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October 1, 2010
Closer Look at Rift Between Humanists Reveals Deeper Divisions

By MARK OPPENHEIMER

AMHERST, N.Y. — You can tell something about a man by what he names his dog. At Paul Kurtz’s house, I was greeted in his driveway by a pug puppy named John Dewey. The dog’s predecessors, I learned, included Voltaire and Bentham.

Mr. Kurtz, an 84-year-old who names his dogs for free thinkers throughout history, is the exiled founder of the Center for Inquiry, which is devoted to promoting humanism and criticizing religion. He founded the center’s two affiliates: the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which investigates claims of the paranormal, like U.F.O. sightings and mental telepathy, and the Council for Secular Humanism, which promotes ethics and values without God.

And he started two magazines and a publishing house, Prometheus Books.

There are more famous opponents of supernaturalism, but none is an institution-builder like Mr. Kurtz, a retired philosophy professor. The Center for Inquiry, which assumed its name in 1991, until recently shared a budget of more than $6 million with its affiliates, and it supports campus groups, a West Coast office and branches in many American cities and in countries like England, Peru and Poland.

Which makes Mr. Kurtz’s fall Lear-like.

We are meeting in his home, not at the center, minutes away in this Buffalo suburb. In 2008, looking to spend less time running the center, he supported his board’s decision to hire Ronald A. Lindsay, a corporate lawyer from Washington, as chief executive. He soon regretted the decision. Mr. Lindsay “became very authoritarian and dictatorial,” Mr. Kurtz told me.

In June 2009, at odds with Mr. Lindsay, Mr. Kurtz was voted out as the center’s chairman. In May, he resigned from the board altogether.

According to Mr. Kurtz, there were two areas of conflict. First, he says, Mr. Lindsay changed the work culture. Whereas Mr. Kurtz had managed “in the spirit of a think tank,” Mr. Lindsay brought his legal background to bear.

“I am used to the academic life, where we don’t impose rules on employees,” Mr. Kurtz said, sitting in his living room. But Mr. Lindsay, he said, “set up a command system, said these are the rules and laws, and anyone who deviates from that will be investigated.”

Employees were interrogated for minor infractions, Mr. Kurtz said, and several were let go. “That is like Stalinism or the Inquisition,” Mr. Kurtz said.

By phone and by e-mail, Mr. Lindsay said that the “investigations” were due-process inquiries into complaints, and that he had not fired anyone for questioning his authority. He said that four employees were laid off for economic reasons, one resigned, and one freelance employee did not have his contract renewed. Only the center’s spokesman, Nathan Bupp, who left last week, may have been fired; Mr. Lindsay, in an e-mail, would only say, “This was not a layoff.”

More generally, he said that Mr. Kurtz, after 30 years of leadership, simply found it too difficult to cede responsibility; in particular, Mr. Lindsay mentioned fund-raising, saying that Mr. Kurtz was reluctant to introduce him to donors he had known for years.

But Mr. Kurtz’s second complaint goes beyond internecine power struggles. He said that Mr. Lindsay was turning the center away from Mr. Kurtz’s humanist philosophy and toward negative, angry atheism.

According to Mr. Kurtz, skeptics must do more than just deride religion. “If religion is being weakened, what replaces it in secular society?” he asked. “Most of my colleagues are concerned with critiquing the concept of God. That is important, but equally important is, where do you turn?”

In books like “What Is Secular Humanism?” Mr. Kurtz has argued for a universal but nonreligious ethics, one he now calls “planetary humanism.” Its first principle is that “every person on the planet should be considered equal in dignity and value.” In his books, he explains how this principle can be derived from nature and from what we know of the human species.

And he contrasted his affirmative vision with recent projects under Mr. Lindsay, like International Blasphemy Day. (The 2010 version, held Thursday, was renamed International Blasphemy Rights Day.) Mr. Kurtz was also a vocal critic of a contest for cartoons about religion that included some entries that could be considered deeply offensive.

“Angry atheism does not work,” Mr. Kurtz said. “It has to be friendly, cooperative relations with people of other points of view.” To that end, he and several former employees of the center are starting a new organization, the Institute for Science and Human Values.

Does Mr. Lindsay really have a different vision for the Center for Inquiry? Is it hard-line atheism versus a more positive humanism? Mr. Lindsay and the employees who remain dispute Mr. Kurtz’s portrayal of them as angry atheists. In a blog post, Mr. Lindsay defended the day of blasphemy as a reminder that the right to blaspheme is curtailed in much of the world and so “remains a live issue for anyone concerned about human rights.” And he countered that magazines run by Mr. Kurtz had long published cartoons critical of religion.

The center’s donations have fallen since Mr. Kurtz’s departure, which prompted warring blog posts between his defenders and Mr. Lindsay’s. Matters have not improved: on Wednesday, when Mr. Kurtz stopped by the center, where he still keeps an office, he found the locks had been changed. Mr. Lindsay told me that Mr. Kurtz did not need the new key because he “has no connection with us.”

Next: In Los Angeles, taking stock of atheism’s future.