Point of Inquiry

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 previous books include Why Are You Atheists So Angry: 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories about Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns & More. Plus, she edited a book called, Paying For It: A Guide By Sex Workers for Their Clients. So, if the thought of telling your grandmother that you don't believe in God makes you queasy, Greta can help. As an out-and-proud atheist, bisexual, and retired sex worker, she's had a lot of practice being forthright about who she is. Lindsay and Greta talk about how coming out can improve your life and strengthen the secular community. They also discuss the distinctive challenges facing women and people of color looking for a way out of the atheist closet.

This week, Point of Inquiry is excited to welcome “The Amazing” James Randi: famed magician a godfather (as it were) of the modern reason movement, and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Randi is the subject of a new documentary film, An Honest Liar, which brings to life Randi's intricate investigations that publicly exposed psychics, parapsychologists, fait- healers, and con artists. Randi and host Josh Zepps diagnose the state of American credulity, and discuss why human beings continue to believe unreasonable things that simply “sound nice.” They reminisce about some of Randi's greatest hits with Johnny Carson and Oprah Winfrey, and consider the impact of the religious right in America, of the Internet and social media on skepticism, and much more. It’s a funny and insightful trek through the last few decades of skepticism from the mind of a great man who helped make it all happen.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Barbara Ehrenreich, award-winning columnist and essayist, and author of 21 books. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she went undercover as a minimum wage worker and in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, she took aim at our punishing national obsession with positive thinking. Her new book Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything is very different from her previous writing.

Living is the story of Ehrenreich's intellectual coming of age. At 17, she had what she calls a mystical experience. She thinks experiences like hers raise the possibility of a world beyond the physical, which might include deities or extra-terrestrials. The only form of deity that she definitively rules out is the judgmental, anthropomorphic god of monotheism. Beyerstein and Ehrenreich also discuss the status of transcendent experience within a naturalistic worldview.

Ehrenreich will be speaking at CFI's upcoming Women in Secularism 3 conference in Alexandria, Virginia.

This week, Point of Inquiry is delighted to welcome Ann Druyan, co-writer and co-creator of both the original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, starring her late husband Carl Sagan, as well as the new series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson. In a wide-ranging discussion, Druyan talks to Josh Zepps about how the first Cosmos series came to be, her efforts to translate the majesty of science into relatable and accessible storytelling, and how we've progressed toward making a more reasonable and humane society. We also get a little bit of insight into what it was like to get to know Carl Sagan for the first time. Ann Druyan co-wrote with Sagan the books Comet, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and sections of The Demon-Haunted World. Their twenty-year professional collaboration also included NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message (the famous "Golden Record" aboard the Voyager spacecraft) along with many articles, speeches, and other written works. She is co-founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, as well as Program Director of Cosmos 1, the first solar sailing spacecraft mission. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey premiered March 9, 2014 simultaneously in the US across ten FOX networks in 125 countries, and on National Geographic networks in 180 countries, making it the largest global launch of a TV series in history.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Meredith Dank, PhD, Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute. Dank is the co-principal investigator on several international and domestic human trafficking projects, including the new study, "Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities”, which attempts to put dollar figures on prostitution in Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, Seattle, and other major municipalities.

Point of Inquiry goes behind the headlines to interrogate the methodology and meaning of this three-year study, which uses a complex statistical model to extrapolate the size of sex markets from interview data from 73 incarcerated pimps and sex traffickers. We explore questions such as whether the interviewees are representative of the sex industry as a whole, and the role of trafficking in sex work.

Following the death of the Westboro Baptist Church's Fred Phelps, Josh Zepps discusses the state of religious fundamentalism with Frank Schaeffer, the New York Times bestselling author of Crazy for God: How I grew up as one of the Elect, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics-- and How I learned to love Women (and Jesus) Anyway, among many others.

Having recovered from being raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and having written multiple novels about growing up in that world, Schaeffer has a fascinating perspective on what he sees as the psychological damage inflicted by angry fundamentalism, and helps us examine how we, as atheists, might respond to the death of those we despise.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes David Gorski, MD, PhD: cancer researcher, surgeon, and managing editor of the Science-Based Medicine blog, aka "Orac" of Respectful Insolence. Gorski and Beyerstein discuss a pair of exposés of cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski in the March/April issue of the Skeptical Inquirer, one by Gorski and one by skeptical activist Robert Blaskiewicz. Gorski explains why Burzynski's urine-derived antineoplaston therapy is worthless; how the doctor strong-armed the FDA into letting him peddle these expensive and potentially dangerous drugs for over 30 years; and how the treatment may have killed a little girl. Gorski also discusses Blaskiewicz's report on skeptical activists who banded together online to warn the public about Burzynski's quackery and push back against his attempts to silence his critics.

Rebecca Goldstein, a professor of philosophy and the author of five novels and a collection of short stories, joins us on Point of Inquiry to discuss atheism, philosophy and her new book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. Along with some of her weightier philosophical works she has also recently published 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, a novel that is both deep and playful in its examination of apologist positions.

Goldstein, who will be a guest at the upcoming Women in Secularism III conference, has written five novels -- including the recent 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction -- as well as a number of short stories, essays, and biographical studies. As someone with a distinguished career teaching Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, and as the recipient of a MacArthur Fellow "Genius Award", and the Humanist of the Year award, she is in an exciting position to discuss historic, current and developing ideas in thought and the field of philosophy.

This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Daniel Loxton, longtime Editor of Junior Skeptic, the 10-page kids' science section bound within Skeptic magazine, author and illustrator of the national award-winning kids' science book Evolution: How We and All Living Beings Came to Be, and a series of illustrated books subtitled Tales of Prehistoric Life. Loxton has published two major essays on skeptical activism; "Where Do We Go From Here?" in 2007, dealing with the focus and direction of the new generation of skepticism, and which helped to inspire the SkeptiCamp community organized conferences on scientific skepticism; and "What Do I Do Next?" in 2009, providing ideas and suggestions for individual involvement in the skepticism movement.

Recently, Loxton, along with co-author Donald R. Prothero, has written an entertaining, educational and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence. Abominable Science!: Origins of the Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids systematically challenges the pseudoscience that perpetuates these myths, and examines the nature of the science and pseudoscience within cryptozoology.

This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Gabriel Sherman, writer and contributing editor for New York Magazine and author of the new book The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and Divided a Country. The book takes an indepth look at Roger Ailes, the conservative mastermind and president of Fox News Channel, and the effect he has had on American culture.

Sherman interviewed over 600 people and spent years compiling a history of Ailes, from the 1960s when Ailes was a producer for the "Mike Douglas Show," through Ailes' time with the Nixon administration, all the way to his reign at Fox News. This week we venture into the mind, motivations and mission of the heart of right wing news.