Dim Bulbs

We have pictures of you in the anorak, Kieran. Start calling yourself a Bright, or we go public.

Hehheh. Nice, Kieran.

My father joined Mensa in the hope of meeting interesting and intelligent women (a reason for joining as close to immemorial custom as you can get re Mensa, I believe). He said that all the women he met there were primarily interested in talking about how intelligent they were. I’m grateful that he had enough taste not to find that appealing.

P.S. Incidentally I was very surprised and disappointed to read on PZ’s blog that Dawkins has climbed aboard this stupid bandwagon after previously distancing himself from it.

I once knew someone whose surname was Bright. Too bad he wasn’t.

If you’re an atheist, an agnostic or a Deist, why not just call yourself that? “Bright” sounds like a resentful nerd who is trying too hard.

The problem with brights is not the silly name, it’s the ridiculousness of their attempt to ban the irrational by fiat.

I’m never shy about being offensive to religious people- religion is a form of mental illness and a scourge of the species. But if I’m going to be offensive I’m going to do it openly, not by hiding behind this nauseatingly twee term.

What would happen in a post-Bright era? Would the next wave of dweebs in anoraks call themselves Brighter? Or does that sound too much like blighter?

Come to think of it, that could be a slogan : “The brights are a blight.”

I’m not going to take the Brights seriously until they have their first couple dozen martyrs.

All of the above holds true, PLUS the arrogance thing.

One problem is that “atheist” and “agnostic” are untenable terms, so poorly defined that they invite argument, and so freighted with negative baggage that their very use clouds thought. Polls show that the American public is less willing to vote for an atheist than even a gay, though oddly it seems not to mind non-religious candidates.

Most of the alternatives on offer are nearly as problematic. P.Z. Meyers is certainly a naturalist, inasmuch as he’s a professor of biology. He’s less a humanist than a cephalopodist (We welcome our calamari overlords … to dinner!)

Though I remain fond of “freethinker”, it does appear that “not religious” is better at short-circuiting arguments and circumventing deep-seated prejudices.

Well, actually, I am a Well Hung, but i would hate the term to be miscontrued as arrogance. I’ll just wait the term’s new meaning takes hold in mainstream society.

surely we need a better term than “non-Bright”…

This reminds me of the scene in the Life of Brian where Brian tells the crowd “You are all different!”, and, in unison, they repeat “Yes, we are all different!”

Let’s see: people claiming to be free and independent thinkers … band together to form a new tribe they can all conform to. Hmmm.

The term “bright” makes you think which I really like. This term is not meant for hurting anybody’s religion or sentiment. It’s just a plain simple word!

There are two issues here: the legitimacy of the Brights’ project, and the asninity of the chosen label. The project isn’t an entirely bad idea, to give a useful name to a naturalistic or materialistic worldview. Using the terms atheist or agnostic, and you’re defining the worldview only in the negative. It’s like describing your politics by saying “I’m an anti-Communist.” Say “I’m a naturalist” and people think you’re a gardener or maybe an environmentalist. Say “I’m a materialist” and people think you’re obsessed with money, XTC or both and spend your free time wearing power ties from the 1980s.

The problem is that if you say “I’m a Bright,” people think you’re a self-important prick.

How about “I’m a secularist”? Secular means distance from, or lack of, religion. Adding “ist” raises it from a personality quirk to a worldview rejecting the supernatural. Covers everyone the term should rightly cover, from Karl Marx to Richard Dawkins to Ayn Rand to the Brights. Overlaps well enough with political secularism.

How about people stop running back and forth from labels like a Benny Hill skit and just explain what they are to people who care?

This has me thinking, “What about successful sect-names?” Where did they come from and what form do they take?

The closest analogy I can think of is the Friends. Kinda goofy name, right–or at least one to which many of the concerns about “Brights” apply? so we (the Enemies? the Casual Acquaintances?) call ’em the Quakers, and it’s caught on.

Methodism and most, I suppose, of the other ism appellations were, on the other hand, self-applied, and stuck. But that, I think, is because they’re specifying an adjustment in practice to Christianity, whereas the Friends and the Brights are trying to show that they’re rethinking the whole enchilada in the one case, and the whole restaurant in the other.

The arrogance, and pomposity, and bloody **cheek** of these people who run down anoraks just drives me wild.

Props to “dave” above for the esperanto line.

Brights sound a bit like iron deficient Scientologists with facial ticks.

Didn’t Ron Hubbard (who stole from OTO and Al Crowley by the way), coin the term “clear”? Being “clear” and being “bright” have a similar connotation.

What I get from Kieran’s insightful analysis are people burdened with cultural chic (of the progressive type) and philanthropic compulsions, who are likely to be very, very tidy … very, very organized … and doubtless …. very, very shiny.

They sound like exremely hygenic mega-nerds … highly informed and very earnest about everything.

Some Brighteestas, I would hazard are likely either to be vegetarian or micro-biotic and can be sent into a state of deep shock by people who jump out of dark corners and yell “McDONALDS!”

There is also a sort of pseudo-spirituality connoted by the term “bright”. It has a pantheistic ring to it as in “indwelling brightness” … which could equally easily translate as “aura”, “essense” or even “soul”.

There seems to be an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to appropriate spiritual terminology and place it in a naturalistic context.

“Why yes oh seeker of truth, you can be “bright” without believing in the Great Absurdity.”

I just know that if I was invited to a party and was told it would be a “Bright” affair, I would buy a good Chilean cab and head down to Victor’s.

Americans have an unfavorable view of atheists but that’s unfortunate and something atheists should work to fix—by noting that they are atheists but don’t believe that ethics is all b.s., aren’t out to trash religion, etc.

It seems to me that “atheist” has the same negative baggage as “feminist.” They’re both defined in public opinion by the most doctrinaire, shrill and unlikeable of their members (Andrea Dworkin, Madalyn O’Hair, Michael Newdow). Hence the attempt at spin with “Bright” which reminds me a lot of “I’m not a feminist, but…”

That’s why atheists (and feminists, and others who tend to be vilified in popular opinon) ought to stop spinning and “but”-ing and just say who they are. The more atheists who call themselves atheists, the more public opinion will change, as people see that “atheist” does not mean “amoral puppy-kicker.” Most people just want to live and let live.

My opinion is colored by the fact that I live in Northern California, where “out” atheists are thick on the ground and there is much diversity of religion. I can imagine it is much harder for atheists in smaller Southern towns, for instance.

To the extent I don’t think this is a useless exercise in identity politics, I like “secular humanist”.

First because it’s used as a pejorative term by the U.S. right, and reclaming a pejorative term is like maybe trick #15 in the Book of the World’s Oldest Tricks. Besides which, it’s a reasonable description of my take on things. “Atheist” is a fine descriptive term, but (per John Gragg 30) I agree that it’s limiting to define yourself negatively. My own atheism arises out of a preference for non-anthropomorphic explanations for phenomena that don’t obviously involve people-like actors. H.E. Baber in (37) is correct to identify this as one philosophical position among many, and, for my money, a position in a pretty musty an uninteresting debate.

The “secular” part, then, is to capture this whole non-anthropomorphic business, and “humanist” is shorthand for a particular moral/political outlook that sees individual human beings as the ultimate source of and reason for moral authority. Granted the “secular” part here still falls into a bit of the same negative trap as “atheist”. A more accurate term would be “natural individualist”, but this puts me in the mind of a guy with a shotgun and a coonskin cap singing Aretha Franklin.

Right on “secular Jew,” which I take it means someone with the ethnic/cultural identification who doesn’t believe in God. But I’m not sure that, in general “secular [religion name]” works this way across the board. I’m not sure, e.g. whether “secular Muslim” refers only to cultural Muslims who are not religious believers or whether it means more generically cultural Muslims who, regardless of beliefs about the existence of God, don’t buy into the political agenda, don’t want shari’a law instituted, etc. But I’m actually curious about this–I don’t know what the phrase standardly means.

“Secular” literally means worldly, with the connotation of this-worldly–and, notoriously, lots of prominent religious figures–like renaissance popes–have been very worldly. Again, “secular” is used in a special sense to designate persons and institutions within religious contexts so, e.g. a “secular priest” in the RC Church I think is a diocesan priest, one who isn’t a member of a religious order.

So seems to me “secular” just invites confusion. Make it “atheist”–nothing wrong with that, and nothing particularly wrong with being “negative.” Most English-speakers don’t even recognize the word as negative–most don’t even know the word “theist” and many don’t recognize the “a-” prefix as negative.

h.e. barber and others,

I had understood that “freethinker” meant a person who rejects authority in matters of religion (or anything else, but mostly applied to religion).

Most freethinkers have also been atheists but one could have a theist freethinker.

I agree with Luc: what’s the point of calling yourself an ‘atheist’? Well, unless you’re trying to make some kind of statement, of course. Atheism is not a state of mind, theism is.

In addition to picking a term that resonantes unpleasantly with contemporary cultic monikers (e.g., “clear”), the [perhaps-not-so-]Brights have, without showing evidence of possessing a single ironic bone in their altogether evolved bodies, walked right into compairson to one of the more risible (except, perhaps to complete nutters) Enlightement-Era cults — the Bavarian Illuminati. Just the thing to get our neo-Birchers all excited. We need to sentence them to some re-education. I would suggest that they be forced to read and re-read, out loud, Hofstadter’s The Parnoid Style in American American Politics, while laboring in rice paddies, until such time as they have memorized the text and absorbed its lessons . . . 20 years?

Re (44): I stacked the deck by saying “secular Jew” instead of “secular Muslim” or “secular Christian”. Among the three big monotheisms, Judaism is specifically tied to a particular ethnic group/cultural tradition and the main way to become a Jew is to be born one. Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, generally aspire to be transcultural ideologies that seek converts. An Indonesian Muslim is no less Muslim because they’re not ethnically Arab, and a French Catholic is no less Christian because they’re not…er, an ethnic Jew, I guess. So “secular Muslim” and “secular Christian” have a tinge of oxymoron that “secular Jew” do not.

Apart from that I think we just have different intuitions about the emotional valence of “secular” when it’s used independent of a particular context, which is pretty standard language variation and nothing surprising.

“What did adherents to the ancient Greek religion call themselves?”

“Greeks”?

i’m with 54. the only true thing we can call ourselves is “human beings”. although i’ve done a few things that would disqualify me from using this label.