Evangelize For Humanism Without Evangelizing Humanism

Voice Over 0:02
This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values by a humanist. Here’s your host, Douglas Berger,

Doug Berger 0:11
How can one sell humanism to the public without appropriating suspect tactics used by the religious who recruit to their groups, I talk about my experience of selling humanism over the years, and how we can reach people and bring them to us. And finally, I give an update about a busing dispute involving religious school kids in a public school district.

Voice Over 0:31
Glass City Humanist is an outreach project of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, Building Community through Compassion and Reason for a Better Tomorrow.

Doug Berger 0:50
As we close out the month of August 2022, just want to go back and reflect on some of the things that we did as a group, the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, we had a couple of info booths. We set up a booth at the mommy summer fair on August the 13th. And on August the 20th, we had a info booth at Toledo pride. Toledo pride always takes place in August. And so we had a booth at promenade Park. Funny thing about the booth at Toledo pride was that the weather didn’t hold out it, thunderstorms started moving in. And we had elected to pack up before the storm hit full force. And as we’re packing up our booth, we had taken the weights off the legs of the tent that we have the pop up tent, and Augusta when almost took it. If it hadn’t been for the booth next to us, catching one of the legs, we probably would have lost our tent. And so that was kind of playing. I was telling my fiance Shawn, I said we were this close little close to get in on the news, because they always like putting that stuff. But we did the those booths. And I always enjoyed doing that. Because basically, it gives me an opportunity to sell the group to people who may not know, we exist, or may not know that there’s humanists in the Toledo area, they might not know anything about humanism. And so this is one way since since we aren’t a church, and we don’t have large pockets, and we don’t have large donations, and Hent please send me donations. And since we don’t have large donations, we can’t do the the typical advertising model, where you take out ads in the newspaper or on TV, or you do billboards, I would love to do a billboard. But we do not have the cash for that. So one of the ways that we can advertise the group is we set up these, these booths at these community festivals or community events. And so we elected to do the summer fair and Toledo pride. And you have a selection of literature and you try to put it up into a nice display. We have a tablecloth with our name on it. And it’s and it’s got the old old tagline and because those are kind of expensive, so it’s not like we can get new ones all the time. Now we have our banner up at the Pride festival, we had a pride flag, we put that up. And basically what happens is people walk by, and they see our literature or they see our display. One of the things that we use to lure people to the booth is we gave away toy dinosaurs to the kids, little plastic, I don’t know one inch size dinosaurs bought a bag of old Mafa off of Amazon and just put up a sign saying free and kids would come up and I would bring the parents and then they would see its humanism. We had a couple people come up one woman in particular during Pride it she said that she had no idea that Toledo had a humanist group. And that’s on us because, you know, that’s what we have to do is we have to advertise the group and try to get people to see the group. And what that part is, is is a group like ours, a social group like ours. We always have to be constantly trying to bring in new members. Especially if we want a sustainable group, something that’s going to last for the years you gotta you gotta keep bringing in new People, you have to try to retain the people that you have, you know, that’s a different effort. But you also have to sell it, you have to sell humanism is one of the things in and we’re all familiar with it is religious people do it all the time. churches and religious organizations, they’re selling their product, their beliefs all the time, sometimes in shady ways. I just saw the other day, there’s an ad for a movie, that is a faith based movie. And it’s got some really funky, Hip Hip music to it. And then at the end, you find out that it’s a religious movie.

Doug Berger 5:48
And then there’s also this other campaign that’s had many different TV commercials. It’s called he gets us. And so what it will do is it will say, many of us are struggling with finances. And then the next slide, and I’m not, this isn’t word for word. That’s how I imagined it. Some of us are struggling with finances. Jesus was poor or something like that. And it’s like, he gets us. And so their tagline is, Jesus gets our lives because he was human too. So basically, they’ve watered down religious belief, and almost turned it into humanism, but focusing on Jesus. All right, and then, of course, then we’re also familiar with some of the mega churches, the the ones that don’t have any set. They’re not attached to any particular belief system. You know, they’re not like Pentecostal or, or Presbyterian or even, you know, they’re just kind of a generic, mega church, they meet in large buildings. And a lot of them have rock bands, and flashy lights. And, and they have presentation graphics during the sermon. And, and the thing is, it to me, what the religious people are doing, to talk about an old saying, is putting lipstick on a pig, because you still have these, this crappy belief system, but you’re trying to dress it up to appeal to people today, because because, you know, poll after poll after poll shows that people are not buying traditional religious beliefs, they’re not, they don’t want to go sit in a church for an hour or two hours, and get preached at, you know, they’re trying to jazz it up, make it fun, and turn it into a spectacle. You know, it’s still a crappy belief system. But hey, it looks good. Of course, the the thing where humanists kind of come in there is, you know, we want to make our our belief system into a spectacle and make it flashy, but we don’t have a crappy belief system, we believe that our belief system is superior to religious belief. And so, and so but we still have to appeal, we still have to use advertising methods I took. I studied advertising in, in college. And so I’m familiar with some of the techniques. But there’s other ways of making, you know, appealing to people, and trying to make people excited, because that’s what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to create a buzz, you’re trying to make people excited when we’re having these info boosts. It’s not about hitting people over the head, okay. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to quickly introduce humanism. And one of the things that I use is, I got some I got some of those 10 commitment posters that Ha, is selling to different for groups or people, but the 10 commitments, and, and even though I hate the name 10 commitments, I’ve said that before, I think it’s a stupid name. These have been growing on me of late. And one of the things that as a chapter we got, that they had available, were these postcard sized 10 commitments. So had all the all the 10 commitments, briefly listed on this postcard, and you can hand this out. So if somebody says, Oh, what do you believe? You pick up this 10 commandment, commitment card and you say, you know, here’s our values in general, you know, and so people can take that with them and, and consider it. So it’s got everything that we want to talk about. And so that’s what you’re doing. You’re you’re trying to advertise humanism in general. You’re trying to for us So as a group, we’re trying to advertise our group, we want people to join our group, because you join our group, then we get more money, then we can do more programs, and then we can bring more people in. It’s it’s kind of like a treadmill a little bit, I get that.

Doug Berger 10:15
One of the things we want to do, though, with our info booth, and something that a lot of these community events have rules about, is we don’t want to battle religious beliefs. All right? We don’t want I mean, it’d be easy to put up a sign, religious belief sucks, look at us. And, but that wouldn’t be that wouldn’t be appropriate for a community event, the Pride festival, in fact, they have rule that you can’t be you have to be inclusive, and you have to be nice. You know, you can’t be talking about beating up people stuff like that you can’t do promote violence and things like that, they have a list of things that you have to do. So we can’t really come out and, and claim that we’re better than religion, even though we are in it. Religion is religion sucks, we can have a sign that says religion sucks. But we don’t. And I think that’s good, because that’s not the only thing about humanism isn’t just that it’s better than religious belief. You know, the reason why we’re human. So this is we want to have an and this is, and this is what we do is when people come up to the booth and ask us, they go who you guys believe, or what’s humanism about. And basically, you just give them the boiler plate or the elevator pitch, that humanism is a philosophy of life that says that humans can solve human problems without reliance on the supernatural. And that we support rational evidence based policies to address social justice issues. That’s in a nutshell, that’s what you tell people, that’s the elevator pitch that that we were using this month. And so that’s what you give them and then know like, and then you hand them literature, like we had a brochure for our group. And we had these 10 commitment cards, and we had to humanism and its aspirations the little little card and had Gloria Steinem on the other side is a humanist of the year and we even had bookmarks with a quote from her. And she’s from, from the Toledo area, she grew up in Toledo. And we point that out. And, and so what we do then is, is we introduce somebody to humanism, if they’ve never heard of it. And then we have the people that have never heard of humanism, not new, they know what humanism is, but they don’t know us. So we introduce our group. And the main thing that we’re trying to do is we have a signup sheet. Well, we want them to join the group, that’s, that’s the ultimate goal is to join the group become dues paying members of our group. That’s the that’s the goal. So we’re looking for people that want to help us build a community.

Doug Berger 13:26
Because that’s what that’s our ultimate goal is to build a humanist community in Northwest Ohio, Southeast Michigan, that’s going to be a safe place or safe space for humanists and other non theists. That’s, that’s our, that’s our mission. Okay. So ultimately, we want people to sign up and become members. However, not everybody wants to make that commitment. So we have an email list, where we send out information about our upcoming events, I usually do it about once a month. I also have a separate list that well, the email blast that I send once a month is all fancy and graphics and and you can read it on a website and things like that. And then then I have another list. It’s the same list, same list of addresses, where I can send people like, you know, we got to have a protest at this and we send that out. Something that it’s time sensitive, we send that out, like reminders for meetings, I send that out. So if they’re not gonna become members, we’d like them to sign up, give us their contact information. We have it available on the website, so people can go on the website and sign up. But sometimes if you have and I just redid the signup forms because the signup forms hadn’t been revised since since COVID. Started. And so we have you know, we asked for their name, their email address, a phone number We asked them, if we can text them, that’s something new that we added recently, is permit permission to text them. Because a lot of people see, here’s the thing. Here’s the thing, you know, one of the main points about running a group a social group, is you gotta keep up on the latest trends. And one of the trends is that a lot more people deal with text messaging, than emails. So one of the things that we’re doing is we added to our signup sheet, is we asked for permission to text them. So it’ll be me going, Hey, we have a meeting coming up and I text people, then the last thing we ask for is their address their mailing address, we had a picnic coming up on September 11, I am sending out some postcards to remind people, Hey, we got this picnic coming up. And those are probably going to go out in a week or two. And so if this is on a contact form, and it’s in our database, then I can send that person a postcard, or I can send them an envelope with a letter, things like that. So we do that we get them on the contact form. You know, and then, and then most of the time, when we’re talking to people at our info booth, we don’t get a contact information. They don’t join, but they take the literature with them. And maybe later on they consider it. Or maybe they see us at another event and they go, hey, you know, I checked them out before. And I want to check them out more. So that’s what we do. And so we don’t battle religious beliefs that are info booths. I mean, that would be easy. But but that’s not what we do. You know, we’re trying to sell ourselves, we’re trying to advertise the group. And, and the other reason why I don’t like to battle religious beliefs, is because it’s not an it’s not a battle of equals. No supernatural belief. And anything that derives from that supernatural belief is not equal to rational ways of living, believing that there’s a second coming of Christ. And so we should be good, is not equal to we should be good because it’s better for community if we all treat each other good. You know, that would be a rational reason to be to behave is you don’t want to cause trouble in your community. All right. So one of the other things that we do when we’re promoting humanism, and it’s something personal to me, a lot of some humanists aren’t like that. We have some religious humanists that definitely don’t do this. But I don’t I try not to use religious terms or concepts. All right.

Doug Berger 18:08
We don’t meet on Sunday. We don’t sing hymns. I don’t pass the collection plate. I call I call our group of community. I don’t call the congregation. I don’t believe that we? Well, it’s an argument that we had with somebody some years ago, and it’s kind of popping up again, is that there are some people who promote humanism, that believe that there should be humanist congregations all over the country. First of all, there are quite a few humanist groups across the country already. They exist. And just because they’re not called a congregation doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. So but that, that that’s like an internal issue, and not germane to this what I’m talking about today, but I just get away from using religious terms and concepts. Because even though humanism modern humanism is a replacement for what people do with their religious beliefs, their their way of life, their worldview, I don’t see the good in doing that. So we don’t do that. One of the things that I believe is that humanism is self identifying. That means that I don’t tell you you’re a humanist. You look at what we believe and how we arrive at our beliefs and our conclusions. And then you decide, hey, I agree with that or I am just like that. I am a humanist itself. It’s self identifying One of the ways that we help people identify as humanists is to give concrete examples of humanism in action. It isn’t about saying, Hey, did you know that humanism believes in critical thinking, from the 10 commandments, it’s one thing to see them written out. It’s the other part, to give concrete examples. For, for example, the British Humanist Association, they did a series of videos with the actor Stephen Fry, narrating, that basically distilled in a couple of minutes, different concepts of humanism. And I keep, they did want about how humanists, think about the afterlife, you know, we don’t believe that exists. And they did another one about what is right and wrong. And so they give concrete examples of that. You can also give concrete examples, like when we report news items, and then we give our information about it. Later on, in this episode, I talk about a bus dispute a bus plan dispute involving some Catholic families. And I wrote a letter to the editor about it. And so basically, when I compose that letter, I used humanist concepts. And then unfortunately, I, this will come up and I’ll discuss this a little bit more detail in the next segment. You know, I had signed it as president of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, unfortunately, the newspaper elected not to put my title, but that’s another item we can use to promote humanism, there’s been some other things. One of the other things that I think sometimes hurts us as humanists is when we try to get too academic about it, it is a philosophy humanism is a philosophy. And some people like to talk about philosophy, they like to discuss philosophy, and they, they like to sit in rooms and, and do point counterpoint and, and give concrete examples and, and talk about it and smoke cigars and drink cognac, or whatever, whatever I imagine people thought about, but I did, I was on a webinar, about the history. I don’t know if it was about the history of humanism, but it was just humanism, in general, or something like that. And they talked about the history of humanism. And, and it was just dry. It did didn’t, it didn’t,

Doug Berger 22:44
wasn’t exciting, it didn’t make it seem exciting, it would just seem like a lecture. And so that’s one of the things we try to get away from when we’re doing meetings, is just straight lecture lectures, some people like that. So some people like academic discussions of, of humanism or church state issues, but we need to connect humanism to how people live today. For example, one of our recent meetings we had one of our members who was part of the Aggie Fund, which funds abortions and we talked about the abortion issue after the over there. Well, the meeting was just the day before Roe v Wade was overturned, but we talked about the possibility that that was going to happen and what we could do about it so that’s putting our humanism into action we’ll get that with social justice issues like black like Black Lives Matter you know, what can we do as humanists to promote Black Lives Matter to support African Americans in this country and so that’s one of the things that we can do to help humanism appeal appeal to other people who aren’t caught you know, that aren’t like college professors and and sitting around smoking cigars and drinking cognac although that I’ve never smoked a cigar but I’m sure that that’s what professors do. The other thing where we have a problem sometimes in humanism is families. Everybody’s familiar with with religion with churches, and they have Sunday school for kids and and they have daycare for the little ones while while Mom and Dad sits in the sanctuary for the sermon. And then the younger kids have Vacation Bible School in the summer and and then they have picnics and camping trips and, and stuff for families to do and a lot of times that’s what is missing that’s missing in our group. We don’t have we have that I know of one A member who has a family who has a little child, and, and has come to meetings with that child. And so that’s why a lot of people who support humanism, and have families, that’s why they join a UU church because the Unitarians have that church model where they have, you know, religious education for the kids and daycare for the little ones and, and things like that. And I think, a group like the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, where we’re not a church, we kind of lose out on attracting more families. And it’s kind of a catch 22. Because you have to have activities and things for families to do to attract the families. But you have to have the families in order to make that work. And so we really have to find somebody, a family, to join us that is enthusiastic about starting family activities. One of the things that we’re missing with secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, which I admit, we need to do better is trying to attract families. And I think, if you attract families, as, as churches know, if you attract families, usually, you’re going to sustain that group for many years, because you’re going to have the kids grow up in the church, and they’re going to come to that church, even if they don’t believe everything in that church, because mom and dad took us to that church, or they’re going to move away and go do their own thing. And then they’re going to have kids and they’re going to come back and they’re going to say, you know, let’s go to this church, because I went there as a kid, you know, so that’s why we need to try to attract families. And then finally, the, the other thing that I want to point out about humanist groups in general, is we’ve got to keep moving, and reach people where they are, you know, that’s why we try to maintain our social media channels. That’s why we do the info booth. You know, I have stuff with me all the time with the, with the business card and, and stickers and stuff like that, that I can give out. And if I meet somebody, and they say, Oh, who are you and I’m, I’m a humanist, and you’re a humanist, and give me all that stuff. So so that’s what we need to do. We need to evangelize humanism. Without evangelizing humanism, we need to sell humanism to people, we need to keep bringing in new people to in order to sustain the group.

Doug Berger 27:45
And as I said, the group is important because that is how we establish a community a safe space for humanists, and other non theists is by having a group by having a community you know, even if they’re not coming to meetings, 100% of the time, the fact that they know that we exist, that we’re there and that they’re members does a lot better for people than not having a group. And so I just kind of wanted to talk about that about how we can sell humanism without, without appropriating religious people and how they do it. Because a lot of times what they do is pretty shady, a lot of the things that they do is pretty shady. And humanism is not like that at all.

Voice Over 28:41
For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at Glass City Humanist dot Show.

Doug Berger 28:55
There was something that caught my eye in the news around about the time that our previous episode had been published. So I didn’t have I wasn’t didn’t have a chance to talk about it in the previous episode. But one of the suburbs to the west of Toledo Sylvania, like many school districts in our area, they’ve been having problems hiring bus drivers for the school year. Not sure there’s many different ideas about why that’s a problem. Some people think it’s because it’s too regulated. Other people think that a lot of a lot of the people that were that were eligible to drive a bus might have perished during the pandemic. That’s a possibility because a lot of the bus drivers are retired or semi retired. And that can be well, you know, who knows? Anyway, so they’re having trouble getting bus drivers and one of the ways that They tried to address the problem of not having enough bus drivers was to redo their bus routes, cut some routes and, and combine some routes, so that they could stretch their drivers as far as they could, and still get kids to school on time. And correctly. So, you know, it’s it’s about logistics, there’s people that go to college, about school transportation logistics anyway. So they came up with this plan. And, and according to state law, when they do a bus route plan, they have to present it before July the first to the parents, they just have to do that. That’s a state law. Don’t ask me why the state laws are weird as it is. And so in April, they introduced this plan. And one of the changes was that some little kids kindergarteners first second third graders, were going to get on a bus early in the morning, transported to one of the public high schools, there’s two public high schools in in Sylvania, to wait for another bus to transport them to their religious school. And two of the families of these younger kids did not like this new plan. They didn’t believe the initial reports was they didn’t want their kid having to get on a bus at 615 in the morning and ride with teenagers to the high school. And I don’t know what it is about. Little kids hanging out with teenagers. I mean, it’s not you know, like, like I said, I had told somebody I mean, they’re not drinking and smoking and stuff on the bus anyway. So these, these parents, so these school kids that were going to the Catholic school, were upset about this plan. And they they begged the school district to change it. They wanted to go back to the old plan, whatever the old plan was. And the school district said we can’t we don’t have the drivers. So the the parents decided to file a lawsuit in Lucas County, Common Pleas Court, local local court, county court, when the parents filed their lawsuit in the county court, it had morphed into a First Amendment complaint. Their claim now is that the school changed the schedule for their kids because they were Catholic, and that this new bus plan would infringe on their ability to practice their religion. And so that’s why they filed a lawsuit they filed a First Amendment lawsuit. So they added on they said, Yes, the kids are getting up too early. You’re writing with teenagers who ik teenagers. And that school was doing this because they were Catholic. So it went to the county court and the judge, local judge Stacy Cook, ruled in favor of the parents, but not for the First Amendment reasons. She without evidence, without any testimony from experts said yes. 615 in the morning is too early for kindergarteners. And yes, they shouldn’t have to ride with teenagers who are sick. And so they she ordered the order to the school to go back and do a plan that would satisfy these parents or the judge said she would impose a plan. Okay. So they had until August the 26th.

Doug Berger 33:55
Well, I had seen this article in the Toledo Blade, where the parents in the school district were meeting with a mediator. That’s what in legal in the legal process. That’s what some parties do they meet with a mediator or a third party. It’s not associated with either of the parties that are squabbling. And what they try to do is they try to work out a plan satisfactory to both parties, and then they don’t have to go to court. They don’t have to have a trial. And then it gets settled. So they meet with a mediator and apparents. Their idea of how to satisfy their their issue is for the school district to stop transporting high school kids altogether. And they say that that will free up the bus drivers because according to state law, transporting high school kids secondary kids and Junior High in high school is not required by state law. Transporting the little kids is required While the school district’s not going to do that, they’re not going to stop transporting all high school kids, just so that these two families don’t have to ride a bus at 615 in the morning. So at that point, when I saw this article about mediating the dispute, I wrote a letter to the editor, the blade. And one of the things I pointed out in the article, you know, I talked about how the judge based her judgment on him didn’t base her judgment on information at the hearing, or offer any evidence, it was just her gut feeling a little kid shouldn’t be up that early, and that riding with teenagers is awful. Anyway, but that’s one part. The other part was I wanted to address the First Amendment violation that they claim. And the obvious point was that catching the bus at 615 in the morning, does it keep the children from practicing their religion, they’re still getting transported to their Catholic school. And then there was a little bit in the article, and I want to read this quote from the article and I included in my letter that the district said previously, the three Catholic schools were the only ones out of the 14 private schools that they bus that did that didn’t have to ride with older students or have layovers at the public schools. And that the that the superintendent stated that doing so was necessary, because those private elementary schools, unlike their public counterparts, held similar start times to the high school. So what this tells me is that these Catholic, these families that were sending their kids to these Catholic elementary schools, were getting special treatment before. Because they had similar times they were getting their own bus, their own separate bus, to take them to school. That because they were they were starting at about the same time that the high schools were starting. And so the plan the school was going to use before the lawsuit, the families would now be treated just like all the other private school and public school students. And that’s how it should be. And it was just ridiculous. It’s just and and what it is, is that these religious people when they file these lawsuits are claiming, not not a particular concrete injury, but like a feeling like, oh, no, they’ve made me feel bad. And it was kind of ironic, because a lot of times that’s what, what secular people when they filed First Amendment lawsuits, you know, when they were talking about 10 commandment monuments on a courthouse lawn, that it made people feel like second class citizens, and a lot of times the courts dismissed it, they dismissed the feeling of an injury. You actually, the way it’s going now is that federal court, especially in federal court, is that if you’re making a First Amendment claim, you actually have to prove that there was an injury. That means that, that the state forced you to pray, or forced you to read a Bible or whatever, you know, they don’t, they’re not going with a feeling or a concept that they’re being discriminated against, you actually have to prove that they did discriminate against you.

Doug Berger 38:54
And so it just amazes me that the families are doing this, because being inconvenienced is not an injury, at least in my part, I’m not a legal person. But just being inconvenienced, having to have your kid get on a bus at six to 15 in the morning isn’t a violation of church and state. You know, because in a lot of our first a lot of our Bill of Rights, it’s like the First Amendment, the Second Amendment and and so forth, that there are exceptions. They’re not absolute rights. There are exceptions like time for First Amendment time, man or place. You know, you don’t have an absolute right to protest. I don’t know the state house. You know, you have to get a permit or, or there’s a designated area that you can protest in and you And if they tell you to leave, you have to leave and things like that. And so these families claiming that, that they were singled out because they were Catholic is ludicrous on its face. Now, one of the things that they did offer up in the, in the in, I’ll have the I have a copy of their complaint, a link to the copy of their complaint posted on on the show notes. What they said was that the Director of Transportation, made a comment when they were thinking about doing this new plan was they had come up with a list of talking points to tell parents about the new plan. And the Director of Transportation said, you know, make sure you point out to the public school parents, that we’re not going to have all the buses have K through 12. You know, little kids, all little kids weren’t going to ride with teenagers, just in this particular instance, because they were Catholic, because they were private school students that are starting at the same time. They’re going to ride with teenagers. And the families and their complaint said this is obviously showing animosity towards religion. And it kind of reminded me of the cake baker Supreme Court decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that one of comment, offhand comment made by one of the commissioners in Colorado, showed a hostility towards religion. So they tainted the whole thing and threw it out. So that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to use any animosity towards religion as proof that they were singled out because they were religious. And they weren’t singled out, because they were religious, they were singled out, because they were private school students. And they’re being treated now like all the other private school students. So that’s why it’s ridiculous. So, you know, I’m thinking, you know, they’re, they’re not going to reach a an agreement, and the local judge is going to want to impose something and somebody is going to appeal. Well, the school district kind of did a preemptive appeal, is they’re going to appeal directly to a federal court. They’re not even going to wait for Judge Cook, to force them to do another plan. They’re going to go to a federal court to try to get approval for their current plan the plan that they want to do, which is unusual, because usually, and especially when a school district is involved, the only time I’ve ever seen a school district, run to a federal court on a First Amendment issue is when they’re trying to be religious bigots and trying to force religion on kids. And they’ll waste taxpayers money, because they’ve been told that what they want to do is illegal, but they’ll still go through and go through with a trial in federal court, and then find out that what they did was illegal, and then they’ve wasted money. So I wanted to bring give you an update on this. This is an issue that I’m following. We have some members that live in that school district. And it’s just, you know, we could get into talking about probably not in this episode, but later on. In a future episode, we’ll probably talk about a lot of the things a lot of the privileges that religious people enjoy in this country simply because of the First Amendment.

Doug Berger 43:45
And having public school districts bussed their kids to their private school is one of those privileges and there’s some people some atheists and and humanists who oppose the spending of taxpayer dollars at all to benefit religious kids. And so maybe we’ll we’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Voice Over 44:12
Thank you for listening. For information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at Quest city humanist dot show. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, and is supported in part by a grant by the American Humanist Association. The AHA can be reached at americanhumanist.org SHoWLE can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written and produced by Douglas Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content Our theme music is Glass City Jam composed using the Ampify studio See you next time