I guess this is what cafes are could be like, but somehow they have turned out to be places where you are expected to keep to yourself.
And it's not just the social part of the community, or the moral lessons, although I liked both of those things - a church gives you an entire framework for your life. What's a secular wedding? A secular funeral? How do your kids get involved in the community outside of the public school system (Boy Scouts is hardly secular) and how do you celebrate their coming of age? What are your standing plans for Wednesday night and Sunday morning? We have to reinvent all these things from scratch when we're not involved with a church, and people do that, but I've never seen such an in-depth and positive out-of-the-box experience as what a church provides. They've been optimizing this stuff for literally millennia.
And I think that society is ripe for a group that will provide all of this, while not also trying to tell us about spirits doing magic tricks. And if you think about it that way, then the "this is where the world comes from" part of religion is almost a sideshow to the "here's a community and framework for your life" part, and yet it's what people focus on and what turns people away.
Meanwhile there are ordinary churches in London that are centuries old...
Some religious institutions provide strict, rigid answers, and others are more flexible. Most I would say have fallen at least somewhat behind the times, especially as modern society finds it more difficult to accept that God exists.
For example, my wedding, and those of most of my friends, were secular. They were very much similar to the religious weddings in my culture, but the official part was done in front of a judge instead of a priest.
In my (European) country, we have two groups of Scouts, one aligned with the Catholic Church, and one secular. It seems some people are trying to do the same in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigators_USA
A somewhat similar organization: http://www.unity.org/ It's based just outside of KC at Unity Village and I can highly recommend a visit if you're in the area. The site is beautiful and an incredibly peaceful place. I'm an atheist so I can't speak for any of the religious or quasi-religious beliefs of the two entities but they definitely have an established social infrastructure.
Church is a place where they help you figure out how to live your life. You learn about family. You learn about money. You learn about grief and loss. You share your own insecurities and learn about the insecurities of the others in your community.
We would sit down once a week for about 90 minutes in a group of ~7 and try to apply lessons (moral, financial, social, etc.) to our lives.
I'd love to see an analog spring up in the tech community.
Whatever the hell I feel like doing. It's nice not having to attend service two days a week (and twice on one of those days)
Churches can be full of the most hypocritical, judgemental, and gossipy people.
So in other words, humans. They are full of humans.
i.e, humans with those attributes more than the average human
The secular weddings had a feeling that every minute was purposeful, that there wasn't any going through ceremony to "get to the good stuff".
Scouts is pretty secular around here. At least my troop was. Never a mention of religion, really.
This sounds like you live in a region where the majority of people are religious. I live in East Germany, where the majority of people don't belong to any church. Consequently, all of the things that you mentioned exist here:
* A secular wedding consists of a ceremony wherein a state-appointed official solemnizes the marriage (basically like the wedding service without the prayers and the singing), followed by the usual reception.
* A secular funeral is basically the same, a funeral service without the religious parts. The last time I attended a funeral, I was 4 years old, so I cannot comment on this, but I imagine that a secular funeral would focus more on the history of the person to remember, rather than on the religious interpretation of the event.
* There is a secular coming-of-age ceremony called Jugendweihe [1].
* There are clubs etc. that organize activities for children, they're just secular.
* "Standing plans for Wednesday ngiht and Sunday morning" are not a problem either because no-one goes to the church.
My comment about plans for wednesday/sunday is just that having church activities automatically twice a week provides something to do without specifically planning. On wednesdays I used to sing, play my instrument in a group, or attend church classes all with friends. Now I drink beer.
There are societies where this concept is pretty foreign. I live in Thailand and when I tell Thai friends that foreigners often sit down at a pub and talk to complete strangers, many are quite surprised.
Games have helped me be around strangers and give me a reason to talk to people I would be too shy to talk to normally. Now a lot of those strangers are no longer strangers, but friends, and that's because we played a lot of games together.
I also believe that you can learn more in much less time about the character and personality of a person by how they act in a game (especially games about devising your own strategies and negotiating with people) than you can with most traditional social outings.
Surprisingly video games don't really do this for me anymore. I do still play a lot of them, but I mostly play single player games. If I play multiplayer, it's got to be something in the same room now, which is why I have a Wii U.
But! The mechanics of the game itself are inevitablely social. Pretty soon you're interacting with your fellow players in dozens of small ways. Maybe you're even striking bargains and forming alliances. By the time the game ends, these people you've been chatting around a table with for almost an hour don't seem like such strangers anymore, and you've got a shared experience to talk about, as you trade views on how the game went and what you'd do differently next game.
The smart phone is looking like The Adult Pacifier. I'm getting old, but I remember social anxiety. I might have been that person who pulled out the phone?
Talking to people older than me, they often seem to say that a timeless feature of living in cities is that you try to pretend that the masses around you aren't there.
Today the iPhone in my pocket completely replaces all of those interactions, since I can (and am supposed to be able to) map my way to absolutely anywhere in NYC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
After four years of living in our town with kids, I almost always bump into people I know when we are out and about. I've never been so connected to the local community where I live before and I really love it. :)
If you want to meet completely new people, I think you're better off joining some activity.
It's funny how different this is. In my country i would barely ever go to a cafe alone, as it's supposed to be a social activity.
The café was a club that anyone could join.