Update About Un-Churches
I haven't posted about Un-Churches in a while, but I know there are a few of you interested in experiments in secular alternatives to religion, so I'll update you on where things stand. I don't think Universism is waning in popularity as a philosophy, but the movement to organize under this label and cement it in public awareness seems to be folding due to some kind of bipolar enthusiasm swing on the part of the organizers that Ford handed it off to. Some of you met Ford at Tuesdays at Tio's when I brought him there once. He's a medical student and you know what their free time is like. The Fellowship of Reason canceled its email list, although they still meet locally. I assume the North Texas Church of Free Thought continues to exist, but I've never heard from them. Email digests from the Church of Virus used to be daily, but I haven't heard from them in months. Yoism seems interesting, or at least fun, in a psychedelic way. I love their collection of TV clips. Their vocabulary doesn't do it for me, personally, so I haven't gotten involved.
There is a memetic life cycle at work here, and I'm determined to figure it out. The latest entry on Karl Schroeder's blog "Age of Embodiment" brought this topic back to mind. I'll copy and paste part of my response into this post:
I myself have grappled with attempts to cope with and redirect the religious impulse in our culture, with various rational organizations and philosophies providing a secular alternative to church.
In retrospect, I realize that in essence, we were distracting and confusing religious people with religious-sounding terminology while utterly rejecting the psychological effects they were looking for. Our efforts failed because the organizers didn't actually have a religious impulse, we just wanted to re-channel that of other people. For all practical purposes, this gets it running on a tiny and pathetic treadmill where it can't hurt anybody and eventually atrophies. Religion is a wild, free-range parasitic meme that does not seem to survive under tamed conditions. Many vapid new-agers would come and go in the membership, only long enough to realize -- for all our talk of the mystery of the cosmos*, the infinite interestingness of every insect, leaf, and grain of sand* -- we were holding our noses and barely tolerating their supernatural woo-woo.
Those who don't want to tame their religious impulse don't bother joining such institutions. So the institutions merely self-selected for groups of healthy atheists, agnostics, sort-of-deists, and sort-of-pantheists, trying to devise a cure for a global memetic parasite that none of them have. We couldn't relate to it from the inside, so we couldn't really affect it or speak to it. We got bored of this and drifted off. I still haven't thought of a solution to this problem.
*Which is true. But much more prosaic than it sounds.
Comments
avt-tor on Jun. 23, 2006 11:01 PM
Why do you need a secular alternative to religion? Instead of embracing anti-religions, why not just live without religion?
Anonymous on Jun. 23, 2006 11:15 PM
Because we'll still get blown up with suicide bombers.
matt-arnold on Jun. 23, 2006 11:26 PM
OK, my last answer was the off-the-cuff answer. It's like the old saw that goes "everybody complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it." We face rampant anti-intellectualism down here in the States, and whenever we point out that the problem is religious in nature, enlightened liberals point out the nice, reasonable religious people who occupy the affluent and educated fringes of religion. We're constantly told that people need religion and benefit from it. So, this makes us want to offer them a substitute that will quench their spiritual cravings, like suggesting to a raging irresponsible drunk that he switch to non-alcoholic beer such as O'Douls.
paranthropus on Jun. 24, 2006 3:22 AM
I don't know if I agree that anti-intellectualism is fundamentally religious in nature. Anti-intellectualism is a rejection based on social class. Religion can piggyback on this rejection and attempt to justify it, but it is not the foundation. IMHO, anyway.
avt-tor on Jun. 27, 2006 5:00 AM
That's true; there are atheist versions of anti-intellectualism (e.g. Khmers Rouges).
avt-tor on Jun. 27, 2006 5:11 AM
Well, I'm not going to defend a religious perspective, but I don't think that other people interpret the word "religion" the same way that you do, and when you fail to communicate on a semantic level, your point will be lost.
rachelann1977 on Jun. 24, 2006 7:49 PM
"we were holding our noses and barely tolerating their supernatural woo-woo"
Hilarious, and so true! That's exactly how I feel every time I try becoming involved in any religious endevour, no matter how enlightened, or open-minded the orginization in question claims itself to be.
My feelings on this have become remarkably similar to my feelings about global warming. There is no reasonable action I can take at this point in my life that will be likely to improve the situation, for myself or for others. So, I just lay low, and let the back of my brain chew on it slowly, so to speak, while the rest of me focuses on goals I have a chance of actually reaching.
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