Naturalism at its Brightest

As I posted several days before, Richard Dawkins’ made ‘The out campaign’ see the light of day. This nice little example of creationist activity in an actual sense bears many relations with events happening in real life. Time to point towards another worthwhile initiative, called the Brights.

It focuses on more or less the same people as does ‘the out campaign’, though with a slightly less desperate tone. For one thing, it is less specifically aimed at people who are socially under pressure in defining their public beliefs, though to be fair to the Brights they do all but forget this part of their potential members. I do get the impression though, that they are more positively (that is to say: in affirmative terms) describing their members, rather than just boldly stating they are atheists.

To give an example we can bring forward their definition of ‘a bright’. Three points are listed:

1. A Bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
2. A Bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
3. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

Being an atheist is near logical entailment if you apply these three principles to a personality, though I doubt whether it works the other way around (being an atheist doesn’t necessarily mean ethics, actions and worldviews have to be reduced to nature. Though I am sure that, in general, those things will accompany each other).

Now I’m not writing this for mere fun. I’m writing this because I think it is a (dare I say useful?) introduction to a new folder that has been created by the Brights. It is something that almost coincides with a plan of the so called creationists, which is re-releasing Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, only then by leaving out all the fragments with which they cannot cope. Creationist by the way, can be seen as a collection of idiots who think their theories are on equal footing with science, but I will divert my attention to them later this month (by ripping their arguments apart).  The initiative by the Brights focuses itself on the more secure parts of our human knowledge however. Most importantly, for a naturalistic minded Bright, the theory of evolution.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” is something that can be heard and read all over the place. And it is a fact, a true fact even. Because of the enormous rich body of knowledge this theory can account for, it will be way too interesting to leave it aside. Quite unlike the creationists, who are merely interesting because of their enormous stupidity, the theory of evolution is something I will refer to many, many times. Therefore I consider it to be a subject that is worthwhile to write about, which is another promise I am now indebted to fulfill in the coming months.

But I am going astray, as so often happens. The initiative is an “Evolution Education Flyer”. It’s simple and elegant, much like the theory itself you might say (though admittedly there are sides of evolutionary biology that are anything but simple). You can view their new pamphlet here.