An Eclectic Humanist

Thinking Out Loud

This episode departs from the ongoing series on the rise of Christian Fundamentalism to just plunge, stream-of-consciousness style, into some thoughts that have been occupying my mind lately. It is quite personal, so maybe not for everyone, and simply presents an hour's worth of taking through various thoughts on subjects such as lockdown, mental health, personal loss, optimism, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, and the human capacity for meaning-making, subsequently edited down to about a half-hour talk. It is unscripted and unplanned, and so rambles a bit, but in playing back the final edit, I think it communicates something that I want to communicate. Hope you like it.

Attack of the Fundamentalists 3: Gimme That Old Time Religion

Well, folks, I've finally managed to finish the third installment in the Attack of the Fundamentalists series, and I do apologize for the delay. This one roughly spans the time period of the Cold War and touches, in a helter skelter fashion, upon a handful of road markers along Evangelical Christianity's rise to power: McCarthyism, rock and roll, the sexual revolution, feminism, Roe v. Wade, and the merger of the Christian Right with the Republican Party. The narrative here is a little looser than in the last couple of episodes, but several strands will be picked up again and hopefully tied together when I conclude this sequence next episode with a discussion of Christian Dominionism along with its objectives, strategies, and effects. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this latest installment. Look for the next one in about two weeks, after which I hope to be back on my originally intended weekly schedule.
culturereligionhistorypoliticsfundamentalismreligious rightERARoe v. WadeJohn BirchJimmy CarterReaganFalwellSchlafleycold warmoral majority
 
 
 

Attack of the Fundamentalists 2: Deep Time, Darwin, and Denial

Damn you, Darwin!
This episode picks up the challenge to religious authority posed by modern science, focusing specifically on the emerging knowledge of the age of the Earth in the 19th century and, most importantly, on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. While a literal reading of the Old Testament suggests an age of about 6,000 years for both the Earth and the Cosmos, and while the Genesis creation myth presents animals being created in specific and stable “kinds,” by the end of the century, neither position would remain viable. And while many in the religious community found, and continue to find, ways to accommodate their faith to the growing body of knowledge presented by the various sciences, many, on the other hand, chose and continue to choose to reject both the conclusions and the methods of modern science in favour of a retreat into the comfortable and increasingly counter-factual certainties of myth. By the first quarter of the 20th century, this retreat from reason and evidence had already become a salient and politically powerful feature of American Christianity, as shown both by the Revivalist Movement and, most dramatically, by the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which marked the first high profile showdown between the competing discourses of modern science on the one hand, and a newly energized Christian fundamentalism on the other. These twin trends of intellectual retreat and political advance would continue throughout the 20th century, as we will see in the next episode, to define much of the character of what we now refer to as the religious right.

Mythic Meanderings 2: Revelation, Ragnarok, and Reality

In the second part of the Mythic Meanderings sequence, I dig into two end-of-the-world myths: the biblical narrative culminating in Revelation, and the Norse Ragnarok tale. These myths, and the differing understandings of human nature, the divine, and time underlying and articulated in them, have a certain amount of common ground, but oppose each other in important ways. They present quite different notions of human worth, and of the source and possibility of meaning in life. As an atheist and metaphoric pagan, I lean toward the Norse myth, and honestly, one of the reasons I hold these two up together is to dispense with the notion, common in Western society, that the various displaced polytheisms in our various cultural heritages are, as we are often told, intellectually immature or primitive. There are rich metaphors in both of these myths, and both offer complex and sometimes challenging notions of the meaning and worth of an individual human life.

Mythic Meanderings 1: Myth, Mind, and Metaphor

This episode took on a life of its own. Simply put, it is a look at several mythologies in which I explore such elements as time, creation myths, the nature of the gods, and the nature and construction of the other. It ranges freely across several different bodies of thought—Sumerian, Christian, Hindu, Daoist, Greek, Roman, and Celtic—and therefore gives a taste of the way I hope to address the humanist approach to myth throughout this series. As a humanist and an atheist, of course I do not believe in any of the gods I discuss, but what I find interesting and useful in them is the light they shed on the minds from which they emerged, and on the differing mental and social paths down which they might lead. Of course, a single podcast that I've always intended to keep under an hour is not enough to address such a wide array of material in detail, and in fact, there were other questions I also wanted to ask, and other narratives I wanted to explore, such as the Norse Ragnarok myth. These will show up next episode, in Mythic Meanderings 2.

Friedrich Nietzsche vs Robert E. Lee

This episode plunges into contested territory. In many countries, people are calling for the removal of monuments to slavery and genocide while others decry these demands as an assault upon their "culture." It occurs to me that Nietzsche, in his early work _On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life_, has something worthwhile to say on the subject, so that is the exploration I've undertaken this week. What is our relationship to history? How does it shape us, and how do we shape it and thus ourselves? Who controls the narrative, and what happens when narratives butt heads? And who among the disputants has the fortitude to bear up under history's ever increasing weight?

A Mohawk Tale

This episode ended up taking me on an unexpected journey. When I started out, the plan was simply to tell the story of the Six Nations First Nation near Brantford, Ontario applying for membership in the League of Nations in 1923, and the underhanded ways in which the government of Canada, and especially Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, opposed and punished them for their application. But when I finished that part of the recording, the episode seemed incomplete, and as I sat at my desk, staring at my bookcase and wondering what I might do to turn the tale into more than a mere historical lecture, the name Beth Brant and the title of her first collection, Mohawk Trail, kept tugging at me, as did the fact that Scott was not merely a bureaucrat but also a highly regarded poet in his time. Would a comparison of texts be a useful way to bring the story more fully to life? Maybe, but how much better would it be if there were a family connection between Beth Brant and the Mowhawk war chief who, with his sister, established the Six Nations First Nation and after whom the city of Brantford is named? Well, it turns out there is. So it turns out that I was able to explore the questions at the heart of this episode not merely from a bureaucratic and historical perspective but also from the deeply human perspective of literature, and to do so through the work of the arch villain of the story, himself, on the one hand, and a bearer of the protagonists' heritage on the other. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you find it as enlightening to listen to as I found it to make.

The Final Solution to Our Indian Problem: Canada’s First Nations Genocide

In this episode, I give a brief history of Canada's genocide against First Nations with a particular focus on the infamous residential schools. The episode touches upon important pieces of Canadian legislation,and discusses a number of the methods by which first the colonial and later the federal government has tried to eliminate Canada's Indigenous population both culturally and physically. Listener discretion is advised.

Moral Charisma: A Confucian Approach to Jacinda Ardern and Donald Trump

The pre-release of my new humanist podcast series continues with this discussion of Jacinda Ardern and Donald Trump with reference to the Confucian notion of "moral charisma" as the two leaders offer very different responses to both domestic and global crises.

Mencius in Minneapolis

This episode considers the ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which I support and in which I am participating, from a Confucian perspective, particularly with reference to Mencius (Mengzi). Mencius would be deeply critical of a regime that, on the one hand, has established such an inequitable system as the one in which many minorities find themselves, while on the other hand has effectively criminalized their response to such inequity. His argument is based on the essential goodness of human nature (to be addressed in future episodes), and the responsibility of the regime to cultivate that nature in everyone living under its authority, or at least to foster conditions in which individuals have sufficient time and  circumstances in which to cultivate it in themselves.