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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

> a sense of community

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.

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In my experience nothing has been able to replicate what religion does for communities. Every Sunday hundreds of people get together and chat over coffee before service. This mass gathering offers the opportunity to find other people with similar interests which in turn leads to small groups. Some will say, "That's what meetup.com is for.". I agree, meetup.com is great, but it doesn't have that central core of hundreds of people before splitting up into smaller groups. Meetup.com cuts out the larger group entirely and pushes people into smaller groups automatically. That's an important thing that gets lost.

I meet like minded friends from the group classes at they gym, working at a homeless shelter, some conferences, being on the school board. “Like minded” means these aren’t folks with whom I only discuss things related to how we met.

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.

Much like claims about morality, the claim of the religious to be the only glue that can hold communities together is an obviously false claim that the religious get to make with a straight face because of the moment in history that we live in. In the United States, the primacy of Christianity over the last few hundred years has resulted in a culture that maintains nonsensical claims like these enshrined and untouchable.

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.

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