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Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

nautil.us

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Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#191

Post by unprepare »

humanrebar wrote: post #147
kerkeslager wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see a public discussion on this. Intuitively, I think you could be right that church participation brings about happiness and reduces alienation, but it's hard to discuss in a complete void of data. I admit I didn't look very hard, but a quick search only yielded a Pew Research study which showed that weekly church attendance was correlated with happiness, but being in good health had a much stronger corr…

> Church attendance isn't available to everyone. Specifically, LGBTQ folks are often excluded. I have been to a lot of churches and I've never seen this happen. > Why do people believe that this is unpopular to discuss? The Bible offends people. And it's very strange to discuss church participation without discussing God and the Bible. For example, I believe creating a godless (or even God agnostic) church will be ul…

>I have been to a lot of churches and I've never seen this happen.

because youve never seen a gay person be escorted out of a church doesnt mean the church is welcoming to homosexuals.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#192

Post by minikites »

baron816 wrote: post #108
cousin_it wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bringing depressed people together doesn't help them. They need attention from non-depressed people, who abandoned them for the freedom of modernity. Solving this problem won't be win-win, so a startup won't help. Just like you can't make a startup to redistribute money from rich people to poor people. It's a task for charity or government.

I'm not aiming to bring depressed people together. I'm aiming to bring people together, depressed or not. I think no matter who you are, going from a situation where you know no or few people who live close to you, to one where you suddenly know and have access to people who are within walking distance would make a huge difference on your life. Will that solve all of a depressed person's problems? I don't know, but I…

Another thing to consider: Why are they lonely? Maybe they're new in town, maybe they're socially awkward, maybe they've been ostracized from previous groups because they're a sociopath. What happens when you bring a lonely person seeking validation to meet a manipulative sociopath?

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#193

Post by VLM »

FilterSweep wrote: post #175
VLM wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is a young people echo chamber, yet not entirely, and I can assure you from personal experience and observation of peers that a successful twenty year marriage involves remarkably little romance, although keeping a little going is nice. I think there's a lot of young people with soon to be broken expectations who think that marriage means every night is romantic date night. Most life is muddling thru.

From a young person's perspective who has seen older coworkers get divorced and observing remarkable fallout from divorce, why get married then? Please don't take the question as an insult, its a query from a young developer who scarcely has relationships longer than a year.

Mostly to raise kids in a stable manner. And the finances are much more stable. You need someone you can have fun with; little league games are not romantic, but are fun. Ditto doing the laundry or yardwork or cooking dinner or whatever. We have similar outlooks on hobby / life / work balance.

We're also both descended from 40+ yrs of marriage couples, so the risk of divorce seems much lower.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#194

Post by baron816 »

minikites wrote: post #192
baron816 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not aiming to bring depressed people together. I'm aiming to bring people together, depressed or not. I think no matter who you are, going from a situation where you know no or few people who live close to you, to one where you suddenly know and have access to people who are within walking distance would make a huge difference on your life. Will that solve all of a depressed person's problems? I don't know, but I…

Another thing to consider: Why are they lonely? Maybe they're new in town, maybe they're socially awkward, maybe they've been ostracized from previous groups because they're a sociopath. What happens when you bring a lonely person seeking validation to meet a manipulative sociopath?

If you go about you life refusing to meet people because you're afraid you're going to meet a sociopath, then you're going to be awfully lonely. Fortunately, most mature adults are pretty easy to get along with. Yeah, everyone's had a bad experience meeting people here and there. But that's just part of living.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#195

Post by minikites »

baron816 wrote: post #194
minikites wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing to consider: Why are they lonely? Maybe they're new in town, maybe they're socially awkward, maybe they've been ostracized from previous groups because they're a sociopath. What happens when you bring a lonely person seeking validation to meet a manipulative sociopath?

If you go about you life refusing to meet people because you're afraid you're going to meet a sociopath, then you're going to be awfully lonely. Fortunately, most mature adults are pretty easy to get along with. Yeah, everyone's had a bad experience meeting people here and there. But that's just part of living.

I agree, but I'm talking about a situation that could be dangerous for a lonely person who doesn't know any better. A mature adult could recognize the danger but an awkward, sheltered person could easily be taken advantage of by a skilled manipulator.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#196

Post by humanrebar »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #188
humanrebar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Church attendance isn't available to everyone. Specifically, LGBTQ folks are often excluded. I have been to a lot of churches and I've never seen this happen. > Why do people believe that this is unpopular to discuss? The Bible offends people. And it's very strange to discuss church participation without discussing God and the Bible. For example, I believe creating a godless (or even God agnostic) church will be ul…

What's your opinion on Unitarians? They seem to fit your description and have been around for a wile.

In general, Unitarians are nice people trying to be nice. But nice isn't enough.

The Bible teaches that you can't have love without truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love without truth isn't really love at all. To take one particular, teaching people to be agnostic about who God is or even whether He exists isn't really loving in the long run, no matter how nice the intentions are.

And there's some real danger of self delusion in editing the Bible. If we are the ultimate judges of what parts of the Bible count, we become the ultimate judges of Truth. In contrast, it's consistent to trust the scriptures and the God of the scriptures. But if you take that objective source of Truth away, what keeps us honest about who God is? When there is no objective source of Truth, people create a false god in our own image. One that's cold and harsh. Or one that thinks love involves money and power. Or one that only hugs and never rights wrongs.

Anyway, I've never heard a good answer from a Unitarian about how they know what parts of the Bible are good. It generally boils down to their own feelings and experience. Typically phrased like, "I can't see how God could...." As if anything we don't understand is automatically false.

Anyway, Unitarians are generally nice people, but the ones who are Christian are heavily editing the commandments of Jesus from the Bible. They're very close to practicing another faith. It makes about as much sense to me as a Christian attending a mosque or synagogue.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#197

Post by maxerickson »

humanrebar wrote: post #196
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your opinion on Unitarians? They seem to fit your description and have been around for a wile.

In general, Unitarians are nice people trying to be nice. But nice isn't enough. The Bible teaches that you can't have love without truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love without truth isn't really love at all. To take one particular, teaching people to be agnostic about who God is or even whether He exists isn't really loving in the long run, no matter how nice the intentions are. And there's some real danger of self delu…

I think GP was maybe more curious about how you would evaluate their agnostic church than about how you would evaluate their beliefs.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#198

Post by meric »

jokermatt999 wrote: post #180
meric wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion consists of a set of superstitious beliefs and a set of philosophical beliefs. When setting aside the superstitious part be careful not to lose sight of the philosophical part that makes sense. I think the reason a church provides social cohesion and belonging is because it is literally a group of people trying to become the best human beings they can be, a process that involves feeling their own and being a…

Like how atheists complain about fundamentalists, religious folks tend to be more annoyed by the loud atheists. There are plenty of us out there who may even believe in strict materialism, but are graceful enough to not disparage others beliefs when they share them. It's a shame you've met more of the former than the latter.

That's not what I meant - what I meant was sometimes people, me included, and me in particular, in conversations get into a factual mood and lose the opportunity to connect with how the other person feels. More to do with a preference for scientific proof to personal experience than to do with Atheism itself.

But yes people can sometimes be annoying.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#199

Post by humanrebar »

maxerickson wrote: post #197
humanrebar wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, Unitarians are nice people trying to be nice. But nice isn't enough. The Bible teaches that you can't have love without truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love without truth isn't really love at all. To take one particular, teaching people to be agnostic about who God is or even whether He exists isn't really loving in the long run, no matter how nice the intentions are. And there's some real danger of self delu…

I think GP was maybe more curious about how you would evaluate their agnostic church than about how you would evaluate their beliefs.

I find the forms of church to be fairly meaningless on their own. It might as well be a weekly TED Talk and Sing-A-Long series by another name. Maybe it's enjoyable, but I can't really see it being transformative. To me, the worship services have become the least meaningful part of church life. Higher quality music (even worship music) and sermons can easily be found elsewhere.

The accountability and shared search for applied Truth is where the meaning is. I don't see how UU churches provide either well. In other words, a church needs to be able to fire a pastor for heresy without being hypocritical. Otherwise, the word 'church' has started to become a synonym for the word 'nonprofit' or 'club' or 'fraternity'.

Re: Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese

#200

Post by khedoros »

bargl wrote: post #189
khedoros wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some co-workers who attend a kind of spiritual-social group. It's designed as a kind of third place for those who choose to avoid the Christian tradition. I haven't been, so maybe I'm wrong about there being any kind of spiritual focus to the group, but I might describe my coworkers as an ex-Christian (who's fairly bitter about it) and...well, the other guy, I'm not sure. Maybe "theist"? My impression was that…

Do they have a name or some sort of label to easily identify the group so I could do a search for something similar in my area?

It's been a couple of years since I last talked to them about that. If I remember, I'll ask tomorrow.
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