Chuck Bryant

At the very least, if they do believe in a God, he's not an interventionist God.

He's not playing a role in our lives day to day.

Maybe you could also interchange that definition of God with the universe or nature or

or something like that, but not God in any religious way whatsoever.

And in fact, if you do believe that, a lot of strict humanists will say, well, you can't really be a humanist because not believing in God in that sense is a core part of humanism.

And a lot of other people say, hey, you're a humanist.

Who are you to tell me what I believe?

And the humanist says, you got me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then we leapfrog all the way over to the Renaissance.

And you'll note that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, medieval era.

The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages.

That there was a part of history where essentially the church ruled everything with an iron fist.

Corruption was rampant and people were...

were removed from their relationship with God and the church was inserted.

And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did, they were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics too.

They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God?

You know, there's a connection between you, this person who is important and matters just because you're a person and God who made you.

And this is where the very beginnings of humanism find themselves, even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet.