Feeling overwhelmed by the relentless attack on American Democracy by the Religious Right? Welcome to Unreasonable: sane conversations for a country that's los...
Whatever your position is on Israel, on Zionism, on Hamas' attacks on October 7, 2023 or Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war in Gaza, it's undeniable that Israel had an outsized influence on our recent presidential election.And it's ironic that our greatest ally in the Middle East, that tiny state described as the only functioning democracy in the region, may well have been a major contributor to the undoing of American democracy. How did the promise of Israel become the problem of Israel? Unreasonable executive producer and this episode's guest host, Bennett Windheim, spoke with political economist, educator and author Bernard Avishai and asked: Is Israel a theocracy, and are there cautionary lessons for America to learn?Avishai is the Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth and former adjunct Professor of Business at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He’s taught at MIT and Duke. A Guggenheim fellow, he is the author of several books including 'The Tragedy of Zionism,’ 'A New Israel,' and 'The Hebrew Republic.' He is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review and contributes regularly on matters of political economy and Israeli affairs to the New Yorker, The New York Review, The Nation, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper's, for which he wrote last year’s captivating report entitled “Israel’s War Within: On the Ruinous History of Religious Zionism.” Support the show
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1:05:37
"How Religious Organizations Game The IRS" with Prof. Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer
Despite the New Testament’s recording of its main character making a clear distinction between what man owes his government (taxes) and his lord (devotion), in real life it’s never quite worked out that way. Churches have been tax-exempt since time immemorial. Today, the very idea of asking houses of worship to pay their fair share is a non-starter. Much like asking this country to elect a woman president.At a time when the IRS is stretched thin and overwhelmed by its own complexity, religious organizations are leveraging loopholes to take advantage of the tax code and pastors are increasingly, and egregiously, flouting electioneering from the pulpit (an activity restricted by the Johnson Amendment). Further, the incoming administration has already made clear its intent to declare nonprofits that oppose its policies terrorist organizations, thereby stripping them of their nonprofit status and thus their ability to collect tax-deductible donations, their very lifeblood.Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, professor of nonprofit law at Notre Dame University, is our Virgil, guiding us with wisdom and humor through this holy hellscape of taxes and religion.Support the show
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1:03:30
"It's An Opus Dei World, You're Just Living In It" with Gareth Gore
In 2017, like many financial journalists, Gareth Gore went to Spain to report on the sudden collapse of the global bank, Banco Popular. And, like every other reporter, he missed the real story. That is, until he returned to Spain two years later. As he recalls, "It was sheer luck, ...that I picked up a newspaper and saw that there was this scramble from people to get their money back. And it was only when I discovered some of the more sinister links later on that it became a wider story about Opus Dei rather than the bank."In his new book, "Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church" (Simon & Schuster) Gore explains how one man turned his "vision" from God into a mission to "reChristianize the world," and how the organization he created, with its bizarre rites and structure, first infiltrated Spanish society with the help of the country's dictator Francisco Franco, won the imprimatur of the Vatican, became a financial powerhouse, and today, wields influence in the halls of the United States Congress and Supreme Court.If you thought the New Apostolic Reformation and Ziklag were disturbing, you will not be assuaged by Gore's revelations. Still, knowledge is power. Come November 5, we have the opportunity to reject the theocratization of America. #voteSupport the show
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52:46
"The Risk of Left-Wing Political Cartooning" with Jesse Duquette
Early last week we recorded an interview with illustrator Jesse Duquette. Then we got the word over the weekend: Meta not only shut his account down, but permanently deleted its posts and eradicated his community of over 200,000+ followers. Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaminions decided Duquette’s incisive and hard-hitting cartoons were just too much for Instagram. (Meta is the company that started out simply as Facebook but now includes Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp as well as other properties.)This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who in 2019 told students at Georgetown University that “Frederick Douglass once called free expression ‘the great moral renovator of society,’ and repeating Douglass’ words, ‘slavery cannot tolerate free speech’.”Apparently Duquette’s style of cartooning was intolerable.This episode is a twofer: Part One is a deep-dive into the life and times of an artist and political commentator at work. Part Two explores the aftermath, when the AI of the world’s most powerful social media company, proves incapable of discerning satire, and banishes a popular presence based on its own misunderstanding of what it thinks it knows. Support the show
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1:24:18
"Conversations with THOSE People" with Pierce Watkins
Pierce Watkins is a Zen-master of epistemology.According to the Oxford English Dictionary, epistemology is “the theory of knowledge and understanding, esp. with regard to its methods, validity and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.”In other words: how do we come to know what we know, and believe what we believe, whether it’s true or not? At what point do our inherent biases take control of our brains?Pierce's current project, Compassionate Epistemology, is fascinating. He’s interested in having civil conversations around why people believe what they do and, more importantly, how they came to those conclusions. Even more importantly, how does one express an opposing view (based on, say, provable facts) without resorting to emotional violence. It's not easy. But at a time when America is a country of divided states each with their own belief system, isn’t it at least worth trying to understand where "those people" are coming from? (Maybe. I dunno…) As Christina asks, "How do you have a conversation with someone who would have stoned Galileo?"Pierce has some ideas about that.Support the show
Feeling overwhelmed by the relentless attack on American Democracy by the Religious Right? Welcome to Unreasonable: sane conversations for a country that's lost its friggin' mind. But Unreasonable is more than a podcast. It’s the start of a movement to reverse the inexorable rise of religious fanaticism taking over our government and our lives, on issues from public education, to women’s reproductive health, to the mainstreaming of loud-and-proud racism. Here we not only learn together what in the world's going on with our country, we develop an action plan to move America forward. It’s time for all of us who believe in the Separation of Church and State to unite — as the majority of Americans we are — in the name of democracy, common sense and kindness. Is that really so unreasonable?
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