(2003-09-25) The Brights

Richard Dawkins has jumped onto a meme-wagon launched by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, forming the Brights movement. The parallel they are using is transforming "homosexual" to "gay" based on the belief that the latter term made the practice more publicly acceptable. (We're bright, we're right, get over it.)

• "a bright" is a person whose World View is Naturalist-ic - free of Super Natural and Myst Ic-al elements - Atheist, Agnostic or others can be included. (There are whiffs of Isism around here...) (Naturalism)

  • they try to insist on using the word only as a noun, not an adjective, but this seems Clintonesque in its language abuse. WordPirates alert?

• http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/religion/story/7085566p-8033409c.html |article

• Richard Dawkins http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,981412,00.html |article

• Richard Dawkins again in Wired Mag

• Daniel Dennett op-ed in the Ny Times - * I recently took part in a conference in Seattle Wa that brought together leading scientists, artists and authors to talk candidly and informally about their lives to a group of very smart high school students. Toward the end of my allotted 15 minutes, I tried a little experiment. I came out as a bright. Now, my identity would come as no surprise to anybody with the slightest knowledge of my work. Nevertheless, the result was electrifying. Many students came up to me afterwards to thank me, with considerable passion, for "liberating" them. I hadn't realized how lonely and insecure these thoughtful teenagers felt. They'd never heard a respected adult say, in an entirely matter of fact way, that he didn't believe in God. I had calmly broken a taboo and shown how easy it was.*

• Daniel Dennett dialog with pastor Jack Good. My considered view, then, of liberal theologians and their efforts to redefine God in ways that make God compatible with Naturalism parallels my view of the late Stephen Jay Gould's similar effort, coming from the other side, to blur the hard edges of science, to downplay the conflict between science and religion. It was a nice try, and well-meant, but it couldn't work... Finally, a point about the word "bright". It was not my choice, and I shared your misgivings at first, but the term is growing on me. I, like E O Wilson, am a wholehearted believer in the Enlightenment, a movement that had its excesses, but gave birth to many great things, including, pre-eminently, American democracy. I prefer bright to "enlightened", which smacks of revelation, a phenomenon we brights are more than a little skeptical about.

Given all the bible-beating associated with every Presidential Election, I suppose this is a good time for some push-back...

But I still hate the word. Alternatives? (I don't necessary follow any of these schools...)

• Illuminat I (heh)

• Phenomenologism: maybe - Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking. maybe not - Phenomenologists tend to oppose Naturalism (also called Objectivism and Positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology

• Empiricism, Pragmatism, Operationalism, Instrumentalism

• Model Agnosticism