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therufs comments on State of the Solstice 2014 - Less Wrong
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Other than human immortality, do you remember specific cringeworthy quirks?
For one, I don't think that much anti-religion talk is needed at an atheist celebration. It could be about the things we are passionate in instead (like science, the representation of which I liked), but I feel uncomfortable 'dissing' religion.
I have a lot of friends who believe in religions and know of many, many smart people who were religious. Therefore I find a lot of anti-religious writing to easily edge on the offensive, especially when said in the context of a celebration. (Much of it to me sounds a lot like "Obviously smart people shouldn't be religious, anyone who is is stupid", which I feel is incorrect and arrogant). It's a sensitive topic, and hard to do well, so I would recommend just in general avoiding it.
But also, I just find it repetitive. I'm already an atheist (agnostic), I was a long time ago. That's like a really, really basic thing in my philosophical understanding. Hearing someone provide an argument for atheism is like hearing them explain addition. By this point it's kind of uninteresting. I realize that some people here apparently had really important experiences discovering atheism, but I didn't.
The "Beyond the reach of God" text partly does advocate atheism but it does more than that. It's not like explaining addition. It also about challenging people who believe that democracy is always good and in general things will turn out well. It's about the idea that nothing will protect us from an X-risk wiping out humanity and we have to take responsiblity for preventing that to happen.
As far as the songs go, "God Wrote the World" doesn't seem to me like it's very offensive.
Did you have at your solstice other texts that fit into that frame that you consider to be problematic?
The light/dark/light structure does call for speeches that aren't completely positive in the middle. Ray's book doesn't speak only about fun celebration but says that a solstices should be scary.
Avoiding sensitive issues is a recipe for being boring and shallow.
It's worth noting that if someone has a negative reaction to an event, "but the Ray/the-book says we should do it this way" isn't actually much of a counter-argument. If everyone was reacting negatively to the darkness I'd change the darkness.
It may be that Jayson just isn't the target audience for what the Solstice is trying to do. I have a feeling this was not so much about things getting negative/dark, but that they were dark in a way specifically reminiscent of Christian mass. (Being somewhat preachy and advocating transhumanist ideals that slot in, for good or for ill, very cleanly where the "live forever in heaven" elements are slotted out).
He hadn't. He said he liked the event in general.
If someone watches a horror movie and then criticises the movie for raising uncomfortable emotions, that criticism misses the point.
If you analyse indivudal elements of an event without looking at the purpose of why those elements are there, that often leads to flawed conclusions.
Raising uncomfortable emotions to release them at the end, can make the dark portion feel uncomfortable but make the following light phase feel awesome.
Oh, I totally think you can argue the darkness is necessary. But I was made uncomfortable by the argument "Ray said it's necessary" as opposed to "it's useful because it helps appreciate the light."
I had the impression that he considered uncomfortable feelings to have been created accidently.
Just to clarify, Beyond the Reach of God isn't what I felt was overly disrespectful (it seems more like frank disagreement, which I think is still compatible with respect). It was the song that had a chorus of "goddamn".
Also, my comment about cargo-culting church services wasn't meant as a criticism. Often cargo-culting something known to work is the best you can do as a first step (at least until more data comes in). I have no better ideas and think the planners did a better job than I could have done (by far).
In short, I don't think we should mock/disrespect those people/institutions, because (besides being mean for little benefit) it makes it hard to take them seriously enough to learn from them the things they are currently doing better (of which there are several).
Okay, I can understand that sentiment. It doesn't seem to be one of the songs published in http://humanistculture.bandcamp.com/album/brighter-than-today-a-secular-solstice
I think it makes more sense to focus songs on our positive shared values for the light periods and on uncomfortable issues like death in the dark period.
Huh. That song struck me as so silly and almost content-free (it's vaguely bemoaning that winter sucks, I think) that I didn't even think of it as something that might be controversial (except for being silly and almost content free).
But it was not a very popular song (different people had different criticisms, some more addressable than others), so I wouldn't be too worried about it next year.
I too found this particularly jarring given the event was mostly cargo-culting Protestant Christian church services in the hope that it would allow the formation of a community similar in strength, but we don't yet know what it is about those institutions that allow them to form such communities.
Overall, the people were extremely welcoming and helpful (even more so than expected), but haven't quite figured out the whole "community" thing (something most people were honest about and seemed to be taking very seriously).
Trying to do community by being welcoming and helpful, does have it's sense of cargo-culting, but to me it's seems like a reasonable first try.
Er ... does it? I guess you can form community by deserting all the subjects on an island or something ...
edit: I just realized this sounds like I was trying to make a joke about cargo cultists living on islands, but what I actually meant was "well, how else would one form community, other than by being welcoming and helpful? I guess you could put a lot of people in a stressful situation together."
What would have been different if they had figured out the whole community thing?
Fewer people telling me about their deep depression (of course, maybe there is no difference between Bay Area rationalists and a typical Protestant congregation, but the rationalists are just more honest about it). Fewer people telling me about how they moved to the Bay Area to join a rationalist community, but that it doesn't really exist yet, so they are trying hard to create one.
This sounds to me like voluntarily divulging private information, which I tend to interpret as a strong indication that the divulger is inviting me into community with them.
Maybe unless the content of the depression talk along the lines of "I'm depressed there's no/not more community"?
As a first guess: couldn't it be the fact that they explicitly claim to put their community members in touch with cosmic, existential truths larger than their own lives and daily concerns?
The closest analogy I can think of is that it's like being part of an enormous LARP with millions of participants and thousands of years of history.
It could very well be that, yes.
For what it may be worth, I've historically been pretty cranky about badmouthing religion, and I don't remember anything triggering my "harumph" reaction. (Edit: I went to Solstice in NY.)
This said, my current model of reality is that the atheist community in the US is marginalized to some degree, and it isn't the responsibility of a marginalized community to abide by the expectations of its marginalizers.
I think we agree a lot here, but that last sentence sounds to me like, "If someone is marginalized at all, they should feel free to act like a jerk".
I don't think any of us think that we need to completely abide by their expectations. But I think that having respect for another group and being careful to be respectful to them shouldn't be an unreasonable ask.
As a guideline, I don't think anyone should be generally jerky. And I am on board with mutual respect.
I probably should have said something more like "It isn't the responsibility of a marginalized community to abide by the expectations of its marginalizers in its own space." In particular, I see a need for spaces where people can express their own experiences without censorship or self-censorship or having to explain themselves.
By way of illustration: I used to be one of those people who ran around nontheist blogs insisting that anyone with complaints to level about Christians or Christianity be excruciatingly specific that not every Christians was a terrible person (or whatever). Then #NotAllMen happened, and lo, I was ashamed of myself, and stopped doing that.