Hey everybody, hi friends, well from truly gorgeous Salt Lake City, Utah.

It's Thank God I'm Atheist, the podcast.

I'm Frank Feldman, and I'm Dan Beacher, and coming up on the show today, Dan, we're

going to be talking about your evolution on Christmas, my, it's my hallmark story, it,

you know, Dickensian, possibly, yeah, and it's in, in its redemption, the, the, the loss

of your humbuggery. Or is it scum done done? Did Scrooge's heart grow three times? Three

sizes that day, or has the Grinch, re-grinched? I think you re-grinched. That's where my money

is. We'll see re-grinching of Dan. All right. But first we've got some stories, some stuff

to talk about, stuff happened in the world. You bet. Such as a Florida pastor and his son

were arrested this week. Sure, that's normal. Happens all the time. What's special about

this one is they were caught in an over eight million dollar COVID scam. Oh, they filed

for PPP. That's the pay check protection program relief funds that the federal government

was just doling out like there was no tomorrow in those early days of the pandemic. These folks

said that they had a weekly, I'm sorry, a monthly payroll of $2.7 million. And 486 employees

they needed to keep going. I did the math. That would suggest that their average salary

that they were paying, these people, was $66,000 a year. Which is conceivable, I suppose.

But it's a Christian ministry. So that should have been a red flag all by itself, because

literally everything about everything should be a red flag on this one. Nonetheless, it

turns out that it's very likely that they never had employees. Like literally no employees at

all. Well, that is a great scam. When when when federal investigators showed up the ministry's office

in Orlando, the door was locked and workers at the neighboring businesses told them nobody was

ever seen inside a review of the ministry's website found that the donation links were inactive.

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