Join hosts Edouard Tahmizian and John MacDonald for about an hour in this interview with one-time Jesus Seminar co-chair John Dominic Crossan and his recent coauthor and community organizer Michael Okinczyc-Cruz as they explain their motivation for writing Jesus and Justice: Organizing for God's Reign on Earth Then and Now. After explaining their aim and process, the interviewees turn to why a contemporary secular audience can still find much of value in the moral principles attributed to a first-century leader, whether Jesus went into Jerusalem for martyrdom, substitutionary atonement, or obedience, why claiming to be the Messiah would be a capital offense to Jesus' contemporaries, and how both first-century Israelites and later Christian sects came to understand the concepts of Resurrection and Ascension. Tune in for a wide-ranging interview on the moral and political relevance of the teachings ascribed to Jesus even—and perhaps especially—today!

Join host Edouard Tahmizian for a half-hour interview with long-standing biblical scholar Robert M. Price on whether Christian "conditional prophecy" rationalizations succeed in reconciling Matthew's verse stating that his contemporaneous generation would not pass away until "all these things be fulfilled" with the failure of Christ's second coming to materialize back then, whether it's exegetically plausible that the more salacious biblical passages were interpolations absent from the original manuscripts, and whether a historical Paul—if indeed there was one—contradicted the historical Jesus' teachings in holding that Christians need not follow the Mosaic law to a tee and become circumcised. Tune in for a discussion canvassing everything from biblical erotica to how biblical interpolation mirrors the social processes that occur among Appalachian snake-handlers today.

Check out Freethinker Podcast host Edouard Tahmizian's shy-of-an-hour discussion with Richard Carrier about the metaphysical impossibility of libertarian free will. Our actions are aimed at fulfilling our desires; but where did our desires come from? Did we choose our desires, or simply discover that we had them? As Carrier notes, if you reason from premises to a conclusion, the premises and the rules of logic determine/cause your conclusion. Any interruption of that process would destroy rationality, not preserve it, making the supposed connection between reasoning and acting uncaused nonsensical. The concept of an 'uncaused self' originating actions would destroy the only sense of freedom that we can have, a compatibilist/soft determinist sense of our actions being 'free' from interference by causes external to ourselves (where our actions are free in the sense of being internally caused). If you take away a person's memories, deterministic reasoning processes, proclivities, values, knowledge of particular information, and so on, what is left of the person? A person just is a bundle of causes; to remove the causes of a person's actions is just to remove the person. But then, Carrier argues, you are not talking about free will anymore, but rather its absence. Tune in for an enlightening foray into an age-old philosophical issue!

In this nearly two hour interview, join History Valley Podcast host Jacob Berman as he interviews Internet Infidels President John MacDonald about his synthesis of the evidence from biblical scholarship supporting Nina Livesey's thesis that the letters attributed to Paul were not written by Paul—and indeed that a historical Paul might have never have existed at all.