Comments on: Bright is as Bright Does

By: Brett Fife

Brett Fife — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 13:08:16 +0000

For what it’s worth (and coming from an anonymous post, let’s say not much) there is a bit of blindness evidences by most of the harsh critics of the Bright movement. I do a bit of research regarding extant worldviews, have for a while. When I stumble on something new (new to me, or ‘brand-new’ though don’t care fro the expression), it doesn’t make me afraid or spark a desire to condemn. Relax. If you insist on being blind, please don’t be afraid of that which you stumble over in the dark. This comment in no way addresses the visually impaired. Thanks.

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:32:46 +0000

There could be some useful arguments going on here but we’re getting bogged down in semantics and emotions. What are the “Brights” trying to do? I believe they are trying to fix a problem Cause: Religious groups have the benefit of their own organizational structures to project their viewpoints into the democracies in which they operate. Secular peoples (Agnostics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, Free Thinkers etc.) have little or no organized voice with which to project their views into a democracy. Effect / Problem Politics in the world’s wealthiest democracies is being monopolized by people who are overtly religious and social pressures are being applied to people who are secular. Remedy: Organize secular viewpoints into an umbrella group and establish political clout. To me, that’s the entire Bright movement in a nutshell. Everything else in the movement is fluff. The people running the movement will certainly concede to that. I must confess, on this topic I am about as mentally gymnastic as cat poo. I would like to read you opinions concerning how the Brights should be moving forward more effectively. Any marketing gurus out there? Pete

By: ATON--TExas Tech University

ATON--TExas Tech University — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 19:38:32 +0000

Chronicle of Higher Education Thursday, July 24, 2003 BOOKMARK A Collection of Ancient Folk Tales From Turkey Meets Modernity on the Internet By BROCK READ For more than four decades, researchers interested in folklore and oral history have trekked to Lubbock, Tex., to use one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of indigenous tales: the Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative at Texas Tech University. Now, through a digitization project, http://aton.ttu.edu librarians at the university are making their unique archive accessible to a broader audience on the Web. Texas Tech came upon its sizable collection “by sheer luck,” according to H.B. Paksoy, an adjunct professor of history at the institution who heads the online project. In 1961, Warren Stanley Walker, a professor of English at Iowa’s Parson College, was teaching English in Turkey on a Fulbright grant. There he met Ahmet Edip Uysal, a professor of liberal arts at Ankara University. The pair shared an interest in Turkey’s rich but largely unacknowledged history of folk narratives, and spent parts of several years journeying to small villages to document indigenous tales and traditions. When Walker returned to the States and took a position at Texas Tech, Uysal continued to send information collected from the field. The transcripts and recordings that Walker accumulated became the basis of the university’s collection. (Uysal died in 1997, Walker in 2002. Walker is survived by his wife, Barbara, who worked with the oral-narrative archive until this year.) Online, the Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative makes available all of Walker and Uysal’s transcripts of Turkish epics, folk legends, and local stories. The Web site’s highlights include versions of the Dede Korkut, an oral history of Central Asia that survived for almost a thousand years before it was committed to paper in the 19th century. Samples of Uysal and Walker’s fieldwork include stories like “The Guessing Children” and “The Farmer and the Bear,” gathered from Turkey’s Konya province. Such narratives shed light not just on Turkish life, but on the central role of folk tales in cultures throughout the world, according to Mr. Paksoy. “These would be of great interest to anyone investigating cross-cultural stories,” he says. “A great volume of what we have online applies to students of anything from Icelandic sagas to African narratives, because it provides a context and a sense of what themes develop across cultures and geographies.” In addition to the transcripts, the site includes a growing number of multimedia elements. At present, Mr. Paksoy and his colleagues have digitized a small collection of images of modern-day Turkey, audio of indigenous-music performances, and many of Uysal and Walker’s recordings of epic tales as narrated by Turkish citizens. Mr. Paksoy says he is working on placing recordings of key narratives alongside the transcripts so that researchers can listen to a reading in a Turkish dialect while examining its translation. Faculty members at a number of colleges offering courses in Turkish culture and linguistics—including Princeton and Indiana Universities and the University of Pennsylvania—have directed students to the site, Mr. Paksoy says. Erika H. Gilson, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, is one such professor. Ms. Gilson and other professors say that the site is a useful tool in part because it provides students of Turkish with valuable exposure to the language as it is spoken. The Web site presents its information in a smorgasbord of languages. Most of the material is available in both Turkish and English, but many of the narratives are recorded in some of the many dialects—including Kazakh, Turkmen, and Uzbek—that appear in pockets throughout the nation. The site’s use of multiple languages has increased its appeal, Mr. Paksoy says, noting that the project has attracted a strong contingent of international users. And Mr. Paksoy says that the archive’s home on the Web has made the narratives available to an audience that would never have traveled to Texas to use the originals. In the first three weeks of 2003, when the project made its debut online, some 10,000 documents were viewed or downloaded—more, according to Mr. Paksoy, than were read in the library’s previous 41 years. The original collection can still be seen only by appointment. “This way we can reach the furthest corners of the earth without potential users’ having to travel,” he says. ———————————————————————————————————————— ————————————————————————————————————————Go Back to Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative Uysal Walker Türk Öykürleri Sandığı’na Geri Dönüş ————————————————————————————————————————Copyright © 2002-2003. Southwest Collection / Special Collections Library Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas Comments

By: metaph0r

metaph0r — Wed, 23 Jul 2003 02:43:56 +0000

Very well put: 1 – “A Bright’s ethics and actions are based on a naturalistic worldview.” How about everybody’s ethics and worldview are firmly grounded in the categories, prejudices, preconceptions and ideologies that come from their historical context and the conditions of their existence? Does this fit into the Bright worldview? 2 – “A naturalistic worldview is absent any presumption of forces or entities beyond what can be observed/measured.” You will find a great many people who quite firmly believe that they can and do personally observe the hand of God at work in the universe. By the same token, does a conspiracy theory worldview constitute a naturalistic worldview? A lot of apt replies (criticism and support) in this thread!

By: Lynne

Lynne — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 22:13:46 +0000

I like the concept of Bright, but I think it’s a bad name. As my poll shows (see url), most people find it offensive and I think that’s because it seems to imply that supernaturalists are somehow less “bright”. Although I like Humanist or Secular Humanist, I do agree with those who say it is not all inclusive because you can have a naturalistic outlook and still not accept the specific moral values that Humanists embrace. A good blanket term, and one that my poll shows is the most popular, is “Freethinker”. Yeah, in rare cases a supernaturalist might call themselves a freethinker, and even be a freethinker, but such people can be good political allies, esp. in regard to church-state separation issues.

By: Kirk Hughey

Kirk Hughey — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 14:34:18 +0000

As Dennett (with Dawkins and Marx, among many)demonstrates; humans cannot fail to create religions no matter how hard they strive toward the opposite. That of the “brights” is scientism, one that has proved as destructive as any in our past and even more hollow of meaning. Its god is the human, certainly the most ludicrously arrogant choice in our ill-starred history.

By: Simon Bidwell

Simon Bidwell — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 04:14:54 +0000

With their cloyingly cutesy concept of ‘brights’, Dennett/Dawkins et al appear to be making explicit what has long seemed implicit in their expoundings: they would like to make of their shared worldview an ideology or creed which can be set up in opposition to other ideologies or creeds. In doing so they reveal themselves to be closer to their supposed opponents than they would care to acknowledge. As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, the vehemence of Dennett’s/Dawkin’s opposition to religion, and promotion of their own ‘hard Darwinism’, itself appears to have religious overtones. And surely, what is most regressive about religion, from an intellectual and a human standpoint, is not its commitment to the ‘supernatural’ (whatever that might be), but its dogmatism. The ‘bright’ movement’s expectation that followers will declare their adherence to a particular belief structure pushes it down this pathway, and contravenes the Enlightenment principle of intellectual openness; the acceptance of the revisability of even core belief principles. Whereas atheism and its arguably subtler cousin agnosticism are effectively negatively defined positions, Dennett, Dawkins and Co. want people to sign up to something more aggressive. As mentioned by others here, this ‘naturalistic world view’ ends up being something so inclusive and mellifluous that it is basically meaningless, or involves a commitment to D&D’s own narrowly defined position: that everything is at least in principle reducible to interactions governed by Newtonian mechanics, as they impact on observable phenomena (a kind of quasi-positivism). Dennett usually defends this position as being simply a pragmatic epistemology; when prodded on the issue it turns into something more like a dogmatic metaphysics. Philosophical considerations aside, one wonders what the haranguing of all things religious is really about. From a British (read New Zealand or Australian) perspective, it’s almost incomprehensible why D&D would want to spend so much time attacking what seems to be a straw man. The differences in the American situation are noted, and it is indeed worrying that academic faculty in Missouri can’t admit to being atheists. However, I find it hard to believe that fundamentalism is widespread among New England academes: it certainly isn’t in New Zealand universities, yet I’ve been to lectures by both Dennett and Dawkins in which they spent most of the time rubbishing Creationist theories. People were puzzled – the expression ‘preaching to the converted’ sprang to mind. I certainly see no record of the Leaders of the Brights down in the Deep South impassionedly trying to convince hellfire-raising preachers of the error of their ways… Maybe it would be unkind to suggest that it adds up to an easily identifiable and quotable ‘brand’ issue that has a vague tinge of controversy and helps to sell more books…

By: Tim Gorski

Tim Gorski — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 01:32:03 +0000

Unfortunately, people – even unbelievers – are tempted to believe in quick fixes for every problem. The problem for unbelievers is not one of having good labels. Those abound: atheist, agnostic, freethinker, unbeliever, nontheist, humanist, secular humanist, nullifidian, etc. If we want better PR it is not a new name (that can also be used to pillory us – “You’re really BLIGHTS” – “You’re saying that the rest of us are DIMS” etc) that we need. What is needed is a new approach, or, rather, wiser applications of old approaches. To get unbelievers to come out of the closet they must be given good reason to come out of the closet: communities of others like themselves, as opposed to exhortations from tenure-safe book-writing professors in ivory towers. See http://church.freethought.org

By: tony somera

tony somera — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 22:25:24 +0000

For me the key question is not whether there’s a God (if there is one he’s abandoned us) it’s whether Nature contains the explanation for its own existence or not. I don’t think it does so I can’t rule out the metaphysics.

By: Jim Wilson

Jim Wilson — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:59:26 +0000

Not quite bright… I think the word you’re searching for is intellectual. Since that particular word has been so sullied by the intellectual feudalism of the various socialist movements I can understand the desire to change the word. It would perhaps be best to come up with something less arrogant. Intellectual and Bright have the same connotation: we’re the smartest. I think Smarty would be better. It’s as cutesie as Bright but has a little bit of self-mockery to make it less presumptuous. I am not a Bright or Intellectual myself, or even a Secular Humanist. I’m not nearly closed-minded and dogmatic enough.

By: Lloyd Reinhardt

Lloyd Reinhardt — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 06:43:19 +0000

Does this movement have participants or recruits in Australia? Australia is full of philosphers who are not shy of being called atheistic materialists (and nonphilosophers too) I am sure that support for ‘bright rights’ would be forthcoming here, But those who would avow brightness don’t really get much eyebrow raising or frowning from religionists or establishmentarians. So not much urgency is likely to be felt about the matter.

By: Rodney Dill

Rodney Dill — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 01:17:23 +0000

The opposite of Bright is Brilliant Here is the definition of a Brilliant® A Brilliant is a person which is cognizant of both a naturalist and supernaturalist world view. We Brilliants embrace, in humility, the belief that there mysteries that man cannot fully comprehend. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics, and the meaning of life. Brilliants are not blinded by the arrogance of the type of intellectualism that only acknowledges the existence of things that are tangible to human senses.

By: Trapper John

Trapper John — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 21:10:50 +0000

Gah! This reminds me of nothing so much as Andrew Sullivan’s continuing endeavor to convince people to use the term “eagle” to describe people who think like Andrew Sullivan. I’m an unwashed heathen, meself.

By: Ivy League and I believe

Ivy League and I believe — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 21:04:32 +0000

St. Thomas Aquinas did the hard work of resolving theology and philosophy, putting the intellect to work on behalf of faith. Check it out!

By: Asian man on the wrong little island

Asian man on the wrong little island — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 20:21:14 +0000

Are all Tufts professors espousing silly names for commonplace beliefs which, given their abundance, hardly need defense and special political pandering? Does a Gilbert Ryle-meets-Scientism conspiracy grip all of Tufts faculty? I really want to know, because I was thinking of going. Comments?