A friend of mine who moved from the very religious community she was born in to a very non-religious community overseas says the BDSM community provides the same sort of social support network that church did when she lived in the US.

There's something delicious about that.

I have a twofold response here.

1. Atheists who are interested in gathering the social benefits of church attendance without checking their brains at the door might want to look at the Unitarian Universalist church, which has no dogma. I mean it. They have no dogma. In theory this means there's absolutely no inherent contradiction in the idea of an atheist Unitarian. You're a Unitarian if you sign the book saying you're a Unitarian: what you believe is entirely up to you. In practice, the degree to which an atheist would feel comfortable depends a lot on the local UU congregation. Some are essentially liberal Protestant churches with some handwaving of the thornier bits. Some actively welcome atheist members.

2. I think the social aspect is critically important to an understanding of why people continue to seek out religion after the Enlightenment, but I don't think it tells the whole story. I think there's good evidence that spiritual experience--and here I am not talking about sitting on a pew on Sundays and mouthing hymns, but rather about the real deal, a mystic state of religious transport and ecstacy--boils down to chemicals in the brain. I believe this because there are drugs like ayahuasca that trigger these experiences very reliably. It looks to me that every human culture has its own way of reaching this brain-state: it very often centers on music and dance, but meditation, self-hypnosis, yoga-like practices, or an endorphin rush triggered by fasting and self-harm are all common as well.

Some brains reach this state more easily than others. Some brains absolutely crave it. Some are all but immune to it. This is why some people become shamans, or religious nuts, and some don't. Authentic ecstactic experience is (or was, until people like Alexander Shulgin came around) comparatively rare, but even when people had one such experience in a lifetime it was enough to change the course of civilizations.

I also strongly suspect that the state of "creative flow" reported by artists--the state where the artist feels that s/he is merely "taking dictation" from a higher power--is chemically similar to the state of religious ecstacy. There's too much crossover between the message that artists and mystics "bring back"--a general sense of oneness, higher purpose, the interconnectedness of all things, etc--for this not to be true. I also, based on my own experience, suspect that the state of flow experienced by programmers is not too far off. That state when you're holding all the connections in your mind, and you see the way forward, and you're like a god--yeah. That one. Except about a thousand times more significant.

Where I think the proselytizing atheists tend to go wrong is that they discount the power of that brain-state. I mean, part of it is that it's by definition charged with meaning. So naturally it's going to feel like the Most Important Thing Ever. You're flooded with a sense of immense meaning as part of the experience itself.

And I also think that the experience is desirable. Everyone should get to have it at least once. It clarified a lot of things for me in my early twenties. Religious practice gives people--oh, the lightest shade of what a true ecstactic moment has to offer, but for the kinds of brains that crave that state, religious practice is really important to their ongoing sense of well-being.

I think in a way the proselytizing atheists are being chemically...discriminatory? That's not exactly right, but they're failing to recognize that some brains crave an experience their own brains do not. They're trying to other-optimize without fully understanding all the benefits that religious practice provides to the people who are so emotionally attached to it.

AREA 51, Roswell, Sunday (UNN) — A tortilla has been found bearing an image in the shape of the face of Richard Dawkins.

Atheists from around the world have united in claiming this as an important sign. "It's a sign of pareidolia, which is what it's called when you see faces in random things — clouds, the moon, Mars, tortillas. Truly, this is a miraculously improbable confluence of random chance."

Over 35,000 atheists and sceptics have flocked to the town, bringing photographs of sick loved ones so that the image of Professor Dawkins may have no scientifically detectable effect upon them. Atheist irreligious nonservices have been packed out with people coming together to fail to worship a lack of God. Sales are at an all-time high of "WWDD" bracelets ("What Would Dawkins Do?"), which atheists look at when confronted by superstition and irrationality. (The usual answer is "Lalla Ward.")

Agnostic apparitions are most often associated with sceptical tradition, wherein there is a special emphasis on tangible examples and replicable proof. Today, scientists are usually quick to dismiss such images, one physicist wisely attributing them to "prosaic imagination." However, they remain intensely popular among the practical faithless, as evidence of the cosmic rule that "stuff just happens."

Plans to sell the tortilla on eBay have unfortunately been delayed after it was eaten by a particularly religious poodle. After its emergence, the face on the tortilla now resembles Andrew Schlafly.

(original by me here)

There are possible secular analogues to the church format, but there aren't many close secular analogues that don't derive from some kind of totalizing ideology. Church is very explicitly set up to propagate received wisdom (and to reinforce it with ritual, etc.), and the secondary social structures that accrete around churches (daycare-like services, church outings, community services, etc.) would most likely have a harder time existing if they couldn't fall back on the shared experience of receiving wisdom from on high. More cynically, there's also less incentive to maintain those secondary organizations if you're not trying to keep your flock socially isolated in order to benefit from cult attractor effects.

There's certainly a social void that not going to church leaves in some individuals. With the above in mind, though, the most adaptive way to fill it might not be to copy the church format but to expand the secondary services around existing secular organizations. The key here is leveraging the existing common ground to build affective links in a structured way: my current dojo, for example, has taken to throwing parties after intensive training sessions and on the dates of events significant to the organization. It's at least been effective at improving regular attendance, which strikes me as a good proxy for emotional attachment.

If you wanted to make something up from whole cloth, patterning it roughly after the Boy Scouts or something similar might not be a bad way to do it. Alternately, a modernized revival of the 19th-century "gentleman's club" format (i.e. not a strip joint but a venue for making and maintaining socially useful connections) might have potential.

Sir Martin Rees, a British astronomer, told Richard Dawkins that he attended church “as an unbelieving Anglican…out of loyalty to the tribe.”

A Hackspace is currently filling that position in my life.

I would avoid calling any such thing a "church." I do think some sort of organized secular community meeting place would be beneficial, though. Personally, as someone who didn't attend church as a child, I had that sort of community at the karate dojo I attended. Beyond increasing happiness by socializing, having such an organized community can be helpful in reinforcing moral values and behavior. Given past discussion on this site about rationality as a martial art and so forth, it seems like that sort of organization might work better than the church archetype.

There's the Ethical Culture Society, which serves many similar functions. I've attended one a couple of times while visiting friends who were near one, and it was nice, but while there are several of them, you can't expect to find one in any given town the way you can find churches of popular sects.

I'm actually in a strong rationalist community which you might say offers the social benefits of a church. I certainly feel "part of something."

What I valued (still do?) about religion wasn't actually the community, so much, or states of religious transport, which I never experienced. It was history, tradition, membership not just in a "group" of my choice but a nation of my birth, the purely intellectual pleasure of reading in a different language and becoming knowledgeable and learning things by heart, and a sense of reverence or propriety, a feeling that I was safely doing the right thing. I miss all that, sometimes acutely.

And the thing is, a lot of atheists (and people in general) actively dislike precisely the things that I like. I've met a lot of people who dislike ethnic affiliation. I've met a lot of people who are temperamentally irreverent, and have mostly negative associations with "obedience" and "propriety." And practically everyone I know -- atheist or not -- hated Hebrew school/Sunday school, detests memorizing, and doesn't have even an aesthetic or literary feeling for the Bible. I probably can't get atheists to share those things with me. It's an unsolved problem.

I think that Dungeons and Dragons fills this space in my life.

Unitarian Universalism comes close in practice. I have an atheist friend who's a UU minister. Because he likes people.

Why ask "should we"? You can have whatever you like - just so long as you don't expect me to participate.

The most annoying part of church wasn't the silly belief in a "God" - that made no real difference. It was the fact that it was an arbitrary social hierarchy with absolutely no practical purpose via which any concept of 'merit' could be realised. Such entities do not benefit me.

has anyone considered adding a toastmasters element to OB/LW meetups? anyone could be the preacher for the week and get in valuable practice at presenting an idea. even if it's just something that we all "know" seeing different ways of presenting it is fun and rewarding.

I interviewed Zachary Moore, who has been (at different times) the head leader of two major secular churches, here.

I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.

Causes? They often have community organizers and motivational speakers.