Humanists Are Reaping What They Sowed A Half A Century Ago

Yesterday I cited R. Joseph Hoffmann's critique of Richard Carrier to provide support for my rejection of Carrier as a scholar who anyone has to trust or take seriously.   He made some good points in his critique so last night I spent some time at his blog and read more of what he had to say.   Hoffmann makes some very good points about the neo-atheists and is obviously spot on in much of what he says about that and many other things.  I do respect him, even as I don't agree with much of what he concludes.

As someone who has been critical of the "Humanists" I was especially interested in his critique of that club.  As it is I read his two  posts on that in opposite order, the second one an answer to John Shook's comment on the first contained one of the best, short descriptions of the atheist religion, what most people online know as "Humanism"

The “humanism” that movement humanism hawks is a duck blind for the so-called new atheism.    It isn’t (as a CFI operative recently alleged) that religion is the opposite of humanism, any more than your grandpa is the opposite of you.  But in its premises, approach, and substance, secular humanism is now the opposite of humanism.

Having called "Humanism" a smoke screen for the promotion of atheism and a Trojan Horse for neo-atheism, I think I like "duck blind" better, it encapsulates the real intention of its founders, or, at least, those who controlled it after Corliss Lamont bought it out when it fell on hard times.

Since Hoffmann was one of the central figures in the Paul Kurtz circle, it was especially gratifying to read his criticism of the movement he relatively recently was at the center of.  Here is how the first post which Shook was responding to begins:

As a humanist I have often done what humanists do: hide behind the great thoughts of significant men and women to give my own ideas heft and importance.

The possibility of doing that came to an end in 2009, when America’s oldest humanist society, the AHA, bestowed its “Humanist of the Year” award on a man named P Z Myers, someone whose simplistic views, bare-knuckle style towards his critics, and lack of literary depth embody everything I abhor about contemporary humanism and new atheism.

But I have written plenty about what I abhor.  And I have written a fair bit about why organized humanism, infused and high-jacked by the “new” atheism, has been turned into a parody of serious humanist principles and ideals.  Myers, blogger Jerry Coyne, and a few other swains who hang out at the Free Thought Ghetto, wasted no time trying to frame me as a pompous, old school, elitist, humanities-loving humanist, the sort who is soft on religion because (of course) he is (a) secretly religious himself (b) too dim to be Bright and (c) naïve enough to think that ‘humanism’ can still be separated from the religion-hating spew and tactics of Richard Dawkins and his cult.  While not every voice was as repetitive and coarse as Myers’, 2009-2012 were rough years for people accused by the court of atheist opinion of being “accommodationists.”  Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the new atheist/humanist defense of its position, given the role of Richard Dawkins in the movement, was its incipient anti-intellectualism, its impatience for words in preference for what it construed as “argument,” and its contempt for even mild dissent and criticism–characteristics we normally associate with religious apologetic.

Perhaps more tellingly, here is his description of what led up to that event.

It was only slightly amusing to watch these religion haters develop all of the essential symptoms and pathologies of a cult, traits which were less obvious to them because they had never studied religious behavior and the psychopathology of cults.

But all the markers were there: a book, or canon of four books; a savior and a few lesser avatars; the promise of intellectual salvation using a formula for separateness and difference; most of all, the certainty that they are on the straight path, the right road, that others are wrong, and its behavioral corollary: intolerance of contradiction and correction.

With a few of my friends, notably the persistently hopeful Nathan Bupp I have pleaded for the return of the remains of serious humanism from the exile into which its captors flung it in 2008– the year Paul Kurtz was dethroned from the chairmanship of CFI, and the year I stepped aside as its Vice President—to mainstream intellectual and social life.  But the infiltration of the key outposts of humanism by religion-haters makes the job of reclaiming or “restoration” one for Atlas.  Outside the halls of academe, the word humanism is today almost synonymous with the word atheism, and atheism synonymous with the lowbrow definitions of its loudest, pop science-worshiping groupies.

I could have written most of that myself, if I could write that well, except, of course, that I'm not an atheist or a humanist and that I know the Paul Kurtz who he lauds wasn't opposed to the tactics and anti-intellectualism Hoffmann decries, he was one of its pioneers.   How Hoffmann could overlook the content and tenor of the many activities that Paul Kurtz initiated and was at the head of, certainly beginning with his editorship of The Humanist, the house organ of American Humanism,  his early years as the dictator of CSICOP* and the real force behind its house organ, Skeptical Inquirer, the founder and head of  Prometheus Books (the atheist equivalent of Regnery) and his association with some of the sleaziest figures in organized skepticism, such as James Randi, and including  a number of those who Hoffmann criticizes, such as Richard Dawkins, I can't imagine.

The Paul Kurtz I looked into and studied broke and planted the ground that the new atheists sowed in the past dozen years. That they eventually pushed the old man aside as he thought they were bringing the movement farther down market than he liked was predictable but he'd brought it quite far down market, himself. His part in ousting Marcello Truzzi, another co-founder of CSICOP and the first editor of its journal, which became Skeptical Inquirer after his ousting, made what the youngsters did to Kurtz seem rather karmic, if I believed in karma, which I don't, exactly.  I do believe that you are likely to reap what you've sown, though.

Still, with that in mind what Hoffmann says about Humanism is entirely worth reading for the information it contains and as an all too rare internal critique of atheism.   Here is another passage to encourage you to read the rest:

In fact many atheists have tried to persuade their commando friends that the new atheist critique of God and religion is amateurish, indeed embarrassing: intellectuals and academics with no religious sentiment at all have been stunned by its lack of sophistication and ignorance of the voluminous literature—both academic and popular,   historical  and philosophical  on the God problem. The reason critics like Richard Dawkins have done comparatively well selling books on subjects they know nothing about is the transferability thesis: the idea that the prestige you earn writing books on genes and grasshoppers can easily be transferred to topics as hazy as “religion,” at least if you accept (as Dawkins does) that the study of  religion and theology is nothing at all.

Add celebrity atheism to secular humanism and you get the word cash, which is what these organizations need to stay afloat. And as churches have known forever, to get cash you need converts.  To get converts, at least in the USA, you need big names. Big names lend luster, star power, even credibility to any campaign, and movement humanism is just that: the campaign for disbelief.

But “celebrity atheism” like celebrity anything else, actually cheapens the serious study of religion, which has dealt with the problem of God for a few hundred years, and longer if we include the history of theology stretching back to Anselm and the pre-Christian classical writers, perhaps especially Epicurus and Lucretius.  In fact, I would argue that celebrity atheism weakens the atheist position in the same way that Hollywood manages to ruin every good book, glitz without guts.

How does it cheapen it?  By associating ideas that should be arrived at by careful thought with other (even if famous) people’s conclusions:  Bill Maher is an atheist; so is Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Sarah Silverman, Bill Nye. Are you smarter than they are? Case closed.   Fallacy-wise it’s called argumentum ad auctoritatem.  But we can forgive this trespass, because religious people do it every time they appeal to the Bible. At any rate, the “25,000,000 smart people can’t be wrong” approach to intellectual (or political) rectitude doesn’t always get you where you want to go, and American atheists and humanists can only dream about a number like that.  What once was proudly called free-thought is fast becoming the slavish repetition of slogans and one-liners. Did you hear the one about the talking snake?  If God is so smart, why did he put the prostate next to a man’s urinary tract?

I like that so much that I will repeat that I can't understand how Hoffmann missed that it is merely an extension of what his friend Paul Kurtz did in the past half-century.  His critique of the neo-atheists and his decrying what they did to humanism is all there from  sTARBABY,  the critique of Kurtz and CSICOP written by Dennis Rawlins and which was confirmed by another former (and far more measured) member of CSICOP. Richard Kammann.   The most telling part of that is that Dennis Rawlins is a loud-mouthed neo-atheist of the kind who Hoffmann abhors but who, as a scientist, couldn't abide the scientific incompetence and dishonesty of Kurtz and CSICOP in its one and only scientific investigation.   Taken together with Hoffmann's critique of "Humanism" from the point of view of a person in the humanities, there really isn't much left in it but the spectacle of ignorant armies trashing the entire range of the intellectual tradition.

I also can't understand how he couldn't have seen through John Shook earlier than that.  I had a few exchanges with Shook at his Center for Inquriy blog a few years back.  Shook has to be one of the most vacuous owners of a PhD in philosophy I've ever read or, even more tellingly, heard. Listen to this exchange, the analogy he constructs and even more so what he says about there being "more nature beyond nature" , remembering he's a PhD in philosophy, it's amazing how inept it is.   And he  is typical of the best and the, um....., "Brightest" of those living off of the legacy of Paul Kurtz.

Update:  Dennis Rawlins from "sTARBABY "

Once CSICOP was under way, I found myself not only on the ruling Council but also on the editorial board. Although most of the Fellows sought, like me, to battle pseudoscientific bunk, they disagreed about the means. Except for the agreement to start a magazine (Zetetic, later Skeptical Inquirer) there was little cohesion on public policy, a vacuum that was filled (if not in fact caused) by tacit cohesion on Private Priority Number One for active CSICOP Fellows: maximum personal press coverage.

... Kurtz tried another let's-make-a-deal ploy, bursting out. "But I agree with you" He went on to blame the whole sTARBABY mess on Zelen and Abell! They had led him into the pit! But he would do nothing beyond private assent 
    After we had finished! I phoned Randi to report Kurtz was trying to buy silence on the Gauquelin mess. By the next day (November 20) a Council deal had been concocted (and offered) that would have me chair the astrology section of the press conference. Of course this would entail my introducing Abell. My reply was the old adage that a man who can't be bribed can't be trusted 
    At this Kurtz exploded in raging fear that his holy press conference would be ruined. He immediately phoned the Councilors and expressed concern that I might attack the Gauquelin project from the floor during the conference; some way had to be found to get me kicked off the Council. (This sudden search for a pretext to eject me -- the first suggestion of the need for my demise -- should be kept in mind because Council is now at great pains to dredge up any other sort of "offense" on my part as the good reason for booting me To borrow from the business world, let us recall the immortal words of J. P. Morgan: "For every action there are two reasons: a good reason and the real reason.")

Really, you have to read the whole thing and Richard Kammann's confirmation of it to believe how sleazy and dishonest the whole thing was and how many eminent and famous people were either involved or complicit in its cover up.  The prominent part played by James [The Amazing (and entirely incompetent)] Randi in it was a dead giveaway of its anti-intellectual, pro-publicity nature.

*  The critique of one of the other founders of CSICOP, Dennis Rawlins, correctly described the absolute control over CSICOP that Kurtz exercised, he had called Kurtz its "President for Life".