The Zeitgeist Movement: Radio Show - Ben McLeish

3rd in a short series of lectures begun in December 2011. This talk outlines the traditional understandings of social control, reinforcement, coercion and human behavior within present society, and in a society organized around scientific principles and mutuality.

Host: Ben McLeish

Prior talks

Talk 1: What is Corruption: http://bit.ly/WhatIsCorruption

Talk 2: Art in a Resource Based Economy: http://bit.ly/ArtInRBE

About : Started in 2009, TZM Global Radio is a weekly radio show presented by various coordinators/lecturers of The Zeitgeist Movement in a rotational fashion.
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The Virus of Faith - Richard Dawkins

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The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins
Dawkins at a signing for his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution in 2009. Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford.[1][2][3][4] Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the concept, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins is well known for his candid criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. Dawkins is an atheist,[5][6][7] secular humanist, sceptic, rationalist[8] and supporter of the Brights movement.[9] He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",[10][11] by analogy with English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion − as a fixed false belief.[12] As of November 2007, the English language version had sold more than 2 million copies [13] and had been translated into 31 other languages,[14] making it his most popular book to date.
Born	Clinton Richard Dawkins 26 March 1941 (1941-03-26) (age 69) Nairobi, Colony of Kenya
Residence	Oxford, England
Nationality	British
Fields	Ethologist, evolutionary biologist
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley University of Oxford New College, Oxford
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Doctoral advisor	Nikolaas Tinbergen
Doctoral students	Alan Grafen Mark Ridley
Known for	Gene-centred view of evolution Introduction of the concept of memes Advocacy of atheism and rationalism Criticism of religion
Influences	Charles Darwin, Ronald Fisher, George C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Daniel Dennett
Notable awards	Zoological Society Silver Medal (1989) Faraday Award (1990) Kistler Prize (2001)
Notes Fellow of the Royal Society Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

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Secret Space

The best documentary on UFO, Illuminati, NASA.

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A whiff of hypocrisy in pope's pronouncement

The American journalist (and militant atheist) HL Mencken once defined religious puritanism as being motivated by the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy", and there are not a few Catholics – and many lapsed Catholics – who would agree that the maxim also fits the papacy and old-style authoritarian priests with their disapproving fondness for telling their flocks what not to do.

As with many papal pronouncements, even if reading between the lines to interpret Benedict XVI's speech as an outright criticism of homosexual behaviour and, less ambiguously, of transsexualism, it is impossible to avoid the strong whiff of institutional hypocrisy: it is not so long ago that Donald Cozzens, a former Catholic seminary principal in the US, was estimating that half the church's priests in training in America were gay. A number of well-known British Catholics are also homosexual.

The church's argument heard more frequently from evangelical Anglicans, busy tearing their own denomination apart over the issue – that accepting homosexuality is going against 2,000 years of Christian teaching – is not strictly accurate. Although the Bible, in a few scattered references, appears uniformly hostile, the texts are more nuanced and complicated to interpret than seems the case at first glance – and, in any event, Christians have reinterpreted other biblical passages on issues such as slavery as they have fallen out of time.

Attitudes to homosexuality have varied over the years, as have church punishments for it. Early Christian writers such as saints Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome thought all sexual activity was inherently disgusting: the historian Reay Tannahill said in her book Sex in History: "It is undoubtedly a tribute (if an ambiguous one) to such men … that much of what the modern world still understands by 'sin' stems not from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, or from the tablets handed down from Sinai, but from the sexual vicissitudes of a handful of men who lived in the twilight days of imperial Rome."

Sodomy proved a convenient excuse when disaster struck: the Emperor Justinian ascribed a plague which devastated Constantinople in AD 541 to God's revenge for "the defilement of males … perpetrating vile acts" and the Council of Toledo in 693 prescribed the exile until "struck down by damnation" of any priest or bishop caught in gay flagrante. It was only in the 13th century that St Thomas Aquinas laid down the doctrine that the genitalia had been designed by the Creator only for procreative purposes – an argument still wheeled out by church leaders today.

But despite the punishments and the fearful warnings, church penalties varied: in 6th century Wales homosexuals were given three years' penance, in 8th century Burgundy, 10 years – about the same as for oral sex. Pope Gregory III described homosexuality as "a vice so abominable in the sight of God that the cities where its practitioners dwelt were appointed for destruction by fire and brimstone". But the penalty he imposed – one year's penance – was only a third of that imposed on priests caught going hunting.

In England homosexual offences only became part of civil law after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1533 when Henry VIII found it convenient to use the alleged immorality of monks as an excuse for seizing their orders' property for himself.

The degree of zeal with which gay people were persecuted varied over time, depending on the degree of contemporary moral panic, and punishments varied according to the power and status of the accused: kings such as Henri III in France, and Edward II and James I in England maintained their catamites with impunity and, in one notorious case, Ralph, bishop of Tours, installed his partner as bishop of Orleans with papal blessing.

Despite all the pulpit condemnations it seems probable, based on admittedly sketchy court records, that the incidence of homosexuality has not been significantly diminished, or increased, over time or cultures. It has certainly not been wiped out. In Oxbridge college chapels there are instances of medieval dons being buried with their special friends – a practice that would cause the Church of England conniptions today. The Roman Catholic church officially still resolutely condemns homosexuality as evil and a moral disorder but there are some who hope for change: one anonymous Jesuit priest expressed the hope that "once the church is aware of the destructive impact of its policies on hundreds of thousands of lives it will have to change its policies". That may be a triumph of optimism over experience.
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