In this episode, we explore the two flood stories woven into Genesis, the Yahwist and the Priestly, and what they reveal about the human longing for renewal. Rather than tales of divine wrath, these ancient myths become windows into our deepest hope: that even after collapse, whether personal, familial, or societal, a fresh beginning is possible. This reading offers a secular humanist reflection on the flood as a story not of destruction, but of the enduring power of reset.

In this episode, we’re turning to the opening chapters of Genesis, the creation myths in chapters 1 through 3. These are some of the most familiar words in the Bible, yet when read as myth rather than history, they take on a deeper meaning. Genesis doesn’t give us science; it gives us wisdom. It doesn’t tell us how the universe began; it tells us what it means to be human, to long for connection, to awaken to responsibility, to live between innocence and awareness.

In this introductory episode, I explain the idea behind my secular humanist Bible commentaries: reading the Bible not as God’s word, but as humanity’s word. As a humanist and atheist, I see these texts as works of literature, history, and ethics—written by people, shaped by their times, and revealing their struggles, hopes, and blind spots. Some books, like Jonah, Amos, and Ecclesiastes, speak with surprising honesty about conscience, justice, and mortality. Others, like Joshua and Romans, show us the dangers of violence and dogma that cannot be reinterpreted but only explained away. The goal isn’t to rescue the Bible or to worship it—it’s to read it honestly, as a mirror of ourselves, and ask what it still has to teach us today.

The Gospel of John is often considered the most spiritual, the most poetic, and the most theologically rich of the New Testament texts, but it is also the most dangerous. Unlike the earlier gospels, which preserve traces of a human teacher navigating real moral and social tensions, John presents a fully mythologized figure: not Jesus the man, but Christ the cosmic absolute. This essay offers a secular humanist reading of John, not to reinterpret its theology, but to examine what it reveals about our need for certainty, belonging, and permanence. By tracing how metaphor hardened into dogma, we can better understand both the power and the peril of turning a teacher into a god.

Beneath the long genealogies and idealized kings of 1 Chronicles lies a blueprint for something very modern: sanitized nationalism—the deliberate crafting of a clean, unifying story to bind a wounded people. This isn’t just biblical history. It’s the logic behind cable news, political mythmaking, and the boundaries we still draw between “us” and “them.” We’ll unpack how the Chronicler’s vision helped a nation heal—and why that same storytelling instinct, if left unexamined, can divide a global humanity desperate for common ground.

In just four chapters, the Book of Jonah delivers one of the Bible’s most surprising moral reversals—and it’s not about the fish. In this episode of The Word Made Human, we explore Jonah as a parable of conscience, resistance, and reluctant compassion.

From a secular humanist lens, Jonah isn’t a lesson in divine obedience. It’s a story about how hard it is to care beyond our tribe—and how much it matters when we do.

What if the most sacred question isn’t about God at all—but about how far we’re willing to let our empathy go?

For secular humanists, Mark offers something rare: a portrait of Jesus that feels profoundly human and radically ethical. This is not the cosmic Christ of John's Gospel, nor the law-fulfilling messiah of Matthew. This is a man of flesh and vulnerability, of compassion and confrontation. He heals not to prove divinity but to restore dignity. He preaches not dogma, but direct action. He challenges not the irreligious, but the powerful religious systems that have grown indifferent to suffering.

For the secular humanist, Ruth is not a tale of divine favor — it is a celebration of human potential. It invites us to trust in the strength of our own moral agency, to believe that kindness can triumph over cruelty, that loyalty can overcome isolation, and that love, even in its simplest, most fragile forms, holds the power to reshape the world.

For secular humanists, the value of Romans lies in its transparency. It exposes the architecture of religious control. It reveals how belief can be leveraged to override moral reasoning, how abstract theology can be used to enforce conformity, and how power often hides behind claims of divine authority.

The Book of Amos stands as one of the earliest prophetic texts in the Hebrew Bible and is strikingly contemporary in its themes. For secular humanists, Amos is not simply a relic of theological antiquity—it is a human cry for justice, a call for ethical integrity in the face of institutional corruption, and a poetic demand that those with power recognize the humanity of those without it.