Speaker 1: Understand the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through the.
Speaker 1: Rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I
tell the truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because.
Speaker 3: I put my hand on a book and made a wish.
Speaker 1: And working together for a more rational world.
Speaker 2: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness. Truth,
Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 2: Recent data indicates that there are about five hundred active
podcasts in the world. My guest today is on about
half of them. He's just on shows everywhere. He is
the puzzle in the thunderstorm. He is the scathing in
the atheist. His keen intellects surpassed only by his snark.
He writes, he tours, he loves his Lucinda and his cats,
and he joins me today, no illusions. How you doing, brother,
Good to see you.
Speaker 4: I'm doing great man.
Speaker 3: After that intro, I'm not sure I can fit my
head in the frame, but I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: That's what I do. You know, I'm like, you're Tony Robbins.
Actually used to be a better reference to the motivational speaker,
and then somebody told me that Tony Robbins is kind
of creepy, and I thought maybe I shouldn't say that.
So you and I are just a quick plug before
we talk about real stuff. We're taking the stage together
for the first time ever in Cincinnati July the eleventh.
Why you agreed to do this is a mystery, but
I'm glad you said yes. So is it spilling the
beans of I ask what you're going to bring? Like,
we're doing a whole bunch of audience stuff, but you're
doing thirty something minutes on the stage. Do you want
to talk about what you're talking about? Yeah?
Speaker 3: So you know, a couple of years ago, I had
a heart attack and I did it in South Georgia,
which where I live, and it occurred to me as
I was going, you know, there are two separate things
I'm fighting against. One is the heart attack and one
is sort of the religious nature of the way it's treated.
And so I'm going to be presenting a talk that
I call how to Die Like an Atheist, where I'm
going to talk a little bit about the way that
a medical emergency is different if you're a non believer,
especially if you're a non believer in a really religious
part of the country.
Speaker 2: Did you end up in one of those Catholic hospitals,
because we've got them all over the place, there's a
crucifix in every room kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Oh no, I'm in South Georgia. They don't let Catholics
around here.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: No, it was not a religious hospital, but you would
you know, you'd have to check the name to find
out for sure, you know.
Speaker 4: What I mean.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I know that they have some clergy
kind of bouncing around from room to room saying, would
you like prayer for your illness? Which is the weird
double standard? You're receiving science based medical treatment, and we
would like to call down the magic. Any of that
go on when you were on death's door, so to speak.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I didn't see an actual chaplain at
any point, but I was offered prayer by almost everybody
I saw, to the point where I almost wanted I
almost asked him to put on the little chart there,
please don't.
Speaker 4: Pray for me. But you know, I didn't want to
antagonize anybody too much.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about doing a speech that I've been touring.
I was always a pretentious word. That's why I use it, Noah,
but about white Jesus, the American perception of Jesus, and
what would happen if I took the Middle Eastern or
Black Jesus or Asian Jesus depictions into a typical Protestant church, Like,
how quickly would I get my ass kicked? That's been
a fun one. Sum I may do that, or I
may do one where we talk about all the shit
advice that we were given growing up in much of
which we hear today. And it's sort of that coffee table,
you know, dinner table stuff where they're like, don't speak
ill of the dead, and you and I are like like,
why not? Right?
Speaker 4: I have a segment on my show called Son of
Obituary you.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, hang on, I got to write that down.
I'm stealing. I will give you credit. Son of Obituary
is also what was another one, never go to bed angry.
I was like, well, sometimes you need to go to
bed angry. You know. It sort of places this burden
on people to resolve what may not be irresolvable, and
there's a whole litany of this type of shit. So
I thought, well, that might be kind of fun to
go through all the armchair advice and not just not
psychology but pop psychology that you and I see. You know,
the meme verse is filled with inspirational stuff posted mostly
by people whose lives are in the shit or I
don't know if you've noticed that or not. Right, Yeah,
Now we're going to talk a lot of religion and
politics and the culture and whatnot, but I want to
talk first about geography. You are in Georgia. Is this
Atlanta or what?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: No, no, no way south of Atlanta. Now we're in a
completely different universe. The part of North Georgia that Marjorie
Taylor Green used to represent, that's the progressive part of
Georgia compared to where I am. But you know, I'm
here for family reasons. My father in law got sick
a few years ago. My wife and I moved down
to take care of him in the last years of
his life, and since then we've sort of gotten roped
into where my wife is the primary babysitter for my
niece and her three kids, and you know, we've got
so many family obligations that would be really hard to
step away from here at this point.
Speaker 2: Well, that was one of the questions from one of
my listeners. Michael said, ask Noah, why Georgia, Like, what
the hell is he doing down there? So I mean,
is that it you just sort of came down to
take care of family, And the anchor held.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I think it's true for so many people.
You know, I'm fortunate in that I could take my
job anywhere like you, right, you could. You could theoretically
take your job to some other location and.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't matter.
Speaker 3: You're working online, and so people often ask, why don't
you just go to the most atheist friendly place, But
that's not how living works, right. You have to live
near the people that matter to you, the friends that
matter to you, and stuff like that. So, you know,
as tempting as it would be to just go somewhere
that's already better, sometimes the only choice is to try
to make the place that you are better.
Speaker 2: I was reading about the city of Atlanta. It's the
whole blue dot phenomenon ride because Georgia itself is about
as red as it comes. I'm not telling you anything.
Somebody made this joke. If you're in Atlanta, you're also
two hours from Atlanta. The city is just I found
a challenge to navigate. But I mean, we're talking about
the birthplace of doctor Martin Luther King Junior, the civil
rights icon, and I have to wonder if he materialized today,
he would think it was still nineteen sixty four, right.
Speaker 3: Well, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions VIASA the
Voting Rights Act. Yeah, absolutely, I would wonder if you'd
think we were moving forward or backwards.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, the SPLC said that, Georgia, I think
you're just behind Florida. So look great on Florida's resume,
but you're up there near the top of the list
for hate groups, whether it's white supremacy groups or ANTILGBT
groups or those types of things. Do you have the
pulse of that kind of thing in the South? No.
Speaker 3: You know, one of the nice things about the job
that I do is that I am able to mostly
unplug from the community around me. I'm able to travel
a lot and get away from it a lot. So
I don't really socialize with a lot of people in
the area outside of my Fami family, which you know,
for I what I know of South Georgia, I'm not
missing much when I say that. That being said, though,
when I went to you know, my town had the
No King's rallies, which you know, there's fifty or sixty
people in a town like that, which is still impressive.
But and I, you know, met a lot of people
at those rallies that were you know, I mean, no
matter how red the place is, there's still some blue there.
And I met a lot of people there that did
kind of make me wish that I was a little
bit more plugged in.
Speaker 4: But fortunately it.
Speaker 3: The benefit of being as insular as I am is
that I do get to avoid the hate groups by
and large.
Speaker 2: You're One of the things I like to point to
people is that, well, there are two reasons for me
beyond the fact that you know, my social circle here,
you know, is within twenty miles. But the cost of
living is part of it. I mean, okay, fine, I'm
going to go to a big city, a blue dot. Well,
if I was to try to buy my house there,
I'm totally priced. Especially with the interest rates where there are,
It's just no freaking way. And the second thing is
I do take a kind of satisfaction being a rogue
heathen atheist in Jesus Town. It's so rare for people
here to see an atheist in the wild, right.
Speaker 3: Well, especially one that can say I'm an atheist, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I'd love to see the expression. I was
at a tennis match. I was watching Natalie play a match,
and there were some people gathered around, and you know,
everybody's pinballing around going, oh, what do you do for
a living? What do you do? Well, I'm an engineer
and I work over here and I'm in marketing, and
I knew I was next. And then I have that
cost benefit discussion. Do I really want to go here? Like?
Is this? I'm not here for this? Do I really
want to have a moment? I thought, I'll screw it.
What do you do? Oh? I host a website, online community,
and podcast for atheist agnostics and secular humanists. And she
literally froze and then she just turned around and watched
the rest of the MA didn't say a syllable to
me for the rest of the day, you know, but
I thought, this is healthy. She needs to know we exist,
you know, absolutely.
Speaker 3: And are in your area as well, yeah, you know,
I was in Austin a couple of weeks back for
my nephew's graduation, and I'm with his very very Catholic family,
my sister in law's family, and what do you do
for a living?
Speaker 4: Question came up.
Speaker 3: Now I have a little bit of an out that
you don't have, because, like you said, I'm on a
bunch of different podcasts, So I can say, well, I'm
a podcaster. Well what's your podcast? But oh, I do
a bunch of them, a bunch of different things.
Speaker 2: How many so wait a minute, let me jump in.
How many shows are you won?
Speaker 4: Five at the moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and one of them is sort of like
a history trivia show we do with the guys from
Cognitive Dissonance called Citation Needed. So if I don't feel
like having the discussion, I'll push people that way, you know,
I'll say, well, I host a bunch of shows. You
should probably start with Citation Needed if you want to
check them out, because that doesn't have the word atheist.
Speaker 4: But as often as not.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm actually really happy, like you say, for
the opportunity to tell somebody like, hey, yeah, I'm an
atheist and we're out there and we exist. And you know,
if somebody's job was pastor or priest, they wouldn't hesitate
to say that in public, So why should I?
Speaker 2: I use true stories in the same way, I don't
get to populate the show as much as I used to,
just for bandwidth. Of course, now that I hear that
you're doing five and I just have the two, I
feel shame and inadequacy.
Speaker 3: Thanks Noah, Well, I have two co hosts too, well
five on one of themselves.
Speaker 2: Do you use producers? Do you have people who can
go through I have this, It's the classic we call
it the e myth dilemma. Anybody in business knows with this.
But if you don't duplicate yourself, you limit how much
you can grow. But I'm a control freak. I know
exactly where I want the edits to be. I know
the tone, the temperature, I know the topics, and I'm
terrified of releasing too much of it because I'm afraid
someone else is going to I don't know, post the
wrong thing, or they won't get where to, you know,
hit the inflections. And then I think, well, Natalie says,
I'm a control freak in that way, I don't know,
do you go through that?
Speaker 4: No, I'm absolutely with you.
Speaker 3: The advantage that I have is that I have co hosts, right, So,
like when it came to we have an editor that
does the sort of first pass edit on everything, and
it was so hard for me to give that up.
But luckily I had two other guys saying, hey, man,
here are other things that only you can do that
we'd much rather have you doing, and so they were
able to push me into offloading some of that.
Speaker 4: But yes, absolutely, I.
Speaker 3: Didn't want to give up anything because, like you know,
like you, this all started us just an idea in
my head and then it was just an idea in
my bedroom. And the idea of you know, sending off
you know, like pushing the edit out of the nest
or whatever it is, it's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've gone from that too. Like speaking in other countries,
it's right, not just in your bedroom, not just in
your state, not just in the USA, but you're international.
I mean you do you travel alone or with the
god awful movies guys, or what a.
Speaker 4: Little of both?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we've goneofful Movies is now headlined at the biggest
atheist conference in Australia, England, and the United States. I've
actually never spoken in Canada at a Canada show before,
but I'm going to take care of that in August
at Baja Khn.
Speaker 4: Really excited about that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, we've been regulars in England for quite a
while with a QED conference that unfortunately they don't do anymore.
They just had their big finale last year. But yeah, yeah,
it's it's uh, it's really something to think that, you know,
an idea that started as just you know, me scratching
out a few ideas on a blog eventually became something
that would you know, pay for tickets to Australia and whatnot.
Speaker 2: Well, I got to do the Barbara Walters question, why
did you have a fire in your belly because you
were raised religious? Where does this scathing come from?
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's really not my scathing anymore. I
was not raised religious. My parents were nominally religious, but
they weren't church goers. So when I would ask questions
very often, they'd give me religious answers. But then when
I had follow up questions, they had no idea where
to go with them.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: But when I was living in New York, which you
think of as this sort of secular bastion New York
City as this you know, very progressive place, like you
said this blue dot. But the reality of it is
you see the entire sum spectrum of religiosity in New
York City from the very very conservative to the very
very liberal.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: And I in the job that I did, I was
an entertainer, I was a juggler. I worked a lot
of bar mitzvahs, and I saw a lot of the
very very far right Jewish religion, and that sort of
led me down a series of rabbit holes about the
more repressive forms of Christianity, of Judaism, of Islam. And
you saw bits and pieces of that everywhere. The the
thing that I've reflected on most when I get this
question is a single moment I had in a subway
where I watched a young girl from an orthodoxe Jewish
family get berated for reading a book that was only
intended for boys. And the rage and the fury I
felt on behalf of that little girl, knowing how limited
she was going to be in her life if she
couldn't escape from that. You know, I felt like she
was impotent in this There's nothing that she can do
about it. But there's something I can do, There's something
I can say, And that same I believe it was
that same day I came up out of the subway
and I saw for the first time there was some
organization or another that was running atheist signs on the
sides of buses in Manhattan at the time. And it
was just something as simple as you know, I'm good
without God, something that simple. And I remember seeing that
and putting all that together and realizing that I could
be a voice for a lot of those people that
you know, Unfortunately they are not going to have an
opportunity to find their own voices.
Speaker 2: I was in Denver, Colorado. This was many years ago,
and we had a night off and I'm walking around
downtown and they had I want to say, they were
legit Harri Krishnaz, right with the robes and the bald
heads and the literature, and they're dancing and chanting. And
I mean, forgive my ignorance, I'm not well versed in
the hardy Christnas. But picture in your mind right right now,
you've got that mental picture, this is what I was
looking at. And in the crowd was she must have
been a sixteen year old girl head shaved, handing out booklets,
but she had a surrendered look on her face. She
was smiling, but she was kind of vacant, like she
had never been given the opportunity to develop a personhood
of her own. And there were some who would walk
by and they'd see this sort of peaceful, happy, happy,
joy joy, singing group of believers, saying, Oh, they've got
their own culture, How wonderful for them, live and let live.
I saw it, and I thought, this poor girl never
had a chance. And I guess that's the vibe of
what you were maybe you were thinking at the time,
like you grieve because you're like, this person almost certainly
has never been introduced to the much wider, grander world.
Speaker 4: Right absolutely.
Speaker 3: You know, people think of you know, very often you
hear the Amish culture listed as this exemplar of simplicity
and the old life and everything like that. And of course,
if you look into it, if you learn anything at
all about what it's like to grow up in the
Amish culture, you lose that very quickly, especially if you
look at what it's like to grow up as a
girl in the Amish culture.
Speaker 2: Okay, I can't have a reviewer of god awful movies
and god awful video games on this show without talking
about god awful movies and video games. So we're going
to take a relatively if not a deep dive. We
are going to dive into that subject and more. Next.
Thanks so much for supporting me in this broadcast on Paytreon,
Patreon dot com, slash Seth Andrews. If you'd like to
become a supporter, makes a huge, huge difference, and if
you choose, you can get the show early and commercial free.
Talking here with Noah Lucianz, who is host of The
Scathing Atheist, co host of God Awful Movies, Citation Needed,
and other shows. So you walk up or you are challenged.
You're not a costing Christians. But let's say somebody walks
up and they're kind of adamant about their faith. The
Bible is a good book. And you've done a lot
of diatribes, I mean, you call them diatribes on your
show about Christianity. Is there a Bible story that you
at least fantasize about leading with Okay, all right, fine,
you want to talk Bible. If you really want to
talk Bible, I'd like to talk about this story. Do
you have any favorites, anything that pops to your head.
Speaker 4: Uh, well, you know, it depends on what you want
out of it. Right.
Speaker 3: If you want to prove that the Bible is not
a good story, of course you go straight to God
telling them to kill the men and keep the young
women for themselves or whatever. But if I just want
I'm scratching their heads, I go to the story where
Moses mooned everybody, or sorry, where God mooned Moses on
the mountain, and they just refuse to believe it's in there,
you know, because I think very often what I'm trying
to do when I'm engaging with a Christian about the
Bible is I'm trying to get them to realize how
little they actually know about that book. Right, So if
you're able to be like, well, you know, God mooned
Moses at one point, and they're like, no, he didn't, Well,
then you know, if they if they go back and
they look at that passage or passage reader, and that's
exactly what happened, look at that passage, well that's a
good that's a good phrasing. I guess if they look
at that passage about looking at that passage. Then they're
going to realize that, hey, maybe there's other stuff in
this book that I'm not aware of. Maybe I I
haven't really been told all of the stuff that's in here.
So that's usually the goal if I am going to
engage about that.
Speaker 2: And maybe I'll bring a Seth Andrews teaches Sunday School
to Cincinnati. You just I've done that on the air,
but it might be fun to do from the stage
because I'm thinking about, like I like to lead with, well,
I mean, beyond the typical atrocity slavery and talking donkeys
and all that stuff, and talking donkey's not an atrocity.
It probably is an offense to logic, but you know
what I mean, just the wacky shit. But it's out
of Ezekiel, where apparently God commands him to lay on
his side for a year. Yeah, and then he's commanded
to cook with his own feces and he has to
beg God, please don't make me cook using my shit
as fuel, and then God has to change his mind
and people are like, come on, and I'm like, all right,
chapter verse, chapter verse. I don't know any other gems
you like to talk about.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, that's the one where he has to eat
the scroll as well.
Speaker 4: Isn't it awesome?
Speaker 2: It's awesome.
Speaker 4: I actually i'd got off of movies.
Speaker 3: We recently watched a really really low budget movie where
they had tried to re enact that the guy.
Speaker 4: Eating of the scroll. It was. It was amazing to see.
Speaker 3: It was like a when you play tea party with
a kid and they give you plastic food to eat,
you know.
Speaker 4: He just basically went with that on it.
Speaker 2: Awesome. What was do you remember the name of the movie.
Speaker 4: It was called Key of the or Keys of the Kingdom.
Speaker 2: Is this like Pure Flicks or Angel Studios thing?
Speaker 4: Oh no, it's way below pier flicks level.
Speaker 3: This is Yeah, this is entirely made on this guy's
green screen in front of him. I don't know that
there's a production company involved at all.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 3: Oh I'm really mad that I can't remember the guy's
name that made it, because it was absolutely hilarious the
way he described the film as a such and such banger.
Speaker 4: But I can't remember his name.
Speaker 2: We've got to talk Christian media. I just recently streamed
the I Am Jesus Christ video game. I lasted about
forty five minutes. You're familiar because we talked about this.
I didn't think it was ever going to release. I thought, oh,
this is a crowdfunding scam and they're just going to
tease it forever. I think the trailer has been out.
I don't know how many years, but apparently. I mean,
I don't know if the whole game release, but enough
a playable version of the game at least the beta
is out. You've seen I Am Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they had the first chapter of it playable
for a couple of years.
Speaker 4: I'm with you.
Speaker 3: I honestly, I have a talk that I give on
Christian video games, and I've ended the talk with for
years with talking about this game and about how it
was never coming out, and now so I have to
totally revamp the talk now. But yeah, First person Messiah Simulator.
I'm amazed that it took so long.
Speaker 2: It's amazing in the worst sense of the word. I
don't know if there have been a lot of recent
Christian video games, but in your speech about some of
the retro games, there's some gems in there, So come on.
Greatest hits Christian video games over the past thirty some years.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, Yeah, So the thing about Christian video game
is very much like the thing about Christian music or
Christian movies.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: These are people who couldn't really get it done in
the secular version of the thing, and so they turned
to Christianity because they had this sort of captive audience
that was underserved. So a lot of the games you
a lot of the best of the retro games were
just Christian version of X right.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 3: There was a game called Spiritual Warrior that was the
Christian version of.
Speaker 4: The Legend of Zelda.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It was very clearly patterned after that, except all the
puzzles sucked in. The game was no fun right, Like
you said, they're just awful games to begin with. There
was a game called Sunday Fun Day that was quite
notorious because it was just a direct remaking of an
existing game. They just threw in some Christian tropes and
they didn't even try to make it make sense with
the Christian tropes, right, So the game went from I'm
trying to rescue my girlfriend from a gang to I'm
trying to get to Sunday's school. They never explained why
a gang is trying to stop you from getting to
Sunday School though, right, a gang that includes Bears by
the way, it's a hell of a very inclusive gang.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: But I think my absolute all time favorite is a
game called Captain Is it Captain Bible? I mean it's
Captain Bible in the Dome of Darkness.
Speaker 2: Nineteen ninety four. Yeah, I saw that one crazy.
Speaker 4: It's a classic.
Speaker 3: It's one of the point and click ones and the
whole the way that the gameplay works is that you
go around finding Bible versus and then you run into
enemies who will tell you lies about what's in the Bible,
and then you have to find the verse that contradicts
that lie. That's the gameplay. That's what you do throughout
the game. So like, you know, if the Giant Spider
will say, well, no, God could love an insignificant piece
of protoplasm like you, and then you've got to find
the God loves Everybody verse.
Speaker 2: There was a Noah's Our game, and I think they
licensed the Doom engine, yes, from it to or either
that or the engine license expired and they just grabbed it.
I think maybe it had moved on. I don't know
the story. Noah's Ark. Have you seen that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was this what would they called it,
Super Noah's Arc three D I believe was the name
of the game. But yeah, they had licensed the engine
because the engine would you know, they had moved on
to the newer engine and they so they remade the game.
It wasn't just that they licensed the engine. They actually
remade the game Castle Wolfenstein three D, but they just
changed the graphics out, so now you're in Noah's Ark
instead of a Nazi castle. And that ended up you
had some interesting choices there, right, because like, for example,
if you ever played Castle Wolfenstein three D, you know
there are pictures of Hitler everywhere, right, because you're in
this Nazi castle. So who would there be pictures of
in Noah's Ark everywhere? Well, we're to believe that Noah
went out and commissioned thousands of self portraits beforehand to
hang them up on the arc so the animals would
know who was boss.
Speaker 4: I guess awesome.
Speaker 2: He just walks from room to room in the boat
going me, yes, me, more, me, also me. There was
another one, much more serious, titled that Dragon Cancer.
Speaker 4: Now I'm not super familiar with that one.
Speaker 3: I know this story behind it is that a Christian
couple had a child with a terminal illness and they
made a video game that was sort of in a sense,
it was like a second person having a kid with
cancer simulator, which I mean, it's as fun as it sounds.
I'll be honest that there are from what I know
of it, there are some really like beautiful artistic choices
that they made with the game.
Speaker 4: It's very like. It was very well reviewed.
Speaker 3: It's often the answer I give when people ask are
there any good Christian games? Like I haven't actually played it,
so I don't know that it's a good game, but
it's definitely got some beautiful moments in it. It's a
really interesting statement as to what can be done with
video game storyteller. I read an interview years ago with
it was a couple that created I can't remember if
it was the husband or wife that that was interviewed.
They were talking about showing the game at at a
video game expo. And there's one moment in the game
where you've got the kid who has cancer, and the
only interaction you have is you can push a button
to push him on a swing, and that's it. And
then you just keep doing that until you're done with that,
and then you press that I'm done with this scene.
And the developer talked about the way people would linger
on that sequence in the game, even though all you're
doing is pushing one button and making the kid swing,
because they knew that when you moved on from that moment,
you weren't going to have another moment like that with
the kid. And and so I think, you know, one
of the beautiful things about video game storytelling that really
came up, if you're familiar with the game Mistape that
just came out a couple of weeks ago, really came
out in that one in an incredible way, is that,
unlike movies or television, video games can be told in
second So this isn't what happened to me, this isn't
what happened to him, It's what happened to you. And
it can give you this sense of agency that makes
certain aspects of the story far more impactful. And I
think that that's a game that really took advantage of that.
Speaker 2: This is one of the places where I really am
super charitable when it comes to people who hold a
religious belief when they are going through suffering or when
they've lost a loved one when they're navigating fear and pain.
You know, there is a happy ending to that story,
and there is a kind of bomb, and we can
have the discussion about whether it's a healthy bomb, you know,
But it's medicine for some people. I tend to think
they're better served by rooting themselves in the real world.
But I think we have to approach those types of
things with compassion. I don't know your thoughts on that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that when I see somebody trying to
use religion to cope with a tragedy, I very often
feel sorry for them because it's not a good coping mechanism, right,
if you look at it, just statistically, right, people who
are super religious are not better at coping with death,
and they'd be far better off with secular therapy I
think most often. But in the moment, when that's what
you've got, you know, like if somebody's drowning, I'm not
going to criticize what a crappy life raft they've built,
you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Well. I also that takes us into the conversations about
the efficacy of prayer. They say prayer makes you feel good.
There's a meditative aspect to it. You've got people around you.
They're you know, laying hands on your shoulder. There's human contact.
But I'm like, all of this stuff could be done
without mythology and superstition. Plus, there have been studies that
many of the people who are prayed for in the
hospital actually do worse after they've been prayed for if
they know about it, possibly because they feel pressure to
get better and they don't, you know, or when they don't.
So and there's a lot of counterintuitive stuff. You know,
all prayer makes people feel better, Heaven makes people do better,
but I think that's only true on the surface. If
you scratch beneath, the story's much different, right. Well.
Speaker 3: And the other thing too, is that if religion is
just a means of like if prayer's a means of
getting human contact and getting people to work together, et cetera,
et cetera, well, then prayer is getting in the way
of those goals by not being forthright about them. Right,
Because if we set out and we say, hey, our
goal here is to have physical contact with the person
who's suffering, we can do it in a much less
convoluted way.
Speaker 2: I feel the same about alcoholics Anonymous. I appreciate a
support mechanism and community for people trying to overcome addiction.
But the higher power thing, I think strips people of
agency and cheats them out of a journey they're taking themselves.
And I don't know if there are a lot of
secular alternatives out there, but you know, alcoholics Anonymous might
be a great example of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3: You know, whenever I talk shit about Alcoholics Anonymous on
our show, I do quite often somebody will reach out
to me and say, hey, man, you know I was
or am involved with AA and it did wonders for
me and all of this, you know, tell me all
of the great stuff about it. And I know that
some AA groups go out of their way to be
secular or as secular sup possibly can be within that framework.
But again, you know, it's a case of like, look,
if there are things that are effective within it, let's
find out what those things are, and let's distill those
things and let's do the best version of that, which
isn't what they do.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Instead, AA refuses to release any statistics unrecidivism, right, so
we don't know how effective it is. And if we
don't know how effective it is, how the hell can
we figure out which elements are the most effective?
Speaker 2: I want to talk with Noah about a deeply personal
subject and it has to do with cigarettes and addiction.
So we're going to get into that and more and
just a moment. Thanks so much for listening today. I'm
in a conversation and there's video of this conversation which
is linked in the description box. But I'm talking to
podcast activist, author and scathing atheist No Illusions. You've been
pretty forward facing about overcoming addiction in your own life.
Can we talk about cigarettes? You want to go there?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I I started smoking back when I was a kid
because it was cool back then. But years ago, I
guess it's been almost five years now. We did a
charity fundraiser. The charity turned out to be awful. The
guy just recently pled guilty for embezzling from the charity
that we raised a lot of money for. But as
part of the charity fundraiser, I said, if we reached
a certain amount, which I was fairly confident we wouldn't reach,
I would quit smoking. And we reached it, so I
was obligated. And I found that, you know, of all
that I did a bunch of different stuff to help quit.
I used the patch, and I did a lot of
cognitive behavioral therapy and things like that. But the thing
that was most effective to me is that I was
very public about it. I'd made the commitment publicly, and
I quit publicly. I started a blog where I talked
every day about my experiences and things like that, and
so I felt this like enormous obligation to all the
people that were listening to the show, that were following
the blog, that were quitting along with me. A bunch
of people quit along with me, and so you know,
I'm certainly not going to say that quitting smoking was easier,
but thanks to the amount of online support I had,
it was a hell of a lot easier than I
ever expected it would be.
Speaker 2: You can take this as far as you want, if anywhere.
How hard was it? I mean, we're talking about withdrawals
and symptoms and sleepless nights, and you know the psychology
of addiction. Did you go through all that?
Speaker 3: Not as again, not as much as I thought I would.
I think that there's you know, there are two ways
that people overcome addiction. One is when people really want
to write when you when you realize in your own heart,
like I'm done with this addiction and I don't want
it to be a part of my life anymore.
Speaker 4: And that one is far easier.
Speaker 3: The other one, of course, is when you have to
when you realize that, you know, I do still want
to drink, but it's ruining my life. I do still
want to, you know, take this drug or or smoke
this cigarette, but I can't do it because of a
health issue, or because of a social issue, or because
of a financial issue or whatever. And I and lumping
those two types of overcoming addiction together, I think, is
it probably isn't fair.
Speaker 4: I had the former.
Speaker 3: I had the much easier, I really don't want to
do this anymore type of addiction. And you know that
combined with the I mean, yes, there were some sleepless nights.
Yes I gained a bunch of weight, you know, a
lot of those things. But it wasn't sort of the
existential misery that so many people have to suffer through
when they're overcoming addiction. So I don't I feel like
comparing mind to theirs is almost like stolen valor.
Speaker 2: Man, if you know he got cranky, how would you
be able to tell the difference. I mean, he's well
got agitated in this crazy climate, you know. I mean,
how would you really know he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms.
I'm just saying I want to come back quickly to games.
It's an awkward segue, but I had in my notes
that there is a Christian Game Developers conference scheduled for
November of this year, and I in my brain am
trying to figure out how we get crowdfund your travel
expenses and no honorarium to send you do a Christian
gamers conference to I don't know, report from the field,
do a live stream interview people. This is a fantasy
of mine. Would you go? I mean, I'm not putting
you on the hook, but would you attend?
Speaker 4: Dude? That sounds amazing. Nobody would have to Where.
Speaker 2: Is it it is? Oh gosh, it's in Orlando, Florida
in November of this year.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, that's driving distance. So yeah, I just
I might have to make that.
Speaker 2: Oh the Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn't he doesnety.
Have you seen that new I'm going to segue to politics.
There's that group what are they called? They're called Secret
Handshake and they always pull a bunch of Shenanigans in
DC to tweak the Trump administration. And they put a
couple of console games called Operation Epic Furious Straight str
Ai t Straight to Hell, and you can play it
online at Epic Furious dot com. Have you seen this one?
Speaker 4: Noah, I have not.
Speaker 2: It is a gift. It is a gift. It is
produced in the classic eight bit theme. And you are
Donald Trump and you spawn in the White House in
the Oval Office, and you just pinball around and just
a few of the experiences. You can talk to JD.
Vance about why oil should be referred to as lube.
There is a couch store, which also of course relates
to Vance. You can burn Epstein files. You can order
diet cokes if you're not in the mood for declaring
war on another nation. Vladimir Putin shows up and he's
a centaur. He's got a horse. His whole half of
his body's a horse, and he's naked from the waist up.
You can meet Matt Gatz in a creepy locker room.
You can fight Iranian schoolgirls. You actually go to Iran
Gone and anyway you can go. Anybody can go to
epic Furious dot Com and play this and the way
the game ends, I think you go to Milania and
you ask to hold hands and the game's overly is
you know what, beautiful? It's beautiful.
Speaker 3: One of the worst things I've ever had to do
in my professional life. On god awf of movies, we
reviewed the Milania movie recently, and I'll tell you the
one big takeaway from that. I mean, we all know
that there's no love in that relationship, but the biggest
takeaway in that entire movie for me is there's a
moment where he calls her and he's just delivered it's
not his inauguration speech, but it's some really big speech.
It's a big deal thing. And she's like and he
calls and he's like, Hey, did you watch my speech?
And she's like no, no, and he goes, oh, you
should really watch it. It was really good. And she's like,
I'll see the highlights on the news. This is in
her fucking movie that he's financing.
Speaker 2: Which was directed by Brett Ratner, who has a shit
ton of sexual allegation the sexual misconduct allegations. He's been
a pariah in Hollywood, the guy behind Rush Hour. I
think he did X Men three. Yeah, and now he's
doing I heard it was like sominex. I'd like it
is God, the longest commercial in the world is what
I heard. So is that accurate?
Speaker 4: It is staggeringly boring. You know it's funny.
Speaker 3: I uh, my co host Eli boskiy, you made a
great point throughout the whole thing, because the entire thing is,
you know, we go from one fitting to another and
listen to Milania complain that the that the caller is
a quarter of an inch too fat or whatever, and
he says, He's like, can you imagine if they made
this documentary about Jill Biden no shit right, where she's
just going to different balls and getting fitted for different
hats the whole time.
Speaker 4: It's just it's incredible to that.
Speaker 2: I heard the same riff on Kamala Harris. They're like,
imagine Kamala Harris insisting that she have a billion dollar ballroom, right.
Fox News would lose its mind over it.
Speaker 4: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I had somebody named Tim ask this question. This
is in regard to today's political climate. Do you get
a guilty pleasure out of watching the pro leopards eating faces?
Party get their own faces? Eaten when when magas see
the shit fall back on them and they pay. Is
there some Shoden Freuda going on with you when you
see that happen.
Speaker 3: Oh, I live for it now. So there's two levels
of this, right. So when it's just faceless guy on
the internet, I absolutely love it. When it's like, you know,
members of my family, it's a lot less fun, right
because you know, I've just watched my niece and her
whole family lose their health insurance thanks to Donald Trump
and their their elimination of the Obamacare subsidies, right, And
so there's no Shotenfreuda in that. But yeah, in terms
of the folks online yelling about this ain't what I
voted for, well, yes it is. It's exactly what you
voted for.
Speaker 2: I see the headlines, and our media continues to fail
us utterly. You know. It was like Donald Trump's polling
numbers are tanking. It's only thirty eight percent, and I'm like, no,
the headline is thirty eight percent of Americans polled say
they still support this motherfucker. That's the headline. Right.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, It's just crazy to me that we're still in
this horse race mentality. But a guy who's just actively
dismantling democracy, aligning us with autocrats and tyrants, openly taking bribes,
openly taking billions of dollars of bribes and not even
pretending otherwise. And the media is talking about like, well,
you know, the rhetoric on the left is getting a
little violent.
Speaker 4: You know, why are we still talking about this.
Speaker 2: I'd like to make note here as well. I use
the word motherfucker to keep Noah comfortable. You got to
throw those in from time to time, you know, don't
let him be the only one who uses it. Do
you swear as much in real life? I swear a
lot more in real life than I do on the air.
People like to call me, you may be host of
the scathing atheist. I'm kind of the gateway atheist. So
when people know somebody they're coming out, or they're you know, doubting,
or they're curious, or maybe they know someone who is
I'm a pretty easy referral because I tell a lot
of stories and we do a lot of in general
info and I'm not, you know, I'm not too abrasive.
And you seem to be the place where they land
when they're a little more I don't know, I don't
even know how to praise the question, but you know
what I'm talking about, Noah, you get that vibe?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I mean I do that. Man.
Speaker 3: When I tell people who are religious that I do
an atheist podcast, they're like, oh, I'd like to check
it out. I'm like, why don't you start with my
friend Seth.
Speaker 2: You're kidding me? That's a lie. Oh don't you don't
do that? Really?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? Yeah, No, I don't want them to go straight
to me. No.
Speaker 3: It's funny because there are two different trajectories there. One
is like Seth to Noah, and the others that Noah
to Seth. Right, because a lot of people come out
of religion and they're super angry and they're really mad,
and they want somebody to yell about all of the
injustices that they've suffered and all of the things that
they missed out on, in which case I'm great. And
then as they calm down, they move on to you
and they're like, Okay, now, what can we do about it?
But I think that, you know, they also go the
other way sometimes, when people are just kind of doubting
and not so sure, they start with your stuff and
then and that gets them angry, and they're like.
Speaker 4: Well, I need somebody with more fucks in their show.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well and you meet that quota and you and
the god awful movies guys have such good chemistry. So
that's another jumping off point. How many films have you reviewed?
Two dates?
Speaker 3: Uh, five hundred and we're going to be doing reviewing
our five hundred and fifty seventh today this afternoon.
Speaker 4: But that's not counting.
Speaker 3: We also do secular bonus episodes for our patrons, and
that's another I think one hundred and twenty or so,
one hundred and fifteen.
Speaker 2: At this point, I'm just doing the math on the
hours invested in these films. Is it still fun? I mean,
are they still bad in a good way after all
this time?
Speaker 3: Well, you know what's amazing is that the technology of
making terrible movies has been moving up right this whole time.
So like the accessibility of filmmaking, you know, like you
go back to the terrible movies of the seventies, terrible
Christian movies of the seventies, there's like nine of them,
you know, there's I mean there are there are quite
a few, but there it took a lot to make
a movie. In the seventies, right, you had to talk
a lot of churches into investing a lot of money
into your production to make even the worst of films.
But now, you know, especially now with the advent of AI,
anybody can go in their room and spend a couple
hours and walk.
Speaker 4: Out with a movie. And believe me, that's all that
goes into a lot of these.
Speaker 2: So I remember I did a running commentary on the
Thief in the Night films. This is a peak into
my pathetic world. So I stream are produced an entire
commentary showing the film Steve in the Night, Distant Thunder,
Image of the Beast, and there was a fourth one
I can't remember, Prodigal Planet or something, yep. And so
I'm going through all of these and I'm down in
the little thumbnail window and I'm doing commentary on everything
that's happening. Well prepped, you know, all of this time
I spent and I posted it all and three days
later I get a copyright strike and YouTube says you
do this again, We're going to delete everything you do
and make you a pariah. And online I was like,
oh my god, So you guys, how do you dodge
the copyright stuff.
Speaker 4: So we don't show clips of the movies.
Speaker 3: We don't, you know, we just describe what happens in
the movies, because yeah, there's a couple of them that
are crazy litigious, right the a couple of the big
Christian film producers and makers. So yeah, we avoid showing clips.
We don't even show stills or anything like that of
the movies. We just describe how they turn out. And
we have had a couple of people make noise about
suing us, but I think that in every case to
this point, once they actually talk to a lawyer, if
they talk to a lawyer, the lawyer explained to them
they've got you know, there's just no way in.
Speaker 2: Oh, I've guessed it on the show, and we get
the privilege of sort of, I mean, it's almost better
when they're described like you know, apocalyptic militarized group shows
up in jeeps wearing plastic hats and fake guns and
you know, there's a monster. And the more you know,
you get you and Eli and Heath describing the shit,
it's actually better than the actual film.
Speaker 3: Right, certainly, hope so and and you know, like one
of the things that we do on the on the
because I love terrible movies. I'm a big fan of
watching people fail miserably at creative endeavors. So a lot
of times when we watch these movies, we're encouraging people
to watch them, you know, like the the the one
place where potentially we could be open to a lawsuit
is if we're discouraging people from watching them movies that
we're costing these guys' money. But we're constantly We'll constantly say, hey,
this is a fun one to put on with your friends,
you know. So, you know, in a sort of a
weird perverse way, we're actually helping out a lot of
these filmmakers in a way, to be honest, that I'm
not entirely comfortable with, but for legal reasons is apparently
very important.
Speaker 2: It's almost like when I published something on the Thinking
Atheist YouTube page and a religious organization's ad pops up,
you know. Yeah, I'm like, some people are like, doesn't
this bother you? And I'm like, well, first of all,
good luck converting this audience to whatever religion you're selling.
And sometimes it's even Christian films. I may have even
seen a Pure Flicks ad. I'm like, yeah, you let
me know. How that's working out. Secondly, thanks for the money,
Thank you for investing in my work.
Speaker 3: So Liberty Universities put out an episode or two of
our show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's lovely. I was on, did you guys we
were talking about bad movies. These aren't religious movies. But
I'm trying to think and I'm going to come back
to sort of the battlefield earths of Christian films, like
you know, they're really bad ones. But did you guys
ever review the car? Because I was We were talking
on your show about this nineteen seventies film. There's this
blacked out like Lincoln something, and it's all murdered out
and it's like a demon car with no driver and
it just drives around the town running people over. But
it won't go into a cemetery because that's holy ground.
Did you guys ever go there with the car?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: The honest is like, I think we may have on
an episode I wasn't on, but I can't remember for sure.
I remember you recommending it and we got really excited
about it. If we've somehow let that slip through the cracks,
I am.
Speaker 2: Somebody check it. Okay, I'm gonna I hate it. This
is almost like what's your favorite song kind of thing,
but give me one of the worst in the Christian realm,
and then overall in the culture, like a non religious
film or piece of media, something that's just on the
hall of shame. Anything come to mind.
Speaker 3: Well, So, honestly, the movie The Keys of the Kingdom
that I mentioned earlier is one of the most delightfully
horrible things that I've ever watched in my life, So
I can't recommend that highly enough. My normal answer here
is a movie called If Footmen tire you, then what
will horses do? But I've talked about that on your
show before, so I didn't want to go back to that.
Speaker 4: Well, so you could do a lot worse than that.
But if you want an absolutely terrible secular movie, I
think possibly the worst movie ever made with real cameras
and real lighting was a movie called Blackbird by the
guy who started River Dance Flatley, Michael Flatley.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the story behind us is absolutely amazing. The
Irish government enacted all these laws, as many countries do,
to try to encourage Hollywood productions to come and make
their movies in Ireland, and part of this is like,
if you hire Irish people to work on your movie.
The government will imburshi fifty percent of their salary if
you hire locations. If you rent out locations in Ireland,
the government will give you.
Speaker 4: A certain reimbursement.
Speaker 3: So Michael Flatley came up with this great scam where
he was making a fake movie and renting Irish locations
from himself and then getting the government to reimburse him.
Right and he was hiring his own restaurant staff during
the restaurant or the restaurant scene and getting the government
to reimburse him. And he did this for years and
the only thing they had to show for it was
this preview, because he had to like at least keep
up the pretense that this was a real movie.
Speaker 4: But eventually the government.
Speaker 3: Kind of came to him and said, hey, man, if
you don't make a real movie out of this, at
some point you have to give the money back. And
so they put this hurried nonsense thing together to try
to string the scenes from the preview into a real movie.
And it's just such an afterthought of a disaster. If
you love bad movies, this one should absolutely be on
your list.
Speaker 2: It sounds that you've a bull model. He made Blood
Brain and some others, and I guess he got government subsidies.
And it has been argued that the worst the film
was somehow he was able to get a kickback, so
he made shitty movies on purpose. I don't even know
if that's true. I need it to be true. That
sounds similar, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, very similar to his model, Okay, I would
I would say worst movies though, Yeah, there was.
Speaker 2: Any time you make a video game film, you're probably
in shaky territory, you know, because that's rarely done well
at all. But he did. I think it was called
House of the Dead or Island of the Dead, where
these people are on a boat and they end up
on a zombie infested island and then all of a sudden,
they all somehow miraculously know how to do martial arts,
so they're flying through the air doing all these ninja
moves some yea, you know, the rave music's playing as
that kind of classic film kind of deal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not Sega's proudest moment there. It's right beneath the
time that Sonic the Hedgehog's balloon guide in the middle
of the Mazy S Day Parade, And I think I
think we reviewed that one on got awful movies at
some point.
Speaker 2: I know there's a new Mortal Kombat film. Those have
been kind of hit and miss. But you've watched the
challenge of taking a gaming experience to the big screen
and how rarely it works. It's not that it's never worked,
but I guess I have a two part question. Do
you have thoughts as to why the translation is so hard?
And do you have like a best and worst of
video game films?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 4: I think the House of the Dead is a pretty good.
Speaker 3: Nominee for worst of them, but I think actually the
Super Mario Over the first Super Mario Brothers movie, would probably.
Speaker 4: Have to take the cake there. I think.
Speaker 3: You know, the biggest problem that you have most of
the time is the same as the biggest problem that
you have in video game writing. Right. It's a thing
called loudo narrative dissonance, which is the fact that what
the gameplay demand of you and what the story demands
of you are almost always two completely different things. Right,
So there are very few stories where the next logical
thing in the story is for you to go out
and kill six hundred more orcs right or upgrader bags
so that you can put more arrows in it or
what have you. And it's very often in a game
you're like, well, if the entire universe is at stake here,
you would think that this merchant would just give me
the largest available quiver for my arrows and not make
me go out and you know, get my own leather.
And so whenever you're writing for a game, you have
to take all of that stuff into account, and those things,
those things that are created to make the game work,
end up becoming canonical elements of the story, right, Like
so with the Assassin's Creed games. Originally one of the
clever things that Assassin's Creed did is they said, well,
these are all memories, and the reason you can't go
into that part of the town is because that person
never went there and he doesn't remember what it looks like.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So this was all developed early on as a reason
why there would be artificial limitations on the city that
you're walking through. Of course, as the Assassin Screed game
franchise continued to get more and more popular, that element
had to stay with it. So that's a weird accumulation
that the game has that serves no narrative function, but
that anybody who wants to make a movie about it
is now stuck with so And.
Speaker 2: The list is long and indistinguished. But I remember, and
some of these are pretty old. The Super Mario I
remember watching I bought a ticket for Super Mario Brothers,
the movie with Bob Hoskins, and I remember thinking, this
film is so disconnected from the gaming experience. It was dark,
it was dystopian. It was kind of grimy, like I
felt kind of gross, and I'm like, the game is clean,
happy colors and Boeing buying, buying, and you're getting coins
and doing all this stuff, and instead it was like
it's like somebody had a really bad Blade Runner and
you know, they threw a few mon A characters in,
but I just felt like I was I felt I
left depressed. It was just sad. And then the Street
Fighter that was a piece of crap. I wanted to
like the Resident Evil films. I wanted to like him
Wing Commander Doom was awful. Prince of Persia blood rain.
My problem with Doom was this beyond the fact that
the Rock was in it, and I'm like, why why
would you do that? But they didn't use real demons
like isn't Doom. You're opening the portal to Hell and
you're battling demons. Wasn't that the game?
Speaker 4: That's the whole concept.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so they're like they took the easy way out,
and they're like, wow, you know, we don't want to
use hel on real demons, so they ended up using
creatures from another dimension. Just oh, just took to That's
weak sauce. Noah, that's weak sauce. Did you see Doom?
Speaker 4: I didn't see the movie.
Speaker 2: No, Wow, fine, fine, I subject myself to the bad
video game movies. Well you subject yourself to the bad
religious movies. Maybe this all evens out. So any other
any other worsts on your list?
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think of, Uh, yeah, like the Resident
Evil ones. I mean, the Resident Evil is some of
the silliest writing in the history of video games. So
that was a pretty big uphill battle that they had
to fight there. I it would be very hard for
me to hate the newer Super Mario Brothers, the Chris
Pratt Super Mario Brothers movies more than I do. Why
there's just strike me as just meaningless fan service. There's
just no no real story going on there. It's just like,
oh look, here's another thing from that game, you like.
Speaker 2: You know, just a big commercial kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just no real effort at at at telling
a story within this world. Just just more an effort
of throwing as many Easter eggs as they possibly can
at you.
Speaker 2: Do you get the cynical about the disnification of major franchises.
A lot of people flipped out about Star Wars. I don't.
I'm not, you know, I'm not a purist. Like, if
they've got resources and can tell a good story, I'll
probably go see the new Mandalorian Grogu film. I mean, yeah,
I don't know. Do you feel like it's all been
kind of I don't know, homogenized by the big corporations.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It seems to me a little bit of a weird
argument to be arguing that Star Wars has gotten too commercial, right,
Like it's sort of the whole point of it. I mean,
I take issues with the way that Disney has handled
the Star Wars franchise, you know, I don't think they've
done a great job with it, although I'm super excited
about Mandalorian and Grogu as well. But yeah, I mean,
you know, look, I'm not going to complain about anything
that brought us Rogue one and and ors, so.
Speaker 2: Really, I mean, we really enjoyed them. And it's almost
like when somebody likes an indie band that makes it
big and they're like, if they have a hit song, man,
I'm never going to listen to them again. They're commercial now.
It's almost like we want to keep stuff in our
back pocket. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it, so
and hopefully we'll have a culture in which we can
enjoy things. And our final segment, I'm going to see
if I get No Illusions to sound off do a
Dia tribe about the state of politics and perhaps the
future of the United States given all the stuff that's
going on around us. I know he's got an opinion
and we'll hear it next. Continuing now, a conversation with
podcast host, author, activist, humanist, and nice guy No Illusions.
I don't know I got to end on a heavier note,
but as we head into the last half of twenty
twenty six, every moment is a no shit moment. You're
a cultural commentator. Do you have any predictions, hopes, fears
about you know, just what the United States is even
going to look like in the next few months.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I'm really hesitant to say anything optimistic
because a it's sort of against my brand, right, I'm
supposed to be the pessimist and be there's just nothing
to get optimistic about. I mean, I have a perverse
hope that all of this redistricting that the Republicans are
doing underestimates the amount of shift there has been towards
Democrats as Trump has fucked the economy. So my hope
is that a lot of these safe Republican districts that
they think that they're creating actually aren't safe. But given
the fact that they've sort of given up any pretense
of democracy, and given the fact that the Court has
given up any pretense of justice, I I find I
find it very hard to see anything positive in this
country's future.
Speaker 2: I have shifted in my own mind, and I can't
tell if it's right. You know, We're all like, we
need to play by the rules, and we need to
obey established norms, and we need to take the high road.
And meanwhile they're scrambling and bending and breaking every rule
in the book in their favor and it's working. And
so I kind of come to this point where I'm like, fine,
you want to redistrict, Fine, let's go in a redistrict
and let's go and just sort of change the whole
freaking map. You want to set those rules, Fine, we'll
play by your rules and let's just see how it
shakes out, regardless of what the law says, or you know,
whether or not they aberated the law. I don't know.
I feel like we're in a street fight, and that's
kind of where I've landed.
Speaker 3: Noah, Yeah, No, We're very much in a street fight
where we're going well, nothing below the belt. But the
scary thing about that is, of course, if both sides
abandoned that at the same time, you never know what
you're where you're going to land, right. You look at
something like the Iranian Revolution, which was started for all
kinds of really good reasons, but because you know, they
because everybody had sort of abandoned the norms, abandoned the rules.
Then at the end, when there was sort of a
scramble for power, something even worse grew in instead. So,
you know, the the value of the rules based order
is that you know what you're getting at the end
of the day, at least, you know, to some degree,
and if everybody abandons it, you know, it's just a
complete crapshoot as to what we wind up with if
if we have to burn the house down to save it,
you know, that's we haven't really saved much.
Speaker 2: It's messy. It's so messy, and I don't I think
people some of it will call me seth, what do
you think the answer is, like, you're calling the wrong guy.
Like I'm as alarmed and overwhelmed and confused and frustrated
as anybody else. And then we've got all of these
effigies and statues and posters. Have you ever seen a
man who has masturbated publicly as much as Donald Trump?
I mean, oh my god, God, that guy can, I mean,
and we're doing it. His face is on the park pass,
and he's got the golden statue at mar A Lago,
and he's got the banner off the DOJ which is
supposed to be an a political organization, and he's I mean,
he literally is hanging his face everywhere. And I didn't
hear someone say this, and I don't know, I think
it may be true. There's no statue or poster or
banner or whatever that he can establish that we cannot
eventually tear down almost you know, I have that mental
picture after the Iraq War, and we can have that discussion.
But when they put the ropes on the Saddam statue
and ripped it to the ground, I don't know, do
you you feel like that way? I mean, he can
put up the stuff and then we can go and
we can just all strip it down whenever it's all
over kind of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the phrase, if I recall correctly in
Latin's damnatio memoriam, where we damn the memory, we rub
the face off all the statues and just try to
erase him from the history books.
Speaker 4: And I have a lot of high hope about that.
Speaker 3: You know, I have watched this country completely lose its
mind and then wake up ten years later and go,
what the hell were we thinking with the Patriot Act?
Speaker 4: Right, So.
Speaker 3: That's possible. It's possible that we have that kind of
a shift ahead. But I think we've learned so much
about what Americans really are from the Trump administration. I mean,
keep in mind, you know, you were talking about that
thirty eight percent approval rating, and some people have him
down as low as thirty. But like, the reason that
people lowered their opinion of him wasn't because of.
Speaker 4: All the awful stuff he did. It's because the incompetent
stuff he did.
Speaker 3: Right, Like, these people wouldn't have stop if the economy
was doing better, if gas prices weren't high, if the
Iran war had been more successful, his approval rating would
still be hovering in the high forties.
Speaker 2: We didn't mind if he did it to other people
when he did it to us, Well, now it's all right.
You know, when our bank accounts are affected, or when
our rights are infringed, or whenever we're getting screwed at
the gas pomp pot. Well now now it's on, and
it has been a black light at the crime scene
for sure. And I'm still pissed at non participants in
twenty twenty four, those sort of idealistic protest non voters
who told me that the high road was not to
participate in the game. If you play the game, you've
already lost. I'm livid at those people and they come
after me in the comments section. You're not going to
shame me into participating in the political process, And I'm like,
I don't think you're going to participate. I just think
you're an asshole. I was just kind of where I fall.
Do you feel that at all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was this meme that was making its way
around a little while back that says, I'm going to
script the wording, but it said something along the lines of,
you know, if you're blaming our non participation for your loss,
then obviously you've got to put somebody that we like
in next time, Right, it would make no sense to
blame us for the loss and then not listen to
us next time. And my response to that was just like, wow, Yeah,
if you don't learn my lesson, who will the.
Speaker 2: Perfect is the enemy of the good. I mean, the
house is on fire. I just think, you know, and
I get it. I mean they on the border in
Palestine and Kamala and all those things that they would
just stick right there. And I understand Gaza was a
big sticking point, and I understand, but I'm like, all
things are not relative. And I'm also angry that I think,
how freaking blind or delusional did you have to be
in twenty sixteen when you saw him coming? I saw
him coming. Tens of millions of people saw this con
man coming. Hell even people in his administration. I'm thinking
about Vance and Marco Rubio and all the other people
who came forward and said, this man's a gruptor and
a con man and a showman. No one should believe
his shit. And then he gets elected and they're like,
we love you, and they stick their head right up
his ass, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, absolutely well.
Speaker 3: And then the one that was so bizarre to me
was in twenty twenty four when we're trying to convince
people of this and we're.
Speaker 4: Like, where the hell were you six years ago? Right?
Speaker 3: We had all of these people, all of these non voters,
all these people who just couldn't be bothered that were
like pointing out, well, you know, Trump says he's going
to do X, Y and Z.
Speaker 4: Well, who gives a ship what he says? You were?
Speaker 3: He was just there four years ago. You saw what
a liar this guy was. Would you rump still skin
your not Rumble Skills, whichever one s lept for too long?
Speaker 2: Given I think it was. I think it was Rumple
skill skin.
Speaker 3: Okay I may have gotten that one, right, I'm too
angry google it, but yeah, it's it's it's just it's
incredible to be. You know, a lot of people say
American voters have a short memory. Every American voters have
the memory of a gold fish. It's not that, right,
It's that they don't care. It's that they don't care until,
like you said, their uh, personal finances are affected by it.
Speaker 2: All right. In the comments section, it's rip van Winkle.
Don't just don't send the email. Don't send the email.
We've course corrected. Good science corrects itself when it comes
across the accurate information. Last thing, and I'll let you go.
So we see, despite all the Christian Nationalism Project twenty
twenty five, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this
country totally turned into a far right history revisionist rally
of zealot and hateful people. But the rise of the
non religious in the United States cannot be ignored. So
more and more the government standing in contradiction to the
values and the culture of everyday people. Do you have
any thoughts about if they're not atheists, they're certainly not
all that interested in religion, sort of the core grassroots
of the United States. You have any thoughts on that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there's a really interesting myth that's going
on right now Visa VI the resurgence of religion amongst
young men.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: You hear this quite a bit, and there's some statistical
evidence that maybe this is happening. There's a lot more
statistical evidence that it's not. But what it's mostly built
on is this anecdotal evidence that pastors and preachers and
religious leaders are saying, wow, my congregation is made up
more and more of young men, Like there's a higher
percentage of young men than there used to be. Now,
the story here is that young women are leaving the
church and they're not coming back. Right, For so many years,
the church was able to perpetuate itself by appealing to
women and counting on them to come back to the
church when they had kids and they were ready for
these traditional family values and things like that. And that's
just not happening for him anymore. Now it's possible that religion,
that the church can sustain itself without that maternal influence,
without mothers raising their children in the church and pushing
their children towards religious values. But if they're going to
I don't know how the hell they're going to do it.
It will have to be something entirely new, So if
you need a hope for the future, that's where mine
is right now.
Speaker 2: We saw that during COVID, right, people finally had an
excuse not to get up on Sunday morning. Ah yeahquarantine,
you know, social distancing. And then they were sleeping in
or doing their own thing on Sundays and thought, hey,
this is kind of nice. And then when the pandemic
pretty much ended, they didn't go back, and churches are
still reeling, and I did find a sense of joy,
like people are discovering. I mean church has always been
for most people. I think Christianity, religion, whatever, is really
more of a social exercise, right. I belong it's an identity,
it's a community, but we don't need religion to do that.
I do think a lot of people are starting to
figure that out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was a weird litmus test. I think COVID
was there were a lot of things that we all
had to stop doing. And then once COVID was over,
there were certain spells that were broken, right, Like people
just never really went back to the movies like they
did before COVID. And then there were other things that
we realized that we actually truly missed, right, Like people
go out to eat a lot more now than they,
or at least I know in the years immediately after COVID,
because that's one of those things that we really missed
and that we really wanted back. And I think it
was a great chance for the whole country to reevaluate
what mattered and what didn't. And yeah, Church firmly fell
on the side of didn't for an awful lot of people.
Speaker 2: I'm good with it. I'm okay with it. No illusions.
How do people find you and your your work? I
say your work like you're going to send me in
twenty directions? But how do people find you in your work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, wherever you get your podcast, just look for the
scathing atheist or gone awful movies and those shows will
send you to the all the other ones.
Speaker 2: Okay, and Noah and I taken the stage for a
three hour event Cincinnati, July the eleventh. This is going
to be right before the Arc Encounter protest in Williamstown, Kentucky.
No have you ever done the ark and counter protest before?
Speaker 4: I have?
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 3: I was there with them, I think on the seventh anniversary,
on the seventh one.
Speaker 2: It's a ton of fun, awesome for those who don't
know what it is, real, real fast, indulge me everybody.
So Canahan bills this one hundred and ten million dollar
paper weight in Williamstown, which is supposedly an exact replica
of the Arc, except it's not. It's like a building
with an ARC on the front and the woods already deteriorating,
even though it was built with state of the art
construction equipment. And he's playing both sides. On one side,
he says, I'm tax exempt because I'm a church and
ministry five oh one c three Oh. Look, I'm a
tourist organization bringing in dollars so now we can operate
for profits. So he's really got it. He's got it made.
But I don't know if his Tri State Freethinkers, Kentucky Atheists,
several groups sort of come together in the They congregate
on the entry area of the ark Encounter and just
hold up funky signs funny stuff. Genocide and Incest Park
is one of the signs, and they just sort of
make some noises. People either drive by or go into
the Ark in counter. It's kind of awesome that's happening
on July the twelfth. So if you're going to begin
in the area you can do both. Details on all
of that The Thinkingatheist dot com slash events Noah, thanks
for spending over an hour chatting me. I'll look forward
to seeing you in person here in a few weeks.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, super excited.
Speaker 1: Thanks so follow The Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter
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