Secular Humanism – The Sometimes Ugly Step-child of Humanism

[0:02] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. In this episode, we look at the attempt to politicize disaster recovery, and how that is just a continuation of the anti-science crusade by religious and political conservatives. Then I share my remarks about secular humanism that I made at a recent public appearance at a local UU church. 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.

[0:40] Music.

[0:59] As this segment is being recorded, we just have experienced, or not me, but the country has experienced another hurricane. Hurricane Milton came ashore towards nighttime in Florida, and that was the second hurricane in two weeks, and causing a lot of trauma to areas that have already experienced the trauma of a severe weather event. Hurricane Helene was the first hurricane that hit the panhandle area of Florida, up into Georgia, and then it went into the Carolinas, North Carolina and Tennessee.

[1:49] And what happened was a lot of people experienced severe weather damage.

[1:57] And the thinking was, with most hurricanes, that it would kind of peter out once it made landfall, and people further inland wouldn’t experience as much damage. However, in western North Carolina, which is made up of foothills and rugged terrain and mountains, they got hit very hard, mostly from the water, mostly from the rain. I saw a report where at least one area of western North Carolina was deluged with two feet of rain in a 24-hour period.

[2:40] Turning some of their roads into rivers. And the reason why it turned the roads into rivers is because in a lot of places they built the roads next to rivers so that they didn’t have to move mountains to build the roads. So you have a lot of that where they’ll put a road in where the cut for a river is just to save them time and money in building a road. But then if the river explodes out of its banks, it’ll tend to wash out the roads. And there’s limited roads going into a lot of these areas. And the community of Asheville, North Carolina, which is home to the Vanderbilt estate and is known for artist colonies and things like that, they were hit particularly hard.

[3:34] And, you know, I feel for them. Our group, Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, we donated some cash for the relief effort. There was a humanist group that was going to take some food into the area. So we did that. Now, one of the things, you know, one of the things about hurricanes and about severe weather is this country has spent a lot of time and money in forecasting. And trying to determine where these storms are, where they’re going, trying to anticipate how much damage there might be. One of the things that, you know, we have the federal disaster relief people called FEMA. They pre-position, when they have a far enough advance notice of a disaster coming, They preposition equipment and people so that it doesn’t take as long to get help to the people that need it. And like I said, we’ve spent decades and billions of dollars and a lot of time on weather forecasting. And so when we have anybody that attacks that science, I take it a little bit, I take it kind of personally.

[5:01] One of the things that happened is that one side of the political spectrum, and I’m not going to name names, basically were repeating conspiracy theories about hurricane disaster relief.

[5:23] They were harping on all day on their news network that they have harping all day after Helene that the federal government was only giving $750 to people, victims of the disaster and then they were complaining that, meanwhile we’re giving billions of dollars to Ukraine to defend itself against Russia And so they were politicizing the disaster recovery. And it’s not the first time that they’ve politicized disaster recovery. The previous presidential administration, who also shall remain nameless in this segment, used to do that quite often. You know, the wildfires in California happened, and he was not going to sign a declaration of disaster because it was California, and he assumed California didn’t vote for him.

[6:21] He would do that. He would consider whether or not somebody deserved disaster recovery if they voted for him in the last election. And that’s just wrong. That’s just wrong. So now, fast forward here to this election season, 2024, and that same person who is running for office this year, and people aligned to him, are pushing these conspiracy theories, and that is one of them. And what it is, is, and this is how it came about.

[6:58] Vice President Kamala Harris was in Georgia, in Augusta, Georgia, and gave a speech. What happens in disasters is the leadership, political leadership, comes to the area and views the destruction or whatever. And basically what you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to let people know, hey, we have your back. We’re going to get you through this. We understand what’s going on. You know, you’re not alone. That’s basically what they’re there for. Because they can’t clean it up. They can’t wave their hand and make it all go away. But they can support you and be positive about not your experience, but, you know, the recovery efforts. And so Vice President Harris gave a speech in Augusta where she explained that immediate needs for disaster recovery, people would get $750 in cash.

[7:56] Well, the news network that is associated with the candidate that’s running against Vice President Harris in the election, they cut the speech off at that point, and then they did this misinformation, disinformation, that that’s all that people were going to get was $750. Now, I immediately knew that that wasn’t true. But I wonder how many people that were watching that broadcast believe it. Well, I saw it in my social media feed. Even some friends of mine, who I went to school with many moons ago, repeated that lie. And they were outraged that illegal immigrants were getting more money than people that were affected by Hurricane Helene. And that was misinformation on two fronts. One, it was misinformation about disaster recovery, and it was misinformation about undocumented people. Undocumented people don’t get money from the government. I’m sorry. That’s just not true.

[9:09] They don’t get handouts. They don’t get welfare. They don’t get food stamps. They get free medical care only because hospitals that receive federal funding are required to treat everybody who shows up. But that isn’t money that’s going directly to undocumented people. That’s going to the hospital. You know, they can’t vote here in the state of Ohio. Undocumented people are not allowed to vote in elections. You know, so anytime you hear a conservative person talk about illegal immigrants, because they like to call me legal immigrants to dehumanize them.

[9:49] Every time that they talk about undocumented people and saying that they’re getting free handouts from the government or living high on the hog in four-star hotels with credit cards, they’re lying to you. And what was really sad is political leaders were lying to people about this. Not only the major candidate for political office that I talked about earlier, the one who used to pick and choose who deserved disaster recovery, but even some local people here in the Toledo area of the conservative persuasion were repeating the same lies.

[10:31] And that’s disheartening. When your political leaders lie to their constituents, I mean, actually flat-out lie, I’m not talking about political lies where they’re saying, well, I’m going to cut your taxes, and they never do. Yes, that’s a lie, too. But I’m talking about a lie that gets people hurt. That’s what this does. This gets people hurt. Either somebody takes it to heart and tries to harm undocumented people, or these people in these disaster areas eat this stuff up, and then they don’t ask for help, and then they suffer or die because they didn’t ask for help because they assumed that they weren’t going to get it because they were told that they wouldn’t get it. And that’s disheartening. That’s disheartening for me where I believe everybody has a basic worth and dignity. No matter who you are, where you come from, you need to be helped.

[11:31] And so what that dishonesty has done is politicized disaster recovery, and it doesn’t need to be politicized. It shouldn’t be. As Americans, we need to set aside our differences in times of great needs, such as hurricanes, after hurricanes hit. But there are a group of people in this country that are bent on politicizing everything for the sake of being politicized. Not to help the country, not to help people, but for their own ends, for their own benefit.

[12:17] And so, like I said, you know, one of the television networks that are aligned with conservatives here in this country, they forward this lie about people only getting $750. Now, if they had played the whole entire speech, they would have said, they would have had Vice President Harris also continue after she said about the $750. She then said, and you can apply now. For anyone who’s watching this who has been affected, there are FEMA personnel who are going door-to-door to interact personally with folks, especially those who do not have electricity, but also that aid, if you have electricity, can be applied for online. I encourage people to do that. FEMA will just basically verify your address and the process can take hold. FEMA is also providing tens of thousands of more dollars for folks to help them to be able to deal with the home repair, be able to cover a deductible, when and if they have insurance, and also hotel costs. Today, I’m also announcing that the President has approved the Governor’s request for 100% federal reimbursement of local costs. Also, we will be covering 100% of the local costs for food, water, and shelter. That is the accurate thing.

[13:40] And then the other part that distresses me about this whole situation is that part of Project 2025, which the candidate for President Trump is associated with, wants to cut back money from the National Weather Service. They want to reduce how much money is spent to track and monitor severe weather. In this era of climate change. Because that’s the other thing, is that, you know, meteorologists and other scientists were surprised how hard hit Western North Carolina was, but they weren’t totally surprised because climate change is a reality. And one of the things that climate changes bring is that it causes severe weather to be more severe. And that is why they got the deluge of rain is due to climate change. Trump wants to, Trump and his cronies want to reduce the money that’s spent to protect us from, not protect us, but to warn us about impending severe weather and to study severe weather and what we can do to try to protect ourselves in the future.

[15:05] And that’s the general attack on science that we see from conservatives, religious conservatives, political conservatives. They attack science. They did it during the pandemic. They’re doing it now. They do it all the time. Because it doesn’t agree with their politics. That’s the short of it. It doesn’t agree with their politics, so they’re against it. And so I’m reminded of a tweet from several years ago from Neil deGrasse Tyson, where he writes on formerly Twitter, he says, the good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. And that’s what I believe as well.

[15:54] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at GlassCityHumanist.show.

[16:07] Back on September the 29th, I was invited to visit the Maumee Valley Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bowling Green. To talk about secular humanism.

[16:27] And public speaking is not exactly something I really enjoy doing. It’s one of the negative parts of my job of promoting my group, the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. But I took the opportunity to say a few words, and they were kind enough to welcome me and there’s a lot of good people there. Maumee Valley UU is, I would say, about halfway between Perrysburg and Bowling Green. It’s on US 25. And so if you’re in southern Lucas County, Wood County, Bowling Green, and you’re looking for a Unitarian church, Maumee Valley is a nice place. They are lay-led. That means they do not have a called minister that preaches there, but they have a formal service. I was there for the service. I made my remarks during the service, and they did record it. They live-streamed it, which is also good for people that don’t want to travel to Bowling Green. But they live streamed it and they put it up on their YouTube channel and they were kind enough to allow me to.

[17:54] Rebroadcast my remarks here on this episode, and I appreciate that. So here are my remarks. The title that I gave my remarks was Secular Humanism, the sometimes ugly stepchild of humanism. I became a secular humanist because I just never joined a church. I am not somebody who does church normally. Modern humanism came from the UU church at the start of the 20th century with people like John Dietrich from the First Unitarian Church of Minneapolis and Curtis Rees. Curtis Rees helped found the American Humanists Association in 1941 and my group, the Secular Humanists of the Western Lake Erie, is a chapter of the AHA. The first humanist manifesto was signed in 1933, and it’s considered a description of religious humanism, since many of those involved in writing it and signing it were Unitarians, including Walter Mondale’s brother, I believe brother, Lester Mondale.

[19:07] And it also made the statement that this is religious humanism. So how did secular humanism show up in the humanist spectrum, and what is it? The simple definition is that secular humanism is humanism without a church. We don’t meet on Sundays. We don’t sing hymns or have rituals that you would normally find in a congregation such as this one. In fact, Reverend David Breeden, who is the senior minister of the First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis, who I happened to interview for one of my podcast episodes, informed me that they don’t call it religious humanism anymore. It’s called congregational humanism because that pretty much matches what is in how it operates.

[19:57] And so secular humanism is a fork, to use a tech term, for humanism. And it’s for humanists who don’t choose not to attend a church or join a church. A more blunt definition comes from Tom Flynn. He used to be with the Council for Secular Humanism. And he said, and he wrote, secular humanism begins with atheism. Absence of belief in a deity and agnosticism or skepticism of the transcendent. Because no transcendent power will save us, secular humanists maintain that humans must take responsibility for themselves.

[20:38] While atheism is a necessary condition for secular humanism, it is not a sufficient one. Far from living in a moral vacuum, secular humanists wish to encourage, wherever possible, the growth of moral awareness and capacity for free choice and an understanding of the consequences thereof. So essentially, secular humanism rejects supernaturalism as the foundation of a worldview. you.

[21:07] Organized secular humanism evolved in the late 1970s when a man named Paul Kurtz left the American Humanist Association. Paul Kurtz was one of the authors of the Humanist Manifesto 2 that was signed in 1973. He believed that the AHA was dominated by religious humanism and he believed that the humanist movement needed to evolve to be more secular in order to be more popular. So he started his own group. And so the group that he started today, you may recognize it if you’ve seen it online, the Center for Inquiry. And they also published the Free Inquiry magazine. Kurtz issued a secular humanist declaration in 1980, and it lays out 10 ideals. Free inquiry, as opposed to censorship or imposition of belief. Separation of church and state. the ideal of freedom from religious control and from jingoistic government control, ethics based on critical intelligence rather than deduced from religious belief, moral education, religious skepticism, reason, and a belief in science and technology as the best way of understanding the world, evolution, and education as the essential method of building a humane, free, and democratic society.

[22:36] And there have been times when humanist thinkers have said or written that humanism needs no qualifier, like congregational humanism or secular humanism, and that we are all humanists. And we agree on the humanist consensus, and that’s a fair assessment.

[22:53] The international group, the Humanist International, they don’t use any qualifiers. And that’s the AHA is a member of that and there’s like the British humanists and they don’t use any modifiers and we had a former president of the AHA Ed Doerr who wrote various modifiers are often placed in front of a term in attempt to distinguish and clarify but this practice can convey the opposite for example the naturalistic humanism or scientific humanism in encyclopedias, or the secular humanism demonized by the religious right are redundant and unnecessary because the life stance is by definition naturalistic, scientific, and secular. Using modifiers in front of the term can also suggest the absurd that there is an opposite to naturalistic humanism and scientific humanism. But I would also note, too, that Ed Doerr did not appreciate atheists putting up billboards during Christmastime saying that there were alternatives to religion. So he was a bit of a curmudgeon back in the day.

[24:10] It reminds me of my school district in Finley. I grew up in Finley, graduated from Finley High School. And we had some old buildings. Our middle schools were built in the 20s. And they got state money to build new schools. And so I went to Glenwood. There was Donnell and Central. Glenwood was the Eagles. Donnell was the Adams. And Central was the Spartans. Well, when they rebuilt the schools, they closed Central and built new buildings. They decided to do away with the individual mascots. And our high school team is the Trojans. And so it became the Glenwood Trojans and the Donnell Trojans. And so they were saying that we’re all Trojans now. And so how that builds up a consensus or a community by removing those qualifiers. And it was also a very large discussion in the public about that, too. So I titled this talk, Secular Humanism, the Sometimes Ugly Stepchild of Humanism. Not only because of the loving sibling rivalry that we have with congregational humanism, but secular humanism has been a lightning rod for attacks by Christian nationalists since the 1980s during the days of the moral majority.

[25:35] We got dragged into the culture wars because of a footnote in a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Tarasco v. Watkins, in 1961. This was a case where the court unanimously found that Maryland’s requirement for a person holding public office to state a belief in God violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

[25:57] Justice Hugo Black commented in a footnote, Among the religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of a god are Buddhism, Taoism, ethical culture, secular humanism, and others. And, of course, secular humanism and congregational humanism shares a history with ethical culture as well. Religious extremists like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would use that footnote as proof that secular humanism was a religion and should be kept out of public schools, like sectarian religion is banned. The Christian nationalists ended up lumping anything they didn’t like as secular humanism, and they wanted it banned, such as sex education and evolution and some books.

[26:50] Author tim la hay he is the person that wrote the series the left behind series if you’re familiar with that he wrote a book in 2000 called mind siege that reportedly details the efforts of secular humanism to control the world and corrupt our children which he argued meant that humanists shouldn’t be allowed to serve in public office.

[27:13] And he wrote no humanist is qualified to hold any governmental office in america united states senator congressman cabinet member state department employee department of defense employee or any other position that requires him to think in the best interest of america, he is a socialist one-worlder and an american second we forget so soon that every tax increase is a move toward bigger government and more humanist trained bureaucrats dedicated to dragging us, kicking us, and screaming into the new world order. Does that sound familiar? Something that we’re kind of hearing these days? And I really wish humanism was that powerful. I really do. Not only is it completely false, but it’s similar what we hear about CRT and DEI. And I should tell you, too, that diversity, equality, and inclusion are humanist values. And just like we see in sectarian belief groups, congregational and secular humanists, have both claimed to be the better humanism. In fact, that struggle still shows up today. I was in a webinar recently discussing how we can grow our humanist groups in this day and age of social media and why many younger people don’t join groups much anymore. The discussion was led by a Unitarian minister, And his answer was to have a church, meet the needs as a congregation.

[28:41] And i do acknowledge that a congregation meeting in a church or a building like this one can be important to some humanists in my younger days i was a little bit more militant about that but as i’ve grown older i’ve moderated my views i have been contacted by people as as president of my group asking about specific family activities that we could do and we don’t We don’t fulfill that function, but I have recommended them attend Unitarian churches. And one of my friends down in Columbus during the days I was down there, he had two young children, and he joined the local Unitarian church because he wanted some family-friendly, non-theistic activities for his family to attend. And his kids actually were happy, and they were happy with it as well. In my long-term plans, I hope to be able to have more family-focused events and programming, but of course it takes resources I don’t have right now. It’s like a catch-22. You need family activities to attract families, but you need families to justify having those family activities.

[29:50] However, I do disagree with those who believe that you must have a congregation in order to meet the needs of people. I don’t believe there is one model, perfect model of organization. You do need to have a cadre of committed volunteers who want to help grow your community. And I was very pleased to see the many volunteers working here today.

[30:16] And that is one thing that we can borrow from the religious is that they’re really good at marshaling volunteers to address a need in a community. I just don’t believe that it’s an innate feature or that you need to have a building like a church or formal services and my niche is to try and provide a community without all the trappings of a formal congregation for those that would that are looking for that so i’m not trying to compete with you guys i’m trying to be complimentary of course that is ironic coming from me the founder and leader of a group that we’re basically nomads and dependent on the local libraries for meeting space and then we have to abide by their rules that come with it like not being able to pass a hat. I would love to have a building I could call home for my community just so we would have a consistent meeting place and hope that it was big enough to share with other non-theistic groups in the area needing a home. I would love to have a dedicated space for a library of humanist books and be able to share them with anybody that’s interested.

[31:25] I recently, or I do this occasionally, is I looked on Google and I noticed that there were at least 12 churches within a mile of my house. Why don’t I find that many humanist houses near me? I would love to see that.

[31:42] I would like to, though, I would like to let you in on a little secret. When I was naming my group, the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie, the actual idea was more marketing than philosophical. I like the initials S-H-O-W-L-E, or sholey as we call it on my board, and we have discussed and may in fact in the future change our names to shorten it. Personally, I am still a secular humanist, but our group accepts anyone who wants to support our values. Even religious believers are welcome. We do make a point of not toning down our beliefs, but we aren’t anti-religious. We’re just anti-bigotry, and we support social justice issues. We actually had a former leader of the Emanuel Christian School in Toledo attend some of our meetings. He reads the Bible every day, but wanted to explore humanism, and he participated. He didn’t try to preach to us or get us to convert. He actually participated. And we wouldn’t be a group today without the early support of Reverend TK Barger at the Toledo First UU. He let us meet at his church for our first year, and I count him as one of our longtime members. He recently did an excellent talk at one of our meetings about an early humanist group in Toledo led by Dr. Gardner Williams.

[33:06] And we are having our best year so far in 2024. We have about 30 paid members. And our meetings have been attended by at least 10 people, which I consider a win.

[33:20] We are still too small to make a big impact in our community, but I like what we have done. For Darwin Day this past February, we volunteered at the Seagate Food Bank. Many religious people and business people seem to only volunteer for things like that during the holidays, and so we made an effort not to volunteer during the holidays. For the past several years, we have worked with Lucas County Children’s Services to support a struggling family at Christmas time. And although we are a small group, I’ve been pleased that we have been able to go beyond the wish and needs list of our sponsored family each year. A recent service project that we do is we host a movie and free pizza event for kids at the library village of the library village neighborhood of Toledo at the West Toledo Branch Library. We just had one yesterday. We showed Inside Out 2 which that was another thing is we wanted to make sure that the movies that we showed complemented humanist values and that was the sixth event that we’ve had this year, and we actually had 34 people show up total, a couple of families and everything. The unique thing we bring to this program is we don’t tell the kids about humanism or our group. We don’t even have any signage up, but we do wear our t-shirt. We have group t-shirts.

[34:48] Religious groups will host something like that and they’ll want to give their testimony to you and invite you to their church. We don’t do any of that. We don’t require the kids hear a sermon before they get their free pizza.

[35:02] We have an out we have the outreach podcast glass city humanists that i host and produce i’ve interviewed some local people and some bigger names in the free thought movement like rachel lazar from americans united and nick fish from american atheists and, and we’ve had uh 5 000 downloads over 87 episodes since i started it in 2020 right before the pandemic. And we also have a 30-minute time slot on community radio station WAKT, 106.1 FM. It’s also on ToledoRadio.org, where I spend time talking about humanists and humanist values, and I even share some interviews, if I have some. In the past several months, I’ve been working with the group Honesty for Ohio Education on a toolkit to help parents and others fight back against the radical religious group LifeWise Academy that insists on taking kids off campus for a Bible school in the middle of the school day. LifeWise is manipulating Ohio law to inject the Bible into public schools, and our website, if you want more information on that, has a page about it. And we’re opposing it not necessarily because of the religious issue, but because of it being in the middle of the school day.

[36:21] Sholee has had information booths at a few community events. This year, it’s our second year, we had a booth at the Old West End Festival, and we also participated in the Umami Summer Fair, and one of our ideas with the booth was having something for the kids, and I developed a prize wheel with AHA’s 10 Commitments on it. And they spin the wheel, land on a humanist value, kind of educate them a little bit, and they get a prize out of it. I enjoy meeting new people, including those that who may not agree with my worldview and I want to and that they want to give me their testimony. Had a few of those this year. Every year we have a picnic at a Metro Park and we are one of our members is hosting a potluck in their home this year.

[37:08] And this year, on December the 21st, we will be having our first ever winter solstice event at the Yeager Center at Swan Creek Metro Park. I’ve been wanting to do this event since I formed the group, but then the pandemic got in the way. And we were able to do it this year and schedule it. And the extra cherry on the top is we were able to book Gloria Steinem, a Toledo native and humanist, to visit on Zoom and say a few words. When we confirmed the booking, I actually got emotional about it because she’s one of my heroes. So I hope that I haven’t scared you away and I haven’t made you mad. But I hope I’ve educated you about secular humanism and how it really isn’t any different than congregational humanism and is really close to Unitarianism. And it’s okay to take different paths to support our shared humanist values. And I’ll be more than happy to talk with you about my group and other things afterwards. Or you can send me an email, text me, and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you very much.

[38:22] Thank you so much, Doug. And, yeah, we do look forward to having the chance to talk with you afterwards during our coffee hour. Thanks so much. Thank you for listening. For more information about the topics in this episode, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is an outreach of the secular humanists of Western Lake Erie. Sholee can be reached at humanistswle.org. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Glass City Jam, composed using the Amplify Studio. See you next time!

[39:15] Music.