Should we have secular churches?

the BDSM community provides the same sort of social support network that church did

I'm going to quote that to my religious friends if a suitably related topic comes up. :P

I've never been too closely involved in the community but from my limited observation BSDM groups also have failures modes just as bad as religious communities.

There's something delicious about that.

Yes, but it's not the stuff the dominatrices make you eat.

I was partly raised Unitarian Universalist and I can assure you there is a dogma. It just isn't metaphysical.

Nice people though.

One of my best friends is an atheist Unitarian Universalist, but the church he attended seemed to be more of a vaguely supernaturalist "unknowable mysteries" sort. Not explicitly theist, but also not the sort of place to properly celebrate the merely real.

For more information on the brain state stuff, you might want to check out Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquilli, and Vince Rause. It had a pretty big effect on my understanding of religion back when I read it.

The word you're looking for might be neurodiversity.

I understand what you're saying, but it's not going to stop me from being generally and vocally anti-religion.

I'm someone whose brain is not wired for spiritual experience; I've never had one nor even wanted to have one. Because of this, for a long time, I didn't really understand the point of view of religious people. I took a course on the psychology of religious belief, in which we read (among other things) William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. It's a seminal work in the field, and while the field has made quite a lot of progress since then (as Desrtopa points out below), it's still very informative. This helped me realize that others' brains were doing things that mine wasn't.

Nevertheless, religious claims are explanations for such experiences, and they're bad explanations. The popularity of those claims is harmful to rational pursuits. Decrying religion is about the claims and not the experiences, despite how many people seem unwilling to separate the two. For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn't seem in principle like it should be).

Some [UU churches] actively welcome atheist members.

I visited the uucpa once. Fifty people or so gathered in a room to sing songs for an hour; someone lit a flame, and rang a bell; and a congressperson gave a sermon on the health care reform bill. Afterwards, we went out for brunch. There is a humanist reading group as well.

I can see how an atheist would be comfortable there. It didn't personally excite me, though.

But even PZ Myers, who is about a proselytizing New Atheist as you can get, has explicitly said that he doesn't mind people engaging in religious behavior because it feels good (he has used the term "hobby"). The objection the proselytizing atheists have is that a) people don't acknowledge that that sort of thing is purely chemical in nature b) religion in its current forms has massive negative side effects c) lots of deeply religious people make things worse for the atheists.

I go to religious services semi-regularly. This is mainly for social reasons, but that occasional vaguely ecstatic feeling is certainly a positive. Nothing in that constuction requires me to believe that that feeling is coming from anything other than material aspects of my own brain.

I'm also curious about your use of the word discriminate. While that word might have some purely denotative forms, it seems like you are using some connotations or other conclusions that discrimination is in general wrong. Can you expand on your definitions of discriminate/discrimination and point to the logical chain that it is always (ETA: in this case) wrong?

CRACKER BARREL, City of Dis, Friday (NTN) — The Church of Satan is reaching out to schools and playgroups to attract more young people into the faith and cull the nation’s goat population, amid fears that a generation of children have become disconnected from religion.

The Church will also establish breakfast, homework, sports and sacrificial orgy clubs in schools to ensure as many young people as possible have “life-enhancing encounters with the Satanic faith and the person of our Unholy Master Beelzebub,” says the internal planning document Goating for Growth.

“We need to reconsider how we engage with and express Satan’s wrath to this generation of children and young people, whoever and wherever they may be. Children are vicious little arseholes by nature, so it shouldn’t be too hard. The challenge is how to creatively offer young persons encounters with the Satanic faith and its beliefs. Except those little shits playing music on their mobiles on the bus, they can star in tonight’s sacrifice.”

The policies, which include providing religious materials to schools to help them abide by the curriculum requirement to provide a daily act of worship, have been criticised by secular campaigners.

“I’m not sure they’re much better than the Christians,” said Richard Dawkins, “particularly considering how many of them are also bishops in the Church of England. Let’s face it, if the Church of England was relying on Christians it’d be sharing a room with the Flat Earth Society. The Satanists’ approach to religion is entirely too namby-pamby and hands-off. They’ve also stopped inviting me to the midnight orgies ever since I was kind enough to point out to them in detail the logical errors in their faith while they were naked, screaming, drenched in goat’s blood and orgasmically invoking fell spirits with random coupling and loud enthusiasm. This demonstrates their deficiencies with regards to intellectual rigor.”

I've experienced something like the "gentleman's club," more than once, and I can attest that it is a good institution. You have to have a critical mass of people you not only like but admire, people who are involved in things that you want to be involved in -- not just friends but connections. You have to see each other more regularly than once a week. You have to have a place that is frequently open to hang out on the spur of the moment. And booze (or intoxicants of your choice) is more important than you might imagine.

If you can get all this, then very good things happen in your life, very quickly. It's sort of setting up the conditions that make serendipity possible.

Including finding a spouse and baby-sitting co-op?

I'd get up every Sunday morning to watch a TED Talk.

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.

Practicing martial arts and fencing were both positive social influences on me, but I don't feel that martial arts instructors are an adequate substitute for the sort of community influence a good priest has.

In fact, one of the events that got me thinking about the value of secular priests in the first place was a priest who brought some of his congregation to the New York Fencers Club, of which I was a member, which shared facilities with the Peter Westbrook Foundation, so that they could watch a demonstration, and he gave a speech to them about the transformative power that that sort of athletic and competitive environment could have on their lives. It was an impressively inspirational speech, and he didn't bring up God or religion at any point, and it left me thinking that he would be a great help to the community regardless of any sort of religious authority, even though he only occupied his position because of the framework created in the community by religion.

I may soon be moving to a city with one of these. I'll check it out.

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.)

And the thing is, a lot of atheists (and people in general) actively dislike precisely the things that I like.

I can definitely register the affirmative on this. Personally, I made a conscious decision to stop identifying as Jewish, back when I was attending Brandeis University, because I found the group dynamic (perhaps they would have called it solidarity, but I perceived it as bias) downright oppressive.

The feeling generalizes to most sorts of traditions. For instance, I have a hard time understanding why one would want to affiliate with a particular style or branch of martial arts given the option of a syncretic approach like Jeet Kune Do.

There is something appealing about identifying as part of a ethnic group. Tribalism is natural after all, we're built for it.

The 12 Virtues of Rationality is a great thing to learn by heart and recite daily I think.

My impression is that lots of religiously moderate individuals also didn't like their Hebrew school/Sunday school etc. so that's not unique to atheists. At to literary feeling for the Bible, I don't know how someone who is educated wouldn't have a fair bit of that other than simple emotional reaction because of the damage that religion has done to society. I'd have to wonder if those people have read Samuel or the first few chapters of Kings or Ruth for example. Maybe tell them to read it as they would read Greek mythology and evaluate the literary merit as if it were from a no longer extant religion?

Could you elaborate? My experience with churches is not extensive, but those I'm familiar with, looking at them as individual entities rather than large institutions like the Catholic Church, mostly had fairly flat social hierarchies.

Maybe that's why my agnostic/atheist parents felt comfortable bringing us to a Unitarian church when we were kids. I never understood that.

Yes, but those organizers and speakers generally don't have the sort of personal relationships with the communities they work with that priests do with their congregations. I think that a lot of people would benefit even more from the sort of personalized guidance priests provide if it were given by people who're given solid, evidence based training in giving such advice.

Personally, I like having sessions with psychiatrists for exactly this reason, but neither my funds nor my various neuroses are great enough to allow for doing it as often as I'd like.

Incorrect link?

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 :-)

I dunno. I mean, don't some martial arts dojos at least somewhat depend on a lot helpfulness/volunteering of its members?

For example, when I was taking Aikido, a standard thing we'd do when we finished was that all of us would clean up the mat, for example. Also several of us did various other things around the dojo. And I don't think any of us thought of it in terms of "saving our souls".

So I'd say that particular obstacle isn't as much of a problem, we'd just need to set up the right sort of social standards/expectations for it. There may potentially be other barriers, however.