Point of Inquiry

It’s National Chicken Month! But rather than celebrating the consumption of fowl, Point of Inquiry is asking what exactly is going on in America's meat industry? Is the way we consume meat at all rational? Joining us this week is Christopher Leonard, investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Fortune, Slate, and The New York Times. He is a fellow with The New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy institute in Washington, DC., and the author of The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business. Leonard and host Josh Zepps explore the morality of super-industrialized meat production, the iron grip of certain large corporations, and how the centralized system of factory farming is, to Leonard, “Soviet-esque.”

Point of Inquiry welcomes Caitlin Doughty, creator of the cult classic web series Ask A Mortician, which gives unvarnished answers to questions about dead bodies and the death industry. Caitlin has tackled topics ranging from "What to say to a grieving person?" to "How could my titanium hip implant end up as part of a road sign in the Midwest?" Caitlin is the author of the new book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory, the story of her stint as a crematory operator in Los Angeles. She went on to become a licensed mortician to launch a one-woman crusade to change our culture's attitudes about death.

It’s been ten years since the publication of Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith kicked off the cultural phenomenon of “new atheism,” bringing frank criticism of religion into mainstream conversation. In the decade since, Harris has emerged as something of a maverick among nonbelievers and progressives, frequently at the center of controversy with his opinions on Islam and extremism, science’s role in morality, and his embrace of a kind of “spiritualism” grounded in science. It is this last item that is the subject of his latest book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, in which he seeks a rational approach to transcendence; one that puts the supernatural aside in favor of an honest, scientific exploration of the mind, altered states of consciousness, and other (as he puts it) “spooky phenomena.” On this special episode of Point of Inquiry, Harris talks to host Josh Zepps about his foray into the mystical. In this fascinating interview, Harris asserts that experiences such as bliss and transcendence must be removed from the realm of sectarianism, but that “one of the great holes in secularism” is that “we don’t have a ready answer for someone who wakes up tomorrow morning with an extraordinary change in their conscious life which they deem positive.” Harris talks about the search for this answer, as well as the illusion of the self, expanding our moral circle to include other creatures, and an evaluation of the progress secularism has made since the time “new atheism” was still new.

This week Point Of Inquiry welcomes Dr. Adia Benton, a professor of medical anthropology at Brown University. She joins host Lindsay Beyerstein to talk about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.Medical anthropologists bring a unique expertise to epidemics because they study both the physiology of illness and the cultural factors that influence its transmission. That's why the World Health Organization has deployed med anthros to combat prior Ebloa outbreaks. They ask questions like: "How do people think a disease is spread?," "What role do traditional healers play in this culture?," and "Do people trust Western medicine?" The answers can be used to craft more effective public health messages. These are urgent questions for the current Ebola outbreak, where some are resisting quarantine, attacking hospitals, and blaming the outbreak on doctors and nurses. In a crisis, culturally competent care can be a matter of life and death.

Point of Inquiry's hosts are off this week, so we're running Lindsay Beyerstein's excellent interview from earlier this year with Dr. Paul Offit. Dr. Offit will be the Center for Inquiry's special guest on September 6th in Amherst, NY, as he is awarded the Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking.

* * *

Paul A. Offit, MD is best known as a co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine and a staunch, public supporter of vaccination and opponent of pseudoscientific alternative medicine.

His most recent book, Do you Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicinepoints a critical eye at the alt-med industry, one than takes in 34 billion dollars a year with little to no regulation. Are patients being harmed, and is it any worse or better than so-called “Big Pharma”?

Dr. Offit talks with our host, Lindsay Beyerstein, about all of this and much more on this week’s Point of Inquiry.

Dr. Offit has published over 130 scholarly articles on the rotavirus vaccine and vaccine safety and efficacy in general. He has also authored or co-authored many books on pediatric medicine, childhood vaccination and opposing pseudoscience in Medicine.

He is also the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as well as a member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Offit is also a Founding Board Member of the Autism Science Foundation (ASF).

One hundred years ago, Great Britain declared war on Germany, joining in what we now refer to as World War I, a conflict which cost more than 9 million combatants and 7 million civilians their lives, and shaped the the world we know today. How did reasonable people let "The Great War" begin, and what can reasonable people today learn from it? Joining us this week is Christopher Capozzola, an MIT professor in political and legal history, war, and the military, and author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. How did rational people plummet themselves into the irrationalism and chaos that tore apart the continent of Europe along with the rest of the world while sowing the seeds of much of the 20th Century's subsequent horrors? Dr. Capozzola and host Josh Zepps examine the kind of day-to-day rationality which can spiral off into madness.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Laurel Braitman, a TED fellow with a PhD in History and Anthropology of Science from MIT, and the author of Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. It might sound strange to say that animals suffer from mental illness but the brain systems that regulate anxiety, attachment, and arousal are evolutionarily ancient. If faulty neurochemistry compounded by stress can lead to mental illness in humans, is it such a stretch to imagine it in other animals as well? Today we look into the minds of our fellow animals. What do their minds and mental illnesses teach us about sanity, insanity and the concept of consciousness?

How do we rationally assess risk? Following a terrible series of horrifying air travel disasters, reasonable people begin to question what we consider to be "safe." But should we? To answer this question, our host Josh Zepps is joined by David Ropeik, an international consultant and expert on the subject of risk perception and communication, and author of Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding Whats Really Safe and Whats Really Dangerous in the World Around You and How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts. Ropeik discusses how human beings perceive danger versus mathematical probabilities, how fear and optimism affect our perception, and how it might be a good idea to be "gentle" with the word "rational" when it comes to the subject risk.

On March 15, 2000, over a dozen whales beached themselves in the Bahamas in one of the largest multi-species strandings in history. Suspicion turned to U.S. Navy sonar, but at first there was no proof. This revelation brings us into the detective story told in War of the Whales: A True Story. Point of Inquiry welcomes the author, Joshua Horowitz.

We discuss the history of the U.S. Navy’s use of high-intensity active sonar; the cover-up of sonar in the Bahamas; and the titanic struggle between the Navy and an unlikely team of conservationists: marine biologist and ex-Navy sonar man Ken Balcomb, and environmental lawyer Joel Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Host, Lindsay Beyerstein and Horowitz also delve into the history of sonar, the militarization of dolphins, and the sordid history of whales in captivity.

Point of Inquiry is taking a week off and filling in with a classic episode. After Saudi Arabia recently tried to silence the Center For Inquiry's UN representative, Josephine Macintosh, as she delivered a statement critical of their repeated assaults on freedom of religion, belief and expression, we felt that our Austin Dacey episode was fitting to fill in during our week off.

Austin Dacey serves as a respresentative to the United Nations for CFI, and is also on the editorial staff of Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry magazines. His writings have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times and USA Today. His new book is The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Austin Dacey details his trip to Geneva, Switzerland on behalf of the Center for Inquiry's UN mission. He describes the UN lobbying efforts of the Center and its response to the United Nations Human Rights Council's resolution "Combatting the Defamation of Religions." He explains that despite legitimate concerns about stereotyping Muslims or racial profiling, this resolution equates any criticism or satire of religious beliefs with bigotry. He contrasts Europe's position on free speech with the United States' and how it is used by Islamic countries to justify their blasphemy laws, which often carry mandatory sentences of death or life in prison. He talks about how the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the United Nations aims to build into international human rights such legal standards that actually outlaw offensive speech against religions. And he argues that what should be protected under international human rights laws are individuals, and not ideas — that persons should be protected from harm and discrimination, as opposed to ideologies being protected from being criticized or satirized.