Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. And there's chalk and cherries here too. And this is stuff you should know about humanism, which I find fairly relatable in a lot of ways and in other ways not necessarily.
Yeah.
Can we we'll get into it.
Can we say Whatlivia titled this one? She's been really killing it lately.
Yeah, go ahead.
This is on humanism, the bright side of being a godless heathen.
That's right.
I was looking for that, aha definition, because that put it about as good as anything in this whole article. The is it American Humanist Association? Is it an association?
Yes, they are associated.
Yeah.
They put it like this, It's a progressive philosophy of life that without theism or other supernatural beliefs. Bit of a dig affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good. And of course, if you don't know what theism is, we're talking about, you know, religion and God. So it's like, hey, you can be a good person and have a moral and ethical center and strive to do those things without God. At the center of it.
Yeah, for sure. And most humanists, I yeah, I think it's fair to say most are atheists or at least agnostic. Yeah, at the very least if they do believe in a God, he's not an interventionist God. He's not playing our role in our lives day to day. Maybe you could also interchange that definition of God with the universe or nature or something like that, but not God in any religious way whatsoever.
Yeah.
And in fact, like if you do believe that, a lot of like like strict humanists will say, well, you can't really be a humanist because not believing in God in that sense is a core part of humanism. And a lot of other people say, hey, you're a humanist. Who are you to tell me what I believe? Now the humanist says, you got me.
Yeah, yeah.
And as we'll see it, you know, it had kind of been tangled up with religion here and there until it kind of landed eventually where it did.
And we're gonna talk a little bit about the history though.
That term humanism goes back to at least Cicero in first century BCE, Rome, when that very famous writer and I think lawyer and Statesman use the word humanitis to describe like people developing or the development of these qualities, these virtuous qualities that Chuck will talk about, like a moral and ethical center, compassion, good judgment, like being a good person and doing good things.
Yeah, and then we leap frog all the way over to the Renaissance. And you'll know that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, Medieval era. The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages, that there was a part of history where essentially the Church ruled everything with an iron fist. Corruption was rampant, and people were removed from their relationship with God and the Church
was inserted. And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did. They were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics too. They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God. You know, there's a connection between you, this person who is important and matters just because you're a person, and God who made you. And this is where the very
beginnings of humanism find themselves. Even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet. This is the first step.
Yeah, I mean, looking back, we apply the tag to a lot of different people. We're going to talk about some of them, but yeah, they wouldn't have called themselves that.
Then.
Petrarch was probably looked at as maybe the first humanists or the first modern man sometimes called. And in the Renaissance, it was it was a pretty hot ticket depending on what crowd you ran with. If you were among the elites in the Renaissance, you might have hired humanist scholars to come and teach your kids all about like sort of the moral systems of the classical era to you know, and very much in the effort, like you were saying, to bring us out of what they call the dark ages.
And some aspects of this whole movement in the Renaissance included three things we're gonna kind of touch on here are realism, dignity of the individual human, and application of learning, like putting it in to practice.
Yeah. So humanism contrasted with scholasticism, which had been going on for hundreds of years. It was essentially the church's form of teaching and that was basically reconciling the concept of reality that came from the classical Greeks like Aristotle with scripture and basically using scripture to explain the world and reality as it is. And these humanists came along and they were like, what happens if we stopped doing that?
What happens if we just study the classical Greeks and just basically also still stay Christians, but stop using this scripture. This received wisdom that the Church gives us, what if we study it ourselves instead? And that brings up that other the second part you mentioned, which is the dignity of the individual human Up to this point, individuality was not prized. You were not supposed to look inside yourself. You're supposed to look outside the glory of God, you yourself.
If you paid too much attention to yourself, that was a quick one way trip to hell for you when you died. The humanists were like, no, let's look inside ourselves, like we're important, you the individual is important.
Yeah.
And also part of that first one with the realism was that we are flawed. So if we want to learn about each individual and human the nature, what it means to be human, we have to look at the bad stuff too, like the vices and the disorders and things like that. And then that last one that I mentioned was application of learning, like all this stuff is great, but it's not naval gazing like or we don't want it to be navel gazing. We want to actually stimulate action.
Yeah, and you're not learning just so you can give more money to the church or something like that too. And if this sounds a little bit like Protestant thought about the connection between the individual and God, that's exactly right. These thinkers eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, which basically pushed the face of the church off to the side and said you and me God we're connected.
Yeah, for sure.
And it'll also tie into the Unitarian Church in a big way later on. A church that has interested me, oh yeah, yeah, I mean, I like my Sunday's free, so probably not going to go.
But if any quote unquote church.
Appeals to me at this age and where I am in life is definitely those guys.
Yeah, those people that you see out and about at like ten am on a Sunday. Can give that a little knowing head nod too.
Yeah.
Yeah, So something I think is we're pointing out real quick though, to Chuck is everything we're talking about involves God. Even though the Church has been pushed out of the way, God has not. Yeah, God is still front and center. Christianity is still the most important thing around, and that is this is the cradle of humanism. And one of the frequent criticisms of modern humanism is that it's never really shaken off its birthright from Catholicism or Christianity, even
though it opposes religion itself. We'll get more into that, but I just wanted to put that out there for the moment.
And we're also talking about like coming out of a time where atheism could get you killed. Yeah, you know, like saying that there is no God, you know, was against the law unpunishable by death for sure.
Yeah, but that started to change gradually around beginning in the seventeenth century. One of the people we have to thank for that is Francis Bacon. Yeah, known as the father of empiricism. He also invented bacon and he also had a big hand into coming up with the scientific method.
Yeah. Yeah, we talked about him and that.
Yeah, for sure, which has been largely abandoned by science in the last one hundred years.
Yeah, well, he argued for really studying like like what we call social sciences. Now he kind of kicked that off as well, the systemic study of like the human passions. But all these people that we're gonna talk about here in the next little bit, we're Christians. So this is sort of this is where it was still a time when it was still tangled up even though they had these ideas, All of these people, Bacon and this next person, Thomas Hobbes, were Christian.
Yeah, and the fact that there are Christians who identify themselves as humanists and vice versa, that goes to show you, like that those two things are not incompatible. Yeah, you can be religious and care about human beings and like they don't have to oppose one another, although humanists have eventually said yes they do.
Yeah, I mean that's the deal, right, I mean, did I read that correctly? Is that it's the modern humanist movement was really where they were like, we're really separate from and congruous with belief in God.
Yes, yeah, Okay, so we mentioned Bacon. What about Thomas Hobbes because he came up with the social contract, which is ba like you and me. We basically allow a government to rule us in exchange for protecting us from nasty, brutish, short lives which we would otherwise have without the state or without society. Right. That doesn't sound very humanist, even though it's human centered, because he assumed that humans were essentially bad and we'd club you over the head and
kill you first chance. They got. That's why we need government, according to Hobbes. But he's considered one of the early humanists for sure.
Yeah, and he was Christian as well, but he did not write a lot like and his writings didn't write a lot about God. He kind of put that to the side and said, you know, if we want to understand who we are and what it means to be human, we have to look at it through a just a very sort of secular and like, very reasoned approach.
Right exactly, so humanist rationalism to understand ourselves in the world. Thomas Paine was also one. He was probably Yeah, he was like the first person that you can point to and be like, the guy's a humanist. He even says so himself in not so many words, or more than those words. He was a pamphleteer who helped get the American Revolution started despite moving to America just two years before the revolution started. That's how effective his pamphlets were.
Yeah, he was very forward thinking. He was arguing very early against slavery. He's had an idea for what we might call universal basic income now, very much believe in the equality of all humans. And he has this quote that's really pretty great, like I'm a big pain guy. After reading up more on him, Sure, my country is the world that my religion is to do good. Pretty nice.
Yeah, there's pretty much no better way to sum up the humanist view in a nutshell than that.
Yeah.
The French Revolution also, there's a couple of people who get called out a lot, Jacqui Beart and Twant Francois Momorro, because they established the cult of Reason, where they would actually go in and seize churches in France during the revolution and repurposed them. I saw into Temples of Reason. I read about them on the Collector, which is a great website that explains all sorts of different philosophies and stuff.
Great website. Anyway, the French Revolution itself basically said Catholic Church, you're out. And then they were like, okay, well, wait a minute. We're all about reason and enlightenment. What are we going to fill the vacuum left by getting rid of the Catholic Church? And all of these ideas like the Cult of Reason kind of came along, which was essentially create humanist temples to logic in humans and humanity, remove God from the equation altogether.
Yeah, for sure.
And buddy, do you think I like Thomas Bain. Don't get me started on Jeremy Bentham, because after reading up on Jeremy Bentham, I wish I had named my daughter Jeremy Bentham Bryant.
That would have been a great name.
I really missed an opportunity because Jeremy Bentham was a great dude. He was working for welfare, fair programs for the poor early on. He didn't believe in slavery obviously child labor, and this was like decades before anyone else was talking about this stuff. He was into animals. And we'll see. That's some of the criticism from humanists is
that they kind of stop at humans. And that's not to say that humanists can't be like pro animal or pro environment, because most of them probably are right but ben them very early on when it talked about like the suffering of animals, he said, the question is not can they reason, because that's what animals were, just animals, because they can't reason, they have brains like us. He combatd that with the question is not can they reason nor can they talk? But can they suffer?
Yeah? What a thing to say in the seventeen hundreds.
Yeah, I'm glad you explained what you meant by he was into animals because I was confused at first.
Oh, come on.
One of the other cool things about Jeremy Bentham is he willed his body to science. He donated to science early on and they used it. They said, thanks a lot, buddy, here's your skeleton back. Because as part of his wishes, he wanted to remain at University College London, which he helped found as a secular college open to everybody. And he's still under glass at the University of College of London, dressed up in his own clothes. He's got wax hands with gloves on, he has a wax head and apparently
he originally wanted his head to be part of it. Yeah, so they used some I guess some Maori technique of desiccation and it didn't go very well, and his descated head is still around. But they're like, Jeremy, you do not want us to leave this on your body because you look so great with the wax head. We're just going to keep this separate under class itself.
Yeah. Up with Jeremy Bentham?
Yeah, you mentioned the secular college Like he went well beyond like the separation of church and state, where he was like, colleges should have nothing to do.
There should not be religious colleges.
He really wanted to draw a strong divide between God and kind of all the institutions.
Right. He was also the father of utilitarianism, which is essentially, if at its worst, killing one person saves two people, then you kill that person, which gave us things like the trolley problem as a utilitarian thought experiment. Essentially, Bentham, I think, didn't really think that way, but he was basically like, we want to maximize the most good for the most people. That's the way he developed it.
Yeah, pretty cool stuff.
You want to take a break, Yeah, I think we're off to a hot start, So I'm gonna go take a cold shower and we'll be right back.
Okay, Chuck, we're back, and we're going to talk about the development of humanism in the way that we know it today, because up to this point we've been talking about a little bits here, little bits there that all together changed the world and essentially took all the power in the West, especially Europe and eventually the United States, away from the Church and organized religions in general and said, no, there's a way for you to live an upstanding, meaningful,
ethical life without even believing that there's a God or in afterlife. And here's how we're going to do it.
Yeah, I mean the idea at the time, and there's still people that believe this in twenty twenty six. Which is pretty scary, is that if you were not religious and devout, then you were a heathen and you were like morally bereft. And those like people very early on stood up and were like that didn't make any sense, Like why is it I don't believe in God? Like people have feelings in their heart or whatever. And someone realized, like,
why is it that in my heart? Like I don't believe in a God, but like I believe in doing like really good things, Like why are those tho? Why
are those two things have to be tied together. And that was humanism, or if you look at philosopher and theologian from Germany Friedrich Niedhama, the term was HUMANISMUS in eighteen oh eight, and that is he was kind of talking about that Renaissance humanism, those studies that they were doing with the people that are trying to sort of reform education during the Renaissance.
Yeah, but very quickly people latched onto that. He just kind of came along at the right He was in the right place at the right time, Yeah, which was Germany, because Germany eventually became kind of the cradle of modern humanism, and eventually humanismths what we would call humanism now we just dropped the US or the US And if you kind of subscribe to that, it was way beyond the way that you interpreted scripture. You supported women's equality, You
were all about separation of church and state. You had compassion for all people, not just people that looked like you and had the same amount of money as you. You cared about actually doing stuff to get the government to take care of poverty and things like that. Like Quakers. The conception of Quakers at this time was a really good view of what it meant to be a humanist at the time, because you still believed in God, but
you really cared about other people. And this was fairly new for Europe at the time.
Yeah, for sure, you mentioned the French Revolution, but in the nineteenth century, during the time of all those European revolutions, was it also started to kind of touch on socialism, of course, and like this idea of a utopian society
that we could strive for. It was starting to become a little more acceptable in the United States at the time, where well partially because of German immigration to the United States and you were talking about them being the cradle, but also Charles Darwin and just this idea that you don't need these theist beliefs to be a good person, and there's something called free thought that can happen, like prethinking is very much at this time aligne with deism.
Yeah for sure. And free thought essentially as a concept is it's just questioning everything, Yeah, especially received wisdom. You stop and ask click, well, wait a minute, why do I think that? How do I know that? You just challenge all of your own assumptions, and by doing that you can kind of free yourself from being indoctrinated by the man essentially. So this is when it seems to me the progressive movement in the United States really started to come about. Yeah, right, this is the till late
nineteenth century. One of the next big things that happened was the establishment of the New York Society for Ethical Culture by again named Felix Adler. And this became essentially the ethical movement E in capital E, capital M. And they were basically like the very first humanists. They tried to essentially provide the same thing, that's say, moral upstanding structure that the church provides for so many people to people who don't believe in God.
Yeah, and not more than that. But alongside that, I think they realized that the church had something that people clearly liked in tradition and in ceremony, and they're like, hey, if we're going to be a thing like, maybe we should have some of that stuff too. So they organized Sunday services and they said, how about a how about a deist marriage ceremony, like kind of substituting religious ritual for non religious ritual because people like that kind of stuff.
Yeah, They're like, how about atheist holy communion, and the humanists are like, how does that work?
Right?
They're like, oh, we don't know. This is new. We're just throwing everything we can at the wall. See what sticks.
Yeah, maybe instead of the blood and body of Jesus, it's just crackers and grape juice.
There you go. And they were like grape juice or flavory, and they're like, grape juice.
We used grape We used grape juice at our church because even the Baptist did not take wine as a communion.
It's kind of funny to think about.
I remember moving to the South and being like, you don't drink any wine, like even in church because I was raised Catholic.
Welch's baby.
Yeah, that's funny. So this whole kind of evolution is still going on. In the United States in particular, it started to take off. Humanism really is huge today or through the twentieth century in the US and the UK.
They're kind of like hotbeds for humanist activity. And the people who were attracted to this were very frequently liberal intellectuals, yeah, philosophers, literati, intelligentsia like academic elites and people who ran in their circles, which included communists at the time in the twenties and thirties, like basically super radical liberal thinkers were very much attracted to the early establishment of modern humanist organizations.
Yeah. That in the United States in particular, the University of Chicago nineteen twenty seven was one place where it really got cooking. There were efforts there by students and so professors who belonged and this is where the Unitarian Church comes into play. They were Unitarian Church members, which is technically Protestant denomination. It's very political, has always been
very politically progressive. And in this group in Chicago, there were a lot of ministers, even in theologians who had non Christian ideas that they were putting forth, like transcendentalism, and they had a magazine. They organized what was called the Humanist Fellowship and put out the New Humanist Magazine.
It was like all ads though yeah, probably so all ads and perfume samples.
Well, and at the very end they had the little fold thing like the Mad magazine did.
It's very popular.
But they were trying to move Unitarian and as Unitarianism, even in nineteen twenty seven, completely away from Theism.
Yeah, and Unitarian Unitarianism as a church was like, yeah, let's go and then stop just short. And that's where it stays today. Essentially, they're like, you don't believe in God, Great, you can be a member of our church. Do you believe in God? Yeah, great, you can be a member of our church. It's universalist Unitarian. Right.
Should we talk about the manifestos?
Yeah, because you can't have liberal thinkers and communists together and not come up with a manifesto. Right, It's just going to naturally bubble up from those people being together. And in nineteen thirty three, I think they drafted the first humanist manifesto and it basically said so and this is where this is one reason why religious people don't like humanists. It took direct aim at religion, right, Yeah, and then this is why people who are religious don't
like humanists. It also called humanism its own type of religion. Yeah, take that, chuck and run with it.
Mixed messages. Can I read this bit from the seventy three manifesto?
Yeah?
Or wait?
This was Okay? The seventy three was a manifesto Part two?
Yeah, sorry, nineteen thirty thirtight. I believe thirty three was the first one, I think, thank you, we got there.
Okay, thirty three was the first one. Seventy three was Manifesto two, and this was from seventy three. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduced disease, extend our lifespan, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers. Starting to sound a little bit like scientology there, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.
Yeah, it also smacks of transhumanism too. Oh yeah, it's just denoted by h plus Stellarc. It's a branch. Yeah, it's a branch of humanism where you graft a human ear onto your forearm.
Right. Oh boy, man, I can't believe you remembered his name. It just came right up.
If you're a long time listener, you remember when we first talked about Stellarc, the transhumanists who did, in fact, graft a human ear to his arm, complete with a little speaker like it heard and worked, right, Yeah.
I think it. Yeah, I had a Bluetooth speaker which is probably dead by now.
How many c tips do you think that guy's gone through.
Oh, crisps, he's like got catch up in there again.
Oh man.
So the reason that they wrote the nineteen seventy three Manifesto two was because Manifesto one had a lot of well, it was of its time. Yeah, it was very pro communist and socialism, it was anti capitalist. It even said, quote, the existing acquisitive and profit motivating society has shown itself to be inadequate. Yeah, it said it was a religion. So in nineteen seventy three they're like, let's just kind of get rid of some of this. Let's not call
ourselves a religion of any kind. We'll still take aim at religion, but we're not going to call ourselves a religion. We're going to drop the whole life communist, capitalist, you know, West Coast, East Coast war in our own manifesto.
Yeah.
And then as time went on, there were more affirmations, there were more manifestos. There was one in nineteen eighty, nineteen eighty eight, two thousand and three, in two thousand and two, so all these were American, by the way.
In two thousand and two it finally went international, which what's called the Amsterdam Declaration of Humanism from two thousand and two, and it basically it basically says like, yeah, everything these guys have been saying, but take out the religion stuff and the anti capitalist stuff.
That's right.
And they said, we need a word though, if we're going to be consistent, and so instead of religion, let's settle on this word life stance.
You were like, oh, sure, sure, LifeStance.
Everyone knows what that is. We did a little digging.
It's a pretty obscure term. I think Wikipedia, which is not a website. We really like to go to a lot for this, but that's kind of the only place we could find anything. But this is how they define it is the relation that one has with what he or she accepts as being of ultimate importance.
That's a great definition of life stance for sure. Yeah, it really gets across. And essentially it's what they use in place of religion, not just what they offer, what humanism offers people, but what people need. And that's one thing that humanism is always basically said, is you need the things that religion give to you, like people need that.
It's been around for thousands of years for a reason, right, Yeah, And there's all these different ones around the world that billions and billions of people subscribe to because it gives their life meaning, It gives you purpose, it tells you how to be a good person. And humanists were like, all we're saying is that you don't need religion. You don't even need to believe in God to have all
those same things. And as the world and in particular the United States and the West, has gotten more and more secular and less and less religious, there's this there's a debate that's developed, like, is humanism up to the task of providing meaning in people's lives in the absence of religion, And that definitely remains to be seen, but it seems to be leaning a little more like No, Actually, things kind of fall apart when you don't have a lot of people who believe that their lives have meaning
because they believe in religion. That seems to be the way things are leaning right now. That's not the endpoint necessarily though.
No, for sure.
And you know, I think I'm like you, like, a lot of this stuff seems very appealing to me, a lot of the thoughts. But you know, when I was reading that one thing, I was like, man, this sounds a little scientology like here and there.
Sure, sure, and then let's not like LifeStance.
Yeah, it just feels like the kind of word where you go to a meeting, like a humanist congregational meeting, and they're like, and now Josh would like to rise and share his life stance, and then everyone like clucks and goes LifeStance, LifeStance or something, right, and that's when they and I like back out of the room very slowly.
You know what LifeStance says to me, It says I don't know what I mean. That's what that word screams. If you use a word to describe what you're talking about and no one else knows what that word is. As a matter of fact, it's much more widely understood. Is the name of an insurance company than then? Yeah, then you you kevin't figured out exactly what you're trying to say. That's my take on it. And what the reason they're using life stance is because they can't use
the word religion. They're using that in place of the word religion. So a lot of people kind of look at humanism like, man, these guys really tie themselves up into knots to get around this religious thing. They're really preoccupied with religion, despite saying you don't need religion to live a good life. If you don't care about religion, stop talking about religion so much. Stop focusing on religion
so much. That's a big criticism of humanism that it's just it's like those you know, those hilarious parodies of like Southern preach or whatever, and it's taking aim at hypocrisy and stuff. If you really feel that way about the church or religion or God or whatever, just go your own way, do your own thing. Stop paying attention
to it, stop giving it your oxygen. If you really feel that way about it, and if you don't, if you still are focused on it like that, there's something there's some disconnect between what you claim to believe in what you're actually doing.
Brother Josh, I want to thank you for sharing your afflack flat nice.
That was great, Chuck, that was great. I like that that screed.
Maybe we should take a break and talk about what happened in nineteen forty one right after this.
All right, everybody, we're back.
We're going to talk about what happened in nineteen forty one, not the movie nineteen forty one from Steven Spielberg.
Good one.
I'm talking not really, I'm talking about did you like it?
Hey man, anything has got Bellushi in it? I like, all right, Yeah, I don't see what was wrong with it.
It was a notorious bomb. But that's not to say you can't like it.
No, I do like it. I just have never heard that other people didn't like it.
But yeah, yeah, it's pretty well regarded as a big plot. But I appreciate you sharing your affle, Like once again.
I had that's my life stance on in nineteen forty one. It's a good movie.
I can't wait to get sued, all right. So in nineteen forty one, there were two Unitarian ministers that form the AHA that we referenced at the very beginning of the American Humanist Association. They, you know, they advocate for humanist causes like separation of church and state of course in schools that is, like, hey, let's legalize birth control,
things like that. They have about thirty four thousand plus members with two hundred and thirty local chapters, and they're like, you know, their goal is I think not only to spread the word, but I think like you are saying, is to like try and unify into something that's with a coherent message that people can actually say, like, Hey, that's a legitimate thing that you can believe in and follow.
Yeah, Like that appeals to me. So I'm going to go find out more about what you guys are saying. So there's a guy named Andrew Cops and he's very frequently cited when you're talking about humanism. He's the executive of Chief Chief Executive of Humanists UK, and he basically says, here's what humanists are about. One, we use the senses and reasoning when we're seeking out the truth to understand what the world's all about. We are all about rationalism.
We're all about scientific inquiry. That's what our stuff is based on. It's not based on supernatural beliefs. Again, it's not based on receive wisdom. It's about using rationalism in our own senses to understand the universe for ourselves.
Yeah.
Can I just make a quick comment. I don't want to get too political, but using the sensus and reasoning like that is missing I think a lot today because we're in a world now where they are very powerful people in the world that are literally sort of gaslighting the rest of the world and saying, like what you're seeing and hearing is not the truth, Like even though
you're seeing it and hearing it. So to see someone stand up and say, hey, one of our big tenets is going to be the use like to see stuff and hear stuff, and like that's what it is.
Yeah, you know, I find your reasoning sensible.
Yes, aflack I flic what else?
Viewing humans as the product of natural biological processes and seeing death is the end of individual consciousness. So you're not going to an afterlife. You're not gonna go hang out with Elvis and Tom Petty. Once you're gone, you're a warm dirt.
Yeah, there's nothing after that. It's a real bummer part of it, for sure.
It is.
But I've always, well I've always in my adult life believe that, and I don't think it's a bummer. That's just yeah, I don't think it's a bummer.
You know. I believe that for years and years and years, and I've just recently kind of started to I don't want to say go back, but just kind of expand the possibilities. Yeah, that's good, more than I used to because I was exactly what you're talking about, like that's it, Like you're just it's lights out. You don't even know it's lights out because you don't exist anymore. Yeah, just like you didn't exist before you were born. This is
exactly the same thing. It's just tacked onto the end of your life, not the beginning of your life.
Yeah. I like that you're exploring that.
I think that's I think I'm not opposed to anyone in their beliefs, So I think it's great, Especially when you get older and you're in the like forties and fifties and you start kind of radically.
Exploring new ideas. I think that's very valuable.
It's funny. I have been doing that a lot lately. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode in Humanism. I've been reading a lot of different philosophy and just yeah, yeah, exploring ideas that I hadn't before. And I didn't realize why. Apparently it's because I'm about to be fifty.
Yeah, probably, so I've been hurry.
I got I have to find meaning in life before I die.
I've been watching a lot of Kids in the Hall reruns.
Nice. You can do a lot worse than that.
And reading rock bios. But that's fine, everyone has their own thing.
What else, Chuck, How about if you want to live a good life, Yeah, what are you going to do?
Well?
You have to develop yourself personally, like keep striving, sure to be better and do better, try to connect with others, pursue things that are truly meaningful. But you don't necessarily have to believe in the meaning of life to do all that stuff.
That's not what you're seeking.
Yes, And from my recent exploration, that is essentially the basis of a philosophy called existentialism, which actually, yeah, is born out of nihilism, and it's basically saying, yes, there's no God, there's no meaning to life, we're all a fluke. But that doesn't mean you can't live a great fulfilling life, right that has meaning that is meaningful to you. So go figure out what your life is, what you want
it to be, and make it meaningful. And I think that's if you do believe that there's no such thing as God, That to me is essentially the best mentality you can take on that if there's no afterlife before all a fluke, then it's up to you pal to go make meaning for your own life.
Yeah, Like live with intention, I think is another good way to say that, to like not just be someone who things happen to.
Yeah, or live without Netflix. That's another way to put it.
To What's another one view moral behaviors, like you know, consider other people's needs, Like humanism is not a self inward looking thing, like you're looking inward, but you're acting outward.
If that makes sense, Oh, it does.
It makes perfect sense. It's not a self centered or.
Self Yeah, self center I was looking for.
Yeah, you're not self involved. You care about other people. And yeah, by doing that, you're you're you're developing yourself. That's part of self personal development. Right. You're also not relying on any doctrine to teach you ethics, although you can go find ethics from like say the great Greek philosophers or Buddha or you know, Taoism or Confucianism, like
you can go find these from wherever you want. You can even read the Bible or something and sure, you know, like Thomas Jefferson edited the Bible, he took all the miracles out and just basically made it a really great moral handbook. You could do the same thing. Right and still gain these idea.
Yeah.
The point is you're not supposed to take anything wholesale, including ostensibly humanism. Like you should not just go, okay, I want to be humanists, tell me how to be, because they're going to say no, you got to go figure that out.
Yeah, you should probably start with the New Testament too and just leave it at that.
Yeah, that Old Testament is grim.
Yeah, it's pretty grim.
You know, if you're a humanist, you're you're definitely like opposed to war, you value universal rights of all humans, in equality. It's not tied to a political system necessarily. I mean, I know it has its roots in sort of liberal progressive think, but you don't have to be like, oh, I'm a registered Democrat and a humanist. Like you can be anybody. I'd argue, maybe not. You could vote for anybody, But as far as political affiliation, it's not tied to anyone thing.
No, nor should it be.
We should probably name some famous humanists through the years. You could start and end with Albert Einstein, but we're just going to start there. He supported the Capital the E Capital C Ethical culture movement, and was a founding member of the First Humanist Society of New York, and in nineteen fifty published Essays in Humanism. And he was he was walking the walk.
Oh, he definitely was. He was big time into world peace and civil rights. And he was a pantheist apparently as well. So yeah, he was definitely the real deal as far as humanists are concerned. So too was Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. Apparently they were both very much active. Yeah, in the American Humanist Association.
No surprise.
Kurt Vonnegut had a great quote, if you don't mind me taking.
It, Yeah, do your best Vonnagut. I want to hear this.
He said that. By the way, Kurt Vonneguet and I are basically voice doubles. Okay, does he have a I've never heard him talk, man. Does he have an unusual.
Or significant Well, I don't know.
Weirdly, the only time I think I've ever heard Kurt Bontaguet talk was if I'm not mistaken, He had a cameo and Broughtney Dangerfields back to school. Yeah, because he hired he paid him to tutor him in college.
Well, how about this. You take this quote, but do it as Dangerfield?
No, no, no, no, no, no, it said.
He said, being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you're dead. Yeah, that's nice, it's great, great description of it.
What else, if you're a Star Trek fan, you even if you're not, you're probably not surprised that Jeane Roddenberry was a very big in the humanist movement. He I means Star Trek is a is a great example of just a group of people that are doing humanist things that that's kind of the culture of that show.
A they're trying to solve.
Problems peacefully, high tech, but of course it's they're always trying to do the right thing.
On Star Trek.
I feel like, yeah, there are a bunch of do gooders. Yeah, they don't want to use their phasers. It's why they always set them to stunt. So there are many critiques to humanism. They get it from all sides, other atheists, other philosophers, Christians obviously. Christian thinkers basically are like, dude, you can't have meaning in your life without God. Theology teaches us that God is what gives your life meaning, you chump, And that's essentially the most basic criticism of humanism.
They basically say you can't be ethical or moral or have meaning or value in your life without believing that there is such a thing as God.
Right, you mentioned atheists, there are also atheists that say, you know what, a little too much credulity going on about the value of humanity and like that we can all just improve ourselves. And I mean, I think there's some very prominent philosophers from the twentieth century that are very much anti humanist.
Yeah, they call themselves anti humanists. Apparently the structuralists and post structuralist movements of philosophy that came out of France in the sixties and seventies, I think maybe even into the eighties, they were very much anti humanists, and they were like, the individuals don't matter other than you know, we don't go make our own meaning everything we are is basically created by institutions and structures that were born into and there's basically no way out, So stop being
silly and naive.
Yeah, that's interesting to me, not to do an episode on necessarily, but I'd like to poke around the structuralism a little bit more.
I'd never heard of that.
I have been doing that, and it is very interesting. Essentially, what they're saying is like, you are so shaped by institutions that these cool thoughts that you think you have, the interactions you have with other people, all of them
are shaped by the institutions we're born into. Argue with that, right, but so much so, Chuck, that those cool thoughts, those amazing things that you're saying, those interactions with people, all they're doing is reinforcing those institutions because they're all within that structure. So you're just teaching other people how to be in that structure too by even rebelling against it as a form of reinforcing the structure.
Wow, it's very grim.
Like, it's actually a very grim approach.
Yeah, that's interesting.
One other thing too that they get held up for a lot is that they that they believe that man is inherently moral, and that a lot of philosophers are like, how do you prove that? What are you talking about? Where'd you get that from? That's not a universal given, Like philosophies never turned that up. And did you see
that thing that I found from Francisco Jay Eliah? He basically said, so, basically, this guy kind of proves that humans are actually biologically moral, resulting from a consequence of natural selection. Francisco j. Eliah says that one, we have the ability to anticipate consequences of our own actions. Two we have the ability to make value judgments, and three we have the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. And so because of our abilities, our natural abilities to
do that, we are naturally moral creatures. Which is the only support I've seen for that idea that people are inherently moral. I've only ever seen attack. This guy did a pretty good job of making a case that supports that.
Yeah, I mean, isn't the idea that humans are inherently evil much more common?
Like, wasn't that what Hobbes was all about?
That's what Hobbes was about Satanists, Yeah, basically, or I think they're like, it's not good or evil, and I think Satanists are really they don't like humanists very much either. Yeah, there's a Yeah, there's a lot of it's definitely not settled whether humans are inherently good or bad.
So we haven't figured that one out.
I guess, not meaning toward the bad lately though.
Yeah, I'm with you.
I mentioned environmentalists and animal rights activists earlier that sometimes there's they believe there's just a little too much human and humanism, But there are certainly a lot of people and humanists that have kind of worked on the environment and animals and the value of all that stuff into the cause for sure.
Very very Jeremy bentha mask Yeah. Yeah, although if you want to get down to it, I've seen an example given where a genuine humanist if if somebody killing a deer kept a human family alive, they would be like, killed that deer. Dear interesting, that deer is secondary, It's life is secondary to human life. Humanists might be like, no way, man, go eat go eat a plant, go eat some lichen.
Yeah.
I've never been a hunter, but if the zombie apocalypse happened, like I could, I could do it.
You could eat zombie. I think it's if they bite you that you become a zombie. I've never seen any problems with somebody eating them.
Well, that's true, you definitely need a healthy spice rack though.
Yeah, it's like that rotted shark they eat in Iceland.
Oh yeah, oh god, Yeah.
That's essentially like eating zombie. From what I understand, okay, tastes like zombie. You got anything else?
No?
I uh, you were right. I didn't.
I didn't think I was gonna be able to get through this because it's very petty stuff for me. But you said, settle down, jerk, you'll be fine.
Yeah, you did great. When when't like a philosophy class one of your favorite classes in college too.
Yeah, and every time we do anything philosophy related, I get all scared and it always works out.
Oh yeah, he did great, man, you always do great.
Yeah, so do you?
Thanks well, check and I agree we both did great. Patting ourselves on the back. He let me pet you on the back, dude, Oh thank you. That means, of course it's time for listener mail.
All right, this is going to be short and sweet. It is.
I think I jokingly asked for a haiku as it relates to mcguffins, because many years ago we put out the call for haikus and got hundreds and hundreds of them, to the point where I think we just quit reading them, so and hopes people quit sending them, and time marched on, and they did. But David centnasen a haiku about the mcguffin amt coukay man, you ready. The mcguffin lives, critics argue,
and gnash teeth. The ending still comes wow, and David goes on to say, this great show, guys, y'all create an entire universe of stuff, insider stories and jokes. I hate it when I can't recall one of the callback tangents and you just want to say, lastly.
The Jackhammer episode. Wasn't that terrible? Guys? It was needed in the world.
Can you read the high cup again? It's still sinking in like the genius of what David did.
Yeah, it's pretty good. The mcguffin lives, critics argue, and nash teeth. The ending still comes, man, pretty good.
That's a T shirt if I've ever heard one. Aaron Cooper, that's.
A high quality coup.
Buddy.
If you want to be like David and well, I'll not send us a high coup, but just write in about something we would be happy to hear from you. You can send it off to Stuff Podcasts. I Heart Radio Huh.
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