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

Even if all you want is to improve your own accuracy of belief, the more that people around you want the same thing, the better you can correct for your mistakes (c.f. Aumann). To that end, it is helpful to find ways to make rationalism more approachable and welcoming to people who are unlikely to experience such an intellectual high, a group that the evidence suggests encompasses most people.

the more that people around you want the same thing

Do they really want the same thing? It's hard to tell when we're also offering other tasty treats. Prostitutes will do things for cocaine that they wouldn't do otherwise, and pretend to enjoy themselves.

As for Aumann, Robin Hanson points out that we'd often do better to update toward "average beliefs" than the beliefs of our chosen in-group. So it appears I can already maximize my "Aumann benefit" by conversing with random strangers. It seems to me that the benefits of a rationalist ... (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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