Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [22]
Words matter and language counts. Feminist is a fine word that describes someone who believes in the need to secure the rights and opportunities for women equivalent to those provided for men. Unfortunately, thanks to certain conservative commentators, it has also come to be associated with sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, postmodern, deconstructionist, left-leaning liberals best scorned as “Femi-Nazis.”
Likewise, atheist is a descriptive term that simply means “without theism” and describes someone who does not believe in God. Unfortunately, thanks to religious fundamentalists, it has also come to be associated with sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, postmodern, deconstructionist, left-leaning liberals who are immoral, pinko Communists hell-bent on corrupting the morals of America’s youth.
Speak the scorn into existence.
The “Brights” Are Born
At the April 2003 conference of the Atheist Alliance International in Florida, at the behest of the organizer, I spoke about this labeling problem in the context of what “we” should call ourselves: skeptics, nonbelievers, nontheists, atheists, agnostics, heretics, infidels, free thinkers, humanists, secular humanists, and the like. Apparently there was some discussion among the organizers about whether or not I should be invited to speak because in my book How We Believe I defined myself as an agnostic instead of atheist, by which I mean, as Huxley originally defined the term in 1869, that the question of God’s existence is an insoluble one. I suggested, rather strongly, that dividing up the skeptical and humanist communities because of a disagreement over labels was not dissimilar to the Baptists and Anabaptists squabbling (and eventually splitting) over the appropriate time for baptism (infancy vs. adulthood).
My lecture was followed by a formal PowerPoint presentation introducing a “new meme,” by Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, from Sacramento, California, who noted that, by analogy, homosexuals used to suffer a similar problem when they were called homos, queers, fruits, fags, and fairies. Their solution was to change the label to a more neutral term—gay. Over the past couple of decades, gays have won significant liberties for themselves, starting with gay pride and gay marches that have led to gay rights. Analogously instead of calling ourselves skeptics, nonbelievers, nontheists, atheists, agnostics, infidels, heretics, free thinkers, humanists, secular humanists, and the like, it was suggested that we call ourselves brights.
What is a bright? As defined by its creators, “A Bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic—free of supernatural and mystical elements. Brights base their ethics and actions on a naturalistic worldview.” At present there is no brick-and-mortar brights headquarters, no brights secret handshake or decoder ring. This is a cyberspace phenomenon that “seeks unification of these many persons into an Internet constituency that will grow to have significant social and political influence.” Given our “severe linguistic disadvantage,” the codirectors state, “The Brights movement asks those with a naturalistic worldview to join hands (in a metaphorical sense) and to begin to view themselves and speak in civic situations as Brights.” As such we must unite against the prejudice that as nonbelievers we are not qualified to be full participatory citizens. “Brights have as full a spectrum of beliefs as any other citizens. We, as Brights, reject entirely societal imposition of a set of distasteful negative labels (unbelievers, godless, irreligious) that hamper us unfairly as we work to