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

logi said, "Do we really need to simulate drugs to be taken seriously?"

Yes, so long as the competition offers something like it. I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior at age 12, and it was a lasting emotional high that only recently have I been able to reproduce (at age 50). At age 12, my behavior and life really did improve considerably (as well as those around me) for a long period of time, until I finally backslid. I become rational at age 20 (and was quite ashamed of the personal Lord and Savior thing), and wasn't able to reproduce the postive effects that I experienced at age 12 until only very recently, at age 50. Fortunately, I was able to do so without giving up rationality. In fact, rationality is key to a lasting Transformation.

Interesting. I rejected belief in God and the afterlife also at age 12, because I realized that the only reason I believed those things were true was that it made me feel good to believe them. It was a lasting intellectual high knowing that I had overcome my base emotions with some clear thought.

Emotional manipulation is like propaganda. One of things I found most striking about OB was the high signal-to-noise ratio. No base emotional pleas, no Giant Implicit Moral Framework silently guiding the discourse. I'd hate to see this community lose that by stoopi... (read more)

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The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture

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The Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture

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