Humanize Me

Last week's episode hit a nerve, or perhaps that should be many nerves. It's late at night in his apartment in Los Angeles and Bart takes a few minutes to touch upon the many responses to the episode with his wife Marty about whether he's being ‘too nice' about Christianity.

If it were up to Bart’s wife Marty, the rest of the world probably still wouldn’t know about their deconversion and this podcast wouldn’t exist, so her joining him for this episode is a pretty big deal. Rather than focusing on their marriage per se, however, Bart and Marty open up to each other about an immediate and excruciating question that every former believer must face sooner or later: How long do we hold our tongues once we realize that what we used to believe – and that many of our loved ones still do – is not just untrue, but also genuinely harmful?

Bart's friend Peter Montoya talks about his attempts to start a new community of secular ‘freethinkers' from the ground up, how he began with the idea of a real, physical intentional community and didn't get there, and ended up with a large online community to show for it instead.

Bart talks about the attempt to create a new humanist community, one that listeners of this podcast can be part of. What's the difference between having a group of friends and having a community?

Can documentary filmmaking tell us anything useful about how to live our lives? Are people worth listening to for their own sake? These questions and others came up during Bart’s chat with his friend John Wright, the Northern Irish filmmaker working on the documentary about Bart’s transition out of Christian faith, and his father’s response to it as a well-known Christian evangelist.

Bart reads a letter from a listener whose wife worked really hard over many months to get a coveted new job, only to have her mother attribute all her success to God instead. Bart responds.

Bart chats with Brian Kateman of the Reducetarian Foundation about his mission to help reduce our meat consumption by encouraging people to simply eat less meat. This new movement is composed of individuals who have committed to eating less red meat, poultry, and seafood, whatever the degree or the motivation.

How to initiate conversations with people about life after religious belief, even when you live in the Bible Belt.