the brights (NY times op-ed)

[Dave Wilton]

> Today's Times has an op-ed on a new term "a bright" to
> describe people who
> are "naturalists" as opposed to "supernaturalists"--they
> don't believe in God or
> the afterlife or magic, and want religious people to give them some
> respect--are they a renaming of the old secular humanists? An
> interesting piece...
>
>  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/12/opinion/12DENN.html


The first I saw of it was in a Guardian op-ed by Richard Dawkins on 21 June:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,981412,00.html

Evidently the term was recently (May 2003?) coined by Paul Giesert and Mynga
Futrell of Sacramento, CA. It was deliberately modeled on the example of
"gay," a positive-sounding label (never mind that "gay" was not a deliberate
coinage). See  http://the-brights.net/