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…
[…]
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.
Merry Christmas!
“He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
`They are not torn down.’ cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms,’ they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here — I am here — the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will.’
His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
`I don’t know what to do.’ cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon of himself with his stockings. `I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody. A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here. Whoop. Hallo.’
…
…Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!”
Merry Christmas to all from Joy
I think of them as the Glares.