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How to Humanist asks life’s questions big and small with the help of brilliant humans along the way.
SHAY: Okay, we’re here. We’ve arrived. It’s the first official episode. Well, I mean technically second — but first guest interview and episode of How to Humanist. And I cannot believe that we were able to get Greg Epstein, busy bee that he is, onto the show to help us kick things off and get really down to the nitty gritty of what is humanism.
And wow, did he have a fascinating answer for that — and all the other questions that I asked him. So I’m really, really looking forward to you hearing this episode.
First of all, Greg Epstein was somebody I didn’t know who he was when I first joined the American Humanist Association last year, but now I hear his name everywhere — and rightfully so.
Listen to Greg’s bio here:
Greg Epstein serves as Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT (peep-ee, my mom would say), where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He’s TechCrunch’s first Ethicist-in-Residence. He has been called a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion. He’s the author of New York Times bestseller Good Without God and the multi-award-winning Tech Agnostic, and has written for Time, CNN, and The Boston Globe.
Would you get a load of that?
I’ll put all of Greg’s information in the show notes. I don’t want to keep you any further from this episode.
This is going to be all of the foundational humanist stuff — the base-level stuff. You’re going to be kicking off our podcast. No pressure.
Okay.
SHAY: So I am interested to know about the AI stuff too and everything. I just started reading Good Without God, so I’m probably going to be asking a lot of questions that you eventually end up answering in the book.
GREG: I mean, that’s what a podcast is generally thought up to be, right? I mean, yes — it’s great. No worries. I’m happy to just have a conversation with you. It’ll pick up what it picks up.
SHAY: Perfect. Yeah. Great.
Just to ease into this, what have you been up to lately?
GREG: I mean, with the world on fire?
SHAY: Yes.
GREG: Yes. What have we been up to while it’s… you can be on your way to hell in a handbasket, but there’s no process of enjoying the handbasket, you know?
SHAY: I know. Still having to go grocery shopping in the middle of all of it.
GREG: Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that is the Sisyphean task, right? Sisyphus is pushing the boulder up the hill infinitely, and it rolls back infinitely. And that’s just like doing dishes or doing the laundry, right? Yep. That’s why it’s not really just a metaphor, you know?
📍 SHAY (ASIDE): No, I actually had no idea what he was talking about. I remember learning about Greek mythology in my humanities class in high school. I remember hearing about Sisyphus, but I’ll be damned if I remembered who he was, or if there was an actual metaphorical reference to him in day-to-day life.
So if you’re anything like me and you’re just a lowly performing artist and you’re not an academic, hopefully this will help.
Okay, so as a refresh: Sisyphus was infamous for tricking the gods and cheating death twice. As punishment for his hubris, Zeus condemned him to eternally roll a massive boulder up a steep hill in Tartarus (that sounds like tartar sauce), only for it to roll back down whenever it neared the top.
Okay, so “Sisyphean” is when you are doing a task that seems to be futile.
And there you have it. Back to the episode. 📍
GREG: And so, I mean, what am I… you know, I have a couple kids now, and I try to play with them a lot. We have a lot of fun. And I’m doing creative writing these days. I’m working on a graphic novel series that is very, very humanist and very explicitly humanist. But it has action and it has drama, and it has characters and it has some disaster and some utopia.
So, you know, I’m trying to make this fun. Humanism shouldn’t be boring. Otherwise, why are we doing this?
SHAY: Wait — so did you always want to be a writer, or was it more that you saw a gap you needed to fill?
GREG: Well, look, if you talked to me in elementary school, I think I really, really wanted to be a writer, but I got this sense as I was getting a little older that the only way to be a writer was to be great.
SHAY: I’m picturing you in elementary school with a beard and just hair.
GREG: This is significantly… well, I mean, the distribution of the hair was very different back then.
I mean, as a kid I really wanted to be a writer, but I developed a real complex around, like, “Oh, it’s gotta be the best. Everything’s gotta be the best.”
I struggled as a young adult to allow myself to be creative and explore and enjoy that process — of just thinking and feeling — without the pressure to accomplish something all the time.
It doesn’t mean that therefore everything was rendered worthless that I did. No, I still had a lot of great experiences despite that. It’s not a zero-sum game.
But as I got older and more established in my career, I had a lot of realizations. First of all, I’m not the best. Second of all, I don’t have to be. I don’t want to be.
I would really like to have my humanism be about lifting others up and actually improving the world. And to do so really requires people to just be human.
So since internalizing that — which came through a lot of failure, and this constant pursuit of excellence for its own sake rather than excellence for the sake of doing good for others — I got to the point where I was sick of it.
Being creative and writing again for fun and for storytelling and to be able to hang out with my friends… the graphic novel series is going to be co-authored with one of my best friends that I’ve ever had, and who I’ve been wanting to write something with forever.
It’s just a better way to live. It’s a better way to live.
And, you know, the whole perfectionism thing is how I ended up at Harvard anyway — wanted to be around like minds, right?
But really, I gravitated towards people who were struggling with some of the same stuff that I was struggling with. And now it puts me in a position where I feel like I can help people as a chaplain, because I help people with issues around humanism, but I also help people with issues around just being human.
SHAY: Now that’s a perfect segue, because it brings me to the reason why I have you on this podcast — to really lay the foundation. What the heck is humanism?
GREG: Yeah, I mean, I love the idea of the podcast. And if I understand correctly, you yourself, Shay, you’re relatively new to humanism.
SHAY: Yes.
GREG: The idea is that this philosophy of life, life stance — people have even called it a religion. I don’t necessarily call it a religion, but some could think of it as that — it appealed to you. You heard about it.
Do you tell your story at some point early on in the podcast?
📍 SHAY (ASIDE): It is so funny you ask, Greg, because after this conversation I ended up recording what became our first episode, where you get introduced to a little bit of my story — but it was at Greg’s suggestion.
So thank you so much for that suggestion. And if you are listening to these episodes out of order, if you love me enough afterwards, you will go back and listen to the first episode because it’s nice.
It’s all about my mom and ice cream cake. 📍
SHAY: For your knowledge and context, I only learned about humanism through applying for my job at the American Humanist Association. And before that, I was really struggling because I was feeling more and more incongruent with what I knew Judaism to be. I grew up a Reform Jew.
GREG: Me too. Yes.
SHAY: And I’m so excited to ask you more about that experience.
When I found humanism, I was like, wait a second — I think these are all of the things that I’ve always loved about what I thought Judaism had. So I would love to just consider myself to be a humanist, because this feels the most in alignment with anything I’ve ever wanted to label myself.
GREG: Yeah. But then you have to figure out what it is, right?
SHAY: Exactly. And that’s what I’m still exploring.
Wait — tell me the doctrines. Tell me what we all believe. Tell me all the things we’re required to believe at all times.
GREG: Right. Do at all times.
I mean, Reform Judaism is sort of a side story for me because my parents were not particularly religious, but they both were culturally Jewish. And at some point I had, as a kid, asked to be part of something, and that was the closest something to where we felt we could belong.
You know, it’s funny — if it had been really captivating, inspiring experiences, as some Reform synagogues are, maybe I wouldn’t be here today.
But for me it felt like people weren’t living out, in their day-to-day lives, the values they were speaking when they were reading the prayer book. There was a disconnect for me, and it was like, this isn’t for me. This never felt right.
But I came from a family of seekers, really curious about what it is to be human — for various reasons, including a lot of refugees. A lot of people whose lives had been upended by political, but not just political developments.
My mother’s father made his way over from Eastern Europe to Cuba because almost all of his entire large family had died in the flu plague around World War I. I only discovered that in the last decade or so. I’d always just assumed these people were fleeing Nazis or pogroms — no. They were fleeing biology.
SHAY: Wow.
GREG: My grandfather, the story goes, found himself eating dirt to survive when he first got to Cuba as a young man.
SHAY: Wow.
GREG: Human beings have really difficult experiences, and we want to ask why. Why is this happening? Why am I here? Why are we doing the things that we do?
And then from why, we want to ask other questions like: what would be a better way to do things? What would be the right way to do things? How did we get here and how can we go to a better place?
These are natural questions that became natural to ask as animals got bigger and bigger brains. Because as you get a bigger brain, you can solve more problems.
📍 SHAY (ASIDE): Mo’ money, mo’ problems. Oh my gosh. It was like a tick that I was trying to control, and I did successfully during the interview, but I have to let it out now. I have a jukebox that’s always playing in my head, and if you set it off, there’s nothing I can do.
Alright. Sorry, Greg. Continue. 📍
GREG: You know, in order to solve problems, you have to ask questions, and that’s it.
So humanism, I think, is really a…
I’ve been doing this for what, 25 years? And it’s still the same. Thinking it through with you — that’s all it is.
Humanism is a way of understanding human life, being human, from the perspective that there’s no magic, there’s no miracles that we can see — or that seem likely or plausible to us.
So that means we evolved. We’re part of this universe that seems to be 14 and a half billion years old. Every one of us is the product of… we’re trillions of interconnected cells. All the cells are made up of the material of exploded stars from billions of years ago. We are the universe learning to know itself and talk to itself.
And we managed to make it here today because our ancestors, and their ancestors, and their ancestors were able to cooperate with one another — to be kind to one another, to love one another, to support one another — just enough. Probably not nearly enough to be what we would wish, but just enough to get us to the point where we are incredibly unlikely, but really here today, with one another.
And then where do we go from here?
We all know what it feels like to be hurt, to be let down, to be disappointed, to be treated badly. And so we can all imagine what it might feel like to be treated better, to be cared for more, to be appreciated more, to be taken more seriously, to be treated with dignity.
And then we can further imagine: if that’s the world I want, then that’s perhaps the world that I need to contribute towards bringing into being, right? I need to be some of the change that I would like to see in the world.
That’s what humanism is to me. It’s an ongoing process of figuring out what it has meant to be human — historical level, anthropological level, psychological level, whatever — and then what it currently and in the future can mean to be human, and how do we improve upon what we’ve been given.
We do it with love. We do it with caring. We do it with community. And we do it through critical thinking and asking serious and sincere questions.
SHAY: My first confusion when I was dipping my feet into the pool of humanism was looking at people like Mr. Rogers, who, for all intents and purposes, embodied all of what you just described — but he identified as a religious, theistic person. So then I guess it gets tangled for me: well, what about that doesn’t make him a humanist?
GREG: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, first of all, the answer is very little.
And one of the things that I love about being a humanist chaplain — being clergy, professionally trained in a role of community support and helping people who identify as humanists and allies of humanism to find their meaning, their purpose. Not that I give them the meaning or purpose — that’s not how humanism works — but I’m in a position to help people figure that out for themselves.
I get to work with good clergy from a lot of different traditions. I work on a day-to-day basis with other clergy and trained leaders and facilitators — everything from evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahá’ís, Sikhs.
Have I observed religious leaders who have been problematic and who have done bad things? Obviously. Of course. But I think it’s healthy and important to acknowledge that there are plenty of leaders in these religious communities who are doing good things, who are sincere, who are caring.
And in my case, who have taught me good lessons about different aspects of what it is to be human. Human life is complicated, and not everybody is good at everything — you may have noticed.
And I certainly have areas in which I specialize and tend to do better, although I’m not incapable of fucking up even in my own areas of expertise at times.
But there are religious leaders that I’ve really learned from — how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good leader for social justice. All sorts of things.
So there’s that.
But the question you’re really getting at though, if I understood you correctly, is the historical analysis of: where do religious liberal communities and humanist communities diverge, right?
SHAY: Mm-hmm. Like, okay, we can have a lot in common, but what is the difference otherwise? Why are we even having this conversation?
GREG: Right. Exactly. Yeah.
And I think there is a real history to that. And the way my brain works — forgive me — I would take it back to ancient times…
GREG: And I think there is a real history to that. And the way my brain works — forgive me — I would take it back to ancient times.
What I would say is: having studied the history of humanism, both on my own and in the company of some great humanist leaders and thinkers who came well before me…
Ever since people started to come up with religious ideas — which goes back to prehistory and goes back to the idea that when people would die, we still tend to feel their presence, right? Why?
Well, as a child — even a child 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 years ago — you need to understand that when your mother or your father walks away, that they still exist in your life. You can’t see them. You need to be able to trust that they’re there, they love you, and they’ll be back. That’s key. But sometimes they won’t be.
Our brains didn’t evolve a switch you can toggle to say, “Aha, this is the time the person that I love not being here is for forever.” The only switch we really evolved is called grief. It’s a long process of coming to terms with sadness, fear, anger — and ultimately returning to a place of joy, of “I’m glad I had that person in my life.”
But that thing that we all deal with today, 2026 — that goes back many, many thousands of years, and even to organisms that are much less complicated neurologically than we are.
So you have people developing these religious ideas. A powerful person would die. They still believe that person is there. They still feel the power of that person. That person becomes projected onto the universe like a god. Okay. That’s really literally how it seems to have happened.
And then ever since then — ever since there were people that would say, “Oh, the chieftain,” or the… I’m not sure of the terminology.
SHAY: I’m not sure of the terminology. I’m just being like — I’m not one of these people that believes that only the men were powerful back then. Kudos. Powerful women and men and people, you know, because gender’s been complicated forever as well.
GREG: Yes. Would die, they’d get projected into the universe, and then people would start to believe that they had some sort of divine power — even though they couldn’t be seen, and they couldn’t be felt anymore, whatever, right?
And then people would start to make up stories about them. And even in those ancient days, there would be somebody sitting around the campfire saying, “I don’t think that’s really actually true. Are you sure that person is not just… gone? Are you sure they’ve now ascended into the heaven and they’re on their throne and they’re giving us divine orders?”
Right. And blessings. Like, really? Maybe not.
There are documented examples of people like that in the ancient what you call East and West — really, from thousands and thousands of years ago.
In fact, people tend to think that humanism is rooted in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and they basically get presented to you as like a white person’s thing, right?
SHAY: Right.
GREG: Yeah. I mean, like we’ve learned over the last several years, a lot of us liberals have that — not to be so Eurocentric, or white supremacist, or whatever you might want to call it. But there’s a lot of that in the history and understanding of humanism too.
Because the ancient language that has the most literature in it that was basically atheist or agnostic philosophy, criticizing ideas that gods are somehow real and interacting with us, and suggesting that actually we’re here on our own and we need to take care of one another…
The ancient language with the most of that kind of literature in it is Sanskrit.
SHAY: Wow.
GREG: Yeah. Sanskrit.
There were multiple philosophies, multiple communities of philosophers, thinkers, and simply critically minded humane people in the ancient Indian subcontinent 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 — and perhaps more — years ago who were saying essentially like, “Oh, you, the priest of what ultimately became known as Hinduism…” A word, by the way — an H-word — that represents about a billion people, but was not actually chosen by the people themselves. It was given to them by colonialism.
I mean, there are a lot of parallels between what you call Hinduism and what you call humanism, interestingly.
SHAY: Wow.
GREG: But anyway, you’ve got these people in multiple philosophies, communities, et cetera, who are saying: you, the priest, will tell me to make this rich sacrifice to the gods.
Because people would set up a temple, and then the people would have to bring their lamb or their goat or whatever it was that they had, and they’d burn it at the temple.
And I’m picturing like, you’d burn it instead of get all charred and juicy, and then the priest would be like, “Mmm, I’m biting in. Thanks so much for that. I’ll see you later. You got my blessing.”
Right?
And here were the Lokayatas, and some of these ancient philosophers — in what became the Jain tradition as well — who would say simply like, “If gods are so powerful, why do they need our sacrifice? Why do they need my goat? And if you, the priest, are so in tune with the gods and have so much of their power, why do you need our goats?
Why not just enjoy the power of the gods and let us live in peace? Surely if there were real power in the skies, that power would distribute more to the people rather than asking the people who already don’t have enough to give to it.”
And so this is a thousands-of-years-old tradition that is rooted in the Indian subcontinent, in Greece, in Rome. There are parts of Africa that you see this. There are philosophers in the early Islamic world who are speaking this way.
There have always been skeptically minded people — especially skeptically minded people when it comes to… because there are different kinds of skepticism, Shay, right?
SHAY: Mm-hmm.
GREG: There’s one kind of skepticism which says, “Well, there is no God. And if you believe there is a God, then you are the most stupid person that I’ve ever met.” That’s one kind of skepticism, right?
And there’s another skepticism that takes things a little further, I think, and says: “Yeah, I’m not sure that these ideas that you’re espousing about a God are really valid or true. Couldn’t we spend more time and more energy just helping one another here and now? In this world, in this life — we’re struggling. We could be doing better if we just cared about one another more. If we just looked after one another more. If we just supported one another more. Things might get a lot better.”
And that’s the skepticism that I trace my humanism back to. That’s the skepticism that I trace our humanism back to. And it doesn’t mean… it has something in common with the first kind, but not everything in common.
SHAY: So then — because I have friends that when I announced that I was a Jewish humanist, they were like, “Well, I think all of those things.” But they identify as Christian.
So I guess I would just love to know: what are the signals to somebody that they might be a humanist rather than the religion that they’ve grown up with?
GREG: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So my historical analysis is now coming out of the ancient world and we’re about to do the early modern and now.
Okay. So — and I’ll try to do this as quickly as I can.
People formalize religions. Christianity becomes one of the first religions in the world — maybe the first massive religion in the world — to go out and try to win converts all over the place and create big institutions in order to manage large pockets of supporters in all sorts of different places and continents, right?
But Buddhists ultimately end up going out and doing a lot of that stuff as well, which we don’t think of, but they do. And certainly Muslims do as well.
And a whole lot of things happen, right?
And the first people to use the word “humanism” in the Western context had a different meaning for the word. They were Renaissance thinkers — philosophers, Christians — who said that there is more to life than just studying God. There’s more to life than knowing the mind of God. We can study the human too. We can appreciate the human too.
And so these were people, you know, hundreds of years ago during the Renaissance that were called the Renaissance humanists — people like Erasmus, if somebody wants to go down a Wikipedia tunnel.
📍 SHAY (ASIDE): Alright, forgive my pronunciation from the Jersey accent from which it comes. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. He was a Dutch philosopher, theologian, and the preeminent scholar of the Northern Renaissance known as the “Prince of Humanists.”
He championed a philosophy of Christ focused on inner piety, education, tolerance, while utilizing satire and critical philosophy to critique scholasticism and church corruption.
You know, I have a lisp, and it’s having a party tonight. 📍
GREG: And then into modernity we go, and people begin to solve more problems, right? The sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology are created. Biblical criticism, right? People looking at the ancient texts that were known to be — or purported to be — sacred for hundreds, thousands of years, where we didn’t really have a lot of evidence to contradict that.
All of a sudden now, in the 19th century and into the 20th century, we do.
And so people begin to take that seriously, right? Like Darwin comes along and gives us evidence for something that people might have suspected before, but we didn’t have any systematic way to say, “Oh yeah, there are actual concrete reasons why we should believe that we’re descended from apes.”
There were philosophers like Lucretius and Epicurus in ancient Rome and Greece who talked about the world being made up of atoms, but we didn’t have concrete evidence. And now there’s evidence, right?
And then people start asking themselves: what do we do about that?
So in the 19th century, for example, you have a lot of liberal Christians who form a school of thought called the Social Gospel, where they’re still Christian, but they’re realizing the injustices that have been done in the name of Christianity and in the name of modern Western society.
And so the Social Gospel Christian preachers were some of the main people that began to fight against institutions of slavery that had been developed in their own communities, for example.
But alongside those people, you have others that are questioning even more than they are. They’re questioning: what if this whole religion isn’t actually true? What if we’ve been sold a bill of goods that just isn’t helping us to get to our human need to know the truth? Or it isn’t helping our need to build a better society?
There’s a guy named Robert Ingersoll right around the same time as these Social Gospel preachers who was known as “the Great Agnostic.” That was his nickname.
And he becomes the most prominent traveling lecturer in the United States in the post-Civil War era. And if I said to you now, Shay, like, okay, the most prominent traveling lecturer of 2026, you’d be like, whatever — that doesn’t sound like anybody who’s a very big deal.
But actually, back then they didn’t have the Nintendo Switch or whatever, so a traveling lecturer was a really big deal.
I’ve compared that person… oh boy. When I first wrote Good Without God — it’s sort of like a generation ago now — I compared Ingersoll to Oprah Winfrey. But now, like, does anybody know who Oprah Winfrey is anymore?
Who would you compare this person to? It’s like a really, really major influencer. Ingersoll would’ve had 10 million Instagram followers or something like that, right?
SHAY: Oh gosh.
GREG: And he was preaching the gospel of what later became known by the word humanism.
Decades later, a group of mostly liberal Christian ministers, along with others like philosophers — and a Jewish guy or two — got together. This is in the 1910s, and it led to the formation of the American Humanist Association.
A couple decades later, they got together and said essentially like: what are we? We’re not Christian anymore. We’re not Unitarian. We don’t believe even in any of these gods, whether they’re Trinitarian or whether they’re in unity with one another. What are we exactly?
We believe in science. We believe in evolution. We believe in what later became known as human rights. What are we?
And they drew that word “humanism” from the past and brought it into the present. They said: this is a word that describes us — not just by some God that we don’t believe in. Not just calling ourselves atheist or agnostic, because then we define our whole identity by what we don’t believe in.
But this is a word that expresses, in a more positive, active way, who we are, who we aspire to be, and what kind of world we want to build.
And so when you are talking about Mr. Rogers and somebody like that being religious — like any religious person that one wanted to hold up as an ideal, who probably did some good, in many cases did tons of good, and some of them are not as well known as others — these are two competing but also complementary strands that emerge as the modern world emerges.
Some are challenging religion from within and saying, “We need to reform religion.” And others are beginning to move outside of religion and challenge it from without, saying, “I am no longer what you’d call a traditionally religious person, but I deeply, deeply want to be good and do good and help to bring about good.”
And these people were often allies. They were sometimes at each other’s throats because of what Sigmund Freud called the “narcissism of minor difference.” But more often have essentially been allies in a struggle to make life better for all human beings.
So I know it’s like six years ago that you asked me the question, but I feel like we’ve now gotten to some kind of answer.
SHAY: A lot of people that are feeling the way that we feel — about what we’re sharing, what this belief entails — are wanting to branch out from their surroundings: the friends that they know, their family.
A lot of cultural influence of maybe being first-generation, and it’s just like magnified the intensity of theistic belief.
What were the persecutions that people faced back then to part ways with the traditions of the religion that they were surrounded by?
GREG: Mm. In some ways it looks the same. In some ways it looks different. Injustice has always been with us, sadly.
And that’s why, you know, when more liberal religious preachers preach, they’ll say like, “Oh, the Bible speaks a lot about justice.” Yeah, it really does.
Tzedek — the Hebrew word for justice — is truly a key theme throughout texts of the Hebrew Bible. It’s not the only theme, and it’s not that it’s uncontradicted ever, but it is a key theme.
The reason discussions of justice go back to ancient times, and writings about injustice go back to ancient times, is because there have always been, as long as there have been humans — and certainly since before human beings — two different strategies for meeting our emotional and physical needs.
Strategy one is: I feel a lack. I see what you have. I take what you have. Now I have more. Sorry. Or not even sorry. Hashtag sorry-not-sorry person, right?
Strategy number two is: I feel lack. You feel lack. I look in your eyes and I understand myself enough to see that you are similar. We have a sense of common humanity. Let’s help each other. I care about you. My life is made better because of your presence. I hope to live in such a way that your life is made better because of my presence.
Let’s help each other to have something better. To have more joy, more fun. To keep ourselves safe from sickness. To keep ourselves safe from tragedy. And live a life that we can feel good about.
I mean, is anything there impossible to apply to 2026? It’s a universal human experience that is made different by lots of circumstances and specific details throughout history.
People have taken notice because of course you take notice when you feel you’ve got a lack. Like: I’m worried about my health. I’m worried about somebody that I love. I’m worried about where my next meal is coming from. I’m worried because I don’t understand why I am here or what I’m meant to do with my time here.
All kinds of worries.
And other people seem to be addressing that by taking advantage of others. And there have always been people who’ve said, like, there’s gotta be a better way. Taking advantage of others as your life strategy just feels wrong — intrinsically, on a gut intuitive level. It has always been that way and it always will be.
From many different circumstances around the world across time, people have arisen to criticize the system that privileges the privileged, that prioritizes the needs of the taker, and deprioritizes the experience of the giver.
We have had many ancestors who’ve been dissatisfied with that and wanted and believed in a better way.
Apply it to whatever circumstance: sexism, racism, classism, the divine right of kings, violence over compassion, et cetera. Dishonesty over honesty.
People have arisen in criticism of these behaviors that then turned into ideologies and said: there’s got to be a better way.
And the last thing I’ll say about that is like… to me, you know, I realized early on — and I don’t tend to be the one to get into all the detailed history. I love to read this stuff, but it’s a little boring to go through all the details. So I leave it to some of the great historians out there — the Bart Ehrmans of the world, and so many more that I could mention.
It became really clear to me that one of the primary strategies that toxic religion has always indulged in — and that has always generated more humanism wherever it has gone — is this idea that people try to take.
They become obsessed with the idea that if they could just have more power, then their life would be perfect and everything would be right within the world, right?
There have always been these assholes throughout time and place. And the jerk, the ruler, the despot will tell you…
Here’s what they can’t tell you. They can’t tell you, “Because I’m the leader, everything’s great for you,” because it’s not true. First of all, there are too many problems in the world for anybody. But then second of all, if the despot was actually taking their time to go out and address the problems of people, they wouldn’t be a despot. They wouldn’t have time to sit and have grapes peeled for them or whatever they want.
📍 SHAY (ASIDE): Okay. I thought I would get this just from the context of what Greg was saying, but I don’t know what “despot” means. So here we are looking it up.
A despot is D-E-S-P-O-T, by the way. Yes. A ruler or leader holding absolute power, typically exercising it in a cruel, oppressive, or tyrannical manner.
Ooh. It’s like a villain. 📍
GREG: So, you know, the despot can’t say, “My rulership is doing good for you,” and they can’t say, “Your life is great,” because most people’s lives haven’t been that great.
So what they can say is: “If you follow me, you will get perfection in the long-term future,” right? Eventually one day you will be rewarded with the greatest stuff you ever saw.
And still, in many places and times in history, that hasn’t been enough for us. And so then they say, “Aha, you don’t like my carrot? Oh, but I’ll calcify it into a stick.”
And: “If you don’t follow my leadership, then when you die you will burn in a lake of the most fiery fire.” You will suffer the most egregious torture.
But all that so that you’ll please follow me and listen to me because I want the grapes peeled for me at all times.
And so one doesn’t need to go through every historical circumstance to understand that all through human history, people have risen up who are like this — and then people have risen up to challenge them in the name of humanity itself.
And that’s our best legacy.
And by the way, that’s why I like being part of the American Humanist Association these days, because I really kind of feel — especially these days — like the AHA is a group of people that are following that legacy. We’re rising up to challenge injustice because we want something better for all humanity.
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SHAY: I’m so curious because you said that you’re a dad.
What is it like raising kids with humanist values without God?
Because I’ll never forget: I was told my father’s mother was a piece of work, according to my mother. And she said, “It’s not fair of you to deny the kids a Christmas tree.”
Even though we were all Jewish — my ancestry.com has come back very, very Jewish — but she said, “You need to have a Christmas tree for these kids.”
And so my mom appeased her once, and after that she was like, “Nope. I’m going to come up with our own traditions.”
So do you ever get that kind of imposition? Or do parents in general that are humanists get that kind of imposition of: it’s not fair of you to deny the kids belief in God, or the Pledge of Allegiance, or all of the stuff that comes in this theistic society that we live in?
GREG: First of all, I would say my family, I think we really enjoy being humanists. And I have a lot of fun with my kids — helping them to appreciate all the stories that have been passed down through human history, and how do we want to respond to that?
So, you know, I read a lot of comic books with my kids. I started with both of them when they were like two and a half, three years old — superhero comic books.
And I’ll sit with them and their vocabulary is not the most developed at that point, but I’ll read the comic book. And when there’s complicated words, I try to translate it into words that they can understand. I try to pick heroes that seem interesting to them.
Comic books are great in the sense that they’re very diverse. The heroes and characters are coming from all over the world. There’s a lot more gender equity than one might think in the comics as well. And a lot of meaningful stories about justice and science and philosophy, et cetera, right?
So I start reading the comic books with them, and I make it very clear: no, these powers are not real, right?
Do you ever see a Superman-type person flying across the sky? Do you ever see somebody getting mad and transforming into a giant green Hulk? You don’t.
And the kids understand that. It doesn’t ruin the story for them that Bruce Banner isn’t real, or that Black Widow isn’t sneaking around our neighborhood blasting people.
They love the story because it’s a great story, because we love to think about what could be possible. We love imagination. Our lives feel dramatic, even if to others they don’t. And it feels like, in my life, I could be a hero. My friends could be heroes. People who pick on me could be villains.
And in the comic books, the villains have complicated motives — they’re not all bad all the time. And the heroes have complicated motives — they’re not all good all the time. Any good comic book will show you that within a few pages, if not on the first page.
And so the kids — it’s not like, “Oh, I’m feeling really depressed right now because Batman isn’t real.” No. You love the story. You learn from the story.
I think being a humanist parent can be a lot of fun.
We’re lucky enough that we have, in our local area, a chapter of an organization called the Society for Humanistic Judaism — which is Jewish culture: tradition, history, background, food, music, literature, et cetera, but from a humanist perspective. There’s not praying to God or worshiping God. God’s a literary character.
We’re members of that organization. We pay our dues. We volunteer occasionally.
I used to lead a congregation of humanists from all different backgrounds — we called it “the Atheists, Agnostics, and Allies.” It was called the Humanist Hub, and it would meet like almost every day. We raised millions of dollars. It had its own space.
Ultimately, I have to admit, I got a little tired of that. I mean, it was really cool, and it’d be fun if that could be everywhere, but I don’t necessarily know that humanists need something that intensive everywhere we go.
Humanists can get involved in the arts, politics, science, local civics, all sorts of things. And we can derive community from that. Ultimately, that’s good enough for me, and I think it’s probably good enough for most of us.
Although we live in a time of loneliness and isolation, and we all could use more community in our lives.
SHAY: Always. Yeah. Because I’m Jewish, I would love to just broach this topic briefly.
GREG: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figured we should probably get into this for a minute.
SHAY: Yeah. Why is there such a thing as Jewish humanism?
GREG: Yeah. Yeah. Right.
SHAY: And why do we hold on to that?
GREG: If you hang around humanists, you might feel like Jews are only a very tiny percentage of the world, right?
There’s like 20 million people or something like that in the world today who are Jewish in one way or another. You stretch it, maybe you get to 30 million. You concentrate your definition, you get down to lower than 20. It’s really small.
Why are Jewish people disproportionately represented in humanist communities in the United States of America or places like it?
And I think there’s a pretty concrete answer, which is that in Western society, power has been concentrated for a thousand years in the hands of Christian communities.
And Jewish people are sort of an inexorable part of Christian communities’ history, et cetera, right? The Christian story emerges from the Jewish story. The Hebrew Bible emerges, and then somebody who was part of that world emerges and becomes known as Jesus Christ.
Christianity does not exist without Judaism. If Christianity hadn’t come along or hadn’t become as powerful as it did, Jewish people might have vanished from the face of the Earth. Or they might be like Zoroastrians now — a 4,000-year-old Persian religion. There are still some Zoroastrians in the world today.
In fact, there’s a Zoroastrian chaplain colleague of mine at both Harvard and MIT who is an amazing person. I love hanging out with him. I love working with him.
Jews might be like that — a really tiny minority religion right now — if it hadn’t been for Christianity.
But look: as people start to question religion, Christians have the power. They’ve got the institutions. They’ve got the giant cathedrals. Their power is justified by their belief.
So Christians sometimes, as modernity emerges, critique their tradition and sometimes move outside of their tradition. Bertrand Russell: Why I Am Not a Christian. But they don’t have as much incentive to do so because being a Christian is power. It’s privilege.
Jews, on the other hand, have a lot of incentive as the modern world emerges to be the ones to say: what is religion anyway? Why are we all following it so closely? Aren’t we just human? Aren’t we all just human?
Who has the incentive to say that?
Jews in the Western world are the group of people for the last 150 years who by far had the most incentive to think that way.
And so that idea spread like wildfire within Jewish culture and tradition. It became one of the dominant ways to be a Jewish person in the world. And it still is.
SHAY: I can’t help but think of this episode of Frasier where they’re putting on a ruse for someone that Frasier’s dating. I think he had claimed to be Jewish in front of one of his date’s mothers. And so he’s trying to figure out: how do you be Jewish?
And Niles says, “Easy. Answer a question with a question.”
And he’s like, “What do you mean?”
And he said, “What do you mean, what do I mean?”
And so I feel like, yes — culturally, we are the group that is going to land in critical thinking whether we like it or not.
GREG: Yeah. And by the way, the Jewish cultural tradition includes literature — what you call the Talmud, the Mishnah. There’s these library-size compendia of literature from ancient Jewish culture that is debating and philosophizing: what is a person? I don’t know. What do you think a person is?
And we weren’t the only ancient people that were debating with one another and philosophizing. There’s tons of philosophy all over the world. But this particular niche group of people that becomes the Jews that we know today — they were a people that was pretty inclined towards that.
Which then helped them become this middle group within early capitalism, because they were tending to come from literary debates and textual analysis and stuff like that. They tended to be more literate than average, and they had a common textual language.
So if they were to migrate in order to help sell products from Northern Europe to Western to Eastern to Southern to what we think of as the Middle East — these skills and background characteristics made it more possible for Jewish people to become a kind of global people.
Which then really falls in line naturally with our humanist imagination today of what human society could look like.
So yeah, we’re disproportionately represented in humanism. And that’s fine, and that’s good, and that’s something to be celebrated.
But humanism is something that people from all over the world, of every background, of every gender, of every social class have been able to envision.
And it’s still an imperfect and evolving project. We all need to still find ways to come together to say: what does it actually look like to affirm humanity?
Because I’ll tell you what — what we’re doing now is often affirming the creations of humanity more than affirming the human beings themselves.
SHAY: Do you mind if I ask you one more question?
GREG: Sure. Of course.
SHAY: It’s a little selfish. You probably noticed.
You made me cry earlier. For anybody who’s listening, I started crying as you were talking about a child knowing that when their parent walks away, they will return — and sometimes… mm-hmm… that they don’t.
And the thing that was really tough for me to grapple with when I was introducing myself to humanism — and is this really me — was the idea of completely denying anything supernatural.
I think that’s the one thread I still have trouble letting go of. I find comfort in thinking that my mom is still here, guiding anything good that happens to me and putting the right people in my life.
And I logically know that’s likely not the case, but it’s still, at least in my grief process, something I don’t feel ready to let go of.
Does that make me any less humanist?
GREG: No.
I mean, it’s a conversation that’s worth having some nuance about.
So first of all, I want to personalize it to you. In the dedication of my book Tech Agnostic — my second book, not my first book, because I wouldn’t have really known how to write what I’m about to tell you about in my first book…
Even though my first book, Good Without God, it’s all an introduction to humanism.
But humanism is not such that there are perfect people introducing it to anybody. I remain imperfect, but I was even more imperfect back then.
In the dedication to the second book, I talk about how over the course of writing that book, I had done so much work on trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to live.
On the one hand, I was proud of myself because I felt like I had made a lot of improvements to who I was. But on the other hand, a lot of it is lonely work.
Especially — when I wrote Good Without God, I found myself thinking more than I wanted to about what the external result was going to be. How many copies was it going to sell? Would it establish me in my career, et cetera.
When I wrote Tech Agnostic, I really wanted to just focus on sitting down and writing the best book — the best work of art — the most meaningful book that I could write.
And it required hundreds — I mean thousands — of hours just sitting on my own and working on it.
I found myself having conversations with my dead father about it. My dad and I hadn’t had a perfect relationship. He died when I was 18. And he never, I think, felt particularly complete as a person. He didn’t like himself very much, essentially. He didn’t feel enough. He didn’t feel worthy enough.
And he always kind of had this idea, as a lot of us do — and I get into this in Tech Agnostic too — that if he didn’t accomplish something amazing and extraordinary, then he wasn’t much of anything.
He kind of died with that perspective.
And yet as I was writing the second book, after years of psychotherapy and being in community and working on a better way to look at life, I found myself thinking: hey, if my dad had been lucky enough to have more time, he probably could have done some of that work too.
And I love the idea of picturing a version of him that would be proud to see how far I’ve come and how far his family has come.
More inclined to feel okay enough that he could find beauty in what others were doing.
And see that one of the best things about my work these days is that I get to talk to hundreds of amazing people. I get to be supportive of them. I get to help them understand their own stories better.
And he would’ve taken some joy in that.
So I dedicated it to my mom, who’s still alive and who’s amazing — and to my dad — with the vision of him that I wouldn’t have been able to quite enjoy what I had done without.
And I think that kind of experience is so normal and human.
I mean, it’s self-serving to me to say it’s normal because it’s my experience, but it sounds like maybe something along those lines might be helpful for you too.
SHAY: Absolutely.
GREG: Yeah.
These people — the people who populate our lives — mean so much to us. We are who we are because they are who they are.
To paraphrase the key piece of wisdom from the African philosophy Ubuntu — which also has ancient roots and is also essentially humanistic in many of its iterations — we are who we are because they are who they are.
And so when they’re gone, or even when we’re just thinking about how they might one day be gone, it matters to us so deeply. It touches us on such a fundamental level.
Those of us who prize emotional awareness, who really want to feel our joy — in order to feel your joy, you also need to know how to feel sadness. You need to know how to feel grief and loss and pain and fear.
Try it sometime. If you try to drown out those negative feelings because they’re too negative — try really feeling the emotion of joy. It’s very, very difficult if you’ve completely disconnected yourself from the painful emotions.
And so those of us who really want to feel our joy, we’re going to be in touch with our sadness and our longing and our grief. We’re going to miss people deeply. And we’re going to want to imagine that they’re still with us.
Now, does a humanist insist that that person is absolutely still there like a ghost? And do we further insist that that ghost is talking directly — when they’re not talking to us — to the ruler of the entire universe, who has a very specific prescription for them of like whether some army should fight some other army, et cetera?
Right? You see how it gets a little complicated, right? And how skepticism becomes incredibly important.
It’s really important to know how to be skeptical even of our own longing.
It’s not about like, “Shay, I gotta tell you your family member or my family member is just not there, and stop it.” It’s not about that.
But it’s about: humanism asserts that it’s really important that we know how to be critical of our grand visions and our fantasies, and try to come to terms with what’s real, so that we can really show up for one another and for ourselves in such a way that feels true and honest.
And that we don’t need to rely on the piece of it that we’re not really sure is actually real in order to do the thing that we all want to do — which is love, connect, make things better, right?
And so it’s not my place to tell you which thing is real in your own mind and which thing isn’t. It’s just my privilege to be in a role where I can say: look, at times we have fantasies that feel deeply real to us. It’s important to be able to do the critical thinking at the same time.
You’ll work that out for yourself. You’ll come up with the way that works for you.
I trust you to do it. You trust me to do it. We hold each other accountable. We build a movement like that. That’s all it needs to be.
Some people will have a slightly more spiritual worldview, some people slightly less.
We’re each other’s allies. We’re each other’s friends and colleagues. And we build something for all humans together. That’s how I think it works.
SHAY: Greg, I know you gotta go. Thank you so, so much for coming on and talking to me.
GREG: It’s a pleasure.
SHAY: I can’t wait to have you back. I hope you will come back on the show because we have so much more to talk about.
GREG: I’m excited for you. I’ll check it out. I encourage other people to follow you on your journey, and I’m excited to see what other guests you’re gonna have.
We’re all guests in each other’s life. I think there’s a great line from Rumi about the guest house — look that up. One of my best friends has it tattooed on his arm.
So, you know, we’re guests in one another’s guest houses. And we bring joy with us where we go, if we’re doing this right.
So I’m excited for you, and I’ll see you again sometime soon.
📍 SHAY: I love an arm tattoo.
SHAY: Thank you, Greg.