A long time ago, Bob asked

Maybe. I have to learn more about the brights. Is there a good website?

but I did not notice because I had not subscribed to his comments. Let that be a lesson to all of us who do not subscribe to the comments feed in blogs such as this one.

The answer to Bob’s question is

No.

but there is a bad website. It’s at www.the-brights.net.

The Brights did 3 excellent things.

They came up with a rather pleasing logo

that represents a sunrise in a world where north on a map is not necessarily up.

They came up with a definition

A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview without supernatural and mystical elements

and an antonym

A super is a person who has a supernatural worldview

to head off the inevitable observation that the opposite of bright is dim.

But then they kind of wandered off into that well-meaning no-man’s land where all liberal causes seem to go once the t-shirts are printed.

They started an entirely admirable campaign to counter the idea that morality can only come from belief in improbable entities. It was originally announced as a two year campaign in 2004. Perhaps they are working up to a big finale? It should come any day now.

They had a number of handy suggestions for what to respond if someone should inadvertently wish you a Merry Christmas or if a theist should unwittingly respond to your sneeze with an unasked for Bless You! (my favourite responses are Merry Christmas and Thank You! respectively) but then they kind of lost their way.

Many would say that they got off to a bad start with the name The Brights but I kind of like it. The world needs a positive term for a positive set of beliefs. For that, I salute them. I also like their handy-dandy definition, their logo and their antonym.

I am a bright. I believe in a naturalistic worldview without supernatural or mystical elements.

Bob just moved his blog and when I popped over to check it out, I noticed that he had been continuing our discussion about Belief in Belief without me
From his comments,

Since there is no proof of the existence AND THERE IS NO PROOF OF THE NON-EXISTENCE of God or FSM, any position taken on the matter, other than agnosticism, is pure faith. Without proof that God does not exist, it is possible that God might actually exist.

By a pleasant happenstance, I just read the chapter in Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works where he talks about scientific proofs and how inappropriate they are for everyday circumstances. According to Pinker, our ancestors on the savanna evolved sophisticated mental machinery for dealing with probabilities but formal proofs … not so much.

The number of domains outside of pure maths where proofs are appropriate, or even possible, is vanishingly small and only a logician would claim that belief in something completely improbable and disbelief in something completely improbable are in any way equivalent. Fortunately, most of the rest of us deal in probabilities and most of us would conclude that the possibility of an entity existing

1. which violates many of the known laws of nature and
2. for which there is absolutely no evidence

is so close to zero as to be not worth considering.

Bob seems to be asserting that, given a proposition that is almost certainly false, the only reasonable position to take is to say “I don’t know” and that any other position requires an unreasonable leap of faith.
I cannot prove that I am not brain in a vat. I cannot prove that you exist. I cannot prove that I existed this morning. I have no need to prove them. It would not be useful to prove them. The evidence to support those positions is overwhelming, is reasonable and requires no leap of faith. The opposite positions - that I am a brain in a vat or that you do not exist or that I did not exist this morning - require an unreasonable leap of faith.
There is no god. I am certain of it.