About brights

brights’ Society is an organisation of rational atheists.

Goals

• Establish a constructive dialogue between atheists and the rest of the society for promotion of scientific temper
• Encourage and support atheists along their journey of atheism
• Facilitate exchange of ideas within atheists
• Dispel the social stigma associated with atheism

What is a ‘bright’?

An atheist, Paul Geisert had observed that when homosexuals were facing severe persecution abroad, their mere choosing an epithet ‘gay’, meaning ‘happy’, for themselves helped to reduce the social stigma associated with homosexuality. Inspired by this observation, Geisert proposed to use a noun ‘bright‘ for atheists to avoid the negative connotation involved in identifying oneself as an atheist. The concept ‘bright‘ is defined slightly differently than the concept ‘atheist‘. While an atheist per se only rejects the belief in the existence of any god or at most rejection of supernatural religions, a bright rejects the beliefs in the existence of all supernatural entities including soul, heaven/hell, or life after death. One doesn’t need to reject the belief in the existence of any god to be considered as a bright – it suffices even if one merely believes that this world operates without any supernatural intervention. Therefore, even agnostics, skeptics, freethinkers, naturalists, or materialists might be able to consider themselves as brights.

We, at brights’ Society, India, are not affiliated (legally or otherwise) with https://www.the-brights.net/, but we describe ourselves with the word ‘bright‘ according to the meaning coined by Geisert.

Activities

Since 2014, we have been organising annual atheist meets or conferences where around 300 atheists gather to exchange ideas. We also conduct online sessions for more frequent and focussed discussions. Most of the online and offline sessions have been recorded and are available on social media. We have conducted these events in Mumbai, Pune, and Sangli. Various prominent personalities have spoken at our events. Their names include Prithviraj Chavan, Javed Akhtar, Tushar Gandhi, Kumar Ketkar, Vishwambhar Choudhari, Pradeep Rawat, Asim Sarode, Amol Palekar, Hemachandra Pradhan, Milind Murugkar, Sheshrao More, Uttam Niraula, Narendra Nayak, Prasann Joshi, Avinash Patil, Anand Karandikar, Ganesh Kanate, Prabhakar Nanavati, Y N Walawalkar, Prakash Reddy, Ajit Abhyankar, Rajeev Sane, J V Pawar, and Achyut Godbole.

Since 2019, we have published three books discussing various aspects of atheism. You can buy them by clicking here.

In 2023, we had organised a first ever National Painting Exhibition and Competition on the theme of Atheism in Thane, Maharashtra. We received over 200 entries and awarded more than two lakh Rs in prizes. We repeated the experiment in 2024 by conducting a similar national painting exhibition and competition on the theme of Rationalism.

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