I am not religious and have no desire to start being now but sometimes I just want the community people get with church. I am craving connection with the community and feel it’s very healthy for families and neighbors as well. The United States is seriously lacking in third spaces and communities. It’s leading to a serious loneliness epidemic… Just wondering if there is anything that can fill that need for non-religious folks?
Linux User Groups?
Do you live in a city, and do you have hobbies? If you like stuff like anime, go to an anime con, it’s great and how I know a huge amount of my friend group
Team sports, volunteer work, social clubs, table top rpgs, choir or a band, basically any hobby you do offline in a group,…
Honestly the fact that you have to ask this question kinda shows how broken the society you live in is.
This is what’s called a “third place”. And they’ve been deliberately killed off or commercialized.I would see if you have a Unitarian Universalist (UU) Congregation near you.
It IS technically a religion, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is trying to make you believe anything, is aggressively LGBTQIA+ friendly, and is also welcoming to all races and cultures (it is literally in their commandments to respect people regardless of creed or views, and respect their individual search for truth and meaning).
While people there are incredibly nice, welcoming etc…the big downside is that most people at UU churches are usually older. It’s got a lot of “old hippie” energy, which is great but they might have less younger people if you’re looking for people in your age group. You won’t really know until you visit your (hopefully) nearby congregation.
They do have traditional church services, with sitting at pews and singing hymns (a select hymnal with a lot of pagany hymns) and a sermon, but the sermon is always about philosophical things and thought provoking stuff, or more recently about current events. For example, when I went for my first time to a nearby church, the reverend spoke about her life growing up queer and everything the world did to make her feel like she didn’t belong.
If you can give the church format a chance, I can’t recommend it enough. A lot of the greatest most loving people I have met have been UU, and I still love and cherish them to this day.
Sorry if this is too churchy for what you are looking for. I would say if you’re pretty liberal/leftist and you want to find groups that do/talk about stuff like that you can often find those connected to UU churches in some way and they’ll never pressure you beyond “oh we hope you will stay, we love to have you” and things like that.
Dungeons and dragons
Yes, Quakers. They sit reflectively with one another instead of listening to services (generally speaking). Some don’t consider themselves religious
Imagine if the west had been dominated by the quakers during colonialism, instead of the puritans, how different the world would be.
Interesting thought experiment. The thing is, Puritanism is older than Quakerism, I think. Oldest long term English Settlement in the region is Jamestown from 1607, but quakerism is 1657’-52. The Puritans had a head start.
I also get the feeling Catholics and the other protestant groups, who later settled in the USA in huge numbers, would have hated the hypothetical Quaker majority and done violence against them or driven them out.
Fun fact: Quakers were important advocates against slavery in the UK (presumably in the USA too), from its very inception.
Oh I know, and I understand why it didn’t work out that way. But imagine if it did.
Also yes, the quakers were also very anti slavery in the US. The quakers seem to be (from what I’ve read) on the right side of almost every issue the capitalist imperialist west has faced for as long as they’ve been around.
They do seem like the OG liberals
The quakers were far superior to liberals
