Comedian Interviews Westboro Baptist Church… and Wins

February 27, 2013 By 57 Comments

Comedian Brick Stone engaged members of Westboro Baptist Church in a series of conversations… and it turns out when they try to justify their positions, they just end up looking like idiots:

WBC usually gets accused of being a hate group, but when you watch this video, it comes off like irrational anger more than anything else. They don’t even know what they’re protesting against — they only know that God must agree with them. Crazy.

Filed Under: General, GLBT, Humor 57 Comments
About Hemant Mehta

Hemant Mehta is the chair of Foundation Beyond Belief and a high school math teacher in the suburbs of Chicago. He began writing the Friendly Atheist blog in 2006. His latest book is called The Young Atheist's Survival Guide.

  • Simon

    Members of hate groups do tend to be irrationally angry. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the WBC as an anti-gay hate group: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/westboro-baptist-church

    • Witchgawd

      How do they classify all the Christian groups with word “Family” in them?

      • http://itsmyworldcanthasnotyours.blogspot.com/ wmdkitty

        A number of those have also been classified as hate groups.

  • Mej

    The WBC started looking like idiots the moment they held up those signs. Brick Stone really just harassed them about it.

  • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

    I don’t normally condone giving them any more attention than absolutely necessary, but he’s good!

  • PietPuk

    1:30: “Would you argue with god if he asked you to hug a gay?”

    Brilliant question!

  • The Other Weirdo

    Dude! Those sunglasses are so totally 70s!

  • ganner918

    You literally don’t know what gay means!

    • Helanna

      Hahaha I loved his absolute disbelief during that whole part.

  • Mike

    These fools are an easy target. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

  • Art_Vandelay

    “Didn’t I jerk you off in a Kmart bathroom once”?

    • Jennifer

      That one was priceless!

  • Claude

    This woman thinks a three-day old baby is going to Hell? Why? Why are the Newtown victims going to Hell? Is it because God is mad at gay people? I googled and could not find out what these people are thinking.

    Incredible.

    • Tom

      I wish he’d zeroed it in a bit more on that one, just to really make it absurd and pin them down. How about five minutes after birth? How about five seconds? How about when the baby’s half-way out – does it half go to hell?

  • njew84

    I hear these people saying God hates fags and I am just lost for words. God doesn’t hate anyone. Actually God(Jesus) commands us to love everyone including homosexuals, porn addicts, sex addicts, porn stars, prostitutes as they are all people. I say this because I am guilty of sexual immorality myself. I know God loves me, I know he has offered a way out of my feelings of hopelessness, my addictions. I am a porn addict and it tears me apart and it’s tearing my family apart. Most of all it tears me away from Him. We are all guilty of a sinful pleasure, the good news is Jesus Christ took it all away. I have accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior and even though I still stumble He knows my heart. We all must realize we can’t make it on our own. I pray for WBC and anyone who is caught up in sexual idolatry or any kind of addiction, I love everyone of you. I don’t care who you are!

    • decathelite

      What exactly did Jesus take away? The guilt or the sinful pleasure? Because it looks like you’ve still got both.

      /Nothing wrong or sinful about rubbing one out, as long as you’re not doing it 20 times a day.

      • njew84

        Let me explain it to you the best way I can..

        I have been addicted to pornography since I was 8, I thought everyone did it and just thought I would grow out of it when I grew up and got married. Bad news, I was wrong. Porn does an odd thing to us. It gives us a false impression of what a woman should be like. It puts the image of a woman that is only there to please us and basically do whatever we want deep into our psyche. When we get into a real relationship we find it is much different. We find woman are nothing like that false image or that standard we initially held them to. In fact many things other than porn influence these ideals of a perfect spouse but porn is a probably one of the biggest problems in most relationships.

        Accepting Christ isn’t like rubbing a magic bottle and a genie pops out and all your problems are solved. Accepting Christ is allowing him to renew your mind. The enemy will still attack you and try to deceive you and you will fall for it on occasion. I do believe that one day I will be free from my addiction. Like any addiction however, there is always that chance of relapse. God knows your true heart like no one else, no human being will ever understand the thought process of our creator. Will I see porn again, probably, however my thoughts are being renewed. I now see it as a sin, I know it is wrong by how it affects people and my relationships.

        • Persephone

          “Porn does an odd thing to us. It gives us a false impression of what a
          woman should be like. It puts the image of a woman that is only there
          to please us and basically do whatever we want deep into our psyche.”

          You are aware that there is such a thing as porn which features no women, right?

          That aside, you might be surprised to learn how many Christians have told me that the purpose of women is, in fact, nothing more than to please men. Your description of porn actually dovetails nicely with that viewpoint.

          • njew84

            Yes I do realize porn features more than just woman. I didn’t think I really need to describe each individual type of pornography and what it does to the human psyche, my mistake.

            I like how you lump all Christians in together like we all are alike in how we view the world and interpret the word of God. I’m sure you don’t appreciate when people discriminate against atheist and lump you all in as “bad people” because I’m sure you’re not ALL bad people.

            • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

              Where did Persephone “lump all Christians in together” ?

              If I understood the point correctly, it was that there is a large fraction of Christianity that is profoundly misogynistic. And, as I said above re. Westboro, you can’t say that they are not true Christians. The same applies to atheists who advocate sexism, of which there are far too many. They are still atheists, but they are dangerously misguided.

              Also:

              You are making massive over-generalization when you assert that pornography gives people “false impressions” of others. That may be true in some or even many cases, but it requires that people not recognize the difference between the fantasy presented in whatever media they are consuming and the reality of actually having a sexual relationship with someone (and, to point out the obvious: a sexual relationship is not necessary a romantic relationship, and neither necessarily involves marriage).

              • http://www.facebook.com/ash.whirt Ash Whirt

                To be fair, there are many atheists willing to throw rape and death threats at females they disapprove of.

                • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

                  And those people are dangerously misguided. Didn’t I just say that?

            • Persephone

              Well why don’t all Christians have the same religious beliefs? Don’t you all draw from the same source material? If your god was so great, why couldn’t it write a book that would be clearly understood to have one and only one meaning by all people?

              I mean, if I was god, there would be no atheists. Everyone would know without question that I exist.

              So which Christians are right, the ones who despise gay people, or the ones who don’t?

              Which Christians are right, the ones who think that women exist to serve men, or the ones who don’t?

              I could make questions like this all day.

              In the end, I form my personal opinion of Christianity by the people who profess to be Christians, by the statements they make, by their actions, and by their professed beliefs. I experienced this first-hand being raised in a Southern Baptist household and attending such churches, growing up and living in a place that is overrun with Christians of all denominations, and by interacting with Christians of all sorts as an adult. This isn’t something that I just decided on a whim. There’s a mountain of evidence, and overwhelmingly it reflects extremely poorly on Christian people.

              • njew84

                Everyone on the face of this planet is different. All Christians are different and all atheists are different. The word of God doesn’t change, people change the word of God. The two commandments Jesus speaks of in Matthew 22: 37-40 are, 1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, 2. Love your neighbor as thyself. These are the two greatest commandments to follow and live by. If everybody loved the Lord and each other, like Christ loved us, there
                would be no sin in the world! There would be no murder, no hate, no
                bitterness, no adultery, no stealing nor any other kind of sin, if we only loved the Lord with all our heart and our neighbor as our own self.

                In my opinion, you can call yourself whatever you want but if you don’t follow these commandments you aren’t a Christian you’re a fool.

                • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

                  The historical Jesus, if there was one, did not say that, since the Gospel of Matthew was composed by an anonymous author at the end of the first century – who was cribbing off of the Gospel of Mark. But I defer that discussion to the historians.

                  The Bible says that people are to love one another. It also says that unless you hate your family, you cannot be a disciple of Jesus (Luke 14:26), at various places different describes people that God hates, and says that Jesus did not seek to bring peace, but the sword (Matthew 10:34). And, as Westboro Baptist never ceases to remind everyone, the Bible says either to kill men who have sex with men (Leviticus 20:13) or exile them (1 Kings 15:11-12). It also contains at least three cases that can be ambiguously interpreted as positive endorsements of same-sex relationships (Ruth & Naomi, David & Jonathan, Daniel & Ashpenaz).

                  The point of that is to illustrate that the Bible is a self-contradicting text. Here is a list of a few hundred contradictions: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/by_name.html . Absent external information, the Bible can be used to justify just about anything.

                  You have _no_ justification for claiming that the members of Westboro aren’t Christian, although you are certainly correct that they act like fools.

                • njew84

                  There is also text in the Old Testament that says a woman who is caught in adultery should be stoned to death correct? However in John 8: 1-11 “Jesus” clearly states, “all right, then let the person who has never sinned throw the first stone.”

                  I’m not by any means an expert in theology but I can tell you that many of these “contradictions” are simply taken out of context.

                • Claude

                  The Woman Taken in Adultery is thought by many scholars to be a late addition and not original to the Gospel of John.

                • njew84

                  I could debate all day about this but it is really futile as any Christian/Secular debate. I will say this though, if this was in fact added later, why then didn’t they go in and fix all the other so called condradictions?

                • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

                  Because it was quite literally compiled by committee. I think if God really guided everything, as so many Christians tell me, it would have been a lot more clear.

                  The answer I usually get is that God has to keep things mysterious. He can’t just come out and say it, otherwise he’d be taking away our free will to be critical thinkers. Really?

                  As it is, no matter how you look at it, no matter what specific religious view you take, you’re in the minority.

                • njew84

                  You know what I love about my God? Those who are faithful to him may still not completely understand everything that is written in the bible but if you truly believe he will make all things clear, maybe not right then and there but if you pray and ask for clarity He will clarify.

                  Mark 4: 1-20 is a great reference to this. Jesus is speaking in a parable as usual, to a large crowd, later after the doubters had gone away his disciples ask him why he doesn’t speak more clearly.

                  Now what I get from this particular passage is, those who plain out don’t believe, it will never be clear and will likely write it off as a bunch of crap, he says Satan will come and take away the word that was sown in them.

                  Those who claim to be a believer will listen and might even understand but since they are not truly a believer doubt will overcome them.

                  Some believers will also listen and understand but because of material things of this world, personal problems and selfish desires will too lose their understanding.

                  Finally those who truly believe will hold onto the word, whether they get it completely or not and stay faithful, and He will make all things clear, even more than you can ever imagine.

                • Claude

                  Mark 4 is remarkable. Why should understanding be contingent on faith? Why not appeal to simple curiosity, the desire to know? Of course in that case Eve would be the star of the whole saga.

                  Apparently Mark thinks that because the crowd may be skeptical, Jesus obscures his message to them to confuse them even further, while explaining himself clearly only to his disciples, who themselves are portrayed as uncomprehending bumpkins throughout the Gospel. This is not the democratic Jesus accessible to all, but the Gnostic Jesus who reserves the “secret of the kingdom of God” for an elect few.

                  Why do you find this persuasive?

                • njew84

                  Because the secret of the Kingdom of God is not a secret at all! You choose not to believe therefore putting yourself in a position of an outsider. It’s only a secret because you make it that way!

                • njew84

                  Do you not realize that it is pure selfishness to think God should have to meet YOUR needs and reveal Himself to YOU first before you will believe in Him?

                • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

                  No, that’s not selfishness. That’s rational. If I tell my son something preposterous, then I expect him to question me. The problem with this whole “you’re trying to judge God on your own terms, God is greater to you than you are to an ant” is that if I wanted to explain something to an ant, I’d know to put it on the ant’s terms. If I want to explain something to my son, I explain the words he doesn’t already know.

                  Frankly if God existed as this vastly greater entity, then it wouldn’t be shadowing things in mystery that most people on the planet are going to get wrong. What we have is exactly the kind of thing people create when they want to tell a story that can’t be refuted.

                • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

                  >>it is pure selfishness to think God should have to …
                  reveal Himself to YOU first before you will believe in Him<>The secret of the Kingdom of God is not a secret at all!<<

                  If that were true, we would expect this make-everything-better idea to be followed by a large group of people (like how everyone worked together to get rid of smallpox). Instead, there are tens of thousands of different sects of Christianity, all composed of people equally devoted to entirely different and contradicting visions of what the Kingdom of God is. If there were one actual meaning, that is not what would be seen. Whereas if everyone is picking and choosing and making stuff up, a massive proliferation of sects is exactly what would be expected.

                • Claude

                  No. The author of the Gospel of Mark wrote:

                  He [JESUS] said to them: To you are given the secrets of the Kingdom of God, but to those outside all comes through parables, so that they may have sight but not see, and hear but not understand, lest they be converted and forgiven.

                  According to Mark, Jesus reveals just enough to the crowd to foreclose them from the opportunity for conversion and forgiveness. Don’t you find this troubling?

                • njew84

                  Not even a little troubling! Understand that God is not here to serve you! You are here to serve Him and be in a relationship with Him. He wants you to come to Him all on your own, your choice. If he spoke with perfect clarity to everyone and revealed Himself to everyone who would not believe? Even the most evil of hearts would believe.

                • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

                  You are here to serve Him and be in a relationship with Him.

                  Do you not realize how infantile and immature that makes Him sound?

                  And the choice between loving Him or going to Hell is exactly the definition of an abusive relationship.

                • Claude

                  Even the most evil of hearts would believe.

                  Isn’t that the whole object of the game?

                • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

                  No, ’cause then free will. I think the object of the game is to keep reciting rules such that the other person cannot win.

                • njew84

                  My speculation would be that Jesus wanted people to come to Him on a personal level and ask Him what he meant instead of just writing it off as rubbish. He created us to be in a relationship with Him not to criticize and analyze Him from afar.

                • njew84

                  You know what I love about my God? Those who are faithful to him may still not completely understand everything that is written in the bible but if you truly believe he will make all things clear, maybe not right then and there but if you pray and ask for clarity He will clarify.

                  Mark 4: 1-20 is a great reference to this. Jesus is speaking in a parable as usual, to a large crowd, later after the doubters had gone away his disciples ask him why he doesn’t speak more clearly.

                  Now what I get from this particular passage is, those who plain out don’t believe, it will never be clear and will likely write it off as a bunch of crap, he says Satan will come and take away the word that was sown in them.

                  Those who claim to be a believer will listen and might even understand but since they are not truly a believer doubt will overcome them.

                  Some believers will also listen and understand but because of material things of this world, personal problems and selfish desires will too lose their understanding.

                  Finally those who truly believe will hold onto the word, whether they get it completely or not and stay faithful, and He will make all things clear, even more than you can ever imagine.

                • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

                  Am I correct that you are claiming that you have unique personal insight into the mind of your God?

                  That does not actually address any of the contradictions in all of versions of the Bible, or how you and Westboro and every other Christian sect read the Bible and come up with mutually-contradicting ideas. Every religious group contains people who to all appearances believe just as truly as you do. Being certain is not the same as being right.

                • http://squeakysoapbox.com/ Rich Wilson

                  When Joseph Smith found the gold plates and seer stones, the Angel Moroni told him not to show anyone, so it makes perfect sense that Smith didn’t show anyone. And that’s why when he dictated the translation of the plates to Harris, he had to keep them hidden behind a veil.

                  Unfortunately, Harris’s wife didn’t have faith and was filled with doubt. She told Harris to challenge Smith to read the plates again. If Smith really was reading something magically translated, he should be able to reproduce it.

                  But of course God was angry with Smith for letting the translations fall into the hands of a doubter like Mrs. Harris, so he forbid Joseph Smith from reading the plates of Lehi again. But not to worry, Joseph also had the plates of Nephi to translate. So the story wouldn’t be exactly the same, but close.

                  So how could Smith be lying if God got angry with him? I mean, if he’d made it all up, then why would God be angry?

                  You see, it doesn’t sound like explanations. It sounds like excuses. A lot of excuses. And every single one of them is internally supported. It’s all one big mess of circular logic. If you make the leap of faith to get into that mess of circular logic, then it all makes sense. Everything support everything else. But if you remove that single starting assumption, it all unravels.

                • Claude

                  It’s an historical, not a Christian/secular, debate. Who’s this “they”? Scribes did at times change scriptural texts to better harmonize with current ideology and translators introduced errors and modifications. I guess the short answer is that the Bible is a collection of many different books by many different authors written over hundreds of years.

                  In one important respect it’s incidental whether Jesus “clearly said” something, or if current wisdom was simply attributed to him, or if a story inspired by his story was added on later. Did “he who is without sin cast the first stone” represent a breakthrough in moral consciousness over “stone the adulteress”? I think we could all agree that it did.

                  Incredibly, a couple accused of adultery by the Taliban was stoned to death just two years ago.

                • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

                  >> I can tell you that many of these “contradictions” are simply taken out of context.<> if this was in fact added later, why then didn’t they go in and fix all the other so called contradictions?<<

                  Because, as noted, the Bible is a composite of texts written by a large number of authors in a large number of different languages over several centuries and a large area of the eastern Mediterranean. And when the various versions of the Bible were compiled, they were not edited for content.

            • SphericalBunny

              Saying ‘many Christians’ is not ‘lumping all Christians together’. Saying ‘Porn does an odd thing to us. It gives us a false impression of what a woman should be like. It puts the image of a woman that is only there to please us and basically do whatever we want deep into our psyche.’ is lumping ALL people together.This is not only hypocritical, it’s wrong.

              I’m female. I enjoy porn. I’ve never been stupid or naive enough to believe that pornstars are my role models. Other peoples mileage, obviously, may vary. I have no idea how or why you were able to get hold of porn at the age of eight, but it suggests to me that your current addiction may be the tip of the iceberg, issue-wise. Have you considered going for some secular counselling? Because right now you’re giving out strong vibes of some weird wank-God-guilt triune (do you really want those three inextricably tied together?), and the obsessional nature you appear to be placing on the 3 is really not going to help you deal with it.

              Having said that, what you may consider an ‘addiction’ may not really be something someone who doesn’t believe enjoying the odd bit of porn would even think of classifying that way without the odious ‘sexual pleasure is dirty! you are dirty!’ message hammered out by religion…

              I hope you get some practical help for your issues.

        • mobathome

          @njew84:disqus wrote “Accepting Christ isn’t like rubbing a magic bottle and a genie pops out and all your problems are solved.”

          You have to let someone else read your writing before you post!

        • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-Harrison/23417637 Michael Harrison

          I see this as scapegoating, or at best addressing a symptom rather than the underlying issue. As for me, I rather think my intimacy issues probably have more to do with a history of paranoia that causes trust issues, and I’ll stop there to avoid TMI.

    • Pattrsn

      Of course God hates fags. God being a figment of a person’s imagination has the same perspective of the person dreaming it up. Since members of the WBC hate gays so does their God.

    • http://www.facebook.com/people/Michael-W-Busch/578120211 Michael W Busch

      Both you and Westboro Baptist assert that the Christian God is telling you to do something. But the Bible is self-contradicting on this and many other matters, so there is no way to say that they are doing Christianity wrong and you are doing it right.

      What you _can_ do is to apply actual empirical evidence – e.g. we are all people and should all be treated with respect, because the alternative is a lot of avoidable human suffering. What Westboro does is wrong regardless of if God exists; treating people well is right regardless of if God exists.

      Also: if you are putting homosexuality in the same class as a clinical addiction, you are mistaken. Addiction is continuing to do something mood-altering in spite of adverse consequences. There are no adverse consequences to homosexuality.

    • Quintin van Zuijlen

      God doesn’t exist, and Jesus has been dead for about twenty centuries, so whatever. See, just as compelling.

  • http://www.laughinginpurgatory.com/ Andrew Hall

    He’s got good comedic timing, and gold mine for material.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/EYZCDG3OAPGD3PDG7XD7SM7OAM ElizabethS

    ONA shot outs! haha love this guy!

  • Jennifer

    Hilarious! He really has a wit and knows how to use it!

  • http://itsmyworldcanthasnotyours.blogspot.com/ wmdkitty

    Dude, is his name really “Brick Stone”?

  • Robyman4

    They don’t look like idiots. They ARE $%^&ing idiots.