He is founder and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the Council for Secular Humanism, the Center for Inquiry and Prometheus Books.
He is editor in chief of Free Inquiry magazine, a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism. He was co-president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Humanist Laureate and president of the International Academy of Humanism. As a member of the American Humanist Association, he contributed to the writing of Humanist Manifesto II. The asteroid (6629) Kurtz was named in his honor.
Kurtz received his bachelor's degree from New York University, and the Master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy degree from Columbia University. Kurtz was left-wing in his youth, but has said that serving in the United States Army in World War II taught him the dangers of ideology. He saw the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps after they were liberated, and became disillusioned with Communism when he encountered Russian slave laborers who had been taken to Nazi Germany by force but refused to return to the Soviet Union at the end of the war.
Kurtz was largely responsible for the secularization of Humanism. Before Kurtz embraced the term "Secular Humanism," which had received wide publicity through fundementalist Christians in the 1980s, Humanism was more widely perceived as a religion that did not include the supernatural. This can be seen in the first article of the original Humanist Manifesto which refers to "Religious Humanists" and by Charles and Clara Potter's influential 1930 book Humanism: A New Religion.
Kurtz used the publicity generated by fundementalist preachers to grow the membership of the Council of Secular Humanism, as well as strip the religious aspects found in the earlier Humanist movement.
In 1999 Kurtz was given the International Humanist Award by the IHEU.
Kurtz is the publisher of over 650 articles or reviews and has authored and edited over 40 books.
Kurtz believes that the nonreligious members of the community should take a positive view on life. Religious skepticism, according to Paul Kurtz, is only one aspect of the secular humanistic outlook. The term "eupraxophy" was coined by Kurtz as a nonreligious philosophy that embraces ethical, exuberant, and rational living to promote the betterment of the human condition.
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