Atheist Community Building
On the two most recent Chariots of Iron podcasts, they have had big discussions on the importance of atheist community building and while I think there is a certain point to it all, there are reasons why I don’t personally take part in it.
The reality is that while I am an atheist, I have very little in common with most atheists. The majority of atheists, at least in my experience, are liberals. I am a social conservative-leaning moderate and fiscal conservative. A lot of atheists are hard-core humanists, I’m not. A lot of atheists enjoy fantasy, I detest it with a passion. Some atheists are sports fans, I never found any interest in it.
My point is that just being around atheists doesn’t guarantee that I’ll have anything in common with any of them except for a mutual dislike of religion. That’s not a lot to base a friendship on. Personally, I want to hang out with people who want to do what I like to do, not who don’t want to do what I don’t like.
I wrote about this a while back and got some relatively negative comments. That’s fine, everyone is welcome to their opinions and I respect that. I simply do not agree that atheism, by itself, needs to take on the part of replacing the social role of religion. Religion does a good job of forming communities because everyone in a particular church has an automatic commonality that ties them all together. If anything, atheism is an anti-community because there’s nothing that inherently links us, we’re all bound by a non-belief but that’s hardly enough to mean anything in my opinion. I don’t hang around with non-drinkers, I don’t hang around with non-football fans, I don’t hang around with non-soap-opera-watchers, why should I automatically want to hang around with non-believers? Sure, they might be on-average smarter but that doesn’t make them automatically more mature. Just hang out in the chat room waiting for any episode of the Atheist Experience on ustream for clear evidence of that.
They also discussed why most atheist groups tend to get the old guard, those people in their late 50s and up, who were involved with the great humanist awakening in the early 70s and they have the younger crowd who are in their early 30s and below who have grown up in the Internet era. I fall in the middle of those two, among those who really don’t get involved. However, it’s not because I don’t understand the Internet, clearly I do, it’s because I don’t need to be led around by the nose by a giant national group like some people seem to. I guess I can understand it to some degree. The old-timers came into the fold at a time when they were outcasts and their only way of achieving any power was to be a part of a huge national organization like American Atheists or the American Humanist Society. Newbies have never known a world where being an atheist could get you in serious trouble, they just want to trade one social structure for another. Myself and many in my generation stood up for atheism at a time when being an atheist was relatively dangerous in America. No, we probably weren’t going to get dragged behind a truck unless you were in the deep South, but it was a time of religious resurgence where people reacting negatively to my atheism could have cost me a job, etc. I don’t want to put us on a pedestal or anything, but like Madelyn Murray O’Hair, someone I don’t especially like but I respect the work she did, we took risks standing up as individuals. Perhaps it’s the fact that we stood up as individuals that makes us different. We did this before the widespread use of the Internet, we didn’t have a built-in support system, we managed by being individuals and setting up our own support systems. By the time the “new atheists” came along, we no longer had a need for their “newfangled” social networking, we had tried and true methods of finding our own friends. We didn’t need to be joiners, we were already self-sufficient.
Also, there was the problem of Brian Parra’s “5 issue” solution. Now while I agreed with at least some of those issues, the fact is that atheists are not a unified block in anything but their lack of belief in god(s). Some atheists may not even care about separation of church and state or so-called “humanistic values”, therefore setting your platform upon blocks that may or may not even exist seems a bit silly. Brian says we have to recognize what unites us all, but his issues don’t necessarily unite all atheists. Marxist communists may have been atheists, even if they didn’t have a secular government and that’s fine. They’re still atheists whether he likes it or not. His idea that he can define atheists as only those people who fit into his 5-point model is absurd. Atheism is a single answer to a single question, nothing more, nothing less. As Brother Richard pointed out in a recent interview, “atheism” is just a small part of any particular individual’s makeup. Anything that comes outside of that tiny part isn’t atheism, it just happens to be held by an atheist.
I guess, at least personally, I just don’t care about “building atheism’s brand loyalty” or however you want to phrase it. I don’t want to make atheism larger, I just want to make religion smaller. If that has the effect of enlarging the population of atheists, so be it. There is a difference in the two approaches. I don’t necessarily care if atheism is especially attractive as a philosophical position and I certainly don’t care if it’s a “cool” place to hang out and party. I’m interested in philosophical truth, not being part of some “in-crowd”.
If I want friends, I’m not going to go looking for them at an atheist conference, a secular alliance or a non-religious convention, I’m going to go looking for people who share common interests with me, not who share common non-beliefs. Some of the most boring people I’ve ever hung out around have been people whose only commonality have been positions against something. To be honest, if I was running an atheist group, I’d want people to find me based on their non-belief in gods, not because I had killer BBQs and lots of fun non-atheist-events. By the same token, I’m sure churches don’t want people showing up to their pot-lucks if they don’t actually believe in their god(s).
I’m sure I’ll get plenty of negative comments again, mostly from those who run these athiest social clubs, but to be honest, I don’t care. Some people might need to frame their lives around a particular religious belief or non-belief. I don’t. Truth be told, I have far more religious friends than I have non-religious friends. My religious friends happen to accept that I’m not religious and, for most, that I have a far greater understanding of their religion than they do. I don’t actively try to convert them, they don’t try to convert me. We can still be friends no matter what we do on Sunday morning. Keep in mind that the majority of religious people in this country are “religious-in-name-only”, they do it because they think it makes them look good to the neighbors, not because they actually buy into the mumbo jumbo. It might make them somewhat intellectually disingenuous but it certainly doesn’t make them bad people. In fact, none of them have ever made a list of things we had to agree on before we could be a part of the same club.
Maybe some people ought to think about that.
2 Comments to “Atheist Community Building”
Within reason, sure. They're just trying to increase their numbers. But if someone who was "lost" went to a potluck, chose to remain "lost", they wouldn't be welcomed at every event the church has to offer, would they? Those can be seen as a sort of membership drive, nothing more.
And yeah, I don't blame you, I took part in some of those potlucks myself, at least my church had a full commercial-style kitchen that we could use, but it was a pain in the backside cooking for a ton of people, most of whom didn't know how to say "thank you".
churches don’t want people showing up to their pot-lucks if they don’t actually believe in their god(s)
That may be true sometimes. On the other hand, churches sometimes hold these events specifically to reach "the lost." They encourage their members to bring their unchurched, unsaved friends to pot-lucks, etc., so that they can get a good dose of the gospel alongside their potato salad. True story: I once cooked a spaghetti and meatball supper for approximately 100 people for an outreach supper – homemade sauce and several hundred hand-rolled meatballs. Yeah – I only did it once.
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