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I've never liked the term "bright". Maybe it's just that I object to turning adjectives into nouns (almost as bad as turning nouns into verbs; e.g. funeralize, ugh!), but I think it's mostly because it sounds pretentious.

I personally think that "rationalist" is as good as any. It nicely embodies my outlook on life (at least when it comes to religious beliefs :-)

Posted by: tacitus | June 24, 2006 3:29 PM

Personally I prefer to describe myself as a member of the reality-based community. It distinguishes me from nutjobs-who-happen-to-be-atheists like Larry Darby. It is intrinsically inclusive rather than exclusive, hence sounds more inviting to others. It isn't a term many people have come across before, so provokes discourse. And frankly it describes me a lot better than atheism - if God were willing to participate in the Randi Challenge, I'd happily accept His existence.

Posted by: Corkscrew | June 24, 2006 3:45 PM

Regarding the term "bright"...

PZM wrote:

The argument that this is analogous to the appropriation of terms like "queer" and "gay" by the homosexual community is false. Those were used as terms of opprobrium by outsiders, and were seized and inverted by homosexuals to remove their sting, and as a mark of pride. This isn't the case with "Bright". It's artificial and phony.

Bingo!

Personally, I don't see a problem with "atheist." However, the one point that I would stress is that this is essentially a negative definition: it identifies a category of people simply on the basis of the fact that they believe there is no personal (and perhaps no impersonal god). Moreover, to the extent that people think of themselves primarily in terms of their atheism, they will tend to see themselves simply in terms of what they are against, not what they are for.

With regard to the term "rationalist," it has a few too many different connotations - at least one of which is essentially the polar opposite of an "empiricist," and while most who visit this blog would tend to identify more with empiricists, in certain respects this opposition is quite dated. (I would regard myself as a pantheistic humanist, I suppose, but that is a different matter.)

Anyway, it is about time to code...

Posted by: odysseus | June 24, 2006 3:54 PM

I agree, I've never cared for "bright".

I always liked freethinker, which has a long history. But atheist doesn't bother me, either. :-)

Posted by: Deborah | June 24, 2006 4:23 PM

My only objection to the term "atheist" is that it allows people to jump to the conclusion that atheism functions for atheists the way religon functions for believers. What I say is, "I'm not a believer". This is intelligible to Christians (it's actually Christian language) and tells them what they need to know, and it's also literally accurate.

With Christians, anyway, faith is the main point. They sometimes make it seem as though disagreements about fact are what's at stake, but it's really the refusal to let faith override reason and experience, and if you say it that way, they understand.

Theists are theists, because they organize their lives around God. But atheists aren't atheists that way. They're just deliberately and openly not theists.

Posted by: John Emerson | June 24, 2006 4:28 PM

My problem with "bright" is that it implies the other folks are "dim." This is unnecessarily insulting (though often, in fact, correct.)

Posted by: JST | June 24, 2006 4:35 PM

The Chinese gooseberry is/was also known as "monkey fruit," which I think stems from the fact that it's brown and fuzzy like the stereotypical monkey, and that one of the Chinese names for it translates as "monkey's peach."
...
Also, rather than "nontheist," or "brights" as alternatives to "atheist," why not just call yourself a "Dagonite"? Or "Meijūtei P. Z. Meyers"?

Posted by: Stanton | June 24, 2006 4:39 PM

Atheists are pretty diverse group, even though small in number. To unite us under a label may be politically expedient, but too simplistic. It is difficult to organize people under a banner that identifies them as exclusively "not" something, i.e. not tennis-players, not-environmentalists, etc. Anti-something can certainly be adopted as an element of some broader unifying theme (a political platform), but to form an coherent, persistent organization that is based on being exclusively not-something, is tough.

Posted by: jeffw | June 24, 2006 4:44 PM

"Brights" lends itself all too easily to sexpert, headlight and laundry jokes. [Something about washing your Brights in the blood of the Lamb immediately comes to mind...]

When I describe myself at all, I use "atheist"; it's short, punchy, to the point. If I wish to confuse people at my door who are likely to start proselytising, I declare myself to be a Shelleyist [Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism" got him expelled from Oxford]. This takes them aback, as they have no idea what I'm talking about and are loath to admit it.

I must admit, tho', that I do believe in the Parking Gods. I believe that they are omnipotent entities who preserve parking spaces for those who make blood sacrifcies of SUVs. Nothing will sway me from this deeply held belief...

Posted by: DominEditrix | June 24, 2006 5:07 PM

I just posted this defense earlier today on another forum that raised some of the same concerns as PZ and the comments here:

If you visit the Brights home page, http://www.the-brights.net you'll find the antonym of "Brights" is "Supers" or "Supernaturalists", not the "dims", which is a straw man that was first used against brights by a popular televangelist, if I recall.

Many of us who identify with the bright movement don't care for the name either, and there is a great deal of discussion within the movement about that. The main page encourages members to "love the idea, hate the name" if they like. The real point is to identify as having a naturalistic worldview, free of supernaturalism and mysticism---what you call yourself is your own business. For my part, I think
naturalism is fine as a term instead, but saying you are a naturalist tends to make people think you are either a nudist or a field researcher, heh.

Some brights have independently of the main movement put together some great resources on various subjects such as fallacymongering, too.

A lot of people seem eager to ciriticize the brights movement without actually finding out what they have to say. I use atheist more than bright myself (because I frequently need to describe myself in a theistic context, like it or not), but I prefer bright because the term lowers the status of theism to a subset of supernaturalism in general. Why should my self-description have any reference to theism in it when it has zero relevance to my worldview?

Posted by: akari_house | June 24, 2006 5:38 PM

Isaac Asimov disliked the term "atheist" because it defined him in terms of what he was not, so he settled on "humanist" to describe himself.

Posted by: nomativa | June 24, 2006 5:54 PM

JST: Do you expect gay people to call heterosexuals "sads"? Strangely, the antonym of gay in that context would appear to be "straight"...

Anyway, like I said, the term itself isn't what is important to the movement, but the worldview. If the movement found another, more effective term to get the message across and rally under, than all the better. Certainly the founders of the movement have been reconsidering it. In the meantime, the controversial name does at least continue to attract attention and controversy and draw new blood in.

Posted by: akari_house | June 24, 2006 6:31 PM

Guess who said that?

Richard Dawkins himself, as cited here. I have no idea what has happened to his good sense since.

I suspect that one of the main reasons both Dawkins and Dennett have adopted and promoted the word "bright" is out of curiosity -- to watch a meme try to spread, and see if they can help spread it. It's a bit of an experiment. I believe Dawkins once said something to this effect.

Posted by: Sastra | June 24, 2006 7:16 PM

I'm rather disappointed to see these tired old arguments yet again. Is this all atheism is about, running other atheists down because their name isn't as intellectually satisfying as your name? "Brights" is just an excuse for people like us (the one who think science is a the best answer we have) to get cooperating with each other without the constant bickering and infighting that characterises atheism. The brights I know are of all different brands of non-belief, and we get on fine because we're not looking at our differences or quibbling over names. I'm afraid you're acting the atheist stereotype here, and it's sad to see, when there is so much more that we could all do if we actually wanted to.

Posted by: ProfMoriarty | June 24, 2006 7:26 PM

There are many reasons I don't like 'athiest', most of them already captured in the comments. I don't like 'bright' either since it sounds more like PR than a reasonable definition of a broad world view.

I'm quite happy to say 'I'm not a believer' or if you want something a little more positive how about 'I'm god free'? Which of course means we'll all be called Godfreys, but I could live with that!

Posted by: SparrowFalls | June 24, 2006 7:54 PM

The argument that this is analogous to the appropriation of terms like "queer" and "gay" by the homosexual community is false. Those were used as terms of opprobrium by outsiders, and were seized and inverted by homosexuals to remove their sting, and as a mark of pride. This isn't the case with "Bright". It's artificial and phony.

Agreed. So how about the word 'heathen'? That actually would be analogous to gays appropriating 'queer'. :-)

Atheists are pretty diverse group, even though small in number. To unite us under a label may be politically expedient, but too simplistic

Agreed. It implies that all people who are nontheistic are 'the same thing'. Technically, it would even include (many/most?) Buddhists.

Why don't Americans say something I hear fairly often from the British? Brits have no problem with saying "I'm not religious". Seems pretty unambiguous to me.

Posted by: George Cauldron | June 24, 2006 8:08 PM

"What I say is, "I'm not a believer"."

Don't believe in the equal rights for all? Too vague.

I'm a Christian (of the leftist variety - that is, in a political context I might actually refer to something Jesus said other than 'the poor will always be with you'), but I've never, so long as I can remember, thought there was anything pejorative about "atheist". If it happens to fit your views, use it. It is clear.

As to 'brights', wouldn't your aim be to achieve a world where even the folk nobody would call 'bright' in any other context would also reject what you consider irrationalism?

Posted by: Mike | June 24, 2006 9:15 PM

Why don't Americans say something I hear fairly often from the British? Brits have no problem with saying "I'm not religious". Seems pretty unambiguous to me.

Doesn't work. There also seems to be a fairly sizable contingent of Americans who claim no affiliation with any religion and yet believe in some sort of God.

Posted by: Todd | June 24, 2006 9:48 PM

Doesn't work. There also seems to be a fairly sizable contingent of Americans who claim no affiliation with any religion and yet believe in some sort of God.

Sure, but would such people ouitright claim they're not religious?

Posted by: George Cauldron | June 24, 2006 9:58 PM

Surprisingly, yes. I've encountered quite a few people who make the claim, "I'm not religious, but I do believe in a higher power." It's a spiritual version of a diversified portfolio.

Posted by: Todd | June 24, 2006 10:20 PM

Here's an instructive example of how clueless even the smartest lefties and scientists are about their own deep emotional block against accepting the reality of mass-communication and mass-decision-making in American now. Utterly blocked.

I haven't read Dennet's book, and only a couple articles about it, and I have seen reference to some sort of name-testing results. My intuition tells me whatever was done in that area was perfunctory, maybe a focus group or two. This word/concept choice was made without adequate reference to the extant scientific literature from the disciplines involved, nor was adequate consultation done of the decades of applications of the scientific knowledge about how to do such a rebranding successfully.

Anyone who understands the real-world dynamics I'm speaking of realizes that if this usage gains traction, the rightwing psychomarketers can, if they want, quickly turn it into a humiliating albatross and hang around "bright's" necks. In a decade or two there will be endless hand-wringing in the blogosphere about how to shed the name and what went wrong. "Brights" is a hopeless gambit. In the eyes of the larger culture, "brights" will lay a veil of buffoonery and ridicule over the still visible "phobic content" of "atheist". Let me push it a bit further for effect -- if you can't see this, you don't get it.

Yarr gives voice to a sliver of this inability to comprehend. Specifically, Yarr doesn't understand that the actual meaning of words is irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant, just as actual facts and actual reality are irrelevant. It's all manufactured, not at will but close to it, by the far right. The word "liberal" was done in quite methodically, as liberals passively watched, long before MizCee showed up. The left mostly capitulates by standing around with their thumbs up their butts without any counter-programming or counter-strategy, both mandatory. Or they actively screw it up. An example is that while "pro-life" is a good [and obvious] choice, a bigger problem is "pro-choice" was an egregiously "stupid-choice" that the movement thereby grafted onto itself. Both types of mistakes result from being profoundly ignorant about the psychomarketing tactics and strategies that work, and why.

America has become all message, all the time; all media, all the time. Americans live in an artificial, virtually 100% manipulated environment. Our brains don't know any better and process the information the same way environmental information was processed by human brains 50,000 years ago, the way our brains evolved to do it. The difference is our current environment is not natural, it's manufactured.

This is how Americans are exposed to politics. Media content washes over people, wave after wave. These ideas, concepts, rebrandings, etc., that are actualized through smart choices, deft media manipulation, and lots of repetition, simply become part of the media environment that America lives in. Citizens don't reason this stuff out. These memes simply become a fact of life that we accept as we accept the rest of our environment. Here's a specific example of how Dub and Vee-Dub used this to drag the U.S. into Iraq.

I'm trained as a fiction writer. What the right has been doing for 30 years works exactly like fiction -- their carefully thought-through, science-based, analyzed, tested, redesigned, retested, and monitored psychomarketing becomes vicarious reality. Only there is no book to alert us that it's fiction.

Americans, with their 50,000-year-old software, now live in a forest of bites, ecosystems of bites, continents of bites, a world of bites, a universe of bites. Bites, bites, bites, bites, bites all day long. All bites. BITES.

This arena consists of highly specialized communication through certain media with strengths and weaknesses, to extremely distracted people, in a HIGHLY competitive environment where decades of research and application results are used by high-stakes, big-money players whose survival depends on the results! One guy comes up with an idea and wham, everyone takes it seriously, pro or con.

This is amateur hour. I'm not criticizing the name, nor the idea a name-change is needed. I'm criticizing the mentality that refuses to comprehend how contemporary society functions. It's the same approach creationist take towards science. "There's no need to look at nor to understand the data. The data are irrelevant."

It's an irrational approach by a generally uber-rational group. Deal with reality, not fantasies.

How do you do that? You start by understanding how what works works.
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First, do the research.
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A note about further discussion appearing as I wrote this.

Nowhere in the discussion could I find acknowledgement that such attempts will no longer take place in a stable environment. For any sort of political or cultural move for change, there's a potential counterforce. The upper-echelon far-right strategists -- the only group that's effectively mastered psychomarketing in politics -- will be co-evolving. If they deem such movement a threat, then right now, today, they've got the chops and we don't. They'll observe and analyze opponents' counter-strategies, devise counter-counter-strategies and tactics, and make them operational in short order.

I'm not suggesting this will happen. Just flagging that these items are almost never part of the left's discussions, and when they are, rarely discussed other than anecdotally.

Posted by: SkookumPlanet | June 24, 2006 10:36 PM

I have begun to refer to myself as a "Nullifidian - One of no faith; a sceptic in matters of religion." Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1908 . . . From the Forgotten English Calendar.

Posted by: arch_fiend | June 24, 2006 11:01 PM

The problem with "nontheist" is that nobody uses it. It's not part of our language. Sorry.

As for "bright," well, it's just so cheesy. Seriously. It's embarassingly goofy.

We have a word that works just fine: "atheist." So let's keep it simple, people.

I still like 'heathen'.

Posted by: George Cauldron | June 24, 2006 11:22 PM

And no one paid any attention to Skookum...

Skooky,

You have made this point in various forms many times int he past, I think - I _know_ - you are absolutely correct.

Please link through to my URL and send me an e-mail. I want to learn from you.

Posted by: Spike | June 25, 2006 12:05 AM

Personally I like 'infidel'. It has a nice ring to it and goes well with maniacal laughter.

In any event, I dislike the term 'bright' for all the reasons mentioned above and because it is allowing the right wing to usurp the perfectly good term 'atheist' -- without belief. I think there's a lesson to be learned here from the way 'geek' was appropriated by techies and repositioned from being a negative appellation to a positive one. Another example would be with the GLBT movement and the word 'queer'. We need to do similarly with atheist (and liberal and secular humanist) and reclaim the labels from the right wing.

Anyone up for an Atheist Pride parade?

Posted by: tng | June 25, 2006 3:25 AM

To respond to the first comment, English often uses adjectives as nouns: the rich, the poor, etc. To be consistent, "bright" should not be used with an "s". Just the bright.

Maybe lucent would be a better PR term.

The opposite of bright could be dark or obscure, or unaware or erring.

Posted by: bernarda | June 25, 2006 4:28 AM

I like the implications of the term freethinker, but as PZ points out, it does not explicitly specify that the conclusion of freeing thought is necessarily atheism. This is an advantage if one is trying to describe a group of like-minded people with whom once can have common goals and interesting discussions, but not precise enough if one wants a godless synonym for atheist.

Though atheism is not a religion, it is the right answer (for an atheist) to the question "what religion are you?" - the equivalent of responding the the question "what is your favourite flavour of ice cream?" by saying, "I don't have a favourite; I am allergic to milk". But in response to questions about worldview, morality, etc, I think free-thinker is more informative (and hopefully more accurate).

Q: If you are an atheist, how do you tell right from wrong?

A: I am a freethinker - I believe it is possible to come to rational conclusions about such things.

Posted by: Theo Bromine | June 25, 2006 6:36 AM

I'm surprised that nobody has take a cue from the "we're not childless, we're childfree" folks, and started saying "we're not godless, we're god-free". ("We choose to call ourselves "god-free" rather than "godless," because we feel the term "godless" implies that we're missing something we want...")

But pulling neologisms from air seldom works. I can't think of an example where someone has declared a new word, and it's actually been accepted into the language.

Personally, I have a sentimental attachment to "secular humanist". I remember reading, years ago, some panicked fundamentalist screed about this terrible ideology casting its baleful shadow over the future of the nation, and, reading the provided bullet points, thinking "hey, those are all pretty good ideas".

Hmm. This is very, very tangential to the point you're making, but don't transgendered people usually take new names as a part of the transitioning process? If this isn't "pathetic" or "laughable", why not? Someone's picking a name they feel fits then, but no one else has ever used, then announcing to the schoolyard (such as it is) that they'll be referred to only by this name from now on. (And sometimes retroactively as well.)

Posted by: grendelkhan | June 25, 2006 9:04 AM

Hmm. This is very, very tangential to the point you're making, but don't transgendered people usually take new names as a part of the transitioning process? If this isn't "pathetic" or "laughable", why not? Someone's picking a name they feel fits then, but no one else has ever used, then announcing to the schoolyard (such as it is) that they'll be referred to only by this name from now on. (And sometimes retroactively as well.)

Because trans people have actually undergone a transition. Trying to be called "bright" instead of "atheist" is just slapping a sticky-note on top of it. I don't see where that gets us. Invariably, because no one knows what a "bright" is, the person is going to have to explain that it means atheist (or agnostic, or humanist, or freethinker, or whatever). Inventing a meaningless name doesn't help anything.

If you're not an atheist, I think "humanist" is the best name, although I must profess a newfound love of being a "Godfrey".

Posted by: mothworm | June 25, 2006 10:16 AM

BTW, if you really want to rebrand atheists as "Brights" I can think of alternatives. We could rebrand ourselves as "Urkels" or "Poindexters", which would have a similar but even stronger effect. For that matter, why not just cut to the chase and tape "kick me" signs to our butts.

Posted by: PaulC | June 25, 2006 10:55 AM

I still haven't really seen a term besides bright or naturalist that puts the emphasis on the absence of the supernatural, not god/s. Atheist also bothers me as I have some atheist friends that believe in ghosts and such, which happen to slip outside that definition. "Naturalistic atheist" IS a mouthful, and I find the atheist part somewhat redundant....

Posted by: akari_house | June 25, 2006 12:53 PM