Arnell Dowret will host “Equal Time for Freethought’s Secular Christmas Party,” focusing on the things that people do on and around the holiday season which transcend the “faith barrier.”
Audio here!
Show 188: The Politics of Jesus – A Debate
Audio here!
The battle between the progressive secular Left in America with religion lies squarely on the frontlines of radical religious fundamentalism. It is clear for the American Left that an America dominated by the likes of Dominionists – Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Tim Lahaye and many politicians in the current Neo-Conservative Republican Party – will be an America minus democracy, diversity and equality.
But what of religious liberals?
Continue reading “Show 188: The Politics of Jesus – A Debate”
Show 187: Lauren Sandler
Audio here!
There’s a new youth movement afoot in this country. It’s a counterculture fusion of politics and pop, and it’s taking over a high school near you. Like the waves that came before it, it’s got passion, music, and anti-authority posturing, but more than anything else, this one has God. So what does it mean when today’s youth counterculture has a mindset more akin to Jerry Falwell’s than Abbie Hoffman’s?
In Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, Lauren Sandler, a dynamic young secular journalist, reports from this junction of Evangelicalism and youth culture, traveling across the country to investigate the alternative Christian explosion.
Show 186b: Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior II
See show #197
Audio for part two HERE!
Show 186a: Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior
Audio here!
Humanism requires unselfish behavior and human cooperation for it to relevant to the future of human society. It has become popular – perhaps as a backlash to the 1960s liberal strides – to think of humans as selfish, greedy and uber-competitive… A Hobbesian take on human nature which has been promoted to justify dangerous economic systems such as capitalism, as well as authoritarian fascist states such as the Bush Administration has been taking us toward.
Some scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers and Stephen Pinker, while not backing the latter, have backed the former, and now claim that science backs such draconian perceptions of our basic nature.
Others haven’t made such claims.
Continue reading “Show 186a: Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior”
Show 185: The Free Will Question
Audio 1 here!
Audio 2 here!
A couple of weeks ago week, “Equal Time for Freethought” featured an encore presentation of a discussion we had this past summer with Eddie Ellis, host of WBAI’s “On the Count!: The Criminal Justice and Prison Report.” During our conversation one major question which emerged hinged on the question of whether people behave as they do as a result of their own free will, or as a result of factors which they do not choose.
Show 184: James Loewen – The Meaning of Thanksgiving
Audio here!
Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving in America? How many of us know what happened leading up to the first Thanksgiving? Why are so many of us ignorant to the fact that Thanksgiving was not meant to be about family and friends gathering for turkey, but about ethnocentric nationalism, genocide and civil religiosity? What does all this tell us about how we view our history and our current role in the world?
James Loewen, author of Lies My Teach Told Me, will discuss these questions and more as we investigate the meaning behind Thanksgiving in America.
Continue reading “Show 184: James Loewen – The Meaning of Thanksgiving”
Show 183: Chris Hedges
Audio here!
This week on Equal Time for Freethought, Sunsara Taylor will interview Chris Hedges about topics touched on in his forthcoming book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. They will also discuss his recent speech at a teach-in held in NYC by ‘World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime’ where he insisted that attempts to dialogue and seek “common ground” with Christian fascists will lead to disaster.
Show 182: Fund Drive Special: Ann Druyan & Stephenie Hendricks
Audio 1 here!
Audio 2 here!
For the 2-hour Equal Time for Freethought October marathon special, the bridge between science and religion will once again be crossed… this time to analyze the special relationship between the two and to find out what can go wrong when the latter steps to hard on the toes of the former. For this program, we talked to Ann Druyan and Stephenie Hendricks.
Carl Sagan is considered one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. His ability to explain science in terms easily understandable to the layman in bestselling books such as Cosmos, The Dragons of Eden, and The Demon-Haunted World won him a Pulitzer Prize and placed him firmly next to Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sachs as one of the most important and enduring communicators of science. This December will mark the tenth anniversary of Sagan’s death, and Ann Druyan, his widow and longtime collaborator, will mark the occasion by releasing Sagan’s famous “Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology,” The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God.
The Varieties of Scientific Experience has been edited and updated with an introduction by Ann Druyan. In the book, Sagan discusses his views on topics ranging from manic depression, creationism and so-called intelligent design, and the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets, to the likelihood of nuclear annihilation of our own.
In Divine Destruction: Dominion Theology and American Environmental Policy, Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Stephenie Hendricks charts the important connections between “Wise Use”—a rabidly anti-environmental philosophy—and dominion theologists—far-right Christian ideologues who believe that there is no reason to protect the environment given the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ. This political collaboration reaches all the way to the Bush administration whose environmental policies are deeply influenced by dominionist thinking. Divine Destruction is an in-depth look at the radical remaking of American environmental policy already underway—in terrifying secret.
Show 181b: Ted Honderich on “Right & Wrong” II
For information and audio for Pt. 1, see listing for September 24, 2006
Audio here!