girlwriter

LOL, Gunner! LOL. :notworthy

This "because it is a noun and the current use is a verb" claptrap is absolutely inane. Come on. Bright is a verb. You cannot just decide it's a noun with a completely different meaning and have it be true. Language is what people understand it to be. You cannot arbitrarily make up a new meaning for a word. I don't give a damn *who* is behind it, Bright! is a lame attempt to try to associate non-theists with intellegence and cleverness. Why else would they pick *this particular word* out of millions on mono-syllibic words to arbitrarily assign a new meaning to? I don't care what the power point slides say. Are they going to show them to the whole damn world?

The situation with gay is NOT the same. Gay is a word that was generally associated with homosexuality *by everyone else* long before it's connotaion was changed from a negative one to a posative one. I didn't happen arbitrarily either. They did it the hard way by getting out there and showing the world that they exist, and showing their pride in who they were.

clark

I believe it was a skeptics/science conference. Mynga Futrell (TheBrightsNet@aol.com) can give more details. Dennett corresponded with her before putting together the presentation.

Slogans can go both ways, as it has with gay. From Fred Phelps' "GAY = Got AIDS Yet" to the proud slogan "Gay Pride". I'd rather have a slogan-friendly term regardless if it can be used negatively by detractors.

Of course not. It's a word with no negative connotations and no current noun use.

By "linquistically positive", I mean that most words we have to identify ourselves negations - A-theist, non-theist, god-less, in-fidel, etc. The words that are linguistically positve are bit esoteric (humanist, metaphysical naturalist). Bright is not meant to replace these words, but provide a simple umbrella for them.

I like secular, but it has one problem. It is used in two different meanings, often without clear distinction. First, "the United States has a secular government" means the US is religiously neutral and doesn't favor one religion over another religion or no religion. Under the current administration, this is becoming less true, but that's another issue . Second, "Paul Kurtz is a secular humanist" means that Kurtz lives a non-spiritually without religion. The religious right has used this effectively to convince people that a secular govermnent is hostile to religion.

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark

clark

Actually, the situation is very similar. The connotation of "gay" was always positive, but it meant happy or joyous before it had anything to do with sexual preference.

Now, the primary definition of gay has to do with sexual preference, due to the gays' using the word with pride. From http://www.bartleby.com/61/45/G0064500.html :
It wasn't associated with sexual preference by the general public until the 1960s and 1970s. The theme from the Flinstones ends with "we'll have a gay old time". If they wrote a theme for it today, they would probably reword it or Jerry Falwell would complain.

Today the connotation of gay is both positive and negative: positive from gays and negative from viewers of the 700 Club.

The struggles of the secular community are often compared with those of the gay community. I think we could have success with "Bright" as they have had success with "gay".

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark

GunnerJ

The difference being: someone who was against gays would have said it, a gay person probably wouldn't have. As I am someone who would qualify as a "Bright" the situation becomes a little, how shall we put it, different.

Edit: I believe girlwriter put it better than I did. My comment is criticism from the inside. You can't compare the old use of "gay" as a slur to this.

GunnerJ

I shudder at the very thought. I'm not going to go around identifying myself as a "Bright" just because people are too dumb (supposedly) to understand the meaning of "metaphysical naturalist" or "humanist."

I mean, really, is this not a case of jumping into the fire to avoid the frying pan? "Bright" sounds like a term used by some new age cult to describe members who have chemically castrated themselves and given their life savings to the cult leader, and are therefore eligable to be picked up by the mother ship (read: poisoned koolaid).

I'm sorry, but I cannot imagine myself using the term "bright" to describe my beliefs without feeling a bit stupid.

clark

Although there is some disagreement of the etymology of the word gay, earlier there were homosexuals who refused to use the term. Gradually, the term became more accepted. Novelist Gertrude Stein begin to use it in the 1920s and it became used more widely in the homosexual community. After Stonewall and the maturation of the gay rights movement, it became a universally used term.

As for the atheist/freethought community, we'll never totally agree on anything. If two atheists agree on 98% of things, they're likely to almost come to blows over the 2% they disagree on . None of the words used now is anywhere near universally accepted. It's the old "herding cats" metaphor.

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark

girlwriter

No, clark, it is not the same.

Homosexuals did not arbitrarily choose a word out of nowhere that no one associated with homosexuality and start using it to refer to themselves in an attempt to garner posative associations with that word for homosexuals.

What they did is do the *work* of demonstrating to the general public that they exist, they aren't going anywhere, they are human beings with the same rights and emotions and diversity of personality as everyone else. Only then did the word 'gay' have a posative association. It has to be earned.

clark

The word gay as we think of it evolved as an alternative use of an existing word, as "bright" would. Fifty years ago ago, if someone said they were gay, 99 times out of 100, they meant happy. It was positive then; its predominant use was to mean happy. More homosexuals used the term to identify themselves and used it proudly. Many "came out of the closet" and proudly showed they exist. Many in the straight community, particularly in journalism and entertainment, embraced them. Others in the straight community resisted, and viewed them negatively.

I'd like us to learn from the successes of the gay community in gaining societal acceptance. I see "bright" as potentially a step in this direction.

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark

RufusAtticus

Except for the negative connotation that if you're not a Bright then you're a "Dull." This of course produces the negative connontation of arrogance.

Are you seriously willing to use a term to describe yourself that implies that coworkers, friends, and family are not bright?

Besides the argument that "it's a noun" is senseless because it ignores the process by which English constructs nouns that refer to groups of people, i.e. it turns adjectives that describe those people into nouns that refer to those people. Therefore, it is impossible to disconnect the noun Bright from the adjective "bright." And I have no illusions that the originators of the noun "Bright" to refer to themselves were doing anything differently than is typical in English. They have just either lied to themselves or are lying to the rest of us.

clark

I don't think this really is any more of an issue than a gay person implying that non-gay people are not "happy".

English is a uniquely diverse language. There are many words which have different meanings depending on which part of speech is used ("hip" and "cool" come to my mind, but I'm sure there are better examples).

The originators address some of these criticisms here.

THOUGHTfully Yours,
Clark