The Transcendental Temptation Paperback – March 1, 1991

Like Joseph Campbell's great body of work, Paul Kurtz' analysis of the bases of religion have caused many to call this book a fundamental resource for reason and humanism. If you care about skeptical/critical thinking, fact-based decision making, understanding why we think so poorly and are gullible to all manner of delusions and hokum, this book belongs in your hands -- not tucked away on a shelf.

If you want to skim major parts of this book, then you will love it. If you want to read word-for-word, you will be busy for awhile. This book reads like a PhD dissertation, but the points it brings out about the tendency to look for answers somewhere outside of human experience is valuable. The section on Christianity is riveting.

A well balanced review of science in modern society, providing deep philosophical insights and information, and addressing the delicate matter of all religious (unsustainable) support; that is, exhibiting the irrational attitude behind religion, as well as the need of believers to impose it on others.

I bought this book because I've always felt attracted by the question of why we do believe in gods or in the supernatural. This has been my search for several years despite I know there is not a final and definitive answer. Does this book provide an answer? Yes, it provides an answer but not the definitive one. So, does it deserves to be read? Yes indeed. But why? Because it completes all that you have heard about this topic, especially if you have read about atheism, faith, history, cosmology, evolution and so on. Even poetry and drama.

The author, Paul Kurtz, was a philosopher (1925 - 2012) and according Wikipedia is considered the "father of secular humanism." If you read the book you'll realize that the latter is true from the beginning to end. But this is not the most important part of "The transcendental..." The most important part is the convergence of the most important issues in just five hundred pages, which have been organized in four parts: Skepticism and the meaning of life; Mysticism, revelation and God; Science and the paranormal; and Beyond religion. Every one of them are linked by the thread of the main subject of the book: the transcendental temptation thesis.

What I believed before reading this book was that our conscious of dying some day is --to say the least-- too much to be accepted as a plain fact. And not only that of course. There is also the compensation for a life which is not entirely just, peaceful or healthy. And so on and on. I thought that insofar as we born with this wonderful capacity of looking at everything around us like the conscious side of an almost entirely unconscious universe, cannot avoid neither the drama of discovering the finitude time of the observer to watch. One thing came with the other. We cannot have the heads without the tails. We cannot play the fool. So how are we indemnified for these interrupted histories we live?

All this is addressed from the very beginning of the book by Kurtz: "Man deceives himself about his ultimate destiny so as not to be tormented by the contemplation of it." And so "[he] devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support." Alas, "[the] pathos of the human condition is that many or most human beings cannot readily accept the stark realities of human finitude, the fact that there is no ultimate providence or purpose for our existence." And we didn't know this for millennia. Thus, insofar as we began to understand the machinery of the natural world, all the gods, one by one, began to fall. But did they? In this perspective Kurtz asks: "Are the religious needs of men and women too powerful, the hunger for the divine too pervasive for skepticism ever to prevail?" What do you think?

The distinctive character of the book is its wide scope intertwined with the depth of a rigorous thinking. Kurtz writes about hard topics with common words that build understandable sentences. He is an academic but not a snob one. He writes to be discussed or reviewed knowing that the only way to do that is by showing what he thinks in the clearest way. Kurtz again: "The trouble with technical philosophy is that it has incapacitated philosophy proper, so that it hobbles about like a mendicant friar cloistered in a distant monastery on a remote island in the midst of an empty sea." And this is not just poetry.

I already mentioned the topics that Kurtz review in the book. However I would like to highlight that he doesn't repeat what you already know. What is different here are the numerous insights that he provides as the author to you the avid reader in every single issue either historical, sociological or cosmological. The chapter dedicated to the "Jesus myth" was one of the best interesting to me, but the previous and the next ones were highly interesting too. In fact, the paranormal ("Psychics, ESP, and Parapsychology.") and all that stuff aren't really cool or intriguing to me but Kurtz manages to make it interesting and even amusing.

I cannot finish this review without mention the moral (political and academic) courage that Kurtz had in writing this book. To be skeptic he is surprisingly clear and straightforward. And I thank this. He is skeptic then he is not a special kind of believer, he is not an agnostic, this is not his business. He is an skeptic but he is also (and mainly) a humanist. That's why he says that there "is no one hearing our prayers who can help us... They are one-sided transactions. There is no one on the other side to hear our pleas and supplications."

Last bus not least: it is not easy to keep the tone of a book for over five hundred pages. You have to be really good at that and our author is good, very good. He is convincing and provoking without being especially controversial. He is a thinker and a gentleman. A writer and a gentleman. One who is capable of keeping your attention in the topic just like in a detectives novel. In fact I'm not exaggerating if I add that he keeps you in suspense to the very last sentence. The sentence I put in the title is just an example of a book meditated and written seriously by an illustrated mind.

Paul Kurtz wrote in a logical manner for a complicated subject. A must read whether you believe in the supernatural or not.

Paul Kurtz has done humankind a tremendous service by, in one succinct phrase, summing up the fundamental problem with religious belief; that it is essentially a “transcendental temptation”. Most people have a fundamental urge to escape their nature. They don’t want to die, and they wish to believe that, somehow, human beings are “special”. Kurtz articulated this as people wanting to somehow ‘transcend’ the realities of life. This is an essential understanding for all who wish to connect with what is true. If you want to know what motivates most people, and causes many of their destructive social associations, this is an excellent place to look. This book is in the ‘core understandings’ section of my library – there is no higher recommendation, for my part.

It is interesting that although the original edition of this book was written in 1986, much of the discussion on Jesus and the origins of Christianity were recently reinforced by the excellent PBS special titled "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians" which first appeared April 1998, and in which many notable religious scholars provided material that concurs with that presented in this book. Kurtz draws on numerous historical sources to provide background on the historical Jesus: "In order to evaluate their [the four Gospels] historical accuracy, it is important that we find independent corroboration. Thus we need to examine nonbiblical literature of the first few centuries C.E. I am referring here (1) to any parallels between Christianity and pagan or Jewish presursors; (2) to any secular references by pagan and Jewish authors; (3) to what the early critics of Christianity had to say; and (4) to the extensive apocryphal literature, gospels, and epistles that were subsequently rejected by the church." Kurtz presents the material in a very accessible and well researched manner. An excellent book.