A prolific author, Kurtz in 1973 drafted what came to be known as Humanist
Manifesto II, in which he updated a 1933 document by addressing issues that
the earlier tract, which was largely a critique of religion, had failed to
address, among them nuclear arms, population control, racism and sexism. The
document was signed by 120 intellectuals including Andrei Sakharov, Francis
Crick and the novelist Isaac Asimov. In its best-known dictum, it declared:
“No deity will save us; we must save ourselves.”
In 1980, in response to the rise of the religious Right, Kurtz founded the
journal Free Inquiry. In its first issue he warned that “the reappearance of
dogmatic authoritarian religions’’ had become a threat to intellectual
freedom, human rights and scientific progress. Most traditional religions,
he observed, have their origins in pre-urban nomadic and agricultural
societies of the past and are not appropriate to the modern age.
In Eupraxophy: Living Without Religion (1989) Kurtz envisioned a secular moral
alternative that met some of the social needs served by religions without
the supernaturalism or authoritarianism of traditional faiths.
He maintained that it was not only possible but easy to live a good life
without religion . In a revised Humanist Manifesto 2000, endorsed by, among
others, nine Nobel Prize winning scientists, Kurtz called on humankind to
form a planetary system of government, including a World Parliament elected
on the basis of population, a transnational environmental monitoring agency
and a transnational system of taxation.
Ironically, though, secular humanism has proved just as disputatious and
faction-prone as the religions it seeks to debunk, and Kurtz’s career was
marked by a series of fallings-out with his fellow non-believers.
In 1978 he parted company, amid some acrimony, with the American Humanist
Association, whose journal, Humanist, he had edited, and went on to found a
series of organisations of his own, including the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which became the
Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), the Council for Secular Humanism, and the
Centre for Inquiry.
But in 2010, after a series of disagreements, Kurtz resigned from the organisations he had founded saying that he disapproved of their “angry atheism”.
Paul Winter Kurtz was born in Newark, New Jersey, on December 21 1925 into a Jewish family of “intellectual freethinkers”. His father was a restaurateur. Paul left New York University to enlist in the US Army during the Second World War, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and entered the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after their liberation.
Returning to New York University, after graduation he took a doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia University, then taught the subject at several universities before moving, in 1965, to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he became a Professor of Philosophy, remaining until his retirement.
Active in the Humanist movement from the 1950s, in 1969 Kurtz created Prometheus Books, a publishing house that released works critical of religion that other publishers would not touch. His Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published the Skeptical Inquirer to combat “pseudoscience”, including UFO sightings, the paranormal and homoeopathy. In 2010 Kurtz founded a new Institute for Science and Human Values and the journal The Human Prospect.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Claudine, and by a son and three daughters.
Paul Kurtz, born December 21 1925, died October 20 2012
But in 2010, after a series of disagreements, Kurtz resigned from the organisations he had founded saying that he disapproved of their “angry atheism”.
Paul Winter Kurtz was born in Newark, New Jersey, on December 21 1925 into a Jewish family of “intellectual freethinkers”. His father was a restaurateur. Paul left New York University to enlist in the US Army during the Second World War, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and entered the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau shortly after their liberation.
Returning to New York University, after graduation he took a doctorate in Philosophy at Columbia University, then taught the subject at several universities before moving, in 1965, to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he became a Professor of Philosophy, remaining until his retirement.
Active in the Humanist movement from the 1950s, in 1969 Kurtz created Prometheus Books, a publishing house that released works critical of religion that other publishers would not touch. His Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published the Skeptical Inquirer to combat “pseudoscience”, including UFO sightings, the paranormal and homoeopathy. In 2010 Kurtz founded a new Institute for Science and Human Values and the journal The Human Prospect.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Claudine, and by a son and three daughters.
Paul Kurtz, born December 21 1925, died October 20 2012
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