I WENT TO the-brights.net today, and registered there, in spite of some rather picky misgivings.
For those readers who aren't familiar with the term, the brights movement consists of people who have a naturalistic world-view.
Exactly what this means may differ from one bright to another, since there are even clergy registered at the site.
Among my picky misgivings, of course, is the name itself. "Brights" just doesn't work for me. But labels aren't everything—substance counts for something, too.
On the other hand, they have a cool logo.
They've also done something I've been tempted to do for some time now: put their site name in small letters.
I like that. It may be what finally won me over.
(Those of you who follow the daily mull (ahem) will have noticed my aversion to caps here, here, and many other places.)
In fact, the fear of top-down, capital letter thinking was behind some of my more serious petty hesitations.
One reason I call myself (also somewhat hesitantly) an atheist (a term not to be confused with "bright", by the way), is that belief in Zeus, or Thor, or Yahweh, or Allah, or Baal is always a top-down system.
Even if I were to accept any (or all) of the philosophical arguments put forward for the existence of a first cause, or a prime mover, or an intelligent designer, I wouldn't have any evidence for anything like Zeus or Allah.
The jump from "something had to start everything" (itself a doubtful proposition) to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who holds an arbitrary and irrational preference for the nation of Israel, blames people for exercising the free will he gave them, and requires a human sacrifice of his own son as payment for this misdeed, is enormous.
Talk about a leap of faith.
The fact is that most (not all) religious thought is a form of political rhetoric, designed to buttress a forgone conclusion, which has been embraced for reasons other than evidence.
I know, because I was raised in that world, and didn't move out of it until I had two graduate degrees from a seminary.
Unfortunately I notice too many people with a naturalistic worldview taking the same kind of stance that religious people do.
They often have their own dogmatic positions, completely immune to evidence—some of which I'll be talking about in future posts.
They often tend to assume all religious people are hypocritical, stupid, and immoral.
Which, by the way, just isn't so.
I know, because I was raised in that world, and didn't move out of it until I had two graduate degrees from a seminary.
So I hesitated to label myself as a bright.
But I've been haunting the site lately, lurking on the forums.
I've seen some of the narrow-minded, top-down thinking I just described there, but I've also seen a lot of open-minded dialogue, by people who really care.
I've lost my excuse.
There's bigotry and top-down thinking on both sides of the chasm.
I guess I have to choose based on something else—like where I think the truth lies.
That's a small "t", by the way.
