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Warning! This podcast has bad words in it. Don't tell mom.

This week's episode of The Skating Atheist is brought to you by Stamps.com

and by The War on Christmas. Halloween's over so it's time to ruin the lives of Christians with red cups and the word happy. Let the preemptive strikes begin.

And now, Skating Atheist.

I'm Chris from the Po-Duck Polymath podcast and we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men,

unless you're from the south in which case we didn't come from no damn apes.

It's Thursday. It's November 2nd. And we're just as pissed off at God as you are. I'm no illusions.

Um, Eli Bosnick. Um, Heath N. Wright. And from New York, New York. And Secret Layer, Pennsylvania. This is The Skating Atheist.

Oh, and this week's episode. Roy Moore isn't sure if Gays are people. House Republicans hope to pass a morning after bill that describes when a woman's right to choose comes to an end.

And the president of the Australian skeptics will be here to convince us that Australia isn't going to kill us. But first, the diatribe.

On Tuesday, the world gathered in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. And as the web of Protestant sex,

the vast in the afterglow of that milestone, I think it's important that we rationalists piss on it a little bit.

So here's the story they tell. Well, it's one of the most iconic stories in the history of Western religion. Martin Luther, a plucky small town monk grew tired of the festering corruption of the Catholic church and defiantly strode through town hammer and nails in one hand and is complaint in the other.

As the town folk watched, he walked up to the castle church in Vittenburg and nailed his 95 feces to the door, thus sparking a worldwide religious realignment that would sap the power from Rome and put it back in the hands of the people in that single act of defiance Luther paved the way for the enlightenment and began the slow process of resting power out of the greedy hands of the papacy.

And of course, virtually every word of that is bullshit. Now, that doesn't matter much to Protestants because their religious and historical accuracy has long been a fickle mistress for the faithful, but we value facts. So let's shine a light on a couple of the details here.

First of all, Martin Luther almost certainly never nailed the 95 feces to the church door at Vittenburg or anywhere else for that matter. And this isn't a he would have used pace kind of quibble here, although he almost certainly would have used paste. This whole event is just a fucking fabrication.

Now, I should ratchet down my confidence level a bit on that because I know historian and there are legitimate historians who think this happened, but there's also a hell of a lot who don't and they tend to offer up better evidence like for example, the fact that this story wasn't recorded until after Martin Luther's death.

And when it was, it was by a guy who claimed to be an eyewitness, but was later proven to be nowhere near Vittenburg that day or that year for that matter. And it's not like Martin Luther wasn't a fan of writing shit down.

Why wouldn't he have written in something about having done this somewhere in the 30 or so pamphlets that he cranked out in the three years after it, but beyond that, it just wouldn't make any fucking sense for him to nail a do something note to the church door. Martin Luther wasn't looking to create a schism.

He considered himself a good Catholic and didn't want to get x communicated. He wanted reform sure, but he almost certainly would have been trying to keep it quiet along the way.

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