God Forbid

Do to a dog what we do to a factory-farmed pig, and you’d be arrested. 
Do it to ten thousand pigs in a shed, and it’s breakfast. 
Most of us say cruelty to animals is wrong. 
And then most of us are happy to have them killed and eat them. 
Both our panellists think the way we treat animals is a moral catastrophe. 
But they get there by opposite roads. One says animals matter because they suffer. The other says they matter because they’re God’s creatures. 
GUESTS:
Peter Singer
Emeritus Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University. Host of the podcast Lives Well Lived. 50 years ago exactly, his book Animal Liberation launched the modern animal liberation movement as we know it.
David Clough
Professor of Theology and Applied Sciences, University of Aberdeen. Author of the two-volume work On Animals. He’s a Methodist Preacher and Co-founder of CreatureKind which aims to transform Christian attitudes and practices toward animals.

We are, it turns out, a species that refuses to believe its own birth certificate. 
Australia is ageing, fast. This is not new here, or in Europe and North America where the trend has existed for decades. 
But even in China and now India, the fertility rate has dropped below replacement levels – even the two most populous nations on earth are getting older.  
Yet we’ve built a world — our economies, our cities, our pension systems, our cultures — around the young and the productive. So, what happens when that's no longer who we are? 
GUESTS:
Prof Paul Komesaroff is a philosopher at Monash University. And a practising endocrinologist. And Director of the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society.  
Dr Lee-Fay Low is Professor in Ageing and Health at University of Sydney. She’s also a registered psychologist and chairs the Sydney Dementia Network.

You heard that someone had come unstuck. A rival. A bully. Someone overconfident, or two-faced, or just a bit too pleased with themselves. And something in you was glad. 
You won't say it out loud. You might barely admit it to yourself. 
But the Germans have a word for it. And it turns out, so did the ancient Greeks. 
Schadenfreude. The pleasure we take in others' misfortune. 
Is it a moral failing? A sign of deficient character? Or is it a window into what we actually believe about justice, equality — and each other?
GUESTS:
Tiffany Watt-Smith is a cultural historian and author of Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another's Misfortune. She joins us from London. 
Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne, and the man who's been thinking hard about Australia's national variant — tall poppy syndrome.

Whether or not you believe in - or even know about "the Rapture", "the Tribulation", "the End Times", and "Armageddon", your life is influenced by the idea that Jesus Christ will not only return, he’ll go to Jerusalem, and from there, for exactly one thousand years, he’ll rule the world. 
Yet, this concept is not in the Bible...at least not directly. 
But a bible, published in America in 1909, and written by an American made it the most influential concepts in American Christian fundamentalism.
The story of the Scofield Reference Bible is an extraordinary one. 
Not least because it lies at the heart of Christian Zionism which is more consequential today than ever.  
GUESTS:
Professor Donald Akenson is from Queen's University in Ontario, his latest book The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible.
Dr Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Melbourne’s University of Divinity – among her titles Revelation for Normal People.

Most of us spend most of our waking hours working, paid and unpaid. 
From housework to paid work, most of our lives are dominated by work. It's so ingrained that losing our true selves in work can feel unavoidable.  
Yet, many also find purpose, value, and joy in work – even if it's not their dream job. 
Work is less a place and more a concept, the line between work and home can be blurred. And younger Gen-Z workers are repelled by the hustle culture and burnout that comes from increased casualisation, unpaid overtime and labour shortages. 
It’s why for Millennials, nearly 2 in 3 say work is a part of who they are. But for Gen Z, half say their job is not even a central part of their identity. 
So how, when and why do we work? 
GUESTS:
Valerie Ling founded The Centre for Effective Serving, a psychology practice dedicated to alleviating burnout and other workplace problems. 
Kara Martin is Adjunct Professor at Boston's Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. She's also the author of Workship: How to Use your Work to Worship God.
Rabbi Zalman Kastel is founder of Together For Humanity which teaches intercultural understanding in schools and the community.