Sentientism "This great unresolved tension of modern life" - Monica Murphy & Bill Wasik - Sentientism 214
Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. Their previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Their latest book, "Our Kindred Creatures" makes a case for seeing the fight against animal cruelty as a crucial thread in America's history. Readers are introduced to the activists, scientists, andmoguls who helped create our modern views on animals, with our intense compassion for certain species and ignorant disregard for others.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
01:09 Welcome
- "Our Kindred Creatures" as an example of Sentientist History?
03:30 Monica and Bill's Intros
- Writing two books together: Rabid and Our Kindred Creatures
- "...Monica's interest in animals [as a veterinarian] that I think got me interested"
- Telling the story of how the animal welfare movement came to the USA in the decades after the civil war
- The emergence of the modern way of thinking about animals "some of them are like members of the family... others of them in huge numbers are excluded..."
- "Everyday people in cities... were living among all kinds of animals in a way that feels very foreign to us today"
07:18 What's Real?
- Meeting in a church youth group, Bill's family more devout than Monica’s
- "It was not a creationist church... there was a sense that we weren't going to doubt what science was telling us just because we were part of a religious tradition that had a different story"
- "'In a world in which there's no god why should we care at all about human suffering?'... runs implicitly through the book - many of the people we write about are religious"
- Links between religion, the abolition of slavery and animal ethics "though of course the slavers themselves had various bible verses that they waved around"
- "Today we're Unitarian Universalists... go to church on Sundays and Bill sings in the choir"
- "Our Unitarian church is a very humanist church... animals don’t' come up much... some other Unitarian churches have animal affinity groups"
- "There are also a lot of atheistic Unitarians... our church leans atheistic... the younger people even more so"
- "Whatever concept of god that I have wouldn't conform with traditional ones - it's more notional"
- "We came back to religion because of our son... he was a very loud atheist... a disrespectful atheist... we wanted him to expand his thinking"
- "Even though we occupy three different spots in our family on the atheistic side of the spectrum we're very at home in this church"
25:27 What and Who Matters?
52:43 A Better World?
01:12:27 Follow Bill and Monica
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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