Do I consider myself to be a “Bright”? By their definitions, yes. By my own willingness, sure. But what is a Bright? What are the attributes of Brightness?

Declaring one’s Brightness is an attempt at consciousness raising: changing the name by which someone calls oneself is an attempt to change a political discourse. Being an a-theist is a definition of no god. Being a bright is not just no god, it’s also an implication of one’s intelligence, allegiance to the truth, and a bit of shiny-ness.

By implication alone, it’s challenging an embedded linguistic metaphor and trope: religions claim their followers have seen the Light. In literature, Light versus Dark has been thinly veiled as religious versus evil, and in thesauruses (thesauri? thesaurisies?) around the word: light is synonymous with good and truth. Atheists are godless - an inherently evil state. Brights on the other hand is synonymous with curiosity - a bright child, and with progress - a bright future.

And even more simple, in a trope that only morons will understand, you can’t spell Bright without being Right.

Atheists are more united by the rational of seeking a better future with our curiosity uniting our efforts than their godlessness. Shouldn’t the name by which we refer to ourselves reflect that definition?

The Backhanded Implication
I do not regret the return implication of the Bright naming: those that aren’t Brights aren’t bright. This renaming is not just an escape from the godless state, but it’s forcing people to recognize a very big elephant that no one has been wanting to discuss: education, primarily children. Across the world today we grant parents and religious figures near impunity of how to mis-educate their children.

To be knowledgeable - to be bright, one must study from a wide resource-rich repertoire - that is to say, we have to be exposed to non-doctrine to be considered knowledgeable by our peers. To only be knowledgeable about one form of thought isn’t smart - it’s indoctrination.

The simple declaration of one’s Bright status is an action of political identity, Mazlow’s “self actualization” combined with the feminist-rooted consciousness raising efforts it takes to remove an imposed paradigm.

In short - it makes you feel good. Go on, say that you’re a Bright.