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By Root 399 0

perfect bound, with a duotone coated cover, she said that if we could splurge for a skeptical publication of that quality she would generate the appropriate artwork and typography. Since Pat is a professional artist who was working for movie studios generating film posters, she was more than capable of backing up her offer, which I accepted. Our original cover was to feature Randi, and Pat produced a striking portrait of him, but just before publication Isaac Asimov died, so Pat generated a new cover portrait and that became the cover of volume one, number one of what we came to call Skeptic magazine. (My originally planned title—The Journal of Rational Skepticism—was voted down by Pat and my wife, Kim Ziel Shermer, who reasoned that shorter is better. They were right.)

If Martin Gardner was the pen of this revolution, then James Randi was its sword, as he was in the trenches fighting the good fight and inspiring us all to maintain the courage of our convictions in the face of overwhelming odds. But now that I am running a sizable organization myself I have come to respect more than ever before what Paul Kurtz has done for our movement. He may not be as prolific and famous a writer as Martin Gardner, or as public and visible an activist as James Randi, but in terms of the day-to-day grind of keeping a movement afloat through the constant battering and assaults that come from variegated sources, there are few who can be compared with Paul Kurtz. So I close with several excerpts from what I still consider to be his finest work, The Transcendental Temptation.

The temptation, says Kurtz, “lurks deep within the human breast. It is ever-present, tempting humans by the lure of transcendental realities, subverting the power of their critical intelligence, enabling them to accept unproven and unfounded myth systems.” Specifically, Kurtz argues that myths, religions, and claims of the paranormal are lures tempting us beyond rational, critical, and scientific thinking, for the very reason that they touch something in us that is sacred and important—life and immortality: “This impulse is so strong that it has inspired the great religions and paranormal movements of the past and the present and goaded otherwise sensible men and women to swallow patently false myths and to repeat them constantly as articles of faith.” What drives this temptation? The answer Kurtz provides is both insightful and elegant.

Let us reflect on the human situation: all of our plans will fail in the long run, if not in the short. The homes we have built and lovingly furnished, the loves we have enjoyed, the careers we have dedicated ourselves to will all disappear in time. The monuments we have erected to memorialize our aspirations and achievements, if we are fortunate, may last a few hundred years, perhaps a millennium or two or three—like the stark and splendid ruins of Rome and Greece, Egypt and Judea, which have been recovered and treasured by later civilizations. But all the works of human beings disappear and are forgotten in short order. In the immediate future the beautiful clothing that we adorn ourselves with, eventually even our cherished children and grandchildren, and all of our possessions will be dissipated. Many of our poems and books, our paintings and statues will be forgotten, buried on some library shelf or in a museum, read or seen by some future scholars curious about the past, and eventually eaten by worms and molds, or perhaps consumed by fire. Even the things that we prize the most, human intelligence and love, democratic values, the quest for truth, will in time be replaced by unknown values and institutions—if the human species survives, and even that is uncertain.

Although Kurtz sounds like a pessimist, he’s actually a realist, occasionally even an optimist.

Were I to take an inventory of the sum of goods in human life, they would far outweigh the banalities of evil. The pessimist points to Caligula, Attila, Cesare Borgia, Beria, or Himmler with horror and disgust; but I would counter with Aristotle, Pericles, da