Comments on: Dim Bulbs

By: Gar Lipow

Gar Lipow — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:53:41 +0000

I dunno. “Bright” has the advantage of concision. One word shorter than “Kick Me”.

By: mike c.

mike c. — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 20:30:42 +0000

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.

By: brooksfoe

brooksfoe — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:36:26 +0000

When people ask me what my religion is, I lay out the basic tenets of Brooksfoeism (including the somewhat Manichaean concept of David Brooks as Satan). Then I ask them what their religion is. But usually they say they’re Christian, or Muslim, or what have you, which isn’t really their religion at all – they’ve just plagiarized it from someone else. I find this very dishonest and upsetting.

By: Michael Kremer

Michael Kremer — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 05:27:32 +0000

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

“Greeks”?

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 22:14:11 +0000

Hey, they even have their own brand of Amstel beer! http://www.amstelbright.com. The whole thing (the Brights, not the beer) seems rather faddish to me. I understand that atheist has particularly negative connotations in the US, but I don’t see anything particularly wrong with it.

The Brights seem a little too preoccupied with sounding like a positive, forward-looking bunch. It’s really nothing more of a positive label on a blend of rationalism/atheism/agnosticism. It’s marketing, just like Amstel Bright Beer.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 20:07:52 +0000

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.

By: C.J.Colucci

C.J.Colucci — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:21:05 +0000

What did adherents to the ancient Greek religion call themselves?

By: Sebastian Dangerfield

Sebastian Dangerfield — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 15:48:53 +0000

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?

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:21:46 +0000

Well, really I agree completely with luc and abb1, but we in the US live in a culture that is obsessed with both religion and labels, and if I have to have one I surely prefer “atheist”, “secularist”, “humanist”, “godless heathen”, or what have you to (ick) “Bright”.

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:45:58 +0000

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.

By: Natalie Solent

Natalie Solent — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:01:36 +0000

I should have said, other than that point I agreed with h.e. barber’s comment, and I’m coming from roughly the same place he/she is. But it does seem to me both that the distinction between freethinker and atheist is worth maintaining and that “freethinker” has some claim to accurately describe a certain belief system – although I’m sure that those who coined it also thought it sounded good.

By: Natalie Solent

Natalie Solent — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 08:46:28 +0000

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.

By: luc

luc — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 00:48:09 +0000

Atheist, bright or freethinker, it still looks as a silly label for those that are determined to classifing things according to religion. No need for that at all. Just as there ain’t any asupermanists, asantaclausists and apipoists. It doesn’t mean a thing.

Atheism (and brightism) fails as a worldview because what it describes is so partial that it hardly unites those that are described as such. And if you do make it specific, hardly anyone would classify.

Locally, 42% aren’t affiliated to any religion at all. You wouldn’t be able to find a common worldview amongst them, so why dump a silly label on that group?

It doesn’t look as a coincidence to me then that of all the listed brights on their website there isn’t one from continental “old” europe.

By: H. E. Baber

H. E. Baber — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:15:24 +0000

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.

By: Bill McNeill

Bill McNeill — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:38:40 +0000

I agree with H.E. Baber in 37 that “Freethinker” is a passive-agressive snipe. (And inaccurate: were militant athesists in Stalin’s secret police “freethinkers”?) I disagree about the connotations of “secular”, however. In a pedantic context like this one, I take it as a literal descriptive term shorn of political connotations. (Kinda like “atheist”.)

For example, I think it’s meaningful to use the term “secular Jews” to describe people who feel an ethnic/cultural connection to Judaism without believing in the Old Testament. This term implies the existence of a group of people who I guess you’d have to call “non-secular Jews”, but I don’t automatically assume that this latter group would be a bunch of theocrats.