Why I miss religion
I grew up religious. My family went to Mormon churches, Baptist churches, charismatic churches, and fundie churches. I became an atheist at 16. But I miss churches. I miss a big group of people getting together, open to newcomers, organizing to help those who need help, providing facilities for all sorts of other activities. There are all sorts of good functions provided by a church that have nothing to do with religion. Well, except for one thing.
People don’t like doing those things. To get people to provide the money to have buildings like that, and to run the programs like that, and to pay the people in charge of it all, you have to manipulate them, because there are no honest methods that would work. Because people aren’t that charitable. Sure, they’re charitable, they’re just not that charitable. You pretty much have to couch requests for money in moralizing terms. (Any Unitarians out there know if it works the same way for you? I would suspect so.)
Or maybe the problem is that without grandiose visions, there’s not enough motivation for some people to become ministers and church leaders unless they’re religious, or spiritual. Or that the meme is just not viral enough.
But whatever the cause, I do miss churches. I should try out the local Unitarian church, and see how spiritual they are. Maybe they’re relatively secular. God knows most big Baptist churches are.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:03
Don’t go down the religeous route, just because you are lonely. Join a big company instead, they have all the features you describe including a “big group of people getting together, open to newcomers, organizing to help those who need help, providing facilities for all sorts of other activities”. They also have hyprocritical leaders, justifying their rent seeking with fine sounding words, if you like that sort of thing.