Good responses to Boyne's 'Hardtalk'
published: Sunday | December 8, 2002
JUST FIVE months after the launch of his religious discussion programme on RJR 94 FM, Ian Boyne is reporting that there has been a "tremendous response" to his programme Religious Hardtalk, aired on Sunday afternoons at 12:15 p.m.
The programme, conceived by Boyne and the first of its kind on Jamaican radio, features debates on a variety of religious topics as well as panel discussions and interviews on religious issues. But, says Boyne, "It is the religious debates which have been generating the most consistently high response. Jamaicans love to argue and debate and religion provides a lot of passion to the proclivity.
"I know we could never lose with a programme where people argue back and forth on various doctrines and religious beliefs."
Boyne notes that many Christians don't have the opportunity to hear views other than the ones pushed by their own churches, so a programme like Religious Hardtalk provides an important forum for exposing people to wider perspectives.
Some of the topics debated so far by people of different persuasions have been the Sabbath, whether women should be pastors, what happens to the soul at death, Islam, Hinduism, the church and politics, Christians and sex as well as a four-part series on divorce and remarriage which finished recently with the "biggest response we have received so far. We really touched a nerve," Boyne says.
Topics to be covered in the coming weeks will be Christmas and paganism, Rastafarianism, the Bahà'i faith, speaking in tongues, what name should people be baptised in, and whether God is one, two or three persons - and even whether He exists!
