Realistic Humanism:
I subscribe to Realistic Humanism. Utopianism is a natural, evolved tendency of the human brain, but, in our age, I think our Utopianism tendency, in all of its forms, including Utopian Humanism & Utopian Religion, must be resisted.

Thinkers I Most Admire and Appreciate:

Modern scientific thinkers:

• Charles Darwin (I believe Darwin is the key, indispensable thinker for understanding everything pertaining to human life. I believe the history of knowledge can be divided into two periods: Before Darwin (B.D.) and After Darwin (A.D.) His most important book is “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”)
• Ernst Mayr
• Richard Dawkins (C.F.I. board of directors)
• Albert Einstein
• Bertrand Russell
• Alex Rosenberg
• E.O. Wilson
• Sigmund Freud
• Carl Jung
• Max Weber
• Dr. Paul Kurtz (C.F.I. co-founder; founder of Eupraxsophy, a pragmatic, wholistic Humanist philosophy and movement)
• Ernest Becker (“The Denial of Death”; Terror Management Theory)
• Carl Sagan
• Bill Nye
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Jorge Mario Bergoglio (“Pope Francis”; a closeted Secular Humanist)
• Miguel de Unamuno (“The Tragic Sense of Life”: “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr”)
• John F. Kennedy (a very serious and advanced Humanist thinker, according to the 2011 book “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,” by James W. Douglass. According to that book, circumstantial evidence suggests JFK was killed in 1963 by the right-wing military-industrial complex because, after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, he began to conduct his presidency according to his advanced Humanist thinking.)

Modern fiction writers:

• Cormac McCarthy
• Rod Serling
• David Mitchell (“Cloud Atlas”)
• W. Somerset Maugham
• Thornton Wilder
• Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”)
• Stanley Kubrick
• Arthur Miller
• Oscar Wilde
• William Golding (“Lord of the Flies”)
• Billy Ray (screenwriter)
• Nic Pizzolatto (screenwriter)
• Adam McKay (screenwriter)

Pre-modern thinkers:

• William Shakespeare (“Hamlet” “King Lear”)
• Abraham Lincoln
• Cervantes (“Don Quixote”)
• Plato (His book “The Republic”, in which he argues, in the Allegory of the Cave, that most people live all or most of their lives within a sort of brain-generated “Matrix” of illusions, delusions, falsehoods and that only a few scientists see life as it really is.)
• Epicurus
• Schopenhauer
• Sophocles (“Oedipus Rex”)

Thinkers who straddle the modern scientific era and the pre-modern era, and who present some valuable insights but also some foolish , pseudoscientific, or harmful ideas:

• Karl Marx
• Nietzsche
• Machiavelli
• Carl Schmitt
• Ayn Rand (Her fiction is juvenile; but her writing on philosophy and psychology convey some important insights–along with some true foolishness, ignorance, and immorality, and so, I believe, as a thinker, she is really in the same category as Marx, Machiavelli, Schmitt, and Nietzsche.)