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Heard Bad Religion’s Greg Graffin on NPR’s Here and Now? Get tickets now, while they last!

Greg Graffin has made his name as a rock star science professor. But he’s got one thing Steven Pinker doesn’t: a record deal.

…And the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy’s 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award! Since creating his punk rock band Bad Religion in 1980, Graffin has been recording and touring, boasting such hits as “How Could Hell be Any Worse” and “American Jesus.” Holding a PhD from Cornell in evolutionary biology, Graffin teaches life science courses on Darwin and natural selection at UCLA when not on the Warped Tour or shooting a video. On Saturday April 26th, Graffin will play an acoustic concert and speak about his faith–not in God, but in Humanism.

If you’re a Bad Religion fan, a Humanist, atheist or agnostic, or just interested in science and religion, or rock music, don’t miss this unique evening!

Date: Saturday, April 26, 2008
Time: 8:00pm - 10:00pm
Location: The Memorial Church, Harvard

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Get tickets at the Harvard Box Office! $5 students, $10 public.

For more info see Bad Religion’s videos at mtv.com; Graffin’s book, “Is Belief in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant?” (with Preston Jones); or any of the 14 studio albums that have made Bad Religion one of the most successful and influential punk bands of all time.

Winners Don’t Punish

“Put simply, winners don’t punish,” says co-author David G. Rand of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Department of Systems Biology. “Punishment can lead to a downward spiral of retaliation, with destructive outcomes for everybody involved. The people with the highest total payoffs do not use costly punishment.”

David G. Rand is a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s Department of Systems Biology. He is a member of the Program of Evolutionary Dynamics, where he studies human cooperation and altruism. His research combines mathematical and computational methods with behavior experiments to give a robust understand of the evolution of cooperation. It’s a happy fact of life that in most situations, it pays to be nice!

David is an active member of the Harvard Humanist Graduate Community, as well as the Secular Student’s Alliance Speakers Bureau. Outside of academics, David also likes to write folk-punk and electro songs. Most winter and summer breaks you can find him riding in a van, playing shows up and
down the East coast under the name Robot Goes Here. You can hear audio and see a music video at www.robotgoeshere.com. Impressive acheivements in science and rock music– does anyone sense a theme for this month?

Read more about David’s article, “Winners Don’t Punish,” in the Harvard Gazette. And listen to David discuss the piece on NPR’s “All Things Considered“.

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We’re delighted for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and Humanism in general to be featured for the first time ever on public radio’s biggest and best program about religion. “Speaking of Faith” is public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. Each week, award-winning host Krista Tippett probes the myriad ways in which religious impulses inform every aspect of life and culture, nationally and globally.

This week’s episode, titled “A New Humanism,” is described as follows:

In a recent Pew poll, 16 percent of Americans identified themselves as “unaffiliated” — atheist, agnostic, or most prominently “nothing in particular.” Greg Epstein, a Humanist chaplain at Harvard, described himself that way until he discovered the tradition of humanism. He is passionate about articulating an atheist identity that is not driven by a stance against religion but by positive ethical beliefs and actions.

The story weaves Epstein’s personal and philosophical reflections on Humanist history and community together with readings and musical selections from other voices that help articulate a centuries-old tradition of positive atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism. Another great feature of the story is that Speaking of Faith’s blog has begun a series of posts exploring different aspects of Humanism in greater depth, such as ancient Epicurean philosophy, or the idea of modern literature as a source of inspiration, a kind of “Canon” for the non-religious.

To listen to the episode online or for live broadcast stations and times, visit speakingoffaith.publicradio.org

CHRISTIANITY VS. ATHEISM?

A Student-Moderated Debate Between:

Dinesh D’Souza

leading conservative Christian intellectual and author of What’s So Great About Christianity; AND

Dan Barker

head of the US’s largest atheist organization, and author of Losing Faith in Faith.

**FREE/OPEN TO THE PUBLIC: NO TICKETS OR RESERVED SEATS.**

Arrive early to ensure best quality seating!

The purpose of the course: to strengthen our ability to inspire compassion from others and to respond compassionately to others and to ourselves. The intent is to remind us about what we already know-about how we humans were meant to relate to one another-and to assist us in living in a way that concretely manifests this knowledge.

The course will be taught by Margo Woods, D.Sc. and Carolyn Nalbandian, Ph.D. and will take place in Grays Hall-5 in the Harvard Quad from 7-9PM on March 27, April 3 and April 10th. As with the Voluntary Simplicity Course, call 781-646-6059 to register and reserve parking pass; or come to first session.

Topics to be explored include:

• the intention to communicate
• how to separate observation from evaluation and judgment
• our human needs that drive our feelings
• empathic listening
• the rewards of being truly “present”
• the power of being “heard”
• the difference between needs and strategies for meeting those needs
• the source of anger and its resolution
• Giving effective compliments

Join us to learn the background of this communication philosophy and start to practice it. It can change your life.

I can remember the response I got from a fellow grad student Humanist at Harvard last year when I told him that yes, I was a Humanist from the Divinity School – “Are you here to put us on some kind of black list or something?” It was around then that the idea of organizing a Harvard Divinity School Humanists group began to look pretty good to me. We Div School Humanists are something of anomaly, even for Humanists, as people studying religion while seemingly stepping away from that lifestyle personally. Still, as someone who studies religion and public life, I wanted to see how we Humanists could adopt a public life for ourselves within the dynamic interreligious atmosphere of Harvard Divinity School. When one of my fellow HDS Humanists suggested that we fully integrate ourselves into the spiritual life of the school by leading one of the Noon Services offered by a different religious groups at HDS each week, I was immediately all in. What better way to engage ourselves in interreligious dialogue than to open our practices for public experience?

Of course, figuring out what exactly those practices were was a different matter. The first steps were easy – shifting the service locale from the school chapel to the community room, informing our coordinators that we would need coffee during the service, not just after – steps that were only too natural. It was only when we sat down to actually plan the service that we ended up staring at each other (over coffee, of course) with nothing to say, for the first time in the short history of our group. The first thing that we all agreed on was that we had barely anything in common. There was our resident hard-core atheist, or, as he prefers to describe himself, the “friendly” atheist, who still manages to piss off our religious compatriots in class pretty regularly. There was the self-proclaimed atheist “by faith,” the one who has been prohibited from mentioning care ethics in any of our future meetings. Our Jeffersonian Deist was the one who had suggested the service at all; he balks at calling himself a Humanist but he’s come around. Then there was my poor roommate, raised Catholic but falling away, dragged along to these meetings in which she wonders how she got there –what do these loud men have to do with her spiritual, naturalist love of the world? Finally there’s me, the Unitarian Universalist agnostic and alleged group leader, feeling like I was herding cats most of the time.

Yet the answer to our dilemma was right there, staring us in the face – our very diversity was a unique conception of community. For what sort of community are we, anyway? Held together by mere disbelief, drastically different from any other religious community, which are generally held together by belief. Can we really be a loving, nurturing community with so little in common? We decided that what we wanted to share most was how we hang together despite the odds – we wanted to show the broader Harvard community that we Humanists are diverse, yet still somehow unified. Moreover, we wanted to push our outside community to examine their own community lives – what held them together, what pushed them apart, how communities define our deepest selves.

The service itself was simultaneously an exercise in discomfort and yet the most natural thing in the world. With none of us accustomed to speaking “worshipfully” about our spiritual journeys, we nonetheless elected to open the service with sentences of belief – each of us wrote several sentences expressing the ways Humanism reflects us. For there are few of us who are totally comfortable with the term; we find other words better suited to describing our innermost beliefs. However, there is something common – communal, I daresay – that we find in adopting the term, and so we attempted to articulate the reasons why for our audience. Then, two of our braver members spoke at more length – our hardcore atheist and spiritual agnostic, just to demonstrate our diversity. Two other members of our group shared readings that spoke to their own Humanism. Finally, we asked the broader community to join us in examining their own communities and how we define community at the Divinity School through a writing and then spoken meditation.

We chose an atypical format, even for eclectic HDS Noon Services. We set the room up in a circle of tables, so that we could see the many human faces in the room – facing in, focusing on each other and talking about our shared experience. This interactiveness came as a surprise to many, but when is Humanism about complacent listening? We are thinkers; we are doers, and we demanded the same from our visitors. I was so pleased to see several faces from the broader Harvard Humanist community present. I wanted to share this unique Divinity School experience – the opportunity for us non-believers to express our belief in something: in each other.

In the end, the experience was gratifying. I apologized to my fellow HDS Humanists for forcing them into an uncomfortable situation, but even the hardcore atheist said the experience was positive and affirming. We were – dare I say it – proud of ourselves and of each other, proud to be a community. As I muse over these final reflections, I realize that the very function of Humanism is to provide community. Although we are often barely united in common disbelief, we are also united by the human call to companionship. We can disbelieve alone, we don’t need each other for that. We can be moral agents alone, as well, if we try. However, as long as we continue to seek each other out, we will be Humanists in the true sense, and we will keep working together to define that ever-evolving term.

***
Mary Ellen Giess is a second year Masters student at Harvard Divinity School. She studies religion in public life, including religion and government. She plans to pursue a career educating about their intricate relationship.

Don’t miss a true punk-rock philosopher perform and speak about his life as a humanist musician and scientist! Greg Graffin, the lead singer and songwriter for seminal punk band Bad Religion, will receive the 2008 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism. Graffin, who is also a life sciences professor at UCLA and an expert in religious belief among scientists, will speak about his experience in music and science and his views on humanism in general. The award, presented last year to novelist Salman Rushdie (photos here), is sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy and Harvard Secular Society. Graffin will follow his acceptance speech with an acoustic performance and a question and answer session. Tickets are available now from the Harvard Box Office: $5 for students, $10 for the general public.

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Since forming Bad Religion in 1980 while still in high school, Greg Graffin and Bad Religion have recorded fourteen albums and toured extensively around the world. Hits such as 1988’s Suffer and 1994’s Stranger than Fiction have kept them at the forefront of punk music for almost three decades.

Before becoming a professor at UCLA, Graffin received his PhD in Zoology from Cornell University, where he founded the Cornell Evolution Project, the first major study of the beliefs of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists regarding traditional religion, naturalism, and the philosophical implications of their scientific work. Graffin has publicly declared himself to be an atheist, and he has expressed his passionate views on faith and religion in his music while exploring them in his research.

UPDATE: Download the poster here:

Raise a glass to celebrate science on the occasion of Charles Darwin’s birthday! Free admission, appetizers and birthday cake, plus food and drink at regular prices. Guests are invited to bring toasts, rhymes, readings stories, songs, Darwin impersonations, and whatever else might add to the festivities as we honor the man who put us in our rightful, natural place. Click here for more great photos from last year’s jam-packed Darwin Day party!

Why Darwin Day?

The objective of Darwin Day Celebration is to encourage organizations and individuals to celebrate Science and Humanity every year, on, or near, February 12, Darwin’s birthday. At this juncture in history, the world has become so small and interdependent that we need a Global Celebration to promote a common bond among all people. The Darwin Day Celebration was founded on the premise that science, like music, is an international language that speaks to all people in very similar ways. Charles Darwin is a worthy symbol on which to focus, in order to build a Global Celebration of Science and Humanity that is intended to promote solidarity among all people of the earth.

(adapted from the Darwin Day Celebration website)

Co-Sponsors:

~ Center for Naturalism

~ Humanist Association of Massachusetts

~ Metro-Boston Intercollegiate Secular Coalition

Life getting too hectic? Are you always in the future and not in the present? Do you feel that your life is running you and not the reverse? No time to think about your impact on the Earth and on those around you?

Maybe it is time to rethink things.

• Read what others have said about choosing simplicity.
• Discuss the pros and cons with like-minded people and take time for some self-reflection.
• Take part in the clarification of your values and the reevaluation of how you spend your energy and time.
• Discover balance in your life to reserve time for what you cherish most.
• Explore the material and psychological distractions that prevent us from caring for the earth,
  
• Come together with others interested in acknowledging the connection between our lifestyle choices and the condition of the earth.

Join us in a 7-session course on the Harvard campus developed by the Northwest Earth Institute.

“Voluntary Simplicity”

Thursdays, 7:00PM to 9:00PM at Grays Hall-5, Harvard University (Less than a block from Harvard Square T-Station)

January 31st through March 13th, 2008

Sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard and the Ethical Society of
Boston

Open to the public:

$35.00 (includes manual)
Harvard Students: $25.00
Harvard Alumni: $30.00

Special discounts on PARKING Passes for nearby Felton St./Broadway Garage available on a first-come, first-served basis to a limited number of students.

Facilitated by: Dr. Margo N. Woods (PhD, Harvard School of Public Health) and Peter Ames (JD, Harvard Law School) with manual from the Northwest Earth Institute.

Call 781-646-6059 to register and reserve parking pass; or come to first session.