Transcript
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.
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.
Speaker: Welcome to the conversation. Okay, I'm your host Steve Jakadis 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.
Speaker: He was awarded the title of Harvard Humanist 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.
Speaker: 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. 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.
Speaker: I appreciate that. 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 a digital platform. It's a website for ah secular creators 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. But that's always been the core of it. It's been getting a lot of good secular thinkers together, creatives, ah but having them think outside of the typical limits of secular topics.
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. And I think I have a guess on this, but what is the official meaning behind the name?
Speaker: ah The official meaning is it's, it's an echo of John Lennon's imagine. when so thought Yes. Above us, only sky. Yeah, that's perfect. It's that, 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?
Speaker: ah Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. um My earlier work and the, uh, 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.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: We're frequently parenting, you know, secular parenting, raising kids without religion, but also um 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.
Speaker: ah And I've always been interested in the secular mind and secular habits of thought, the way secular ah 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 and um Sean Sean Harden, who's the co founder of only sky Sean and i talked about this from the beginning that. um
Speaker: I had the experience of coming across writers, for example, or podcasters or whatever it is and. ah Reading what they say, following their thoughts and just going that's a secular person.
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 ah habit of mine that attracted me to the way he thought.
Speaker: And it took me years to figure out what this how to really describe this pattern. But ah 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 ah 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.
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.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: And when I would read religious writers, including a lot of religious writers that I enjoyed reading, there is a there tends to be a kind of expression that is protecting a conclusion.
Speaker: 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 conclusion person already has.
Speaker: um 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. So we wanted to apply that to um the whole spectrum of human experience and really get outside of the the sort of the narrow bounds that so many ah projects, including projects we'd been involved in, were in talking about religion and church state issues and, and you know,
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 a. 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.
Speaker: ah But. um That year, 2022,
Speaker: was um a really a 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. and 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 writers and kept the project going for that year.
Speaker: But it was just um earlier this year that ah that was sort of running its course, and we needed to go a new direction.
Speaker: and uh we came up with the idea of narrowing the focus instead of the whole human experience uh we wanted to do something that i have um 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 uh talking about what is life going to be like 25 years from now, 50 years, 100 years, 500 years from now, a thousand years from now. um
Speaker: That was something that was constantly going on in fiction and nonfiction in vivid detail. And I felt like more recently that's missing.
Speaker: Aside from sort of post-apocalyptic dystopian ah fiction, that sort of thing which which we do great zombies and and whatever.
Speaker: um there's a blank out there. There's not a real conception of what's the world going to be like 50 years from now, except for climate change. It's going to be climate change. It's going to horrible. But what's it going to be like on a daily basis? what's it going to be like to be a person on Earth 50 years, 100 years from now yeah in in very specific ways?
Speaker: And that's what I wanted to explore. So i so we relaunched with a new domain and a new focus and um it's been ah wonderful it's a it's more of a passion project now it's not a we're we're not ah investor funded or anything like that we're remember funded we've got subscribers who were very appreciative of 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 ah um all the possible futures that are ahead of us.
Speaker: Yeah, well, you nailed it. Because, I mean, 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...
Speaker: whatever it is that that that essence that we have as a secularists and and humanists for the most part that's coming through in the writing. Awesome. And and 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 New Only Sky articles about the future, I was thinking it reminds me of in Raising Freethinkers when you talked about um your son being bored in church, and then you told him 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 from ah an alien civilization and coming to witness, you know, something on earth from the past. And I thought that was kind of ah a neat connection between the two.
Speaker: Oh, that's great. Yeah, I hadn't made that connection, but that's, that's terrific. That was, so ah I love that story because it really worked. It it got him ah you know seeing that seeing church like as if he was an anthropologist.
Speaker: Yeah. And I do that a lot with my kids now. I i use a lot of the techniques that you that you've brought up in your in your previous writing, like the nine best practices for raising freethinkers. And I really like the idea that you came up with like the small F freethinker, because we're not trying to indoctrinate. We're not trying to place a label on them. It's just allow them to 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.
Speaker: um The one thing. 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.
Speaker: I wouldn't want to deprive my kids of that. Yeah, exactly. And I think you and I have 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, you know. um yeah 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 after I was a kid. so um So what is your favorite like your personal favorite article 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 can be from another writer. Before you answer that, though, I'm just going to mention that my favorite article um is a recent one. And it was the one that you wrote about the future of music. 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, 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 read really that really spoke to me. So well what is your favorite article?
Speaker: Oh, I appreciate that. That's one I really enjoyed writing because it's I was a music professor for years. And ah 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.
Speaker: um I thought, what a terrible cop out. What? Try. um So that's great. i'm I'm glad you like that one. So I am a member of Only Sky.
Speaker: And i be yeah yeah that's awesome. Thank you for just providing that service. um And what are some of the benefits of being a paid member? ah Well, we distribute um among our articles. um There are some articles that are available to anybody in the public.
Speaker: There are some articles that are available to um 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.
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. 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 keep the lights on.
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 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 the our potential future. It's something that's probably going to happen in some way.
Speaker: Yeah, that's um I appreciate you bringing that up. it's um 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 it is what keeps us going.
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.
Speaker: It's not in the works that I know of. ah Sean is... ah 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.
Speaker: 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?
Speaker: ah Well, we've got um 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...
Speaker: 21 years? Wow. At least 21 years I know that he's been going. And just ah you know an absolute fountain of ideas and creativity. think I've even sent you like personal messages to say Adam is great. Oh, yeah, right. yeah Yeah. um There's also John O. Pierce in in the UK, also goes by the name tippling philosopher.
Speaker: Okay. ah Yeah. 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 um psychedelics and um kind of the legalization fight for psychedelics.
Speaker: um Yeah. And then we just have a whole lot of um individual contributors who Phil Zuckerman. I love Phil too. Just, ah you know, Phil's just fantastic. Phil, I don't know if, never know if anybody knows anything about Phil. People know him sort of as a writer and all this sort of thing. yeah Phil is one of the the greatest people on earth. If if you've ever ah had a chance to hear him speak or anything like that, he's one of the most lovely fun, ah ah funny, intelligent, warm human beings there is. i Yeah, I would... ah 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
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 yeah, so Phil's a great contributor as well. So yeah, it's... um So 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.
Speaker: Right, for sure. And I've read Phil's book, What It Means to Be Moral. That's an excellent yeah book. And I can't remember, there's another one I read of his as well. 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...
Speaker: ah She has gone, ah um we have some of her archived pieces from the previous site okay ah that were future future oriented. So once in a while we bring some of those up, but she's got her own deal going now at RollToDisbelieve.com, which is her, yeah, that's her ah ah her own website. And she just, ah yeah 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. but 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 where she's what she's talking about.
Speaker: Yeah, down to earth, funny, original. Yeah, she's just she's just phenomenal. she I had the um you know i was at patheos uh before uh only sky with the uh non-religious blogs there before with hement and everybody yeah before it got uh 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 did not know um but uh anyway
Speaker: Dr. But I had the pleasure of bringing Cassidy in to Pat the house. She had her independent blog role to disbelieve and then So I worked with her gosh eight years or something like that all together just ah and and you know she would she would turn out a 4000 word piece just in a day. absolutely incredibly wellresearched Incredibly well incredibly well, 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.
Speaker: um i mean, this is this is one of the great things too. It's... um 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 ah really creative people, ah really thoughtful, those questing minds, you know. ah So it's it's really been a um privilege of mine to work with so many of them.
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 in 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?
Speaker: Yeah, it's very strange. Yeah, Marriott, right? Yeah, that's the one. So how can someone contribute and submit a piece to OnlySky? Oh, um if you write, you know, gosh, I always I keep getting this wrong. I realized that I was telling ah giving people the wrong um email address.
Speaker: ah What was it? Trashbin at only sky.com. I I can never remember if it's plural or singular when I'm actually telling people.
Speaker: um Singular ah editor at only s dot K. y So it's only s dot K. Y yeah is the is the new abbreviated domain.
Speaker: ah But yeah, if ah if somebody has ah an idea for an article to pitch anything that is dealing with possible futures. um on a broader range of topics a broader range broad range of topics, of topics, that's the place to send it.
Speaker: 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. um Are you optimistic about our future, short term and long term?
Speaker: Ooh, the human future? The human future.
Speaker: um Boy, you'd 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.
Speaker: ah 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 yet, then maybe we won't.
Speaker: 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. 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.
Speaker: as as much as ah as much as human stupidity because you 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.
Speaker: so Anyway, who knows? Yeah, exactly. And and i mean, you've brought up in your writings before too, that the the older we get, the more we realize our mortality. And it's, it sucks. You know, I, I want to live forever. It would be amazing to do that. um But the, you know, the fact of reality is that we returned 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.
Speaker: Exactly. And the fact is I can, I can, um, make a parallel of that to the human race. If you really think of, ah 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,
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.
Speaker: So even if our species, our planet ah winks out of existence, it's not the end of everything. It's just the end of us. Yeah.
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 favorite fact about Canada?
Speaker: Oh, my gosh, my favorite fact about Canada at the moment is the Maritimes. ah and And I know that's actually not even what they're typically called anymore. But I um i uh have become enamored of the idea of moving there for ah period of time three months six months whatever um and uh you know whether it's uh labrador or nova scotia that newfoundland whatever uh uh and just experiencing the remoteness and the um the
Speaker: uh the culture that is you know like uh the the dialect of uh of english that is um almost incomprehensible the new fee they call it oh is okay there i didn't even know the the the name for it but uh um yeah that's that's one of um that's one of many things is my current fascination with uh um the maritime provinces. um our honeymoon was in the San Juan islands and we, uh, of, uh, the U S right on the the border in British Columbia.
Speaker: And we loved, uh, Victoria and Vancouver, you know, that, that whole area is absolutely fantastic. Um, I, uh, am dying to get to montreal my daughter is fluent in french oh wow and uh we would love uh love to take her uh up there she's been to france a couple of times but she hasn't been to montreal oh so uh yeah i'm a 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
Speaker: Oh, fantastic. Yeah, I'll let you know. Okay, awesome. Well, I've only got five minutes left here. So I'm just going to ask you, other than you work at Only Sky, what has been your favorite project or book to work on?
Speaker: Oh, um you know what? I'd have to say it's another project I'm involved in right now. me ah 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.
Speaker: Oh, that's awesome. It's definitely needed. Yeah, it's also specifically devoted to countering misinformation and disinformation in the election. Perfect now.
Speaker: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So it's it's a fantastic outfit, a fantastic organization run by guy named David Becker, who is the election law expert for CBS News.
Speaker: And yeah one of the top election law experts in the United States. ah So it's just very gratifying work to be involved in right now. It's exhausting right now. yeah we ah ah All the things we're doing, but we we work with a lot of secretaries of state and election officials around the country on best practices, but also right now on protecting them, protecting them from threats and harassment that they are constantly under. So I really like that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's ah 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, OK, well, we've only got a couple of minutes left, so I'm just going to ask where else listeners can find your work.
Speaker: ah You can also find my work ah by going to dalemcgowan.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.
Speaker: 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 Freethinkers 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 at Recovering from Religion, with with friends and and family. And it's just been an amazing, 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.
Speaker: 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.
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.
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.
Speaker: You can also like and subscribe to us on social media at Humanist Canada. We'll see you next time.
