A friend of mine who moved from the very religious community she was born in to a very non-religious community overseas says the BDSM community provides the same sort of social support network that church did when she lived in the US.
There's something delicious about that.
I have a twofold response here.
Atheists who are interested in gathering the social benefits of church attendance without checking their brains at the door might want to look at the Unitarian Universalist church, which has no dogma. I mean it. They have no dogma. In theory this means there's absolutely no inherent contradiction in the idea of an atheist Unitarian. You're a Unitarian if you sign the book saying you're a Unitarian: what you believe is entirely up to you. In practice, the degree to which an atheist would feel comfortable depends a lot on the local UU congregation. Some are essentially liberal Protestant churches with some handwaving of the thornier bits. Some actively welcome atheist members.
I think the social aspect is critically important to an understanding of why people continue to seek out religion after the Enlightenment, but I don't think it tells the whole story. I think there's good evidence that spiritual experience--and here I am not talking about sitting on a pew on Sundays and mouthing hymns, but rather about the real deal, a mystic state of religious transport and ecstacy--boils down to chemicals in the brain. I believe this because there are drugs li
I was partly raised Unitarian Universalist and I can assure you there is a dogma. It just isn't metaphysical.
Nice people though.
AREA 51, Roswell, Sunday (UNN) — A tortilla has been found bearing an image in the shape of the face of Richard Dawkins.
Atheists from around the world have united in claiming this as an important sign. "It's a sign of pareidolia, which is what it's called when you see faces in random things — clouds, the moon, Mars, tortillas. Truly, this is a miraculously improbable confluence of random chance."
Over 35,000 atheists and sceptics have flocked to the town, bringing photographs of sick loved ones so that the image of Professor Dawkins may have no scientifically detectable effect upon them. Atheist irreligious nonservices have been packed out with people coming together to fail to worship a lack of God. Sales are at an all-time high of "WWDD" bracelets ("What Would Dawkins Do?"), which atheists look at when confronted by superstition and irrationality. (The usual answer is "Lalla Ward.")
Agnostic apparitions are most often associated with sceptical tradition, wherein there is a special emphasis on tangible examples and replicable proof. Today, scientists are usually quick to dismiss such images, one physicist wisely attributing them to "prosa...
There are possible secular analogues to the church format, but there aren't many close secular analogues that don't derive from some kind of totalizing ideology. Church is very explicitly set up to propagate received wisdom (and to reinforce it with ritual, etc.), and the secondary social structures that accrete around churches (daycare-like services, church outings, community services, etc.) would most likely have a harder time existing if they couldn't fall back on the shared experience of receiving wisdom from on high. More cynically, there's also les...
I would avoid calling any such thing a "church." I do think some sort of organized secular community meeting place would be beneficial, though. Personally, as someone who didn't attend church as a child, I had that sort of community at the karate dojo I attended. Beyond increasing happiness by socializing, having such an organized community can be helpful in reinforcing moral values and behavior. Given past discussion on this site about rationality as a martial art and so forth, it seems like that sort of organization might work better than the church archetype.
I would avoid calling any such thing a "church."
Call it whatever you want in ordinary conversation. Just make sure to call it a church on all the government forms so that you can get the tax status that churches receive, and so your confessors can commit to a vow of secrecy stronger than what psychiatrists and other medical professionals can offer.
There's the Ethical Culture Society, which serves many similar functions. I've attended one a couple of times while visiting friends who were near one, and it was nice, but while there are several of them, you can't expect to find one in any given town the way you can find churches of popular sects.
I'm actually in a strong rationalist community which you might say offers the social benefits of a church. I certainly feel "part of something."
What I valued (still do?) about religion wasn't actually the community, so much, or states of religious transport, which I never experienced. It was history, tradition, membership not just in a "group" of my choice but a nation of my birth, the purely intellectual pleasure of reading in a different language and becoming knowledgeable and learning things by heart, and a sense of reverence or ...
For what it's worth, I still get a kick from time to time out of being able to recite long passages of Hebrew and engage in pilpul with my Jewish geek friends (both frum and otherwise), despite in no meaningful sense remaining a practicing Jew.
I also get a kick out of being fluent in Spanish and I've been known to enjoy hairsplitting discussions about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and reciting long passages of scripts of plays I performed in. I also get a huge thrill out of being able to recite the first sentence of the Oddysey in Greek. None of this has anything to do with religion or atheism, admittedly.
All of which is to say I suspect you can probably find atheists (both strong-sense and weak-sense) who share your appreciation for history, tradition, shared birthright, the intellectual pleasure of memorization, and learning foreign languages.
The comfortable feeling of safely believing the proper things, on the other hand... yeah, that one will be more of a hard sell, at least to talk about. (You will find many people in sufficiently large soi-disant atheist communities who enjoy this feeling, of course, like any other group of humans, but they probably won't admit to it and may well get upset at the suggestion.)
Why ask "should we"? You can have whatever you like - just so long as you don't expect me to participate.
The most annoying part of church wasn't the silly belief in a "God" - that made no real difference. It was the fact that it was an arbitrary social hierarchy with absolutely no practical purpose via which any concept of 'merit' could be realised. Such entities do not benefit me.
Unitarian Universalism comes close in practice. I have an atheist friend who's a UU minister. Because he likes people.
I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.
Causes? They often have community organizers and motivational speakers.
has anyone considered adding a toastmasters element to OB/LW meetups? anyone could be the preacher for the week and get in valuable practice at presenting an idea. even if it's just something that we all "know" seeing different ways of presenting it is fun and rewarding.
There are a couple of atheist meetup groups in my area; I've been thinking of going but have yet to get off my butt. Such a thing might well help fill the same hole. My wife and I are crazed loners with no local family so the socialization would be a big help.
We live in Raleigh, NC, where one cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Baptist church, so we could get a nice non-conformist thrill as well.
Offtopic, but in all seriousness if some kind of rave church existed I would attend regularly. Although I'm not certain that it'd be all that different from just going to an actual rave.
You are not the first one to come with this idea :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Comte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_of_Humanity
After being raised Methodist, I stopped attending church during college and have attended Quaker services for a month since then. Not what I need at this stage in my life, but I can see myself going back. UU is another good option.
It seems to me that the shared activity of "listen to a lecture and sing some songs" is one that doesn't have the same appeal when you strip it of its religious overtones. (Especially the Quaker version, which omits the lecture and the songs.) I suspect a philosophy meetup or book club would serve the same purpose for most atheists, and if the rationality dojos ever get off the ground they strike me as another strong substitute.
It could be fun and/or useful but I doubt it would take off. Churches depend on lots of volunteer effort, which is hard to coordinate without as strong a motivator as saving one's soul. The reasons cited in the OP apply as well. The LW meetups seem to be providing community to a certain extent, but I can't really say because I've never been to one (none in my area).
In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.
Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.
It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.
So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?