How Will You Be Remembered?

[0:04] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. It’s true, we will all die. But as humanists, we know we won’t take anything with us. So we must live our lives the best that we can in the here and now. How will people remember you? We also look at the launch of the Secular Vote Project. 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.

[0:42] Music.

[0:59] This past weekend, the weekend that I’m recording this episode, one of our friends of our group, his name is Ford Caulfield, has passed away. Not many people knew who he was. Wasn’t a member, but he was a friend of the group. And he had come to a couple of meetings he even hosted a meeting a social activity at his house a couple of years ago and it was kind of uh kind of ironic too that it was shortly after the pandemic had ended or people you know they said it wasn’t around anymore and we had this meeting It was a discussion, you know, talk about things, talk about stuff that’s in the newspaper. You know, it was Ford’s idea to have it.

[1:58] And after that, a couple of people that had attended let me know that they had been diagnosed with COVID. So I had to call everybody and I had to call Ford and let them know that they probably should keep an eye out because, you know, they got exposed. But Ford was in his 90s. He was an entrepreneur, an engineer. Reading his biography that he had on his website, he built an engine with his brother when he was like a teenager in the 40s. And they sold the engineering plans to a small engine manufacturer.

[2:45] And so he’s formed companies and bought companies and sold companies and making steel, a bunch of industrial stuff. He was also known in this area for his classic car collection that he kept in a garage off of Central Avenue. And he had a very extensive classic car collection. and he sold it off recently, within the last decade or so, and donated the money to various charities. He also bought some industrial land off of I-75 over in the Northwood area and donated a portion of it to the Nature Conservatory. The other thing that Ford did was he started a student-to-student peer tutoring activity for the schools. It’s called Students for Other Students, and he started in 1989, and he got the Rotary Club to donate to it and fund it, but he got it going.

[3:56] And he told me in conversations I had with him that he was pretty active in the American Humanist Association and that he had received the Horace Mann Award in 1999. And I’m assuming that that was probably because of the Students for Other Students tutoring program. I believe in 1999, the National Conference was in Columbus and I was there at the time. I remember attending that conference, but I don’t remember any of the awards from that time. I think the only one I remember was the Humanist of the Year, and I think that was Andrei Sakharov got it. But I’m not my thing. I just remember working in the exhibitor room all day and everything. I don’t remember attending much of the conference. So Ford Caulfield and I believe it’s his second wife Phyllis and he also had some children that he’s left behind.

[4:58] And he’s going to be missed by his family for sure the other thing too is he was very active with Toledo with the first Unitarian in Toledo and that’s who’s going to be, that’s where they’re going to hold his funeral on August the 25th, and Reverend T.K. Barger, I believe, is going to be doing the services. And he’s going to be buried in Woodlawn Cemetery. And afterwards, they’re going to have a party at his house. He wanted people to have a party. And so it got me thinking about death. I’m sorry. Got me thinking about death as, you know, people that you know, that you care about, you know they pass away and it really starts to make you think about your own mortality, We talk about this in humanism a lot, that your life is what you make of it. You can’t take it with you. The religious people, the Christians and the other religious people, they believe that they go on after death, that they have an afterlife. And humanists, we don’t believe that. So we always believe that we need to make our lives what we can make it, the best that we can do while we’re here. And it’s a real short time. Ford was in his 90s. So that’s 90 years.

[6:26] We don’t have a lot of time. And so we have to do the best that we can, like he did. He gave to charity. He made fortunes. He probably lost fortunes. And he just tried to improve improve the world, put it that way, by coming up with industrial processes. Like I was reading about, he came up with a process for lithium batteries and using those in an industrial process. You know, he was always thinking, his mind was always sharp. Even when he’s 90, his mind was sharp. He self-published his autobiography, he self-published it. And he was giving everybody a copy that wanted a copy. And it pretty much reads how he acted in the times that I interacted with him. And, you know, my thoughts are with his family at this time. You know, it’s never easy losing a loved one. And like that senator from Iowa, Jody Ernst, said, we all die. And that’s true. You know, the biological process, the cycle we go through, we’re born, we live and then we die. We can’t stop it. We can’t change it.

[7:51] We can try to keep ourselves healthy and make good choices so that we live a long life, but there is a definite end to it. At some point, you will not be living.

[8:10] And so you have to ask yourself, what am I doing? You know, how am I making this a better place? How am I helping my loved ones, helping my family, you know, making a positive impact? You know, that’s what you, you know, people talk about legacy.

[8:31] I saw this article the other day online. I think it was probably on my Facebook feed. And it was a picture of the tombstone of John Hancock. John Hancock was one of the signers, or he was the signer of the Declaration of Independence. You know, his signature was the big signature at the bottom. He was also, I read it, that he was the richest man in the colonies at the time, and that he funded the war effort with his own funds, something like $300,000 or something like that, which was a fortune. That’s almost like multiple millions of dollars today. And he didn’t expect any payback. He really didn’t. And he was doing it because he thought it was the right thing to do and he wanted to be free to do what he wanted to do. But today, if you go to the cemetery in Boston, I believe it’s Boston, where he’s buried, it’s just a nondescript little tiny, you know, it’s not a huge monument or anything like that.

[9:48] And that is one of the founding fathers. Just, you know, you get buried in the ground and you get a tombstone. That’s your legacy. Even though he’s remembered in the history books. You know, once people are far enough away from it, they kind of lose touch. And so that brings me to another thing I wanted to talk about that’s related, is several years ago during the Black Lives Matter protests, and yeah, it was in 2020, 2021, down in Columbus, the capital of Ohio, they had a reckoning with a statue of Christopher Columbus that had been in front of the, I believe it was the city hall. Been there for decades. I mean, it had been there so long, it was green, you know, with the patina from the weather, and the city council agreed to remove it. And the reason why they agreed to remove it was because, aside from, quote, discovering America, unquote.

[10:56] Christopher Columbus was a terrible person, a terrible human being. He was, He ravaged and pillaged the native population that he came across. His sailors gave them diseases that eventually killed them off to extinction. He didn’t discover America. He found some islands in the Caribbean, and he was looking for gold. He was looking for wealth. And when he didn’t get that, then he killed the native population or tried to subjugate them to the Spanish crown. The guy was such a terrible individual that people back in his home country didn’t like him. You know, and here we are putting up a statue saying he was a great man because he discovered America, which isn’t true. And then we have President Trump and his lackey, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, wanting to restore all of the Confederate crap that was removed during this whole reckoning that we went through during Black Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter period, the protests.

[12:15] Again, honoring Confederates is dumb. It’s stupid. It’s illogical. It’s against history. The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War. They should not have any monuments. They should not have any statues. They should not have any bases, military bases named for them. Nothing. They deserve nothing. But that’s what these right-wing people, these Christian nationalists do, is they go into that old lie that the South will rise again. It’s dumb. It’s dumb to restore that stuff. Just like it’s dumb, I saw in the Columbus Dispatch, that somebody wants to build a park and put that removed statue of Christopher Columbus up in it. And if I was living down in Columbus again, I’d be like, no. Why don’t we honor people who actually made a difference to better the world that they’re in? Instead of honoring people that crapped on us, that were terrible humans.

[13:30] You know, it’s barely, barely good to honor somebody like Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, or Washington, who owned slaves. You know, there was some school in Virginia, I think, where they removed Robert E. Lee’s name off the school, and now they’re thinking of putting it back. Again, the South lost the war. They don’t deserve any honors. And we really need to do a better job of honoring the people, if we’re going to honor people, honoring the people that deserve really to be honored because they’ve either improved the world or improved their lives or helped their community in such ways that made a positive difference for everybody. And that’s what we need to do. And that is why I think that I really appreciate what Ford Caulfield did while he was living. And it is going to be a hole to be filled now that he’s gone. And we’re all a little bit worse off because of it, especially his family.

[14:47] So that’s all I’m going to leave you with today on this matter is, yeah, you know, we want to think about how we leave this world because we’re only going to be here a short time. And as humanists, that’s what we do. We focus on the here and now. We don’t focus on an afterlife because there is none. There is no soul. There’s no reason to hold off doing the good things for after you die because when you die you’re in the ground and you’re only going to have a tombstone if that and that is going to be your legacy so you need to do with your life you need to make it the best that you can in the short time that you have on earth.

[15:36] Music. Related to that last segment about dying and leaving a legacy and living your best life in the here and now is I found this video clip from Alice Roberts of Humanist UK. And I think it has some pertinent information and pertinent points to be made. Give it a listen. Life is like a piece of string. It has a beginning and an end. We don’t get much say about that. But we can make choices about the bit in between. We have the freedom to shape our own lives. We’re not completely free. We are limited by our biology, by the laws of physics, and by some of our circumstances.

[15:37] You’re listening to the Glass City Humanist podcast.

[16:31] But we are conscious creatures. We can think for ourselves about what we believe and make choices about how we act.

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[17:07] Our lives aren’t lived alone. We are social animals. We are connected to others, our family and friends, our community, even people on the other side of the world. Our actions have consequences for others and their actions have consequences for us. So freedom comes with some constraints. We should try not to cause harm. We have a responsibility to consider our impact on other people, other animals and the planet. But these connections can also enrich our lives. They’re the source of conversation, friendship, joy and love. Good vibrations. They can magnify our possibilities. When we share our ideas and work together, we’re capable of creating incredible things. Not everyone is born with the same opportunities that some of us might enjoy. We have a responsibility to speak up for their freedom. It will be to all our benefit.

[18:11] Our connections also provide a way for something of us to survive our deaths. Through the ideas we share and the contributions we make, our lives can continue to have an impact after we are gone. Our piece of string may come to an end but the ripples we make will continue and live on in others. One life. Live it well. Think for yourself. Act for everyone.

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[18:51] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show.

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[19:11] . The other day, I participated in a Zoom call or webinar for the launch of a reimagined version of an old project. And it’s called The Secular Vote. And I think that there’s been something similar around for a while, and this is just a reimagining of that whole system. The people that were behind it were Sarah Levin of Secular Strategies.

[19:50] And Dr. Juhem Navarro-Rivera, who I have interviewed previously, previous times, they had done a presentation about the religiously unaffiliated understanding and engaging the nuns at Netroots Nation. Netroots Nation is one of the largest progressive conventions, political conventions that happens every year.

[20:13] It’s part of that daily cost if anybody’s familiar with the daily cost blog it’s uh kind of evolved from from that blog and this was in 2023 when they did this presentation, and what it was according to their story that they have on their website it said the inspiration for the secular vote was our shared frustration observing media politicians and research institutions talk about secular people without truly talking to us. We’re cutting through the noise and the bias and sharing a truer, more complex, and exciting, for us nerds, perspective on the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, the non-religious. There has been a growing interest in studying and reporting on the rapidly growing population of nuns, people without a religious affiliation, and with it a growing recognition of the impact of the demographic on our culture and politics. However, the research being conducted, analysis presented, and resulting discourse in media, academia, about this population continues to be influenced by religion. And what they’re talking about is that whenever the media talks about the nuns, they think of it as a problem for society, and they get analysis and commentary from religious sources rather than talking to the community itself.

[21:41] And so they decided to do this. And what it was is Dr. Navarro Rivera, he has a research consulting firm and he does, he crunches the numbers. And then Sarah works with Secular Strategy and she does the analysis and the consulting and things like that for different projects that involve secular voters.

[22:08] And uh and there’s other experts that are also involved uh such as dr ryan uh cragan and he was in the the phone call the the zoom call that we had the other day and then um you have dr phil zuckerman dr melanie brewster people like that so there’s experts in data and and the sociological aspects of the secular voter. And one of the things that I really like about it, and it was a post that I saw from earlier in August, and they go into detail about, and the title of the post is, Why We Don’t Say Nuns. And if people are familiar with some of the times that I’ve talked about the secular segment of society and how it’s referred to nuns, I don’t, I’ve never liked that word because nuns encompasses people who just don’t go to church. They may still be believers or whatnot, and it could be agnostic or it could be atheists, It could be Catholics who don’t go to church anymore, things like that. And so it’s not necessarily opposite of religion. It’s just people that just aren’t religious. And so I’ve always disliked that word.

[23:38] And it says, it starts out their article, it says, you’ll find that the secular vote does not refer to secular people as nuns. And it’s not even because it sounds like nuns, the religious order, when you say it out loud. Nuns was popularized by survey questions in which non-religious participants could choose either from a list of faiths or opt for none of the above. The none of the above question is part of the broader problem we seek to solve. The religious lens applied to research on secular people gets in the way of asking the right questions and using the right language, which would actually lead us to a better understanding the complexity of this demographic. There is still a lot more we don’t know and we would like to find out through research led by and for secular people. So that’s very good that they’re they’re doing that and then the other thing that they have on their site right now are fact sheets so in these fact sheets they break down the data that they’ve already collected it’s already been collected and analyzed uh by uh yoom’s um company and they put it into like little bite-sized pieces that you can you know use as a boilerplate you know to show people. Under secular vote at a glance, it says that 94 million U.S. Adults age 18 and older identify as secular.

[25:08] And they make the point that that’s 36% of the population. More than one in three Americans are secular.

[25:17] Another fact sheet is they look at the political profile of secular vote, with the largest component being 38% Democrat, 33% Independent, 15% Republican, and 14% not sure. And when I interviewed Dr. Navarro Rivera about this, he was telling me that the reason why secular people tend to vote independent or Democrat is because we’re in a marginalized group and we have sympathy for other marginalized groups. And so we are not we are not as prone to being racist or bigoted towards other people that conservatives tend to be sometimes. Not saying that secular people can’t be bigoted and racist. Some are. Some big name atheists are. But overall, a secular voter votes liberal. Then the other stat that they put down is 48% of all American adults under the age of 30 are secular. So then the other part that they have on their fact sheets is they have secular voters in the USA, and they have the states, and you can click on your state, and it will tell you the percentage of voters that are secular.

[26:43] And if they’re latinx white lgbt black asian what age group man or a woman atheist agnostic or nothing in particular so if you click on ohio the percent of secular voters in the state is 38 which is a lot, And when you compare that to the United States, it’s 4.3% of the voter population in the whole United States is secular in Ohio. Then you have 51% are men, 47% are women.

[27:22] In the age group, the highest age group is 30 to 49, then 18 to 29, then 50 to 64, and then 65 and older. And then most of the people, most of the secular voters in Ohio are nothing in particular. They’re not atheists, they’re not agnostic, and they’re not Catholic, they’re not Methodists or whatever. There’s nothing in particular. People like to say that they’re spiritual. You know, maybe they believe in a higher being, who knows? And then they have atheists 16% in Ohio or atheists 19% is agnostic.

[28:04] So I just think this is a real good thing and then they have a map of secular elected officials and you can share they have infographs that you can download and share on your social media and I’m sure as we get closer to national elections they’ll probably have information for that So if you can check that out, I would recommend it. I can’t recommend it more highly for people that are politically interested and are secular and you want to see this data or see what issues are coming up. And hopefully that will get translated then into the media and then we can get better representation there. Address is thesecularvote.com and I’ll have the link up in the show notes and check it out today.

[29:02] Music. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.

[29:02] Thank you for listening. For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Show Lee can be reached at humanistswle.org,

[29:41] Music.