I would like to nominate this for the **2003 Lebon Award ™ . **
Lebon Award would be **Nobel ** backwards. Nobel awards are for people(s) advancing the human race, Lebon Awards are for those who are trying to desperately set humanity back through their uneducated, poorly -if-at all- researched diatribe, fear and ignorance mongerers and general hatred towards humankind.
Please submit your found entries and catagory they should be entered in.
With the exception of Rael, who I don’t think anyone would deny is a nutjob, the other ones seen to lack one specific requirement for this award - they’re not religious. I won’t deny some of them are, well, “special”, but notwithstanding your attempts at balance, I’m not sure if they really fit in here.
To hijack, (perhaps we should start another thread), but what is wrong with Daniel Dennet? I read his stuff and Richard Dawkins’s stuff on the whole “bright” thing. It seems as though atheists do have quite the image problem in the US today. From a Slate article:
If the whole “bright” thing can change this even to a small extent, I’m all in favor. I don’t think Daniel Dennet is out of line or a “nutjob” for wanting to do a little image adjustment. The US was founded on a freedom of religion – and part of that has always been taken as a freedom from religion.
He wasn’t discriminated against. He was asked to do the same thing everyone else was asked to do: show respect for the various American Indian cultures, in which religious faith is deeply rooted.
As for the others, Sherman is paranoid about age-old folk songs and African American music that mentions God, as though the mere mention of the concept “God” is prohibited. Plus, he thinks that someone who sings “Hashivenu” believes she is God.
Millar is trying to summon the authorities to impose discrimination against a religious belief while at the same time saying that authorities ought not to discriminate against religious beliefs.
Spitzer is cooking data, and advocating a position that could hurt the progress of gay and lesbian people in society who are just beginning to get a taste of acceptance.
I included Dennet because of his flippant and stupid remark about gays “hijacking” a word. Seldom is the term “hijack” (or any term based on a criminal act) not pejorative.
I think they all qualify for Lebons, so long as we are not discriminating on the basis of religion.
I have no problem with atheists trying to find a label that will help them project a more favorable image to the rest of the world. But somehow I doubt this is it. By calling themselves “brights,” they are implicitly saying all religious believers are “not-bright.” Which to me sounds like a very not-bright PR move on the part of atheists.
Putting aside the question of whether atheists actually are smarter than their theistic counterparts, it’s generally a bad idea from a PR point of view to insult those among whom you’re trying to soften your image.
D’oh! Sorry. I am unfortunately supremely ignorant about British culture, even though I love the British royalty. One example: I was recently corrected in a GQ thread when I mistakenly assumed that a Duke could give orders to an Earl.
Nobody claims that straight people are more glum or less joyful than gays. Bright is just a term, used as a means of identification, that he hopes makes it easier for one to identify with a group. Pride follows identification, as he says happened in the gay community. He hopes that a similar PR move will follow for the bright community.
Ya know, “bright” wouldn’t have been my first choice. I think it opens the door for a bunch of easy criticism and is based on Dennet’s (and others’) preconception of those who hold naturalistic beliefs. But it does make sense. For starters, much like the word gay, the word “bright” is linguistically redundant – “bright” can easily be replaced by “smart” or “sharp” or “strong” (when referring to light), like the word “gay.” Second, it is sufficiently ambiguous to be defended against most criticsm – they can say that they just were intending to portray naturalism as shedding a “bright light” on the world or whatever. Or that “bright” has no connection with intelligence. Lastly, it has no inherent derogatory overtones – it is sort of a blank slate of a word.
