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Humanism in the Face of Change: Fish Stark Talks Future Directions for AHA

In this episode we talk to the new ececutive director of the American Humanist Association Fish Stark. We discover his origin story, his connection to a past AHA Humanist of the Year, assurances for Humanists and local chapters around the country especially with the upcoming Presidental administration, and we learn the facinating story about his first name, Fish.

Episode 93: Humanism in the Face of Change: Fish Stark Talks Future Directions for AHA

In this episode, we have a visit with Fish Stark, the new Executive Director of the American Humanist Association (AHA). Stark, who officially took on the role in August 2024, shares his gripping origin story steeped in familial influences and the core values of humanism, shaped significantly by his father, Pete Stark, the first openly atheist member of the U.S. Congress and 2008 AHA Humanist of the Year.

As Stark seamlessly transitions into his new role, he elaborates on the mission and future of AHA, targeting the overwhelming need for individuals to find meaning and community in a contentious political climate. He highlights the alarming rise of extremism fueled by individuals searching for identity and purpose, often leading them to less savory outlets. Stark envisions the AHA as a vibrant, inclusive space where the 40 million Americans who identify as secular—yet may not label themselves as humanists—can find solidarity, identity, and opportunities for collective action.

Stark touches upon the organization’s recent initiatives, such as the “Democracy Not Theocracy” campaign aimed at countering the encroachment of religious extremism in politics, especially with the just concluded election period. Stark outlines his plans to enhance the infrastructure supporting local chapters of the AHA, ensuring they receive the guidance and resources necessary to thrive.

The episode culminates with Stark’s candid discussion on pressing social issues, such as the implications of recent legislative changes in Ohio surrounding release time religious instruction in public schools. Stark’s views underscore the importance of maintaining a separation between church and state and the critical conversation on teaching empathy, compassion, and justice devoid of religious context—rooted instead in humanistic values, all supported by science.

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Our Guest

Fish Stark, new executive director of the American Humanist Association
Fish Stark

Fish Stark is an organizer, educator, social entrepreneur, and lifelong humanist. Fish has spent his career turning big ideas into bold action in service of belonging, flourishing, and social justice for all people.

Prior to joining the AHA as Executive Director, Fish was the Head of Program + Curriculum at Legends, an educational technology startup, where he led research and implementation teams to create products that helped children build self-confidence, positive mental health, and critical thinking skills.

Previously, Fish served as the Director of Programs at Peace First, a global nonprofit that provides training and funding to youth social justice activists, where he led a global team of organizers who empowered thousands of youth grantees in 140+ countries to make lasting change in their communities, and worked with organizations such as the Red Cross and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation to develop youth leadership programs.

A self-proclaimed developmental psychology nerd who is passionate about giving everyone the tools to live lives of meaning, service, and self-determination, Fish holds a Master’s in Education with a concentration in child development and psychology from Harvard University, and a Bachelor’s from Yale University with a certificate in Education Studies. While at Yale, Fish served as a student board member of the Yale Humanist Community and received a Dean’s Prize for his work to build a stronger relationship between Yale and New Haven.

Extras:

AHA Announces New Executive Director Fish Stark, says “Game On” to Christian Nationalists

The American Humanist Association’s new leader has a unique history with the group

Stop Ron’s War on Christmas

Don’t Like Christian Nationalism? We Don’t, Either.

Democracy, not Theocracy Campaign

Representative Pete Stark Named 2008 Humanist of the Year: Nontheist Leaders Gather in Washington to Unify Efforts and Honor Trailblazers

American Humanist Association

*Note* Our parent sponsor, Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie is a chapter of the AHA

Transcript:

Read full transcript here

[0:01] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. In this episode, we talk to the new Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, Fish Stark. We discover his origin story, his connection to a past AHA Humanist of the Year, assurances for humanists and local chapters around the country, especially with the upcoming presidential administration and we learned the fascinating story about his first name Fish. 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. I’ll see you next time.

[0:43] Music.

[1:00] All right. Our guest today is Fish Stark. He’s the new executive director of the American Humanists Association. He’s an organizer, educator, social entrepreneur, and a lifelong humanist. Prior to joining the AHA, he was, as executive director, he was head of program plus curriculum at Legends, an educational technology startup. Um he lives in the maryland in maryland and the in annapolis area and welcome and thank you for joining us today thanks doug i really appreciate you having me it is good to be here and uh talk to all the fans of the glass city humanist podcast so uh when did you get the job was that like september right i so i officially started on august 26 2024 um and i yeah so it’s been, gosh it’s coming up on four months i don’t know how long i get to call myself new executive director for i feel like for an organization that’s been around for over 80 years i think four months is still pretty new um so i’m gonna write definitely as long as i can.

[2:08] All right. Well, people these days are interested in origin stories and the fact that you share a last name with a Marvel character. I think people would want to know your origin story. I know you’re not related to Tony Stark, but how did you become the executive director of American Humanist Association? What brought you here? So there are a number of things that brought me to the AHA.

[2:33] But the first and foremost is it does come from my family, right? I was raised a humanist. A lot of folks know of my dad, Pete Stark, who was the first open atheist in the US Congress. And when I was growing up, the values that we talked about at the dinner table were humanist values. right? Everything in our house was about how do we stand up for the underdog, do the right thing always, tell the truth and seek it whenever you can, be unafraid to live courageously. The values of compassion and fairness and doing right by people rather than genuflecting to abstractions that have governed humanism as a philosophical movement for a long time. In my father’s house, the one sin was limiting yourself. He was very specific with us that he was going to support us whatever we wanted to do as long as we were not letting anyone else put expectations or conditions on us and that we were being as bold and working hard and doing the right thing as we possibly could be. And so there was this ethic of…

[3:45] Hey, you’re here to do right by other people and to do right by yourself. And I think when you look at what humanism has meant to people over the years, it’s been a philosophy that people come to, when they’re looking for meaning and purpose, and especially for a sense of agency, when they’re starting to realize, hey, nobody is coming to save us. Nobody’s coming to save me. I’m the one who is in control of my life and choices. But what am I going to do with that? Because that’s a heavy thing to have to wrestle with. But that was what we were encouraged to wrestle with from a young age. We didn’t talk a lot about humanism per se. It was when my dad was awarded the 2008 Humanist of the Year Award, and I went to the AHA’s conference that I learned that there was a word for what I believed, not just not being religious, but also really believing in people, right? Believing in this idea that actually it’s people that matter, not abstractions, and that people are good and worthy and they don’t need to be saved or redeemed, that people can solve problems without need for some kind of supernatural intelligence or intervention, that ultimately living a good life in this world is about helping other people live free and meaningful lives.

[4:58] And so that was, you know, that was, I was very, you know, I read 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, a work of fiction, and I watched Tim Minchin’s funny videos about religion. I was, coming of age as a teenager in this sort of peak new atheist world where it was us versus sort of George Bush and the Tea Party and their radical, you know, backwards nonsense. And, When I went to college, I had the great fortune of being part of the humanist community at Yale, which was organized by a great humanist chaplain named Chris Stedman. A lot of people don’t know that one of the most important things I think we do at the AHA is through our humanist society, we train and certify hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of humanist chaplains and celebrants who work doing a lot of the things that typical religious chaplains do, whether it’s performing wedding or providing counseling on college campuses or in hospitals or in prisons.

[5:59] And that was, you know, among other things, that was one of the things that helped me sort of clarify what mattered to me and what I wanted to do. Because it was sort of very easy to just say, okay, well, I’m going to go to, you know, I’m going to go to college, I’m going to get good grades, I’m going to go to law school, and I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. And one of the things I realized when I started to think about it more deeply was that I really loved the work of education and thinking about the life of the mind of the child and really thinking about this question of how we become the people we are, how do we learn what we value, and how do we become good people without religion? And so I trained to be a teacher, not a lawyer. And then that kicked off a career in what I would call applied humanism, right? I worked first in college access programs, helping low-income kids get into college, first in New Haven and then in the coal fields of West Virginia. I worked as the director of programs at a global NGO that trained and funded youth activists around the world. So we would do humanistic leadership development with them and help them think about how they had to be themselves and listen to other people before they could change their communities. And we funded them. We gave them checks. So we sent to Nigeria and Nepal and India to do really good pro-democracy work in their communities.

[7:18] I went back, did a stint in grad school at Harvard, doing a deep dive on young people’s moral and psychosocial development. And then right before coming here, as you mentioned, I did a stint at a tech startup where we built mental health apps for kids, and I ran the R&D team there. And then when we got acquired, I was already sort of interested in going back to the nonprofit world and trying to fix some of the problems with democracy we had right here in America with the rise of the extreme right.

[7:52] And I was really worried that I was going to have to choose between the part of me that had never really left the family business and was sort of very political and always running campaigns on the side or running this or that Democratic club, and the part of me that has really always been fascinated about this question of how do we become our best selves and how do we help people feel valued and learn to value others. I thought I was going to have to pick one or the other. And then in the AHA, there is this incredible legacy of a movement that not only has worked for social justice and liberty and pushed our politics forward for a while, for decades, for centuries, depending on how you measure it, but also has done that by being very interested in this question of how do we live a good life and how do we do well by others and giving people who are asking those questions for themselves direction and meaning. And so that was when I saw the job posting for the AHA, well, it was impossible to resist. And that’s how I ended up here.

[8:55] Yeah, I think that’s a lot of, what you describe is a lot of people’s journey to humanism. I know it describes mine. It’s like that my atheism took care of the God question, but humanism addresses my worldview.

[9:10] And helping people and making the world a better place and humans solving human problems. You know, that’s what humanism means to me. And so it’s a really similar journey. Yeah, no, I think that’s right, Doug. And I think, like, you know, when I think about what we want the AHA to do in the future, the thing that we have to recognize is that we live in a country right now where a lot of people are crying out for meaning and purpose and identity. And we can’t separate that fact from the nastiness and extremism in our politics. Because the truth is, when people lack meaning and purpose and identity, they will look for it. And we may not always like the places where they find it. The truth is that you’ve got this whole network of red pill media that markets to secular young men and tells them, hey, you feel unmoored? You feel unsure of what’s coming for your future? You feel pointless? Well, guess what? There’s a solution. You can hate other people and think about how superior you are to them, and that’s going to make you feel good. Right. And it’s, you know, it’s cheap high, right? The same as a Snickers bar. It does give you a little shot in the arm to feel morally superior to people. And we’re not immune from indulging in that as secular people, I would point out.

[10:34] The truth is, I think that there are, you know, internally, we’re jokingly referring to it as the 40 million project. I think there are 40 million humanists in America who don’t know it yet. I think there are not everyone. I think there are millions and millions of people in America who are broadly secular, right? The concept of the supernatural does not in any way guide their life or their morality, and who are broadly progressive, meaning that they are not afraid of change, and they believe that everyone has an equal right to worth and dignity and opportunity. And I think that a lot of those people, especially my generation, the least religious in American history, but the loneliest also, and the most curious about these questions of meaning and purpose because we aren’t really finding it in work and we’re not finding it in relationships, we’re not finding it in other things.

[11:29] Those folks need something to belong to and believe in and fight for. Those things that religion has always provided, which I would argue are, can be good things for people. Those can, I mean, shoot, when I was working at this startup that was building mental health apps for kids. When we were trying to help kids build confidence, the first thing we would do would start with identity, right? What psychologists call self-concept. If you know who you are and how you connect to other people and you know what you believe, that’s the basis of a meaningful and healthy life. And right now, I think humanism has incredible potential to provide that common identity to people who believe what we believe, but don’t know about our community yet. And that’s the thing I’m really excited to do over the next few years.

[12:19] All right. Well, just to change gears just a little bit, people will notice that your first name is Fish. And I know you get this question all the time. Where did that name come from? What’s the origin of that name? Yeah. So it’s interesting. My name, I’ll lay it out right at the start my real name is not fish and my father’s real name was not pete so he is fortney hellman stark jr and i am fortney hellman stark the third and we have this great stark family tradition of passing on this name and then not using it ever at all um so you know when i the other interesting thing the fascinating thing.

[12:59] I am not this man’s firstborn son i have an older brother named jeff um but when i came along i guess he wanted to die you know so you ever remember the johnny cash song the shell silverstein poem a boy named sue you know my theory is that maybe he wanted me to learn that they’re suffering in the world uh and so the name fortney hellman stark the third you know was bestowed upon me i was not consultant at the time for obvious reasons and then when i got to first grade i realized it is very hard to be a little boy in the first grade with a name like fortney hillman stark the third especially because i mean i was like a like a lot of six-year-olds are i was a weird little kid i was very feminine i had these big tortoise shell glasses i couldn’t play sports for shit i was always reading a copy of the babysitter’s club under my desk like it was and so the name fortney which sounds like courtney which is a girl’s name was like a giant blinking target on my back and i was just like i didn’t like it it didn’t feel like and i could not change and didn’t want to change a lot of the things that were getting me picked on but i was like oh you know i could change my name. And so I took matters into my own hands.

[14:20] I wrote down FHS, my initials, on the back of a Martin Luther King dot-to-dot, which I think is something that you could not put in a school in Florida anymore.

[14:32] And I was like, oh, you know what? FHS, that looks like fish. That looks hip. That looks edgy. I bet a kid named Fish doesn’t get picked on, which was incorrect. But nevertheless, You know, I told people that that’s what I wanted to be called. And, you know, it was the 90s of a kid wanted something crazy. You humored him for a little bit and you figured he would get over it. And the truth is, like, it just stuck because the name felt a lot more like me, especially because I had made it myself.

[15:04] No, actually, that’s a more fascinating story than I imagined. I thought maybe you were fishing with your dad or something, and you fell in, and you started calling you fish. No, it was a good swimmer. Something like that. No, I mean, I do like fish and I like to swim, but no, it was an act of low-key rebellion. And in the times where I’ve been working as a youth organizer and training young people, I like to tell that story because I think it always reminds me of something important about humanism and about life, which is, look, there are a lot of things in the world that we don’t control and that we can’t control, right? But we control who we are. We control our identities. We control how we show up. And I think in a world where people are feeling more dispossessed than everything, people need reminders of what they can control. And humanism has always been about giving people a sense of control over their own lives, rather than letting our identities be determined by the whatever strict scriptural moral code somebody else has for you.

[16:12] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at GlassCityHumanist.show.

[16:27] Uh when you uh started with the aha you literally leaped into a ring of fire where you had a national conference and a national election all at the same time how did you manage that transition yeah i do not recommend uh joining an organization three weeks before its national conference um i somehow it didn’t click to me that i was doing that i’d do it all over again.

[16:56] Um the you know the truth is at the team at the aha doug is second to none like you know nicole carr my deputy who was the interim director for a long time she is a testament to what organizations can weather when they have really competent leadership right nicole just through a long and challenging transition, she kept that team humming and that organization amazingly stable so that when I came on, it’s not like I was running around putting out fires. It was more like there was a team of people who were like, oh man, like a coiled spring waiting for the ability to be really loud, proud, and aggressive about humanism and fighting Christian nationalism. And so, you know, it was the first few weeks on the job were this great time of sort of generation of ideas. I met with chapter leaders, I met with donors, and of course, I met one-on-one with all the staff. And, you know, my question was, what do you think….

[18:01] The AHA could become and humanism could become in this new world of 2025. And what are we going to have to do to get there? And we really quickly, as you saw, we launched at the conference less than three weeks after I started the Democracy Not Theocracy campaign. It was the largest election year initiative AHA has ever undertaken. We mailed thousands and thousands of handwritten, humanist-written postcards to Pennsylvania. We produced research about what Project 2025 says about religious freedom in its own words that was cited on the House floor by Congressman Huffman and viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on social media. We hired college students in swing states to spread the word about Project 2025 to their peers. You know, there was, because the AHA has this incredible stability and leadership and history and energy, we were able to move really quickly to hit the far right where it hurts on the religious nationalism issue, which polls very poorly for them. And I continue to maintain Donald Trump did not win because people want America to be turned into a theocracy. Donald Trump won because people want to pay less for eggs and gas. And when he starts turning America into a theocracy and people have to pay the same amount for eggs and gas, there’s going to be hell to pay. Um so we’re working now in a rhythm of you know we are using our humanist values of you know.

[19:27] Rationality and justice calling out the bullshit to take the fight directly to the religious right and saying hey you know what every time you wave a bible in one hand and you pick working people’s pocket with the other we’re going to call you out on it and we’re going to say not only does Is it a fundamental American principle that everyone deserves the freedom of conscience, that no religion gets preference or value in America over another? But also how dare you spend your time on this culture war nonsense that nobody wants while there are people struggling to afford homes and groceries in this country and you’re talking about just today talking about shutting down the government not giving troops pay over the holidays to send bigger tax breaks to billionaires like elon musk so we’re gonna keep hammering those points home every opportunity we can the uh one of my concerns over the past couple years has been that several of the national freethought groups, that they kind of ignored the local side of things and focused more on national topics or national advocacy.

[20:37] Are there plans to increase the support of local chapters in the future for the AHA?

[20:43] Yeah. So very specifically, we are increasing our staffing to support local groups by 125%. So we’re going from 50% of one person’s time to having a full-time person and then a quarter of another person’s time focused on it. We’re actually, we just put a job description in the field this week for a full-time organizing director, someone really experienced who is going to, you know, we don’t need to tell chapters what to do, right? People know how to develop their community. What we want to do is make sure that whenever somebody’s got sort of a technical assistance request, not only can they get that support real quick, which I would, I hope you feel it’s the case, Doug, that if you ever reach out to the AHA for something, the team gets back to you pretty quick with it. And you should tell me offline if that’s not the case, because we’ll solve it. No, I have never had an issue. Never had an issue. But beyond that, I think it’s about more than just being responsive when people call.

[21:39] I think one of the things we found from our campaigns, especially the Democracy, Not Theocracy campaign, is people want things that they can do where they feel like they’re taking collective action with other humanists across the country. That was why this national postcard writing campaign, I think, was as successful as it was. We didn’t tell anyone they had to do it, but it felt really good for people in Orlando to be doing the same thing as people in LA, to be doing the same thing as people in Milwaukee, knowing we’re all working together as humanists under a common identity to push for what we cared about. So we’re going to be building a lot more of those programs.

[22:16] Again, never telling a chapter what they have to do, but saying, hey, you can take part in this AHA-wide campaign, and you’re going to be doing it, and other organizations are going to be doing it as well.

[22:27] Separately, I think that one of the questions that I hear really often from people is, how do we get young people in? How do we grow our organization? How do we get more people to come? And here’s the truth. I don’t have any answers to that that are better than the answers that Evan Clark in Los Angeles has, who has grown Avis United tremendously, or that David and Jocelyn Williamson down in Central Florida Freethought community don’t have, or that Ellie Hayland at Humanist Minnesota doesn’t have, right? We do have big, burgeoning humanist communities in areas in the country.

[23:01] What an organizing director can do is they can, rather than Evan having to teach everyone what he did, they can synthesize those insights. They can basically say, here’s what the people who are most successful at growing their organizations are doing. And they can bring group leaders together and train them and say, you know what, here are 10 things you can try. And they’re not all going to work, but here’s what’s worked for people before. Let’s try it out and let’s work together and we’ll give you some support to help you think through it. So we’re going to be rolling out in the next year more programming that helps chapter leads who want to grow their chapters do that really effectively based on what works in other parts of the country. Because that’s what we’re hearing people really want. And everybody, I mean, we know this, Doug, everybody wants more community right now.

[23:48] It’s not just that people are going to church less. People are doing less rec sports. People are going to bars less to just hang out with friends. People have, my generation has fewer friends than any generation in American history. We have to do something to create places where people can come together and really just get to know people they wouldn’t already know in the course of work and family, but who have a common interest. I think that comes not necessarily from strategy or programming, but from leaders. So we’re really going to invest in leadership training for the folks who want it. The other thing we’re going to do is early in the new year, we’re going to launch a humanist online community on the platform Discord. I’m sure you know Discord.

[24:33] And our goal is, you know, the truth is people are building community online much more than they are in person nowadays. And I think you have to meet people where they are. So we’ll bring people into this community. We’ll provide support, a place where they can have dialogue and meet other humanists and feel welcome and valued. And then our hope is once people get involved, they’ll say, hey, I want to meet some of you guys in person. And then we can pipeline them in to local groups. So create another recruitment channel for all of you. You’re the chapter lead, though. I kind of want to know how that sounds and what you think we should – I mean we’re going to have this new hire. What should be on their day one agenda from your point of view?

[25:14] I think I had mentioned this in one of the chapter leader meetings that we had was that I’d like to get I would like to be more connected to the national office in that, you know, they are saying, well, this is going on here. This is going on there and or uh this month we’re focusing on this theme and you know just to kind of give me ideas on where i can uh help out and program that meets that theme so it meshes with what’s being talked about nationally no i and i agreed and i do think sometimes like you know.

[25:54] Humanists are really nice right and i think sometimes that can if it’s not checked um lead into kind of a deference, where it’s just like, oh, like, what do you want to do? I think we got to get better at telling people what we want them to do. And that’s not telling people what they have to do. It’s saying, hey, we’re running this campaign nationally, it would be a really big help to us if you did X, Y, and Z. So you’re going to get a lot more asks from the AHA. And my feeling with an ask is always everybody has the freedom to say no. But when you ask someone for help, it shows that you value them and you want their support. I think it’s part of how we cultivate stronger relationships. I talked a little bit about the democracy, not theocracy advocacy. The current one that you’re running this month in December, that this is being recorded, is…

[26:45] And i didn’t write it down stop ron desantis’s war on christmas yeah could you tell us a little bit about that yeah so here’s the deal i love christmas like i have been celebrating a secular christmas now my partner who’s a secular jew and i celebrate secular christmica um i’ve been celebrating secular christmas since i was a kid right we put up the tree and we bake cookies and we do presents and we have the bing crosby playing it’s my favorite holiday of the year, And the war on Christmas rhetoric from the right has always gotten me because, first of all, how dare you tell me that I don’t like my favorite holiday? It paints us as joyless scolds who are annoyed by other people celebrating Christmas. And let me tell you, I have heard a lot of complaints within the humanist movement. I have never once heard somebody complain about other people celebrating Christmas, even when they don’t celebrate. And the truth is, it’s the perfect example of the religious rights total misdirection tactics. We’re going to talk about how these liberals are ruining Christmas when at the same time, we’re the ones who are putting the screws to work in families and making it so that 60% of families are experiencing financial stress at the holidays over how to afford gifts for their kids.

[28:06] And so Ron DeSantis, the most sanctimonious of them all, who decided he wants to spend all his time talking about his Christofascist fantasies and how everything would be better if everybody just followed his religious values, Ron has been enacting some of the most inhumane sets of policies on low-income families in Florida that you could imagine. He defied a Biden administration rule because his commitment to the rule of law is about as ironclad as my commitment to my New Year’s resolution to not eat McDonald’s.

[28:41] He defied a Biden administration rule that said you have to keep kids on Medicaid even if their parents miss a payment. And he kicked over 22,000 low-income kids off their health insurance. He denied over $250 million in federal funding that was meant to help low-income families buy groceries over the summer when their kids weren’t getting free school lunch. And he slowed down federal hurricane funding to Florida by playing politics and refusing to go to meetings with the president and vice president, all of which are actual things that are making Christmas harder for families in Florida. And so we have been running ads in Ron DeSantis’ local newspaper, full page ads in the Tallahassee Democrat. We’ve already got hate mail about them, criticizing him for what we call his war on Christmas. And making the point that, you know, humanists, we don’t care what you celebrate.

[29:34] We are happy for you to do your religious observance in any way you want. What we care about is people being treated fairly, kids having a decent life and opportunity, equality, all things that these kind of policies are undermining. So we’re going to call them out, but we’re also going to do what humanists do and help. And we have mobilized humanists all over the country to donate and send toys.

[29:59] Band books, essential items to local nonprofits in Florida to give families direct relief at the holidays because of the things Ron DeSantis refuses to do. I think it’s important to do that because I think it’s the best defense against tyrants is a little bit of sarcasm and humor. But also we’ve got to start showing, not telling people what humanism is about. We do a lot of talking about what we believe, but people really know what you’re about when you’re willing to actually show up and do something for them. And so for us, this was a chance to say, we’re going to put our humanist values into action and we’re going to save Christmas from Ron DeSantis. And how long is this campaign running till so people can donate up through the end of the year obviously if you donate on december 30th your uh gift is going to get there after christmas but every single donation we get from this campaign after credit card fees uh every single dollar is used to buy gifts that go directly to kids in florida and i so i hope people will go to ron’s war on christmas.com support the campaign um and if you who knows if you like it maybe we’ll run another one next year. We’ll pick somebody else who’s has their war on Christmas.

[31:11] Hello, this is Douglas, host of The Glass City Humanist, inviting you to listen to selected segments of The Glass City Humanist on Toledo community radio station WAKT, 106.1 FM, Tuesdays at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. If you can’t listen to us on the

[31:30] radio, You can live stream us on ToledoRadio.org or visit our On W.A.K.T. Page on our website, GlassCityHumanist.show, for past episodes.

[31:45] Music.

[31:53] Here in Ohio, we have had issues with release time religious instruction law. In fact, just last night at almost midnight, the Ohio legislature passed a law mandating that public schools have RTRI policies. And for listeners who may not be familiar with it, that’s where kids can leave school property in the middle of the school day and receive Bible classes. And one of the main champions of the RTRI movement in public schools is LifeWise Academy. And the founder and CEO is Joel Penton. And recently we found out that the satanic temple was going to start one of their programs up in a central ohio elementary school as a as a response to life wise and uh he was being interviewed by the christian broadcasting network and what i wanted to do is i wanted to play or try to play a clip of him talking about compassion empathy and justice and i wanted to just get your take on it. The director of this Ohio program with the Satanists, this individual said that the goal of what they’re doing is to teach empathy, compassion, and justice, and to do that without religion.

[33:13] That’s interesting to me. I don’t know if you have any reaction to that. If that’s the true goal there of the program, what does that mean in your view? Well, I understand what the words mean, but I think it seems a little unrealistic. I think It’s basically saying, I want to build a building without laying a foundation. I mean, those things of empathy and compassion and kindness, those arise out of a worldview and a worldview as it relates to morality and the larger questions of life. And you’re not going to be able to build those concepts on a purely atheistic or religious-less worldview. you. So I think it just seems unrealistic.

[34:00] Well, it’s bullshit. We have science to prove it. Listen, I studied child development first at the Yale Child Study Center under people like Mark Brackett, who runs the Yale Center on Emotional Intelligence, then at the Harvard Graduate School of Education under people like Rick Weisbord, who runs the Making Caring Common Center. And the truth is, we don’t have to guess. We’ve got a ton of research about what helps kids build empathy, build compassion, and build a sense of justice. First, kids are born with a natural sense of justice. It is wired into our brains. That, in fact, is one of the basis for the humanist belief that it is part of our purpose to look out for each other. It’s been shown recently in research that young kids have a sense of fairness before they can talk, and certainly then before they have a sense of religion or a question, you know, a sense of God. The way empathy and compassion develop, you know, and you go all the way from Piaget and Kohlberg to recent researchers, they run experiments on kids and how they develop pro-social behavior.

[35:06] And the truth is, kids teach each other these things. You learn empathy and compassion from engaging with other kids, learning cause and effect, action, reaction, and consequence, learning that you have better social experiences when you’re not a little jerk, and ultimately realizing that your actions can impact other people and help or harm them. Most people, especially most kids, want to make other people feel good and not bad, and it’s the practice of social interaction.

[35:32] Oftentimes, specific social instruction has been proven to help, to help people, for instance, better read others’ emotions. And absolutely, there’s a moral component. We want to teach our kids that it is right to help other people and wrong hurt others, right? It is right to be generous, and it is wrong to be selfish. It is right to keep an open mind about new people, and it is wrong to just want to shut out people who aren’t like you. But really and and i don’t want to dispute in any way that kids could learn these principles through a well-taught religious program certainly i know many religious people in my lives who embody empathy and compassion and justice very deeply but i also know plenty of religious people who are not that way and i know plenty of atheists and humanists who are who are both ways the truth is the development of empathy and compassion is a measurable process that happens in our brain. Empathy is a skill, not just an attitude. These are all things that can be trained and learned, and most of the time we train and learn them through social interaction. And if that happens in Sunday school, great, but if that happens in these classes the Satanic Temple is teaching, or if it happens in these other things, amazing. And by the way, I just want to say, these are the people who are trying to tell us that social-emotional learning is communist.

[36:50] There is a whole field of researchers and experts who have been trying to figure out, hey, in schools, what are evidence-based ways we can teach young people things like empathy and compassion and fairness? Because that’s going to, when they do those programs in schools, they have fewer discipline problems, kids learn more, and kids are more likely to have pro-social behavior as they get older. We’ve been being told for the last 10 years that schools have no business teaching that, but apparently the schools have business bussing kids to a religious program so they can learn that with a side of somebody else’s religion. So you know i don’t know this whole rtri thing i think it’s just a fascinatingly um you know.

[37:33] It’s it’s such a blatant end run around the idea of religious liberty and secular public schools to say oh well of course we’re not going to teach your kid religion in school they’re just gonna during school hours take a bus to somewhere else to learn about religion and then come right back to school. It’s nonsense. And I’m glad that there are people like you willing to speak up and call it out for what it is.

[37:59] And as we wrap up today, again, I appreciate your time. Was there anything that you wanted to tell the listeners that we haven’t already discussed that you think is important for us to know about? Or if you want to restate anything that we’ve already talked about? I would just say that humanism is going to go places in 2025. Our plan is to be a forceful counter to all of the overreach that is going to happen. We’re going to see an unprecedented attempt to force other people’s religious law on Americans, to have our tax dollars used to push somebody else’s religion on our own kids.

[38:43] There are a lot of people who are going to be interested in standing up to that and looking for someone who’s going to call that out forcefully. The Trump administration can issue all the threats it wants about how it thinks secular people are a threat to America. They can try and advance their policies to shut down nonprofits that disagree with them. The AHA and humanists in general have always, throughout American history, stood up against tyrants and stood up for regular people and their right to live freely. We’re going to keep doing that. And if you want to be on the train.

[39:12] AmericanHumanist.org is the place where you can sign up and become a member. You can join the AHA for just a dollar, although we hope you’ll contribute our standard membership fee of $45. That helps do things like support local groups like Doug’s. It helps fund our attorneys and our policy people who go toe-to-toe with the far right every day, trying to stop them from treading on the basic bedrock freedoms that we have. It funds our programs to certify secular chaplains and celebrants like the one I had the privilege of working with when I was in college. It funds our work to provide. We’re going to start providing new programming for humanist parents because there are a lot of parents who are interested in teaching empathy, compassion, and justice, and who don’t want it to come from religion. So when you support the AHA, you’re supporting a stronger culture of free thought and free religion in America, and you’re also helping provide identity, meaning, and community for the millions of people like me and Doug who share these beliefs but who still need something to be a part of and don’t yet know about humanism. We’re going to be on a big journey, and we really want everybody to be a part of it.

[40:21] All right, Fish, I really appreciate your time today, and it’s been very informative. And I wish you luck on your future as the executive director, because it sounds like you got some good ideas, and I can’t wait to see them come into reality, as it were. Thanks, Doug. Well, I’m lucky to have a good team around me and have good grassroots leaders like you, and that’s what’s going to make us successful.

[40:48] 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.

[41:32] Music.

Transcript is machine generated, lightly edited, and approximate to what was recorded. If you would like perfect transcripts, please donate to the show.

Credits

Written, produced, and edited by Douglas Berger and he is entirely responsible for the content. Incidental voice overs by Shawn Meagley

The GCH theme is “Glass City Jam” composed using Ampify Studio

This episode by Glass City Humanist is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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