The bull fighter

Last
week, on the anniversary of September 11, religious organizations all over the
United States commemorated the events of last year with prayer services. But in
a modern building in a suburb of Buffalo, a small group gathered for a secular
commemoration.

            The Center for Inquiry in Amherst,
with its multiple offshoot organizations and publishing arms, is dedicated to
the idea that belief in God is not a prerequisite to being a moral person and
living a good life. The center also crusades against beliefs in nonsensical
claims — from Bigfoot to crop circles — all over the world. This bastion of
free thinking is the brainchild of one man, the organization’s founder and
chairman, Paul Kurtz.

            Kurtz, who is in his mid 70s,
launched the Center for Inquiry in 1976 while a professor of philosophy at the
State University of New York at Buffalo. He now presides over an empire that
includes Prometheus Books, which publishes about 100 volumes a year, and eight
magazines with a combined circulation of 100,000 worldwide. Aside from its
spacious, modern headquarters across from the University of Buffalo’s Amherst
Campus, the organization has a branch in the New York City area and has
recently opened a media center in Hollywood, California. Kurtz’s enterprise has
an annual budget of $11 million and 75 employees in the U.S.

            Most visible among Kurtz’s
publications are Free Inquiry (circulation: 35,000), a quarterly magazine published by the Council for
Secular Humanism, and The Skeptical
Inquirer (circulation: 50,000), a bi-monthly published by The Committee for
the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, known as CSICOP. “Free Inquiry is interested in examining
religion and dealing with ethical alternatives,” says Kurtz, who has written or
edited 35 books. “The Skeptical Inquirer is concerned with defending science and examining paranormal and fringe science
claims.”

            Just before leaving for Buffalo to
interview Kurtz, I sat down for lunch and turned on the television. There, on
10 NBC, was Crossing Over with John
Edward, an hour-long, nationally syndicated program hosted by a “medium”
who claims to communicate with the deceased loved ones of audience members. I
began by asking Kurtz about the increasing popularity of such shows.

Kurtz: John Edward is
going to be on Larry King Live tonight. I’ve been on that show three times and Larry King should know better.
But he’s only concerned with ratings. John Edward claims to communicate with
the dead — with your aunt, your uncle — and there’s no evidence that he
does that.

            City:It seemed to me he was going on a fishing
expedition in the audience.

            Kurtz: That’s right.
It’s called a cold reading and anyone can do it. Particularly in a big
audience, it will match someone. He’ll say, “I’m getting the letter H, is
anyone H?” “Oh yes, my uncle Harry.” “Oh, your uncle Harry, he died?” “Yes.”
“Something in the chest or the stomach?” “Oh, yes!” Well, most people either
have heart, lung, or stomach problems, so that’s a good hit. “He’s on the other
side and he wishes you well.” The person is brought to tears, but that is
really an immoral misuse of film-flam.

            City:I know that one of your concerns is popular
culture’s preoccupation with angels, ghosts, crop circles…

            Kurtz: Signs is the new movie with Mel Gibson about crop circles —
crap circles, I call them. They’re fabrications that have been disproven, but
they’re like unsinkable rubber ducks. No matter how many times you disprove
something, it keeps coming back. Given our media, there are so many things
going on all the time. The parade passes everybody by and there’s no historical
memory.

            I think one of the real problems
with the United States is the pace of life is so frantic, so frenetic,
everyone’s on kind of a roller coaster. With the Internet, and especially cable
television, we’re overloaded by misinformation, constant misinformation. This
is the age of razzmatazz, the age of entertainment, so people are titillated.

            City:Do you think these things are done just to
make money, or do you think they’re a reflection of a deep desire people have
for something spiritual?

            Kurtz: Obviously
there are deep desires and people are concerned about death and the meaning of
life, but there are different ways you can respond to that. The way the mass
media responds is to play up every hokum and to play to the galleries. The
basic problem that we face in this area is that the media are controlled by the
conglomerates. They’re owned by huge global corporations. Their main interest
is the quarterly report, the bottom line, what’s the stock going to do on Wall
Street? The standards of careful journalism have been lost.

            That’s why I think we need an
alternative press in the United States desperately. We need a dissenting point
of view, because it’s all pre-packaged, sold by hucksters and advertisers. The
paranormal and spirituality is packaged — it could be books or bricks or
breakfast cereal — and sold in public. The defenses are down. I think this
country’s in great danger today.

            City: Is it getting worse? There have been times in history when
people’s beliefs in the supernatural got completely out of hand — the Salem
witch trials. Do you think we’re headed in that direction?

            Kurtz: Yes, I think
we are indeed. The danger to our democracy is that the public would be so
overwhelmed by junk that it cannot distinguish the true from the false. Science
fiction dominates the imagination and that is dangerous because, politically,
we will be overcome by a man in the White House who will make outrageous
decisions. I think that’s where we are today.

            City: So this has repercussions beyond popular culture.

            Kurtz: Yes. An
educated public is the best guarantee of a viable democracy, and it presupposes
a free market of ideas and a critical give-and-take with some ability of the
ordinary person to discern hokum and falsity. Once you break this down in area
after area then, politically, people make unwise decisions.

            In the current situation, as this
country is ready to attack Iraq if it can get away with it, I think in one
sense the country is politically illiterate. The American public has been so
bludgeoned by the misinformation of the media that it cannot make wise
decisions. Why does Bush have such high ratings? It boggles the mind. Why do so
many people support him when he is totally incapable — him and his
administration — of making wise decisions? Practically everybody in the world
sees that, but the American public does not.

            City:School systems in at least two states have
insisted on putting creationism into the science curriculum on equal footing
with evolution. Is this part of the dumbing-down of America?

            Kurtz: A good friend
of mine, Steve Allen, used the term “dumbth.” It seems to be getting worse
because of the decline of critical thinking skills, because of the mass media
barrage we’re getting. So-called “Intelligent Design” — as I see the
universe, it’s unintelligible mis-design — is a code name for creationism,
and it’s gaining ground. We’re a super power and a scientific nation. At the
same time, you have this scientific illiteracy, because the sources of
information — the media — are dominated by interests in profits and
entertainment, not information.

            City: Another example would be the controversy over taking the
words “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. They’d been inserted there in the first
place by Congress, but the uproar was unbelievable. No politician could get on
that bandwagon fast enough.

            Kurtz: Yes. I
happened to be in Europe at the time. I was reading the [International] Herald Tribune and the French press and I couldn’t get over all the shouting in Congress. And
they went out on the Capitol steps and sang “God Bless America.” We’re a
secular republic, but politicians are fearful. They met recently in New York
City to remember 9/11. “Remember the Alamo.” “Remember the Maine.” 9/11 is the
symbol of peerless power.

            City:If an excellent politician admitted that he
did not believe in God, could he be elected here?

            Kurtz: No. An atheist
could not be elected, not even an agnostic. That’s really a shame, because
there are a lot of atheists and agnostics in the United States. People who have
no religious identification are the third largest minority.

            City:What religion did you grow up with?

            Kurtz: I was a free
thinker. My parents were indifferent to religion. I grew up at a time when you
had a lot of free thought in this country and there were a lot of people who
were liberal and wanted to build a new world. I fought in the Second World War,
and at one time was interested in pursuing spiritual inquiries, but I became a
skeptic.

            City:Did the war affect that?

            Kurtz: The war
affected it because I was part of the army that came to Dachau and Buchenwald
right after they were liberated. I served at the Battle of the Bulge and I was
troubled by this infamous fascist dictator [Hitler] and, having been left wing,
I turned against Stalinism early. Having gone through World War II, having seen
the bombing of London, the decimation of France and the German cities by
daylight and evening bombing, and then the concentration camps, these things
really seared something in my mind.

            That’s why 9/11, in comparison to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has to be seen in perspective. 9/11 is a terrible thing
and I’m certainly critical of aspects of the Jihad and what we’ve suffered, but
if you see it in a broader perspective, it should not be used as a symbol as
it’s now being used by the peerless power to wage wars.

            City:How did your education prepare you for your
work?

            Kurtz: I was always
interested in ethics, value theory, political and social theory. I studied
under students of John Dewey and also at New York University with Sidney Hook,
a very great influence in my life. I took my doctorate at Columbia.

            Being a disciple of Socrates, you
should ask the wrong questions at the wrong times and ask for definitions. It
occurred to me it was not in the ivory tower, but in the marketplace where men
and women were, that you really have to take your quest. In the 1960s, I became
editor of The Humanist. I founded
Prometheus Books in 1969. Then I began to get active in the open market of
ideas, especially during the days of the student revolution, and I’ve been busy
ever since. Philosophy should not be limited to the ivory tower.

            When I founded the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, known as CSICOP, in 1976,
it took off immediately. News of our event hit The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and papers worldwide.

On the wall of
the library in the Center for Inquiry is a secular version of The Last Supper. In place of Jesus and the apostles are
free-thinking historical figures like Thomas Paine, John Dewey, Susan B.
Anthony, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Jefferson. Display cases
deal with herbal remedies, ESP, and fortune telling, all ripe for skepticism.
Hallway cases salute free-thinkers like Bertrand Russell, Carl Sagan, and Karl
Popper.

            Nearby is a wall holding dozens of
photographs of members of the International Academy of Humanists, including
well-known scholars and Nobel Prize winners. Among them are Elena Bonner,
Andrei Sakharov, Sidney Hook, Francis Crick (who discovered DNA), Kurt Vonnegut
Jr., Simone Veil, Betty Friedan, Sir Peter Ustinov, and Stephen J. Gould.

            Free
Inquiry, a magazine that challenges religious beliefs, boasts top
intellectual columnists like Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, Richard
Dawkins, and Nat Hentoff. Over the last three decades, Prometheus Books (housed
in another building three miles away) has published over 2,000 volumes by
authors from Asimov to Zola. With titles like Atheism: The Case Against God, Rage
Against the Veil, and The Trouble
with Christmas, it’s clear that Kurtz’s organization does not pussyfoot
around issues.

            City:What is the purpose of religion? Is it to
control us through heavenly rewards and the threat of Hell? Or is it to help us
cope with the uncontrollable and explain the unexplainable?

            Kurtz: There are many
purposes and many functions to religion. The United States has at least 1,350
sects and cults, denominations; it depends which religion you’re talking about.
But I think religions began in the primal past of the species in an effort for
humans to cope with the universe. Why did it thunder? Why did people die? Why
is there suddenly a drought or a forest fire? So the inexplicable was
attributed to hidden occult causes. Philosophy developed seeking reasons, and then
science, five-and-a-half centuries ago, seeking causal explanations. So the
early function of religion, I think, has largely been replaced by science.

            City:In our country, if someone claims to have
seen a ghost, they may be considered loony. But if they believe in the
Resurrection, they are simply part of the mainstream.

            Kurtz: That’s true.
The United States is an anomaly in this regard. I think we have a kind of
distemper, a disease. Because if you look at belief in the other democracies,
it’s declined enormously. I think Europe is post-religious. In France,
something like 45 percent of the people are atheists or agnostics; only eight
to 10 percent of people attend church on Sundays. In England, it’s something
like 25 to 30 percent non-believers. In the Netherlands, it’s probably 50
percent. It depends on the country, but basically people are either indifferent
to religion or these countries don’t have widespread practicing of religion.
This is true of Japan, too. Among the democracies, we are the highest, so the
question is why is belief higher here, particularly in the last 10 years, than
in other countries.

            City:But many European countries are experiencing
negative population growth, while countries where they believe strongly in
religion are growing. Are they destined to take over?

            Kurtz: There is a
correlation, but I don’t know if it’s causal. The highest growth here is in
Asian religions in the last decade — a lot of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims
in North America. I think the reason people in Europe are post-religious now is
because they went through the Fascist and the Communist efforts to dominate,
and I don’t think they’re suffering the same mass-media inundation we are. They
don’t have the sensationalism. They also lived through bloody religious wars.

            City:It’s often said that our country was founded
by religious people.

            Kurtz: The Founding
Fathers were not religious believers, despite what you hear from the
fundamentalists today. They were largely anti-clerical. They were deists, but
they were skeptical of organized religion.

            City:Would you say the current world situation is
in some part due to people’s blind faith?

            Kurtz: I think
that’s true of this country today. I think there’s a kind of blind faith that’s
taking over.

            City:I was also thinking of Muslim countries and
Israel, Ireland, India, Pakistan…

            Kurtz: The conflicts
between the Muslims, who believe in the Koran, and the strong minority of
Orthodox Jews, who believe in the Old Testament, and the Christians, who want
to build a temple and believe in the New Testament — the battle between these
points of view is very unfortunate. I think the real need is in the Muslim
world. They desperately need an Enlightenment. Islam needs — and it’s not
going to advance unless it develops — a scientific critique or rational
critique of claims that are unexamined.

            City:Sometimes people seem to acknowledge that
religion is soothing, but not real. I heard Bill O’Reilly ask a man whose
daughter had been killed if he believed in heaven. When the man said he did,
O’Reilly said, “Then at least you know she’s in a better place.” The
implication was he could take comfort in his belief — if he had it. It seemed
transparent.

            Kurtz: Religion does give people some comfort, there’s
no doubt about that. But it’s also uncomfortable for some people. I find that
free-thinkers are less fearful of death than believers, because who hasn’t
sinned? So a lot of believers really worry about death a great deal, that
they’ll meet their maker on the other side. I have no worry about death.

            City: What do you say to people who say, “Look at this wondrous
planet, its animal and plant life, the amazing human body — how could there
not be a higher force?”

            Kurtz: Well, I want
to use the best evidence to say how and why things happen, and I consider
myself to be a scientific naturalist. My theory of the universe is based on the
best scientific evidence. So evolution replaces creationism. Darwin is really
radical in his assault on traditional explanations. Belief in God is a kind of
anthropomorphic reading into the world. You can always ask the question: “Who
caused God?” God created the universe — who created God?

            City: Science can only go so far. If you go back to the Big Bang,
you have to ask: “What banged? Where did that come from?”

            Kurtz: I take the
role of the agnostic, the non-believer. I don’t know how to answer all the
questions, so I just suspend judgment. I can live with uncertainty.

            City: I like to say there are two types of people in the world:
those who don’t know and those who don’t know that they don’t know.

            Kurtz: That’s well
stated. We can live with uncertainty. The universe is exciting, enjoyable. It
presents us with great opportunities to lead a good life and I don’t spend the
night worrying about the ultimate beginning or the inevitable end, if there is
such a thing.

            City: Would we be better off if people paid more attention to the
here and now?

            Kurtz: Yes, we should
deal with the here and now, and I consider one of the key virtues to be
courage, the courage to live a good life in spite of difficulties, tragedies,
and adversities. People who I know have no problem with that. They’re able to
cope. They don’t walk around wringing their hands, saying, “Oh, I’m so
miserable. Life is so boring without an ultimate purpose.” Take life for what
it is. It’s a great challenge.

            City:You’ve been successful in spreading your
message, but to a niche audience.

            Kurtz: Yes, our
readers are highly educated, scientists, professionals. They’re also ordinary
people who have common sense and want to think things through.

            City:But do you sometimes feel like a man trying
to hold back a tidal wave?

            Kurtz: The better
analogy is the Dutch boy putting his thumb in the dyke as the dyke is going to
break. Nonetheless, I’m basically an optimist. I think we’ve come a long way.
There are setbacks, but also advances. Look at the advances of modern life. Go
back a century. The longevity has increased. Pain and suffering, at least in
affluent countries, have decreased. You can live a richer life of leisure
without drudgery and sorrow. Obviously, there are parts of the world that need
to be improved, but I think the human species has made a lot of progress.

            City: Some of your comments on religion must not be popular. Have
you ever received death threats?

            Kurtz: We have locks
on our door. Not personally. I don’t care anyway — the hell with it. We have
to do what we’re doing, so we do it. Someone has to be the gadfly and provide
criticism, and I think we’re making a contribution to American life by
presenting our point of view.

Next week: Paul Kurtz turns a skeptical eye toward UFOs,
faith healers, exorcisms, Bigfoot, and more.

This article appears in Sep 18-24, 2002.