npr, Huxley, and Brights

well sheez, blogger blipped on me after thirty minutes of post-writting. perhaps it was a sign of over-abundancy. thus i'll hasten to the point of this evening's post.
npr gave an intro to a commentary by Steven Waldman, intro going something like this:

A group of people with a "naturalistic worldview" are trying to improve their image. They want to leave behind their old names -- atheists and agnostics -- and are adopting a new one: The Brights. They are promoting this new term in op-ed pieces in major papers in the United States and Europe and, of course, on the Internet. Commentator Steven Waldman says that some of their goals are laudable, while others are questionable.

what caught my ire was the grouping of atheism with agnosticism. Remembering our Greek, a-theism is the negative of god (theos), while a-gnostic is the negative of knowing (gnomeh is 'thought...or intellegence). Thomas Huxley coined the latter term:

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last...So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant...

I've always thought of atheism as a modernist position. An atheist is certain of a particular truth- just as a Baptist is certain of a particular truth. And as modernists, both have a notion that they can know this and can reveal the truth to others. Take, for instance, Daniel Dennett in the NY Times. He speaks of coining 'the Brights' as a new name for naturalists.

The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny — or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic — and life after death.

The commentary on npr today asks why the Brights feel so bright when so many post grad educated folks believe in a god, or ghosts or devils. I don't find that criticism satisfactory, though. That alot of people think something doesn't make it right. Rather, I'll critique the Bright's being stuck in modernism.
Going back to Huxley, above- he seems to tend towards postmodern thought. It is as if he fights that post-enlightenment notion that reason can not only lead us to truth, but can reveal to others that truth. Modernism takes for granted that availability of revelation (not from god to human, but from human to human). Postmodernism, along this line, recognizes that, because of our stuck-ness within our particular world views, we really can't convey truth with any certainty. For that matter, we really can't know whether, wehn we speech of a shared truth, that we speak of the same thing. But getting back to Huxley, I see in his remark a sense of bravery (in the context of his times) in saying 'I don't know...and dang it, why should I?'
The Brights, on the other hand, to purport to know.
So how is it that agnosticism and atheism can be grouped together when they support entirely different world views?