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

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 moments 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 fathers 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, its a skill that Ive 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 isnt 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 Id overlooked a critical lesson. Id learned to fire accurately and quickly, but I hadnt 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 fathers 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. Id grown exhausted trying to contain it and Id 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 ones 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 persons 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 doesnt make a good target because its shocking, but rather because its 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. Its a tool that has no legitimate use. The beneficial works of charity could be done better without it and theyre more than overshadowed by the detriments of religion. Its 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 weve 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 programs 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 doesnt 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.