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Episode: Episode 598: The Horrible Lives and Deaths of the Saints - The OGs

Author: The Last Podcast Network
Duration: 01:30:35

Episode Shownotes

This week the boys travel way, way back - to the days before the advent of the Holy Roman Empire to examine the dark, bloody history behind a handful of "The OG Saints" and the often brutally gruesome tales that led to their consecrations. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple

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Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_03
There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left.

00:00:09 Speaker_09
That's when the cannibalism started.

00:00:20 Speaker_06
Where are Mother Teresa's bones? Are you quizzing? Fuck your fucking ass. I would feel the sharks. Where are Mother Teresa's bones? I have a business opportunity. Listen, where are Mother Teresa's bones? I'm looking it up right now.

00:00:35 Speaker_06
According to house, she's in the mother house, of course. Yeah. This liar.

00:00:41 Speaker_03
The mother house?

00:00:42 Speaker_06
This black liar. What? Is she in Calcutta? She is in a, where is it in Calcutta? I think it's next to Calcutta, Cleveland? And it was in, yeah, Mother Teresa's tomb is in Kolkata. It is in Kolkata, where, because she had such good memories there.

00:00:58 Speaker_04
Yeah, absolutely. She's laughing, laughing when she was telling people they couldn't have their food.

00:01:03 Speaker_00
No, she was like, one of her favorite things is being like, oh, look, it seems you have dropped your testicles. But I'm saying if we- Put on a little weight, are we? Oh, can I eat your nose? I eat your nose.

00:01:19 Speaker_06
Mother Teresa, if we smash up her bones and we piss all over her bones and we take that piss because of the magic of Catholicism, the piss becomes magical.

00:01:29 Speaker_06
Then we're making our own magic piss using the bones of Mother Teresa and that's called money making money because piss is cheap. You can just get a priest to bless your piss. No.

00:01:40 Speaker_07
Yeah, it's got to be filtered. They do this shit all the time. You got to filter it through something else.

00:01:45 Speaker_06
What they do is, one way they keep saints bones, this is true, they smash them up into little Dorito sized pieces and they put them in a giant vase and then people pour oil in the top that comes out the bottom so it runs all over the bones and then magically the oil becomes magic because of the bones, the magic bones.

00:02:02 Speaker_06
And that's why when you piss in it too, that becomes magic piss and God has to like it because God set up the fucking rules. Except it was man who did it.

00:02:12 Speaker_07
Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. Technically, this is a magic episode. My name is Marcus Parks. Bring me Mother Teresa's bones. I want her skin. I want her organs. I want her face.

00:02:22 Speaker_07
I'm here with the entrepreneurial Henry Zebrowski.

00:02:25 Speaker_04
Because that's all you need. That's the collateral. I heard St. Francis of Assisi gave his bones to the dogs because he liked animals.

00:02:32 Speaker_06
You know... Is it true? It's a true. Sidestorieshelppotl.gmail.com. And if you're emailing me though at the same time, send me him on the Teresa's box.

00:02:43 Speaker_07
And we're here with the fun fact filled Ed Larson.

00:02:46 Speaker_04
That's right, man. St. Jerome. He loved playing with skulls. He did. Who's that? Saint Jerome. The actual Saint Jerome? Yeah, the actual Saint Jerome. He's known for loving skulls?

00:02:56 Speaker_04
Yeah, well the only picture I saw of him, he's holding a skull and looking at it like it's Hamlet.

00:03:00 Speaker_06
I think sometimes that was what TV was.

00:03:03 Speaker_03
Just guess what the face used to look like. Why won't you talk to me?

00:03:08 Speaker_04
One day I'll bury you.

00:03:10 Speaker_03
But not this day. And this day I turn you into a bong. That's right! Saint Jerome!

00:03:21 Speaker_07
Oh, St.

00:03:22 Speaker_06
Jerry. Then I realized I'm the only Protestant bastard in this room. Both of y'all are Catholic. I'm fully, I'm indoctrinated. I'm in the cult. I'm fucking, I'm confirmed. Yeah. And you can't leave if you're confirmed. What's your confirmation name? Xavier.

00:03:34 Speaker_06
Oh, Xavier. I did it because of comic books.

00:03:37 Speaker_04
Cool. Yeah. And I'm St. Poppo, they said, because I wanted to pick the dumbest name in the St. Poppo.

00:03:45 Speaker_06
You truly were sort of almost like a brave figure in a way because you were openly against God. Yeah, I hated it. In Catholic school. Me too. They used to call me little devil kid and used to do this at me.

00:03:55 Speaker_04
No, I used to always tell them that it doesn't make any sense. And then when I left Catholic school, because I hated Catholic school, one day I told my parents that if they sent me back to Catholic school, I was going to fail on purpose.

00:04:07 Speaker_03
Rudy Giuliani did.

00:04:08 Speaker_04
Then I told my Jewish father, I was like, I want to go to free school. And then I was able to go to that school. They sent me to CCD to finish out my learnings.

00:04:17 Speaker_07
CCD, that sounds like a fucking juvie center. CCD is the Sunday school, essentially, for Catholics.

00:04:23 Speaker_04
Yeah, you gotta go on Sunday or after school to learn about Catholicism more. But the thing is, I went to Catholic school, so I knew more than the fucking teachers did.

00:04:33 Speaker_04
And so I'm just sitting there playing on my ass, and every time they're like, Ed, oh, you seem to know a lot. And I'm like, ask me something. Ask me something about Jesus Christ. Ask me the executrician. You know, I fucking got your ass, man.

00:04:44 Speaker_06
Guess what? Jesus was Indian. Was he? If he was anything. I don't think he was Indian. He was in there.

00:04:49 Speaker_07
I think India's a really long ways away from the Middle East.

00:04:53 Speaker_06
He was Asian.

00:04:54 Speaker_04
He was Israeli.

00:04:56 Speaker_07
Yeah. I don't know. Now he's worm food. To put it simply, the reason why we're talking about saints is precisely because of how they become saints.

00:05:07 Speaker_07
Their significance in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran churches come from their acts of holiness, sacrifice, and martyrdom, aka magic, torture, and getting murdered.

00:05:17 Speaker_06
Fuck yeah. Yeah, honestly, it does sound like a fun topic altogether, but only religion can make this boring.

00:05:26 Speaker_07
But because of the horrible fates of the Saints, they're considered closer to God than the average Joe, and they have some of the worst deaths you can imagine that usually come as a result of religious persecution.

00:05:36 Speaker_06
Well, especially if your main dude is the flayed Savior boy. You are, of course, then going to view that as good. Oh, yeah. We're going to get into that angle of it here in a bit.

00:05:47 Speaker_04
What's weird is like if you're a good guy and you just help out everyone and then you die of cancer No one gives a shit. No one gives a shit. You have to get your fucking guts turning the jump ropes in order for people to fucking give a fuck.

00:05:58 Speaker_06
And I think that that's a thing that we should start talking about. I think that too many people get called survivors.

00:06:04 Speaker_04
Yeah, these priests just die of natural causes. We should be stringing them up.

00:06:09 Speaker_06
Mother Teresa should have been cut in four parts. Like, if we were really gonna make her a saint, because they cow-cut her in two parts.

00:06:16 Speaker_04
Thank you.

00:06:17 Speaker_06
Thank you. And that comes from the pun-ishment center of the Vatican.

00:06:24 Speaker_07
Well today we're going to start with the OG saints, the ones who existed before the advent of the Holy Roman Empire.

00:06:31 Speaker_07
This was a time when Christianity was decidedly more magical, and Jesus, according to the stories, would pop down to earth from time to time to kinda sorta help out sometimes maybe.

00:06:41 Speaker_10
Hey, you know, hey, what's going on everybody? You blind? Hey, now you can see, see how ugly I am? Ah, back to blind. Funny times, huh? Where you from?

00:06:50 Speaker_04
Please do not give me marbles to hold.

00:06:53 Speaker_10
No, it's already slipped through. Like sands through the hourglass.

00:06:59 Speaker_07
Well in a way the stories of the Saints, they're sort of like DLC for the Bible.

00:07:02 Speaker_07
It's bonus content Saints build on the original concepts of God Satan demons and angels intervening in the lives of everyday people except with Saints It's done through lightning strikes or miraculous healings, and they involve a whole new cast of characters and a whole different kind of story Yeah, it's like a different stroke.

00:07:21 Speaker_06
You remember different stroke when they go into college and Different world.

00:07:24 Speaker_07
I thought you meant there was like a spinoff of different strokes called different strokes.

00:07:32 Speaker_06
Different stroke singular. The father of that having a stroke and trying to figure out how to jerk off again. God I love the old television. They don't make shows like this anymore.

00:07:44 Speaker_07
But the upside to being a saint is that according to some you're allowed to skip the line and get directly into heaven instead of waiting for the day of judgment like everyone else. Or at least that's how it worked way back when.

00:07:55 Speaker_06
Ancient Christianity has almost nothing to do with modern Christianity. Like what it all turned into from the old old old days like right after Jesus quote-unquote died like this is like it really was

00:08:09 Speaker_06
much closer to the ancient pagan actual magical process thought. It took a long time. They had to make it white.

00:08:19 Speaker_06
They had to take it out and they had to strip all the fun out of it in order to convince you, the parishioner, that you had no power and that you had to speak to the priest that is the only person that could gatekeep God.

00:08:32 Speaker_04
They were like the Scientologists of the day. Yeah, because everyone's like, what the fuck are you talking about? No, it's twenty gods, you fucking idiot!

00:08:42 Speaker_07
Well today, canonization is a whole different deal, but we're going to cover the more modern saints and how they come to be a part of the lore in a future episode. This is pre-Constantinopilinian, pre-Constantinopalian. And you'll have to wait for...

00:09:01 Speaker_03
Saints of the future! I am Saint 45794. I am in charge of our plastic angels.

00:09:12 Speaker_04
Oh, cut off her breasts.

00:09:18 Speaker_06
Really fun stuff. That's just a funny sketch. Just a room of malfunctioning robot saints is a really fun idea.

00:09:29 Speaker_07
But the thing about the saints is that they make Christianity a little stickier. Because not only can you pray to God God for the big stuff, Big arch, big umbrella stuff. Yeah.

00:09:39 Speaker_07
You can also choose a personal mascot for your faith who can protect you from illnesses and situations while also assisting you in your profession.

00:09:47 Speaker_06
They are middle managers for the Godhead, who is supposed to literally be the most powerful creative force in the face of the planet, but what this shows you is that sometimes God doesn't care, and that he needs to pass you off to his other guy.

00:10:05 Speaker_06
Oh, you want to do well in your roller skating competition? Talk to Saint Rollasafur, he's the guy in Santa Wheels, alright? I gotta do shit like make volcanoes that kill deer that no one can see.

00:10:18 Speaker_07
Well, while saints don't perform miracles per se, only God or Jesus are supposed to be able to do that, they can intercede on God's behalf.

00:10:26 Speaker_07
For example, if you're a sailor out at sea during a storm, you can pray to Saints Nicholas, Christopher, or Elmo, and one of them might tell you to take a right instead of a left while the ship is getting tossed, and suddenly, that rolling barrel that might have knocked you overboard, it misses your path.

00:10:41 Speaker_07
Maybe. Maybe. Similarly, if you're having problems with something in particular, like say you got a problem with your feet, You can invoke Saint Servatius.

00:10:50 Speaker_04
Yes, and he shows up.

00:10:54 Speaker_05
Oh yes, this little piggy went straight down my throat. I love the New York Jess.

00:11:03 Speaker_07
He's the patron saint of foot ailments. Oh good, so he might help you out with your foot problems Or at least he could give you some comfort.

00:11:10 Speaker_06
It's like the guy that got caught for sucking all the toes. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, well know that the guy in Big Bear There was like breaking into people's homes and sucking on their toes while they were asleep. Oh Real st. Like I behavior you see this is

00:11:23 Speaker_06
What is interesting about the function of the saint is that it comes out of the very, very OG way of practicing Christianity. So for a while, like when it first started, I watched a good documentary on it.

00:11:39 Speaker_06
and they watched a the uh the christian church would they'd have some formal churches and temples but that's not really the main way because they were the way the religion developed is that actually they had develop in secret and part of the way it developed is that the the worship services would largely be in crypts they would go into ground they would go into tombs and also most of the time the way these functions did is that there was a loose group of believers and there was a guy

00:12:06 Speaker_06
that would be the intercedent for you and God.

00:12:09 Speaker_06
They believed this this guy was that he was holier than all the rest of us for some reason probably because he dick didn't work and then what he did was like say they would pray to him while he was alive and then what would happen is that he would die

00:12:23 Speaker_06
And then that person would be then, their bones would be put in the crypt where they're working.

00:12:27 Speaker_06
And one thing they notice is that very early Christian establishments is that when you went into a crypt, there would be benches and you'd have bones all around them and you'd see written words written on the walls to the bones as intercedents for them to talk directly to God.

00:12:43 Speaker_06
Because again, God's busy and he doesn't give a fuck about you. So you need an agent. You have to, you're supposed to have an, this is what we believe in Catholicism. Representative. Representative.

00:12:52 Speaker_06
So when that guy would die, that's where all this started. Where this guy, a person, and then it would eventually become like, what if that guy was like a super popular version of that?

00:13:02 Speaker_06
The guy that would die and then when he was dead would then become the direct way to talk to God. And this was also based off of the hero cults

00:13:10 Speaker_06
the Greek and Roman myths like things like Hercules those are based off real people like those stories are all based off real actual heroes of the time that then people would use as an intermediary and largely this kind of just comes from the fact that we as humans love polytheistic religions and this is a way to cheat that inside of it.

00:13:30 Speaker_07
And we also love novelty. You know, we love something new. We love a new story, and we love having variety.

00:13:35 Speaker_04
And merch! Yeah, merch! You got the grocery beads, you got the shirts. Oh dude, it's merch out the fuckin' E.R., man!

00:13:41 Speaker_06
And it's fuckin' necromancy. This whole thing is necromancy. Because it's about talking, which is the reason why nobody else liked the Catholics.

00:13:48 Speaker_06
Because we had this little function where everybody else had, like, essentially, they could talk directly to God. God wasn't busy enough for them.

00:13:55 Speaker_04
Yeah, and also cannibalism. Yeah. Because you eat Jesus and drink his blood. But that's later!

00:14:01 Speaker_07
Yeah, we'll get to that here in a bit. Saints also serve as examples. Because the whole point of a saint is that they were persecuted for being Christians but never wavered in their faith. Today though, saints are more used as models of endurance.

00:14:14 Speaker_07
A story to point to as to why you should still come to church and give them your money week after week even though your life still fucking sucks. Like Saint Cal Ripken Jr.

00:14:24 Speaker_04
I cooked him nachos once. Oh yeah? How was he? He was delightful. He was delightful. Well, I never met him, but you know, the waitress said he was nice. And then they stole his mother.

00:14:37 Speaker_07
Well, the problem is that because of the continuation of these stories of oppression, because that's what saint stories are, especially these old ones, the stories of Christians being oppressed, many Christians today still have a massive persecution complex they just can't fucking drop.

00:14:52 Speaker_07
Many or all? And they really do need to drop that fucking persecution complex for all our sakes because the persecution we're going to be talking about today is 2,000 years old. It keeps coming.

00:15:04 Speaker_06
It doesn't keep coming. It ended a very long time ago. Also, the persecution here is, they are using it as propaganda. within the church to say, don't you want to be a saint? The way you do that is to make sure you die extra gnarly for Jesus Christ.

00:15:21 Speaker_06
And it has to make that gnarly death, like, an advertisement. Like, we want you to do this. Like, please, please be flipped over on a grill four or five times.

00:15:33 Speaker_07
Now, amongst many other sources, kudos to co-producer Madeleine Shaw for gathering them, we also used a book called Saints Preserve Us by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Rogers and our quest towards today's hagiographies. Saints Preserve Us!

00:15:47 Speaker_07
Saints Preserve Us! Now, it is believed that suspicion of Christians and their subsequent persecution began in 64 AD with the Great Fire of Rome, which burned for six days before being reignited to burn for a further three.

00:16:00 Speaker_04
Rock and roll.

00:16:02 Speaker_07
It was rumored that Emperor Nero created the fire himself to rebuild his palace and some of the more run-down parts of Rome so he could increase taxation. It's basically engaging in an extreme form of gentrification.

00:16:14 Speaker_06
But when we were in the British Museum, I was reading a thing about Nero, like as we were sitting there, and it is interesting because largely the stories about Nero seem to have been because he was so popular and young, and then eventually they blamed a lot of stuff on him after the fact.

00:16:28 Speaker_07
But no matter what the real story is, Nero still needed someone to blame for the fire that had swallowed much of Rome. And Christians were convenient scapegoats.

00:16:36 Speaker_07
See, before this, people didn't really give a shit about Christians one way or another because they had no bearing on how people lived their daily lives.

00:16:44 Speaker_07
But because they were seen as having such bizarre beliefs, what with their one God that was also a man but also a ghost, they were easy to otherize in a society that worshipped thousands of gods.

00:16:54 Speaker_06
Because the older religions, God is a lot more nebulous. And what the Christian religion did was essentially, I feel like, I'm obviously speaking entirely out of school, but it really seems that they like the concept of, that God started as a dude.

00:17:10 Speaker_06
He started as a dude and it shows you what you can do in this life if you're just meek enough. If you're just humble enough, you do become the ever-loving lord of all existence.

00:17:24 Speaker_04
You know, it never made any sense to me because it's like, is he God of just Earth? You know, is God also in charge of the moon? Is he in charge of the entire universe?

00:17:34 Speaker_07
Yeah, the entire universe. The heavens are also... Heaven and the heavens are two different things.

00:17:40 Speaker_06
But then some people say heaven technically was a planet and a place that was considered for a long time.

00:17:45 Speaker_04
So Jesus is Earth's delegate.

00:17:50 Speaker_07
as far as we know.

00:17:51 Speaker_06
You're talking like this is gem talk. We're in a cult store talk. You're slowly going to be covered in turquoise. You're not allowed to go to Sedona with this line of thinking. All right? I can't allow you to go because you're going to come back.

00:18:07 Speaker_06
You're going to not wear pants anymore.

00:18:09 Speaker_07
Yeah, and you're going to be talking about the Pleiadians and I can't deal with that shit.

00:18:12 Speaker_06
I know you're this far. I know that it's funny. You think it's me, but I think that you're the closest to start showing up in a tunic.

00:18:18 Speaker_04
I mean, what if aliens come and one of them's wearing a cross? I'm fucked.

00:18:25 Speaker_06
I'm fucked. I'm fucked. I feel like they would do it much like when we were talking before the show, as like a punk thing.

00:18:34 Speaker_07
Well, to redirect the anger about a fire that destroyed nearly three quarters of Rome, Nero ordered that roughly 900 Christians be punished for starting the fire and keeping it going. Some were crucified, but quite a few were torn apart by wild dogs.

00:18:48 Speaker_07
Cool!

00:18:48 Speaker_04
Yeah, they like that over there. Crucify him!

00:18:51 Speaker_06
I just want to be able to say that once. Say what?

00:18:53 Speaker_04
Crucify him! You can say it whenever you want. I do, a lot.

00:18:57 Speaker_06
But, you know, I mostly do it in the car, I do it at the dentist.

00:19:00 Speaker_04
Well, that's how you should put Wendy. Crucify her! I'm sure we can't just give her the shot.

00:19:10 Speaker_06
No! She must serve as an example. Open the keys to dog heaven!

00:19:16 Speaker_07
Well, as far as the motivation for starting the fires went, it was said that Christians hated Rome and therefore hated all of humanity because of their worship of this one God who was nowhere to be found in the Roman pantheon.

00:19:29 Speaker_07
See, to Romans, church, state, and private life were all intertwined, meaning that the fortune and strength of not only your day-to-day existence, but the empire itself depended on which God was mad at you that day.

00:19:41 Speaker_07
They've been kicking it down to the fucking single person for this whole time, dawg.

00:19:46 Speaker_07
So if you win against this notion by worshiping one God, and if your religion had rules saying that all other gods were just different heads of your religion's bad guy in disguise, then that meant that you could fuck things up for everyone.

00:20:01 Speaker_07
And so the Romans began spreading rumors about Christians, saying that they only met at night so they could eat the flesh of innocent Romans.

00:20:10 Speaker_08
and engage in incest most foul. Yes, fuck your sister, fuck your brother, yeah, do it for Christ.

00:20:17 Speaker_07
Well, basically, they took the concepts of the Eucharist and the Christian practice of calling each other brother and sister, and they made them literal.

00:20:23 Speaker_06
They really did. They did the thing. It's a smear tactic. Yeah. But they would just say, every single time they would do these sort of activities, calling each other brother and sister, talking about the Eucharist. You guys fuck your brother?

00:20:36 Speaker_06
You fucking your brother?

00:20:40 Speaker_06
technically I don't think that they even well dick sucking was around but they love dick sucking I know weirdly I think it was the opposite where it was just like you had all these fucking pains in the asses Christians showing up and they weren't sucking dick

00:20:58 Speaker_06
And in Rome, everybody was already sucking dick and fucking, and they didn't even have, I feel like they didn't have concepts for like sexual identities in Rome. Like it was all just all over the place where it's just like, they did it.

00:21:08 Speaker_06
They stunk it up.

00:21:10 Speaker_04
I remember we had the concept of a sketch that we never wrote that was called Jeffrey Dahmer, time traveling police officer. And then he goes to Rome and he's like, this is great. This is where I belong.

00:21:21 Speaker_03
Yeah, I remember that. What? Being gay isn't a thing? Murder is legal?

00:21:29 Speaker_07
Oh, the cutting room floor of the Murder Fist writers room.

00:21:33 Speaker_06
So many brilliant ideas slipped through our fingers. Why aren't we on Jimmy Kimmel?

00:21:40 Speaker_07
But Christians were also blamed for environmental disasters, like plague, drought, or earthquakes, because their worship of one weird god was making the Roman gods really angry.

00:21:49 Speaker_06
I'm starting to actually think this is- they're correct! I'm starting to think that we gotta go back!

00:21:54 Speaker_04
We gotta start talking to fuckin' Odin again! Well, the Roman gods were impostors! They were all fuckin' take- they were all- the Greek gods changed their names!

00:22:03 Speaker_06
Yeah, and all the Greek gods were just like guys that walked around, and they gave them funny names! They were broke.

00:22:09 Speaker_04
That was the problem. They got kicked out of the EU.

00:22:15 Speaker_07
It's been bad there. It's been bad in Athens. Now, yes, Christians were killed in absolutely horrendous ways. They really were ripped to shreds in Roman amphitheaters by wild animals for the amusement of the public.

00:22:25 Speaker_07
And they really were tortured most terribly and burned alive en masse.

00:22:29 Speaker_06
It's like in the Colosseum in the front row, people used to get pulled in all the time, too. Yeah, it's like the front row was apparently fucking nuts.

00:22:39 Speaker_04
Navy battles with crocodiles was crazy Remember we saw it.

00:22:44 Speaker_06
Yeah How like they have that whole like underground section of theatrical stuff that would like lift man.

00:22:50 Speaker_04
It must have been awesome. It was very cool Yeah built in the year 72 memory

00:22:58 Speaker_03
You smoke way too much weed.

00:23:01 Speaker_04
No, it's just random shit gets put in there. Well, you know, that's all it is. It's literally sitting on a weed node. Yeah, that one thought. 72 AD!

00:23:08 Speaker_00
Remember me, Eddie?

00:23:13 Speaker_07
But sometime in the second century, stories began to appear of Christians being given magical powers through direct intervention by God himself, or failing God, Jesus.

00:23:24 Speaker_07
Now obviously this was propaganda designed to keep people in the faith because Christians could always believe that there was a chance that they could be one of the Christians whom God arbitrarily decided to bless personally.

00:23:35 Speaker_07
And the more Christian you were, the more likely it seemed that you would receive God's favor.

00:23:40 Speaker_06
Isn't it weird?

00:23:41 Speaker_06
like not to get too MSNBC about this but like it is interesting is that you see that statement and then you realize oh the Christians still think that they just think it about billionaires they legitimately are like it's the same thought process if I pay fealty to him enough if I just am good enough Elon himself will pick me like Elon's gonna allow me to hang out and make the he might

00:24:05 Speaker_07
And I will go to heaven, which is, you know, a Tesla. It's a Tesla burning in the bottom of a canyon.

00:24:17 Speaker_07
But it obviously worked out quite well for the Christians in the end, and it instilled a sort of stubbornness in the religion that persists to this day. That's what Christians are. Stubborn. Really fucking stubborn.

00:24:30 Speaker_07
It would not have worked, however, if the stories hadn't been good. And since humans love a good bloody story, I don't think they would have worked half as well had they not been as incredibly violent as they are.

00:24:41 Speaker_06
One scholar said that specifically the stories were exaggerated. Like it was to stoke a reaction. So, yeah, I mean, we all want them to have their hands cut off and their tits cut off and their faces cut off. We'd like that. We all like that as a group.

00:24:56 Speaker_04
Also, it was told to each other like it was tossed like we're in person to person Now one of the earliest saint stories involves an enslaved woman named Blandinna who lived in what is now the city of Lyon in France

00:25:17 Speaker_07
So maybe it's Blondina.

00:25:19 Speaker_06
Oh, yeah, I thought I was Blondina. Blondina, you get back in here.

00:25:23 Speaker_03
Blondina, get off the hog.

00:25:25 Speaker_04
Yeah, where are you from?

00:25:26 Speaker_03
Lyon, France? Yeah, I'm from Truth America.

00:25:32 Speaker_07
See, this is during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who had decreed that while Roman citizens who were Christian, they would be quickly beheaded upon discovering their faith, non-citizens, like slaves, they needed to be tortured first.

00:25:45 Speaker_07
So, once Blandina was outed as a Christian, she was brought to the amphitheater of the Three Gauls to be publicly tortured and killed.

00:25:53 Speaker_08
I love that name. Bring her to the amphitheater of the three ghouls.

00:25:57 Speaker_03
You got it, boss. Blandina's on the menu. Come on, y'all. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

00:26:03 Speaker_04
Now be careful of them ghouls. They'll steal your fries if you're not paying attention.

00:26:07 Speaker_01
Yeah, and that's the biggest crime that happens at one of these activities.

00:26:12 Speaker_07
Well, in the arena, she was bound to the stake and the Romans released wild animals, most likely lions or bears or dogs or what have you. And most of the imagery that you see of Blandina, it's lions.

00:26:24 Speaker_07
But the animals simply circled Blandina and did nothing. So she was thrown back in jail, much to the chagrin of the audience.

00:26:31 Speaker_04
She tasted like shit.

00:26:34 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's the problem, they didn't want to look. Sometimes, maybe the periods ran them away. Maybe the periods ran them away. Maybe she's bleeds.

00:26:42 Speaker_03
Maybe them periods don't ran them away. You know what?

00:26:45 Speaker_07
That's some good math, Cesarius. Sounds like something that would come out of the mouth of the fucking inbred family in the town where I grew up.

00:26:52 Speaker_01
You can't think that maybe the periods scared them. You don't know, they don't, they like fresh meat. Blandina!

00:27:01 Speaker_07
You got them jellies?

00:27:04 Speaker_01
Blandina, you got jellies today?

00:27:06 Speaker_07
A few days later, Blandina was brought back to the arena where she was whipped, placed on a red-hot grate, and enclosed in a net before being thrown to the mercy of an enraged bull. That finally killed her.

00:27:18 Speaker_06
Now that's how you kill a Blandina.

00:27:20 Speaker_07
Good work, everybody. Good work. But since she had prayed to God during her first round in the arena, and he'd saved her at least once, she became Saint Blandina.

00:27:31 Speaker_06
You know, he should save you all the way.

00:27:33 Speaker_07
Yeah. No, he never does. No, he really doesn't.

00:27:36 Speaker_04
That's the whole point. That's why they didn't eat her, because she was bland. They put a little pepper on her, a little salt, a little garlic. Yeah, call me again when she's Cumin-Dina.

00:27:45 Speaker_06
You know what I mean? Oh, man, Pepper-Dina? Pepper-Dina, you get over here. That's her spicy sister from Mexico.

00:27:55 Speaker_07
It makes total sense that martyrdom became a central feature of early Christianity. Because after all, the whole point of Jesus coming to earth was so he could be killed for the sins of humanity. Not if you asked Jesus early on.

00:28:06 Speaker_06
He'd be like, maybe we could think about me just sort of doing this symbolically, huh?

00:28:11 Speaker_07
But while there were absolutely people who went to their deaths defiantly clinging to their Christian faith, people like Blandina, you're not going to have much stickiness if it's the same story over and over again.

00:28:22 Speaker_07
So the lives and deaths of martyrs came to be greatly embellished with magic, just like Christians embellish the history of Jesus with magic.

00:28:30 Speaker_07
And that's if there really was a guy 2,000 years ago who was simply walking around telling people to be nice to each other. That's cool and everything, but it's a better story if he's a wizard.

00:28:38 Speaker_06
They actually are pretty certain that he was. I did some research and I'm not, you know, I've had so many people call me an edgelord 14 year old for saying that Jesus didn't exist, but there is yet still.

00:28:49 Speaker_06
proof that he existed but there is a you know there's there's some talk around it but it seems like mostly was they were really confused about his ability to rile people up yeah and he was definitely a human man with like a wife and like had a if that was all real like then that's what he was just some guy who's a rabbi yeah that's why Pontius Pilate famously came out and said

00:29:13 Speaker_03
Hey, who wants to kill a loudmouth? Hey, me. Oh, I want to do. Stupid name, though, Pontius.

00:29:21 Speaker_07
Oh, man, Lord, you glad that we don't got stupid names like Pontius no more?

00:29:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, not like me. My name's Coroglio.

00:29:28 Speaker_05
And me, Mr. Ding Dongs. Power, yeah, Jerry Ding Dongs, ready to pierce the Christ.

00:29:38 Speaker_07
Now, just as there were magical relics stemming from Jesus, like the Shroud of Turin... FAKE! Pieces of the True Cross... FAKE! And the Spear of Destiny... FAKE! The bones, ashes, and bloodstained clothing of saints have become magical objects, too.

00:29:50 Speaker_07
And they're very real. And those are real. These were venerated in churches, first in secret, then as tourist attractions for converts. Come see the bones of the boy saint, Sisianus, and toss a ducat into the plate on your way out.

00:30:02 Speaker_06
They talked about, it's true, it also fed the merchant world. They would have these, it first would start as a secret worship place, then it would become a public worship place where people would come and then they'd start selling.

00:30:16 Speaker_06
One of the most found artifacts of the day is these things that are little flasks that people would collect the saint oil with. And they would point to exactly what I said. They would have a thing called a rectory, I think it was called.

00:30:29 Speaker_06
I forgot what it was called, where they put the things in. It was like the veneration box. Rectory sounds right. And they would collect it, but then they'd start selling the little flask. And then eventually, a whole market would devolve right there.

00:30:43 Speaker_06
And they literally, the saints became the first version of Bucky's. Yeah. Like big old traffic stops.

00:30:50 Speaker_04
You'd go big rest stops that you'd go and buy shit at. Maybe that's what you need to do to get Mother Teresa's bones. Put some money on the table. Oh yeah, no. I don't think you can afford Mother Teresa, but we can probably get you some other little guy.

00:31:00 Speaker_06
Honestly, I just need one. I just need one bone. Yeah. And the reason why I want Mother Teresa just because she's the most recent and it's all like lies.

00:31:08 Speaker_04
She's not the most recent saint. She is. There was that kid who just became a saint recently.

00:31:13 Speaker_06
Again, but they're all lies, dude.

00:31:14 Speaker_04
Yeah, but there was like a 17-year-old kid who just died and became a saint.

00:31:18 Speaker_06
I just feel like in the end, I want to see a miracle on camera if we're doing this now. Well, you don't have to have a miracle. You have to have a miracle to be attached to you.

00:31:26 Speaker_06
With Mother Teresa, what they did was after the fact, after she died, is that some guy was like, I couldn't see before and then I prayed to Mother Teresa's ghost and now I can see. And they're like, done. Because she didn't work or whatever.

00:31:37 Speaker_07
Oh my god, the latest saint. He is a kid. His name is Carlo Acutis.

00:31:43 Speaker_06
Oh yeah, I bet.

00:31:44 Speaker_07
He's referred to as God's influencer and the patron saint of the internet.

00:31:50 Speaker_06
Yep. What was his miracle? He was a computer whiz. Was his miracle Taylor Swift's rise? He's the first millennial saint. Yeah. What was his miracle? I don't think he had one. You have to have a miracle to be a saint.

00:32:05 Speaker_04
I don't think you do.

00:32:06 Speaker_06
You do.

00:32:07 Speaker_04
I looked it up. They just have to like you.

00:32:08 Speaker_06
No, you have to have a miracle attributed to you.

00:32:10 Speaker_04
Saint Edward bought his way in. Exactly. That was the miracle.

00:32:14 Speaker_07
The power of money. He was beatified in October of 2020 after the Vatican officially recognized that he interceded from heaven in 2013 to save the life of a Brazilian child who was suffering from a rare pancreatic condition. That was science.

00:32:29 Speaker_07
Second miracle, a girl from Costa Rica suffered a serious head trauma after falling off a bike in Florence, Italy, but recovered after the odds after her mother prayed at Acutis' tomb in Assisi. It just means, yeah, it's fine.

00:32:42 Speaker_04
These are not real miracles. He was a sissy, huh?

00:32:48 Speaker_07
He didn't fight. But in the same vein of, you know, like, martyrdom, the heroic displays helped convert people.

00:32:54 Speaker_07
Because if you're watching a person get ripped apart by wild dogs while basically singing Amazing Grace, you're gonna be impressed on some level no matter who the fuck you are.

00:33:02 Speaker_09
Oh yeah. Yeah.

00:33:04 Speaker_07
Being a Christian in Roman society meant that you were basically cut off from everyone and everything else. It meant the true definition of a cult that demanded you live a separate life from the rest of humanity at all times.

00:33:15 Speaker_07
See, every house, marketplace, street, and tavern was filled with pagan idols, signs of Satan. In public events like festivals, sports, and theatrical performances, these were always associated with the gods, which More Satan!

00:33:30 Speaker_07
You also couldn't serve in the military or public office because all that was tied up in the gods as well. You also couldn't be in any sort of like cultural profession because that was also tied up in all the gods. And you might be asking yourself...

00:33:44 Speaker_07
How do the Jews fit in all this?

00:33:45 Speaker_03
Where's the Jews? I ain't playing Dina. Where's Jews at? Pre-Christians.

00:33:50 Speaker_07
Yeah, because after all, I mean, they were around for thousands of years before the Christians even thought about this shit. Jews was a Jewish man. Yeah.

00:33:59 Speaker_07
But basically, it seems like Jewish people were grandfathered in because they just always sort of been around and they weren't all weird and pushy about their faith like the Christians were.

00:34:09 Speaker_07
So yeah, yeah, that was basically it like they were part of a fabric of society. Yeah, basically like I were cool with them They're cool with us. They don't bother us. We don't bother them.

00:34:18 Speaker_04
Everything's cool But then eventually would begin, you know, there always were then persecuted in certain ways, of course Yeah for sure, but they also there were trying to push their religion on anybody

00:34:27 Speaker_07
No, they specifically don't have an evangelical arm. Now the Romans started cooling it on the persecution of the Christians after the reign of Emperor Odysseus in the mid-third century, who came up with a sort of compromise.

00:34:38 Speaker_07
He decreed that all citizens of the Roman Empire, except the Jewish ones, had to present themselves before the local magistrate and perform a sacrifice for the gods.

00:34:47 Speaker_07
After killing an animal in front of a local official, that magistrate would give you a certificate of compliance. Now some Christians did perform the sacrifice just to get the paper. Yeah, get it done. But most of them just faked the paperwork.

00:35:00 Speaker_07
And that was deemed good enough, at least for a little while. Yeah, that's good. Honestly, I like old school red tape. And as a result, Christianity grew from an estimated 1 million followers to 6 million over the next 50 years.

00:35:14 Speaker_07
And by 300 AD, churches were prominent in major cities across the empire.

00:35:19 Speaker_07
Now, there was one final push during what was known as the Diocletian persecution, but Emperor Constantine the Great brought that to an end when he famously converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan, which gave all Romans religious freedom.

00:35:33 Speaker_06
Oh, nice guy! Yeah. Is he really Constantine the Great? Yeah, that's what they call him. But I mean, in terms of how great was he? Well, you don't know, man.

00:35:42 Speaker_07
Yeah, we absolutely know. We have a very good idea. So why is he great? Because he made Christianity legal. He doesn't know. Holy Roman Empire all that stuff Constantine great.

00:35:55 Speaker_06
I think yep. Yeah, I think But I like put him on the spot really grinding shit to a fucking hole

00:36:05 Speaker_07
But during the time in between, after Romans decided Christians were a good scapegoat, but before Constantine made it safe to be a Christian for literally 1,700 years now, a lot of Christians did die horrible deaths as a result of Roman policies.

00:36:20 Speaker_07
A select few, however, were remembered, and their stories were rewritten to include even more magical properties than those written about in the New Testament, all to create the entities we now know as the saints.

00:36:32 Speaker_06
Whoa, Constantine named Constantinople! You didn't know that. He built it. That's an easy guess.

00:36:38 Speaker_07
Yeah, that's why it's called Constantinople. Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.

00:36:44 Speaker_08
She'll be waiting in Istanbul, even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Why'd they change it, I can't say. People just liked it better that way. Amazing. I'm very impressed.

00:37:01 Speaker_10
God, I love that song.

00:37:03 Speaker_07
Now our first saint today is St. Lawrence, died 258 A.D. Larry, please.

00:37:15 Speaker_06
Lawrence was my father and he got burned to the stake by his ass.

00:37:20 Speaker_04
Leisure suit Lawrence.

00:37:24 Speaker_07
He's the patron saint of cooks and comedians, because he made a joke when he was being roasted alive by the Romans. Now when Lawrence was a young man, he was friends with the future Pope, Sixtus II.

00:37:35 Speaker_07
When Sixtus was crowned Pope in 257, he named his buddy Lawrence the Archdeacon of Rome, the Treasurer of the Church, and the Keeper of the Library of Sacred Books.

00:37:44 Speaker_06
You know, you could have asked somebody better. because I'm the kind of person, I like to write new material every day. I try to make sure that every time I go and I do a different bit, everybody is super entertained by what I do.

00:37:53 Speaker_06
Alright, that's me, Larry.

00:37:55 Speaker_04
I would have assumed the patron saint of comedians would have been Jewish.

00:38:03 Speaker_06
This is for Christian comics. This is Jim Gaffigan's saint. Oh no. Yeah, this is the saint of Hot Pockets material.

00:38:13 Speaker_07
That same year, though, the Roman Emperor Valerian told the Christian clergy to perform sacrifices to the Roman gods or face banishment.

00:38:21 Speaker_07
The year after that, he ordered the execution of all Christian leaders in the city and decreed that anyone else who didn't worship the Roman gods would be reduced to slavery. But I don't know.

00:38:30 Speaker_07
If I'm the kind of guy you want me to be a slave, I'm not going to work very hard.

00:38:32 Speaker_05
Look at my hands. They're very soft, right? I sweat. Hey, it's all for me. I don't like being outside. I like being inside. I need air conditioning. I need a nice little bench. I need a bunch of grapes. You know what I mean?

00:38:43 Speaker_05
You don't really want me to be in there being some guy's slave.

00:38:46 Speaker_07
St. Gleason.

00:38:48 Speaker_06
It's by Jackie Mason. I don't know why I started doing Jackie Mason the other day alone in my house. Oh, because he's fucking hilarious. Yes.

00:38:56 Speaker_07
Great. Now, Pope VI is the second was captured and executed quickly. But before he died, he told Lawrence to collect the church's wealth and distribute it amongst the poor.

00:39:06 Speaker_07
Overhearing this request, Roman officials told Lawrence that he had three days to round up the church's treasure and present it to the local prefect.

00:39:14 Speaker_07
And so, Lawrence assembled a thousand orphans, widows, virgins, lepers, and people with all manner of disabilities to the prefect's palace.

00:39:22 Speaker_07
And when he was ordered to present the treasures, he pointed to his poor, sick, huddled masses and said that they were the church's greatest treasures.

00:39:30 Speaker_06
It's called irony. It's kind of fun, right? In a way, I did this to know it's a kind of fun thing where you look at this, right? Oh, I said it's treasures because these people are all frowning, right? Everybody here, they suck, right?

00:39:38 Speaker_06
Everybody here, they're sick and no one wants to be around them, right? That's why I brought them, huh?

00:39:42 Speaker_05
You see what I'm doing?

00:39:42 Speaker_06
You wanna laugh? You wanna laugh about it? I hate him!

00:39:48 Speaker_07
The Romans, predictably, were not amused. For his disobedience, Lawrence was scourged, branded, clubbed, stretched over the rack, and torn with hooks. The most famous torture, however, came when Lawrence was cooked. Come on, let's think about this.

00:40:01 Speaker_06
Let's think about this. I think we've already done enough.

00:40:05 Speaker_07
His body was placed on a gridiron, which was a new technology for the time.

00:40:09 Speaker_06
Oh, whoa, this is new. Whoa, wow. It's got that new gridiron smell.

00:40:14 Speaker_07
And I love it. Absolutely love it. And after he was roasted for a bit, he allegedly said, quote, Turn me over. I'm well done on this side. And that's why he's the patron saint of comedians. Come on. I saw you laugh. I saw you smile.

00:40:26 Speaker_09
The first roast.

00:40:30 Speaker_07
I wish it wasn't like this. He supposedly survived and was able to baptize several other fellow prisoners before dying in jail.

00:40:49 Speaker_04
Someone throw some water on Charles.

00:40:51 Speaker_07
Our next saint, however, was not a simple archivist like Lawrence. Instead, he was a warrior, although he did seem to be somewhat slow-witted, or at the very least, easily influenced.

00:41:02 Speaker_07
His name was Saint Christopher, and he represents travelers, ferry boat men, and bachelors.

00:41:08 Speaker_04
Okay. Yeah, all the women in my family have Saint Christopher statues or like medals in their car to protect them when they're traveling.

00:41:16 Speaker_07
Dude, he's the hot one. Yeah. Often, Christopher is invoked against nightmares, peril from water, and sudden death. But before he was baptized as Christopher, he had one of the worst names I've ever heard.

00:41:29 Speaker_07
Before he was Christopher, he was named Reprobus. Goddamn.

00:41:36 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's Reprobus. Reprobus? Reprobus. Reprobus. Hi, hi, you know hey, I'm a doctor I Work out five times a week, and I have over $100,000 my 401k my name's so attractive. Yes. My name is reprobes Johnson I also love to eat vomit

00:42:03 Speaker_08
Yeah, until he's baptized, he's Reprobus.

00:42:06 Speaker_06
Also, I'm not calling on Christopher to save me.

00:42:09 Speaker_07
Yeah, because he honestly acts a lot more like a Reprobus than a Christopher throughout his journey. Depending on the source, it's said that Reprobus was somewhere between 18 and 24 feet tall.

00:42:19 Speaker_00
Of course.

00:42:20 Speaker_07
In a time when giants walked the earth. Cool. This is around 3rd century BC. It was said that Reprobus served the king of Canaan until he became disillusioned and decided that he wanted to serve the greatest king in all the world.

00:42:34 Speaker_07
And so, after traveling for some time, he believed that he had found the greatest king, and so he pledged his service to him. That went all well and good until a minstrel appeared at court one day. Let's not blame the comedians, okay?

00:42:47 Speaker_06
We did this once. This guy, it's like, he's just a comedian. You know, you can't have an opinion these days. Yeah, it was so hard to do comedy back then.

00:42:56 Speaker_07
The minstrel performed a song and sang a verse that referenced the devil, and when the devil was mentioned, Reprobus saw the king and made the sign of the cross.

00:43:05 Speaker_07
Reprobus, who was apparently quite brash, demanded that the king tell him what the sign of the cross meant and why he did it.

00:43:13 Speaker_07
The king said that when the name of the devil is uttered, he feared that the devil's power would overtake him, and thus he did the sign of the cross as a form of protection.

00:43:23 Speaker_07
This told Reprobus that this king was not the greatest in the land after all. So he left court to seek and serve the man the king feared. Satan himself.

00:43:32 Speaker_03
Fuck yeah! Yeah, of course! I seek Satan! I will find Satan and I will work for him! I, Reprobus! Sorry, my own name. Yes, I'm sorry.

00:43:44 Speaker_05
I don't think I can hire Reprobus. But according to your resume, it seems to be going very well. I also hate the stupid cross thing that they do. It doesn't do anything.

00:43:53 Speaker_04
It's fake. Now, your name is for progress. Have you thought about shoving things in people's asses?

00:43:58 Speaker_05
To be honest, I'm looking at your CV here, and the first thing it says to me is that this guy loves to long-distance peg.

00:44:07 Speaker_07
Eventually, Reprobus came across a group of knights, one of whom was a cruel and horrible man. This cruel knight asked Reprobus why he was traveling, and Reprobus said, I'm out looking for the devil. What a coincidence, the knight said, I'm the devil.

00:44:24 Speaker_07
Whoa, the ultimate switcheroo, dude. And so Reprobus bound himself to Satan's service.

00:44:29 Speaker_06
You just got yourself kissing a guy, man. That's who that is.

00:44:34 Speaker_07
He just got picked up, dude.

00:44:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's like if a woman asks you if you're a god you say yes Yeah, I'm the devil Anyone the idea of always kind of like the idea of like running into a first date and pretending to be a time traveler And saying you got a fuck because you got to go back as the future's over and all the women are illegal That's why it's good to fuck you.

00:44:55 Speaker_07
That's the way you do is get coming in with a character sometimes Yeah, but one day is he and the devil were traipsing around the desert They came upon a cross and the devil immediately panicked and ran away sticks

00:45:07 Speaker_07
And when asked why he had done this, the devil said that a very powerful man named Jesus Christ had once hung on a cross. And whenever he comes near a cross, he gets scared. So Reprobus once again changed allegiance and began his search for Christ.

00:45:21 Speaker_03
The cross is how they killed him!

00:45:23 Speaker_06
I don't understand. So he fucking, yeah, he should love the cross. I never understood that. And so Reprobus is gonna fucking, he's a fucking fair weather friend, man. He is.

00:45:31 Speaker_07
No, Reprobus is just, he's just looking for the most powerful guy.

00:45:34 Speaker_06
That's all he cares about.

00:45:35 Speaker_07
He's just jumping around. Now, after a very long and boring story in which Jesus appeared as a child and made Reprobus carry him across a river... Carry me!

00:45:44 Speaker_03
Is this the part where my legs don't work carrying me across a river? Fooled you, I'm Jesus! I'm turning piss into soda! Now suck my dick! Oh, I didn't know.

00:46:00 Speaker_07
After he carried him across the river, Jesus revealed himself. Hello! And gave Reprobus a magical staff that would bear flowers and fruit when it struck the ground. Jesus then baptized Reprobus as Christopher. Your name is... Christopher.

00:46:17 Speaker_07
Which means bearing Christ, because he carried Christ across the river. That's where the name Christopher comes from.

00:46:24 Speaker_07
And so Christopher, with a brand new name, traveled to the city of Lycia to pray for and comfort Christians who were being killed by Romans.

00:46:31 Speaker_06
So Christopher is essentially like Christ's caddy? That's all that means?

00:46:38 Speaker_07
He literally carried Christ across the river, and bearing Christ means carrying Christ.

00:46:44 Speaker_04
It's not because they didn't call Jesus. It's also, you know, Jesus is also Jesus.

00:46:49 Speaker_07
There can only be one Jesus. There can only be one Jesus. No, there's not. There's millions upon millions of men named Jesus.

00:46:55 Speaker_06
Yeah, that's later on when people got fucking lazy.

00:46:57 Speaker_07
Now, after visiting future martyrs in prison, Christopher was attacked by the guards.

00:47:04 Speaker_07
But instead of fighting them, he struck his magical staff into the ground, and when it bore fruits and flowers, everyone present converted to Christianity on the spot, and everyone clapped. This was enough to... I just branch from banana tree.

00:47:20 Speaker_04
It's just a banana.

00:47:21 Speaker_07
Yeah, you know, like this is just a fruit. This is enough to impress a local warlord named King Dagnus, who sent two knights to retrieve Christopher. But when the knights came back with Christopher, they'd also been converted along the way.

00:47:34 Speaker_07
So King Dagnus told Christopher that if he didn't sacrifice something to the gods then and there, he would be tortured and killed. Christopher refused, and the converted knights were beheaded.

00:47:44 Speaker_07
So King Dagnus sent two sisters named Nicaea and Aquilina to see if they could tempt Christopher into having an incestuous three-way.

00:47:53 Speaker_04
Fuck yeah! So, killing you didn't work. Have you ever thought about getting fucked by two hot chicks? No, I actually haven't.

00:48:03 Speaker_07
But when they touched him, Christopher began praying, and the two sexy ladies were converted as well.

00:48:09 Speaker_03
Damn, man, he flipped two hoes? That's a shame, dude.

00:48:14 Speaker_07
You can't be losing hoes. Not just two sexy ladies, but two sexy sisters who were willing to go fuck a dude together. They were about to go all around the world? Yeah, I guess they did need Christ.

00:48:27 Speaker_07
When the Sexy Sisters also refused to make sacrifices, Aquilina was hung and a heavy stone was tied to her feet, which popped her limbs out of her sockets. None of these people were made saints, by the way. No. No.

00:48:39 Speaker_07
Nicea was thrown on a fire, then beheaded. Oh, wow. And finally, it was Christopher's turn. First, he was brought before the king and beaten with red-hot, burning iron rods. Then he was bound to an iron chair, where a fire burned underneath.

00:48:52 Speaker_07
The seat supposedly melted like wax, but Christopher remained unharmed. I'm coming home! The king then had him tied to a tree where he would be shot by 40 archers. Cool. But the arrows all stopped in midair just before hitting him.

00:49:08 Speaker_03
Neo.

00:49:09 Speaker_07
And when the king advanced to investigate, one of the arrows turned and shot the king in the eye.

00:49:14 Speaker_04
What an idiot.

00:49:15 Speaker_07
Yeah, what a maroon. There's a bunch of arrows floating in the air. You don't go up and fucking poke one of them.

00:49:20 Speaker_06
Yeah, what is this? You know nothing about Daffy Duck? It's like, ow!

00:49:25 Speaker_10
Ow! This was totally avoidable!

00:49:30 Speaker_07
Christopher then said that after the king killed him, he should anoint his blinded eye with Christopher's blood, and it would be healed. Just a little fun tip. Yeah.

00:49:39 Speaker_05
Why would he tell him? Because he's a fucking saint.

00:49:42 Speaker_07
Yeah. Christopher was then beheaded, but when the blood of Reprobus was dabbed on King Dagnus's eye, he could see again, and the king converted to Christianity as well. Wow, what'd you know? That's amazing. It worked. Wow.

00:49:55 Speaker_06
Wow. Shouldn't it be D-headed? Instead of B-headed? Yeah. I actually wonder why it's not D-headed.

00:50:01 Speaker_04
Yeah, right? English is a funny little language. It really is. You know, because it's D-nutted. Yeah, when they take your balls off. D-nuts. See, we're having fun with English right now.

00:50:15 Speaker_06
That's what I do.

00:50:16 Speaker_07
Yeah, that's what he does.

00:50:17 Speaker_06
That's what I do by being a fucking moron.

00:50:21 Speaker_07
One of the weird things about St. Christopher was not just that he was at least 18 feet tall, but that he's also often depicted as having the head of a dog. According to the Irish Passion of St.

00:50:32 Speaker_07
Christopher... Was that a fucking gay pornography about the Troubles?

00:50:37 Speaker_03
I bet you, I bet you I could fuck this dog! I bet you could! And I bet you I'd watch and I'd jerk and watch, you know? And who said that the Catholic and the Protestant can't come together? All right, one, two, three, come!

00:50:56 Speaker_05
Oh, I can't come unless I'm thinking of me mother.

00:51:00 Speaker_03
And she will raise you up on eagle's wings.

00:51:07 Speaker_07
According to the Irish passion of Saint Christopher, he came from a dog-headed race that ate human flesh and had tusks like a wild boar. Awesome.

00:51:15 Speaker_07
This, however, isn't the only place that dog-headed men show up in religion and myths from this time period. You got the Egyptian god Anubis that was thousands of years before that.

00:51:24 Speaker_07
Jason and the Argonauts, they fought dog-headed men, and Alexander the Great claimed to have fought dog-headed men in India. But what's incredible about St. Christopher is that his representation as a dog-headed man might come from a mistranslation.

00:51:38 Speaker_07
See, Christopher was from Canaan, meaning he was a Canaanite. The Latin word for Canaanite is cananeous, while the Latin word for dog is cananus.

00:51:49 Speaker_07
So it could be that someone just wrote down the wrong fucking word and all of a sudden you got a dog-headed giant as one of your most popular and well-known sub-characters in your religion. Shit like this used to happen all the time.

00:52:02 Speaker_04
You know, dogs got a good sense of direction. You've seen Benji. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Homeward bound. For the traveler. Yeah, homeward bound.

00:52:09 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Dogs are good for that.

00:52:11 Speaker_04
White Fang. You know, they're always traveling.

00:52:13 Speaker_06
Yeah, that one old yeller whacked him.

00:52:16 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, he was traveling straight to his death.

00:52:20 Speaker_07
Now while Christopher became popular because he was the patron saint of travelers and almost everyone travels, our next- They're definitely not driving.

00:52:27 Speaker_06
No. The key is to make sure if you're traveling, that's how you know you can tell the police officers that you're traveling, is that you have the St.

00:52:34 Speaker_06
Christopher thing up there and you cannot be arrested because you're not operating a motor vehicle in a business aspect.

00:52:40 Speaker_07
Traveling. Our next saint became popular because of the plague and in the process also became sort of a gay icon to boot. Okay! That would be Saint Sebastian.

00:52:50 Speaker_06
So Saint Sebastian was H-O-T-T-O-G-O? Oh, we're gonna get into it, bro.

00:52:59 Speaker_07
Now, Sebastian was a soldier who joined the Roman military in the mid-third century as a secret agent so he could be of service to Christians who were being persecuted by Romans. A closeted Christian, if you will. Very sexy.

00:53:12 Speaker_07
Well, in the military, Sebastian was promoted to the Praetorian Guard of the Emperor. I bet. Oh yeah, bet he was. All while secretly converting and baptizing other soldiers and civilians. With my own special homemade white wine.

00:53:27 Speaker_07
Hope you like the aftertaste.

00:53:34 Speaker_06
More of a syrup than a wine. Yeah, it is more of a glop. Don't put it in your pussy. Unless you want a little baby Sebastian.

00:53:42 Speaker_07
But his cover was blown when two twin Christian brothers named Marcus and Marcellin were imprisoned for, again, refusing to make a sacrifice to the Roman gods.

00:53:51 Speaker_06
You did it! I know Marcus is an ancient name.

00:53:53 Speaker_07
Oh yeah, very much so. Marcus Aurelius. Wow. Jesus fucking Christ.

00:53:59 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:53:59 Speaker_07
Marcus is the most Roman name there is.

00:54:01 Speaker_04
Yeah, Marc Anthony.

00:54:03 Speaker_07
He's probably Marcus. That's Mark. Wow, yeah. Yeah. There's not more Roman names. Marcus is pretty much up there.

00:54:13 Speaker_04
You don't see any Eddies. No, but we came around and once we got to Europe, you know, Eddies started popping up.

00:54:18 Speaker_06
Edward did, yeah.

00:54:19 Speaker_04
And Henry.

00:54:20 Speaker_06
Yeah, we'll continue. I'm sorry I did this.

00:54:23 Speaker_07
I'm sorry I did this to us. Well, Marcus and Marcellian's pagan parents tried to get them to renounce Christianity, but Sebastian actually talked them into accepting the fate of their sons by converting the parents to Christianity as well.

00:54:36 Speaker_07
To sell them on it, Sebastian said that he would endure torture and death to show Marcus and Marcellian how to give their lives for Christ. But it actually kind of ended up working backwards. Yeah, he didn't want it.

00:54:47 Speaker_06
He was going to show how he could bought them for Christ.

00:54:52 Speaker_07
See before Marcus and Marcellian were killed Sebastian went on a bit of a converting spree which led to his capture a woman named Zoe married to a Roman official had been mute for six years and Sebastian supposedly cured her by simply making the sign of the cross which that don't make any fucking sense to me because that's a miracle which is something only God and Jesus is supposed to be able to do

00:55:14 Speaker_06
But the reason why miracles have to be attributed is because it has to show that they were chosen specially by God. It's not them doing the miracles. It's God doing it through them.

00:55:30 Speaker_06
And Jesus was supposed to be the ultimate example of you're destroying the avatar of God that I've brought to you to open it up. Because the whole point of the Jesus sacrifice is that he then opens heaven for us. Everybody can go to heaven.

00:55:46 Speaker_06
It's not just angels. It's not the most pure. It's that everybody can go if they follow the way of Christ. This is kind of the same thing that he has to go through. It's about being the middle man.

00:55:55 Speaker_06
And I also think he just asked her a question for the first time because she's the only gay man that she's ever met.

00:56:01 Speaker_04
And when Jesus was flogged and he didn't bleed, that was the first miracle whip. Something's wrong with this whip. God, what's wrong with this damn whip?

00:56:12 Speaker_06
They're all just whipping each other.

00:56:14 Speaker_03
Ow! Ow!

00:56:17 Speaker_07
Well, Zoe's conversion caused a whole cascade of conversions amongst local Roman authorities, which caused an equally strong backlash. Zoe was the first to be arrested, caught praying at the grave of St. Peter.

00:56:28 Speaker_07
She confessed to being a Christian, and in probably the worst death out of all these, she was hung by her hair over a smoking pile of shit until she choked to death on the fumes.

00:56:39 Speaker_04
I mean, that sounds nice.

00:56:42 Speaker_06
That's what your Julie has to deal with every single time. She has to go into the bathroom after you.

00:56:47 Speaker_04
We do this thing now where she sits on my lap when I shit. Married life.

00:56:52 Speaker_06
Married life is amazing. I love chicken and the egging it. That's what we call it in our house. I'm the chicken, she's making the eggs.

00:57:00 Speaker_04
Can you sneak one through?

00:57:03 Speaker_07
Ultimate gatekeeping. From there, the Christians that Sebastian converted, they were killed one by one.

00:57:09 Speaker_07
They were stoned to death, one was drowned at sea with rocks tied around their necks, one was made to walk across hot coals before being beheaded, and a few of them were just burned alive.

00:57:18 Speaker_07
As far as Marcus and Marcellinus went, their feet were nailed to a tree stump, and after they prayed all night to be saved, they were stabbed with spears when the sun came up.

00:57:27 Speaker_04
Again, he's not doing shit. God didn't do anything. That wasn't in the giving tree, I'll tell you that much. Oh yeah, you never saw the nailing stump? I love that book. I give it, I give it, I give it.

00:57:40 Speaker_07
Sebastian, of course, was safe for last. The emperor he served, Diocletian, was particularly angry that one of his own guard had betrayed the Roman Empire so thoroughly.

00:57:50 Speaker_07
This is especially since Diocletian was at that time presiding over the biggest and bloodiest persecution of Christians in history. So, Sebastian was bound to a tree where he would be pelted with dozens of arrows.

00:58:01 Speaker_07
Once the archers did their duty, Sebastian's body was said to resemble a sea urchin, and he was left to die full of arrows.

00:58:08 Speaker_05
Awesome.

00:58:09 Speaker_07
But when a Christian went to retrieve Sebastian's body for burial, she found that he was still alive. Go get my Uggs.

00:58:17 Speaker_03
Is there any Neosporin close by?

00:58:23 Speaker_07
The Christian brought him home where he recovered, but he still couldn't just fucking chill out. He stood at a staircase where he knew the Emperor would pass, and when Diocletian showed up, Sebastian started heckling him.

00:58:40 Speaker_07
For a moment, the Emperor supposedly thought that maybe there was something to this Christianity thing after all. But after waving that away, the emperor said, nah, fucking kill him.

00:58:53 Speaker_07
So his soldiers beat Sebastian to death with cudgels and threw his body in the sewer. No fixing that.

00:58:58 Speaker_07
The location of his body appeared to another woman in a dream who retrieved the body and buried him where supposedly the Basilica of Sebastian now stands.

00:59:06 Speaker_10
Bury me at the Sephora.

00:59:10 Speaker_07
But how Sebastian became a gay icon goes back to the days of the Black Plague. See, arrows have been associated with the plague since antiquity, when Apollo sent plague-tipped arrows to punish the sins of Agamemnon.

00:59:22 Speaker_07
Likewise, the Bible uses arrows as a metaphor when God unleashes plagues upon humanity. But since Sebastian was on the receiving end of many arrows and survived, it was said that he could petition God on behalf of those infected with the plague.

00:59:37 Speaker_07
And since there were so many devastating plagues, Sebastian became a very popular figure in Europe. Therefore, when the Renaissance came about, Saint Sebastian was a popular subject for many paintings and frescoes. But!

00:59:51 Speaker_07
For some reason, and this is how he came to be a gay icon, because no, Henry, Sebastian himself was not gay, Sebastian was invariably portrayed as a nude or semi-nude, handsome young man with a perfectly sculpted and bound body, giving off a general sense of ecstasy and sensualism.

01:00:12 Speaker_07
Basically, all of his paintings look like a guy who's just about to cum during a BDSM session.

01:00:18 Speaker_06
My question is that, do you think on some level they would masturbate to this material? Like, I mean, this is a genuine question.

01:00:29 Speaker_07
On some level, who would masturbate to the material?

01:00:32 Speaker_06
The monks. That make the paintings. Like, the people that make these. No, no, no. The monks specifically don't masturbate.

01:00:38 Speaker_07
No, this is Renaissance painters. This is Renaissance. This is not monks. This is Renaissance. This is, like, fucking the masters.

01:00:45 Speaker_06
But the idea of making him sexy. Yeah. Are we not, like, then jerking off at it? Because is this not what porno was? They make him sexy to be like Jude Law, like the sexy pope?

01:00:57 Speaker_07
What kind of the point was is that you could jerk off to him. Wow. Like you could jerk off to a painting of Saint Sebastian. That's how sexy and homoerotic paintings of Saint Sebastian were. But do they? Well, the thing is that St.

01:01:12 Speaker_07
Sebastian was a favorite of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde used Sebastian's name as a pseudonym when he was exiled to Paris after serving two years in prison in England simply for being gay. Keith Haring also used St. Sebastian's imagery. But St.

01:01:28 Speaker_07
Sebastian really became important in the gay community during the worst of the AIDS crisis when a plague was indeed wiping out their community.

01:01:35 Speaker_07
And while he has somewhat fallen out of fashion, he still remains extremely important to some of the people who survived those times.

01:01:41 Speaker_06
Yeah, because he's sexy.

01:01:42 Speaker_07
He's sexy and fun and that was his whole thing. Yeah, and he protected against plagues. He didn't. Medicine did.

01:01:51 Speaker_06
More could have died. No, Black Plague killed as many as it could. It really did its best. And I think that medicine stopped it. Well, AIDS, in terms of working on that.

01:02:04 Speaker_07
Yeah, I wouldn't say it was the St. Sebastian, but it was a comfort for people, you know, like many saints are.

01:02:09 Speaker_06
Oh yeah, that's why I fucking prayed to the fucking Noid. St.

01:02:16 Speaker_07
Noid, that is your saint.

01:02:18 Speaker_06
Oh, yes. Oh, the Noid is my saint. The Noid. Yes. Saint the Noid of Assisi. Yeah. A peepee. The Saint the Noid of a peepee is one of my favorite of the favorite saints.

01:02:32 Speaker_07
Now, while St. Sebastian is known as the sexy saint, our next one, St. Lucy, somewhat lies on the other side, as she's often invoked against eye diseases, hemorrhages, and the bloody flux, aka dysentery.

01:02:46 Speaker_04
So she's hideous. Well, she's alt. She's alt, okay.

01:02:52 Speaker_07
She is, however, also the patron saint of sex workers, as well as the patron saint of blind people and ophthalmologists. That's a lot to cover. It really is. So many of these saints cover like nine or ten different things.

01:03:03 Speaker_06
Does it mean charge of all sex workers and ophthalmologists?

01:03:06 Speaker_04
It seems strange.

01:03:07 Speaker_06
It's a fun conference.

01:03:10 Speaker_03
Yes, I'd like to see my sex worker better I've been paying my wife Sorry

01:03:34 Speaker_07
Lucy was born to a noble family in Syracuse, Sicily at the end of the third century. God, even Sicily has a Syracuse. God, don't go to fucking Albany, Italy. The great Syracuse of the soul. And she was raised by her mother after her father died young.

01:03:51 Speaker_07
Her mother, however, had the bloody flux, which is so named because its symptoms include bloody diarrhea. Flux meaning flow.

01:04:00 Speaker_06
We know.

01:04:01 Speaker_07
Bloody flow. Yeah, we understand.

01:04:03 Speaker_06
From your butt. Yeah, from your ass. With all the feces.

01:04:06 Speaker_04
Yeah, shit, fuck, blood. Come out of your ass. My hemorrhoids are so bad I had to rename my toilet to Sandy Hook. You like that?

01:04:16 Speaker_06
Are you happy with that audience? Because we're going to keep it in. We're going to keep it in because we want to. Because we want to. And because the Sandy Hook parents won. It was very real. It was extremely real.

01:04:27 Speaker_06
And the Sandy Hook parents won because they bought InfoWars.

01:04:30 Speaker_07
Not that we say this on the day that InfoWars officially went off air. The Onion bought it. Yep. Wow. My God. Interesting time. Very much so.

01:04:41 Speaker_07
So, thinking that she was about to die, Lucy's mother arranged for her daughter to be married to a wealthy pagan family to ensure her future, even though both of them are Christians.

01:04:50 Speaker_06
She should never hear that anymore, wealthy pagan family. Where's the old money pagans?

01:04:59 Speaker_07
Yeah, where would the wealthy pagan families be today? I don't know.

01:05:03 Speaker_07
In the meantime though, Lucy and her mother made a pilgrimage to visit the shrine of Saint Agatha, who died 50 years earlier after she was stretched on the rack and her breasts were ripped off with tongs. About time. Get some breasts rippin'.

01:05:17 Speaker_04
How many saints can we talk about without ripping off breasts?

01:05:21 Speaker_07
Well apparently, miracles happen at the shrine of St. Agatha. And after a night of praying, Lucy's mother... No more bloody diarrhea! I found a cork! Sorry, I just thought about that Sandy Hook joke again.

01:05:40 Speaker_06
It's in there. But again, in this context, it's activism.

01:05:48 Speaker_07
But now that her mother was no longer in mortal danger, Lucy confessed that since she was a young girl, she'd wanted to remain a Christian virgin all her life.

01:05:56 Speaker_07
And since her mother had been cured by God, they should likewise give away all their wealth to the poor. This is why there's no more wealthy pagan families. Lucy's mother said, sure, why the fuck not?

01:06:06 Speaker_07
So they started redistributing their stuff to the huddled masses. But when Lucy's betrothed pagan heard that his dowry was being given away, he got a little huffy and told the governor of Syracuse that Lucy was a secret Christian.

01:06:19 Speaker_07
It's like George Pataki.

01:06:22 Speaker_07
This got Lucy arrested and interrogated, and when she again refused to burn a sacrifice, the governor of Syracuse sentenced her to be defiled in a brothel where she would become a sex slave to disabuse her of any notion of remaining a Christian virgin.

01:06:37 Speaker_07
But when the guards tried to remove her, she allegedly became heavier than a boulder, and she still wouldn't move even after they hitched her to a team of oxen. So they figured, fuck it, let's just burn her right here, right now. Can we fuck her first?

01:06:52 Speaker_07
But when the wood was set aflame, Lucy didn't burn.

01:06:56 Speaker_07
She was finally killed when a sword was thrust through her throat, though, which really does seem to be the secret weakness of any saint, because God, for some reason, just can't fucking deal with neck injuries.

01:07:05 Speaker_06
There's something about it. He doesn't like helping the neck. It's hard to kill a lesbian. That's what I heard. That's what I heard from my father. That's what I heard from my grandfather. That's what I heard from my baseball coaches.

01:07:19 Speaker_07
But as time went on, Lucy's legend evolved to include, for some reason, torture by eye-gouging. It was said that Lucy foresaw the end of Christian persecution, and she said this to the governor of Syracuse, so he had her eyes removed.

01:07:33 Speaker_07
Other accounts, however, are far more dramatic. In one form of the story, Lucy greatly overreacted after a suitor commented on the beauty of her eyes.

01:07:43 Speaker_07
After this seemingly innocuous comment, Lucy cut out her eyeballs and sent them to the suitor in a package and said, please leave me alone.

01:07:51 Speaker_04
Ooh, Lucy's brat. You would have to pre-address that, you know, obviously.

01:07:56 Speaker_07
It's going to be difficult to stay with that in my mailbox. You can't wander outside your house with your fucking eyes.

01:08:03 Speaker_03
Could somebody mail this for me? I didn't think about this through! Four days sitting in front of her hut yelling, postman!

01:08:11 Speaker_04
Where is the postman?

01:08:13 Speaker_06
I know one of you is and you're lying to me.

01:08:16 Speaker_07
But the miracle was that even without eyes, Lucy could still supposedly see. Another of the female saints is Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who lived and died around the same time as Lucy.

01:08:27 Speaker_07
Also born to a noble family, Catherine was intelligent, educated, and beautiful, and was known to say that she would only marry a man who surpassed her in nobility, wealth, comeliness, and wisdom. So she was the saint of standards?

01:08:43 Speaker_07
So, Catherine's mother, a secret Christian, brought her daughter to a hermit who lived in a cave. Which, I'm discovering, was kind of a common trope in early Christianity. Because there was a whole side quest in St.

01:08:55 Speaker_07
Christopher's story that involved a hermit as well.

01:08:57 Speaker_06
They viewed that as the local holy man. That's kind of what they're talking about. Somebody that was specifically so in tune with Christ that they became sort of an aesthetic.

01:09:07 Speaker_07
Yeah, and he had to, you know, live outside of town and hide and so on and so on.

01:09:12 Speaker_04
Hermits were the first people that realized what assholes were.

01:09:15 Speaker_07
Yeah, they were the first one to say, fuck all y'all. But this hermit was supposed to solve the problem of how Catherine was going to find a guy that met her standards. So he gave her an image of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus.

01:09:29 Speaker_03
Where's that hermit going? Hermit's not going where all the single guys are.

01:09:33 Speaker_07
So he gave her an image of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus and told Catherine to pray to the image concerning her heart's desire.

01:09:39 Speaker_06
So you think that baby Jesus is going to make sure your coochie gets fucking filled?

01:09:45 Speaker_07
Well, baby Jesus is going to give you an answer, one way or another.

01:09:50 Speaker_04
Me want milk. Where's my daddy? Why isn't he here?

01:09:54 Speaker_05
Daddy's got a big ol' dick. He fucked mommy till she forgot he existed.

01:09:59 Speaker_07
But Catherine did as she was told, and much to her surprise, the Virgin Mary appeared, holding the baby Jesus. And the Virgin Mary told baby Jesus to behold Catherine to see how fair and virtuous she was. She's fuckable. Yeah.

01:10:13 Speaker_07
Unimpressed, the baby Jesus turned his head away and rejected Catherine. He never does this.

01:10:23 Speaker_04
Jesus, we came here all the way from the afterlife.

01:10:27 Speaker_07
Puzzled, Catherine returned to the hermit who introduced her to Christianity. And that same evening, the Virgin Mary and Jesus appeared again. Except this time Jesus was a guy. Full grown man. Oh yeah, because all he did was have to look at her once.

01:10:41 Speaker_07
And he gave Catherine a ring as a token of her betrothal to him. How much you want to bet this is just the hermit?

01:10:47 Speaker_06
Just dressing up as Jesus Christ. He's got a local hooker helping him doing the Virgin Mary stuff. Slipping her some fucking shrooms in her dinner.

01:10:57 Speaker_04
And it was a nuva ring.

01:10:59 Speaker_07
You're gonna want to put this in your pussy. But unluckily for Catherine, the Roman Emperor Maximian just happened to be in town, and he asked Catherine for her hand in marriage. Whoa!

01:11:09 Speaker_07
When she refused, saying she was a bride of Christ, the Emperor condemned her to death by breaking on the wheel. Awesome! This method of torture, now known as the Catherine Wheel, after Saint Catherine, was quite popular in the Middle Ages.

01:11:22 Speaker_07
First, the executioner would drop a big, heavy wheel on the victim to break their bones. Then the victim was tied to the wheel, where the remaining unbroken bones would be broken with the club. Oh wow!

01:11:33 Speaker_04
Yeah, seems nice.

01:11:36 Speaker_07
Then the ragged limbs that were, you know, all broken, you know, they would be intertwined into the wheel spokes. And then the person would be left there for hours or days until they finally died of their wounds or of thirst.

01:11:49 Speaker_07
Very, very, very bad way to die.

01:11:53 Speaker_06
It's one of the worst ones, yeah. I still think that crucifix is pretty bad, too, because you drown in your own blood.

01:11:57 Speaker_04
Yeah and you said the one where the lady was hung over the flaming shit was real bad but the other one seemed worse to me where they tied the rock to her legs and that just like stretched out her bones.

01:12:07 Speaker_06
I do think that's worse too but again there's a meme that I've seen but the first couple of seconds of that probably feel great. Oh yeah for a little bit.

01:12:15 Speaker_07
Well, in Roman times, the wheel was usually reserved for slaves and Christians. So it was the wheel that Catherine was sent to. But miraculously, the wheel broke at Catherine's touch. Whoa! So the customary beheading was ordered.

01:12:28 Speaker_07
Yeah, lop her fucking head off. But this time, in what sounds like a visual from a fucking Ari Aster movie, Catherine's body flowed not with blood when it was beheaded, but with a stream of milk.

01:12:41 Speaker_01
Oh, milk! It's milk! Everybody get your bowls!

01:12:47 Speaker_07
Catherine, by the way, was one of the three voices who spoke to Joan of Arc.

01:12:50 Speaker_03
Wow!

01:12:51 Speaker_07
Another one of Joan's spirit friends was Saint Margaret of Antioch, the patron saint of pregnant women, servant maids, and sufferers of kidney maladies, as well as being a protector against diabolical infestations.

01:13:04 Speaker_04
Oh wow, thanks Joan! Does she also shoot milk?

01:13:08 Speaker_06
Nah, dude. Nah, she's lame. It's not the same, man. She didn't even do it out of the titties, which is the fun way to shoot milk.

01:13:15 Speaker_04
She did it out of her head.

01:13:16 Speaker_06
Yeah. Technically out of her neck. Yeah.

01:13:18 Speaker_04
Yeah. If her head was still attached, it would've came out of her nose. Someone said something funny. That's all I know.

01:13:25 Speaker_07
Gotta be careful. Like Catherine, Margaret was lusted after by a Roman official but was thrown in jail for being a bride of Christ.

01:13:32 Speaker_07
Margaret was then tied to a stake and tortured by being beaten with rods and iron combs to rend and draw out her flesh from her bones.

01:13:42 Speaker_07
After remaining defiant about her faith, she was taken down and placed in a cell where she prayed to God to reveal the enemy who was fighting her. At that moment, Satan arrived as a dragon and swallowed her whole.

01:13:54 Speaker_07
But when Margaret blessed herself, the dragon split in two.

01:13:57 Speaker_06
Awesome! That's like Evangelion!

01:13:59 Speaker_07
When he's inside, when he goes inside the creature. Don't spoil it too much, I'm watching.

01:14:06 Speaker_04
You haven't seen Evangelion yet?

01:14:08 Speaker_07
I know, but I'm still... You've never seen the OG series of Evangelion?

01:14:11 Speaker_06
It's so much to go through. It is. It's a lot to go through. I'm really surprised you haven't watched all of it. We talk. We're friends. There's a bit of a barrier at times. Yeah, that's the idea.

01:14:23 Speaker_07
No, no, no, with me watching the show.

01:14:25 Speaker_06
Yes.

01:14:26 Speaker_07
And me. When they bring the penguin in.

01:14:28 Speaker_06
It's called fan service, and they're making fun of fan service.

01:14:31 Speaker_07
Are they?

01:14:32 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's the idea. Pen Pen is making fun of fan service. Is that what it is?

01:14:35 Speaker_07
It's meta. Okay.

01:14:38 Speaker_06
Fuck Abigail.

01:14:43 Speaker_07
It's also, I just can't, I can't stand to hear a boy whine for 20 hours.

01:14:46 Speaker_06
When you get to the end, it's good. Cool. Oh, after the 20 hours? But I am not as good. I don't like, I don't like the boy whining either, but I like it towards the end. Okay.

01:14:55 Speaker_07
Well, Satan then appeared in the likeness of a man who tried to deceive Margaret.

01:14:59 Speaker_00
Hello.

01:15:02 Speaker_07
She, however, saw through the disguise, flung Satan to the ground, and stomped on his neck. Yes, please. And when she took her foot away, the Earth opened and Satan returned to Hell, while Margaret was beheaded the next day and sent to Heaven.

01:15:14 Speaker_04
Oh, well. I guess that's good. She literally saved Earth from Satan three times.

01:15:20 Speaker_07
But it's said that since Margaret's story is so fantastical, what with the dragon and all, her feast day was removed from the Roman Catholic calendar in 1969.

01:15:30 Speaker_06
Matt Reeves is a good director, but he's ruined everything.

01:15:33 Speaker_07
Everything has to be grounded. It could also be, however, that the Catholic Church, none too fond of women, weren't that comfortable with a super aggressive female saint. Can't say that for sure, though. Who knows?

01:15:43 Speaker_07
But when it comes to legacy, one of the more interesting saints is our last today. That would be St. Barbara, the patron saint of architects, firemen, and miners, who was predictably invoked against explosions, fire, lightning, and sudden death.

01:15:58 Speaker_06
Honestly, if you have time to pray to St. Barbara before an explosion, you should be running.

01:16:05 Speaker_04
Yeah, and St. Barbara also lights all the explosions with cigarettes. Yeah, I do. Yeah, give me a carton of Mentos.

01:16:13 Speaker_07
Again, she was a beautiful young maiden, hailing from either Lebanon or Turkey. Probably Lebanon. So beautiful was Barbara that her father hid her away so no man could see her beauty.

01:16:23 Speaker_07
And her only contact with the outside world was with her pagan tutors.

01:16:27 Speaker_06
Who are not going to be the horniest people on the face of the planet than pagan tutors? They don't even have to worry about keeping their jobs! Tutors are paid by the hour! That's gig work!

01:16:38 Speaker_07
Now there are many sources that all have a different answer on how Barbara was introduced to Christianity, but like all the other converts, she liked what she heard from someone and weird shit started happening after she accepted the Christian faith.

01:16:51 Speaker_07
Her father became enraged when he discovered she was a Christian, but when he drew his sword to murder his child on the spot, she ducked the blade and fled the tower in disguise to hide in a cave in the surrounding mountains.

01:17:03 Speaker_06
Have you ever tried that? When you're getting like, you know, It is bad. You ever run from your dad before you get the fucking spanking or whatever and then it always makes it worse.

01:17:12 Speaker_07
You realize that while you might be a quick, small thing, he's a large, fast thing.

01:17:16 Speaker_06
Yeah, he's big.

01:17:19 Speaker_04
Well, you want me to talk about when my dad hit me? Honestly, I'm already bored.

01:17:27 Speaker_07
While she was in the mountains, she was found and ratted out by a shepherd. Barbara later cursed the shepherd by turning his sheep into locusts and turning the man himself into stone. Ka-Zam!

01:17:37 Speaker_07
Barbara was dragged back to the city and handed over to the local magistrate, who sentenced her to death by beheading if she didn't renounce her faith.

01:17:53 Speaker_07
When she said no, she was flogged with rawhide and her wounds were rubbed with hair cloth to increase the pain.

01:18:00 Speaker_07
But each night she'd pray to Jesus, and he'd appear to heal her wounds so she could go through the whole thing all over again the next day.

01:18:07 Speaker_07
Alongside Barbara, however, was another Christian woman, Juliana, and together their bodies were raked and wounded with hooks before they were led naked through the city amidst cheers and hecklers.

01:18:19 Speaker_07
When it finally came time to execute the two women, however, the magistrate gave the honor to Barbara's father, who, with a swing of the axe, beheaded his daughter in a public forum. Every father's dream.

01:18:32 Speaker_07
But at that moment, a crack of thunder was heard, and Barbara's father was struck by lightning, immediately reducing him to ashes.

01:18:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, fucking dead!

01:18:40 Speaker_04
He got blown up! That's fun as hell. But he did behead her before he blew up. Very much so, yeah.

01:18:46 Speaker_07
Oh yeah. Now because of this lightning strike, Barbara is invoked against thunder, lightning, and accidents from explosions involving gunpowder, as well as violent workplace accidents of any kind.

01:18:57 Speaker_04
Oh wow, slip and falls.

01:18:58 Speaker_07
Yeah, she really is. She's the patron saint of slip and falls. But that's also how Barbara became the patron saint of artillerymen and miners. The most interesting legacy of Barbara, however, comes from Lebanon, where St.

01:19:10 Speaker_07
Barbara's Day was turned into a version of Halloween. See, in the local version of the story, St. Barbara evaded Roman officials by dressing in a costume when she hid in the hills before the shepherd found her. Don't tell anybody, but I'm a taco.

01:19:27 Speaker_07
So, on December 3rd, the day before the local annual feast day, children in costumes roam neighborhoods screaming, telling Barbara to run away while replicating her escape. That's cute.

01:19:40 Speaker_07
They then go door to door collecting sweets and money in exchange for a song or a bit of dancing accompanied by a tambourine or hand drum. And if the host gives a good treat, the kid will sing a song to compliment them.

01:20:07 Speaker_07
But if the treat sucks, the kid will end their song with an insult and run away.

01:20:12 Speaker_00
Yeah. You're fat. That's it. That's all I have.

01:20:16 Speaker_07
But perhaps where Barbara is most popular is in Poland, where they hold a feast in her honor that has the most Polish name I've ever heard. Barburka.

01:20:26 Speaker_10
Happy Borka to you. Have you fondled your grandmother's breasts? Ah, happy Borka.

01:20:33 Speaker_03
It is the season for big heathen bosoms to be found laying in soup. You have barely touched your woman pie. Ah, it's in the shape of a vagina. Filled with poor corks.

01:20:52 Speaker_06
Ah, sweet, sweet Borka. You get five weeks off.

01:20:58 Speaker_07
I love Baborka season. Well, Baborka revolves around miners, like the people who mine.

01:21:05 Speaker_04
Not the children, no. They're also miners.

01:21:07 Speaker_07
Yes, they are. Well, mining as a profession was- I meant like, slaves.

01:21:12 Speaker_06
Oh, they're working, okay? They get paid almost five dimes a year in whatever they're moving. Oh, you've seen this as well, which is a shirt that says, I love Baborka.

01:21:22 Speaker_07
Well, mining as a profession was held in high regard in Poland, especially during the Soviet years. Because coal, yes, it had high value, but being a miner was among, if not the most dangerous jobs one could have.

01:21:42 Speaker_07
You were the worker amongst the workers.

01:21:45 Speaker_07
And so, to celebrate the patron saint of miners, Barburka began with a mass followed by a parade where each mining company would have their own marching band, accompanied by ranks of miners and their ceremonial mining uniforms specific to each company.

01:22:01 Speaker_07
Additionally, each company would sing their own distinctive mining anthem.

01:22:06 Speaker_07
The festivities would continue throughout the day, culminating in a firework show at night, and a gathering in which minors would divide themselves into teams based on age and rank. They would then... roast battle with songs! Yeah, it's awesome!

01:22:21 Speaker_07
And if your roast or your song was bad, you had to either drink salty beer or you were put in actual stocks where people roasted you further.

01:22:30 Speaker_06
And this was all done by the Carxmi Pwini, or loosely translated, the Brewer's Lodgings. So this is like, well, this is like dude club stuff. Yeah.

01:22:40 Speaker_06
So the minor groups get together and that's just all they do all night is they raise hell and they get drunk and they play pranks on each other.

01:22:46 Speaker_04
It sounds like a blast. And they scream the word barboco.

01:22:50 Speaker_06
You know it honestly sounds like a lot of it sounds very interesting I'm looking this nice because it's like because how important petroleum is to pull petroleum and salt Yeah to the Poland's economy.

01:23:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, yeah, and Yeah, they they say they they hold miners in high regard

01:23:08 Speaker_07
Yeah, in Krakow there's a salt mine that you can go down into that's apparently gorgeous. They built kind of a chapel down there that's supposed to be really fucking cool, but I got claustrophobia so I couldn't go.

01:23:20 Speaker_06
Is there a difference between, like, fresh salt? Like if you went down to the salt mine and you got some fresh ass salt. I think salt's the same. I think so, but I don't know.

01:23:31 Speaker_04
Because you salt things to keep them good for a very long period of time. Yeah, but I wonder if there's different levels of quality of salt. I think so.

01:23:39 Speaker_06
There must be. I figured you'd know this. Yeah, there's table salt, there's kosher salt, there's volcanic salt. I know those types of salt, but I don't know whether or not if it's fresh salt. You don't really want freshly brewed beer, it's gross.

01:23:50 Speaker_04
No, I guess not. I don't know. I never I would have no idea they have the born on date I know that for beers, you know is that was a big one for a while in the early 2000s. Yeah, I remember that Yeah, yeah, yeah, and you wanted a fresh one.

01:24:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, you know what cuz the old ones was skunky Yeah, sometimes have you left them in the back the bad fridge. Mm-hmm. They'd get skunky Shit

01:24:14 Speaker_07
I'm just so happy because I remember skunky beer played such a huge role in my life for a very long time.

01:24:20 Speaker_06
It really was. Skunky beer was a part of my life and then it just stopped. I don't know why. It's not like the beer got bad.

01:24:27 Speaker_04
You got successful. But I'm not buying better beer.

01:24:29 Speaker_06
You didn't have to drink it.

01:24:30 Speaker_04
Yes you are. Well I guess I, Modelo's. Yeah.

01:24:33 Speaker_06
I guess it's that Reeben box.

01:24:36 Speaker_04
Yeah, you can't take them in and out of the fridge.

01:24:38 Speaker_06
Yeah, and you can't drive with them anymore.

01:24:40 Speaker_04
I know!

01:24:41 Speaker_07
Yeah, it's not like stealing keystone light from farmer's trucks like we used to do.

01:24:46 Speaker_06
Exactly.

01:24:47 Speaker_07
That shit got skunky because you had to hide it. Yeah, and you couldn't drink it at school. Yeah, you couldn't drink it until the weekend. You steal it on Tuesday, you drink it on Saturday. Dis skunky beer.

01:24:58 Speaker_03
We start naming all of the specific beers that we have this is officially a

01:25:20 Speaker_06
This is what you ask for. Barbarka day! Yeah, this is barbarka day.

01:25:23 Speaker_07
We're having our own barbarka here, aren't we? So while these are just a few of the stories of the saints, we'll certainly be bringing you another installment in the future that covers the saints of the Middle Ages, when shit gets really weird.

01:25:35 Speaker_06
Because the old days, they used to vote, the community used to canonize, and it used to be more informal.

01:25:40 Speaker_06
But then as the church got involved, when canonization actually became an official process, that's when, as it always does, it becomes like Nepo Babies, essentially.

01:25:48 Speaker_07
But, if the saints show you anything, whether it be with the Mormons, the Scientologists, or the Catholics, the key to growing a cult into a religion is always to have solid bonus content. Yes. Always expand. Yeah. Yeah. Always expand your universe.

01:26:04 Speaker_07
You need a Patreon.

01:26:05 Speaker_04
Yeah, the Cimmerillion, the Thesaurus.

01:26:07 Speaker_07
Yeah.

01:26:07 Speaker_04
That expands the dictionary, right? We've learned nothing. We've learned nothing.

01:26:13 Speaker_06
We went through so much here today and we're not better for it. I want to say thank you so much for being here. That's right. Because without you being here, we can't make our own future religion. Because I think it's huge for us.

01:26:28 Speaker_06
I've been ruminating on it. I've been thinking about it. How do we get canonized? Oh man. You have to sell the catalog. What if we lied at the church?

01:26:41 Speaker_04
Oh yeah.

01:26:41 Speaker_06
And try to get in.

01:26:42 Speaker_04
I mean I've been lying to the church ever since I started going. Yeah. Yeah they used to make me confess like twice a week and I'm like I didn't sin yet. Yeah. So I just started lying about sins.

01:26:52 Speaker_06
Yeah. And it got you creative and started thinking about it and you're like oh that's a great sin.

01:26:55 Speaker_04
Yeah. I should probably do that.

01:26:56 Speaker_08
Yeah yeah that sounds fun. They were not happy when I started asking about dinosaurs. Oh, they got real mad about that.

01:27:02 Speaker_07
Bro, it's dinosaurs! It wasn't just a Bill Hicks bit. Like, they get really angry when you fucking ask about dinosaurs when you're six years old.

01:27:09 Speaker_07
Because you love dinosaurs, and they're talking about it, and it's like, okay, so all the animals that was a dinosaur, and then you get in trouble for asking questions.

01:27:16 Speaker_06
And all of a sudden you're the kid with a big mouth! Oh, that's how it is. If you were a good-ass priest, you would improv your way to enfold it in. Enfold it in! You know, that's the idea. You go like, oh yeah, sure, dinosaur, they, uh, angels.

01:27:28 Speaker_07
Yeah, my Sunday school teacher wasn't ready for that. Regina was not ready for that question.

01:27:33 Speaker_04
Well, she should have just told you. They tossed him in on Noah's Ark. Everyone knows that. Yeah, who knows? Yeah, and then they drowned him. They were too big. Yeah, they drowned all the dinosaurs when the flood came. Noah did it.

01:27:44 Speaker_04
See, it's so important to learn. Everyone says he's a good guy, but he fucking drowned the dinosaurs. It's all he wanted to do. He's a murderer.

01:27:50 Speaker_06
The dinosaurs are the Natalie Woods of the Bible. Patreon.com slash last podcast and left speaking of DLC you can get all of our extended adventures on the patreon We got BTS.

01:28:03 Speaker_06
We have live streams come see all of our fucking bullshit and shit on there It's like you watch us the wiggle around on there go to LP on the left for all of our socials Tiktok and Instagram. Tiktok and Instagram. And go to lastspotgetsthelove.com.

01:28:15 Speaker_06
We are going to be doing live shows. We're out there. We have so many fucking live shows coming.

01:28:21 Speaker_04
December 7th. December 7th is a big one in New York. King's Theatre, I can't fucking wait. Cannot wait.

01:28:26 Speaker_04
Yes, and then after that we're going to be in Atlanta in January, and then Dallas in February, Nashville in March, Detroit in April on 4-18, two days before 4-20. Not bad. And then on May 3rd we'll be in Toronto. But next week!

01:28:42 Speaker_04
next saturday henry and i are going to be with billy wayne davis doing side stories live cannot wait at the mattiel community center in humboldt yeah we're going to be fucking happy but the goal is to make sure we can perform eddie i know because billy wayne right before he sent me that bar before the show i was like could it be after the show

01:29:01 Speaker_06
Yeah, I don't think we should do a dab bar and then attempt to perform. I feel like we're going to forget to do the show.

01:29:06 Speaker_04
I'm not going to do my fifth dab ever and then get on stage.

01:29:10 Speaker_06
No, because it's frightening. I did a podcast with Frank Castillo that was the, he did it all with dabs and it was one of those where it's like 45 minutes in and it's like, what?

01:29:20 Speaker_06
I'm like, you know when you've been talking for so long and they're all looking at you and it's like, What in the living fuck have I been saying for the last 45 minutes?

01:29:30 Speaker_04
Well, Frank's a psychopath. I've seen him drink 100 milligrams and then go on stage and do 30 minutes. He's got to be careful. I don't know what's going on with him. That's taking the joy out of it. He's literally dabbing and shit.

01:29:39 Speaker_06
Yeah, exactly. You have to live your life. I love dabbing, but that's for when I'm finally not talking to anyone.

01:29:50 Speaker_03
Give it up to you Barbara Beach boys, they know beach boy.

01:30:01 Speaker_04
There is no beach boys Fun fun fun when they take my freedom away It's honestly, it's very political full of activism today.

01:30:14 Speaker_06
I Big whale of a bellybutton