Brights Movement/Archive 1

Brights Movement/Archive 1

The Brights movement is a sociocultural movement that aims to promote public understanding and acknowledgment of naturalistic, unspiritual and irreligious worldviews, including equal civil rights and popular acceptance for adherents of such belief systems. It was co-founded by Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert in 2003. The movement aims to create an Internet constituency that will pursue the following aims:

1. Promote the civic understanding and acknowledgment of the naturalistic worldview, which is free of supernatural and mystical elements;
2. Gain public recognition that persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance;
3. Educate society toward accepting the full and equitable civic participation of all such individuals.

The Brights movement distinguishes itself from traditional membership organizations by focusing on the development of a broad public constituency capable of including members of many narrower categories. For example: atheists, agnostics, humanists, skeptics, and members of religious traditions who observe the cultural practices without believing literally in a deity might all pursue shared civic goals respecting egalitarian laws and a political discourse informed by the natural sciences.

Also, unlike a typical membership organization, the Brights movement does not appoint individuals empowered to speak for the whole; individual brights speak for themselves or speak collectively by proposing statements to which all registered Brights may join in assent (or not) as they see fit. Instead, the focus is on making visible to society the largest possible constituency of people who hold a naturalistic worldview.

The noun bright was coined by Geisert as a positive-sounding umbrella term, and Futrell defined it as "an individual whose worldview is naturalistic (free from supernatural and mystical elements)". Daniel Dennett has since suggested that people who believe in the supernatural could choose to be referred to as supers.

As of 2009, the Brights' tagline is "Illuminating and Elevating the Naturalistic Worldview".