Humanists, the Happy Heathens

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday! Right now, we've got some great deals available! Plus, you'll get the best choice of rooms and hotels! Book now with just a £60 deposit per person. Enjoy flexible monthly payments and go direct from London Gatwick. Nothing beats a Jet 2 holiday. Package holidays you can trust. After a night of protected, subject to availability conditions. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is Stuff You Should Know about humanism. Which I find fairly relatable in a lot of ways, but in other ways, not necessarily. Can we say what Livia titled this one? She's been really killing it lately. She has. Go ahead. This is On Humanism, the bright side of being a godless heathen. That's right. I was looking for that AHA definition because that put it about as good as anything in this whole article. The American Humanist Association? Is it an association? Yes, they are associated. Yeah, they put it like this. It's a progressive philosophy of life that without theism or other supernatural beliefs, a bit of a dig, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives, a personal fulfillment that aspires to the greater good. And of course, if you don't know what theism is, we're talking about religion and God. So it's like, hey, you can be a good person and have a moral and ethical center and strive to do those things without God at the center of it. Yeah, for sure. And most humanists, yeah, I think it's fair to say most, are atheists or at least agnostic. Yeah. At the very least, if they do believe in a god, he's not an interventionist god. He's not playing our role in our lives day to day. Maybe you could also interchange that definition of God with the universe or nature or something like that, but not God in any religious way whatsoever. Yeah. And in fact, like if you do believe that, a lot of like strict humanists will say, well, you can't really be a humanist because not believing in God in that sense is a core part of humanism. And a lot of other people say, hey, you're a humanist. Who are you to tell me what I believe? Yeah. And the humanist says, you got me. Yeah. And as you'll see, it had kind of been tangled up with religion here and there until it kind of landed eventually where it did. And we're going to talk a little bit about the history though. That term humanism goes back to at least Cicero in 1st century BCE Rome when that very famous writer, and I think lawyer and statesman use the word humanitists to describe like people developing or the development of these qualities, these virtuous qualities that Chuck will talk about, like a moral and ethical center, compassion, good judgment, like being a good person and doing good things. Yeah. And then we leapfrog all the way over to the Renaissance and you'll note that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, medieval era. The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages. That there was a part of history where essentially the church ruled everything with an iron fist, corruption was rampant, and people were removed from their relationship with God and the church was inserted. And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did, they were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics too. They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God? You know, there's a connection between you, this person, who is important and matters just because you're a person, and God who made you. And this is where the very beginnings of humanism find themselves, even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet. This is the first step. Yeah. I mean, looking back, we apply the tag to a lot of different people. We're going to talk about some of them, but yeah, they wouldn't have called themselves that then. Petrarch was probably looked at as maybe the first humanist or the first modern man sometimes called. And in the Renaissance, it was a pretty hot ticket depending on what crowd you ran with. If you were among the elites in the Renaissance, you might have hired a humanist scholars to come and teach your kids all about like sort of the moral systems of the classical era and very much in the effort, like you were saying, to bring us out of what they call the Dark Ages. And some aspects of this whole movement in the Renaissance included three things we're going to kind of touch on here, realism, dignity of the individual human, and application of learning, like putting it into practice. Yeah. So humanism contrasted with scholasticism, which had been going on for hundreds of years. It was essentially the church's form of teaching. And that was basically reconciling the concept of reality that came from the classical Greeks like Aristotle with scripture and basically using scripture to explain the world and reality as it is. That's right. And these humanists came along and they were like, what happens if we stop doing that? What happens if we just study the classical Greeks and just basically also still stay Christians but stop using the scripture, this received wisdom that the church gives us? What if we study it ourselves instead? And that brings up that the second part you mentioned, which is the dignity of the individual human. To this point, individuality was not prized. You were not supposed to look inside yourself. You're supposed to look outside at the glory of God. You yourself, if you paid too much attention to yourself, that was a quick one-way trip to hell for you when you died. The humanists were like, no, let's look inside ourselves. We're important. You, the individual, is important. Yeah. And also part of that first one with realism was that we are flawed. If we want to learn about each individual and human, the nature of what it means to be human, we have to look at the bad stuff too, like the vices and the disorders and things like that. And then that last one that I mentioned was application of learning. Like all this stuff is great, but it's not naval gazing. Or we don't want it to be naval gazing. We want to actually stimulate action. Yeah. And you're not learning just so you can give more money to the church or something like that too. And if this sounds a little bit like Protestant thought about the connection between the individual and God, that's exactly right. These thinkers eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, which basically pushed the face of the church off to the side and said, you and me, God, we're connected. Yeah, for sure. And it'll also tie into the Unitarian Church in a big way later on. A church that has interested me. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like my Sundays free, so probably not going to go. But if any quote unquote church appeals to me at this age and where I am in life, it's definitely those guys. Yeah. Those people that you see out and about at like 10 a.m. on a Sunday and give that little knowing head nod to. Yeah. Yeah. So something I think is worth pointing out real quick though to Chuck is everything we're talking about involves God, even though the church has been pushed out of the way, God has not. Yeah. God is still front and center. Christianity is still the most important thing around. And that is, this is the cradle of humanism. And one of the frequent criticisms of modern humanism is that it's never really shaken off its birthright from Catholicism or Christianity, even though it opposes religion itself. We'll get more into that, but I just wanted to put that out there for the moment. And we're also talking about like coming out of a time where atheism like could get you killed. Yeah. You know, like saying that there is no God was, was, you know, was against the law and punishable by death. For sure. Yeah. But that started to change gradually around beginning in the 17th century. One of the people we have to thank for that is Francis Bacon. Yeah. Known as the father of empiricism. He also invented bacon. And he also had a big hand into coming up with the scientific method. Yeah. Yeah. We talked about him and that. Yeah. For sure. Which has been largely abandoned by science in the last 100 years. Yeah. Well, he argued for really studying like the, like what we call social social sciences now. He kind of kicked that off as well. The systemic study of like the human passions. But all these people that we're going to talk about here in the next little bit were, were Christians. So this is sort of, this is where it was still a time when it was still tangled up. Even though they had these ideas, all of these people, Bacon and this next person, Thomas Hobbes were Christian. Yeah. And the fact that there are Christians who identify themselves as humanists and vice versa. That goes to show you like that those two things are not incompatible. Yeah. You can be religious and care about human beings. And like they don't have to oppose one another, although humanists have eventually said yes they do. Yeah. I mean, that's the deal, right? I mean, did I read that correctly? Is the modern humanist movement was really where they were like, we're really separate from and congruous with belief in God. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So we mentioned Bacon. What about Thomas Hobbes? Because he came up with the social contract, which is basically like you and me. We basically allow a government to rule us in exchange for protecting us from nasty, brutish short lives, which we would otherwise have without the state or without society. Right? That doesn't sound very humanist, even though it's human centered, because he assumed that humans were essentially bad and would club you over the head and kill you first chance they got. That's why we need government, according to Hobbes. But he's considered one of the early humanists for sure. Yeah. And he was Christian as well, but he did not write a lot like in his writings, didn't write a lot about God. He kind of put that to the side and said, you know, if we want to understand who we are and what it means to be human, we have to look at it through just a very sort of secular and like very reasoned approach. Right. Exactly. So humanist. Mm-hmm. And that's the first thing that we need to understand is rationalism to understand ourselves in the world. Yeah. Thomas Paine was also one. He was probably, yeah, he was like the first person that you can point to and be like, that guy's a humanist. He even says so himself in not so many words or more than those words. He was a pamphleteer who helped get the American Revolution started despite moving to America just two years before the Revolution started. Yeah. So he was very forward thinking. He was arguing very early against slavery. He's, you know, had an idea for what we might call universal basic income now. Very much believed in the equality of all humans. And he has this quote that's really pretty great. Like I'm a big pain guy after reading up more on him. Sure. My country is the world and my religion is to do good. Mm-hmm. Pretty nice. Pretty much no better way to sum up the humanist view in a nutshell than that. Yeah. The French Revolution also, there's a couple of people who get called out a lot, Jacques Ibert and Antoine Francois-Mamoureux, because they established the cult of reason where they would actually go in and seize churches in France during the Revolution and repurpose them, I saw, into temples of reason. Mm-hmm. I read about them on The Collector, which is a great website that explains all sorts of different philosophies and stuff. Great website. Anyway, the French Revolution itself basically said, Catholic Church, you're out. And then they were like, okay, well, wait a minute, we're all about reason and enlightenment. What are we going to fill the vacuum left by getting rid of the Catholic Church? And all of these ideas like the cult of reason kind of came along, which was essentially create humanist temples to logic in humans, in humanity, remove God from the equation altogether. Yeah, for sure. And Buddy, do you think I like Thomas Paine? Don't get me started on Jeremy Bentham, because after reading up on Jeremy Bentham, I wish I had named my daughter Jeremy Bentham Bryant. That would have been a great name. I really missed an opportunity, because Jeremy Bentham was a great dude. He was working for welfare programs for the poor early on. He didn't believe in slavery, obviously, child labor. And this was like decades before anyone else was talking about this stuff. He was into animals. And we'll see that's some of the criticism from humanists is that they kind of stop at humans. And that's not to say that humanists can't be like pro animal or pro environment, because most of them probably are. Right. But Bentham very early on, when it talked about like the suffering of animals, he said, the question is not can they reason? Because that's what animals were just animals, because they can't reason that our brains like us. He combated that with the question is not can they reason nor can they talk, but can they suffer? Yeah. What a thing to say in the 1700s. Yeah. I'm glad you explained what you meant by he was into animals, because I was confused at first. Come on. One of the other cool things about Jeremy Bentham is he willed his body to science. He donated it to science early on. And they used it. They said, thanks a lot, buddy. Here's your skeleton back because as part of his wishes, he wanted to remain at University College London, which he helped found as a secular college open to everybody. And he's still under glass at the University College of London, dressed up in his own clothes. He's got wax hands with gloves on. He has a wax head. And apparently he originally wanted his head to be part of it. So they used some, I guess, some Maori technique of desiccation and it didn't go very well. And his desiccated head is still around, but they're like, Jeremy, you do not want us to leave this on your body because you look so great with the wax head. We're just going to keep this separate under glass itself. Yeah. Up with Jeremy Bentham. You mentioned the secular college. He went well beyond separation of church and state where he was like, colleges should have nothing to do. There should not be religious colleges. He really wanted to draw a strong divide between God and kind of all the institutions. Right. He was also the father of utilitarianism, which is essentially if at its worst, killing one person saves two people, then you kill that person. Which gave us things like the trolley problem as a utilitarian thought experiment, essentially. Bentham, I think, didn't really think that way, but he was basically like, we want to maximize the most good for the most people. Yeah. That's the way he developed it. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. You want to take a break? Yeah. I think we're off to a hot start. So I'm going to go take a cold shower and we'll be right back. Okay, Chuck, we're back and we're going to talk about the development of humanism in the way that we know it today. Because up to this point, we've been talking about little bits here, little bits there, that all together changed the world and essentially took all the power in the West, especially Europe and eventually the United States away from the church and organized religions in general and said, no, there's a way for you to live an upstanding, meaningful, ethical life without even believing that there's a God or an afterlife. And here's how we're going to do it. Yeah. I mean, the idea at the time, and there's still people that believe this in 2026, which is pretty scary, is that if you were not religious and devout, then you are heathen and you were like morally bereft. And those like people very early on stood up and were like, that doesn't make any sense. Like, why is it I don't believe in God? Like, like people have feelings in their heart or whatever. And someone realized like, why is it that in my heart, like I don't believe in a God, but like I believe in doing like really good things. Like, why are those two things have to be tied together? And that was humanism or if you look at philosopher and theologian from Germany, Frederick Nithama, the term was humanism in 1808. And that is, he was kind of talking about that Renaissance humanism, those studies that they were doing with the people that are trying to sort of reform education during the Renaissance. Yeah, but very quickly, people latched on to that. He just kind of came along at the right, he was in the right place at the right time, which was Germany, because Germany eventually became kind of the cradle of modern humanism. And eventually humanists miss what we would call humanism now, we just dropped the US or the US. And if you kind of subscribe to that, it was way beyond the way that you interpreted scripture, it was you supported women's equality. Yeah. You were all about separation of church and state. You had compassion for all people, not just people that looked like you and had the same amount of money as you. Right. You cared about actually doing stuff to get the government to take care of poverty and things like that. Like Quakers, the conception of Quakers at this time is a really good view of what it meant to be a humanist at the time, because you still believed in God, but you really cared about other people. And this was fairly new for Europe at the time. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned the French Revolution, but in the 19th century, during the time of all those European revolutions, it also started to kind of touch on socialism, of course, and like this idea of a utopian society that we could strive for. It was starting to become a little more acceptable in the United States at the time where, well, partially because of German immigration to the United States and you were talking about them being the cradle. But also Charles Darwin and just this idea that you don't need these theist beliefs to be a good person and there's something called free thought that can happen. Like free thinking is very much at this time aligned with deism. Yeah, for sure. And free thought essentially has a concept is it's just questioning everything. Yeah. Especially received wisdom. You stop and ask like, well, wait a minute, why do I think that? How do I know that? You just challenge all of your own assumptions and by doing that, you can kind of free yourself from being indoctrinated by the man, essentially. So this is when it seems to me the progressive movement in the United States really started to come about. Yeah. Right? This is the mid-1800s. Mid to late 19th century. One of the next big things that happened was the establishment of the New York society for ethical culture by getting Felix Adler. And this became essentially the ethical movement E and capital E, capital M. And they were basically like the very first humanists. They they tried to essentially provide the same thing that same moral upstanding structure that the church provides for so many people to people who don't believe. Yeah. And not more than that, but alongside that, I think they realized that the church had something that people clearly liked in tradition and in ceremony. And they're like, hey, if we're going to be a thing, like maybe we should have some of that stuff too. So they organized Sunday services and they said, how about a how about a deist marriage ceremony? Like kind of substituting religious ritual for non-religious ritual because people like that kind of stuff. Yeah. They're like, how about atheist, holy communion? And the humanists are like, how does that work? Right. They're like, we don't know this is new. We're just throwing everything we can at the wall. See what sticks. Yeah. Maybe instead of the blood and body of Jesus, it's just crackers and grape juice. There you go. And they were like grape juice or flavoring. They were like grape juice. We used grape juice at our church because even the Baptist did not take wine as communion. I know. It's kind of funny to think about. I remember moving to the south and being like, you don't drink any wine, like even in church because I was raised Catholic. Well, Welch's baby. Everybody drinks wine. Yeah. That's funny. So this whole kind of evolution is still going on in the United States in particular started to take off. Humanism really is huge today or through the 20th century in the US and the UK. They're kind of like hotbeds for humanist activity. And the people who were attracted to this were very frequently liberal intellectuals, philosophers, literati, intelligentsia, like academic elites and people who ran in their circles, which included communists at the time in the 20s and 30s. Like basically super radical liberal thinkers were very much attracted to the early establishment of modern humanist organizations. Yeah. 100%. That in the United States in particular, the University of Chicago in 1927 was one place where it really got cooking. There were efforts there by students and some professors who belonged. And this is where the Unitarian Church comes into play. They were Unitarian Church members, which is technically Protestant denominations. It's very political, has always been very politically progressive. And in this group in Chicago, there were a lot of ministers even and theologians who had non-Christian ideas that they were putting forth like transcendentalism. And they had a magazine. They organized what was called the Humanist Fellowship and put out the new Humanist magazine. It was like all ads though. Yeah, probably so. All ads and perfume samples. Well, and at the very end, they had the little fold thing like the Mad Magazine did. It's very popular. But they were trying to move Unitarianism even in 1927 completely away from theism. Yeah. Yeah. And Unitarianism as a church was like, yeah, let's go and then stop just short. And that's where it stays today, essentially. Right. They're like, you don't believe in God? Great. You can be a member of our church. Do you believe in God? Yeah. Great. You can be a member of our church. It's universalist, Unitarian. Yeah. Should we talk about the manifestos? Yeah, because you can't have liberal thinkers and communists together and not come up with a manifesto. Right? And it's just going to naturally bubble up from those people being together. And in 1933, I think, they drafted the first humanist manifesto. And it basically said, so, and this is where this is one reason why religious people don't like humanists. It took direct aim at religion. Right? Yeah. And then this is why people who aren't religious don't like humanists. It also called humanism its own type of religion. Yeah. Take that, Chuck, and run with it. Mixed messages. Can I read this bit from the 73 manifesto? Yeah. Or wait, this was, okay, the 73 was the manifesto part two. Yeah, sorry, 1938, I believe. 33 was the first one, I think. Thank you. We got there. Okay. The 33 was the first one. 73 was manifesto two, and this was from 73. Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our lifespan, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution, and cultural development, unlock vast new powers. It's starting to sound a little bit like Scientology there. And provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life. Yeah, that's great. It also smacks of transhumanism too, which is denoted by H plus. Stellarq. It's a branch of humanism where you graft a human ear onto your forearm. Right, oh boy. Man, I can't believe you remembered his name. It just came right up. If you're a long time listener, you remember when we first talked about Stellarq, the transhumanist who did in fact graft a human ear to his arm complete with a little speaker, like it heard and worked, right? Yeah, I think it, yeah, I had a Bluetooth speaker, which is probably dead by now. How many Q-tips do you think that guy's gone through? Oh, perhaps. He's like, catch up in there again. Oh man. So, the reason that they wrote the 1973 manifesto two was because manifesto one had a lot of, well, it was of its time. Yeah, yeah. It was very pro-communist and socialism. It was anti-capitalist. It even said, quote, the existing acquisitive and profit-motivating society has shown itself to be inadequate. Yeah. It said it was a religion. So, in 1970 through there, like, let's just kind of get rid of some of this. Let's not call ourselves a religion of any kind. We'll still take aim at religion, but we're not going to call ourselves a religion. We're going to drop the whole like communist capitalist, you know, West Coast, East Coast war in our own manifesto. And then as time went on, there were more affirmations. There were more manifestos. Yeah. There was one in 1980, 1988, 2003, and 2002. So all these were American, by the way. In 2002, it finally went international, which what's called the Amsterdam Declaration of Humanism from 2002. And it basically says like, yeah, everything these guys have been saying, but take out the religion stuff and the anti-capitalist stuff. That's right. And they said, we need a word though, if we're going to be consistent. And so instead of religion, let's settle on the, this word, life stance. Yeah. We were like, oh, sure, sure, life stance. Everyone knows what that is. We did a little digging. It's a pretty obscure term. I think Wikipedia, which is not a website we really like to go to a lot for this, but that's kind of the only place we could find anything. But this is how they define it is the relation that one has with what he or she accepts as being of ultimate importance. It's a great definition of life stance for sure. Yeah. It really gets across and essentially it's what they use in place of religion, not just what they offer, what humanism offers people, but what people need. And that's one thing that humanism has always basically said is you need the things that religion give to you. People need that. It's been around for thousands of years for a reason, right? Yeah. And there are all these different ones around the world that billions and billions of people subscribe to because it gives their life meaning. It gives you purpose. It tells you how to be a good person. And humanists were like, all we're saying is that you don't need religion. You don't even need to believe in God to have all those same things. And as the world and in particular the United States and the West has gotten more and more secular and less and less religious, there's a debate that's developed. Like is humanism up to the task of providing meaning in people's lives in the absence of religion? And that definitely remains to be seen, but it seems to be leaning a little more like, no, actually things kind of fall apart when you don't have a lot of people who believe that their lives have meaning because they believe in religion. That seems to be the way things are leaning right now. That's not the end point necessarily though. No, for sure. And I think I'm like you. A lot of this stuff seems very appealing to me. A lot of the thoughts, but when I was reading that one thing, I was like, man, this sounds a little Scientology like here and there. Sure. Sure. And then life stance. It just feels like the kind of word where you go to a meeting like a humanist congregational meeting and they're like, and now Josh would like to rise and share his life stance. And then everyone like clucks and goes, life stance, life stance or something. And that's when you and I like back out of the room very slowly. That's right. You know what life stance says to me? It says I don't know what I mean. That's what that word screams. If you use a word to describe what you're talking about and no one else knows what that word is, as a matter of fact, it's much more widely understood as the name of an insurance company than you do. Yeah. You haven't figured out exactly what you're trying to say. That's my take on it. And the reason they're using life stance is because they can't use the word religion. They're using that in place of the word religion. So a lot of people kind of look at humanism like, man, these guys really tie themselves up in the knots to get around this religious thing. They're really preoccupied with religion despite saying you don't need religion to live a good life. If you don't care about religion, stop talking about religion so much. Stop focusing on religion so much. That's a big criticism of humanism that it's just, it's like those, you know, those hilarious parodies of like Southern preachers or whatever and it's taking aim at hypocrisy and stuff. If you really feel that way about the church or religion or God or whatever, just go your own way. Do your own thing. Stop paying attention to it. Stop giving it your oxygen if you really feel that way about it. And if you don't, if you still are focused on it like that, there's something, there's some disconnect between what you claim to believe and what you're actually doing. So Josh, I want to thank you for sharing your aphelac. Aphelac, aphelac. Nice. That was great, Chuck. That was great. I like that, that screed. Maybe we should take a break and talk about what happened in 1941 right after this. Now does it feel to face the storm head on, go beyond the map, drive into the extreme or win a Ford Explorer. Test drive one before the end of May and you could win one. Now how would that feel? Search Win a Ford Explorer. Ready, set, Ford. Please and see is applied 25 plus only. C4.co.uk for details. All right, everybody, we're back. We're going to talk about what happened in 1941, not the movie 1941 from Steven Spielberg. Good one. I'm talking, not really, I'm talking about, did you like it? Hey, man, anything that's got Belushi in it, I like. Yeah, I don't see what was wrong with it. It was a notorious bomb, but that's not to say you can't like it. No, I do like it. I just have never heard that other people didn't like it. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty well regarded as a big flop, but I appreciate you sharing your aphelac once again. That's my life stance on 1941. It's a good movie. I can't wait to get sued. All right, so in 1941, there were two Unitarian ministers that formed the AHA that we referenced at the very beginning, the American Humanist Association. They advocate for humanist causes like separation of church and state, of course, in schools that is, like, hey, let's legalize birth control, things like that. They have about 34,000 plus members with 230 local chapters. Their goal is, I think, not only to spread the word, but I think like you were saying, is to try and unify into something that's with a coherent message that people can actually say, like, hey, that's a legitimate thing that you can believe in and follow. Yeah, like that appeals to me. So I'm going to go find out more about what you guys are saying. So there's a guy named Andrew Copsson. He's very frequently cited when you're talking about humanism. He's the chief executive of Humanists UK. And he basically says, here's what humanists are about. One, we use the senses and reasoning when we're seeking out the truth to understand what the world's all about. We are all about rationalism. We're all about scientific inquiry. It's what our stuff is based on. It's not based on supernatural beliefs. Again, it's not based on receive wisdom. It's about using rationalism in our own senses to understand the universe for ourselves. Yeah, can I just make a quick comment? I don't want to get too political, but using the senses and reasoning, like, that is missing, I think, a lot today because we're in a world now where there are very powerful people in the world that are literally sort of gaslighting the rest of the world and saying, like, what you're seeing and hearing is not the truth. Even though you're seeing it and hearing it. To see someone stand up and say, hey, one of our big tenants is going to be to use, like, to see stuff and hear stuff. That's what it is. Yeah. I find your reasoning sensible. Yes. Afflack, afflack. What else? Viewing humans as the product of natural biological processes and seeing death as the end of individual consciousness. You're not going to an afterlife. You're not going to go hang out with Elvis and Tom Petty. Once you're gone, you're a warm dirt. Yeah. There's nothing after that. It's a real bummer part of it, for sure. It is. But I've always, well, I've always had my adult life, believe that. And I don't think it's a bummer. That's just, yeah, I don't think it's a bummer. You know, I believe that for years and years and years. I've just recently kind of started to, I don't want to say go back, but just kind of expand the possibilities more than I used to. Because I was exactly what you're talking about. That's it. It's lights out. You don't even know it's lights out because you don't exist anymore. Just like you didn't exist before you were born. This is exactly the same thing. It's just tacked on to the end of your life, not the beginning of your life. Yeah. I like that you're exploring that. I think that's, I think, I'm not opposed to anyone and their beliefs. So I think it's great, especially when you get older and you're in like 40s and 50s and you start kind of radically exploring new ideas. I think that's very valuable. It's funny. I have been doing that a lot lately. It's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this episode on humanism. I've been reading a lot of different philosophy and just exploring ideas that I hadn't before. I didn't realize why. Apparently, it's because I'm about to be 50. Yeah, probably so. I've been watching. Hurry, I have to find meaning in life before I die. I've been watching a lot of kids in the hall reruns. Nice. You can do a lot worse than that. I've been reading rock bios, but that's fine. Everyone has their own thing. What else, Chuck? How about if you want to live a good life? Yeah. What are you going to do? Well, you have to develop yourself personally. Keep striving to be better and do better. Try to connect with others. Pursue things that are truly meaningful, but you don't necessarily have to believe in the meaning of life to do all that stuff. That's not what you're seeking. Yes. From my recent exploration, that is essentially the basis of a philosophy called existentialism, which actually is born out of nihilism. It's basically saying, yes, there's no God. There's no meaning to life. We're all a fluke. That doesn't mean you can't live a great fulfilling life that has meaning. It's meaningful to you. Go figure out what your life is, what you want it to be, and make it meaningful. I think that if you do believe that there's no such thing as God, that to me is essentially the best mentality you can take on. If there's no afterlife before all a fluke, then it's up to you, pal, to go make meaning for your own life. Yeah. Live with intention, I think, is another good way to say that. Not just be someone who things happen to. Yeah, or live without Netflix. That's another way to put it too. What's another one? View moral behaviors. Consider other people's needs. Humanism is not a self-inward-looking thing. You're looking inward, but you're acting outward, if that makes sense. Oh, it does. It makes perfect sense. It's not a self-centered or self-self-centered. Yeah, self-centered. Yeah, you're not self-involved. You care about other people. By doing that, you're developing yourself. That's part of self-personal development. You're also not relying on any doctrine to teach you ethics. Although you can go find ethics from, like say, the great Greek philosophers or Buddha or Taoism or Confucianism. You can go find these from wherever you want. You can even read the Bible or something. Sure. Like Thomas Jefferson edited the Bible. He took all the miracles out and just basically made it a really great moral handbook. You could do the same thing and still gain these ideas. The point is you're not supposed to take anything wholesale, including ostensibly humanism. You should not just go, okay, I want to be humanist. Tell me how to be because they're going to say, no, you got to go figure that out. You should probably start with the New Testament too and just leave it at that. That old testament is grim. Yeah, it's pretty grim. If you're a humanist, you're definitely opposed to war. You value universal rights of all humans and equality. It's not tied to a political system necessarily. I mean, I know it has its roots and sort of liberal progressive think, but you don't have to be like, oh, I'm a registered Democrat and a humanist. You can be anybody. I'd argue maybe not you could vote for anybody, but as far as political affiliation, it's not tied to any one thing. No, nor should it be. We should probably name some famous humanists through the years. You could start and end with Albert Einstein, but we're just going to start there. He supported the E-Capital C ethical culture movement and was a founding member of the first humanist society of New York. In 1950, he published essays in humanism and he was walking the walk. Oh, he definitely was. He was big time into world peace and civil rights. He was a pantheist apparently as well. He was definitely the real deal as far as humanists are concerned. So too was Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. Apparently they were both very much active in the American Humanist Association. No surprise. Kurt Vonnegut had a great quote. If you don't mind me taking it. Yeah, do your best Vonnegut. I want to hear this. He said that by the way, Kurt Vonnegut and I are basically voice doubles. Oh, okay. Does he have a... I've never heard him talk, man. Does he have an unusual or significant... Well, I don't know. Weirdly, the only time I think I've ever heard Kurt Vonnegut talk was if I'm not mistaken, he had a cameo and Rodney Dangerfield's back to school. Oh, yeah. Because he hired... Was he tutoring him? He paid him to tutor him in college. Well, how about this? You take this quote, but do it as Dangerfield. No, no, no, no, no. I want to hear it. Kurt Vonnegut said, he said, being a humanist means trying to behave decently without expectation of rewards or punishment after you're dead. Yeah, that's nice. It's great. Great description of it. What else? If you're a Star Trek fan, even if you're not, you're probably not surprised. Gene Roddenberry was a very big in the humanist movement. He, I mean, Star Trek is a great example of just a group of people that are doing humanist things. That's kind of the culture of that show. They're trying to solve problems peacefully. It's high tech, but of course, they're always trying to do the right thing on Star Trek, I feel like. Yeah, they're a bunch of do-gooders. Yeah. They don't want to use their phasers. That's why they always set them to stun. So there are many critiques to humanism. They get it from all sides. Yeah. Other atheists, other philosophers, Christians, obviously. Christian thinkers basically are like, dude, you can't have meaning in your life without God. Theology teaches us that God is what gives your life meaning, you chump, and that's essentially the most basic criticism of humanism. They basically say you can't be ethical or moral or have meaning or value in your life without believing that there is such a thing as God. Right. You mentioned atheists. There are also atheists that say, you know what, a little too much credulity going on about the value of humanity and that we can all just improve ourselves. I mean, I think there's some very prominent philosophers from the 20th century that are very much anti-humanist. Yeah, they called themselves anti-humanists. Yeah. Apparently the structuralist and post-structuralist movements of philosophy that came out of France in the 60s and 70s, I think maybe even into the 80s, they were very much anti-humanists. And they were like, the individuals don't matter other than, you know, we don't go make our own meaning. Everything we are is basically created by institutions and structures that we're born into and there's basically no way out. So stop being silly and naive. Yeah, that's interesting to me, not to do an episode on necessarily, but I'd like to poke around the structuralism a little bit more. I'd never heard of that. I have been doing that and it is very interesting. Essentially what they're saying is like, you are so shaped by institutions that these cool thoughts that you think you have, the interactions you have with other people, all of them are shaped by the institutions we're born into. It's hard to argue with that. Right, but so much so, Chuck, that those cool thoughts, those amazing things that you're saying, those interactions with people, all they're doing is reinforcing those institutions because they're all within that structure. So you're just teaching other people how to be in that structure too by even rebelling against it as a form of reinforcing the structure. It's very grim. It's actually a very grim approach. Yeah, that's interesting. One other thing too that they get held up for a lot is that they believe that man is inherently moral. A lot of philosophers are like, how do you prove that? What are you talking about? Where did you get that from? Not a universal given. Philosophies never turn that up. Did you see that thing that I found from Francisco J. Allaya who basically said- I did, but remind me, yeah. So basically, this guy kind of proves that humans are actually biologically moral resulting from a consequence of natural selection. Francisco J. Allaya says that one, we have the ability to anticipate consequences of our own actions. Two, we have the ability to make value judgments. And three, we have the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. And so because of our abilities, our natural abilities to do that, we are naturally moral creatures, which is the only support I've seen for that idea that people are inherently moral. I've only ever seen a text. This guy did a pretty good job of making a case that supports that. Yeah, I mean, isn't the idea that humans are inherently evil much more common? Like wasn't that what Hobbes was all about? That's what Hobbes was about. Satanists, basically. I think they're like, it's not good or evil. I think Satanists are really, they don't like humanists very much either. Yeah, probably. There's a lot of, it's definitely not settled whether humans are inherently good or bad. So we haven't figured that one out? I guess not. We're leaning toward the bad lately, though. Yeah, I'm with you. I mentioned environmentalists and animal rights activists earlier that sometimes they believe there's just a little too much human in humanism. But there are certainly a lot of people and humanists that have kind of worked on the environment and animals and the value of all that stuff into the cause. For sure. Very, very Jeremy Bentham ask. Yeah, yeah. Although if you want to get down to it, I've seen an example given where a genuine humanist, if somebody killing a deer kept a human family alive, they would be like, kill that deer. Oh, interesting. That deer is secondary, its life is secondary to human life. Other humanists might be like, no way, man. Go eat a plant. Go eat some lichen. Yeah, I've never been a hunter, but if the zombie apocalypse happened, I could do it. You could eat zombie? I think it's if they bite you that you become a zombie. I've never seen any problems with somebody eating them. Well, that's true. You definitely need a healthy spice rack though. Yeah. It's like that rotted shark they eat in Iceland. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. That's essentially like eating zombie from what I understand. Okay. Tastes like zombie. You got anything else? No. I, you were right. I didn't think I was going to be able to get through this because it's very petty stuff for me, but you said, settle down, jerk. You'll be fine. Yeah, you did great. Wouldn't, wouldn't philosophy class, one of your favorite classes in college too? Yeah. And every time we do anything philosophy related, I get all scared and it always works out. Oh, yeah. You did great, man. You always do great. Yeah. So do you. Thanks. Well, Chuck and I agree. We both did great. We're patting ourselves on the back. Can you let me pat you on the back too? Oh, thank you. Uh, that means of course it's time for listener mail. All right. This is going to be short and sweet. Uh, it is, I think I jokingly asked for a, um, haiku as it relates to MacGuffins. Totally. Because many years ago we put out the call for haikus and got hundreds and hundreds of them, uh, to the point where I think we just quit reading them. So in hopes people quit sending them and time marched on and they did. But David Sinison, a Mike, a haiku about the MacGuffin, a MacKu. Okay. Man. You ready? The MacGuffin lives, critics argue and gnash teeth. The ending still comes. Wow. And David goes on to say this. Great show guys. Y'all have created an entire universe of stuff, insider stories and jokes. I hate it when I can't recall one of the callback tangents. Uh, and I just want to say lastly, the Jackhammer episode wasn't that terrible guys. It was needed in the world. Can you read the haiku again? It's still sinking in like the genius of what David did. Yeah, it's pretty good. The MacGuffin lives, critics argue and gnash teeth. The ending still comes. Man. Pretty good. That's a t-shirt if I've ever heard one, Aaron Cooper. That's a high quality ku, buddy. Uh, yeah, it is. If you want to be like David and, well, not send us a haiku, but just write in about something, we would be happy to hear from you. You can send it off to stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What a scream. We installed telephone wires across rural Britain over a century ago, and you're still paying to use them for your broadband today. Ha ha ha. If it ain't broke, what? Ha ha ha. Stop! Your days of selling phone age broadband are over. Blast! I've spilled the beans. Upgrade to 100% full fiber. Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month. Price may rise during contract. Teas and seas apply. Check availability at gigaclear.com. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.