Is Your Worldview Naturalistic?

What is a bright?

A bright is any person who can claim to have the following qualities:

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

So a bright is a person who does not rely on gods, superstitions, holy texts and the other accoutrement's that are associated with organised religion.

There are plenty of well known and well respected brights, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker to name just a few.

Organised religious groups are more than adequately represented within society, and on many different levels:

• Demand for special favours, even when those favours contravene current British law (see my earlier blog relating to Religion's Abuse of Animal Rights for a specific example of this)
• Have faith schools with higher concentrations of their own religious faith in attendance
• Prejudice and/or discrimination on religious grounds is recognised in law

For anyone who does not belong to an organised religious group, this may all strike as a little unfair. It would be all too easy to argue that, in fact, it is people who do not belong to an organised religion, who are the victims of discrimination!

The Bright movement attempts to redress this imbalance. It is both a movement and a community for those who share a similar worldview, rather than being a religion in itself.

The Reason and Purpose of the Brights Movement

Currently the naturalistic worldview is insufficiently expressed within most cultures, even politically/socially repressed. To be a Bright is to participate in a movement to address the situation. (Note: the upper case Bright signifies someone who fits the definition and registers on this Web site.)

There is a great diversity of persons who have a naturalistic worldview (free of supernatural and mystical elements). Some are members of existing organizations that foster a supernatural-free perspective. Far more individuals are not associated with any formal group or label. Under the broad umbrella of the naturalistic worldview, the constituency of Brights can undertake social and civic actions designed to influence a society otherwise permeated with supernaturalism.

[Extracted from the Brights web site]

The movement has three major aims, again extracted form the Brights web site:

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

If you share this vision, and these values, then visit the Bright's web site for more details. If you do, I would encourage you to sign up, and have your voice heard. We've had organised religion having its voice for long enough, isn't it time we had ours heard?