Brights movement - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Brights movement is a social movement that aims to promote public understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic

Naturalism (philosophy)

Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...

worldview, including equal civil rights and acceptance for people who hold a naturalistic worldview. It was co-founded by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell

Mynga Futrell

Mynga Futrell is a Sacramento-based activist and retired educator who is active in several fields. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry and Earth Science, M.S. in Natural Science and a Ph.D...

in 2003. The movement aims to create an Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

constituency that will pursue the following aims:

Promote public understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements.
Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance.
Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such people.

The Brights movement distinguishes itself from traditional membership organizations by focusing on the development of a broad public constituency capable of including members of many narrower categories. For example: atheists

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

, agnostics

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....

, humanists

Humanism

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns. In philosophy and social science, humanism is a perspective which affirms some notion of human nature, and is contrasted with anti-humanism....

, skeptics

Skepticism

Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...

, and members of religious traditions who observe the cultural practices without believing literally in a deity might all pursue shared civic goals respecting egalitarian

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...

laws and a political discourse informed by the natural sciences

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

. Also, unlike a typical membership organization, the Brights movement does not appoint individuals empowered to speak for the whole; individual brights speak for themselves or speak collectively by proposing statements to which all registered Brights may join in assent (or not) as they see fit. Instead, the focus is on making visible to society the largest possible constituency of people who hold a naturalistic worldview.

The noun bright was coined by Geisert as a positive-sounding umbrella term

Umbrella term

An umbrella term is a word that provides a superset or grouping of concepts that all fall under a single common category. Umbrella term is also called a hypernym. For example, cryptology is an umbrella term that encompasses cryptography and cryptanalysis, among other fields...

, and Futrell defined it as "an individual whose worldview is naturalistic (free from supernatural

Supernatural

The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...

and mystical elements)". Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...

has since suggested that people that believe in the supernatural should be referred to as supers.

As of 2009, the Brights' Net tagline is "Illuminating and Elevating the Naturalistic Worldview".

History

Paul Geisert was a biology teacher in Chicago in the 1960s, a professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

in the 1970s, an entrepreneur and writer in the 1980s, and the co-developer of learning materials and a web site regarding teaching about religion in public schools in the 1990s.

In deciding to attend the "Godless Americans March on Washington

Godless Americans March on Washington

The Godless Americans March on Washington occurred in Washington, DC on November 2, 2002 with the participation of many atheists, freethinkers, agnostics and humanists.-Timeline of the event:...

" in 2002, Paul disliked the label "godless" and resolved to identify a better term to unite the "community of reason." He sought a new, positive word that might become well-accepted, in the same way that the term "gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

" has come to mean "homosexual." In late 2002, Paul coined the noun "bright," but did not announce it immediately.

Working with Mynga Futrell, the co-founders of the Brights movement wanted to connect and galvanize the many individuals who were non-religious, but who were not associated with the many philosophical organisations already in existence. To achieve this they created not only the definition of "a bright," but also the idea of a civic constituency that would coalesce through the Internet.

Having tested this idea during the early months of 2003, they launched the Brights' Net website on June 4, 2003. The movement gained early publicity through articles by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

and Wired, and by Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

. Within a year, registered Brights numbered in five figures and spanned 85 nations.

The movement has continued to grow and experienced accelerated registrations following media debate around "new atheism" prompted by a series of book releases in late 2006 including The God Delusion
The God Delusion
The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that...

, Breaking the Spell, God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is a book by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens criticising religion. It was published in the United Kingdom as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion....

, The End of Faith
The End of Faith
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason is a book written by Sam Harris, concerning organized religion, the clash between religious faith and rational thought, and the problems of tolerance towards religious fundamentalism....

, and Letter to a Christian Nation
Letter to a Christian Nation
Letter to a Christian Nation is a non-fiction book by Sam Harris, written in response to feedback he received following the publication of his first book The End of Faith. The book is written in the form of an open letter to a Christian in the United States...

. As of January 2010 over 50,000 Brights registered from 186 nations.

The Brights' Net

The Brights' Net web site serves as the hub of communication and action projects in the Brights movement.

The Brights' Net recommends project priorities and facilitates the formation of local groups, known as Brights' Local Constituencies (BLCs). There are BLCs in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, several cities in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, and various other locations worldwide.

However, Brights act autonomously in doing their part for the furtherance of the Brights movement. No person or entity, including The Brights' Net co-directors, can speak for all Brights.

Brights

Within the definition of bright, many, but not all, brights also identify variously under other terms or identities, including atheist

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

, humanist

Humanism

, secular humanist

Secular humanism

Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...

, freethinker

Freethought

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...

, objectivist

Objectivism (Ayn Rand)

Objectivism is a philosophy created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand . Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception...

, rationalist, naturalist

Naturalism (philosophy)

, materialist

Materialism

In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...

, agnostic

Agnosticism

, skeptic

Skepticism

, apatheist

Apatheism

Apatheism , also known as pragmatic atheism or as practical atheism, is acting with apathy, disregard, or lack of interest towards belief or lack of belief in a deity. Apatheism describes the manner of acting towards a belief or lack of a belief in a deity; so applies to both theism and atheism...

, or even naturalistic pantheists

Naturalistic pantheism

Naturalistic pantheism is a naturalistic form of pantheism that encompasses feelings of reverence and belonging towards nature and the wider universe, but is realist and embraces rationalism and the scientific method...

or classical Deists, and so on. Even so, the "movement is not associated with any defined beliefs," as written on The Brights' Net website. One of the purposes of the Brights' Net is to include the umbrella term bright in the vocabulary of this existing "community of reason".

However, "the broader intent is inclusive of the many-varied persons whose worldview is naturalistic" but are in the "general population", as opposed to associating solely with the "community of reason". So persons who can declare their naturalistic worldview using the term bright extend beyond the familiar secularist

Secularism

Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...

categories, as long as they do not hold theistic worldviews. Registrations even include some members of the clergy, such as Presbyterian ministers and a Church History Professor and ordained priest.

Dawkins' analogy in the aforementioned Guardian article is instructive, comparing the coining of bright to the "triumph of consciousness-raising" from the term gay:

Gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

is succinct, uplifting, positive: an "up" word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer
Queer
Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...

, faggot
Faggot (epithet)
Faggot, often shortened to fag, is a pejorative term and common slur used chiefly in North America against homosexual males. Its pejorative use has spread from the United States to varying extents elsewhere in the English-speaking world through mass culture, including movies, music, and the...

and pooftah are insults. Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal, we need a word of our own, a word like "gay". ... Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

Despite the explicit difference between the noun and adjective, there have been comments on the comparison. In his Wired article Dawkins states, "Whether there is a statistical tendency for brights [noun] to be bright [adjective] is a matter for research." Daniel Dennett, in his book Breaking the Spell, suggests that if non-naturalists are concerned with this connotation of the word bright, then they should invent an equally positive sounding word for themselves, like supers (i.e., one whose worldview contains supernaturalism). Geisert and Futrell maintain that the neologism has always had a kinship with the Enlightenment, an era which celebrated science, free inquiry, and a spirit of skepticism; they have endorsed the use of super as the antonym to bright.

Notable brights include biologists Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

and Richard J. Roberts

Richard J. Roberts

Sir Richard "Rich" John Roberts is a British biochemist and molecular biologist. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Phillip Allen Sharp for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.When he was 4, his family moved to Bath. In...

, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...

, philosopher Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

, and stage magicians and debunker

Debunker

A debunker is an individual who attempts to discredit and contradict claims as being false, exaggerated or pretentious. The term is closely associated with skeptical investigation of, or in some cases irrational resistance to, controversial topics such as U.F.O.s, claimed paranormal phenomena,...

s James Randi

James Randi

James Randi is a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic best known as a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience. Randi is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation...

and Penn & Teller

Penn & Teller

Penn & Teller are Las Vegas headliners whose act is an amalgam of illusion and comedy. Penn Jillette is a raconteur; Teller generally uses mime while performing, although his voice can occasionally be heard during their performance...

. Other brights include Amy Alkon

Amy Alkon

Amy Alkon , also known as the Advice Goddess, writes a weekly advice column, Ask the Advice Goddess, which is published in over 100 newspapers within North America. While Alkon addresses a wide range of topics, she primarily focuses on issues in intimate relationships...

, Sheldon Lee Glashow

Sheldon Lee Glashow

Sheldon Lee Glashow is a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. He is the Metcalf Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Boston University.-Birth and education:...

, Babu Gogineni

Babu Gogineni

Babu Gogineni is a Hyderabad-based secular humanist and rationalist. Babu Gogineni was Executive Director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, a London-based International NGO with Consultative Status with the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Vienna and with the Council of Europe,...

, Edwin Kagin

Edwin Kagin

Edwin Frederick Kagin, J.D., is an attorney at law in Union, Kentucky, and a founder of Camp Quest, the first secular summer camp in the United States for the children of secularists, atheists, agnostics, brights, skeptics, naturalists and freethinkers...

, Mel Lipman

Mel Lipman

Melvin Lipman is an attorney and civil libertarian living in Las Vegas, Nevada.Though currently retired from full-time legal practice, Lipman works as an arbitrator and mediator while teaching constitutional law at the Nevada campus of the University of Phoenix.Lipman is president of the American...

, Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Piergiorgio Odifreddi , is an Italian mathematician, logician and aficionado of the history of science, who is also extremely active as a popular science writer and essayist, especially in a perspective of philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and...

, Air America Radio

Air America Radio

Air America was an American radio network specializing in progressive talk programming...

talk show host Lionel and Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci is the chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUNY-Lehman College. He is also the editor in chief for the journal . He is known as an outspoken critic of creationism and advocate of science education.-Biography:...

Criticism of the name of the movement

The movement has been criticised by some (both religious and non-religious) who have objected to the adoption of the title "bright" because they believe it suggests that the individuals with a naturalistic worldview are more intelligent ("brighter") than non-naturalists, such as philosophical skeptics

Philosophical skepticism

Philosophical skepticism is both a philosophical school of thought and a method that crosses disciplines and cultures. Many skeptics critically examine the meaning systems of their times, and this examination often results in a position of ambiguity or doubt...

or idealists

Idealism

In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...

, believers in the paranormal

Paranormal

Paranormal is a general term that designates experiences that lie outside "the range of normal experience or scientific explanation" or that indicates phenomena understood to be outside of science's current ability to explain or measure...

, philosophical theists

Philosophical theism

Philosophical theism is the belief that God exists independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion. It represents belief in a personal God entirely without doctrine...

or the religious

Religiosity and intelligence

The topic of religiosity and intelligence pertains to relationships between intelligence and religiosity, the extent to which someone is religious...

. For example, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry published an article by Chris Mooney titled "Not Too 'Bright'" in which he stated that, although he agreed with the movement, Richard Dawkins' and Daniel Dennett's "campaign to rename religious unbelievers 'brights' could use some rethinking" because of the possibility that the term would be misinterpreted. The journalist and noted atheist Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Eric Hitchens is an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the...

likewise found it a "cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called 'brights.'" Dennett posed the idea that super may serve well as a positive title for those who believe in the supernatural. He also suggested this during his presentation at the Atheist Alliance International '07 convention.

Similarly, Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer

Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. The Skeptics Society currently has over 55,000 members...

, who is an Enthusiastic Bright, has nevertheless resisted using the term to describe himself, saying, "I don't call myself a 'Bright'.”

In response to this Daniel Dennett has stated in his book Breaking the Spell:

There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful hijacking of the ordinary word "gay" by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they're straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim.

Another common criticism of the Bright movement is that the proposed terminology is superfluous, being virtually synonymous with already accepted descriptive terms such as secular humanist

Secular humanism

Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...

, naturalist

Metaphysical naturalism

Metaphysical naturalism, also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those...

, and rationalist.

External links

The Brights' Net – The originating hub of the Brights' constituency
Teaching About Religion In Public Schools: Worldview Education

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

History

The Brights' Net

Brights

Criticism of the name of the movement

See also

External links