It goes beyond fairy tails. There is a sense of community that (for the most part) only religion has been able to maintain in the information age.
I'm sorry to see the downvotes since this as an intelligent point. I'm not religious but one thing I do envy in my church-going friends is fellowship.
I'm a man in my 60's, and maybe all this is not applicable for the majority of folks here. But people don't have groups like clubs or bowling leagues very much anymore. Watching TV at home is fine, but not enough. (I'm in a club that is now breaking up, as these things do, and I think there is a very good chance I will not see these friends regularly again, which is too bad.) Of course, I could volunteer at a food bank, etc., but people I know that are in a church seem to find it more natural.
That’s kind of how society works, right? If you go to some sort of religious festival it’s merely another form of this.
I’m not even particularly gregarious.
Of course, this had to change eventually because the underlying supernatural theories are self-evidently false.
For minus the supernatural claims, religious is just another secular organization which fosters certain cultural and social beliefs, like many, many, many others. There is nothing special about religion and there never has been. Human beings do not require certain questions to be answered with recourse to magic in order to function. See the atomic theory for a counterexample.
I beg the moderates among us to agree that community is good, but to insist that it need not come with ridiculous magic strings attached.
I would argue that the cost paid by society due to the institutionalized anti-intellectualism embodied by the church and largely embraced by the government far exceeds whatever communitarian benefits the church itself contributes to society.
Let's find those benefits elsewhere.
How is this so obvious? Where's the counterexample? I've never lived it
There are plenty of non-religious communities all over the world. Look at any co-op if you want an example.
Abstracted from all particulars of a given belief system, religions seem to be a refined, hyperoptimized form of community building.
Secular society is an example of this. We have common goals that we work towards.
We don't have words for "gather once a week and do xyz" in many context, but that doesn't stop us for doing it.
Join an electronics club and meet up every week for the next 10 years. People do this ALL the time and it isn't an issue.
- Ethical Cultures Society
- Unitarian Universalist Church
- Quaker meetings (for non-pastoral Friends, theism is present but not necessary).
My gym for example is full of people who actively work in the community, help each other and gather multiple times per week to better themselves and encourage their community.
Religion has nothing to offer that secular society cannot offer.
It does offer a lot of downsides though.
While this might be true in theory, I have not found it true in practice. I am no longer religious and I have not attended church for 20+ years, but despite trying many of these secular 'alternatives' to church I have yet to find anything as open, welcoming and socially supportive as I found church.
edit: Yes, I know this isn't everybody's experience, and yes some churches can be extremely bigoted, exclusionary and downright evil to people they perceive as 'others'.
Essential in the choice to join a church is the desire to seek out a kind of 'marriage', where for better and worse, you promise to look out for others in an extended family and to help them when they need you. That sense of belonging is one of the big things that brings everyone in a church together -- the wish to be part of a community that regularly joins together and where you can share your life with others.
Membership in a social club can't do that.
As someone who has been involved in both Churches, Church-associated social clubs, and no -Church social clubs, yes, it absolutely can; in fact, what you describe is explicitly part of the concept of many non-Church social clubs, some of which evolved from (or in the tradition of) organizations which started as sub-church organizations within churches by which this function was more tightly expressed for members than in the broader church.
But even where it isn't explicitly part of the deal, it's very common to evolve as an implicit part of a social club.
I'm trying to put into words how much I disagree and why, but I'm failing. Others have done a better job than I can.
I can only recommend you read the strong counter opinions to your position.
I wish you well. But I wont participate in these groups.
- drive you to a doctor appointment?
- repair your house when you can't (perhaps due to injury)?
- take you in for a few days after a crisis at home?
- prepare a week of meals for you, if needed?
These are fairly commonplace roles that I've seen filled routinely by members of a church that I've seldom seen arise from other social networks. And never from a health club.
I don't attend church but I've regularly seen this kind of extended community in others who do. The role churches play of an extended family is incomparable to any other social network I know. This degree of compassion and service to non-family members seems to require a greater common bond than just sweating together.
People are people. We don't need gods to make us care about each other.
Similar to ethnic nationalism, it can and throughout history has provided the glue that holds groups together when they are in conflicts with other groups.
Unlike a secular club, religion cements this power inter-generationally by insinuating itself into the key human institutions of marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and membership in the religion. If you look at any ethno-religious state in the world (i.e. many middle eastern countries), they function this way.
The experiment of a secular national identity (based on shared beliefs about people's rights and dignity) is the only institution that can effectively fulfill this aspect of religion, but as we are now seeing, it can also stumble if it doesn't tend to the needs of its constituents well enough.
But I don't actually see how that is different than religion. Religions have failed many times throughout history.
Modern society has been working well enough for a while now. How long do we have to do it before we can ditch these superstitions?
Would it not be healthier to center that community around something real? It doesn't have to be something serious, but something real would be good.
The challenge is to build community without the judgement that comes along with the beliefs required to attend a church. We strongly support LGBTQ+ folks, the idea of ethical non monogamy, people who elect to be child free, etc, which through our travels and experiences with religious believers, we’ve found incompatible with any church social fabric.
You're responding to fundamentalism and certain non-fundamentalist denominations that take fundamentalist views on selected issues.
Look at recent denominational schisms: Episcopal Church (United States), the United Methodist Church (resolution is on the table but delayed due to the pandemic), etc. The people on the right side of history and the church are winning, and the bigots and fundamentalists are splitting off.