Equal Time For Freethought

The “Hurricane Irene” Equal Time for Freethought Special!

Audio here!

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.

Audio here!

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.