Our guest this week is Farzana Hassan, a Pakistani-Canadian political scientist, a columnist for the Toronto Sun, whose new book is Prophecy and the Fundamentalist Quest: An Integrative Study of Christian and Muslim Apocalyptic Religion. Hassan joins Point of Inquiry’s Josh Zepps to talk about issues surrounding Islam, in particular the difficulty in honestly dealing with terrorism and extremism …
This week Point of Inquiry welcomes the well-known atheist blogger, speaker, and author Greta Christina to talk about her new book, Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other and Why, a no nonsense guide to leveling with everyone in your life about your non-belief. Greta is a woman at home with difficult conversations. Her …
As the War on Christmas wages on, our host Josh Zepps interviews Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, editor of Church & State magazine, and author of Close Encounters with the Religious Right: Journeys into the Twilight Zone of Religion and Politics and the upcoming Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn’t …
Point of Inquiry, the flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry, presents a special episode recorded before a live audience at the 2013 CFI Summit in Tacoma, Washington, with new co-host Lindsay Beyerstein. The fundamentalist, Christian right’s influence and impact on our schools and the educating of our children is the subject of the new …
Over the weekend, the Center for Inquiry’s Women in Secularism II conference unfolded in Washington, D.C.—and we caught up with one of the event’s most distinguished speakers, the feminist poet and author Katha Pollitt. You probably know her “Subject to Debate” column in the Nation—always both insightful and also hilarious to read. It has been called, by …
Remember all the greatest hits of religious apologists—the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments for God’s existence? You may have learned how to refute them in college—but not, perhaps, with the zest and humor shown by renowned philosopher A.C. Grayling in his new book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and For Humanism. But Grayling …
You hear it a lot from religious believers: Faith is about doing good works, bringing about good in the world, and showing compassion. In fact, some go further and argue that you can’t really be moral without religion. Well, says primatologist Frans de Waal, they really ought to take a look at our close cousin …
How many atheists are there in the world? Where do they live? What kind of people are they, and how do they get that way? Are they happy? Are they prosperous? Do they drag their societies down into a cesspool of immortality—as is often alleged—or, is it precisely the opposite? All of these questions are …
Our guest this week is Peter Montgomery, senior fellow with People for the American Way and author of a new report entitled Twelve Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics, released last week with a new introduction by Bill Moyers. Point of Inquiry invited Montgomery on the show to discuss these very useful rules of the road, …
In late April, a study came out in Science that really got the secular blogosphere hopping. It was a paper showing that something we’ve long suspected may be true—less critical thinking is associated with more religiosity. In fact, having a cognitive style where you’re less analytic, and more intuitive, promotes faith. And vice versa. It turns out …