Stream: Reason’s Greetings!, Say Brights to Supers
Our Summa Contra Gentiles series continues after New Years.
The email salutation began “Reason’s Greetings”. It continued:
Friends. Family. Food. Festivity. What else?
Another basis for a bit of seasonal merriment could be the human capacity for rational thought. The radiant spark of reason does offer hope of our species wending its way to a brighter future…somehow. Brights can celebrate that capacity, and each do our best to nourish it!
How nice of these brights to think of me at Christmastime!
Merry and bright
What’s a bright? According to them, a bright “is a person whose worldview is naturalistic (no supernatural and mystical elements).”
Founder Paul Geisert conjured up the term back in 2003. He and Richard Dawkins thought brights would do for atheists what gay did for men who have sex with men.
Now you may think bright is a stuffy, patronizing, and annoying term for atheist. Which it is. What’s a non-bright? A dim? Because of this insulting inference, brights got a lot of grief and a fair share of teasing over the word. So they juiced their powers of reason and conjured a contrasting term for believers. Which is supers.
Super-duper
To them, a super “is a person whose worldview includes supernatural and/or mystical elements.” Some find this cloying, but it is at least not condescending.
Merry Day to brights and supers, then!
Merry Christmas day, that is. The day of Christ’s birth . A birth we know was special via history and revelation—and through the use of reason.
Brights are a branch of the new atheists, a self-declared “community of reason“, folks who attempt to claim reason as their sole territory. By their definition, a believer in God cannot be using reason and must be enslaving himself to superstition and corrupt authority.
Stir the pudding three times
Superstitions are not all bad. Brights point to “research” that argues superstitions “evolved to help us survive“.
A superstition is the false association of an observation with an effect. It is thus an error in reason. Yet superstitions…
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Unreasonable reason
Superstition is one thing, but it is Reason itself brights hang their fedoras on. Reason is what they possess in abundance, and which their rivals freely abandon in search of belief. They say things like “Belief without proof is no virtue. Insisting on proof is no vice.”
Yet there are many instances in which proof (of the sort they imagine) is impossible.
[…]
Unthinking reason
Many new atheists are intellectually uncurious.
[…]
Be reasonable. Click here to read the rest.