Equal Time For Freethought

9/11 10th Anniversary Special: w/ Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping

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Not long after the planes struck on 9/11, infamous anti-consumerist performers The Church of Stop Shopping (led by Reverend Billy and Church Director Savitri D) renamed themselves the Church of Stop Bombing. What followed was years of protest for peace and public space as both were attacked by the US Government and the NYPD.

War, community, shopping, grief, religion, and hope for peace are all tangled up in the legacy of 9/11. Over the years, Reverend Billy and the Church have performed 9/11 anniversary shows and rituals to commemorate the best responses to that day –the spontaneous eruption of community and solace in Union Square, the “I love you” final phone calls from the victims– alongside the tragic response of war, torture, and suspension of liberties from our government.

Michael O’Neil will talk to Reverend Billy and Savitri D on this special edition of Equal Time For Freethought; join us as we discuss where the 9/11 legacy has been taken. Also join The Church on Sunday at 2pm for a flowers and candles remembrance at Union Square in New York City.

What Capitalism’s Wrought w/ Michael Perelman

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Central to the humanistic worldview are the notions of individual liberty and communal freedom. A humanist society is one where people can each reach their potential, and engage with each other in all the myriad aspects of living the good life.  But for all people to be able to participate in such a society, everyone has to have social, political, and economic freedom. To many on the Right, Free-Market Capitalism is the perfect tool toward meeting such goals, and the Government is the major obstacle. To others, it’s the other way around. And to perhaps just a few, both institutions are thought to be severely flawed, if not the actual antithesis of what is needed to reach a humanistic future society.

But everyone can see things are breaking down. Debt Ceilings, Spending Crises, High-Unemployment, Failing Entitlements, Obamacare, Low Tax Rates for the Rich and on and on. It almost seems as if American society is beginning to collapse; fracturing into many angry groups, some more powerful than others; and it all seems to be – underneath all the yelling – over economics (fed by misanthropic beliefs about the human condition).

But economics seems to be so confusing that many people – including the “experts” – don’t really seem to understand what exactly is going on. The result of this is that Americans seem to have many diametrically opposed opinions about capitalism, statism, “free markets”, and socialism/communism … about how we got here, and thus how to get out of this mess. But because so many of these opinions are based on misinformation, they don’t allow us to introduce evidence-based ideas on how to right the ship.

Then again, maybe the ship can’t be saved.

ETFF will speak to economist and economic historian Michael Perelman (The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers) about these questions and problems and more, as we welcome in Labor Day weekend.

The “Hurricane Irene” Equal Time for Freethought Special!

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We will host a special program this week due to changes due to the pending storm.. today we will discuss:

1.   What people helping each other during emergencies says about human nature – we’ll take calls for examples of when YOU gave or received help, including on 9/11.

2.   How freethinkers might respond to comments from religious persons during such troubled times when they say things like, “We’ll say a prayer for you” or “May God bless you.”

3.   The history and concept of the phrase… “Acts of god”

4.   Downed Electrical wires – my mother “the electrical scholar’s” theory of the danger of lose disconnected wire – living in fear and overly generalizing.

5.   Why do we thank god for only killing half of our family?

Good Without God?

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This Saturday in Manhattan, four humanists/atheists will meet on a panel at the NYC Ethical Culture Society to discuss the question many American religionists ask of non-believers often.. how can you be good (moral) without believing in God? This question is particularly important because even liberal religionists and people who identify as “spiritual but not religious,” feel their children need churchin’ so they can have “something (ethical) to believe in”.. and later they can “make up their minds.”

This event will take place in the evening. Earlier the same day, on Equal Time for Freethought two of the four panelists – Michael DeDora of the Center for Inquiry/Counsel for Secular Humanism and Anne Klaeysen of the Ethical Culture Society – will discuss with us some of what they will share at the panel event.

Can we be good without God?

In and Out of Crisis w/ Sam Gindin

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This week, ETFF will speak with Sam Gindin, co-author of In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, available from PM Press. Sam’s history includes serving as Chief Economist for the Canadian United Auto Workers and is a current faculty member of York University, researching Social justice and political activism, unions, socialism, class politics, globalization and crisis theory.

We’re going to discuss the debt ceiling debacle and the aftermath of the U.S. credit downgrade, the class implications of the ongoing unrest in the streets of London, how the Left needs new forms of working class organizations, and how the Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly is attempting to address that.

Sikivu Hutchinson & Mara Hvistendahl

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Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat; Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. She has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, Black Agenda Report, Secular Nation and the American Atheist Magazine. She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, a founder of the L.A. Black Skeptics, and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

She will talk with ETFF about how U.S. white-supremacist slavery and continued white American identity has influenced and shaped the prevalence of Black religiosity as well as explore some of the particular harms of religion among Black people. We will also discuss the vicious and misleading campaign to portray abortion as “Black genocide” and the links between pornography and sexual degradation of the mainstream secular culture and the puritanism and sexual repression of the Christian fascists.

Mara Hvistendahl is a correspondent with Science magazine and a contributor to publications ranging from Foreign Policy to Popular Science. She is also the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. Thanks mainly to sex selective abortion, there are over 160 million fewer females than would be naturally occurring in Asia’s population and an unknown number missing from other continents.  ETFF will discuss with Mara how this gap is transforming communities, leading to everything from a spike in bride-buying to an increase in crime — and how the West played a role in sparking this global problem.

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One of the missions of Equal Time for Freethought, perhaps the most important of them all, is to examine the nature of humanity so as to think clearly about what a truly humanistic society might look like.  It’s easy to criticize one or more element of our current unhealthy society in political or economic terms, but quite another thing to be able to ascertain just what sort of creatures’ humans are and to extrapolate from that the sort of social change which might have long lasting affects… humanistic affects.  We have interviewed many social scientists as well as evolutionary biologists and scientifically minded political activists over the years to help us with this mission, and today’s guest will be no exception…

For the past several years, Dr. Corning has served as the director of the non-profit Institute for the Study of Complex Systems and as a founding partner of a private consulting firm in Palo Alto California.  He has published numerous research papers and articles over the years, as well as five books including Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution.