A weekly podcast about building great relationships, cultivating wonder, and making things better for other people. Hosted by veteran community-builder Bart Campolo, Humanize Me features friendly, thoughtful conversations with a wide array of scientists, activists, artists and oddballs.
Have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Call the Humanize Me ‘Q Line’ at .
An simple index of episodes can be found here.
Humanize Me is a production of Jux Media.
‘How are you not freaking out?’ is the question Gabe asks in one of the two songs we play in this inaugural episode of 2020. Gabe is an artist, musician, poet and more. His C5 spinal injury, incurred when he was 15 years old, left him paralyzed from the armpits down. What more could there be to freak out about? In this conversation, Bart talks with Gabe about finding a room of one’s own in a hostile world, his art including an electronic rock opera telling the story of his life, sexuality and intimacy as a disabled person, music as therapy, Gabe’s agnosticism about God and more.
Gabe’s music can be found on Spotify under his stage name Freaque. He’s also on YouTube and his photos can be found on Instagram.
Humanize Me trivia: Gabe’s father Matthew was our guest in Episode 337.
It’s an end-of-the-year podcast from Bart Campolo, who answers a question from a listener called John.
John wants to know whether faith (of a sort) can still be useful for a post-Christian, whether believing something without evidence can sometimes have its benefits. Bart answers with a riff on the difference between optimism and hope, and thinks about its applicability to the new decade we’re going into this week.
Happy New Year to all our listeners, and especially to our supporters on Patreon! We couldn’t do it without you. See you in 2020!
Emma Bloomfield researches the intersection of science and religious rhetoric, particularly around issues of climate change, human origins and the body.
In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Emma talks about how Christians tend to think differently about science and the environment, the three ‘types’ of religious climate skeptic (separators, bargainers and harmonizers), the similarities between creationists and climate change skeptics, how language matters, how ideological ‘purity’ and orthodoxy can push people away from contributing to positive change, the importance of storytelling, and why she feels hopeful after her conversations with the groups she wrote about.
Emma’s book, Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment, is available from Amazon.
Thanksgiving has been and gone, and now we’re into a whole month of Christmas in America. How does one navigate a time that can be very tricky for those who have deconverted from faith? As one listener put it in our Facebook Group: “Am I the only one who feels like Jesus is my ex and all the decorations just remind me of our ****ed up relationship?” It turns out there’s a lot of that kind of painfulness at this time of year!
In this Q&A episode of our podcast, Bart Campolo tries to answer the following questions:
“My wife still believes. She is very bothered that I no longer believe. Advice on how to handle the tension? How much should I go along, for example, going to Christmas Eve service to keep her happy while still being true to myself?”
“My siblings and mom don’t do presents anymore, which is awesome. My biggest Christmas budget item is charity. My wife though, thinks presents are important and for the most part she handles her big family and that’s fine with me. But, as you can guess, it gets a little dicey between the two of us. So far, I’m just cutting back a little and seeing how it goes. Any suggestions?”
“I’ve recently de-converted, but I am still influenced by spiritual holiday trappings. What do you recommend?”
Got any questions of your own? Send them to us at BartCampolo.org/Contact or call the ‘Q’ Line at (424) 291-2092!
John Tucker used to be a literalist Christian, but says he has now rejected the ‘belief paradigm’ to move beyond either accepting or rejecting the claims of religion.
In this conversation with Bart Campolo, John lays out how he sees truth now, and says that he thinks religious claims should be expressed only as catch-22s. An example of a catch-22: “The only acceptable evidence for religious belief is evidence that is unacceptable.” Confused by this, Bart explores what John means by it.
Along the way, John and Bart talk about how works of fiction can be ‘mined’ for profound insight, and that Christianity can be too, how there are differences between pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking, how we are stuck in the ‘correspondence theory of truth’, how virulent forms of religion can be ‘tamed’ and used beneficially, how John was devastated when he first realized that Adam and Eve were not historical figures, the future of Christianity and how following generations will come to relate to it, why John refutes the context of a question like, ‘Did Jesus rise from the dead?’, the philosophy of how words are used, how Bart can’t figure out why John doesn’t just become a straight-up humanist like him, and an analogy about stained glass windows.
John’s book on these topics, Zero Theology, can be found on Amazon.
It’s a Q&A episode! And this week, the question is:
“Hey Bart, you humanists seem to really love science, so I’m wondering… do you love science fiction too? If so, what do you love and why?” – Marianne
Bart Campolo talks with producer John Wright about sci-fi and the thoughts it can provoke. In the process, he strongly recommends a book that is controversial, poorly-written and probably wrong, and which made him consider the benefits of fascism.
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