You might try organizing a LW meetup?
Having organized several of them for Southern California, my impression is that people willing to come to LW meetups occur within the population at rates between 1-in-200k to 1-in-5M people, depending on cultural factors and travel costs.
Looking at wikipedia and a map, the Raleigh-Durham-Cary "census statistical area" is a research hub and contains ~1.7M people with Nelson as a plausible center and a radius of ~25 miles. If you were willing to drive to Greensboro you'd have another 1.5M people to sift for interesting ones. Between the two locations you've got >3M which (if you're lucky) might contain three people in each willing to drive 15 miles and maybe two willing to travel to "the other city" every other month.
If you want to take a crack at being the "social nucleation site" of a LW meetup group I would suggest finding pre-existing groups around atheist, skeptic, biohacker, lisp/ML/python/AI interests. This would take some googling and then a call or three to group organizers to ask of you can try inviting some friends to their group. Then simply announce on the front page that there will be a North Carolina meetup at the location the pre-existing group will use, starting about 60 minutes before and extending through and participating with their meeting. Use other meetup posts on LW as templates. It will probably be promoted when a mod noticed :-)
It might help to shake a few trees. Google this site for "NC" (I just did and found two people here) and send PMs. Friend them on FB and/or linkedin and see if anyone local turns up who you could invite. Get creative! Maybe get an account on meetup.com?
I can imagine you pulling between 1 and 5 interesting people the first time. And whether or not you pull anyone, you might find a neat crowd at one of the places you piggyback with! If you're interested in the idea and have any specific questions about reward/work ratios or whatever send a PM and I'd be happy to share the tips and work/reward expectations I've worked out trying to set up meetups every so often :-)
Thanks!
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?