An Atheist Takes Over Harvard

Secular Left

An Atheist Takes Over Harvard

August 31, 2021

In this episode Doug is kind of happy that Greg Epstien is now head of the Chaplains of Harvard University but he still has trouble believing that interfaith work really includes the non-believer. Then Doug talks about a recent study that showed ending the $300 extra unemployment benefit didn't cause a flood of lazy cheeto eating slackers to go back to work. It's just one more proof that ignoring science will prolong the pandemic.

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00:45 An Atheist Takes Over Harvard
14:34 Ignore Science At Your Risk

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Show Transcript

Transcript is also available for offline reading

Doug Berger 0:45
Hey, did you hear the news? An atheist has been elected king of the Britons. I’m sorry, that was a terrible, terrible Monty Python reference. Now, the news was that an atheist was recently elected head of all the chaplains at Harvard University. His name is Greg Epstein. And he’s been a humanist chaplain at Harvard University for many years. I don’t personally know him. But I’ve I guess, we’ve talked on social media years ago. Because we had a disagreement, we didn’t see eye to eye on a couple of issues. And I kind of want to go into that. I mean, I guess I’m happy that he got a new job. But I generally have a problem with interfaith anything. Anytime somebody is talking about interfaith, interfaith, what that means is when you have all the different major faith, parts come together and try to work together. A majority of the time, atheists are left out, because people don’t believe that they’re an a faith, or they just have really bad ideas about atheists, so they exclude them. So we have these humanist chaplains, humanist celebrants. They’re atheists, but they take on these these trappings of religion, General, General, mainstream religious faiths. They may have a congregation like Unitarians, they meet on Sunday. There’s a couple of groups like Sunday assembly, and there’s a place I think Kansas City called, it’s called oasis. It’s similar they meet on Sunday, they sing hymns, they have a sermon quote, unquote. The only thing is that they’ve stripped out all the supernatural element elements and, and backing for what they’re talking about. They they use, you know, like classic social sociology, psychology type things to talk about life and how to live life. Here in the part that I’m part of American Humanist Association, we have the Ten Commitments instead of the 10 Commandments. So you see how they kind of take that the imagery and the trappings of religion and kind of remoulded refashion fashion it into something for secular people. That’s what I have a problem with. I don’t like that. It’s a personal thing with me. I just don’t like that. If you’re an atheist, and you want to have a community, by all means, get together, have a community. You don’t need to meet on Sunday. You don’t need to sing hymns, if you don’t want to. You don’t need to take up a collection. You don’t need to help your community if you don’t want to. All these things that that except for belief in God and scripture and all that stuff. People do every day, outside of an organized thing. And so I just I just had a problem. So good on Greg, Greg Epstein, that he got this new job. He said of all the chaplains at Harvard. I just think that I mean, I’ve read the articles, I read his personal response to it. And he says all the right things that I agree with, I just don’t believe in the foundation, the structure of it. I just don’t believe in having congregations. That was one of the disagreements we had. He was writing a book years ago. I don’t know if it ever came out. They might still be working on it. But he was gonna go around the country and Visit with different humanist groups and find out, you know what, what makes a good humanist group. And he had come to the conclusion that you needed to have a community and that community needed to meet on Sundays and sing hymns. And that just, I just had a problem with that, as I’m explaining badly, I’m explaining but, you know, good ol Greg, I’m glad he got that job. I mean, it’s a step up from a mentor, or a judge, I’m not sure what position he was in, on the reality show “Married At First Sight”, back on 20, back in 2015. So you know, Hey, he’s got a better job. Now.

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Produced, written, and edited by Doug Berger

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