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Comment by p1mrx | Hacker News Reader

Consider checking out your local UU (Unitarian Universalist) church if one exists. They're one of the few positioned to poach from the huge flock of "nones" without any change in belief.

UU is basically the church of be excellent to each other, yet whenever I go it's almost entirely old people. It's fun to chat and drink coffee with them, but I wonder where all the younger atheists/humanists are.

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UU sounds awesome. Their 4th principle, the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” sounds particularly enticing when I think about what their sermons would be like. I’d expect the pastors to draw from an expansive set of sources to support that search.

A subset of the members of my former UU congregation are some of the nastiest people in my social media network. The way they talk about their conservative neighbors is horrendous and at the end of the day it’s just trading one set of religious precepts for another.

> I wonder where all the younger atheists/humanists are

Home, sleeping.

As an atheist, this is a challenge if you’re looking for community. These religious communities are organized around some common understanding of whatever sacred text they claim as truth. But it’s hard to feel as connected over disbelief and scepticism. Or maybe it’s all a multifactorial “Bowling Alone” problem that crosses religious and secular boundaries.

My observation of UU is that it's not really about disbelief and skepticism like an atheist meetup. It's more the liberal/progressive ideology wrapped in a church interface. They talk a lot about peace and love, and fighting stuff like climate change, fascist ideas, and inequality.

Since I moved back to the Midwest (not sure if that was a terrible idea), UU feels like a microcosm of the Bay Area.

Maybe the "problem" is that younger people who want to make the world better tend to move to places where stuff actually happens, instead of sitting around talking about it.

Two of my good friends from college are UU (via their families) and I found their whole “thing” pretty interesting and positive. I can confirm your anecdote about it mostly being older people, though.

> it's almost entirely old people

Amen. That was my experience.

> I wonder where all the younger atheists/humanists are

They’ve turned to Freemasonry and the Elks. Ha! No, millennials don’t believe in community organizations. Too creepy.

Both the Freemasonry and the Elks require a belief in god to join, or at least heavily encourage it.

Masons require a belief in a higher power. Individual Masons may believe in God, but the institution is committed to a broader higher power.

"Higher power" is an Alcoholics Anonymous thing, which has been rationalized by the group to include atheism and agnosticism, although not all atheists and agnostics are on board with that (Cf. Secular Organizations for Sobriety, Rational Recovery). In Freemasonry, you're looking for the "Supreme Being," the God of "that religion in which all men agree" which is an attempt at universalism from a 18th century cultural Christian perspective. While that concept has been harmonized with Buddhism, Hinduism, various Neopaganisms, and many other religions that aren't a natural fit, atheism remains explicitly called out as something that's incompatible in the ritual used in the Anglo-American Masonic tradition. Adogmatic or Liberal Freemasonry admits atheists (and sometimes women!), but they're much fewer in number outside Latin America and Continental Europe and unrecognized by the larger Anglo-American faction.

The disqualification of atheism is because it is a materialist anti-belief, where the necessary condition is that any faith of others is wrong, which makes it the essence of choosing to have an irreconcilable difference. They literally identify as adversaries to the faithful.

If you've ever seen a dog scramble to take food and wolf it down without a sense of consequences because the food is the end in itself, materialism is the human version of that but for power. Without a shared abstraction for morality, there is no basis of trust or responsibility to expose anything valuable to them. In this sense, belief in a supreme being is a much more rational position than its critics apprehend.

Masons require a belief in a supreme being and scripture, and various things online say they've explicitly forbidden atheists before. I take everything I read about Freemasonry with a grain of salt, but it still seems fairly hostile to atheists.

You're correct that Anglo-American Freemasonry requires a belief in a Supreme Being. However, the issue of scripture is a bit more nuanced. There's no requirement to believe in the veracity or to honor any scripture in particular. There is a Holy Bible on an altar in a lodge room but it's used as a symbol. During an initiation, a candidate usually has the option to use the holy book of his choice. If one is opposed to the idea that holy books should be honored at all, he might not be a good fit for the institution, but there's nothing technically preventing him from joining. There's also a few times when portions of the Hebrew scriptures are read aloud, though they're pretty unoffensive from a universalist perspective.

They seem to be somewhat welcoming towards most major religions, but atheists still seem frowned upon. One could argue that the universe itself is a supreme being, but any scripture put forth would likely raise some questions.

I'm sure an atheist could successfully become a member, but I doubt many are trying to as the original post joked.

> It's fun to chat and drink coffee with them, but I wonder where all the younger atheists/humanists are.

At home getting stoned and playing video games.

… only half-joking.

Yeah, it's difficult to care about community when you can generate the perception of happiness at home with minimal effort.

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