are there still centaurs obviously it's probably in the first draft right there so here's how ham turns hey look here's yet another thing to add to the list of stuff we'd expect if we were right and you were wrong, into, hey, look, Jesus. First, he takes the scientists that published the paper to task for not using observational science, which is Ham's own stupid made-up term that has no analog in real science. It would literally be no different if he dismissed the paper because they didn't use the magic word. He then goes on to refute the argument thusly quote humans horses and other animals do not use similar facial muscles

and communicative expressions because of shared ancestry but they do share a common designer ducially capitalized and so we would expect to see similarities in living things and we observe that, end quote. Okay, just to make sure I understand this, in simplified form, math teacher says triangles have three sides and rectangles have four, and Ken Ham says, no, that's wrong because God created shapes. God created shapes. I can see where you got confused, though.

But, no, no, God created all that. Right, he's literally saying, you're wrong because I'm right and I'm saying a different thing than you. That's the argument that he's offering. Well, of course mammals would share similar traits that they don't share with non-mammalian animals if God designed them because God designed them and that's what they have. He's not even putting the cart before the horse. He's putting a cart in front of another cart. But in his defense now, to be perfectly honest, I don't think he believes any of this.

I think he's just looking for any chance he can find to do an experiment at the disco toot where he has to make a horse smile. That's the true motivating factor behind all of this, I do believe. And from the fat guy in a red hat file. Oh, good. Facebook evangelist, crowdsourcing fraudster, and guy whose face looks like a girthy Dr. Mario pill, Josh Forreston, released a new video last week featuring the small fraction of his head that he's able to fit within the edges of an iPod shuffle frame when it's held vertically. This latest rant came

in response to a YouTube video that recently went viral of a father named Mickey Willis explaining to the world that he decided not to go into a homophobic frenzy just because his son chose a little mermaid doll at the toy store. Right. And there was also a tacit message that said, you know, don't go into homophobic frenzies at all. Well, we're at it. Yeah.

Well, this was unacceptable to Feuerstein, who grabbed his three small children and a deadly firearm and recorded a homophobic frenzy. Well, but seeing aquatic shit like mermaids makes Shamu homesick. So I get it. I get what happened. I'm not condoning it. I just understand. So moments after trying to make a point about how kids make bad decisions,

Porstein hands his seven-year-old son a handgun and has the kid pointed into their backyard and pull the trigger a few times. Wow. Perhaps the only glimmer of sanity was the gun not being loaded, and honestly, I was not sure about that until the kid fake-fired it. Right. All right, so, quick review. Forrestine saw a video about a stranger's son getting a doll at the toy store, and he

went into a panic and posted a video about how he's super not gay. He's even teaching his daughters to fire guns, too, because, you know, that makes them lesbians, which is like the opposite of gay people. He's so not, he's like lesbian opposite of gay. What do I have to do? Show you guys how gay I'm not, huh? You want me to lick these balls and not like it?

Because I'll do it. Don't think I won't lick these balls with a finger in the ass. I still won't like it. And in Rhodes Scholar news tonight, Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Tony Yarber proposed an interesting new public works initiative via Twitter this week that involves repairing the city's roads with magical incantations. In a tweet from his office that he decided not to pretend was the result of a shitty password, the mayor tweeted that he, for one, believes that God can fix their potholes as long as we believe hard enough. So, you know, quit calling his office to criticize God's road management.

It works in mysterious ways. Okay, but that's just... I mean, why not pray for a fleet of hover cars at that point? The ability to personally fly or to stop living in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems like they're trying to treat the symptoms, you know? cars at that point the ability to personally fly or to stop living in jackson mississippi it just seems like there's a good one trying to treat the symptoms you know maybe god needs to stop letting water expand when it freezes let's look at the root causes if prayer works let's so here's the

deeper actual tweet he starts by saying yes i believe we can pray potholes away that's his opener and in case you're one of them science type what demands evidence he adds moses prayed and a sea opened up so you know there's your proof of concept right there jackson mississippi yeah that's true now as you can imagine the tweet set off a bit of a shit phone among the people that just found out they're driving on fucked up roads until the second coming jackson resident at glenn garner offered this perfectly sensible if somewhat understated response quote are you fucking kidding me i have a better idea pay to have them filled end quote interesting to which this yammering fuckstick mayor actually replied we tried that he tweeted back we tried so putting stuff in the hole that makes it no longer a hole, that's out.

Because that's been done to death and it leads to gay marriage and all kinds of negative outcomes. But wishing the potholes away, that's just sound public policy, damn it. And from the prophesized matters file tonight, self-proclaimed faith healer Cindy Jacobs is one of the founders of something called Generals International, which describes itself as, quote, a prayer-based organization. So right there. Not that happy about it.

Prayer-based organization that exists for the purposes of changing lives and transforming nations. Oh, well. Yeah, they seem to think they offer an array of services, I guess, related to their expertise in fields like prayer, prophecy, and spiritual warfare. What? And, yes, all those words were completely meaningless. intercessory Wolverine magneto powers to heal people by magically transforming

surgically implanted metal rods into reshaped human bone. I'm going to say that again. What? Transforming surgically implanted metal rods into reshaped, new shaped human bone. Uh-huh. And then, in the worst follow-up ever, she made a short person

slightly taller the other day. Yeah, right. She made a short person slightly taller the other day. Yeah, right. She cured someone of short. And I guess you had to add that in case somebody said, well, wait a minute, how do you know them implants turned to bone

if you didn't cut the people open, you knuckle-dragger? It's so fucking weird and it doesn't even make sense. Yeah, so it looks like Jacobs decided to abandon the cutting-edge adamantium research in favor of very small height adjustments. Right, yeah.

During the most recent of her magical symposia that never get recorded even slightly, she debuted the new spell. According to Jacobs' quote, I said, there is someone here, and you are shorter than you are supposed to be. Finally, the right one came forward. She was weeping and weeping, and at last we understood that she had suffered a lot of teasing from her lack of height. In faith, I put my hand about three inches above her head,

and she shot up until her head touched my hand. End quote. I bet she did. Praise the Lord. Meanwhile, there's a blind guy in the back and hey, what did she do? His friend just can't bear to tell him, you know? It was a cripple lady. It was a cripple lady.

Trust me. So two quick points to wrap up. First of all, this lady says she can make things three inches longer. That's dicks, right? That's why we don't get any film of this. But more importantly, this is a Christian person who thinks she can perform miracles of medicine in defiance of God himself. And she currently uses this magical power to alleviate the adulthood suffering of people teased about their height as children. Occasionally, like when she's feeling up to it a few times a year.

So huge fraud or huge asshole. Yeah, right. I know you're lying, and the fact that you are actually makes you less of a bitch. And with that, we're going to hand things over to a person who always makes me grow three inches, the lovely Lucinda Lusions. A man wrote the Bible? A whore is what's smart. If it's a legitimate race.

If it's a slut, right? Cooking can be fun. Hey, I'm proud of a man. This week in Misogyny. Well, it looks like I've got another list of burn down the village in order to save it type stories for you again this week. But before we dive in, I want to make it clear that I am happy that problems like sexual harassment and campus rape are being addressed. that problems like sexual harassment and campus rape are being addressed. But sometimes the proposed solutions tell you more about the paternalistic nature of the society than the existence of the problems themselves.

For example, Missouri Republicans Bill Kidd and Nick King are looking for a way to tackle the repeated accusations of sexual harassment of young female interns. With representatives from both parties having been forced into resignation over harassment accusations, it seems at least a little overdue. With representatives from both parties having been forced into resignation over harassment accusations, it seems at least a little overdue. So I'd love to applaud them for at least recognizing that there's an issue here in need of a solution. But I can't, because they got the wrong problem. See, in the minds of these assholes, the problem isn't 50-year-old men sending dick pics to their 19-year-old interns.

It's all those damn lolitas with their short skirts and exposed clavicles. According to King, quote, we need a good, modest, conservative dress code for both males and females. Removing one more distraction will help everyone keep their focus on legislative matters, end quote. Or translated out of dickhead ease, if those little sluts weren't coming to work in tassels and doilies, these poor middle-aged men wouldn't be victimized as often. Of course, if there's anywhere you can turn to find some surefire misogyny, it would be Fox News' Outnumbered. And at this point, it seems like Andrea Tantoris is to me as Pat Robertson is to Heath. Hell, I guess I should have a nickname for her by now.

So A-Taint and guest host Kennedy Montgomery were discussing a few overtly rapey banners hanging off of a frat house at Old Dominion College. The banners, which had messages like freshman daughter drop off and leave mom too, were roundly criticized by the college, as well they should be. Freshman girls starting college shouldn't be greeted by I've got a roofie with your name on it type messages. But it shouldn't surprise you to learn that ATINT was quick to come to their defense. type messages. But it shouldn't surprise you to learn that 18th was quick to come to their defense. After reluctantly agreeing that it's probably best for the school to take an unwavering no-rape stance, she and Montgomery offered up their preferred solutions for keeping their daughter safe,

which included sending her to a convent and, of course, quote, keeping her at home in the kitchen, end of quote. But of course, nothing will give you perspective on sexism quite like taking a global view. So we'll make a quick stop in Pakistan before we wrap things up. Now, this story doesn't actually have a hook or anything, but somebody sent it to me and I figured it was the perfect capstone for this week's segment. It turns out that in Pakistan, they're having trouble staffing the women-only police forces they have to handle women crimes. And believe it or not, the concept of girly cops is actually a step forward in Pakistani culture, since before this, the only way a woman could report a crime was by convincing a man to talk to the police on her behalf.

So there's my silver lining for the week. At least we're allowed to lodge a legal complaint while menstruating in this country. Sorry, positive spin just isn't my thing. So with that, I'll hand things back over to Noah and Heath. Thank you, Lucinda. And in F is for Faith news tonight, the Secular Coalition for America released its annual political report card last week, and it turns out Americans don't do much better on these ones than they do on regular report cards. They issued letter grades for every member of the Senate and all but one member of the House. Only five got perfect scores. And of those five, one was Eleanor Holmes Norton, who you'll remember as the lady who refused to play along with Stephen Colbert's bullshit, Francophile pronunciation of his surname.

And she doesn't even get to vote. Even worse, none of the five were senators, which means that the highest ranking among them doesn't crack the top 100 of power wielders in the legislative branch. Yeah, we live in a country where you're pretty much disqualified from holding a major public office if you don't pledge allegiance to one of two popular Sky Warlock origin stories. And if you pick the Jew one, you're confined to a few major cities, and that's it.

Now, okay, so these scores were created by looking at eight key votes in the House and nine in the Senate, including things like the recognition of the National Day of Prayer and, on the flip side, the recognition of Darwin Day. Now, obviously, those aren't the most important church-state issues they voted on this year, but the overall voting pattern served as an excellent metric as to their voting priorities on secular issues. And, to be fair, as little as this Congress actually voted on this year, those might have

been the most pressing issues that they addressed. Also, another great metric was whether or not they ever disproved science during show and tell on the Senate floor. Right. The snowball, for example. Those people and their supporters tended to vote overwhelmingly anti-secular. Yeah. Also, if the Koch brothers just bought your election, that was a strong indicator as well.

Uh-huh. Strange. Remember the good old days when supporting the First Amendment was bipartisan? No, I don't, unfortunately. Sadly. Now, one other takeaway here, for all the people who wonder if maybe we shouldn't pick on both sides of the political aisle to balance things out a bit, of the 5A grades, none belong to Republicans. Of the 48B grades, an equal none belong to Republicans. And of the 165C grades, only 13 belong to republicans and of the 165 c grades only 13 belong to republicans none of which were in the senate 13 of 278 republicans got a passing grade on this that's

less than five percent also out of the 179 f grades only five were democrats the two parties are not the same sure they both suck but they suck differently, and one sucks more. Nature ruled, Daniel-san. Not mine. And from the Stillagape anal P-robes file. Oh, we're going to get two fingers in there this week. Awesome. Yes, we are. Host of the 700 Club and Schrodinger's cat of Christian talk show hosts Pat Robertson

continued to broadcast his show last week, presumably while existing in a state of alive-dead quantum superposition. As long as nobody looks directly at him while he's on the set. He's made it possible for us to learn from P-Robes, given his expertise in theological macroeconomics,

about the connection between Chinese monetary policy and America's optimal abortion rate, which he thinks should go back to zero, especially now that the stock market recently went one of the two directions it can go. Exactly. It's time.

Why the Dow Jones hasn't been this low since last April. Right. So according to Robertson, he heard from his prophecy guy, which he has, Jonathan Kahn, that a vague bad thing will happen to the U.S. economy in September. Oh, well, there you go. Or it won't because God changed the plan, but it was definitely going to happen. I got you. One of those two things is going to happen. Right.

And given that useful information, P. Robes is pretty sure that the recent market downturn is just an early warning sign of the vague bad thing. Apparently, God decided to have China's central bank devalue their currency, leading to a lack of investor confidence in their economy, which in turn led to a large sell-off in American markets. Like he does. Because, as it is written, remember, if I manipulate Asian currency values such that the Dow sees a 9.5% drop during the third week of a month, then you really need to stop

the abortions. Like, for realsies this time. I feel like that's going to be a difficult thing. 9.5%! He could have just put that sentence in the fucking Bible, by the way, if he was God. And in Mecca Mouse news tonight, conservative Christians have expanded the scope of the term Christian persecution even further this week by entering full meltdown over a new prayer room

that's set to open in the Orlando airport next week. Their issue, of course, is that the prayer room isn't exclusively designed to cater to the correct incorrect view of reality, but rather the evil brown people terrorist one. What do these people think is happening? Do they think the Christian prayers have been overpowering the Muslim ones this long, but only because Christians have, like,

a dedicated rectangle at the airport until now? Yes, yes. That's basically what they fucking believe that would by no means be the weirdest part of what they believe and despite the misinformation vomiting forth from the conservative racist light media the room won't be exclusively available to muslims it's not being funded by tax dollars and it is not an example of the city of orlando implementing sharia law oh okay because i was about to ask if this is in fact full-blown sharia law in orlando you're saying it's not right i got it exactly

glad i could clarify and finally tonight from the peddling your stemwares file anti-choice groups held protests at several planned parenthood locations last week because they're pretty sure they saw a video of an organization official selling baby hummus to a Sabra rep. They are mistaken. Yes. Nonetheless, these people grabbed their bloody fetus posters and marched around some parking lots harassing people. How bloody fetus posters will harass, exactly. However, one of the protests in Michigan wasn't very successful thanks to the members of a local satanic temple who staged a counter protest.

Thanks to the members of a local satanic temple who staged a counter protest. And because anti-abortion activists tend to be completely insane, they were legitimately terrified of the Satanists and their black magic. So they had to run away. I love their fight bullshit with bullshit tactics. It's like it's like they ran off a bunch of hippies by threatening to infuse their auras with gluten. So it wasn't like the Satanists needed any special gimmicks to scare away the righteous folk, but they brought one anyway. And it was both creepy and fantastic. Yes, it was.

I guess they wanted to express the concept of forced motherhood with some theatrics. So they had dudes dress up as clergymen and pour gallons of milk on top several kneeling women as they wept violently. And since that means the devil worshippers were obviously about to summon a lactose demon, these shoes were forced to disperse. Well, that's the stinkiest of the demons. Right. And then I'm assuming they all had a snack, which means we're going to need 30 seconds

on the clock, food pairings to serve at the milk-themed satanic counter-protest outside Planned Parenthood. So basically, dead baby cereal. Go. Oh, okay. All right. Good. Good. Okay.

That's just another way to feed us fetus. Got it. I guess I already used embryos with Tom and Cecil, so I'll go with unborn pops. That's not very good. You go first. We won't have time. Dead baby cereal. Dead baby first. Dead Baby Cereal. Dead Baby Cereal.

That would be a winning podcast. Murder Mystery with 70 million kids. All right. What about Amniotic Smacks? Dead Baby Cereal. Well, I guess if it was stairs instead of an elevator, we could go with Ray Rice Krispies. What the fuck? Should have saved that one for the end, I guess.

What about Goatman's Cracklin's I Goat Bran? Something like up and light like that. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you mean like Placentamon Toast Crunch. They could have a little mascot. It could be like a placentapede. I was thinking actually placentagrams, eternal gram nation. Oh, nice.

How do they damn all that gram? It's complicated. Yeah, that's some gram neonic fluid infusions. It's technical stuff. It's technical stuff. Empty sonograms. Yeah, right. Exactly.

Exactly. The gram thing. How about count blastula? Nice. What about fiber one child policy? Wow. Brand parenthood. Nice. What about Fiber One Child Pulse? Wow. Brand Parenthood. Nice.

Flush it right out. Well, I guess if you didn't want cereal, but you still want the milk, I love dunking my Stila wafers in a tall glass of milk. What about that, you know that candied popcorn stuff? Fetal Faddle.

Fetal Faddle. That's the stuff. Totally done. Now that everybody's tummies are rumbling, we'll close off the headlines for the night. Heath, thanks as always. Game of life. And when we come back,

Susan Gerbic from the Gorilla Skepticism on Wikipedia Project will be here to help us desperately steer this ship back towards tasteful. Oh, it just depends on how you cook it. And the sauce. The sauce. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Otherwise, they're all salty. I'm very excited to welcome our next guest to the show. Susan Gerbick is co-founder of Monterey County Skeptics. She's a regular contributor to Skepticality and the Skeptical Inquirer, a frequent speaker at skeptical conferences, and the leader of the Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project. And I know that all the stuff I just said is true because I read it on Wikipedia.

And if there's any page on Wikipedia I feel like I can trust, it's hers. So Susan, welcome to The Scathing Atheist. Hello there. So tell us in a nutshell, what is the guerrilla skepticism on Wikipedia Project? Okay, well we are a volunteer group of people who are bent on making sure that the Wikipedia pages concerning scientific skepticism, pseudoscience, the paranormal, that kind of thing, are all in terrific shape because we know that that's where the majority of humankind goes to to get their information. If they don't go there, we know that they're getting it anyway because people are copying it almost verbatim from, you know, in blogs, newspapers, you know, reporters. So it's the sixth most viewed website in the world, and we darn well better have a good hold on it.

All right. So what inspired you to get started? Was it just bad experiences on Wikipedia personally? Oh, no. I have been looking for many years of figuring out what I was going to do. You know, I'd been to all the lectures. I'd read all the books. I'd seen all the, you know, it was my turn to step up and do something. And I didn't know what to do.

I had gone to a JREF cruise and Tim Farley, one of the people I truly admire in the skeptic community, was talking about why it's important to edit Wikipedia. So I took some notes. I forgot about it for a few weeks, actually a few months. I uploaded a photo of Brian Dunning from the Skeptoid podcast, and I said, wow, this is a really awful Wikipedia page. So my picture looks really nice on here, so I better do – and I started fussing with it, and I taught myself how to edit Wikipedia,

which is a total shock because I am not a tech person at all. Oh, right on. So you didn't have any like blogging or wiki type experience before that? No. I'm a baby photographer. I have no skill whatsoever in technology, nothing, zero, zippo. All right. So let me ask you this.

Do we need an organized effort for this? Is it not enough for skeptics to just be doing this work freelance? Oh, you know what? Actually, that's a really great question. I don't think I've ever had that before. Freelanced editing of Wikipedia is what, of course, most of the editing of Wikipedia is happening. We find, though, that it's a certain personality type, maybe somebody who hasn't been really involved in editing Wikipedia before that joins our project. Because the average Wikipedia editor tends to be somebody doing it isolated. They don't really have a lot of contact with anybody else who's doing it.

They're using people's usernames. They don't know who the other person is. It's virtually anonymous. They do the majority of work. I mean, it's mostly in good shape, but the pseudoscience topic is not so much. But we train, we mentor, we are a community, and we know who each other are. A lot of us are friends on Facebook. We go to conferences and we hang out together.

We do Google Hangouts. We're more of a social group, but we train each other. We mentor each other. Before something goes live, you know, it's been viewed by many people's eyes. We, you know, if you have a question or anything like that, we go to each other instead of going to the more anonymous type of Wikipedia. So no, of course not. Anybody can edit Wikipedia. You don't even need an account. But we're more of a social and more hands-on training, that kind of thing. So are there like common mistakes that you find people who are new to editing Wikipedia make? Oh, yes, all the time.

In fact, they tend to get themselves overwhelmed in trying to do too much. In fact, in the newest Skeptical Inquirer magazine that just came out, I just walked in today and it's already here. I have an article. It's a two-page article on here that talks about the myths of editing Wikipedia. And if anybody's interested, they can look that up. But it talks about some of the mistakes that people do make. And they try to edit pages on homeopathy or Scientology or Mormonism or that kind of thing. And they find they're over their head right away.

And it's not a good place to start. You should start off with fixing grammar, fixing spelling. Now, is there a particular type of page that you're focused on or is it just broadly pseudoscience? science? Well, when we're training people, and I handle all the training that is done in English, I am focusing on whatever it is that is kind of of interest of that person who's training. I give them, you know, I look and see if they're into podcasts, or if they're into like the natural sciences, chemistry, maybe medical quackery is their expertise or something they're very interested in. And I try to pick topics that are more associated with that

because I want them to really enjoy the editing that they're doing. I have a few editors who really like to edit pages for conferences. Whoever's going to be speaking at the next TAM or the next Nexus or something like that, they want to work on those pages. So it's all over the board. We have UFO people. We have climate change.

We have all kinds of things. So we're all over, and I like it that way. Yeah, absolutely. Now, is there a particular field where maybe you have a dearth of people? Is there a particular field of expertise that you're always looking for or anything like that? No, I'm willing to take anything that I possibly can, whatever people feel passionate about. We do seem to have an awful lot of people who are interested in atheism. And so we have really completed a lot of pages on, you know, the atheists, the podcasters and things like that. That's has been kind of we need to do a lot more.

But we have done quite a bit of work on that already. This show doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. So obviously we're not done just yet. So this is kind of a goofy question. And if you don't have an answer, that's fine. But is there something that stands out in your mind as maybe the silliest bit of pseudoscience that you or somebody working with you has ever excised from Wikipedia? Oh, my gosh. I wouldn't even be able to start this so much.

But my favorite page is Spontaneous Human Combustion because that was something that frightened me when I was a child. I didn't have the resources of the internet to be able to go and check and find out that that wasn't real. I thought it might be kind of real. So we rewrote that Wikipedia page a year or so ago now. I think it's 2013 we finished it. But that was fabulous because we completely rewrote it. And that was kind of rewarding to me because I knew that people all over the world are still interested in spontaneous human combustion. Can you believe it? Well, and then some little girl that was going to have the fear that you grew up with might not have it.

Yeah, that's awesome. Mine was alien abduction. I was terrified when I was growing up that I was going to get abducted by greys or something like that. Oh, wow. Now, have you seen any organization on the other side? Is there like an anti-GSOW that the alt-med woo merchants are setting up that you know of? Oh, my gosh. They've tried.

Yeah, Rupert Sheldrick and— The dog whisperer, right on. Yeah. He's really into talking about the guerrilla skeptics. For at least a year or more, He had been lecturing using our example. He spells my name wrong every time, but that's okay. I'm on his top 10 list of the material skeptics. I'm there with Richard Dawkins.

Oh, wow. He's got my picture and everything. It's great. I'm on the top 10 of people to be the bad people. But they've tried to organize something, but they have no – they say, let's do this. And then, of course, nobody really answers their call. And they're like, we could do this. And so they were going to try a new Wikipedia.

They were going to try to make a new paranormal Wikipedia. And that went exactly nowhere. Yeah, it worked out well for Conservapedia, I'm sure. Yeah, it's a big jetpack. It's funny that you bring up Sheldrake because I actually have a quote from him right here. I wanted to talk about a few of the criticisms. So I'm going to try to get through this quote with a straight face here. Quote, the guerrilla skeptics are well-trained, highly motivated, have an ideological agenda, and operate in teams contrary to Wikipedia rules.

The mastermind behind this organization is Susan Gerbic, misspelled, yes. The teams are coordinated through secret Facebook pages. They check the credentials of new recruits to avoid infiltration. Their aim is to control information, and Ms. Gerbic glories in the power that she and her warriors wield, end hyperbole. I mean, quote. So now clearly there's a lot to unpack there, but I think the only thing of substance is

the charge that you operate in teams contrary to Wikipedia's rules. Is that true? No, we do operate with teams and that's absolutely fine. We have a forum that we do check people out, make sure that we have people in there who are scientifically minded. Yes, of course, we're a closed forum and we do discuss everything that we do. And yeah, that part's right. But canvassing is what he's talking about. That means to go and find somebody, come over and say, hey, I need you to help me control this page right here.

Come vote on this topic. And I want you to vote yes or no on it and help me get that. That's called canvassing. That is not okay. And we're very careful to avoid that. But talking in a group about editing Wikipedia is no more can be controlled than if a bunch of people share an email list amongst each other saying, hey, Joe, what do you think? Should we do this? So it happens all the time and we're quite open about it. Now, do you in fact glory in the power that you and your warriors wield? It was another one of the choices. I was just glorying before you called. I think I'm kind

of gloried out for the moment. My, my happiness is at its, you know, a hundred percent or 110% right now. Yeah. I've been glorying my Harris turn gold. Oh, right on, right on.

Like Goku. That's awesome. So when you become a mastermind, I think that comes with a secret hideout, but I can understand if you don't want to comment on that. Well, yes. So now,

as far as you know, is Wikipedia aware of what you're doing? Yes. Wikipedia is a, we, not a they. Right. So now, as far as you know, is Wikipedia aware of what you're doing? Yes. Wikipedia is a we, not a they. Right. So, yeah, as you know, you've edited Wikipedia before. So there is no real them to approve or disprove of us. But the editors that we've run into, for the most part, have always supported us.

And when we've been brought up in a talk conversation they've always said oh you mean well-trained editors who believe that citations are a good thing uh more of them oh gee maybe we should you know yeah of course they uh are aware of us and yeah they're they're supportive and we are just amongst them as far as except for training and having a private forum, there's really not much difference between us and the normal Wikipedia editor. All right. So let's get to the part of the interview I'm sure everybody's waiting for, how they can get involved. Oh, yeah. So if I want to help out, what is step one?

Step one is to go to the YouTube channel for GSOW. And we have many interviews that I've done of my editors. And there are some other things that explain the project. But what we want you to do is to listen to the interviews and to make sure that this is the right project for you. Because the training itself takes months. And it is not something to just jump into because you have nothing to do for a few weeks. This is something that once you're trained, we're going to expect you to do this for probably years. Fixing Wikipedia and repairing these pages is something that, oh my gosh, it's so meaningful.

It's so important and there's so much work to be done. And I'm sure it's like cleaning up a mess. As soon as you get it done, you've got to go back and clean up a little more. Not really. Most of the pages that we have done have stayed in really good shape. Really? Yeah. We haven't had hardly any pages that we've had to go back in and fix.

You know, like spontaneous human combustion. That's almost exactly the way it was when we wrote it in 2013. It's very little has changed because we go over it very carefully. We're critical of what we put on there. There's no worse critic than the person, somebody else on our team that will just analyze it to pieces. I mean, we're skeptical. Well, yeah, right, right.

It's what we do. So we're going to analyze it. Yeah. We're like, do you have a citation for that? I don't like that citation. I think you need to find a better citation for it. Okay, take it out. So for the most part, what we do stays.

Right on. And so we train people how to do that. That's another reason why they want to come to GSOW for training because we're going to train you how to do it right and your edits are going to stick. and your edits are going to stick. We hear from people all the time who say that they are just – they've tried making edits and they didn't stick and got frustrated and somebody got angry at them. And it's like, you know what? It was probably justified.

You probably were doing something wrong. Come to us. We'll show you what to do and how to do it right. Yeah, that was certainly my experience. And it's very easy to just throw in the towel and say never mind. Oh, yeah. It's really awesome that you guys are doing what you're doing. Now, I only have you for a couple more minutes, and there's one more topic that I'd love for you to address if you could because I use Wikipedia a lot in my job researching for this show and the other shows that we do, and I'm sure that many of our listeners are in the same position.

So could you offer us some best practices if and when we're using Wikipedia for research? Well, I would suggest that Wikipedia overall is probably in really pretty good shape, especially the things that are science-related, like the chemical compound for measles or something like that. I'm sure those are probably pretty good. What I would do is always go to the bottom of the page and look at the citations and then get your information from the citation itself, the footnote. And treat the Wikipedia page as an overview of the topic. The next thing you might want to do is go to the talk page, which is a tab that's on the left-hand side of your Wikipedia page, which most of the listeners probably have never even noticed before.

But if you click on the talk page, you will see that's where editors are having discussions with each other about what to put on the page, how to improve the page, you know, what's going to not be on the page. And you can see really well, especially controversial issues, you can see exactly what the mindset is of how that page is written. So and, you know, another great thing I should point out is that if there's anything happening in the world right now, any breaking news that happens, bombing or anything like that, the best source you can get your information from is not the news so much as Wikipedia. Because when the event is unfolding, there are people on Wikipedia who are dedicated to keeping it updated, and they're very tight about their sources. They don't allow rumor. They don't allow opinion or gossip.

It's like it's not going to make it to the page unless it is a strong secondary source from some reputable place. And then as soon as that is changed or something's updated, they're on it with a new update. This isn't my team doing this. This is just a general people in Wikipedia. And if you look at the talk page again, you'll see them saying, well, this hasn't been substantiated. What do we have for that citation? They're like, well, this is what's being reported by such and such, but I'm not really sure about it. I'm not comfortable putting it on the page yet.

And they're like, okay, you know. So check out the talk page. Check out the citations. And, you know, take it with a grain of salt. But for the on Wikipedia. That's actually very good advice. I appreciate that. Well, I think James Randi taught us long ago that we can't sink the rubber ducky. So I feel like we owe a huge debt of gratitude to people like yourself who at least push them back down whenever they pop up. So on behalf of myself, our audience, and everybody who ever looked on Wikipedia and

said, wait a minute, that's what homeopathic means? I want to offer our thanks. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And of course, if anybody wants to learn more about the GSOW, we'll link to more information on the show notes, including those YouTube interviews. That's episode 132, and you'll find those show notes at scathingatheist.com. Susan, thanks again for your time. Thank you so much, Noah.

It's time for the part of the show that comes next, the listener feedback. This is the part of the show that lets the outro know it needs to start getting its shit together, because it's almost on. Our first message comes from Robert, who had some insight regarding imaginary taxonomy. He writes, quote, The phylum for centaurs and minotaurs and unicorns would be the same they are all chordates from the phylum chordata they are all bilateral similar and even the chimera like monsters have hollow bodies right they also appear to be mammalian in class so i believe the term you're searching for is order though upon investigation it could just

be a genus separation as well. End quote. Never half-ass the science jokes. Heard. Gotcha. Indeed. Well done, Robert. That all sounds like a valid theoretical analysis, but let's not forget that the line in question

was meant to represent an example of an extremely stupid question, similar to the one Robertson was fielding at the time about classifying magical powers that don't exist. So if I'd used order or genus instead of phylum there, the question would have technically been less stupid, technically. Was all that part of my thought process? Doesn't matter. Great point by Robert either way. I love the fact that we get emails like that. It just makes you know you're doing something right in life. We also got a message from a listener whose name was way too close to Duggars. She writes,

I love the way you crucify Josh and all the other Duggars. However, I was wondering if you could possibly say their name with a thick southern Georgia accent stressing that they are the Doug-Rs and not the Doug-ers. It's one little letter,

but that one little letter is the difference between me and a sexually repressed pedophilic ancestral adulterer. Thanks a million. P.S. I'm still waiting for a picture of Heath to masturbate to. I almost cum every time he says Jumanji. I just need a visual reference to get me over the top.

So I guess try Googling random guy and look for image number three. I hear he's a little... Good way to go. Do the trick. But no, if you really want some authentic Heath, you're going to want to check out the huffington post side boob section where i should be featured prominently if they have any journalistic integrity whatsoever and they don't so that's a correct statement and as much as i hate to move the topic away from heath side boob i'm not sure what you had in mind but i feel like if i say duggers with a thick georgia accent there

are no vowels in it right i'd I'd be like, Duggars. So the names would be identical, but I'll do what I can. Duggars. U-G-G-A. Duggars. The Duggars. We also had an email from Frank, who thinks we might have been wrong by association

about the rules regarding the menu at French public school cafeterias. Frank writes, quote, I really love your show. I know you're not prone to falling for right-wing propaganda usually, so I was a bit surprised to hear your commentary on the French school pork story. What you may not have known

is that the right-wing mayor announced the change only a few days before a big departmental election. In that election, his department flipped from socialist control to UPM, the analog to our Republican Party control. He wouldn't be the first politician to throw an unpopular group under the bus to give his party an edge. Regardless of the motivation, I don't think we should be taking away nutrition choices from children. Please don't yell at me on the podcast. Smiley face. The smiley face is what did it because I was about to yell.

All right. So first, an important clarification for the people who weren't listening last week. The other option here wasn't letting the Muslim kids go hungry, right? I mean, there was a... I think that's what it might have been. Right. I mean, there's a vegetarian option that was available to the kids with dietary restrictions. And I'm going to just guess that the vegetarian option was probably more nutritious than the one with the bacon fucking tea yeah so so i don't doubt that most or all

of the things frank said about the motivation of this particular conservative politician is true and i certainly disagree with those motives and would have likely voted against this person if i lived there however none of that has any bearing on whether or not every public school should have to accommodate every dietary demand for every religion. In fact, I noticed while reading up on the story that I ended up siding with Jean-Marie Le Pen on this issue, which was not encouraging. But just because that guy's a huge bigot doesn't mean he's always wrong about every opinion. He's occasionally right, granted probably for a shitty reason, but that doesn't mean he's always wrong about every opinion. He's occasionally right, granted probably for a shitty reason, but that doesn't mean I can't agree with him

on those issues for good reasons. Yeah, different reasons, right. Consider that fact, Frank. Since your email doesn't address the issue itself, but only the person proposing it, it's a literal ad hominem. It's not the thing that people who are sick of me being mean to them in an argument they're losing

think ad hominem means it's actually a textbook ad hominem fallacy. There's no information that you can give me about the person who made the proposition that should sway my opinion of the proposition unless I was being intellectually dishonest in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. And one last thing, quick point on Frank's closing paragraph. He wrote, I don't think we should be taking away nutrition choices from children. Let's just think about that for a second.

Just for reference, that was the capper of his argument in favor of special rights for religions who very literally take away nutrition choices from children and adults. Right. It just sounded like you were yelling there

a little bit at the end. There you go. And that's all the end. Jeez. There you go. 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 skatingidius.com. Before we puff the magic dragon tonight, I wanted to make two quick announcements. If you subscribe to the show, you'll have noticed that the first episode of our new show, Godawful Movies, popped up in your feed. A lot of people have asked how to subscribe to it or how to rate it on iTunes.

You actually can't do either of those things for a couple more weeks. The show is going to be on its own iTunes feed on September 22nd. That'll be the debut of episode 5, but until then, you'll just get it along with your Skating Atheist feed like a bonus episode every Tuesday. I also wanted to let everyone know that we're within $100 of our next Patreon goal. If and when we hit that goal, two things happen. One is that we get to hire Lucinda away from her day job for a couple extra days a week so that she can take on more responsibility on the show, both appearing on the show and in helping us with the mountains of extra work that goes to the three shows at this

point. But there's also a pretty much immediate bonus for everybody when we reach that goal. One of Lucinda's first behemoth tasks is going to be loading every segment of the show that we've ever done on a SoundCloud feed, which means you'll be able to share just the Bible story or just the skit or just the diatribe, whatever. It also means that you can go back

and easily listen to any of the Holy Babel segments, for example, or the movie reviews or any of your favorite moments from the past 132 episodes without having to figure out what episode they were on. It's obviously a huge project. It's something that we're never going to have time for unless we can add a few more hours to the week and so if you'd like to help us do that and help compensate lucinda a little more fairly for all the work she already does you can head over to patreon.com skating atheist to make a per episode donation anyway that's all the blasphemy

we've got for you this week oh wait sorry this just in fuck jesus in the ass with a forewood okay that's all the blasphemy we've got for you this week but we'll be back in 10,022 minutes with more if you can't wait that long be on the lookout for episode 2 of God awful movies coming to a scathing atheist feed near you on Tuesday at 8 a.m. Eastern time we've got a special guest for that one you're definitely gonna want to check it out obviously a show ain't a show

until I thank Heath Enright for bringing toilet humor so classy it comes with a bidet I need to thank the lovely and talented Lucinda illusions for still loving me even after all these dead baby jokes I want want to thank Ryan of the Bumfuck Ryans for providing this week's Farnsworth quote. I also want to thank Susan Gerbic one more time. If you're interested in getting involved with the GSOW, again, we're going to have links to the YouTube interviews that she talked about. We're going to have links to their blog, more information, all that stuff's going to be on the website. But most of all, of course, I need to thank this

week's most dependable diploids, Joseph Aaron, Josh Marks Mark, Rex, Dan, Janine, Eric, Team Ramrod, Omar, Chase, Sean, Tammy, Other Mark, Dean, Emily, Brett, and Jared. Joseph, Aaron, Josh, Mark, Rex, and Dan, whose ejaculations give Gamma Ray Bursts feelings of inadequacy, Janine, Eric, Team Ramrod, Omar, Chase, and Sean, the sum of whose parts are envious of the whole, and Tammy, Other Mark, Dean, Emily, Brett, and Jared, whose intellects are so vast that they make the Australian Outback look like an Outback steakhouse. Together this dozen and a half decidedly doubtful and drop dead dreamy disbelievers have delighted us with donations this week. If you'd like to count yourself

amongst their ranks, again, patreon.com skatingatheist or you can make a one time donation by clicking the donate button on the right side of the homepage at skatingatheist.com and if you'd like to help but you're more likely to fist fuck Natalie Portman to give money to a free podcast, you can also help us a ton by leaving us a five-star review

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at skatingatheist.com. All the music used in this episode was written and performed by yours truly, and yes, I did have my permission. now go send uh go send heath a happy birthday tweet