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"It's harder for the mass market to hit a moving target." — Rory Booth

Historian and filmmaker Rory Booth studies how subcultures form, thrive and die, from 19th century Parisian bohemians to the British rave scene of the 1990s. He is also a founding member of Leicester Humanists. In this episode, we ask whether humanism qualifies as a subculture, and what organisers can steal from scenes that got it right.

Rory argues that the visual definition of subculture, all style and shock, has been overplayed. What actually holds a scene together is language, humour, and above all space: the shared understanding that in this room, with these people, you are allowed to be a slightly different version of yourself. That, he suggests, is exactly what a humanist group offers, and it is why the venue you pick matters far more than most organisers realise.

We also get into the life cycle problem. A subculture dies the moment the mainstream understands it, or worse, misunderstands it. So is being small and slightly illegible an advantage? And has the internet, with its infinite choice and its everyone-is-a-creator economy, made real subcultures impossible?

Rory Booth is a historian and filmmaker specialising in cultural and urban history, with a focus on 19th century bohemianism and the 1990s rave scene. He is a founding member of Leicester Humanists, where he leads on events and works on school speaking and interfaith engagement. He also plays in punk and noise rock bands.

In this episode

Links and references

Related Humanism Now episodes

Chapters:

00:00 Rory Booth on Exploring Subcultures: Definitions and Context

08:00 The Role of Subcultures in Society

13:38 Humanism as a Subculture

18:43 The Impact of the Internet on Subcultures

25:43 Creating and Sustaining Subcultures

31:40 Reflections on Change and Growth

Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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"I've never heard of humanism, but is this what I've been all along?"

We discuss growing up with everyday kindness as a lived value, letting go of the supernatural without losing what matters, the AHA Creator Program and building coalitions beyond the secular space, and why humanism needs to become more accessible and more representative if it is going to grow.

About the guest

Shay Leonia is the communications manager at the American Humanist Association (AHA), where she hosts the How to Humanist podcast and runs AHA's Creator Program, partnering with content creators to bring humanism to new audiences. A lifelong musician based in Philadelphia, she founded the media company 44th Minute Media and came to humanism recently, arriving, as she puts it, curious, a little confused, and glad she stayed.

In this episode

Chapters

01:18 Growing up, and early humanist values

03:11 A reformed Jewish upbringing

04:01 Discovering humanism through a job posting

05:17 Learning humanism in public

06:00 Talking across belief systems, and reforming your own views

08:53 Letting go of the supernatural

10:05 Breaking the fourth wall on How to Humanist

14:39 The AHA Creator Program

17:12 Building coalitions beyond the secular space

19:59 Giving people a "soft landing" into humanism

22:57 Humanism's blind spots: accessibility and representation

25:51 What role should the AHA play?

28:24 Advice for talking with allies

31:04 Leading with curiosity and compassion

31:32 Changing minds and letting go

Links and references

Check out our new website and subscribe for updates: www.humanism.now

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live, a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies and individuals across the globe. To start your own podcast, visit humanise.live or email [email protected].

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible and should not be treated as a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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"If there's a theme that unites all of Spinoza's philosophical writings, it's freedom: both personal freedom, how we become liberated from irrational passions, and political and social freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of belief and freedom of association." — Steven Nadler

We explore what "atheist" even meant in the 17th century, why "God or nature" is not the same as pantheism, how Spinoza's defence of democracy and free expression anticipated modern liberal values, and why Einstein said his God was Spinoza's God.

About the guest

Steven Nadler is a Vilas Research Professor and the William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and one of the world's leading authorities on Spinoza. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, his books include Spinoza: A Life and A Book Forged in Hell. His latest is Spinoza, Atheist.

In this episode

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: who was Spinoza?

Steven Nadler

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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"Education shouldn't be about telling young people what to think. It should be telling them how they can think." — Sharon Booth

How do you hold an honest conversation about one of the world's most divisive conflicts, in a school classroom, without it descending into a shouting match? This episode looks at peace education: the skills, the psychology and the facilitation that let people disagree deeply while still recognising each other's humanity.

Our guest is Sharon Booth, founder and executive director of Solutions Not Sides (SNS), an educational charity that brings young Palestinian and Israeli peacebuilders into UK schools to share their stories and equip students to think for themselves. Sharon moderated the acclaimed "No Hope But Peace" dialogue at the Festival of Humanism in Bournemouth.

In this conversation we cover:

Links:

Chapters:

02:02 Founding SNS and what peace education means

04:15 The three E's: exploration, empathy, empowerment

06:09 A more divided society: social media, COVID and outrage

08:53 The PEACE model, step by step

15:24 What young people teach us, and Haidt's elephant and rider

19:20 Creating safe and brave spaces

23:15 The Bournemouth dialogue and facilitating hard questions

28:31 Two stories from the classroom

34:53 Religion, nationalism and internal transformation

39:13 What role should humanists play in peacebuilding?

44:25 How to book or support SNS

45:29 Closing question: leaving evangelical Christianity

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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"We are creatures of matter who long to matter — and one of the strongest manifestations of this is people who deny that we are matter."

Professor Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow whose books include The Mind-Body Problem, Incompleteness, Betraying Spinoza, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (a work of fiction). In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama and has been named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. She joins us to discuss her latest book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, and will be the keynote speaker at the World Humanist Congress in Ottawa this August.

Topics we cover

✔︎ What the mattering instinct is, where it comes from, and why it may be the defining feature of our species
 ✔︎ The four locations on the mattering map — transcenders, communal materers, heroic strivers, and competitors — and what they reveal about human motivation
 ✔︎ Why public debates about religion so often fail — and what understanding mattering tells us about how to talk across belief divides

Connect with Rebecca and find out more

• The Mattering Instinct: https://www.rebeccagoldstein.com/books/the-mattering-instinct
• Rebecca's website: https://www.rebeccagoldstein.com
• World Humanist Congress, Ottawa, August 2026: https://humanists.international/world-humanist-congress

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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Seth Andrews spent 14 years as a Christian radio host before becoming one of the most recognisable voices in atheist and humanist media as host of The Thinking Atheist Podcast. In this conversation, he traces his slow-burn deconstruction from devout evangelical broadcaster to skeptic, why he now leads with "humanist" rather than "atheist," and why leaving religion is no inoculation against tribalism, dogma, or bad ideas, on either side of the God question.

Our guest is Seth Andrews, host of The Thinking Atheist podcast, YouTube channel and online community, and of the podcast True Stories with Seth Andrews. A former Christian radio broadcaster, he is the author of six books, including Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason and his latest, Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot.

In this conversation we cover:

• His decades-long, slow-burn deconstruction from devout evangelical broadcaster to "The Thinking Atheist," and the fear that kept him anonymous for the show's first two years
• Why he leads with "humanist" rather than "atheist" today, and why disbelief in God guarantees nothing about a person's rationality or character
• How online tribalism and algorithm-driven echo chambers have reshaped debate on both sides of the God question, and why he's leaned harder into humanism and politics as a result

LINKS & REFERENCES

Seth Andrews

• Personal site: https://www.sethandrews.com
• The Thinking Atheist: https://www.thethinkingatheist.com
• True Stories with Seth Andrews: https://www.truestoriespodcast.com
• Books: https://www.sethandrews.com/books
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sethandrewstta/
• X: https://x.com/SethAndrewsTTA
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheThinkingAtheist

Mentioned in this episode

• Seth Andrews, Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1977250785
• Seth Andrews, Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason: https://www.sethandrews.com/books

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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"I don't think that we have any solid evidence of a religious revival underway in England, or for that matter, anywhere else." — David Voas

In April 2025, the Bible Society published a report claiming church attendance in England had surged by more than 50% since 2018, with young men's churchgoing up fivefold. It made national headlines. A year later, both YouGov and the Bible Society retracted it. This episode unpacks what actually went wrong: bots and bogus respondents in online survey panels, why the data never supported the story, and what decades of solid evidence tell us instead about religious decline in Britain.

Our guest is Dr. David Voas, Emeritus Professor of Social Science at UCL, where he led the Social Research Institute from 2016 to 2020. A quantitative social scientist, he has spent his career studying religious change in modern societies, and his TEDx talk, "Why There Is No Way Back for Religion in the West," has been viewed nearly two million times.

In this conversation we cover:

• How AI chatbots, survey farming and bogus respondents undermined the survey data, and why this is an industry-wide problem, not a one-off
• The three ways sociologists actually measure religiosity — identity, practice and belief — and why they don't always move together
• Why secularisation is a generational process that plays out over centuries, and what fills the space religion leaves behind

LINKS & REFERENCES

David Voas

• UCL profile: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/56605-david-voas
• TEDx talk, "Why There Is No Way Back for Religion in the West": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtAR_OGzlcg
• "Why Humanism Is the Future" — Humanists UK Convention 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfI7VgkDFMg
• "Is there really a religious revival in England? Why I'm sceptical of a new report" (UCL News/The Conversation, 16 June 2025): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/jun/comment-there-really-religious-revival-england-why-im-sceptical-new-report
• British Religion in Numbers: https://www.brin.ac.uk

Mentioned in this episode

• Bible Society, "The Quiet Revival" report (retracted): https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/research/quiet-revival
• BBC News coverage of the report's retraction: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwjxx5eyn1o
• Christian Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete (Oxford University Press): https://global.oup.com/academic/product/why-religion-went-obsolete-9780197800737

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review — it helps more people find the show. Support Humanism Now from just £5/month for exclusive content, a say in future episodes, and we'll plant a tree each month in your name. Follow us @HumanismNowPod.

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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Most of us think of eugenics as a horror confined to the past. It isn't. This episode examines the worrying re-emergence of eugenics and scientific racism, from discredited claims about race and intelligence to the far-right money funding them, and asks how we defend good science against bad-faith actors. Along the way, Rebecca overturns another myth, that the isolated nuclear family is "traditional", and explains why demographers are far calmer about falling birth rates than the headlines suggest.

Our guest is Professor Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary behavioural scientist and demographer at Brunel University London, where she directs the Centre for Culture and Evolution. She is co-founder of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association and a Fellow of the British Academy.

In this conversation we cover:

• The re-emergence of eugenics and biological essentialism, and how old ideas are being repackaged for a modern audience
• Richard Lynn's discredited national IQ database, the far-right money behind scientific racism, and how to spot bad-faith science
• Why cooperative childrearing is the human norm, and how "population panic" over falling fertility has been used to justify real human rights abuses

In this conversation we cover:

• Why cooperative childrearing is the human norm, and what the "male breadwinner" nuclear family gets wrong
• Why demographers are not panicking about falling fertility, and how "population panic" has been used to justify real human rights abuses
• The modern resurgence of eugenics and scientific racism, from Richard Lynn's discredited national IQ database to how to spot bad-faith science

LINKS & REFERENCES

Rebecca Sear

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccasear.bsky.social
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-sear-8183551
• Sear, R. (2021) The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the 'traditional' human family. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 376: 20200020. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0020
• Sear, R. (2021) Demography and the rise, apparent fall and resurgence in eugenics. Population Studies 75(Suppl 1): 201-220. https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2021.2009013
• Samorodnitsky, Bird, Carlson, Lingford, Phillips, Sear & Townsend (2024) Journals should retract Richard Lynn's racist 'research' articles. STAT. https://www.statnews.com/2024/06/20/richard-lynn-racist-research-articles-journals-retractions/

Mentioned in this episode

• Sarah Hrdy (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674060326
• Quinn Slobodian (2025) Hayek's Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781890951931/hayeks-bastards
• The Guardian / Hope not Hate investigation into a US-funded 'race science' network (October 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/16/revealed-international-race-science-network-secretly-funded-by-us-tech-boss

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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 "One of the things I heard again and again was: I thought I was the only one." — Muhammad Syed 

Leaving religion can be one of the most liberating decisions of a person's life. For those leaving Islam, it can also be one of the most dangerous. This episode looks at why so many ex-Muslims stay hidden, how community breaks that isolation, and what the data really tells us about people leaving the faith worldwide.

Our guest is Muhammad Syed, human rights activist, writer, and co-founder and president of Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA), the first ex-Muslim advocacy and community organisation in North America.

In this conversation we cover:

• Why so many ex-Muslims believe they are "the only one", and how visibility and community change that
• What scripture, interpretation and culture each contribute to the risks ex-Muslims face, from loss of family to threats of violence
• The numbers behind a global trend, and how both the political left and right get the conversation wrong

Links for support:

• Ex-Muslims of North America: https://exmuslims.org
• Faith to Faithless (UK support): https://www.humanists.uk/our-work/faith-to-faithless/
• r/exmuslim global reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/exmuslim/

References:

• Pakistan college student lynched after discussing Adam and Eve/incest
• Nigeria college girl lynched over a WhatsApp class chat
• Ayan Hirsi Ali threatened, lost security/neighborhood in Netherlands, moved to U.S.
• Somali gay atheist kidnapped/taken to Kenya for “re-education”
• Canadian mother whose children were taken to Africa; hasn’t seen them in over a decade
• Ex-Muslim husband/wife/siblings chain deconversion story
• IIraq lowering age of consent/marriage age to nine
• 
  
• -Pew: one in four U.S. Muslims raised Muslim have left Islam
• -Pew: among U.S. ex-Muslims, ~55% became nonbelievers and ~23% became Christian
• -Arab Barometer: younger people in parts of North Africa around 18% nonreligious/nonbelieving
• -Turkey survey showing rising nonbelief
• -Iran survey showing roughly 40% nonbelief 
• -Saudi Arabia survey showing ~4–5% confirmed atheists, higher broader nonbelief
• -Pakistan poll: ~60–70% support killing apostates
• -EXMNA data/reporting: ~60% lost friends/social circle; similar share verbal abuse; high 40s/around 50% lost family; one in three experienced threats of violence

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Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

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Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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What does it take to stay human in a world that often forgets what that means? This episode explores storytelling as an act of resistance: why humans need fiction, why representation matters, and how meeting difference with curiosity rather than judgement can ease the loneliness of modern life.

Our guest is Kestral Gaian, an award-winning writer of fiction, theatre and poetry, whose debut young adult novel "The Boy From Elsewhere" is out now.

In this conversation we cover:

• The origins of "The Boy From Elsewhere", born from a 26-hour charity writing livestream, and what tiredness taught Kestral about creativity and craft
• Why storytelling is fundamental to being human, and how representation shapes what young readers believe is possible
• Whether all art is political, the recent publishing pushback against LGBTQ+ fiction, and meeting strangeness with kindness

Links:

• The Boy From Elsewhere: https://reconnectingrainbows.co.uk/book/tbfe/
• Kestral Gaian's website: https://kestr.al
• Support Humanism Now: https://ko-fi.com/humanismnowpod

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Humanism Now is produced by Humanise Live a podcast production agency based in London, serving charities, companies, and individuals across the globe.

Contact us to get starting in podcasting today at humanise.live or [email protected]

Music: Blossom by Light Prism

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

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