The Scathing Atheist Presents: Diatribes, Vol. 1—50 Essays From a Godless Misanthrope

174 Pages·2014·0.76 MB·English

by  Noah Lugeons & Heath Enwright

The Scathing Atheist Presents
DIATRIBES: Volume One
50 Essays from a Godless Misanthrope

by Noah Lugeons
(Additional Material by Heath Enwright)

Copyright 2014 Noah Lugeons
Kindle Edition

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For Lucinda, Heath, Eli and the 5th Beatle of the Scathing Atheist, Neal Nomar
Contents:

Preface
Chapter One: Atheist Activism
Statement of Purpose
Devangelism
Preaching to the Choir
On the Dawkins Scale
On Community
Chapter Two: Atheism and the Media
The Guardian
Don’t Tweet Angry!
Yes, We’re Smarter Than Them
We’re Ashamed of You, Too
Antitheism on Broadway
Chapter Three: Those Who Earn My Ire
Asshole, Inc.
Is Religion Good For Kids?
The Bozo and the Atheist
The Praise-Worthy Pope
Oprah is a Vile Scut
Chapter Four: Religious Vs. Secular
How the Hubble Saved my Soul
How Many Miles to Heaven
On “Falsifiability”
On Secular Holidays
Christians Don’t Own Christmas
Chapter Five: Christians Annoy Me
American Jesus
Christians are Like Raisins
“Believe in God, Man”
Majoring in Stupid
On the Christian Athlete
On Growing Up in the Bible Belt
Chapter Six: Why Religion Always Sucks
The Enemy of Truth
Christian Torture Porn
Atheism and 9/11
On “Islamophobia”
Does Buddhism Get a Pass?
Chapter Seven: The “Benefits” of Faith
There are no Theists in a Foxhole
The Appeal of Not Dying
The Suicide That Wasn’t
Wishing I Was Wrong
Chapter Eight: Debating Faith
There is too a God, Now Pass the Fucking Stringbeans
Bodyguards in the Marketplace of Ideas
God, the Ingredient-less Sandwich
Shoveling Shit for Jesus
“Winning” a Religious Debate
The Unwinnable Fight
Chapter Nine: The Bible
Biblical Children’s Stories
Just Who Is This God Person Anyway?
Don’t Read the Bible!
The Inerrant Word of What’s-His-Name
Chapter Ten: Devoted to Stupidity
The Poophole Loophole
Haunted by Joel O’Steen
Playing With Half a Deck
The Granny Peace Brigade
Part of Something Larger
Afterword
Appendix (Episode Guide)
Preface

When I was a young man, I used to love to watch my dad get angry. He
was an amiable guy most of the time, but when the situation called for it, he was
the Shakespeare of rage; masterfully weaving together insults and vulgarities
with practiced ease. At a moment’s notice, he could string together slanderous
modifiers like the notes in a well played scale until a single aspersion would
leave him breathless. I never wanted to be on the receiving end of his anger, of
course, but when a distracted motorists cut him off or he came home feeling
slighted by his boss, my siblings and I would lean in close and revel in his
disdainful diatribes.
If podcasting had existed in the eighties, my dad might have found success
with a show called “Fuck the Guy in the Maroon Skylark That Was in Front of
Me on I-95 Last Night”. It would have been a 45 minute daily program,
consisting of a single string of blasphemous indignation and impudent scurrility,
during which he would inhale only four times.
I admired this trait in my father, and often I envied it. Every time a verbal
skirmish on the playground ended with me stammering to a close with nothing
but “I know you are, but what am I?” or some crestfallen references to rubber
and glue, I walked away wishing that I could summon my father’s rhetorical
dexterity and unleash a fully automatic barrage of degrading jocularity. But like
all the other traits I admired in my dad, I would eventually learn that it could
only be gained through practice.
Throughout my life, it’s a skill that I’ve honed. I learned early that truth
was funnier than fiction. I learned the importance of preparation, brevity,
specificity and calculated obscenity. I learned to use the audience against my
opponent. I learned to redirect the insult, to overrun the response, to twist the
words of my opponents until they were insulting themselves. I learned that it
isn’t enough to merely reference a sack of monkey shit. To maximize the insult,
one had to paint a mental picture of that sack of monkey shit, and the festering,
fecaphilic fungus that it foments.
But somehow, despite my laborious dedication, I found myself perpetually
falling short of my goal. I wanted to rage on par with my father; to level such
scintillating, entertaining castigation that those around me would bask in it. But
I’d overlooked a critical lesson. I’d learned to fire accurately and quickly, but I
hadn’t learned how to select a target. Everything was the quarry; every person
who annoyed me, every movie or song I disliked, every unit of culture I took
issue with, every idea I disagreed with, every pursuit that I deemed
uninteresting.
My father’s targets were anonymous silhouettes, shielded from his biting ire
by two windows and a few car-lengths of highway. Or they were essentially
mythological characters that existed for me only in his indelicate anecdotes. My
targets, on the other hand, were universal.
Incessant, indiscriminate rage simply made me an asshole and despite all the
years spent crafting this skill, I eventually abandoned it and even tried to
suppress it. But there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. Even when
I thought it vanquished, the specter of my vituperation was perpetually lurking;
waiting for some unsuspecting jackass to try to get on the elevator before I got
off.
One year ago, at the time of this writing, I gave up my struggle against it
and unleashed the dormant fury in full force. I’d grown exhausted trying to
contain it and I’d yet to summon the willpower to conquer it, so rather than
fighting against it, I chose to fight with it.
I needed only to select my victim.
I should admit upfront that religion makes an easy target and not just
because of the ceaseless assaults against the dignity of reason perpetrated in its
name. If one’s goal is to offend, faith is usually the easiest path. For some
inexplicable reason, the feature of our society most in need of mockery is the
one that is generally prohibited among polite company. Social taboos have
evolved such that a person’s unevidenced belief that a man walked on water, a
donkey talked and an omnipotent sorcerer once rebooted an expired Jewish
prophet is seen as above reproach. Even mild rebukes of religion, cloaked in the
most conciliatory prose, are condemned by otherwise fair-minded individuals.
But religion doesn’t make a good target because it’s shocking, but rather
because it’s deserving. Religion hides behind a veil of diplomatic deference,
armoring itself with a veneer of affability, but all the while it is begging for our
derision. It’s a tool that has no legitimate use. The beneficial works of charity
could be done better without it and they’re more than overshadowed by the
detriments of religion. It’s a tool that is used to subjugate women and
minorities, to retard the progress of science, to bastardize the education of the
coming generations, to stifle curiosity, to justify sectarian bloodshed, to
dehumanize homosexuals, to promote ignorance, to oppose rationality, to distort
reality, to abuse children physically, sexually and psychologically, to demonize
healthy sexual expression, to prevent common sense measures to mitigate
poverty, to oppress populations and to start wars. Considering this, the modicum
of social betterment they author is as irrelevant as the punctuality of Mussolini's
trains.
So armed with nothing but $800 in recording equipment, a domain name
and my righteous indignation, I started a podcast called “The Scathing Atheist”;
my attempt to divorce the social taboo from religious criticism by swinging so
far toward the offensive that Richard Dawkins would look like an apologist.
And while I will certainly continue to fall short of that lofty goal, the feedback
we’ve received seems to confirm that at least my epithets are aimed in the right
direction.
Originally, I conceived of the show as a weekly series of short, subject-
specific tirades, attacking whatever troublesome manifestation of faith most
recently provoked my fury. As ideas often do, this one evolved into something
wholly different along the way, but the initial concept remains a popular part of
the show; a weekly 3 to 5 minute irate monologue called “The Diatribe”.
Despite being the easiest part of the show to research and write, it remains
one of the program’s most popular features. So as we approached our fiftieth
episode, I set about compiling and rewriting the diatribes from each episode for
this book. The individual essays have been arranged by general theme into ten
categories, each with a brief introduction. Because there are no time constraints
in this format, many have been expanded and, as the cadence of speech doesn’t
translate perfectly to the written word, many have been edited to a more literary
mold. What remains unchanged is the discordant, impassioned antagonism that
has been the heart of our show since its inception.
Chapter One: Atheist Activism

In the conversations that would eventually lead to the launch of our podcast,
my co-hosts and I agreed that to be worth our while, the show had to be about
more than just degradation. While we believe that religion is in dire need of
derision, the show couldn’t simply be about pointing and laughing.
So in addition to the catharsis we hoped to provide, we set an ancillary goal
to motivate non-believers and try to convert the armchair atheist into an engaged
soldiers in the fight for reason; to promote community and activism. It seemed
clear to us that there is no shortage of intellectual opponents to religion, but the
letter-writing, protest-marching, fundraising, conference-attending devangelists
were woefully lacking.
Below are a series of diatribes dealing with precisely this issue, often
provided in defense of accusations that our brand of atheism is detrimental to the
bridge-building wing of the party.