2006.04.04
Last night I went to a gathering organized through the meetup.com web site, where you can find groups of people interested in any topic that are meeting offline. A few weeks ago I went to an atheist meet-up which is linked to the NYC atheists organization. Last nights meeting was for "Brights", which is a new term for people who don't believe in supernatural forces or entities. You can read all about them at their web site.
I'm still a little wary of their decision to use the word "bright" as the new label for atheists/agnostics/secularists/skeptics. (What was wrong with any of those words?) I know the term has some high profile supporters like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Chris Mooney however has some reservations.
One analogy supporters of the term use is how the word "gay" has taken on the new meaning for homosexual and supposedly given it more positive connotations. They hope to achieve a similar phenomenon by giving atheists "in the closet" a label to be proud of. My two objections to that are 1. "gay" hasn't become totally positive and 2. "gay" started out as a word basically meaning "happy", whereas "bright" often means "smart". The problem with using a synonym for intelligent is that it immediately gives an air of arrogance. Even if no arrogance is intended using that label may put people on the defensive or warp their reactions n a way to make them feel talked down to.
I haven't decided yet whether I disagree completely with the use of the term yet. I do plan to go to more meetings and maybe hear their thoughts on the matter. I get the feeling though that this issue has been debated to death before. Yes I just found an old thread on the Brights forum, and I see they have some good points. Maybe the term will grow on me over time.
* * *
You may have noticed that I am not following the description of my blog on the main page: "updated less than every day, but more than once a week." That's only if you define "week" as the traditional Sunday through Saturday span of time. If you think of week" as a span of any seven days, than I have posted (((59 days)/7)/20 posts) = 2.37 posts per week.
--Old blog comments:
April 4th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
jer Says:
Well, I think the problem they're trying to
overcome is that each of "atheists/agnostics/secularists/skeptics"
mean very different things, if not at least somewhat related.
I consider myself an agnostic and a skeptic, but not a secularist (well, maybe just a little bit, the parts where they're in favor of getting religion out of the government, but not so much the promotion of secularism) and definitely not at atheist (for pretty much the same reason, which we've been over before).
I think they're trying to encompass the people that fit into all those groups, and I somewhat applaud that. I do think they've made a poor choice of words though, as it implys that anyone not in the group is 'dim'. That's really the problem I have with the Atheists and the Secularists, is the focus they put on making people who aren't in the group out to be stupid. (see: Penn Jillette's famous "fucking retards" comment from TAM3)
I'm all about standing up to organized religion, but not to the point of organising your own religion in the process.
-April 4th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
jer Says:
OH, also, I was going to tell you. I've started
a second site that I envision more like yours; posts
on the way I feel/think about things, somewhat intended
for discussion. That stuff doesn't really fit with the
audience at nyquil.org, so I went ahead and made another.
You can reach it at alistair.nyquil.org. I think it
will probably be right up your alley.
(Alistair Hoel is kind of a fake persona I made up a while back, and since I'm not linking to it and want to be able to say things about people that I know and organizations I'm affiliated with, I decided a pseudonym is the best. Plus, pseudonyms are cool.)
-April 5th, 2006 at 9:39 am
GNBenson Says:
Thanks for the comments, my one faithful reader!
(I still follow all your updates through Bloglines,
although I couldn't think of any witty or insightful
comments to make recently besides "Haha" and "right on!"
which are just wastes of screenspace.) My one
question about your new site and its pseudonymity is
won't the domain name give away the fact that you are
writing it? (Unless "Jer" is another pseudonym?)
Regarding the topic of my post, I am currently reading Dan Dennett's new book "Breaking the Spell". He responds to the criticism of non-brights being assumed to be "dim" by saying we should call them "Supers" referring to their belief in the supernatural. I guess that sounds equally silly, but it is more positive. Instead of "godless heretics" and "religious fanatics" we have "Brights" and "Supers"! Now we can all get along.
I do agree that atheists/agnostics/secularists/skeptics are all different, but compared to your typical religious fundamentalist they are pretty close and should be allies against such fanaticism. The hard part is bringing these allies together as a political force. (Hence the often repeated "herding cats" analogy.) The major problem I see is that "free thought" is not a very infectious meme. It is hard to rally people around a single idea if that single idea is based on questioning doubt. Despite these difficulties I think it is important to try and stand up for free thought and rationalism.
-April 5th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
jer Says:
Well, I'm not really trying to be secretive,
just not obvious about it. Any longtime reader
of my site will know the name Alistair Hoel right
away, and I'm not really pretending to be a different
person. I was just trying to figure out what name
to give the subdomain, and I didn't really want
jer.nyquil.org and alistair popped into my head.
(A little backstory for you: I thought it would
be awesome to put up political signs that say 'A.
Hoel for *whatever*. Ifyou have to vote for an
A-hole, it may as well be A. Hoel' and decided A.
Hoel needed a first name, and alistair was my final
choice. Anyway, I'm not REALLY trying to make another
person, or make anyone beleive i'm a differnt person.
Though, should someday I do something more concrete
with the name, and someone googles it, it will be
interesting for him to have some sort of presence.
So anyway, I don't really care that people know it
is me, it's just convenient that people that don't
know it is me won't know it is me :)
Dennet talked a bit about the term and mentioned "supers" at TAM4. My overall impression of his talk wasn't terribly good, as he focused so much on fervently proseletizing this new ideal that everyone should be a part of. It fit in really well with the rest of TAM4 though, which really seemed to me to be one big sermon which on one hand preached about the evils of organized religion, while attempting to organize what amounts to a religion on the other hand. Kind of a turnoff. I'm officially distancing myself from any of the secularism/atheism/making fun of religions portions of skepticism, and really hope that won't mean that I can no longer participate.
"What am I? Super! Thanks for asking!"
I really am of the belief that something which has no testable evidence just plain shouldn't be mentioned in what amounts to a scientific community. But, we've been through this all before.
Penn Jillette is constantly harping on about atheism on his show, but as more and more callers call in trying to bust him on it, he keeps restating his argument in ways that I can really get behind. His extremely gruff, opinionated exterior is very sharply contrasted by his ability to admit when he's wrong (he can literally switch sides of the fence on an issue in a minute, which is really awesome) and his looking out for the concerns of other people. While I take issue with his statements of "evolution is a fact" and "I know for a fact there is no God", I more and more respect his reasons for his arguments, even though I don't think they're scientific.
-April 6th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
GNBenson Says:
I don't find Dennett being too preachy in his book.
He seems to be taking extra care to be reasonable and
analyzing religion softly. I plan to read the various
reviews out there once I finish.
As for evolution, I would have to agree with Penn that it is a fact depending on how you define "fact". If a "fact" is something we can know is true absolutely then there are no facts beyond the impressions of my senses I am experiencing right now. I don't even know if the outside world exists, just that these colors and sounds do. If we mean "fact" as something we can show is true with a reasonable amount of evidence, than evolution is a much a fact as the Earth's roundness or the fact that Lincoln was president of the United States.
How evolution occurred and the theory of evolution used to explain it with natural selection and so on is where the theory comes in and I do mean the scientific use of the term and not the layman use which just means a hypothesis or idea. The FAQ page at the Talk.origins archive explains it better than me as does this page: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html
Regarding Penn's claim about God, I don't understand this term "God", what does it mean? ;-)