Chuck Bryant

He has a wax head.

And apparently he originally wanted his head to be part of it.

So they used some, I guess, some Maori technique of desiccation, and it didn't go very well.

And his desiccated head is still around, but they're like, Jeremy, you do not want us to leave this on your body because you look so great with the wax head.

We're just going to keep this separate under glass itself.

Right.

He was also the father of utilitarianism, which is essentially if at its worst, killing one person saves two people, then you kill that person, which gave us things like the trolley problem as a utilitarian thought experiment, essentially.

Bentham, I think, didn't really think that way, but he was basically like, we want to maximize the most good for the most people.

That's the way he developed it.

You want to take a break?

OK, Chuck, we're back and we're going to talk about the development of humanism in the way that we know it today.

Because up to this point, we've been talking about little bits here, little bits there that altogether changed the world and essentially took humanity.

all the power in the West, especially Europe and eventually the United States, away from the church and organized religions in general and said, no, there's a way for you to live an upstanding, meaningful, ethical life without even believing that there's a God or an afterlife.

And here's how we're going to do it.

Yeah, but very quickly people latched on to that.

He just kind of came along at the right... He was in the right place at the right time, which was Germany, because Germany eventually became kind of the cradle of modern humanism.

And eventually humanismus, what we would call humanism now, we just dropped the U.S.

or the us, and...

if you kind of subscribe to that, it was way beyond the way that you interpreted scripture.

It was, you supported women's equality.