Are You Bright?
Are you bright? Do you know what the question is asking?
A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
These days “bright” is like “gay”, an ordinary adjective pressed into service to paper over an earlier, less-flattering term. Being gay sounds better than being homosexual, more normal, less scientific, more acceptable. And being bright sounds better than being atheist or agnostic for the same reasons. A significant number of people are coming “out of the closet” and admitting they are bright.
Someone can have a naturalistic worldview (and thus be “bright” according to the definition) and believe in the existence of god(s). In fact, the naturalistic worldview itself was born and evolved among people who believed in the existence of god(s).
Terms like atheist and agnostic were created by people who aimed to use language to describe things as they are. They were created by real naturalists for whom language should reflect reality and should aim to be an adequate means for describing the distinctions present in reality. Terms like “bright” are born from an entirely different need, one that is separate from reality, and aims to create a certain psychological mood.
i care not what you believe, but how you came to believe it ;)
More verbal-ability ineptitude among the scientistic. Dawkins has become, and Dennett always was, a propagandist rather than an original researcher.
Their kind used to call themselves “rationalists” or “freethinkers”, and that didn’t work either. Congratulating yourself every time you allude to your little gang won’t endear you to the rest of mankind. It sounds too much like whistling to keep your courage up.
The term “gay” has become risible as evidence mounts of the fundamental dysfunctionality of the “lifestyle”: drug addictions, alcoholism, OCD promiscuity, domestic violence among lesbians etc. “Brights” sounds like nerds who are being ignored trying to cheer each other up.
Go away and try again, infidels. And ole, don’t use the s-word as a bland subsitute for piety. Read http://www.americanatheist.org/spr03/T1/eller.html and beware of the spiritual!
Calling yourself “bright” is so gay.
Jeez when did “bright” become a pejorative? I thought it meant “smart, sharp, witty”. How did I fall behind on this one?
Atheism is as metaphysical a doctrine as any theism and therefore has nothing to do with science.
I am agnostic about this issue.
name changing seems so desparate, and doesn’t change much. (I think ‘gay’ beats ‘homosexual’ only because it reduces syllables and ‘homo’ is ambiguous–homo sapian?).
The bottom line is that most people don’t trust atheists to behave morally, and so wouldn’t entrust them to major public office. It isn’t obvious why atheists behave morally, and until it is, ‘brights’ will be viewed with suspicion just as atheists are.
The bottom line is that most people don’t trust atheists to behave morally, and so wouldn’t entrust them to major public office.
in the united states. states as diverse as chile, australia, france & india have had atheist/agnostic non-communist heads of state. i assume a non-trivial number of the unitarian-universalists elected to public offic as well as jews are not theists. also, our former governor in oregon, john kitzhaber, did not list a religious affiliation.
Back in the 1700s, “brights” used to call themselves “deists”.
Everyone, please kill this meme by utterly ignoring it.
phleg, it’s beyond that stage….
I am not bright; I am an atheist. How can an atheist be bright?
The bright term is unfortunate, since I always start thinking about wattage, incandescent vs. fluorescent, etc.
C’mon, why hide your light under a basket? Call yourselves “brilliants.”
Hi, I’m V Bright and I’m an Arrogant. Some of us prefer the term Obnoxious or Boastful while others just like the term Laughables, but as such a high proportion of Arrogants are research scientists and computer programmers we really can’t see how silly it looks to the outside world to call ourselves Brights.
The proper term is “A Bright”, not to be confused with BEING bright.
> It isn’t obvious why atheists behave morally
Theists scare the shit out of me. What happens when they figure out that there’s no eye in the sky? Riots?