"Why Did You Risk Your Reputation To Attack The Skeptics"?

First, I'm not aware of having that kind of reputation to worry about.   There's a reason I called the blog what I have.

The theme of my blogging is how the left went from the height of its influence and ability to change things in the 1960s to the utter impotence it suffers from today as the "liberal" Obama puts the legacies of FDR and LBJ on the negotiating table with people who have every intention of destroying those, slowly or immediately, as possible.   In some way just about everything I write about is related to that.

In studying the history of the left from the late 18th century till today there has been a complete and total divergence between the struggle for egalitarian democracy based in rights and materialism.  It is, plainly, the difference between regarding people as equal possessors of rights obliged to respect the rights of all other people and the materialist view of people as complicated chemical reactions with no status other than any other material object.  Materialism, in the end, sees people as having no real status different from any other temporary arrangement of molecules.

In that irreconcilable difference is found today's impotence of what gets called "the left" or "liberalism".  I hold that any liberalism which is worthy of the name, any left that will result in a less depraved and sustainable life, grows out of a necessarily non-materialist view of life.  That is my contention.

Since the founding of CSICOP, by a group of atheists who, while occasionally giving lip service to an expansive view of human rights, promoted the idea that people are merely material objects, it was impossible for me to not address "Skepticism".  The history of the modern "Skeptical" movement has been one of intentional and increasing coercion to promote that view of life, a view of life that is inevitably an undermining of the actual basis of liberalism.  The replacement of morally indifferent license on the basis of asserted "liberty"  merely imitates a truly liberated view of life based in holding that people are equally endowed with rights by,  as Jefferson put it, "BY THEIR CREATOR".  

The explicit reason for the creation of the "Skepticism" industry was to bully, coerce, harass, and suppress any expression of any idea that endangered their view of materialism.  Corliss Lamont, the major funding source of the "Humanists" at the time they were giving birth to "Skepticism" was an open and public Stalinist, lying about the mass murders, the show trials and the actual nature of his regime*.  He didn't much change that in the period after Stalin was discredited by his successors and the crimes Lamont had denied were publicly admitted to by the Soviet government or exposed by their liberal opponents.  As the theme I developed last year noted, the actual history of explicitly materialist, anti-religious governments can be seen as an experiment in what happens when people are regarded as being merely material objects and the results are anything but free.

The present day "new atheism" is largely manned by the same people as the "Skepticism" industry was and is.  Many of its online and other incorporated entities were either directly started by Paul Kurtz, other members of CSICOP or other groups in his empire of groups.  Most of the named figures in online atheism who I've checked out have a link to "Skepticism", a lot of them embody that link, themselves.  You can check out the origins or the associations of most of them and you'll find some relationship.   As the materialists make the connection between ideological atheism and "Skepticism",  eventually anyone who criticizes one will have to deal with the other.

As I mentioned, I was as unaware of the real nature of the controlled scientific research in parapsychology, ESP or psi until I began to read it.  

- I was unaware of the rather astonishing level of rigor in protecting experiments from error, a level that is virtually absent in any other science dealing with behavior, that there has been a constant practice of listening to the external and internal critics of previous research AND THE RESEARCHERS INCORPORATING THE ADVICE OF THEIR CRITICS INTO THEIR FURTHER EXPERIMENTS.  

- I was unaware of the rigor in the statistical analysis of that research, AGAIN INCORPORATING THE CRITICISMS MADE OF IT IN REANALYZING THE RESEARCH.

- I was unaware of the rather astonishing research into unintentional and involuntary physiological responses demonstrating psychic phenomena.   Which I find to be the most impressive confirmation of all.

- I was also unaware of the massive dishonesty of Martin Gardner, James Randi, Ray Hyman and others presented by the "Skepticism"/ atheism industry as credible critics.

As I read both the research and the critics and the analysis of both the research AND THE CRITICS the CSICOP party line fell apart.  The motives of CSICOP, its successor, CSI, CFI etc. in protecting a rigid materialism was obvious.  As that was happening in the past decade, my own analyses of the damage that materialism has done to liberalism and the left were also progressing.  It wasn't difficult to notice that "Skepticism" was the Trojan horse of that kind of materialism.   In addressing those movements, the most obvious aspect of them is their dishonesty, both in intentions and in polemical tactics.  They're not much different from some of the seedier manifestations of right-wing fundamentalism and corporate oligarchs.  Indeed, I've come to see that, ultimately, they've got pretty much the same goal, to impose a rigid ideology and regime on human culture, one that reduces people to objects which are there for use and disposal, objects who have no consciousness, no inherent rights.  Objects which can be evaluated on the basis of their utility, unequal in that, objects for use to which the potential users have no absolute moral obligations.

*  I have yet to discover what Lamont, as an active Stalinist, had to say about Lysenkoism, one of two major pseudo-scientific movements of the 20th century.   Unlike American creationist-fundamentalism,  Lysenkoism resulted in the murder of a number of prominent scientists by Stalin, that great champion of "scientific" materialism.   I've noted what another prominent Stalinist-atheist, Haldane had to say about it at the time,  which didn't exactly add luster to Haldane's record.