America loves the word “freedom,” so why do so many of us feel spiritually starved, politically cornered, and weirdly isolated from our own bodies? We pull a thread from The Great Cosmic Mother and it turns into a whole tapestry: patriarchal religion doesn’t just shape private belief, it builds the rules of the modern world. When the sacred gets split from the lived, you end up with what the book calls the American split, a culture that can offer abundance and ideology but not wholeness, ecstasy, or a shared vision worth living for.

We walk through the historical tension that still haunts US politics: Puritan Christianity feeding fundamentalism and Protestant capitalism, while many founders leaned Deist and helped birth secular humanism. That gap helps explain why “Judeo-Christian nation” rhetoric keeps resurfacing, and why people who aren’t religious still live inside religious structures. We also dig into the book’s critique of the all-male divine family, the virgin birth story, and how women’s unpaid labor, sexuality, and guilt get converted into fuel for institutions that claim to speak for God.

Then we hit the hardest link: control female reproduction and you can control the workforce. We talk capitalism, labor rights, reproductive autonomy, and what it means to live inside a machine that tries to turn humans into mechanisms.

It's way more fun than it sounds, trust us. Press play and be sure to share the episode everywhere!

SHOW NOTES WILL BE UPDATED EVEN MORE SOON

Here's some stuff we talked about:

"One nation under god" - added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954:

https://www.history.com/articles/pledge-allegiance-under-god-schools

"In God We Trust" first appeared on U.S. coins in 1864 during the Civil War. It was added to paper currency much later, with the first bills entering circulation in 1957 following a 1955 law requiring it on all money. The phrase was added to reflect religious sentiment, with paper, and to distinguish the U.S. from "godless" communism during the Cold War:
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/The-legislation-placing-In-God-We-Trust-on-national-currency/

And here's Thomas Jefferson's Bible:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/jeffersonbible/#1

Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy:
https://thomaspaine.org/resour

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Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

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Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

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We’re deep in The Great Cosmic Mother, landing in the final section on “Patriarchal Culture and Religion” where the dots connect fast: the split from Earth to sky, the invention of a distant father God, and the long campaign to make the body feel dirty, dangerous, and controllable. Something that affects each and every one of us, whether we attend church or not.

We talk through how The GCM tells us that patriarchy rewrote spiritual reality by ripping women out of the life giving narrative, turning birth and blood into shame, and replacing embodied joy with guilt, rules, and obedience. Along the way we connect the “God as Father” framework to virgin birth logic, modern purity culture, and today’s obsession with policing sex, reproduction, and LGBTQ lives.

Then we follow the material trail: stored grain, property, money, cattle wealth, and the rise of standing armies. The episode links patriarchal religion to labor exploitation, class systems justified by original sin, and professional warfare that turns conquest into “holy” duty. We also get into the imperial tactic that still makes our stomachs drop, redirecting colonized men’s rage away from their conquerors and toward women, fueling misogyny as social control.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next chapter, share the episode with a friend who can handle broads with big ideas, and leave a review. What part of this story do you recognize most in your own life right now?

Music credits:

The_Mountain by Dmitrii Kolesnikov from Pixabay

kontraamusic holy-water-hiphop-instrumental

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://bitingalltheapples.buzzsprout.com

Find us on TikTok and YouTube and BlueSky

Wonder how you got trapped in the machine? We've got all the answers for you. Using our book of the moment, The Great Cosmic Mother, we break down how ancient goddess-centered cultures that were so real and connected through birth, death, creativity, ecstacy, and the earth - got totally crushed and rewritten with a patriarchal influenced monotheistic jealous god. The change coincided with a rise in conquering, violence, and a focus on production - a desire to change humans into worker bots to feed the machine. We know this really happened because the book has so many receipts and well, it's a culture that we still live in.

Some episode highlights:

• using haiku as a quick grounding tool when your justice sensitivity flares up
• rejecting the straight-line patriarchal colonial story of history and progress
• evidence for nonviolent settled life and priestess-led religion at Çatalhöyük
• how modern work culture steals sleep, dreams, and inner life
• how Christianity repackaged woman/goddess-related symbols, including menstrual blood
• we learn that it was a fig tree that Eve and Adam ate from and quickly decide we aren't changing the name of the podcast

Everybody write a haiku and send it to us.

Work less, sleep more, write haikus. Read the book.

Notes:

Fun short vid with CGM reading:

https://www.tiktok.com/@universetrip/video/7503218453923269918

William Irwin Thompson. (Joanna reads a quote)

https://williamirwinthompsondotblog.wordpress.com/

Zoey - Reads the Great Cosmic Mother

https://open.spotify.com/show/54FiACeQTVyz2RDPpovjIQ?si=1955c55d59c348bc

Cassandra Faye Floyd reads The Great Cosmic Mother

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZRu9YEwhWPw?si=ZXTickIZwz-wAojn

Send us Fan Mail

Credits

Recorded at Troubadour Studios in Lansing, MI

Audio Engineer Corey DeRushia

Edited by Rie Daisies at Nighttime Girlfriend Studio

Music: ‘Shifting pt. 2 (instrumental)’ by Rie Daisies

Executive Producer Kate ML Rogers

Leave us a voice mail

Have some feedback? Praise? General thoughts? Know how to pronounce something? Are you a religious scholar? We'd love to hear from you. Leave a message right from your phone or computer by clicking here. Recordings may be used in future episodes.

Website

https://bitingalltheapples.buzzsprout.com

Find us on TikTok and YouTube and BlueSky