You may recall that summer of 2003 Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett proposed a new “happy” designation for themselves as atheists — a term that does for atheism what “gay” does for homosexuality (the comparison is theirs!). They decided on the word “bright.” For Dawkins’s and Dennett’s opeds, where they originally made this proposal, go here: www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bright/bright_index.html.
A band of D&D devotees ran with their idea of recasting atheism’s image to form www.the-brights.net. Nonetheless, some D&D supporters thought this was a bit much (see, for instance, Chris Mooney’s piece at CSICOP: www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/brights). All in all, I would say Dawkins’s and Dennett’s proposal of “the brights” never really took off — until now.
It appears there is a quasi-secret society inspired by Darwin for promoting his theory: The Biological Institute for Theoretical Evolution Studies (www.thebrites.org). According to the email I just received below (I’m not making this up), this society has now decided to come out of the closet:
From: Finch, Galapagos
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2006 8:54 AM
To: Dembski, William A.
Subject: www.TheBRITES.orgDr. Dembski,
The BRITES is your worst nightmare and the gloves are off.
After a unanimous vote of The BRITES Board of Directors, we have recently made our internal web site available for the public viewing at www.TheBrites.org .
The vote was due in large part to the ID friendly leanings we are starting to see at the Panda’s Thumb.
Dr. G. Finch, Ph.D., DDS
Executive Vice President for Education
The BRITES
Finch@TheBRITES.org
www.TheBrites.org
In perusing the site, I was especially struck with their feature on “Darwin Youth” and “Darwin Scouts”:
