The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture

MBlume

Dale McGowan writes:

In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.

I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.

The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.

Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.

So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:

Read on at Meming of Life

Dale McGowan writes:

In the past seven years or so, I’ve seen quite a few humanistic organizations from the inside — freethought groups, Ethical Societies, Congregations for Humanistic Judaism, UUs, etc. Met a lot of wonderful people working hard to make their groups succeed. All of the groups have different strengths, and all are struggling with One Big Problem: creating a genuine sense of community.

I’ve written before about community and the difficulty freethought groups generally have creating it. Some get closer than others, but it always seems to fall a bit short of the sense of community that churches so often create. And I don’t think it has a thing to do with God.

The question I hear more and more from freethought groups is, “How can we bring people in the door and keep them coming back?” The answer is to make our groups more humanistic — something churches, ironically, often do better than we do.

Now I’ve met an organization founded on freethought principles that seems to get humanistic community precisely right. It’s the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture [...], host of my seminar and talk last weekend, and the single most effective humanistic community I have ever seen.

So what do they have going for them? My top ten list:

Read on at Meming of Life

I have no interest in joining a church, period. It doesn't matter to me whether that church spouts theistic nonsense or humanistic nonsense. I'm interested in what groups teach and what they practice, not in their rituals or atmosphere.

Certainly a rationalist group could avail themselves of techniques that make people feel good about the group. But people who join the group for the sake of those feelings, or who wouldn't join if their feelings carefully massaged, aren't rationalists. Bringing those people into the fold can only distract us from what's important and dilute the message. Syncretism requires a sacrifice of the essential nature of at least one of the two incompatible things associated.

Bringing those people into the fold can only distract us from what's important and dilute the message.

This asserts a fact not in evidence, to wit, that people can't learn and change.

3HA217y

And if you're interested in what groups do rather than how they do it, you're in a vast minority. Good for you - you don't have to join a church, even a rationalist one! Nobody's making you! But people have emotions. It's not 'rational' to ignore this. As Eliezer says, and clarifies in the next post, rationalism [is/is correlated with/causes] winning. If the religious get to have a nice community and we have to do without, then we lose. Yes, I would like to join a community of people very much like a church, but without all the religious nonsense. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.

4jimrandomh17y

So your reasoning is that this group has some similarity to churches, and churches spout nonsense, so this group spouts nonsense? Or is it that churches spout nonsense, so you don't want to join a church, so you don't want to join a group that looks like a church, regardless of whether it spouts nonsense?

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