From: metahuman (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 17:11:21 MDT
[Keith Henson] I don't self-identify as a "bright" but I can see their point in trying to get away from derogatory labels the way other groups have done. My interest in memetics and evolutionary psychology (try sex drugs cults in Google) has led me to a profound appreciation of religions and their functions. Alas, for me the ability to appreciate a tree seems to preclude being one.
[metahuman] As a marketer, I feel it is especially important to "cover all the bases", which The Brights have not done, and to appropriately engineer the introduction of the Brights movement to gain social acceptance. However, skeptics and haters of the Brights movement are actually working toward the social acceptance of the Brights. Richard Dawkins in his foreword to Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine points out, referring to the canonization of a new word by the Oxford English Dictionary, "The aspirant word must be commonly used without needing to be defined and withouts its coinage being attributed whenever it is used."
With that in mind, Mr. D'Souza's editorial can be seen as an attempt to define "Brights" with a theistic definition instead of what the term actually means. This is seen by the definition of "atheism" in the American-Heritage Dictionary (Bartleby.com, dictionary.com). As such, skeptics and haters are working on both sides of the fence.
The concept of being a Bright is not a radically new idea, and neither is using the term "bright" to describe a Way of thought as pointed out by a responder to the article at Opinion Journal. Homosexuals recently lifted the term "gay" and redefined it to suit their purposes. Originally, they self-identified as "fags", which also means something more pleasant.
I take issue with redefinition of a commonly-used word. The English language is already screwed up as it is with "Semitic" meaning various peoples and "anti-Semitic" referring to only hate of one among other political correctness garbage. When the term "meme" was introduced, it had no previous meaning. It developed as an analogy to "gene." This is an acceptable form of introducing a new word. The many theists I have spoken to and described to them memetics and the meaning of "meme" have not objected to the word or perceived memetics as an opposing religion. Brights was perceived negatively despite the happiness connotation I don't like about the word "bright."
The common folk will see Brights as atheists who claim they are smarter than everyone else. If this were true, even I would take a stronger stand against Brightism. Since the general public also feels every atheist is representative of atheism, it is more than likely that we'll be seeing more opinions like that of Mr. D'Souza that "dis" 30 million people because of that perception. This is what I feel that atheists must get away from: the idea that we are not individuals, that atheists are immoral, and are a cult of Satanists. Generalizations are inherently inaccurate as they make an assumption of "all". I've heard atheists generalize atheism and atheists and what they "believe". This is wrong and should be corrected whenever confronted.
A member of another forum put it bluntly, "[Brights] don't seem to have actually brought anything new to the table. It seems they just want to create an all-encompassing word that describes atheists." I perceive this quote to be quite accurate while it may err in some miniscule form or another. Besides rewriting the dictionaries, what is it that Brights can do to benefit this "naturalistic worldview"? What makes them different from us, Virians and MetaVirians alike? Whatever it is, it's more destructive than constructive in the long-run.
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