Does Humanism Have A Jeffery Epstein Problem?

[0:04] This is Glass City Humanist, a show about humanism, humanist values, by a humanist. Here is your host, Douglas Berger. Christian nationalists believe empathy is a sin as they look the other way as our out-of-control government hurts and even murders people for political gain. The American Humanist Association is trying to support empathy in a new project. Atheism and freethought have an Epstein problem. And content creator Rebecca Watson has the receipts. 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.

[1:00] I’m going to talk to you about a religious debate, believe it or not. I know most of the time I don’t concern myself with actual religion in this space because I am an atheist and the focus of this program is usually humanism, which is not focused on religion, even though some people who are believers can be humanists if they try.

[1:25] And basically what it is, is, you know, we’ve seen the thuggery of federal law enforcement ICE agents on various people, usually people of color. Also, you know, we’ve seen a woman be murdered and another man was murdered and people pulled out of their cars and kids held to try to lure their parents out so they could get detained. One of the things that’s been happening is that people of faith and other faith communities like Unitarians have been talking about having empathy for people. You know, where’s the empathy? The empathy is missing. Christians, certain Christians, evangelical Christians are like, you know, this is not the teachings of Jesus. And how can you do this? And then on the other side, then you have people like J.D. Vance and Elon Musk who basically have come out and said that empathy is a weakness and it is a sin and people should stop doing it.

[2:35] And the reason why they say that is because the actions that the government has taken in their name have not shown any empathy at all. And they think that that is more in tune with what they believe is a strong country, manly country, white supremacy country, if they get rid of empathy completely. Now, it ties in a little bit here into what we talk about with humanism is because empathy is one of our 10 commitments. And you’re not familiar with the 10 commitments. That’s like responsibility, empathy, critical thinking, ethical development, et cetera, et cetera. And if you’re not familiar with it, I have a link. I’ll have a link up for it. But in our 10 Commitments, we have a commitment that’s labeled empathy. And the subtext is, I will consider other people’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And then it explains it, says empathy means entering imaginatively empathy.

[3:42] Into another situation in an attempt to understand their experience as though we are experiencing it ourselves. Empathy requires us to step outside our own perspective to consider someone else’s thoughts, feelings, or circumstances from that person’s point of view. In many ways, empathy is the first step to ethical behavior as it allows us to respond compassionately to the suffering of others and exercise good judgment when our actions may affect someone else. Understanding another’s perspective is not only critical to building better relationships, but also make us better citizens in our local and global communities. Empathy promotes tolerance, consideration, compassion amongst us all. And the other thing to take from it for, you know, trying to label it as a kind of a religious thing is kind of like the golden rule, do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. Walking in other people’s shoes. That’s another good one. Another one I like is if you’re watching video shorts like on Facebook or TikTok or YouTube and you see somebody riding a bicycle and then they fall down on pavement really hard and you yourself, you’re like, oh, that hurt. That’s empathy.

[5:02] Believe it or not, that’s empathy. You have empathy for that person because you are experiencing, you know, you’re getting inside of them, experiencing what they’re experiencing. And it’s like a visceral feeling when you see somebody get hurt that way, you feel it too. That’s empathy.

[5:24] And so what it is is these white supremacists and demagogues like Musk and J.D. Vance, they look at empathy as being a sin or being not correct because they think it prevents them from doing what they want to do. To other people. Because in order to deport thousands of people, you actually have to rip them out of their community. And most of the time, if you have empathy for someone, you’re not going to intentionally try to hurt them. You’re not going to go into this process saying, you know, I’m going to hurt that person.

[6:04] What do they call that? Being psychotic? That might not be. I’m not a mental health person, so I don’t know. But it kind of reminds me of that. If you’re not empathetic, you’re psychotic, I guess. But the other term that some of the people on the right have called, they’ve called it suicidal empathy. Basically what it is, is they think that your empathy is taking things away from you. It’s kind of like people that are too altruistic. You know, they give away their money and then they’re broke. And nobody says that. Nobody rationally says that about empathy. Well, you should give everybody so much empathy that you have none for yourself or it takes away from you. So that’s what they’re taught about. And so the PBS news website had an article that, when was this published? In August. And it was titled, Is Empathy a Sin? Some conservative Christians argue it can be.

[7:12] And I’ll have a link to this article, but I just wanted to, some points. The word empathy appeared in English for the first time in 1908, taking from a German word meaning in feeling. So it’s a new word, relatively new word. The vice president, J.D. Vance, he framed the idea in his own religious terms, invoking the concept of ordo amoris, or order of love, within concentric circles of importance. He argued the immediate family comes first and the wider world last, an interpretation that then Pope Francis rejected. Now, most people, that’s how it operates for you. You’re more inclined to feel more empathy for your immediate family than you are somebody that you don’t know. But, I mean, it’s not always absent. It’s like a lesser degree.

[8:10] You know, if you know that your uncle is dying of cancer, you’re more empathetic to his struggle, and you want to try to help him, than, let’s say, Joe down the street, who you don’t know, who you see every day, and you find out he has cancer, you’re less empathetic about that because he’s not a family member. He’s not a loved one. That’s just common sense. But they turn this, like Vance and the right-wingers turn that to justify their actions. This one author, Allie Beth Stuckey, she’s the author of a book called Toxic Empathy, How Progressive to Exploit Christian Compassion. Her comments in this article, I really encourage you to read because one of the arguments that these religious people and people like Unitarians say when they complain about the actions of the Trump administration is that Jesus wouldn’t approve. You’re not acting like Jesus.

[9:16] And so they have here, it says, Stuckey admits Jesus is an empathetic figure. In her book, The Southern Baptist from Texas writes, in a way, Jesus embodied empathy when he took on flesh, suffered the human experience, and bore the burden of our sins by enduring a gruesome death. She’s clear that empathy can be good, but she writes, it’s been co-opted to convince people that the progressive position is exclusively the one of kindness and morality. And it quotes her as saying, if you really care about women, you’ll support their right to choose. She writes of this progressive line of thinking. If you really respect people, you’ll use preferred pronouns. If you’re really compassionate, you’ll welcome the immigrant. And then this other pastor, Rigney, I don’t see his name. He doesn’t think empathy is inherently wrong either. He finds fault with excessive or untethered empathy that’s not tied to conservative biblical interpretations. So then they go back to Stuckey quotes later. It says, Stuckey traces her own anti-empathy awakening to the summer of 2020 when racial justice protests roiled the nation. She saw other Christians posting about racism out of an empathy she found misguided. And it quotes her. She says, I reject the idea that America is systemically racist country, she said. When she said as much in the months after George Floyd’s murder, her audience grew.

[10:45] Rigney echoes this critique of systemic racism, but reserves most of his ire for feminism, which he blames for many of empathy’s ills. Because women are the more empathetic sex, he argues, they often take empathy too far.

[11:03] He found an encapsulation of this theory at Trump’s inaugural prayer service, where a woman preached from the pulpit. During a sermon that went viral, Episcopal Bishop Mary Ann Buddy pleaded with the Republican president to have mercy on immigrants and LGBTQ plus people, prompting a conservative backlash. Buddy’s attempt to speak truth to power is a reminder that feminism is a cancer that enables the politics of empathetic manipulation, Rigney wrote for the Evangelical Word magazine. So there you have it. That is why these people on the right hate empathy, because it’s used by progressives, religious progressives and liberal Christians to tsk them for their actions that are not empathetic at all. And so not only do they reject empathy to justify their racism, but also their misogyny. And you see that. There was just a report that came out the other day that Pete Hegseth, who is known to be a practitioner of very extreme Christian nationalist evangelical Christianity.

[12:20] Is having the Defense Department review the women in combat roles in the military. And it’s very possible that they’re going to get rid of women in combat roles in the military and possibly push them completely out of the military because that is their religious bias that women shouldn’t be allowed to be in powerful positions, because they believe that that’s only for men.

[12:53] And that men should only be the leaders. They should only be the ones working. Women should be in the home. So, you know, I’ve identified this problem with this backlash against empathy that’s going on right now. And you’re like thinking, you know, well, what are we going to do about it?

[13:13] Well, there is something that can be done about it. And that is the American Humanist Association has started a project called the Empathy Project. And what they’re going to do, what they are doing is they are offering $100,000 worth of grants to chapters and groups and even non-humanist groups who want to do something for May 2nd, which is the National Day of Reason, I believe, or in that vicinity where you have the National Day of Reason, to do some kind of activity that is empathetic.

[14:01] All right. So the promo for this group, the American Empathy Project, is we’re giving away $100,000 in grants to fund service projects across the country because empathy is stronger than cruelty. Join us. And then they have grant applications are due by March 13th. And the event is going to be, they want you to have this event on May 2nd. You could do things on food over cruelty, conservation over cruelty, affirmation over cruelty, care over cruelty, welcoming over cruelty, respect over cruelty. And I was looking at one of them, the care over cruelty involves people writing letters and postcards to their elected officials about affording basic health care, wanting to make sure that people are taken care of, and also using grant funding to cancel medical debt, which I was amazed. You can do that. You can donate like a thousand dollars to this this company that purchases medical debt. And then what they’ll do, they could purchase up to one hundred thousand dollars with that a thousand dollars and cancel it.

[15:21] And we’ve had that happen here in the Toledo area through the city of Toledo. They paid a few thousand dollars to buy medical debt and got it canceled. And I think that’s a very good thing.

[15:38] The affirmation over cruelty is to help out the LGBTQ people. Um conservation um well it talks about uh reuse or recycling what you can and cleaning up pollution the big activity is cleaning up litter that’s always a good one food over cruelty is to uh focus on child hunger and pack uh shelf stable meal kits for a local food pantry.

[16:08] The welcoming over cruelty is to gather everyday supplies based around your community needs and deliver them to families impacted by ICE activity. That’s always a good one.

[16:20] And respect over cruelty is reconnect with your elders. Lead a joy drive for a local senior center. Put together a fun collaborative activity. Enjoy it with your local elders. Those are all good. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to play for you a video clip from Amanda Nelson. She is a political content creator. She lives in Virginia. I follow her. I’ve been following her on Facebook, but her Instagram account has all the same thing. And so if you’re really looking for some insight on politics, she’s always good to follow. But she did this nice thing for the American Empathy Project, and I’m going to play her promotion of it to finish out this thing. Oh, and I also need to let you know, too, that there are partners in this American Empathy Project. It is American Atheists, Interfaith America, Recovering from Religion, and the Secular Coalition for America. and they are joining the American Humanist Association and getting this American Empathy Project off the ground. And I, like I said, you know, empathy is part of our 10 commandments. I fully support empathy.

[17:42] You really, very rarely can you go too far. You can’t go too far with empathy. You really can’t. And I don’t think it’s a detriment to society. I don’t think that it shows a weakness. I don’t think it’s a sin. I think we need more of it. We need more empathy. We need more compassion. And I think that this political divide that we are experiencing in this country is you You have, on one hand, the people that are not compassionate, are not empathetic, are in charge, and are hurting a lot of people. And then on the other side, you have people that want to be compassionate, want to be empathetic, that want to help everybody. Those are the people we should support.

[18:24] No matter what you do, support them locally, statewide, countrywide, worldwide, because those are the people that you want to support because they are making the difference. The people that are hateful and want to hurt everybody and they don’t care that they’re hurting people, those are the people we do not want in this world. We do not want them to have a place in the power.

[18:49] We don’t want them in charge of anything because they are not good human beings and we need more good human beings. So I’ll finish up. I’ll play this clip. And again, this is Amanda Nelson talking about the American Empathy Project. Are you decidedly not an asshole and doing work to make the world less assholey and need money for it? You need to apply for a grant from the American Empathy Project. The American Empathy Project is the first of its kind initiative from the American Humanist Association, designed to boost defiant empathy through service under the cruelty that we are living through in this administration. And you know how much I love defiance. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, the AHA promotes the idea that reason and science are the best ways to understand the world and that we should treat each other with dignity, compassion, and, as the name implies, empathy. Or as Kurt Ronnegett said, behaving decently without the expectation of reward or punishment after you’re dead. Trump’s administration seeks to diminish our humanity, especially if you are not white or rich enough to end up on Epstein’s jet.

[19:48] The Empathy Project is a way to fight. Giving away $100,000 in grants to service projects that promote empathy and build community. It can be projects of your design, or you can pick from one of their suggestions, complete with how-tos, food, care, affirmation, welcoming, conservation, respect. If it’s your first time running a service project, do not worry. The AHA will be there with one-on-one support and also group sessions to help you along the way.

[20:12] You don’t have to think of yourself as a humanist or any kind of ist to apply. Humanists simply believe that everyone has the capacity to do good and the responsibility to do good no matter what happens after you go. That is probably all of us here.

[20:33] For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. I’m in my 30th year as a leader in the humanist movement. After serving many years in leadership positions in the humanist community of Central Ohio in Columbus, I founded and have led the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie since 2018. Being a leader of a group means that I’ve interacted with many people over the years, from speakers for meetings to members or friends of the group. And that variety of people naturally means my interactions and personal feelings have varied. When you are a leader, you sometimes have to make compromises to reach a consensus. I have worked with some individuals that personally I would not interact with outside of the mission we were working on together. As I tell people when talking about this aspect, there have been some people I wouldn’t go over to their house to have dinner, for example. In the group activity, you withhold your real feelings and treat them as diplomatic as possible so you can accomplish your shared goal.

[21:56] Years ago, I worked with a guy who had sued his local government over a Latin cross on public land he wanted to have removed in the name of separation of church and state. I devoted some space on my personal website at the time to the issue, shared his essays and news reports about his fight. Then I got to meet him in person at an AHA conference in Columbus. The guy was an arrogant asshole who I would never be friends with outside of what we worked on. He was an atheist, and I believed in his cause, but personally, I wouldn’t go to his house for dinner at any time. He was just an awful person to talk to. When I started Sholi in 2018, I made a point to not talk about or support certain individuals in the atheist, free-thought, humanist communities who have become problematic in one way or another. I was not going to work with them, promote their work, or share their views to my members.

[22:58] As host of the Glass City Humanist podcast, I’ve made a point in my stipulations about guests I interview that should they turn out to be terrible people, like if they get accused of sexual harassment or convicted of child abuse, I would remove their episode and expunge them from the show website completely. I refuse to give a platform to any terrible people, no matter what our shared mission is or the shared outcome we desire. I will also call out the bad people when they are being bad people, no matter if they are religious or atheists.

[23:35] A national news story that’s been going on for several years now is about Jeffrey Epstein. He’s the American billionaire, child sex offender, convicted child sex offender, serial rapist, and human trafficker. He pled guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute and served 13 months in jail. He was arrested on federal charges in 2019, but he died in his jail cell, allegedly, before he could be tried in court. Epstein is an interesting character because he starts out as a failed teacher at a prep school and by the 1990s was telling other rich white guys what to do with their money and becoming very wealthy himself.

[24:24] President Trump and other Republicans ran their 2024 campaign in part on releasing the Epstein files on their claim that it only contained information on rich and powerful Democrats. When Trump was elected again, his administration refused to release the files. The speculation and rumors led to a firestorm until Congress passed a law that required the Department of Justice to release all the case files. The administration has been dragging their feet and releasing blobs of files, usually on a Friday, to try and lessen any blowback to them. And we’ve also found out that President Trump is mentioned thousands of times in these files.

[25:10] The Department of Justice has set up a webpage where you do a name search of the files, and that is what I really want to talk about. I think one transgression that no matter your politics or religion, we all oppose is child abuse, and especially child sex abuse.

[25:28] Just getting accused of child sex abuse can ruin your life, so imagine your life if you are convicted of it. You become a pariah in your community, and any good you may have done in the past is just wiped away. When I was growing up in Finlay, I had a school friend whose older brother was arrested and charged with raping a man. My friend’s family immediately lost friends and even a job because of what their son was accused of doing. And this was before he was even tried in a court of law. My friend’s mother had been the dead mother of a Cub Scout pack, and she was removed from that. The family eventually had to move out of the county to try and get a fresh start.

[26:16] Becoming persona non grata for child sex abuse is the usual result of such an event becoming public. Unless you are a wealthy white man, as we have seen, as the names associated with Epstein have come out. So far, only Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, have been the only people prosecuted for child sex abuse and human trafficking. And Maxwell is currently in prison serving a sentence for trafficking, sex trafficking. Let me be very clear. If someone was a business associate of Epstein or a social friend prior to his conviction in 2008 and knew what he was doing or even participated in that abuse, they are just as liable for the crime and need to be prosecuted. If you still associated with Epstein after 2008, then you are a moron and need to be called out in public and shamed, and maybe made the ward of a court. Rebecca Watson is someone I admire and have been following on her YouTube channel and social media for several years. She has been active in the Freethought community, has appeared at conferences, and has advocated for women and other marginalized groups in our community. And Rebecca is mentioned in the Epstein files.

[27:45] She is neither a friend or associate of the man, but her name comes up in emails in the files for a specific reason.

[27:55] Several of the men who palled around with Epstein rode on his private jet and accepted his money for their projects, and that included Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Lawrence Krauss, to name a few. All of these men are, quote, celebrities, unquote, in the atheist, free thought, skeptic community, and all of them, except for Dennett, have had conflicts with Rebecca Watson. Lawrence Krauss is the main reason Watson’s name comes up in the Epstein files, because Krauss reached out to Epstein many times to get advice on Krauss’s own issues with his alleged sexual harassment claims and claims of sexual assault against him. Richard Dawkins also wrote to Epstein about Rebecca. Watson does an excellent job in a video on her channel of explaining this whole ordeal that she has been dealing with for years, from men who just hate a woman who won’t bow down to them. So I’m going to throw the link to that video because you really need to watch it. One point in the video that made my jaw drop is when Rebecca recounts the crap storm that was the Women in Secularism conference in 2013.

[29:18] I remember vividly reading about how then-President of the Center for Inquiry, Ron Lindsay, gave the introduction. Or as Rebecca tells it in her video, he forced himself to give the introduction.

[29:36] The final straw came in 2013. Women at CFI had worked really hard to put on their second annual Women in Secularism conference, and Ron Lindsay insisted that as president of CFI, he should be able to deliver the introduction. He did so, and he used his time on stage to spotlight criticism of feminists for silencing male voices because those men have privilege. In his speech, Ron Lindsay bemoaned the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others as a justification for saying shut up and listen. Shut up because you’re a man and you cannot possibly know what it’s like to experience X, Y, and Z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way. But of course, you’re too blinded by your privilege even to realize that. This approach doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work for me, said the man addressing an audience of women at the Women in Secularism conference that was entirely organized by women for women. It’s enforced silence, he said, dogma spread by the likes of the religious and, of course, the Marxists. I remember back then that a lot of women with CFI and elsewhere quit the free thought movement over that incident and the treatment by some of these men in particular. A friend of mine who was a local CFI leader eventually left the movement entirely because of the rampant misogyny from people like Krauss, Dawkins, and Lindsay.

[31:04] Watson sums up her video. Maybe we can build a secular movement through progressive humanistic ideals and good people doing good things for their communities. The idea that someone would think that, let alone say it out loud, terrified Ron Lindsay, just as it terrified Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins and Jeffrey Epstein and every other mediocre rich man who was trying to coast by and just enjoy their lives.

[31:33] They were furious because it’s like, what do you mean you don’t need us? We’re rich. We’re famous. We have parties on tropical islands where all of our wildest dreams come true.

[31:42] And I don’t give a fuck. You guys suck. You’re idiots. I hate you. Just look at how scared of me Lawrence Krauss is. In one email, he’s talking about some letter he wrote to try to defend himself from the BuzzFeed article. I couldn’t find it, but I did find this evidence that he spent a lot of time working out exactly how vaguely he could describe me when trying to castigate me as ringleader of the movement to impugn leading male atheists because Rebecca and her crowd are very, very vicious and I don’t want to start too much of a fire there. Yeah, you know what? You were fucking right to be scared of me, you disgusting, pathetic sex pest. I hope you never again do a lecture where at least one person in the crowd doesn’t ask you exactly what you did on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. And I hope that Ron Lindsay really enjoys having a little cameo in this latest release, really cementing his legacy as a man who enthusiastically helped run interference for a man who openly and gleefully harassed and abused dozens of women over the course of decades and who kept company with the absolute worst pedophile in human history. All so that Ron could keep his boys club running without the pesky interference of women like me saying, hey, maybe maybe you could stop talking long enough to listen to what we’re saying.

[33:07] Hope it was worth it. Decades later, and we still have not dealt with this cancer of petty rich men and their snowflake feelings of being called out by a woman for being a terrible human being.

[33:22] This is why I continue not to support or work with or support any of those men, and neither will my group, as long as I have a say in it. For more information about the topics in this episode, including links used, please visit the episode page at glasscityhumanist.show. Glass City Humanist is hosted, written, and produced by Douglas Berger, and he’s solely responsible for the content.