Born Again American Scientists

Born Again American Scientists are more emotional and complex than their mass media allies, the British Science Fascists.

They intend to trigger a Damascus experience (in reverse) in their fellow citizens, in a society still dominated by belief, gut feelings and anti-intellectualism. Often charismatic defrocked heroes, they entertain a profound desire to believe, matched by an equally profound desire to fight and destroy the filthy object of their desire.

In a such an apolitical society, their secular humanism is experienced as a means to experience the comforting experience of community that religion initially promised to them.

Defrocked, but still charismatic

Once a fundamentalist Christian, Shermer now describes himself as an agnostic nontheist and an advocate for humanist philosophy. Michael Shermer a 'science writer', 'historian of science', founder of The Skeptics Society (55,000 members!), and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating and debunking pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer is also the producer Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown.

When presented with the Global Consciousness Project², an international-scale study of random event generators (electronic dices, really) and their statistical deviations from chance, which tends to suggest a link between human consciousness and matter in a direction opposite to what Shermer and materialist eliminativists would postulate (thoughts and feelings affect matter through a "spooky action at a distance", as Einstein derided), Shermer replied:

This really sounds absurd, sorry. . . Ridiculous. . . Tell us where Osama Bin Laden is. Not after the fact, post-hoc data analysis.

Strangely, Shermer tends to believe in anecdotal evidence of the most soteriologic³ kind (if you save me from the Devil, I'll believe in you), especially when confronted with adversarial statistical data (of course, Princeton University did not launch an international million dollar project to produce woo-woo post-hoc speculations, quite the contrary).

In effect, this 11 years-old project tends to support the idea of a sort of 'communion of saints' (or anima mundi, etc.). Of course, Shermer can't be fooled, being both an ex-believer and a born again scientist.

From belief to disbelief keeping similar marvels... and aureolas I loved the chance to debate Noebel [an American Religious right polemist and minister], since I'm grateful to him for writing the book that helped me start questioning my fundamentalist Christian beliefs.

Basically, Grothe, a former fundamentalist Christian makes a career of imitating his long lost friend, Jesus, by amazing crowds with miracles (mentalist and conjuror feats) and preaching the Gospel of Science (which he equates, most of the times, with 'skepticism').

In December 2009, DJ Grothe was appointed President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a dynamic group of pseudoskeptics. Prepare to be amazed!

A Protestant fundamentalist in his teenage years. Did not give up his beliefs in God and the Afterlife, but converted to Science as a sacred untouchable domain that should be guarded from 'pseudoscience'. Describes himself as "single most powerful antagonist of the paranormal in the second half of the 20th century" — thus leaving both his Science and his God untouched.⁴

Qualifies as the most actively obscurantist zealot of Science and Religion.

Kurtz is one of the two evangelists of the Humanist Manifesto II. The former manifesto,⁵ exalted "religious humanism" (sic):

Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking. ... Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism.

For those who wonder, My Battle, the English translation of Mein Kampf was published the same year as the manifesto, 1933 (also see British Science Fascists).

Perhaps a little disillusioned by the consequences of the religion of the hygienic man of the first Manifesto, Paul Kurtz and Edwin Wilson declared in the second manifesto, in what seems to be a lapsus:⁶

It is forty years since Humanist Manifesto I (1933) appeared. Events since [...] make that earlier statement seem far too optimistic. Nazism has shown the depths of brutality of which humanity is capable.

This being granted, they rephrased:

We deplore racial, religious, ethnic, or class antagonisms. Although we believe in cultural diversity and encourage racial and ethnic pride, we reject separations which promote alienation and set people and groups against each other (...) We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government.

To achieve such a totalizing or totalitarian end, Kurtz managed and or founded the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, formerly the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry, which leads the Committee for the Scientifc Investigation of Religions — teams of the most dedicated, hygienic, manly scientists devoted to the eradication of sentimental and unreal hopes, wishful thinking, and the institutions that support them. His publishing company goes by the name of Prometheus Books (for those less versed in Greek mythology, a tongue-in-cheek Christian equivalent would be "Lucifer Books").

In 2003, a third manifesto was published by the American Humanist Association. This updated version is expunged of the most deliberate ideological constructs and political programs. In Maddy Urken's address presenting the HMIII, the messianic tone is more insidious: American Humanists, leaving behind their overt fantasies of domination, suggest that they are oppressed, perhaps the most oppressed of the oppressed — because they are the most hated by the dominant religions and their state enforcers:

When we began this new century, our government wasn't legally able to jail U.S. citizens indefinitely and without declared reason, denying them access to legal counsel. ... But with steady demands for conformity, and appeals to the supernatural, our current national leaders have made these new violations of civil liberties possible.

Today, if you are of a particular faith the FBI might have instructions to count all of your houses of worship as a basis for determining the extent of anti-terrorist investigations in your area. Today, if you are brave enough to speak out against extreme governmental policies, you might be accused aiding terrorism. Today, if you don't share the president's brand of Christianity you might find it impossible to get a major government appointment.

A self-proclaimed socialist and "unabashed Whig," Norman Levitt (formerly a Mathematics Prof. at the Conservative US university, Rutgers ) believed that history is "a march of progress, leading steadily to a more enlightened social order and to an increasingly accurate grasp of the principles underlying the natural world", as he put it in terms uncannily similar to Karl Popper writing on ‘historicism’ - only Popper was against it. Not so Levitt who plodded through several books on his ‘science good, modernity bad’ theme before science caught up with him in 2009.