community, advice, church, life, societyDo nonreligious people feel any absences in their lives post-religion, and if so, how do they fill those absences? For example, do people who have given up religion miss their religious community, and how do they replace this close community in their lives?
I think you may be assuming that atheist people are post-religious. That doesn’t need to be the case.
For example, I was born an atheist (as you, and as everybody else), and I never became religious. So I don’t miss anything related to religion because I never had it. I know other people in similar situations.
Of course, many atheists are post-religious. But that doesn’t need to be the case always.
Absence/Loss: A religious belief is a “building block” of one’s explanatory worldview. If you arrive at the conclusion that religion/God is no longer a valid explanation of how the world works, then you will remove those foundation blocks and look to replace them with truth as you can discern it. The experiences you had as a religious person will still exist, but your new mindset will demand that you find new explanations not based on holy texts, faiths, authority of a Priesthood, etc.
This may not be instantaneous or complete, and I am presuming that my own desire for “consistency” in my views, is common. This is not “filling a hole,” nor is the removal of an old, bad explanation an “absence.” I can only speak for my own experience that the transition was long, slow, and sometimes quite unsettling because of the total way religion was intertwined with what I believed about the world.
Community: I will assert that the community that can be had in religious organizations can be had in any organization: the gathering of people with common interests. Nothing special about the religious community except that they are somewhat required to be a doctrinal echo-chamber.
I think the question is based on the false assumption that abandoning religion somehow leaves a void in your life. This one of the things may happen to devout theists but certainly not to everyone. If your life revolves around church activities you may lose something but my life was never that narrowly defined.
In my case I abandoned religion for some very good reasons and I didn’t replace it with anything. It was more like leaving behind a bag of old clothes that didn’t fit and were very much out of style. I felt no loss and instead made the decision that my life would never be governed by fear and superstition.
I can remember the day I realized that there was really nothing for me in any religion. I felt no remorse or sadness. Instead I had feelings of relief and freedom as if I had been released from prison.
There are a groups you can join, such as any of a variety of Ethical Culture Societies. However there are also mock holidays like Festivus and so on that can be used to bond over.
Additionally, almost any hobby can substitute for church-going. And there are plenty of religious and non-religious charities you can take part in personally. Just because the group is religious, doesn't mean they don't do good work; and if what you donate is your time, you can be sure it is used non-religiously.
This is a great question that points (at least for me) to something deeper. My ex was/is a pretty well educated woman in the field of medicine, and she was for all intents atheistic… but she really wanted and seemed to need the communal experience of a church. She’d been raised catholic and really wanted to be a part of the singing, hand holding, church function planning, etc. So, she ended up associated with the ‘Center for Spiritual Living’ folks. Many of them are atheistic in outlook as well, but they have a church and a whole thing around ‘all belief is valid’.
I know that she doesn’t believe that per-se, but she’s more than happy to compromise in order to get the kind of communal experience she desires. I don’t seem to need the same sort of experience at all, so I don’t really get it.
Seems to me like there’s some set of activities or some kind of interaction with people that she gets out of church that just being an atheist and playing video games on Sunday fails to provide.
You are very correct in asking such question.
I have also had similar thoughts in the past - yes, the religious people do have some benefits in arranging their social activities in that the (alleged) presence of deity provided the glue to hold even the worse member to the “family of the church”.
Some of us, do, as @DampeS8N and @ObdurateDemand suggested, go to those religion-independent social gathering and those place are excellent for some of us who want more communal experience.
Some of us, however, spend more time working, studying and enjoying their habits. I went to (Christian) church for a few years ago when I was still a child, and, in fact, I was losing quite a bit of my reading time going to church, looking back from now, so I think it’s a matter to time management. I now spend most of my sunday morning time reading and doing some chinese caligraphy. :)
Everyone is born atheist. Regarding whether most atheists are raised atheist or raised religious, footnote one in Born Atheist reads:
As with so many issues in atheism, there is scant research on even this most basic question. Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, in their 2006 book Atheists, studied small samples of atheists in San Francisco, Idaho, Alabama and Manitoba. They concluded that most of the atheists they studied had "little or no" religious training in childhood. However, they additionally found that about 25% had a moderate or considerable indoctrination to religion. Atheists at 42. Conversely, Luke Galen, in his larger sample of organizational atheists, found 15% grew up in a household where religion was mildly or not at all emphasized and 35% grew up in a home with a strong emphasis on religion, with 50% falling into an intermediate category. Galen, Luke, "Profiles of the Godless," Free Inquiry, Aug/Sept 2009, at 43. A look at the Pew Research Center Data from 2008 shows that less than a third of atheists were raised as atheists. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, February 2008, at 26. Analyzing the same data in a later release, Pew found that 21% of the unaffiliated (which includes atheists, as well as about 40% of the unaffiliated who say they believe in god) were raised unaffiliated. "Faith in Flux," Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, April 2009. The American Religious Identification Survey looked at "nones" (of whom, only a small percentage are atheists), and found that 73% came from religious homes while 23% had a nonreligious parent. Kosmin, Barry and Keysar, Ariela "American Nones:The Profile of the No Religion Population," American Religious Identification Survey 2008, at 6. Part of the problem may be the definition of a "religious upbringing." For example, I categorize myself as not having a religious upbringing since there was no emphasis on religion in my home, however I was sent to Sunday school weekly for most of my childhood. Atheists come from both strongly religious and nonreligious families. I suspect that a large number of atheists had less religious emphasis than average, and the surveys support this, however, there is no clear support at this time to say, for example, that 50% of atheists had little or no religious upbringing.
I didn’t “replace” my belief with other beliefs; I simply stopped believing in gods, and the rituals and related beliefs and practices.
I did, after leaving my religion, find a ton of time to do other things. I’m a member of my local makers’ group, volunteer with local charities more often, and participate in several professional organizations.
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