Point of Inquiry

What is it about human behavior that allows con artists to pull off elaborate scams in which they fool thousands? Moreover what is about those thousands of people — many of them intelligent and sophisticated — that make them so vulnerable them to being scammed? New Yorker contributor Maria Konnikova joins us today to talk about her new book, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for it Every Time.   Konnikova analyses the tactics that con artists use to appeal to our sensibilities, gain our trust, and lower our defenses, and she explores what motivates these fraudsters to do what they do. Some cons are so complicated that they can actually be more difficult than accomplishing the same thing when playing by the rules. Konnikova posits that a combination of entitlement and power spurs con artists to jump through hoops most of us could never imagine. 

We know more and more about how repressive attitudes about blasphemy and religious criticism in parts of the Islamic world can become explosive, as with the Charlie Hebdo attacks or the murder of secularist bloggers in Bangladesh. But these extreme instances don’t tell the whole story.   This week our guest is Jessica Davey-Quantick, who spent several years in Qatar as a reporter and editor for Qatar Happening and Time Out Doha. She experienced first hand the often laughable degrees of arbitrary censorship and cultural oppression, and simultaneously the liberty with which certain members of society could behave as they pleased. She discovered a world that both reinforced and contradicted commonly held beliefs about the restrictiveness of the culture of Islam in the Gulf States, and wrote about her experiences in a recent article at Vox.   She and host Josh Zepps discuss the problems with how we discuss cultures outside our own, the ways religion is intertwined with repressive norms, and how we might hold a mirror up to our own practices.

Most of us have no problem operating under the notion that we should do unto others as we would have others do unto us. But what do we make of people who do go well beyond that, while asking for nothing in return? Why are often perplexed by those who are willing to put their health and well being on the line for complete strangers? Today’s guest is Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the new book Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help.    MacFarquhar argues that we have a history of labeling people who help excessively as having some sort of physiological disconnect, a mental health condition that causes them to give more than what seems reasonable to the rest of society. She finds this resistance to do-gooders troubling, and that our defensive need to justify their behavior may say more about our own philosophical shortcomings than it does about the altruists among us.

Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, speaker, and sex education activist, challenging misconceptions about what it means to have consenting, satisfying sex. She’s the author of What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex & Safety, and she joins us on this special Valentine’s Day episode to bring some freethought to love and sex.   In addition to having written extensively on the topic of healthy sexuality and the myriad hang-ups and myths surrounding sex and pleasure, she’s also in the process of producing a new multimedia project, including a podcast about female sexual power and freedom. 

The freethought movement has seen two of its most respected and influential institutions combine into what has been called a “supergroup” for secularism. The Center for Inquiry, the organization that proudly produces this program, announced in January that it would merge with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, and that Robyn Blumner, the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s president and CEO, would take over from Ronald A. Lindsay as CEO of CFI.    Both Robyn Blumner and Ron Lindsay appear together as our guests this week, here to discuss with host Josh Zepps the reasoning behind the merger, and how the complementary strengths of the newly-joined organizations can make a larger impact on behalf of their shared mission: fostering a secular society based on reason, science, free inquiry, and humanist values.    We learn more about Blumner’s background as both an executive and a journalist, as well as what the Richard Dawkins Foundation (now a division of CFI) brings to the table. We also get a look back at Lindsay’s tenure at CFI, and how he has helped to build the Center for Inquiry into a lasting institution. 

In ancient Greece, did everyone unquestioningly believe in the gods of Olympus? Was there no one in classical Athens to write the equivalent of “The Zeus Delusion”? According to our guest this week, the Greeks’ religious beliefs were as varied and nuanced as they are today. Tim Whitmarsh is a classicist and professor of Greek Culture at University of Cambridge. In his newest book, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, he explores the skeptical aspects of ancient history that are often left out of common retellings. Like so many other cultures, ancient Greece went through its own periods of enlightenment and reform, times when religion and irreligion, and superstition and rationalism, coexisted. Whitmarsh argues that we moderns shouldn’t be so quick to tie the ancient Greeks to their mythology, because along with the myths and gods there is a rich history of secularism, critical thinking and even atheism.

The “nones” are on the rise in the U.S. with 33 million Americans identifying as having no religious affiliation. Atheists shouldn’t get too excited, though, because 68% of the unaffiliated indicate that they do believe in some sort of god. What kind of god do the nones believe in? This week’s guest, Rabbi Mark Wildes, wants it to be the God of Abraham.   Rabbi Mark Wildes is the founder and director of the Manhattan Jewish Experience, a program for young Jewish professionals in their 20s and 30s with little or no background in Judaism interested in connecting with the community. With the unaffiliated being concentrated heavily in the young adult demographic, and with 1 in 5 American Jews identifying as nones, Rabbi Wildes believes there very well may be something about Judaism that could draw in millennials, those who are looking for a certain kind of moral guidance that includes both purpose and reason. 

This week Point of Inquiry welcomes Dr. David Grimes, a board certified physician in obstetrics and gynecology and author of the new book Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation. Dr. Grimes talks with host Lindsay Beyerstein about the enormous good that’s been done as a result of the legalization of abortion, and the horrors that women used to face — and face anew — as access to abortion services is chipped away.  A powerful movement is relentlessly fighting to turn back the clock to the pre-Roe v. Wade era, when abortions were just as common as they are today, but far more dangerous and life-threatening. States across the country have seen the introduction and passage of “TRAP laws” (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) that harshly restrict access to abortion, birth control, and even cancer screenings, all under the pretense of protecting patients’ health. 

Throughout history, humans have looked to religion to explain why the world is the way it is. Thanks to the development of science, we now have more concrete ways of understanding the world, ways that do not rely on faith. Despite our progress, however, in 2016 faith and religion are still considered to be prime ways of knowing for billions of people. Our guest this week suggests that these feelings of faith may be harder to shake than those of us who are already secular might think; in fact they may be evolutionarily hardwired into us.   Point of Inquiry returns from its hiatus to welcome neuroscientist and computational biologist John C. Wathey to discuss the ideas in his new book, The Illusion of God’s Presence: The Biological Origins of Spiritual Longing. Wathey asserts that the intuitive feeling of God’s presence is the primary anchor of religious faith. It’s a consistent phenomenon across every religion and culture for people to “feel God” in their lives. Wathey argues that this is likely a result of an evolutionary adaptation that manifests as early as infancy.

During the perennial War on Christmas, certain Christians often feel the need to remind the rest pf us what the holiday season is really about. It’s Jesus Christ’s birthday and we’re all invited to the party… if by “party” you mean sitting reverently in pews at Christmas mass. Something as little as changing the seasonal decorations on a cardboard coffee cup is enough to put some Christians on edge, as some felt the new red and green Starbucks cups insufficiently acknowledged the role of Christ. Andrea Williams of the U.K.’s Christian Concern wrote, “This is a denial of historical reality and the great Christian heritage behind the American Dream that has so benefitted Starbucks.” But perhaps it's folks like Williams who are the ones guilty of historical denial.   Here to talk about the real historical origins of Christmas is writer and philosophy professor David Kyle Johnson, author of the new book, The Myths that Stole Christmas. Johnson explains how “the reason for the season” is just the season itself. He discusses how Christmas went from being a secular holiday to a religious one, how Jesus was inserted into it, the origins of Santa Claus, and all the other myths in between that still hold sway in our modern-day seasonal celebrations.