Supernatural Rejectionist

A "Supernatural Rejectionist" is someone who deny's the existence of any power outside of the naturalistic world view. It is a term used to include many former terms which may have fallen out of favor due to reputation or misunderstanding, including the many forms of agnostic, freethinker, atheism, humanism, secularism, etc. An attempt was made to create an enveloping term called "Brights" as a nod to the success of renaming homosexuality as "gay" to make it appear to be happy and upbeat. However, unlike "gay", the term "Bright" loses associative meaning entirely and suggests that members may think of themselves as smart and non-members less smart. This is an unintentional consequence and one that is remedied by the term "Supernatural Rejectionist", which clearly identifies anything members could believe in while clearly defining what they do not believe. It also removes political associations that Humanism and Secularism often drag into the conscience.
Supernatural Rejectionists refuse to believe anything that is held up without sufficient evidence. The rule of thumb is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It is also not necessary to disprove beliefs that are held up by the various belief systems when those beliefs do not have sufficient evidence. The standard for evidence of extraordinary claims is usually the Scientific Method.
Origins: The term was coined by Stephen Herron Buck on 2009-02-20 after realizing that 519 entries exist on Google search for "reject supernaturalism" (http://www.google.com/search?rlz1C1GGLS_enUS291US303&sourceidchrome&ieUTF-8&q"reject+supernaturalism") and 2170 entries exist for "reject supernatural" (http://www.google.com/search?hlen&rlz1C1GGLS_enUS291US303&q="reject+supernatural"&btnG=Search)
It was determined that while this may be a http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/protologism, it fulfills the standards of http://en. .org/wiki/ :Notability based upon current usage and recognizability.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu