And who is my neighbour?
May 4, 2017 9:03 AM   Subscribe

When conservatives disengage from organized religion, however,
they don’t become more tolerant. They become intolerant in different ways. Research shows that evangelicals who don’t regularly attend church are less hostile to gay people than those who do. But they’re more hostile to African Americans, Latinos, and Muslims. ... When cultural conservatives disengage from organized religion, they tend to redraw the boundaries of identity, de-emphasizing morality and religion and emphasizing race and nation.
posted by clawsoon (68 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm an atheist, so take what I say with that in mind, but I don't think it's organized religion per se that creates tolerance, as much as being part of a community of people that you see, hear, smell, and touch. That your neighbor, and the jerk who pulled into the parking lot before you are all here, in this same room, together.

It's the isolation of not being in a community, a physical community, that kills you. There's a reason that ISIS and the Alt-Right and other white-supremacist movements both prey on socially isolated young men who have no real-world physical community to be a part of. They are easier picking for radicalization because they have nothing else.

One of the flaws with New Atheism, (related to a comment I made in the thread about leaving ultra-Orthodox Judaism) is that there's no consideration, no thought, nothing given to the community role that religion plays in the lives of so many people. I think it is entirely possible to be in a community, and gain those aspects of tolerance that church-goers get. (And yes, I know some have tried, but I feel stuff like Sunday Assembly misses the point.)
posted by SansPoint at 9:12 AM on May 4, 2017 [73 favorites]


I'm an atheist and a Humanist (more precisely, I'm a Humanist Celebrant and member of the American Humanist Association), and I endorse and second what SansPoint wrote.

Part of my advocacy in Humanist circles has been to help foster that sense of community, without necessarily getting to the level of copying all the trappings and sense of going through the motions that accompany efforts like Sunday Assembly. It's important because, as SansPoint has mentioned, humans are social creatures by nature, and will be prone to the pull of extremist impulses when separated from the community. Within non-religious circles we are constantly challenged by this, as evidenced by the small (but very noisy) minority of hateful, bigoted, extreme-right-wing atheists, whose braying and neighing and bleating so often suffuse the visible side of atheism at the expense of all the rest of us.
posted by mystyk at 9:27 AM on May 4, 2017 [11 favorites]


SansPoint, I have heard that there was a whole community of atheists in Chicago in the early 20th century, the Bohemian Freethinkers, with their own community organizations and meetings and mutual support. They basically took all of the prosocial aspects of religion and kept them without the beliefs. My family has roots in 20th century Bohemian Chicago, and my brother's been curious whether that extremely irreligious branch of the family might have been associated with the Freethinkers.

Just throwing another data point out there.
posted by edheil at 9:47 AM on May 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


mystyk: I like to joke that I'd make a great Unitarian Universalist, if it didn't mean I had to wake up early on Sundays again. ;)
posted by SansPoint at 9:47 AM on May 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


I think this article does a good job of disabusing people of the notion that if societies become more secular than greater tolerance naturally follows- a fantasy that I think too many liberals are prone to believing. Religion can certainly worsen intolerance or direct it towards certain groups but there's something much more fundamental about the human predilection towards it.

But I was really not a fan of the way the article paralleled the rise of the alt-right and BLM. Not only is the comparison offensive on its face, it doesn't even make sense! The alt right transforms hatred of LGBT people into even more virulent hatred of other nations and races. BLM can't convince white people that racism exists because they aren't using the "Christian idiom", apparently. So they're both responsible for increasingly vicious politics. What?

There is a point to be made that Christianity might have been a useful uniting factor among different races. But "tolerance" that is founded on shared religious values is a very limited form of tolerance: where does it leave Muslims, Buddhists, atheists of color? The fundamental difference between the alt-right and BLM is that the alt-right wants to shift the focus of intolerance, while BLM wants to eliminate intolerance entirely. They're in no way comparable and it's shameful that the article tries to frame it as if they were.
posted by perplexion at 9:52 AM on May 4, 2017 [33 favorites]


Maybe this is off topic, but I'm not really surprised by this. I'd like to list a few examples.

A few months back, I met a guy who tried to use Kant's Categorical Imperative to argue for the criminalisation of abortion.

For immigration, I've seen craven appeals to legalism ("The gay HIV+ Russian should have followed the law," even though he did and was at risk of being deported anyway). And also simple statements of "I just don't think it's in our national interest."

The Facebook Stoicism group is absolutely filled with people who like telling others that if they're getting angry at Public policy that harms them directly, it's their fault for getting angry. And yet these people don't even bother to argue against those of us who point out that Stoicism is supposed to support a Cosmopolitan outlook where every other human being should be seen as a brother. A concept that Trump's immigration order surely violates.
posted by Pseudology at 10:26 AM on May 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


There are rational, secular arguments to be made for fairness, kindness, and seemingly altruistic actions that involve personal inconvenience. It's important that those be formulated and disseminated; currently, I think they are made mainly in psychology and/or sociology research reports and classrooms.

Also, of course, just being around different people helps built trust of people in general. Finding ways to make that happen, especially for natural introverts, is a tricky and interesting problem.

There is a huge void where passionate religiosity used to be focused. Various entities will emerge to fill it, and it's very important that those not be shaped only by people who are motivated by anger.
posted by amtho at 10:37 AM on May 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


(ObDisc: I am a practicing Catholic.) I emphatically don't believe that my faith is the only one, but I do think that people are healthier when they are in a community -- almost any community.

Last year I read Nadia Bolz Weber's book "Accidental Saints" about running a very open, accepting Lutheran church in Colorado. Most of her parishioners are "outsiders" to typical churches, but she also made a conscious effort (as discussed on NPR here) to include "people who look like your mom and dad."

The more people you deal with, the more people you learn to accept. *shrug* Seems like it should be obvious...
posted by wenestvedt at 10:57 AM on May 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


ObDisc: I am a practicing Catholic.

I was raised Lutheran, and later Evangelical, but my dad was raised Catholic.

As it happens, today is Star Wars day.
Despite having been an open atheist for over a decade now, I still found myself responding *more than once* today to people saying "May the 4th be with you" with "and also with you."
posted by mystyk at 11:13 AM on May 4, 2017 [49 favorites]


Despite having been an open atheist for over a decade now, I still found myself responding *more than once* today to people saying "May the 4th be with you" with "and also with you."

Heads up for any lapsed Catholics -- "and also with you" is out "and with your spirit" is in. I wish someone had warned me before I went back to mass on Easter.
posted by Jugwine at 11:30 AM on May 4, 2017 [16 favorites]


I think this article does a good job of disabusing people of the notion that if societies become more secular than greater tolerance naturally follows- a fantasy that I think too many liberals are prone to believing.

I would say "too many anti-theists are prone to believing", rather. If I had a nickel for every time someone online blamed "religion" for people being shits I wouldn't have to be looking for a job right now.

Not that I'm not saying "atheists", but rather "anti-theists". There is a difference.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:31 AM on May 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil.

That's a pretty loaded sentence that doesn't reflect a very long view of history.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:32 AM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


I thought the Clinton/Sanders divergence was interesting, too: "While white Democrats who went to religious services at least once a week backed Clinton by 26 points, according to an April 2016 PRRI survey, white Democrats who rarely attended services backed Sanders by 13 points."

There's one confounding variable that the article's author doesn't mention: Women attend church more than men, by a pretty big margin. That surely has an impact on these numbers.
posted by clawsoon at 11:42 AM on May 4, 2017 [16 favorites]


wenestvedt: The more people you deal with, the more people you learn to accept. *shrug* Seems like it should be obvious...

I think this also goes a long way to explaining why cities tend to lean more liberal than rural areas. You have to deal with a lot of very different people on a daily basis. Large cities have a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation that you don't find in suburban and rural areas, and you can't avoid them, unless you stay indoors all day---or just in your existing white neighborhood, like the one I grew up in. Had I not started going to a public school in downtown Philadelphia (as opposed to my majority white Catholic school in lily-white Northeast Philadelphia), I might have ended up like the racist oldheads who blame the decline of the neighborhood on all the black and hispanic families moving in.
posted by SansPoint at 11:55 AM on May 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


MetaFilter: A few months back, I met a guy who tried to use Kant's Categorical Imperative to argue for the criminalisation of abortion.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:09 PM on May 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


Heads up for any lapsed Catholics -- "and also with you" is out "and with your spirit" is in.

Awww. I think I feel a little like my grandfather did when the vernacular Mass arrived.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:15 PM on May 4, 2017 [12 favorites]


Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are all ostensibly "universal" religions that have minimal ties to blood and soil, at least in theology. In practice, of course, it often turns out differently.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:16 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


You have to deal with a lot of very different people on a daily basis.

Not only do you have to deal with people, but you have to sacrifice for the good of the greater whole in a million tiny ways, every day. You cannot just "have it your way" all the time when you live in the city. If you're a colossal asshole, you can try, but you'll a) fail and b) everyone will hate you. With a lot of humans packed into a small space, you kind of have to adopt a "together we'll get through this" attitude or you'll be miserable all the time. You have to pay attention to the needs of others and adjust yourself in many many tiny, imperceptible ways. It makes the idea of "we all sacrifice a little so that everyone can get on with what they need" a lot more cromulent.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:25 PM on May 4, 2017 [21 favorites]


I'm an atheist, so take what I say with that in mind, but I don't think it's organized religion per se that creates tolerance, as much as being part of a community of people that you see, hear, smell, and touch. That your neighbor, and the jerk who pulled into the parking lot before you are all here, in this same room, together.

The chaplain at a Christian college encouraging students to get involved in actual churches and not just "Christian" groups described the difference: "It's not a church unless there's somebody there you didn't invite, and it's probably not a church unless there's somebody there you don't like."
posted by straight at 12:50 PM on May 4, 2017 [39 favorites]


With a lot of humans packed into a small space, you kind of have to adopt a "together we'll get through this" attitude or you'll be miserable all the time.

Or you could live in New York and do both.
posted by Sangermaine at 12:54 PM on May 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


But they’re suspicious of Christianity itself, because it crosses boundaries of blood and soil.

That's a pretty loaded sentence that doesn't reflect a very long view of history.


I don't think you have to pretend that Christians in the Mediterranean, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas have always been on good terms and treated each other well to acknowledge that racists might shun Christianity* because it didn't start among white people and white Christians are vastly outnumbered by Christians who aren't white.

*or a specific denomination like the Anglicans who have 10x as many members in Uganda as in the United States
posted by straight at 1:12 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


:"It's not a church unless there's somebody there you didn't invite, and it's probably not a church unless there's somebody there you don't like."

I'm an atheist. I use socialist gatherings as my "church" and it certainly meets these requirements. ;)
posted by sazerac at 1:32 PM on May 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


> "It's not a church unless there's somebody there you didn't invite, and it's probably not a church unless there's somebody there you don't like."

Sounds like every lesbian bar I've ever gone to!
posted by rtha at 1:36 PM on May 4, 2017 [23 favorites]


The chaplain at a Christian college encouraging students to get involved in actual churches and not just "Christian" groups described the difference: "It's not a church unless there's somebody there you didn't invite, and it's probably not a church unless there's somebody there you don't like."

And in many cases, does networking and collaboration with yet more people you probably don't like.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:38 PM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


"Why did these religiously unaffiliated Republicans embrace Trump’s bleak view of America more readily than their churchgoing peers?"
And speaking of lapsed Catholics, it's sometimes said of us that we retain our belief in sin but lose our belief in the possibility of grace. Some of these religiously unaffiliated Republicans—my instinct is to say many—have kept the hellfire apocalypticism of evangelical Protestantism and lost everything else.
"For whatever reason, secularization isn’t easing political conflict. It’s making American politics even more convulsive and zero-sum."
I don't buy this, entirely, but I do think that secular liberal—"liberal" in the broad sense—societies face a specific problem: which is that even under the best circumstances they can provide citizens with opportunity, but they can't provide them with meaning. And under worse circumstances they are uniquely vulnerable to charlatans who come bearing the truth. Say what you will about the universal religions, they have traditionally tended to knit generations and demographics together while providing meaning to those who yearn for it. In their absence who knows what strange Gods.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:42 PM on May 4, 2017 [13 favorites]


"It's not a church unless there's somebody there you didn't invite, and it's probably not a church unless there's somebody there you don't like."

Describes the Buddhist temple I used to go pretty well.

The head priest used to tell a story of how she was trained to wash potatoes in the kitchen of the temple in Japan. Dump all the potatoes into a giant bucket, pour in a bunch of water, and stir them all around so all the potatoes bump into one another like a rock tumbler. They all come out clean. That's the temple.

I also really valued my years going to temple for the experience of having to do some shit I don't wanna. In a highly formal religion like Zen Buddhism, there's always some shit that is boring or strenuous or you think is silly or involves someone you don't like and don't want to interact with and: tough fucking noogies. You do it anyway because you ain't so special as to get your needs and whims catered to. Someone's gotta clean the toilet and if the priest says it's time to chant the Dharani for Removing Disasters, well, kneel on down there bucco and take a deep breath because chanting there will be.

It's valuable training for adult humans.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:53 PM on May 4, 2017 [15 favorites]


octobersurprise: Bingo. And there's nobody in the secular space trying to offer up a meaning. New Atheism is more interested in making counterproofs to counterproofs of counterproofs of proofs of the existence of a god. Silicon Valley is offering convenience in exchange for surveillance. The left is offering diddley-squat. Meanwhile, the far right is offering Jingoistic Nationalism and Authoritarianism, which is basically a poison oasis in a desert.
posted by SansPoint at 1:55 PM on May 4, 2017 [8 favorites]


soren_lorenson: You cannot just "have it your way" all the time when you live in the city. If you're a colossal asshole, you can try, but you'll a) fail and b) everyone will hate you.

Having lived in both a tiny hamlet and a large city, I'll respectfully suggest that the same is true in small places, with the difference that in the city you can be mostly anonymous. In a small town or rural area, everyone will remember every single time you were an asshole, so that provides some cooperative impetus. In the city, anonymity leads to widespread recognition that the government has a role in enforcing cooperation. Smaller places can enforce cooperation with ostracism (and some bullying), so government doesn't play as large a role.

That's all to say: There's mutual self-sacrifice and cooperation and conflict in places both large and small, just policed in different ways.
posted by clawsoon at 2:03 PM on May 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


> New Atheism is more interested in making counterproofs to counterproofs of counterproofs of proofs of the existence of a god.

New Atheism is a big boat. The local groups I'm most familiar with (because my friends run them) do things like host regular socials at a local coffee shop, game nights, readings, talks and stuff like that. "New Atheism" isn't any one exact thing any more than "Christianity" describes the particulars of all the churches under its umbrella. Not unlike some Christian sects, atheism is also congregational, if you will. So if you want a particular kind of group to fill a need you see, make it.
posted by rtha at 2:15 PM on May 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Many conservative, Protestant white men who are only nominally attached to a church struggle in today’s world. They have traditional aspirations but often have difficulty holding down a job, getting and staying married, and otherwise forging real and abiding ties in their community.

I wonder how much of this specific thing is more or less this causal story: Conservative white man is kind of a fuckup and dick, ergo the job problems, and women don't want much to do with him. So nobody drags him to church and nobody does his ties-to-the-community for him.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:15 PM on May 4, 2017 [15 favorites]


Bingo. And there's nobody in the secular space trying to offer up a meaning. New Atheism is more interested in making counterproofs to counterproofs of counterproofs of proofs of the existence of a god. Silicon Valley is offering convenience in exchange for surveillance. The left is offering diddley-squat. Meanwhile, the far right is offering Jingoistic Nationalism and Authoritarianism, which is basically a poison oasis in a desert.

Before my cough conversion cough I was pretty solidly a paleoatheist, respect for ritual, and UU Humanist person in the tradition of Vonnegut and the authors of the first Humanist Manifesto. It's a position that weirdly got flames from both anti-religion liberals and theistic liberals.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:20 PM on May 4, 2017


Yeah I think the city argument is highly dependent. I remember the couple times I had to get around Manhattan as a young person, and a random person nearby would just come over and help me out, like the one time I messed up my bus fare, or when I was trying to move too much luggage, they (non-white people, interestingly) literally came and helped without a word. I cannot really imagine that happening in the West coast city that I live in now. I'm sure there are many factors that contribute to these cultural variations and attitudes, both implicit and espoused.

As for the article, there's recent, tentative research (some science article last week) that suggests people can be empathic or analytic, but not both at the same time [an older article but not the one from last week]. When people think analytically, they tend to be less empathic, and vice versa, as if there are two cognitive mechanisms. So if you throw in secularisation into the mix you get questions about whether an increasingly secular, analytic society might have some potential social costs (which this piece specifically argues manifests as increased political polarization), etc., and then ask what could be done about that, etc.
posted by polymodus at 3:07 PM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


The problem here goes deeper than most commenters here seem to be willing to admit (though octobersurprise touches on it). There's no point in having some made up community if it doesn't revolve around some sort of God or higher being. Donald Trump presented himself as a Nietzschean ubermensch who lived the kind of life most men dream of having and who was singularly capable of solving all our problems. Just look at all the "God Emperor Trump" memes out there. It's honestly like how the ancient Egyptians used to revere their rulers as Gods, though both better and worse because it's done with some degree of irony/self awareness. It's still not something that can be fully committed to, so on the one had we shouldn't literally treat Trump as a God, but on the other hand it's also not ultimately a solution to our existential/spiritual crisis. I hear a lot how it's important that Trump not become a model to young men, but if God doesn't exist then why wouldn't he be? He has money, power, and women. What else could you ask for? If living a humble and honest life isn't in accordance with a real metaphysical moral order, then what's the point? This deep spiritual sickness is being manifested in all sorts of ways across our society. Elliot Rodger being another prime example.

So if you throw in secularisation into the mix you get questions about whether an increasingly secular, analytic society might have some downsides, etc., and then ask what could be done about that, etc.

Right, so naturally let's use reason from a point of view that's completely detached from any sort of higher meaning to try and figure out the problems with a secular, analytic society. This just goes to show how boxed in people's thinking is.
posted by bookman117 at 3:24 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Perplexion: I think this article does a good job of disabusing people of the notion that if societies become more secular than greater tolerance naturally follows- a fantasy that I think too many liberals are prone to believing.

I've heard this so very much - "if only we get rid of religion, all evil and intolerance will vanish and we'll all sing kumbayah!" I've also heard "patriarchy = religion, so if we get rid of religion, misogyny will disappear and then all will be hunky-dory!" Of course, things don't work out that way: there is such a thing as right-wing atheism and they just love sociobiology as a justification for being racist and sexist. Fundamentalism is more a result than a cause of authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, and it is the latter that is at the root of racism/sexism/other "isms."

I think that churches served many good functions, primary among them as a community and support - why so many people refer to their "church family" - and as a way for people to mix outside of narrow silos of age, class, and interests. There was a question in AskMeFi lately about whether it was OK for a thirtysomething to have a nineteen-year-old friend; it says a lot about age segregation in our society that many people think there is something wrong with that per se - I'm talking about age-gap friendships, not creeping or grooming. People just don't have contact with older or younger others outside of family that much, and I think that is at the root of so much generational categorization ("Boomers," "Millennials," and so on) and stereotyping that flies around even on places like Metafilter: "Boomers suck! Greedy geezers!" "Millennials suck! Entitled special snowflakes!"

I think that neighborhoods could serve some of the same functions in cities: I used to live in an Oakland neighborhood that was really like an old-fashioned neighborhood, where neighbors talked to one another and there were good mom-and-pop stores and the like. I know other cities have such neighborhoods. Co-housing might be another way to fill in the gap.

ROU_Xenophobe: I wonder how much of this specific thing is more or less this causal story: Conservative white man is kind of a fuckup and dick, ergo the job problems, and women don't want much to do with him. So nobody drags him to church and nobody does his ties-to-the-community for him.

A lot of it, I believe. Women don't have to get married in order to lead adult lives, so they don't have as much incentive to put up with fuckups and dicks as they used to. Likewise, it's harder for F&D's to find work because the kind of work where you just shut up and work on the factory line (so no-one knows you're a fuckup/dick) are disappearing, too. And since women are still de facto social directors in relationships, men who don't have much going for them don't get community connections, either. I think this is an argument not for women to marry asshole men, but for better mental health treatment and a universal basic income. I've seen counseling and a course of anti-depressants change grumpy asshole men into decent human beings - it isn't always as easy as that, but it can really, really help.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 3:24 PM on May 4, 2017 [9 favorites]


There's no point in having some made up community if it doesn't revolve around some sort of God or higher being

Heilbronner famously speculated that only a "military-religious complex" was up to solving the world's problems; Heidegger famously declared that "only a God can save us now." It isn't at all obvious to me that the only choices before us are God-delivered revelation or atomized, alienated ... Weberianism? ... neoliberalism? (Tho personally, I might prefer the latter to the former if I had to choose.) I think some kind of MacIntyre-ian virtue ethics point the way to a third path, but I haven't a clue how we (the global "we") get from here to Fully Virtuous Luxury Liberalism.
posted by octobersurprise at 4:47 PM on May 4, 2017


Having lived in both a tiny hamlet and a large city, I'll respectfully suggest that the same is true in small places, with the difference that in the city you can be mostly anonymous.

Not really. I live in Oakland and it's remarkable how little anonymity one has. I sometimes comment about the "small town" aspects of living in a city, and it's true. I know the faces of the people I ride the bus with, and they know me. I recognize the regulars around downtown, and they recognize me. Beyond the times when I'm talking with somebody I know and they say "oh, I saw you walking down the street last week at [location and time that I was absolutely at] but didn't want to yell", I've literally had the apparently-homeless guy who sells the Street Sheet at the entrance to BART say to me "haven't seen you in a while, you been okay?"

It may be true that in a city people move in and out at a faster rate than in smaller places. Whether a city is "anonymous" depends a lot on how much attention one pays to one's fellow city-dwellers, I think.
posted by Lexica at 4:58 PM on May 4, 2017 [10 favorites]


I think this is an argument not for women to marry asshole men

Just to be clear, I didn't mean that fuckups and dicks somehow deserve wives. Only that the problem probably isn't that this guy isn't going to church so much as that he's a fuckup and dick.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:15 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


I live in a city known as the world's biggest small town (the fact that a new hire at my office turned out to be the sister of my high school swim coach was such a routine thing that we were both just like, welp Pittsburgh! ¯\_(ツ)_/ ¯ ) and I grew up here so it's not terribly anonymous. It's frequently uncomfortably non-anonymous. Especially on my block. Miss Jean may say she doesn't know and doesn't want to know everyone's business but... hahaha, no.

Anyway, I totally get how living in very small remote places also breeds a need to compromise and work together. But there's a whole lot of people living in the in-between places where you're not close enough to your neighbors for your activity to impact them, and not far enough away from the rest of the world to need to rely on the people you live amongst. I've lived in such a place and it is frighteningly easy to socially isolate yourself utterly.
posted by soren_lorensen at 5:31 PM on May 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


There are rational, secular arguments to be made for fairness, kindness, and seemingly altruistic actions that involve personal inconvenience. It's important that those be formulated and disseminated; currently, I think they are made mainly in psychology and/or sociology research reports and classrooms.

I'd be interested in hearing more such arguments, because I think there's a fundamental epistemological problem with the idea that there's a rationale for the superiority of kindness to cruelty, or tolerance to intolerance, in a universe with no higher order. There's really no reason, other than subjective and local and ones, to value one above the other - because it really doesn't matter. And there are internally consistent philosophies of society and government that don't value those things much (both religious and non-religious). It might matter to the individual and it might feel preferable from a parochial perspective, but it's not demonstrably better, if not invoking/asssuming some moral system located outside of individuals or communities of living people. At least, I haven't been convinced so.
posted by Miko at 5:35 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


Just to be clear, I didn't mean that fuckups and dicks somehow deserve wives. Only that the problem probably isn't that this guy isn't going to church so much as that he's a fuckup and dick.

Oh, I understand, and I agree with you. I wanted to be clear in my own post that women shouldn't be assigned to what Katha Pollitt called the "adopt a barbarian program" just because they still tend to be assigned the social director role.

I've known many men who don't go to church but are still socially integrated. Some are even married to other men, so they don't have wives to social-direct for them. They manage this social integration by - you guessed it - not being fuckups and dicks. They are kind and generous and do their best to be good friends, spouses, and family members, and it pays off, church or no church.

Interestingly, there seems to be a lot less attention paid to "what about women who have no place in society?" except as right-wing concern trolling of the "get back to the kitchen where you belong!" variety. I don't know if there's science to back me up on this, but in my own observations, it takes a lot more for a woman to have no friends or social connections. Kids tend to be more forgiving of mothers than fathers, especially if their parents are divorced and dad moves out. And even women who are unregenerate fuckups usually have one or two fuckup friends or collectors of lost lambs to pal around with. Women who lose all social connections tend to be really, seriously, mentally ill, not mere fuckups, at least in my experience.
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:37 PM on May 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


Metafilter is kind of like a church/temple/synagogue, now that y'all got me thinking about it...
posted by clawsoon at 5:50 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


The problem here goes deeper than most commenters here seem to be willing to admit (though octobersurprise touches on it). There's no point in having some made up community if it doesn't revolve around some sort of God or higher being.

I disagree. There are plenty of examples of communities which don't revolve around a higher being. there may be a leader, yeah, but not a higher being.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:07 PM on May 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Lexica: I've literally had the apparently-homeless guy who sells the Street Sheet at the entrance to BART say to me "haven't seen you in a while, you been okay?"

Aye, but when you go into BART, you don't have to smile and nod at every single person lest everyone in the city know how rude you were. There's a difference, I think, between seeing people every day who you know, and every person you see every day being someone you know, if that makes sense. (I'm thinking of the driver who got out of their SUV today and starting yelling at the driver of the car behind them. Those two people will likely never see each other again, and their social circles will likely never overlap. Do that someplace small, by contrast, and every single person you meet every day will know how rude you were to Mrs. Johnson.)

But you're right that the anonymity of the city is often what you make it. And I like soren_lorensen's comment about the in-between places, too; I've read analysis that more-or-less blames the Reagan Revolution on them and the selfishness they spawn.
posted by clawsoon at 6:17 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


EmpressCallipygos: I disagree. There are plenty of examples of communities which don't revolve around a higher being. there may be a leader, yeah, but not a higher being.

Isn't much of Chinese history a good example of what you're talking about? I'm not an expert by any means, but I've consistently read that the Confucians who dominated China for much of its Imperial history weren't much concerned about God/gods/higher beings. E.g.:
Confucius himself frequently invoked the term Heaven (天). But this concept is very abstract. The Chinese character 天 is translated as "Heaven" in this case, which seems to give it a religious overtone. But this character is the exact same character Chinese use for "sky", which would be a neutral description of nature. So it could mean some supreme deity, but it could also mean nature. The nature of literary Chinese language allows the reader to decide for oneself what the character 天 means. If you are religious and believe in God, then 天 can mean that supreme deity you call "God" or "Allah". If you are agnostic or atheist, then 天 simply means the laws of nature.
And if there's any community which has shown an unparalleled ability to stitch itself back together again after multiple civil wars, rebellions, and revolutions, surely it's the Chinese state and the civilization it's attached to?

God/gods/higher beings certainly seem to have made it easier to form non-kin groups. Ethereal beings like nation-states have also done the job now and again, though I suppose one could arguably lump them in with "higher beings". Any made-up "father" or "mother" who makes us all "brother and sister" seems to be helpful.

Have any atheists (of whom I am one) yet proposed building a community around the ur-ribosome, mother of us all?
posted by clawsoon at 6:45 PM on May 4, 2017 [6 favorites]


rtha When I speak of New Atheism, I speak very specifically about Atheism as pushed by folks like Richard Dawkins, Penn Jillette, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and other people who essentially service as the public face of modern Atheism. They never both with community building, merely anti-theism.
posted by SansPoint at 7:10 PM on May 4, 2017 [2 favorites]


This tendency to concern-troll nontheistic attempts to build communities with gotcha apologetics and demands to be "convinced" gets tiresome to the point of rudeness. If there is a moral system independent of big conjectures or leaps of faith, I've not seen it, and I don't have it. And it exposes a pretty ugly bias in my fellow liberal theists' willingness to encourage interfaith diversity.

As in, we don't pull that bullshit on other world religions that disagree fundamentally with the specific leaps on faith and conjectures which our moral philosophies are built. Maybe it's time to be a good neighbor, keep your apologetics to yourself, and show up when the nontheists move in with a smile and a pie.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:51 PM on May 4, 2017 [5 favorites]


Maybe it's time to be a good neighbor, keep your apologetics to yourself, and show up when the nontheists move in with a smile and a pie.

I really don't care what people believe if they show up with pie. BUt it's true there's no moral system without leaps of faith and conjectures. You've got to borrow, beg, or invent a rationale to argue that "good" behavior (according the flavor of cultural context/the moment) is valuable, either way. I just like to keep that notion in mind to prevent anybody claiming epistemological superiority - which makes for bad neighboring, anyway.
posted by Miko at 8:06 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Like, if you can agree on a local outcome that seems positive, you can all pursue it regardless of [anti]theology, and we can call it good -- even if it's a negative globally or for others, or whatever.
posted by Miko at 8:13 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Miko: I have a very simple moral system that requires no leaps of faith or conjectures: "Do as little harm to other people as possible." I don't think it's a leap of faith to say that some harm to others is inevitable in life, and I don't think it's a leap of faith to say that harming someone is bad. Maybe you disagree on whether it requires leaps of faith or conjecture, though.
posted by SansPoint at 8:15 PM on May 4, 2017


I think I'm beyond the age of getting into the big theological stuff on MeFi. Of course, such a simple philosophy sounds really good. At the same time, just your living your lifestyle where you do when you do as you do constitutes harm - we are doing harm long before we become active bigots.

And I do think it's a leap of faith to say "harming someone is bad" - of course it is. Why? Because it really doesn't matter if you harm someone in an amoral universe. Who cares? Harm, don't harm, it makes little difference in the grand scheme because there is no consequence beyond subjective experience, and that has no particular meaning.

Even in a moral universe, in many moral systems, it also doesn't matter. Especially if, by harming someone, you can make your own or your family's or community's life better. As we all do, in fact, daily, in the Western world. We are mostly pretty comfortable with that trade-off, in fact, though we rarely really want to think much about it. That's the trade-off we live in every day. Even if we're nice to our neighbors with the pie.

It's a more complicated ethical question than it seems; but I understand that a lot of people here, including me, are fried on engaging it.
posted by Miko at 8:29 PM on May 4, 2017 [7 favorites]


I disagree. There are plenty of examples of communities which don't revolve around a higher being. there may be a leader, yeah, but not a higher being.

Yes, in Buddhist moral philosophy, everything centers on the Four Noble Truths. Which are axiomatic. If you're Buddhist, you take them as a conjecture. If you're not Buddhist, you don't, and the little else about the religion's philosophy will make sense.

And then there's the American experiment of a nation built by a plurality that sincerely believed that the people in the church down the street were heretics to different degrees, but generally agreed that "every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid" was a better option than yet another civil war or purge. (George Washington) Some of that toleration was driven by economics though. My city apparently needed Catholic and Jewish labor more than it needed Anglican purity.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:30 PM on May 4, 2017 [4 favorites]


generally agreed that "every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid"

Yeah, it was great except that didn't actually happen.
posted by Miko at 8:31 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, not doing this.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:50 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, it inches closer and closer to the oldsters at the Dunkin Donuts on weekday mornings.
posted by Miko at 8:56 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


Yeah, not doing this.

Now why don't you two enjoy some of the lovely Jello salad that Mrs. McIntyre brought, hmm?
posted by clawsoon at 9:12 PM on May 4, 2017 [3 favorites]


My partner's father was blind and housebound for the last years of his life. I think the relative isolation led both G (husband) and K (wife) to become more conservative over time.

G died two years ago, which gives K more time to be active in the church. K now has a more diverse array of friends, including a close gay friend. The church is doing outreach to younger adults. She's still conservative, and goes to a pretty conservative church. But, she's a bit softer on some issues that she was four years ago with an information diet of cable news.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:59 PM on May 4, 2017 [1 favorite]


It isn't at all obvious to me that the only choices before us are God-delivered revelation or atomized, alienated ... Weberianism? ... neoliberalism?

well, couldnt we like, um, just come up with some generic moral code without a long bearded dude at the top of it, recognizing its fundamental arbitrariness but also its inherent usefulness because we are sufficiently self-aware to know that our communities need a moral order of some sort? couldnt we do that?
posted by wibari at 10:29 PM on May 4, 2017


Does external morality exist?
posted by flaterik at 2:08 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


Some good feedback here; reading metafilter is certainly more interesting than going to Church, but is an artificial community.
Agree with the comment that women are social facilitators.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 2:20 AM on May 5, 2017


I do think that people are healthier when they are in a community -- almost any community.

This one's tricky for me. Since my divorce, financial problems and my PTSD and ADHD have made it much harder for me not to be socially avoidant, but with my particular form of abandonment PTSD, I have to be especially careful about forming relationships when I'm triggered, because I tend to be attracted to forming relationships with emotionally negligent/distant/manipulative/abusive people when I'm triggered. In counseling I was taught to be extra cautious about forming new relationships while emotionally vulnerable, because the relationship bonds I form, once I form them, become very strong and difficult to break, and breaking them causes me massive amounts of survival stress.

So after my divorce, people tried to offer me emotional and personal support by encouraging me to join churches like UU or other less secular churches, but due to my condition, I'm especially vulnerable to exploitation and relationship abuse at this point in time, while my family is breaking up and in ongoing crisis. Because it's so risky for me to form those kinds of relationships now, but it's the preferred mode of social support, I feel stuck. I'm not capable of forming new healthy relationships right now, while I'm still dealing with the stress overload and emotional complications of my abandonment PTSD on my recent divorce process/stint of unemployment/loss of transportation/increased social isolation...

I had always thought of the whole town of Tallahassee as my main community, not any particular subcommunity within it except maybe the other local weirdos who also devote time and energy to music, art, performance, or writing, but tbh, I feel pretty alienated from everybody post divorce. With my condition, having a secure, rock-solid, authentic and unconditional intimate relationship with at least one other human being, whether romantic, familial, or close friend, is crucial to my ability to feel secure and relate in a healthy and honest way to anyone. So there are people for whom church and community based support may not always be the healthiest options to pursue.

I feel more comfortable being part of less formal communities that cross identity group boundaries, but I agree a sense of community and of collective social responsibility and group identity is probably necessary for most people's mental health. I need it, too, but I have to be careful not to become too dependent and to become too trusting or needy when forming new relationships under crisis. And for every good, enlightened church group that really wants to help relieve human pain and suffering more than to recruit and evangelize to grow their own business, there's always another dangerously cult-like, dysfunctional little in-group forming somewhere that might look harmless at the beginning but prove hard to escape later on. I have to be extra cautious not to take those risks in my condition, so I need different alternatives while I'm in crisis, like non-community and church based public programs and services that don't require being more socially capable at a time when, by the very nature of my health issues, my social function is temporarily broken.
posted by saulgoodman at 2:58 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


Mortality doesn't shape my personal ideology as much as the concept of health. We get sicker and die sooner when we live lives of isolation. We have an actual physiological need for some kind of community. Obviously some communities have strengths others don't, some are toxic, etc. But we need to have them to thrive.
posted by emjaybee at 5:17 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


recognizing its fundamental arbitrariness but also its inherent usefulness

It does have usefulness, but only a subjective, local, and temporal one, defined from our own parochial perspectives, is all I'm saying. We may like it better when we believe we live under a code, an arbitrary one even, that results in favorable conditions for us. But it's very hard to argue that it matters that we do that, or, more problematically, that it matters equally for others as it does for us, especially when creating better conditions for them makes worse conditions for us.

Setting aside the difficulty of getting people to universally agree, let alone faithfully act, on such a code. CBrachyrhynos' note about George Washington's "vine and fig tree" quote is a particularly poignant note, I think - it refers to "the independence of the peasant farmer who is freed from military oppression," yet not only did his Army impress people in the Revolution, but less than a dozen years after he died the government he helped to found was again impressing peasants; and he himself owned 317 people when he died, denying them the "independence of the peasant farmer."

In short, we can agree in word to establish and live under ideals, but they are only as good as our actions, and our actions are as arbitrary as our ideals; and in an amoral universe, that doesn't really matter except to maybe some other people, who really don't have any higher moral claim than we do on our own behavior.
posted by Miko at 6:33 AM on May 5, 2017


saulgoodman: I feel more comfortable being part of less formal communities that cross identity group boundaries, but I agree a sense of community and of collective social responsibility and group identity is probably necessary for most people's mental health.

Despite being the atheist railing against the lack of community focus in New Atheism, I'm also more comfortable not being a part of any sort of formal community. My partner was involved in the OTO for a while, and I tagged along for a few masses and events. It was interesting, and the people were mostly nice, but it was too much of a real religion for me to consider joining. I don't just mean that in the sense that it had rituals, and rules, and all that fun stuff, but also that the other aspects were something I wasn't looking for.

I think we all have different degrees to which we need to belong to a community. I'm happy with a small group of friends I see and support---and vice versa---on semi-regular occasions. I don't need or desire something more formalized, but that's just me. Even if I found a great formalized community without the faith-based stuff, I probably still wouldn't want to be a member. It's just not for me, but if it's for other people, that's great!

To drag this back to atheism, New Atheism, it feels like New Atheism is run by people like me who are hyper-individualistic (which might also explain some of their Libertarian leanings, Penn), but have yet to grasp that what's right for them isn't right for everyone else.
posted by SansPoint at 7:25 AM on May 5, 2017


Hang on - when I say that there are communities that can develop without a Higher Power, I'm talking about stuff like:

* Metafilter
* The Elks/Kiwanis/etc. clubs
* Justin Bieber/Nirvana/X-fies fan clubs
* Building/block associations
* PTAs/Parents Of The Putnam County Jr. High Marching Band/Moms and Dads of Little League associations
* Meetup groups
* Irish-American/Polish-American/[insert group here]-American clubs

Wouldn't you call all of those communities? No "shared belief in a given higher power" required there.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:42 AM on May 5, 2017 [3 favorites]


To me, the most important feature of a moral system or community is not whether it helps me figure out the right thing to do, but how well it inspires and convinces me to do the good things I don't just naturally want to do. And also how successful it is at convincing people who are unconcerned about whether something they're doing is hurting other people to care and be open to change.

Even within the component of "deciding what is right," I think a moral system or community's ability to make abstract judgments of right and wrong is much less important than how well it encourages people to be open to listening and considering whether something they currently think is right or harmless might in fact be hurting someone. It sounds like a hippy thing to say, but I think being willing to earnestly ask the question "Is this thing I'm doing right or wrong?" is more important than having an perfectly reasoned answer.
posted by straight at 7:56 AM on May 5, 2017 [1 favorite]


*Sigh* The specific reference was to Washington's Letter to the Jewish Congregations of Newport, which fairly explicitly describes religious pluralism as an ideal fundamental to American civics. I'll agree that this ideal is still a work in progress and has been historically inconsistent. But the fact that I can walk down the street or show up at a project and see congregations with a mutual history of horrific state-sanctioned violence coexisting and letting outsiders speak from the pulpit is a pretty strong argument that some degree of pluralism is possible, even if it's damn difficult to practice at times.

The Moral Argument for God just punts the problem of subjectivity across the field. And the deep philosophical problems of moral philosophy are a derail from the FPP regardless.

saulgoodman: I find the relatively standardized order of service to be comforting as part of my anxiety and PTSD recovery. I don't agree with everything, but reasonable disagreement is a part of community anyway.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:01 AM on May 5, 2017 [4 favorites]


I think the thread is basically winding down, but I was surprised nobody said it so I wanted to immortalize it:

Metafilter: more interested in making counterproofs to counterproofs of counterproofs of proofs

Also, SansPoint, a genuine bravo on correct use of what amounts to a triple-negative! It took me a few moments to process it, but it checks out.
posted by mystyk at 7:24 AM on May 6, 2017 [2 favorites]


mystyk: I'm pretty proud of that one!
posted by SansPoint at 9:19 AM on May 6, 2017


« Older Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!   |   I could not use my GI Bill to go to code school Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments