It is true that I have praised Paul Kurtz, who died in 2012 and I used to call a “mentor” for his work debunking precisely the pseudosciences that made me lost many years of my life. The photo in the Wikipedia article on him (also at the left) was uploaded by me after I requested it directly to Kurtz.
Alas, after he died I discovered this video where in the last five minutes Kurtz said that “America is a universal culture” and, mentioning the immigration fauna in the US, he added the phrase, “We are part of the planetary community.”
Kurtz then agreed with the interviewer that “the genetic makeup of the human race is all one” and, incredibly for someone who made a career defending real science against pseudosciences, he added: “There are no separate races. We are all part of one human family.”
The interviewer defined Kurtz as the “father of American secular humanism.” On a 2013 Occidental Observer thread a commenter opined about the “secular humanists”:
The new atheists are pure scum. Yes, despite their adolescent hatred of Christianity, their morality is a hundred percent Christian; anti-racism, egalitarianism, brotherhood of humanity, etc. Pathetic. I have far more respect for the average Christian than I have for those soulless, deadened worshippers of “reason” and “logic.”
I could not resist the temptation of naming Kurtz “scum” in that thread, in spite of the fact that Jews and Christians are presently on the same page here. This happened just after I discovered the above-linked video, where Kurtz stated also that WASPs have no exclusive claim to North America, and mentioned the Inuit as a group that, according to him, settled there before whites. Go figure! Before I became Jew-wise once I even harbored the thought of dedicating my autobiographical book to this guy…
Looking directly at the camera by the end of the interview, Kurtz concluded that “the First Principle in planetary ethics is that we ought to treat every person on planet Earth as equal,” after which he mentioned the races and the ethnic groups.
Well, well… I am still grateful that Kurtz’s writings, his magazines Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry, and the organization of skeptics he founded has helped a lot of people who, like me in the past, went astray in parapsychological cults. But when I met him personally in 1989 and 1994—in the 1994 Seattle conference of skeptics I also met Carl Sagan and shacked hands with him—I ignored that both Kurtz and Sagan had Jewish ancestry.
3 replies on “On Paul Kurtz”
Today I found this Kurtz article which contains this sentence:
Wow! Here we have the founder of the association that defends science vs. pseudoscience inverting the whole subject of IQ and raciology. Despite claims to the contrary, in psychometric studies it’s well established the differential IQ among the races.
So in this article the Jew Kurtz is actually promoting pseudoscience claiming he’s criticizing pseudoscience!
I enjoyed his book The Transcendental Temptation. He was a good critic of theism. And although he didn’t understand the implications of Darwin for white Europeans, we have national socialism to do that for us.
I have a copy of The Transcendental Temptation signed by Kurtz himself. It’s a good book to understand religions.