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Comment by vegadw | Hacker News Reader

What frustrates me is that, it seems (Read as: the following is just my vibe) that the majority of 3rd places left are religious in nature, but I, personally, don't want to be religious or raise children that are.

There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to be good - or if they do, that funding brings things that ruin the spirit. Once you're looking for a place as an Adult, especially without kids, the number of relevant events and things to do drops quickly too - so these same children aren't going to find better options as they grow older.

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The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.

I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.

We seem to be doing it with more than just religion these days, but it’s the canary in the coal mine.

Lack of investment in your community will very rapidly erode any sort of high trust society you once had within a single generation. Once it’s gone, it’s pretty much gone for good.

I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. Your daily life is not supposed to be lived in complete social comfort with planned interactions with a tiny group of people being your sole source of socialization. At times you should be feeling uncomfortable or obligated in some community or social setting or you are not growing as a human being. I don’t think the office is the best place at all for this, but for many folks I know it was their last social interaction of any sort outside of family.

I’ve been unable to articulate these thoughts very well for decades now - since my late high school days I was already the crazy guy telling friends I was really worried how our hobbies and social interactions were so much less investment on average than our grandparents generation. On average having a bunch of Quake guild buddies is simply not the same as my grandpa who had a bunch of fishing buddies. It’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I think the data is starting to show those concerns were legitimate.

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. > I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.

It is a problem, but… religion isn’t true. How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?

It seems in 2024 that one simply chooses their religion. Arbitrary GDP growth in a finite environment isn’t true either, it’s just another convenient fiction. More recently the AI doom/effective altruist community has just made some hypothetical AI thing into a god. Even rational things like environmentalism and social progressivism have taken on many of the trappings of a religion.

It might be time to start judging which faith-based organizing principles produce the best outcomes.

Religion is literally false but metaphorically true. Our brain filters existence through metaphors. I’m not religious but my metaphors of understanding reality are built on a culture that was for thousands of years until the state got separated from church within my lifetime here in Norway. And it hasn’t made things better.

>How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?

Empiricism doesn't help you with the questions of "who are my people?" or "what matters?" You can make a legitimate case for some of religion's claims being empirically unsound, it doesn't take away from the fact that religion is very effective at giving a lot of people meaning and community, orthogonal to those specific claims.

It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith. There is this sort of strange very online revival of "trad" beliefs but you can literally tell that the people are trying to gaslight themselves into believing something they don't. Sort of a split-brain religion at best.

Nietzsche's aphorism about God being dead was correct, as was his prediction about the future. Religion wouldn't immediately die out but it would take increasingly pathological forms, it's arguably why religion has taken such a political turn as the capital 'f' Faith portion is just gone.

> It's arguably only effective if you genuinely believe the truth claims of the faith.

At least for Judaism that not true at all. There are enormous numbers of Jews who do not believe, and yet consider themselves Jewish and go to occasional services, and find meaning in them even while not believing.

There are even pulpit Rabbis who do not believe and yet faithfully follow all the practices and teach.

>There are enormous numbers of Jews

There aren't, which is exactly why they're exceptional. After the experiences of the 20th century Jews have retained an acute awareness of threats to their very survival as a group which is why they tend to adhere to practice despite secularization. It's also likely why secular Jewish women are the only secular group with a high birth rate.

There's no historical analog to this in pretty much any other modern society, which is why you don't see secular Swedes drag themselves out of bed to go to mass on Sundays.

> After the experiences of the 20th century

... And the 19th, and the 18th, and the 17th, and the 16th, and...

The Jewish condition was obviously affected by the Shoah, but the fundamental elements of otherness from the communities it lived in (since the exodus), with all the very real threats that they inevitably attract, have always been there.

(Sadly any further elaboration on this point cannot be made in a public forum today.)

It's actually 'okay' to gaslight yourself into believing something you don't. That is the basis of human society and mental health. I mean, everyone gaslights themselves into believing all sorts of weird statements on reality, such as 'my parents love me unconditionally' (realistically, there are probably conditions attached).

It's okay to make aspirational claims or commitments like, "I'm going to do my best to love my children unconditionally". It's not mentally healthy to tell yourself "my marriage is great" when your marriage is in fact in shambles. In an extreme case say, believing your parents or spouse love you unconditionally if they're abusing you might destroy a life. A lot of relationships probably decay beyond repair because people don't face reality early enough.

Personal commitments, even if idealistic are good, trying to talk yourself into facts about reality that you don't even believe is never good. And most religions of course make those demands. It's basically like being in the late Soviet Union. Everything is great, everyone is equal, you leave the house and there's a doctor selling cigarettes and vodka on the streets to survive. And basically when in your mind you see that double-think it's already over in a way.

There are certain elements that are not true. But other ones are true. There are many ways to alleviate suffering.

God is not true, at least not the sense that any religion claims (God as an abstraction and a meme is as real as any other, as real as Harry Potter or Slenderman) Claims of absolute moral right or authority derived from divine right are not true. Claims made by the religious that belief in God is a prerequisite to morality, community or cultural identity are not true. Claims made by religious teachings about the nature of the universe are not true.

So what does that leave? Philosophy, ethics and cultural mythology? Why do we need to keep religion around for any of that, any more than we need alchemy when we now have chemistry?

Growing up in Nashville I've frequently heard that religion is a prerequisite to ethics. While I disagree in principle, I struggle to come up with an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting outside of school(academia included) and politics.

It would not surprise me that on the whole our society is worse off for lack of a widespread secular tradition of discussing these concepts with your community.

edit: substitute "secular setting" for "secular state", definitely not arguing for the integration of church and state.

It's always looked to me like from a first approximation, people just do whatever they want and come up with justifications. The smarter they are, the more elaborate the justification. I doubt I'm above it.

Right. I would argue that organized religion provides(provided?) a guided framework of accountability, transparency, and acceptance for your "justifications" amongst your community. In a vacuum, these differences compound into a complete breakdown of understanding.

It's harder to call someone a "libtard" or a "troglodyte" if you have to sit next to them in a pew for the rest of your life.

I fail to see how being forced to confess your crimes to someone who can then informally blackmail you or your employer, for the benefit of an elected dictator-for-life living on the other side of the ocean, provides any "transparency" or "accountability" towards the community.

I think you're right, but that developing a sense of ethics and believing those ethics and morals down to your bones will make you not want to do certain things. People without empathy don't have trouble lying to, stealing from, or committing violence against other people - but those things feel wrong to me intrinsically, because I was raised to feel empathy. But empathy is taught. Seemingly immoral things can be everyday occurrences. For example, it used to be acceptable for husbands to beat their wives up, and now it's not. Probably most people truly believe it's immoral now, unless they grew up with their father regularly beating their mother.

I suspect empathy is mostly nature with some influence via nurture. Once you encounter a few genuine psychopaths who aren’t particularly good at hiding it, it sure seems like it’s just something innate to them.

Certainly you can instill reverence in people - give people a challenge that involves using a cross as a hammer to complete and they’ll recoil instinctively, but I think that’s just software tapping into something more akin to firmware.

This is just my conjecture, but I think that it's that psychopaths lack the capacity for empathy, and empathy is otherwise like a muscle in that it can be trained. I suspect this because I've grown more empathetic compared to when I was a kid, and some other people I've talked to said it was like that for them (not very scientific, I know). I remember being somewhat selfish and amoral.

I think it's a combination of the environment you grew up in, the behavior of the people you grew up with, the values you were raised with, and the education you received, and some of it is also purely self-driven. And so toddlers and little kids are like amoral sponges, since they're still developing their senses of justice, morality, and empathy.

> an example where philosophy and ethics are discussed in a secular setting

That's what the intellectual cafes of 18th/19th century were. In a more bastardized way, that's what pubs can be today.

This said, school and "politics" have always been the main locations for such arguments - "politics", after all, was effectively built as an alternative to religious establishments to discuss matters without pesky clerics around.

False beliefs are often much more instrumentally useful than true beliefs.

I notice I usually walk away from conversations with fellow believers about the nature of God, the Bible etc feeling closer to and more trusting of them even compared to if I talk with them about e.g. trolley problems or what their take on moral realism is, especially if I later confirm they in fact walk the walk by living in a way which agrees with those principles. There's just something about the religious framing that gives it that extra kick.

The actual question of whether God is real is irrelevant. I just assume they're playing ball the same way I am, and that's often enough to kickstart the friendship.

God is not a testable hypothesis. There is no empirical way to conclude God does not exist except by assuming that anything that cannot be tested does not exist. Such an assumption also rules out morality, as there is no empirical basis for that either.

Assuming you're utilitarian, you're working off of the untestable belief that making people happier has some property called 'goodness', and that there is some inherent value to it. But that doesn't even matter because happiness is a qualia that cannot be tested anyway.

So, while I agree that faith in God is not a prerequisite for morality, faith in something certainly is. And once you've allowed faith into your worldview, stating with certainty that God doesn't exist becomes inconsistent.

Faith in something doesn't need presuppose faith in anything supernatural.

And theists have no empirical basis for their morality either, because faith by definition is belief in the absence of such evidence. People just believe what they believe. I prefer to be fed rather than starve, I prefer peace to suffering, I prefer liberty to slavery. I'm a social being capable of empathy and extending my beliefs about myself to include my expectations for others. I prefer others be fed, rather than starve. I prefer others have peace rather than suffer. I prefer others have liberty rather than slavery. I believe human life has value because I value my own life, and therefore value the lives of others.

What do I need to have faith in, here, other than nature and mortality?

Faith in something that is the basis for any morality absolutely does presuppose faith in something supernatural. If you know of anything in the natural world that proves the existence of right and wrong, by all means let me know.

I don't disagree that theists lack empirical basis for morality, both because I don't think anyone does and because I don't believe there is an empirical basis for God.

But it doesn't sound like you have a morality*. It sounds like you have preferences. One doesn't decide one's preferences, and even if they did, they would need a morality to do so rightly. This suggests that your being a good person is strictly luck of the draw. If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?

*Don't take this the wrong way- I don't mean to insult you, and I fully expect you do have morality. I'm only criticizing the argument here.

>If my friend Bob the sadist says he loves it when people starve, would you be in the right to tell him he's wrong? On what grounds?

You first. You don't believe there is an empirical basis for God yet you believe morality absolutely presupposes faith in the supernatural. Presumably, you also consider yourself to have morality. On what supernaturally-derived basis would you (presumably) believe Bob is wrong? and given that the supernatural cannot be objectively proven, how does that faith differ from a preference, on your part?

On the basis of utilitarian notions of right and wrong, I would have no issue with saying that Bob is objectively wrong- he disagrees with what I claim is objectively right. If all I had were preferences, I could no more claim Bob was wrong to prefer to be a murderer than I could claim he was wrong to prefer to be an art teacher. I say, 'I wouldn't do that if I were you', he replies, 'Good thing you're not!', end of discussion. And then I guess he would probably murder me. Or worse: teach me art.

Faith also beats preference here in that, given the premise that it is good to reduce suffering and increase happiness, I arrive at the same conclusions about morally correct actions regardless of the time and place that my mind happens to exist in. I can align my actions to the right choice even if I was raised to prefer something else. A slave owner prefers that slavery exists; a utilitarian slave owner can see that that is wrong and free their slaves.

> God is not a testable hypothesis.

An activist god, in the old testament sense, would be rather visible.

This is stating as fact several things that have not and cannot be proven by tools such as the scientific method. Seems ironic, given the subject matter. :)

The list of claims made by religion which have been disproved by science is innumerable, and the list of claims made by science which have been disproved by religion does not exist. But sure, let's pretend religion and science are equally valid....

Hey now, you're moving the goal posts quite a bit there! :)

I was just pointing out that you said several things as if they were proven facts, and they are not. That's all.

>I was just pointing out that you said several things as if they were proven facts, and they are not. That's all.

The religious do that all the time, but only atheists ever seem to get called out for it. Why the double standard, I wonder?

I invite you to consider The Shroud of Turin (https://www.shroud.com/78exam.htm) and the documented miracles at Lourdes (https://www.lourdes-france.org/en/the-miracles-of-lourdes/).

God as defined by Jews/Christians as ‘being itself’ doesn’t seem disprovable. Especially if you believe that love is real in the whatever- sense.

> How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?

You examine all cultures and find that, despite their claims, none truly value reality. Then you choose to believe, or have experiences that lead you to believe, one that explicitly says that there is more to life than what you can see.

I am surprised this needs to be pointed out, but people generally believe their religion to be true and do not find it at odds with reality at all. That doesn't mean you have to agree with them just because they believe it, but it is certainly not the case that religion is false in a provable sense, nor that religiosity is incompatible with valuing reality.

Well since we ended up with the most popular religions being monotheistic, it follows that regardless of what is true, most religious people are wrong. We just can’t prove which ones.

His point is a criticism of the role of religion as a community accessible to everyone; what if you don't believe in it? What if you can't? This makes the idea that everyone should just join their local church group a non starter.

I feel this is a very 'Protestant' (for lack of better word) view of the situation.

If you don't believe in it, you should just do all the actions and move on as normal. This is the 'liturgical' approach to religion and doesn't require belief.

I myself have confessed many times to my priest a lack of belief, but by virtue of the fact I'm there, I'm clearly still practicing. I mean, as a very analytical person, sometimes I feel very skeptical, and sometimes I feel as if God obviously exists. But either way, it doesn't matter because the answer is unknowable by observation, so it's a choice to believe or not. But even if my choice feels strained, being liturgical[1] about it still provides the same benefits.

[1] By liturgical, I mean, doing the actions, like kneeling, standing, bowing, etc. This builds community independent of any belief.

On the contrary, most religions assert that their particular views are the _only_ valid ones -- and many require their adherents to actively proselytize, to try to convert others to their dogma.

These views are replete with many untestable and non-falsifiable axiomatic assumptions, which must be accepted on "faith."

That word means "accepting the validity of those axioms _despite_ their lack of congruence with reality."

The church that I was raised in and grew up in for the first 18 years of my life... I became a militant atheist when I left that church at 18, close to 30 years ago. In my 30s, I started to drift between Zen Buddhism, Druidry, wicca, paganism, looked into Daoism, and on and on it went. And I finally realized, quite recently, that I had a God-shaped hole running right through the center of me. I still haven't quite figured out what to do about that, I've been looking deeply into Eastern Orthodox Christianity because I find it very compelling, and I have no interest in going back to Protestantism and am deeply troubled by the Catholic Church and it's hierarchy, but I have my doubts and skepticism still.

Regardless, I personally find all of that to be vastly preferable to whatever the fuck is happening to us in the absence of Christianity.

I asked many of these same questions when I lost my faith. I found compelling answers as to why I had a god shaped hole in D.S. Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral. It’s taken 15 years, but I also finally have plans about what the fuck we should be doing about it.

As a low key non-religious person, I find the German Mennonites pretty appealing. They have a sort of DIY approach to religious practice and very little decorum. But AFAIK the US branch is much more radical, I'm not even sure if there are others than the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Protestants in Europe are also very different from the US btw - they are more moderate than Catholics, not less. I grew up Protestant and have always had doubts, which turned into being pretty sure that it's all bogus from age 20 or so. Having something to believe in is probably nice, but it doesn't work for me.

I (somewhat unknowingly) spent several months of immersion in a Hindu monastery. At least in the branch they practiced, they were very clear that your internal beliefs on the theology were far less important than doing the practices that will bring you benefits in this very lifetime—no need to reincarnate to enjoy your positive karma. Christianity puts too much emphasis on belief and not enough on rituals & practices to thrive in a skeptical public.

Catholic and Orthodox Christians still retain and practice vast repertoires of rituals. They are not thriving amidst our skeptical public.

What culture values reality?

In fact, how often is your own brain lying to you for one reason or another?

Religious pursuits of ‘why anything’ are true to the right hemisphere and false to the left hemisphere.

> religion isn’t true

What does this even mean?

> How do you square that with any sort of culture that values reality?

Is reality true? Like all these agents in the comment section below who claim to know the unknowable, are they true?

That model of reality you are describing, thinking that it is reality itself, is that true?

It seems to me that a lot of the "community" hole left by religion declining is being quickly filled in by politics, which itself is taking on quasi-religious attributes.

Maybe it always was one and the same.. separation of church and state in Western culture was a hard won, radical political innovation not very long ago. And Christians today are a highly motivated special interest group in the States, openly attempting to lock their social agenda into law. See also sharia law.

Separation of C/S at the time was about not instituting a state religion and protecting religious practice from the strong arm of the state (the only corporation we allow violence from).

> he primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on

I just don't think that is true for or to many, likely most, religious people. Community is an aspect but at its core it's a religion. You can't be a part of the community without believing, or at least pretending to believe, in the religion.

You can't because the only people remaining (or the overwhelming majority) in those communities are people who are actually religious and take the whole thing pretty seriously.

In the past (of course it depended on the exact time and place) occasionally going to church even if many treated it mostly as a formality was the default for most people. Even if you didn't, chances are that you couldn't ignore it entirely because you still had some links to the community surrounding it through family members, various organizations, events etc.

What you’re describing is basically Unitarianism.

Religion is a meta-organism that uses minds as it’s substrate.

Just like ordinary organisms, it undergoes mutations and evolution - its characteristics are seldomly 'designed'.

Without community to keep it alive, it will die out. So religions that include practices to tie communities together are at an evolutionary advantage.

Facebook makes money by advertising someone else's products, while religious organizations make money by advertising their own. Is the devil somewhere in those details? Could the disingenuousness of advertising be interfering with the desired authenticity of personal relationships?

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.

In the US, it's been a slow process over 35 years, since 1991.[1] England and Wales are much further along - believers are below 50%. But Islam is on the way up in the UK, at 6%.

The high-intensity religions, the ones that require religious activity once a day or more, seem to be thriving.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...

The rise of Islam in UK is due to immigration from Islamic countries, not natives converting.

I'd say longer than that. I'd say religious participation in the USA has been declining since at least the 1970s.

See the chart in the article linked. The line is reasonably flat from 1972 to 1991, and then starts to climb linearly.

I understand what you mean, I grew up in a church with a youth group and group friends which I valued.

However I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell. It still gets back to me when my insomnia is bad.

So churches and church membership aren't necessarily a net-positive. I too wish there was some sort of community my family could belong to. But I'm not taking my kids to church anytime soon.

> I also grew up with constant anxiety about sin and hell.

Erik Butler has a fantastic book on this overall subject called "The Devil and His Advocates" that you might be interested in.

Not all religious societies are like that. Doing it properly looks more like exercise towards a higher good than fear of failure.

I think it's unavoidable in Christianity. Even if one's immediate religious society doesn't believe in hell, it is trivially easy to find other societies which do, and other societies that believe that everyone is damned except for people who've accepted the 'right' concept in the 'right' way. I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could become an Atheist and mostly put the matter out of my mind.

Quick edit: I'm aware there are a lot of theological and historical publications nature of hell and whether or not it is misunderstood. I knew that at the age of 12. It doesn't matter. No minister or theologian or historian can _prove_ that there is no hell and that I won't end up there.

God, Messiah, Heaven, Hell - we are into the area of the unknowable. We don't have training and testing data.

this is really odd to read, since almost all of the Protestant-related theology in the US West seems to have dropped evil and hell almost entirely. At a graduate theology seminar on the History of Religion in America, Professor Robert McDermott asked the group "How many of you believe in 'evil' ?" and only half the class raised their hands (about a dozen).

You are speaking of what is called "mainline Protestantism."

Catholicism is, by far, the largest Christian denomination in the US.

Moreover, large areas in the south, midwest, and California favor the "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" varieties of Protestant theology, where Hell (and inculcating mass fear of Hell) is very much the central concern today.

Your immediate local community likely does not have many of either group.

Speaking as a Christian I think Hell is often looked at the wrong way. It's easy to fall into, yes, but not because "you're just doing it wrong" but because "you want to". I can't speak for other denominations than Catholic, but no one goes to Hell because they just-didn't-know. They go to Hell because they want to serve someone other than God.

The reason to be afraid isn't "here's someone who's just waiting for you to fail" it's (speaking for myself) "I'm _very_ stubborn and _very_ set in my own ways. Can I do the work of letting God work in me? He's eager to work in me, but He won't without my consent. Can I die to myself to serve the good?"

What about those who never had a chance to hear about God? That is between them and God. But God isn't looking to throw them into Hell - if they go to Hell it is because they decided they'd rather serve "something other than the good" even if they never connected "the good" to God.

Ah yes, I "wanted to" think of hell as a lake of eternal fire that most of humanity, likely myself included, would be thrown into and gawked at by the virtuous. Certainly had nothing to do with what I was indoctrinated with from birth. You realize you literally are telling us we are "just doing it wrong"? Worse, that we're doing it wrong because we want to?!

Hell is a fantasy that causes more mental illness than any marginal reduction in antisocial behavior.

How many lifetimes were wasted fearing/sacrificing, arguing, killing, and dying over meaningless and unprovable silliness like heaven and hell? How many children scarred by things they read for themselves after years of being told it's--some measure of--the highest truth?

"Fall into" was a reference to the act of choosing "something other than God" in a permanent way (that is, "fall into Hell") not the act of being afraid of punishment (that is "fall into fear of Hell"). I am sorry that you have had to deal with such a fear!

I 'chose' God for decades until it became clear he/she/it doesn't exist any more than santa, the toothfairy, and leprechauns. So until there is some evidence besides vibes and evidence-free testimony, I'm choosing to believe there is no God.

Thankfully beliefs aren't permanent, or I'd still be anxious and miserable. Perhaps you should not permanently choose a god who has caused so much harm for no benefit.

I hope and pray that you are not anxious or miserable and that you can find your way to the path to permanent happiness and stick with it to the end!

The universal human intuition of the concept of God is equally valid as the human intuitions on causality that stands as the ultimate fundamentals of modern science. Math is the mother of all sciences, philosophy the root of math, human intuitions the root of philosophy. The very psychologist under his article we're talking, Jonathan Haidt, have proven this, that the concept of God exists from birth even in Japanese kids raised in Shinto culture, commenting 'extraordinary' on his research being an atheist himself.

There's no point in favoring one natural human intuition over the other.

Then the number of people througout history who claimed to have taken revelation from God must be evaluated for authenticity of their miracles, one of which can still be verified today as his entire life is preserved through formal chain of transmissions: Muhammad (pbuh). Jesus, we can't even agree on the exact wording of the revelation he received let alone his life.

> The universal human intuition of the concept of God is equally valid as the human intuitions on causality that stands as the ultimate fundamentals of modern science.

This makes no sense. There are myriad cognitive biases that prevent or hinder the ability to model reality, that may or may not be advantageous to an animal depending on the environment it is in.

Between Christianity as a false religion with its unintuitive teachings ultimately and rationally leading to atheism and the modern American way of life with its freedom extremism at the expense of everything elde, there's a third, albeit unthinkable to many, option: Islam.

We're doing great in terms of societal bonds.

Please don't start religious flame wars.

Two other contenders: Vedanta & Buddhism.

There was a post recently about dunbar's number and it seemed straightforward to me, while reading it, that what it's really revealing is what it takes to scale above dunbar's number and that what we call "religion" is exactly that "binding" and "reification".

"Religion" in this case is not just about religion either, but also nations. The U.S. has our gods, such as Washington & Hamilton, and places of worship such as the "temples" in D.C., but we've also censored leaders like Jackson & Lee, and torn down slave-owning statues.

We're living through a deconstruction of history and rebuilding an inverted digital world. I don't think it's been productive. It actually almost feels like an end to history to me.

Maybe go fishing?

Knowing that the US will never, in my lifetime, be high trust like it is in Japan at the moment means we have to focus on the seeds for helping push it towards that after we die.

> it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.

In the religious community I grew up in, the idea that the purpose of the church was "community" was loudly vilified. There was an active purism regarding sincerity of belief and the centricity faith should have in one's life.

Of course, one can see how cult-like devotion and suppression of dissent are conducive to social cohesion, but as a young adult, I only wanted to get away from an environment that stymied my mind and spirit, and that feeling writ large has shuttered churches, I think.

> But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on.

That is an atheist point of view. I grew up in religious environment too and people really believed in god. Some were hypocrites and some values stand in a real life way (commitment to not lie makes for the worst business), but the basic believe that god exist was really real. And when you play the part just for social reasons, then I think you are just a hypocrite. Which would be good reason for people to leave - so that they dont have to pretend.

> I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community.

I don’t get this part. The only time I had a job in my local community was high school. Most of the adults (which was 95+% of the employees) commuted 20-60 minutes to get to it, though, so even that wasn’t my local community. You’d never run into your coworkers at the park or the store because they went to totally different parks and stores. Same’s held for my career as an adult. Coworkers are rarely people you’ll see anywhere other than work unless you go way out of your way to make it happen.

My edit window’s gone, but thinking more on this: it seems to me that remote work makes it easier to be in one’s local community. Less time lost to commute, more time to do local stuff. Can work from the local coffee shop, library, or coworking space, all of which are likely to have a far higher proportion of locals in them than an office park halfway across the city would. Can have lunch out at a sandwich joint near your house, instead of one so far away that you’d rarely or never go to it if you didn’t have to commute to an distant office.

I see the way US cities are designed, with sprawling suburbs and lack of shared spaces as a key contributor. Where I'm at the parks are filled with people throughout the day. The density of the city also means people tend to know their neighbors and watch out for each other much more that I've seen in the burbs.

This is all a very valid set of concerns; not quite a new one, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone (2000), but definitely a Thing.

> The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me.

People need to acknowledge how much the downside of this kind of closeness was conformism, enforced by shunning (or worse) the noncompliant. A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom, it's not really surprising that young people and women are going to run in the opposite direction as soon as they get a chance - often facilitated by the Internet. While simultaneously responding to actual abuse with coverups and complicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...

The sexual revolution is intrinsically linked to the lack of community. The sexual revolution is not actually about free sex. People have been having weird sex for centuries; with or without their partners knowing.

What is novel about the sexual revolution is that it dismissed any needs for norms. Over the past two decades we've seen non-religious attempts to reinstate those norms (consent, kink, safe words, etc). However, what's unpalatable to religious people is not the sex per se, but the lack of norms.

And we need norms to function as a community with a common culture. Throwing those out does not actually help.

You mention the sexual abuse by the Catholic church, but that was caused by the sexual revolution. At the time, the psychological community encouraged moving pedophiles around. The church was -- at the time -- attempting to modernize, and part of the modernization was listening to 'science', including psychologists. Psychologists at the time insisted these things could be cured and criminalization would not help.

The church is not the only organization to have been affected by this, but it is one of the few prominent examples of institutions being held accountable for it. The same ideology caused the German foster care scandals [1] [2].

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Kentler

The Catholic sex abuse scandal was never about the actual abuse, which is presumed constant between religions. It was always about the coverup. Only the Catholic Church has the preexisting organization to pull off such a scandal; the others simply had controversial youth pastors who stopped showing up one day.

If there were any other groups with an organization capable of pulling off coverups, we'd never know about it, because they would have covered it up.

I'm not talking about youth pastors. I'm talking about foster care (Germany) and public schooling in the US [1] [2] [3] and lots of other places.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/oversight-failures-allow-sexual...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/has-media-ignored-sex-abuse-in-...

[3] https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/research/pubs/misconductreview/...

> A lot of religious communities have coped incredibly badly with the sexual revolution of the 20th century; if the only foray of your church into politics is against abortion or LGBT freedom

IMO, at least for Catholics, it is the Church's insistence that condoms and birth control are sinful that led to the mass defections from belief in the legitimacy of Church teaching. Yes, even more so than anti-homosexual rhetoric or the sex abuse coverups.

It's an attitude of "these delusional celibate people care too much about abstract deductive logic, not empirical observations."

There isnt a rush to abolish religious practices.

There is a rush from many to just leave it.

I read the article, it has one major fatal flaw - people don't WANT those old communities, especially religious communities he describes.

People are seeking community, and finding it, elsewhere.

I've found the only way to make friends/community as an adult outside of religion, at least for me, is to go to events relevant to my hobbies and interests. Yes it's difficult, but communities for just about everything are out there if you put yourself out there. If you choose events that occur regularly I've found you get to know people and make friends just by trying to become a regular face too.

If you don't have a hobby/interest with a local group, you can try picking new ones until you find one that clicks too. It does take some effort initially though. The shared interest is critical to removing barriers to making those relationships for me.

Religious places didn't use to be indoctrinating. Nowadays they mostly are, because religions have to justify them economically.

My guess is that "place" have become a way too expensive good, that people just can't afford to share for free.

Religious places were always indoctrinating, they were just the norm for such a long time people didn't recognize such. It was just the thing you did.

I've had the exact same feeling. I think this is some latent cultural zeitgeist that more people are starting to notice.

My thought was to start a "philosopher's club", for Platonic friendships. Right now it's just me and one neighbor meeting every 2 weeks for coffee, but I think an ideal size might be around 3-4 "regulars" plus 2-5 sporadic attendees. Big enough to get boisterous but small enough to carpool.

One of the major issues with libraries these days is that because a lot of cities want to pretend really hard that homelessness doesn't exist, libraries end up as the only social resource available to many homeless people, which leads to other people avoiding them.

In a few of the local libraries near me homeless people occupy the bank of public computers and are frequently watching hardcore pornography. I'm terrified of my young children seeing that.

My local library employs internet filters, similar to parental control software for your home. This seems to significantly reduce porn watching.

You could even go so far as to say that third spaces that are tied to political, religious, or other types of groups are "monetized" in the sense that they exist to further the cause of growing that group.

What's nearly extinct is neutral third spaces with zero agenda.

I suppose parks (national, provincial/state, or just local) and libraries are neutral.

Perhaps this was always true, but it seems for a brief time places like shopping malls were not as concerned as much somehow with having purely immediately profitable people inside and that’s why they were able to be that third place.

Hopefully in time a new generation of voters will want to fund more third places with taxes, because that seems to be the way to get long lasting third places that really do serve their purpose without an agenda.

Libraries are a great place to be, enjoy, learn, and relax, but a terrible place to meet new people. You're not really supposed to talk, and most people don't go there expecting to interact with a stranger or strike up a conversation.

It depends. Many libraries host events on a regular basis where socialization is half the point.

Libraries are trying to do that (with community events, conference rooms, etc.) though. Depends on the library.

I hear you, but it sounds like you’re saying you want program that delivers high value without paying for it.

The way to make this happen is get out there and volunteer your big dollar software engineer time to make it happen. Use all of the knowledge about how to get things done that you get from reading HN, join a team, and start building.

My volunteering experience has been amazing, but there were some negative experiences where it was clear we should have required more buy-in or up front investment.

I'm willing to help, but as one person, I can only do so much. Hyper-locally, it's actually a problem of community here instead of money anyway. There's a half-way decent maker-space, but it's all old men. Think "ham radio guys" stereotype. They're knowledgeable, but without any young blood (and the artistic pursuits younger people tend to bring) it's not fun.

May I ask where you're based in? I'm a little intrigued.

Lincoln, Nebraska

Sports, hobby groups, book clubs? There are plenty of options to meet like-minded people other than churches.

Chess clubs in my city mostly closed down due to online games. I remember the largest club owner complaining of this in the early 2000s

The extent to which such a list is accurate and complete is the extent to which it’s a great list of startup ideas to destroy some community institution, make it impossible to do without an app, and put ads on it.

Maybe in your experience. It isn't in mine. You can make due with email lists and flyers and word of mouth and if someone tries to push an app for it everyone is welcome to ignore it.

Yeah, this really is the key. I've moved several times as an adult, and my new friend group always comes from doing sports or some hobby regularly with the same group of people.

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