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Episode 13 - An Interview with Steve Ghikadis & Dale McGowan
93 Plays4 months ago
Humanist Canada's Steve Ghikadis sits down with Dale McGowan, an author, educator, podcaster, and philanthropist who has written and edited several books related to living a non-religious life, particularly about interfaith relationships and raising caring curious kids, without religion. He was awarded the title of “Harvard Humanist of the Year”.
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Transcript
Opening Thoughts on Humanity's Resilience
00:00:01
Speaker
You know, i I tend to the pessimistic because of what we are. But on the other hand, gosh darn it, we keep surviving.
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:20
Speaker
Welcome to the Voice of Canadian Humanism, the official podcast of Humanist Canada. Join us as we delve into thought-provoking discussions, explore critical issues, and celebrate the values of reason, compassion, and secularism through the humanist lens. Welcome to the conversation.
00:00:40
Speaker
Okay. I'm your host, Steve Jekattis, and today on the program we are speaking to Dale McGowan. Dale is an author, educator, podcaster, and philanthropist who has written and edited several books related to living a non-religious life, particularly about interfaith relationships and raising caring, curious kids without religion.
00:00:59
Speaker
He was awarded the title of Harvard Humanist of the Year for his work in the above fields and was instrumental in the founding of Foundation Beyond Belief, a nonprofit organization that supported the health and well-being of individuals and families all over the world. His list of accolades and workplaces are too vast to mention in this short intro. Dale, welcome to the program. Good to be here. Thanks, Steve.
00:01:21
Speaker
and So glad to have you here. Obviously, as you know, you're one of my heroes, my humanist heroes. So it's just a really big privilege for me to be able to speak to you today. I appreciate that.
Exploration of OnlySky Platform
00:01:32
Speaker
Okay, so we heard it just a short snippet above, but what exactly is OnlySky and how did you come up with the idea? OnlySky is a um digital platform. It's a website for ah secular creators ah to explore the whole human experience. That was the original version of OnlySky. It's actually gone through a couple of iterations in the last few years.
00:01:57
Speaker
But that's always been the core of it. It's been getting a lot of good secular thinkers together, creatives, but having them think outside of the typical ah limits of secular topics.
00:02:12
Speaker
Awesome. and And I have been frequenting the site for for quite a long time now since you you first came out with it. And I remember there being a big announcement on Facebook saying, you know, check out OnlySky, it's this new platform and I got really um enthralled by it. It was really it was really cool. um And I think I have a guess on this, but what is the official meaning behind the name?
00:02:31
Speaker
ah The official meaning is it's it's an echo of John Lennon's Imagine. when so i Yes, Above Us Only Sky. Yeah, that's perfect. it's That name just seems to sum up everything that it pretty much represents. So that's excellent. um And how do the articles that you're writing and and editing at Only Sky compared to your earlier works?
00:02:54
Speaker
ah Yeah, that's ah that's a good question. um My earlier work and the earlier work of a lot of the writers that have been involved with Only Sky over the last, I guess now it's been um four years since we first launched. um We have a lot of people who wrote in secular silos for a long time, who really wrote in topics that were sort of in the defined, you know, free thought area of mine,
00:03:26
Speaker
were frequently parenting, you know, secular parenting, raising kids without religion, but also I wrote atheism for dummies, so I'm also interested in sort of, you know, atheist history and and the way it plays out in the culture.
00:03:42
Speaker
And I've always been interested in the secular mind and secular habits of thought, the way secular people tend to think and express themselves differently from religious people, even when they're not in talking about a religious topic or anything like that.
The Nature of Secular Thought
00:04:06
Speaker
that. And um Sean, Sean Hardin, who's the co founder of Only Sky, Sean and I talked about this from the beginning, that um I had the experience of coming across writers, for example, or podcasters, or whatever it is, and reading what they say, following their thoughts and just going, that's a secular person.
00:04:31
Speaker
That's a non-religious person. That's a non-theist. Even if they're not talking about anything to do with any of the typical topics, there's something about the patterns of thought that attracted me to particular writers. I mean, you can certainly, you know, somebody like Carl Sagan, there were years when I read Sagan and I had no idea what his views were on religious topics, but there's a particular habit of mind that attracted me to the way he thought.
00:05:01
Speaker
And it took me years to figure out what this how to really describe this pattern. But another example was Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote sapiens and Homo Deus and a lot of others. Yeah. And I remember reading sapiens in the beginning. And just saying, you know, again, he wasn't identifying himself in any particular way in terms of beliefs, but just saying this is a secular guy.
00:05:26
Speaker
I can just tell by the way, not not by the topics, but by the way his mind is working and the way he's expressing himself as is a secular person. um So what we wanted to do was bring a lot of creators together and just sort of explore that that idea. And what to cut to the chase, what i what I really think I discovered is that there is a questing kind of attitude to the secular mind. it's There's a feeling that it's following ideas wherever they lead. And when I would read religious writers, including a lot of religious writers that I enjoyed reading,
00:06:01
Speaker
there is a there tends to be a kind of expression that is protecting a conclusion. So it's a more cautious way of going out into the world. it's it's um it it has There are certain bounds that aren't going to be crossed, that aren't going to be challenged and that sort of thing. And so there seems to be this careful building of a world that is um consonant with the concluded person already has. And I i think that's that's what I finally discovered I so loved about the secular mind is that questing nature, the feeling that it really is willing to go wherever it goes.
Challenges and Focus of OnlySky
00:06:45
Speaker
So we wanted to apply that to um the whole spectrum of human experience and really get outside of the
00:06:51
Speaker
the sort of the narrow bounds that so many projects including projects we've been involved in we're in talking about religion and church state issues and and you know.
00:07:05
Speaker
why the the gospels contradict each other and you know, all these sorts of things. um but But really talk about the world more broadly. So in the initial iteration, it was a um ah venture capital project, we had investors, we had a large, you know, staff of contributors and editors and so on. And it was just a ball. It was just so much fun to be a part of that. But um That year, 2022,
00:07:38
Speaker
was a really horrific year for online media. It was a ah very difficult year. Investment dried up and BuzzFeed and Vice and a whole lot of other online outfits um either closed down or shut down 15% of their newsroom or whatever it was. It was just an absolute collapse. 200 digital media companies went under in the course of a year.
00:08:06
Speaker
and yeah we were no exception, our capital dried up and we were sort of in the in the in the wilderness for about a year. We went down to a small staff of just four riders and kept the project going for that year. But it was just um earlier this year that that was sort of running its course and we needed to go a new direction And we came up with the idea of narrowing the focus instead of the whole human experience. We wanted to do something that I have missed in ah discourse since I was a kid. When I was a kid, one of the things that was talked about a lot was the future. right ah Talking about what is life going to be like
00:09:01
Speaker
25 years from now, 50 years, 100 years, 500 years from now, 1000 years from now. um That was something that was constantly going on in fiction and nonfiction in vivid detail. And I felt like more recently, that's missing, aside from sort of post apocalyptic dystopian ah fiction, that sort of thing which which we do great, zombies and and whatever.
00:09:32
Speaker
There's a blank out there. There's not a real conception of what's the world gonna be like 50 years from now, except for climate change. It's gonna be climate change, it's gonna be horrible, but what's it gonna be like on a daily basis? What's it gonna be like to be a person on earth 50 years, 100 years from now yeah in in very specific ways? And that's what I wanted to explore. So i so we relaunched With a new domain and a new focus and it's been wonderful. It's a, it's more of a passion project. Now it's not a we're we're not investor funded or anything like that were remember funded. We've got subscribers who were very appreciative of it
00:10:16
Speaker
um But it's mostly a passion project, it's a labor of love to get the secular mind trained on the future and describing um all the possible futures that are ahead of us. Yeah well you nailed it because I mean it it does exactly focus on that and and it does have those same undertones that you were speaking of that is you know secular minded. You could tell that the writers that are that are approaching this are approaching it from whatever it is, that that that essence that we have as as secularists and and humanists, for the most part, um that's coming through in the writing. um ah And in the one thing that I'm going to draw your attention to that you probably maybe have thought of in passing, but when I started reading ah New Only Sky articles about the future, I was thinking, it reminds me of in Raising Freethinkers, when you talked about
00:11:05
Speaker
um your son being bored in church. And then you told them to imagine that he was coming back into the past to witness a ritual from like the olden days. um Or if he was an if from ah an alien civilization and coming to witness, you know, something on earth from the past. and I thought that was kind of a neat connection between the two. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I hadn't made that connection. But that's that's terrific. That was ah I love that story because it really worked. It yeah got him you know seeing that seeing church like as if he was an anthropologist. Yeah, and I do that a lot with my kids now. I i use a lot of the techniques that you've brought up in your in your previous writing, like the nine best practices for raising free thinkers. And I really liked the idea that you came up with like the small F free thinker because we're not trying to indoctrinate, we're not trying to place a label on them, it's just allow them to
00:11:54
Speaker
experience things and just come to conclusions on their own like we you and I did, right? And we kind of built our own foundation from that. um The one thing. yeah Well, yeah, that's exactly right. It's yeah, I wouldn't I so enjoy the fact I so appreciate the fact that I was allowed to do that on my own. You know, I've i've written about that that my parents kind of let me run.
00:12:16
Speaker
I wouldn't want to deprive my kids of that. I agree. Yeah, exactly. And I think you and I had that same parallel. My mom accidentally raised me as a free thinker. And I think you've said similar things about your parents just accidentally doing all the best things without knowing it. And I always tell people my mom did it without reading the book because the book wasn't written because you broke the book and it was way after I was a kid. So what is your favorite like your personal favorite article from ah so far from Only Sky and why is it one of your own? I'm just kidding. It can be one of your own or it can be from another writer. um Before you answer that though, I'm just gonna mention that my favorite article um is a recent one and it was the one that you wrote about the future of music.
00:13:00
Speaker
And I think that's just something so cool to think about. Because like you said, in the article, like when we think about science fiction, it's always beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. You know, like that type of thing. But like, what is it actually going to be? Because even through every generation, the the new generation hates the old generation's music, or at least has some type of disdain for it. So that's my favorite article that I've read recently, because I just really, that really spoke to me. So well what is your favorite article?
00:13:27
Speaker
Oh, I appreciate that. That's one I really enjoyed writing because it's a, I was a music professor for years and that's something that I've thought about quite a lot, you know, and it's something that never gets talked about, never gets, you know, I talked about the fact that Star Trek completely cops out of it. It's just awful. They say, you know, oh, you know, Data listens to Mozart and and Picard likes, you know, ah um likes Bach or whatever it is.
00:13:54
Speaker
um I thought, what a terrible cop out what to try. um So that's great. I'm i'm glad you like that one. So I am a member of only sky and I'd be here. That's awesome. Thank you for just providing that service. um And what are some of the benefits of being a paid member?
Membership Benefits Discussion
00:14:14
Speaker
Well, we distribute um among our articles. There are some articles that are available to anybody in the public. There are some articles that are available to free members as well. All you have to do is give your email address and then you get our newsletter and you have access to that second tier of articles. And then there are some articles that are just for paid members.
00:14:40
Speaker
um that ah is a thank you to people who are in the paid membership level. The other major benefit is paid members have the comment section open to them. you Anybody can read the comments, but if you want to actually contribute a comment, you have to be a paid member. So that's just one of the perks that we held out so that we can ah keep the lights on.
00:15:08
Speaker
For sure, and and I haven't commented myself and on anything yet, but I am enjoying the the additional content. um And also just, I feel a benefit is you know providing that that monetary supplementation that you guys need to continue. I just feel it's a super important thing, especially at this day and age with misinformation and everything, just having a platform that's sharing you know maybe about the future, but it's about but our potential future. It's something that's probably going to happen in some way.
00:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's um I appreciate you bringing that up. it's um It is still a difficult time for online media. And so to be able to continue something like this, to to keep bringing it forward, this is our currently our only source of revenue. So yeah, thank you for doing that and thanks for mentioning that because it's it is what keeps us going.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. um And are you thinking about affiliating with another group? I know previously you had partnered with American atheists. I'm just wondering if something like that is in the works or if you're planning on doing that again in the future. It's not in the works that I know of. Sean is Sean is the business brain of the operation. I do the creative side, ah but he's always got 10 ideas and 10 things going on at once. So it's possible that he's exploring something, but not not that I'm aware of at this point. Okay. Maybe he'll write an article about a future event where you are affiliated with. Yeah. yeah um Okay. So um who are some notable names at OnlySky to watch out for?
00:16:49
Speaker
Well, we've got Adam Lee who has been Yeah, Adam's fantastic Adam has been blogging in the secular space for gosh now I think it's been a 21 years. Wow. um At least 21 years. I know that he's been going. And just a, you know, an absolute fountain of ideas and creativity. I think I've even sent you like personal messages to say Adam is great. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. um There's also John O'Pierce in in the UK. Also goes by the name a tippling philosopher.
00:17:33
Speaker
ah okay John does a lot of great work. um We have Becky Garrison, ah who is in the previous Only Sky. She was on our taboo beat. She did a lot about psychedelics and um kind of the legalization fight for ps psychedelics.
00:17:57
Speaker
um Yeah, and then we just have a whole lot of individual contributors who, Phil Zuckerman. Oh, I love Phil too. Just, you know, Phil's just fantastic. Phil, I don't know if, I never know if anybody knows anything about Phil. People know him sort of as a writer and all this sort of thing. Phil is one of the greatest people on earth. If you've ever had a chance to hear him speak or anything like that, he's one of the most lovely fun, ah funny, intelligent, warm human beings there is. i yeah i would He lives in Los Angeles. I would give anything to sort of live around the block from Phil Zuckerman and and go get a beer once in a while. But anyway, he's he's also um
00:18:47
Speaker
he's a professor of sociology and an assistant dean oh associate dean at pitzer college in california so he's an extremely busy guy especially right now and so whenever he's able to give us a piece i'm so grateful i'm i'm totally thrilled with it but uh yeah so uh phil's a great contributor as well so yeah it's um ah It's a smaller crew than it was, but every once in a while we also get individuals who will sort of give us a one-off. Right, for sure. um And I've read Phil's book, What It Means To Be Moral. That's an excellent ah book. And I can't remember, there's another one I read of his as well. um And i felt I felt like that was actually maybe um aimed at the future, and I can't remember what the name of it is. But um do you still have Captain Cassidy there with you as well? or
00:19:39
Speaker
She has gone ah um We have some of her archived pieces from the previous site. Okay that We're future future oriented. So once in a while we bring some of those up But she's got her own deal going now at roll to disbelieve dot.com which is her yeah, that's her Her own website and she just you know, she's got the most fantastic sensibility and the most just encyclopedic knowledge of the Southern Baptist Convention in particular. there I don't think there's a there's a more knowledgeable person in the world about the ins and outs of that strange strange place. Yeah, I would say that a lot of her articles are kind of down to earth, like a lot of people, even if you're just ah a lay person, you can understand what she's talking about. Yeah, down to earth, funny, original. Yeah, she's just she's just phenomenal. she I had the
00:20:36
Speaker
um You know, I was at Patheos before Only Sky with the non-religious blogs there before.
Contributions and Collaborations
00:20:44
Speaker
With Hemant and everybody. Yeah, before it got it got bought out by the Mormon Church. Yeah, I heard that. Yeah, and and we they didn't even tell us. We didn't know. We were there for a year with our paychecks being written by the Mormon Church, and we didn't know that. Oh, wow. But anyway.
00:21:02
Speaker
But I had the yeah pleasure of bringing Cassidy in to Patheos. She had her independent blog, World to Disbelieve. And then so I worked with her, gosh, eight years or something like that altogether. just ah And and you know she would she would turn out a 4,000 word piece just in a day. absolutely Incredibly well researched, incredibly well, you know, deeply linked and everything. wow That makes me very envious. Yeah, oh, me too. And it's and just written like a house of fire, you know. I mean, this is this is one of the great things too. it's um
00:21:41
Speaker
ah We've got so many great people in, I mean in free thought, in in humanism in general. We've just got a lot of really creative people, really thoughtful, those questing minds, you know.
Cultural Fascinations and Reflections
00:21:58
Speaker
So it's it's really been a um privilege of mine to work with so many of them.
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. Speaking of the Mormon Church, there's a certain hotel chain that's owned by them as well. And I was staying and in a room with my kids one time and they pulled out a book, they said, oh, what's this? I'm like, oh, it's probably the Bible. And then I look, I'm like, the Book of Mormon? Yeah, it's very strange, but yeah. Yeah, Marriott, right? Is that the one? Yep. So how can someone contribute and submit a piece to OnlySky?
00:22:27
Speaker
Oh, um, if you write, you know, gosh, I always, I keep getting this wrong. I realized that I was telling, uh, giving people the wrong, um, email address. Uh, what was it? Trash bin at only skydive.com. Um, which um I, uh, I can never remember if it's plural or singular when I'm actually telling people, um,
00:22:57
Speaker
singular ah editor at only s.ky so it's only s.ky is the new abbreviated domain ah ah but yeah if if somebody has ah an idea for an article to pitch anything that is dealing with possible futures um on a broad range of topics, broad range of topics, that's the place to send it. Awesome. So pause this podcast, rewind it a little bit and listen to that email address and send in your submissions. Perfect. That'd be great. Awesome. Are you optimistic about our future, short-term and long-term? Ooh, the human future? The human future.
00:23:48
Speaker
Boy, you think I'd have a ready answer for that. um Am I optimistic? um Okay, the answer is no. But the fact is, i'm I'm with, yeah, so Vonnegut said, I think he was talking about it in terms of the evolution of the brain. He said the more he learns about the evolution of the human brain, ah the more he marvels at the fact that we aren't a smoking heap already. That how is it that we have survived and you know built ah cities and written symphonies and and you know how is it that we haven't reduced the planet to a smoking heap already? So um so basically my feeling is um if we haven't
00:24:39
Speaker
yet, then maybe we won't. You know, I i tend to the pessimistic um because of what we are. But on the other hand, gosh, darn it, we keep surviving. and We keep managing. And we've gotten through some, you know, some horrific tight spots. I mean, I think it's going to end up being, you know, if if anything, it could end up being a comet.
00:25:03
Speaker
as as much as ah as much as human stupidity because you know we just live in an absolutely incredible illusion of safety just just in universal terms. it's We're in in this bubble of of safety that is no by no means guaranteed.
00:25:26
Speaker
so Anyway, who knows? Yeah, exactly. And and I mean, you brought up in your writings before, too, that the the older we get, the more we realize our mortality. um And it's it sucks. You know, I want to live forever. It would be amazing to do that. um But the you know, the fact of reality is that we return to where we came from. So it's ah you know, it's sad, but We just got to live our best life the way it is now, right? Exactly. And the fact is, I can i can make a parallel of that to the human race. If you really think of, you know because one of the um one of the realizations that you come to at some point is that the day after you die,
00:26:10
Speaker
The world will still be here. The world will still be going on. And there's something comforting about that. It's that everything doesn't end. You just end. And then the world continues. Well, I'm convinced enough by the numbers that the galaxy and the universe are teeming with life. So even if our species, our planet, winks out of existence, it's not the end of everything. It's just the end of us. Yeah.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And that there's some beauty in that too, right? Yeah, yeah, I think so. um Okay, well, since this podcast is under the umbrella of Humanist Canada, what is your favourite fact about Canada? Oh my gosh, my favourite fact about Canada at the moment is the Maritimes. and And I know that's actually not even what they're typically called anymore, but um I ah have become enamored of the idea of moving there for a period of time, three months, six months, whatever. um And, ah you know, whether it's ah Labrador or Nova Scotia, that Newfoundland, whatever, and just experiencing the remoteness and the
00:27:29
Speaker
the uh the culture that is uh you know like uh the the dialect of uh of english that is um almost incomprehensible the new fee accent they call it oh is okay there i didn't even know the the the name for it but um yeah that's that's one of um that's one of many things is my current fascination with um the Maritime Provinces. um Our honeymoon was in the San Juan Islands of the U.S. right on the the border in British Columbia, and we loved ah Victoria and Vancouver. you know that That whole area is absolutely fantastic. um I am dying to get to Montreal.
00:28:18
Speaker
ah My daughter is fluent in French, ah and we would love love to take her up there. She's been to France a couple of times, but she hasn't been to Montreal. oh um So yeah, i'm ah I'm a great fan of Canada. Well, if you do move that way, just let me know and I'll come visit. My sister lives in Nova Scotia. so Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I'll let you know. Okay, awesome. Well, I've only got five
Dale's Work and Call to Action
00:28:44
Speaker
minutes left here. So I'm just going to ask you, other than your work at OnlySky, what has been your favorite project or book to work on?
00:28:52
Speaker
Oh, um you know what? I'd have to say it's another project I'm involved in right now. It's the most meaningful work I think I've had a chance to do. I am working for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit in the United States that works on best practices for election administration. Oh, that's awesome. It's definitely needed.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's also specifically devoted to countering misinformation and disinformation in the election cycles now. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, so it's, it's a fantastic outfit, a fantastic organization run by a guy named David Becker, who is the election law expert for CBS News. And yeah one of the top election law experts in the United States. So it's just very gratifying work to be involved in right now. It's exhausting right now. yeah at work ah all All the things we're doing, but we we work with a lot of Secretaries of State and election officials around the country.
00:30:01
Speaker
on best practices, but also right now on protecting them, ah protecting them from threats and harassment that they are constantly under. so I really like that. Yeah, that's that's very close to my heart right now. Well, keep us all posted on that because that is something that's definitely needed and just incredible. so um Okay, well, we've only got a couple of minutes left, so I'm just going to ask where else listeners can find your work?
00:30:29
Speaker
ah You can also find my work by going to dalemagowan.com, and I've got a number of links. I haven't kept it up very well, but I think those links still take you everywhere you need to go. Or if you just search my name on Amazon, you'll come up with with my books. Awesome. And you know, I'm a huge fan of your books. um your Your book in faith and in doubt definitely saved my marriage. um And you know, raising free thinkers and parenting beyond belief were definitely instrumental in the way that I've been raising my children. um And I'm constantly sharing your your your your work with my my clients that recovering from religion um with with
00:31:08
Speaker
friends and and family. And it's just been an amazing, um amazing contribution that you've given to us in the secular community. And I just want to thank you personally for for all that you've done for for that. Oh, I really appreciate that. Thanks for saying that. Yeah, absolutely. And I really appreciate you being here today. This has just been an amazing conversation and I can't wait for everyone to hear it at Humanist Canada and beyond.
00:31:32
Speaker
Great. Thanks very much. I appreciate the invitation. It's really good to chat with you. Yeah. Awesome. So we'll we'll chat later. All right. Take care. Bye.
00:31:43
Speaker
Thank you for listening to The Voice of Canadian Humanism. We would like to especially thank our members and donors who make our work possible. If you feel that this is the type of programming that belongs in the public conversation, please visit us at HumanistCanada.ca and become a member and or donate. You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.