Matron in the train station

Saw an older woman handing out Watchtower tracts at the T this morning. I bet that work gives her a sense of purpose, and of dignity through purpose. And it's nice to know that she has a reason to be out of the house. Still, I'd much rather see her stumping for an ideology that didn't reject science, reject modernity, and demand impossible beliefs from the people interested in belonging to that community.

What kind of an ideology might that be? Well, it'd have to be a big one, else it wouldn't attract commitment and motivate behavior. But so many big ideas are also dangerous ideas. Radical fellowship opens the door to disfellowshipping; community belonging opens the door to shunning; values-based leadership opens the door to coercion, authoritarianism, and abuse.

Some days I'm such an optimist that I feel it wouldn't be such a difficult thing to articulate such an ideology, and stitch up a workable community structure around it, and release it into the wild. Then I think about the observable scarcity of such communities where benign values-in-action have resulted in flourishing and stable social situations, and I tuck my optimism back in my pocket and recommit to a more humble set of ambitions.

"It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled," Mark Twain wrote. (Or no, he didn't, but I will tell you that he didn't and you won't believe me.)

Is UU missing the "new" New Atheist boat?

One of the Sunday Assembly Boston committee members shared the October 2013 sermon above, with the advice that we keep in mind we are not just another group, but a new congregation that other leaders of other congregations are still trying to make sense of.

My thoughts.

Kendrick points to institutional insularity as a reason why UU is not connecting effectively with the population of religiously unaffiliated freethinkers coming out of the woodwork in groups like Sunday Assembly and Humanism; I wonder if there isn't another important factor: the language gap.

In his sermon, he uses terms like "transcendental", "faith", and "spiritual hunger". Now, I know what he means, but the register of this vocabulary seems to be a world removed from the science-infatuated, skeptically-inflected, irony-wrought idiolect of the new freethinkers. I can map his meaning onto my own ethical outlook, sure, but I fear I am not the typical case. For many more people among those he would be seeking to tell about UU, the ecclesiastical and vaguely supernaturalistic vocabulary of the UU tradition is likely to evoke a powerful response of suspicion and even disdain.

In my conversations with UU and HUU leaders and parishioners, I've encountered confusion, wariness, and even dismissal in regard to Sunday Assembly (and to the older project of re-orienting the Boston Atheists as a congregational group). These are folks who have good reason for wondering if we aren't a bunch of johhny-come-latelys, here to co-opt their place as *the* obvious destination for liberal-minded freethinkers in search of community as a connection to "something greater". I share this opinion because I think it is important that we keep in mind that our work in organizing SA isn't taking place in a vacuum; there are allies out there, that we can work with and learn from, and establish relationships of mutual aid, as long as we know that they are there, and are alert to the potential sensitivities. And I share it with full confidence that Kendrick is a certainly a potential ally.

Relatedly: After taking a few months off while occupied with wedding planning, I'll be restarting the Boston Interpath Workgroup with monthly meetings for discussion and position paper publication, in March 2014. If anyone here on the distro is interested in joining, please let me know.

Suggested names for an atheist church

Prompted by the list of alternatives to the term "interfaith" that appeared on this blog earlier today, my friend Alex Vera wrote to offer his suggestions for the name of an "atheist church", each of which derive from the title of De Rerum Natura. Alex asserts that this epic poem of stoic philosophy is "a great starting point for all matters interfaith and euprasophical, since natural stuff includes all the above, but also leans towards naturalism within itself and, by reference to its author, Lucretius, an underlying sense of atheism/secularism."

• barums (suggesting bars, where people of all denominations congregate for discussion and the consumption of alcohol)
• brorums (more fraternal version of the above)
• brostitutions (LOL)
• rerumstitutions (a nice institutional ring to it, right?)
• freerums (blending Freemasonry, De Derum Natura, and an endorsement of free drinks)
• freereasonry (self-explanatory)

Would you accept an invitation to join the Brostitution of Freereasonry?

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Other suggestions that have begun to come in over the transom:

• secular society (suggested by Maria G.)

What's a word for atheist church? And crowdsourcing alternatives to "interfaith".

Were I to ask a typical American to tell me the name of that social institution where people who live near one another come together for the purposes of enjoying mutual aid, of developing a sense of shared interests and identity, and of professing their common commitment to certain shared values (or of exploring their understanding of certain core values), the answer I'd expect to get is "church." (Which answer might or might not be expanded to include the peer institutions of synagogue, temple, mosque, and so on.)

However, if I were to ask for the name of an institution that could be described just as I've done above, but whose congregants are additionally characterized by a common commitment to materialism (or naturalism, or secularism, or atheism), the word "church" seems no longer to apply. There really isn't any word in our vocabulary for a community institution that fills the role of a church for people of the secular persuasion.

Over the past decade, as I've done a lot of thinking and reading about congregational models of secular community, I've thought a lot about this vocabulary problem we secularists face in trying to put a name to the organized form of our coming together. Any time I came across a term in my research, I wrote it down. That list now runs to several hundred terms, many of which are quite weird but some of which seem quite workable. (For example, "congregation", "longhouse", and "assembly" -- as in the Sunday Assembly which this past weekend opened for business in the UK). I'll see about posting that list here sometime soon, to see what others think about this or that possibility, and to invite additions to the list.

An abridged and annotated list of terms will also appear in a future issue of Secular World magazine.

Look: we're here, and there's a lot of us, and we're working together, and though we're certainly not faith-based, we represent, in our shared commitment to reason and compassion, something which transcends the meaning of "neighborhood." It's time we had a name.

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This isn't the only vocabulary problem we have. At a Winter Solstice brunch gathering yesterday organized by the Greater Boston Humanists, one Zach Alexander delivered a talk about the usefulness and limitations of "interfaith" engagement, and the limitations of the word "interfaith" itself (note the scare quotes). As has been noted by any number of commentators, and as was emphasized by Zach during his talk, the word "interfaith" is problematic. It would seem to exclude secular philosophies, lifestances, and worldviews, since adherents to these systems of thought tend to consider "faith" incompatible with their other ethical commitments. (NB: Conversely, the word "eupraxsophy" -- coined by Paul Kurtz -- by definition excludes theistic, faith-based, and supernaturalistic worldviews.)

When an audience member put Zach on the spot to ask if he could suggest a word to replace "interfaith", he observed that -- just as with "atheist church" --  there just doesn't seem to be a word that works. I think we should be able to come up with one. This isn't just semantics; if our ethical commitments prohibit us from celebrating or promoting "faith" as a virtue (which is a matter quite separate from our criticism of and engagement with "religion"), then it stands to reason that we're voluntarily giving up our seat at any table where "interfaith" work is being done. Are students involved with the Humanist Community at Harvard or eligible to participate in the White House-sponsored Interfaith and Community Services Campus Challenge? When the State Department organized the US-Indonesia Interfaith Conference in Jakarta, were representatives of secular community organizations welcome to participate? This semantic quibble represents an actual impediment to these and other venues were nonbelievers would otherwise have a chance to play a positive role in community and government.

To get the ball rolling, I've gone through some notes and typed up this list of alternatives to the word "interfaith". Some of these seem pretty feasible (I already use the words "intermural" and "pluralistic" where others might use "interfaith"), while others are a little out there, e.g. "intercistal" (not from cyst, but from cis-, as in cisgendered and cisatlantic) and "mondkonceptobla" (from the Esperanto words mond, koncept, and -obla, meaning "world", "concept", and "many").

Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments! And please share the URL for this post, and invite others to submit their suggestions below, or by sending me an email. As submissions come in, I'll add them to the numbered list, along with the name of the contributor, and any notes he or she wants to provide about the source or inspiration for their suggestion.

Don't be afraid to suggest really wonky words! Brainstorming is an open-ended process, and it can be useful to see all sorts of untenable suggestions as well as ones that stand a chance of being pressed into usage.

Candidates to Replace the Word "Interfaith"

• heteroethical
• intercistal
• intersocial
• interistic
• interoutlook
• mondkonceptobla
• intermural
• interbelief
• intertribal
• multicongregational
• interideological
• interlateral
• interfacial
• interliturgical
• interassembly
• interfactional
• interpositional
• intercreed
• intersystem
• crosscommunity
• crossperspective
• multistance
• crossconviction
• interweltanschauung
• transdoctrinal
• multinotional
• interdenominational
• pluralistic
• multiphilosophical
• ecumenical
• interminable (not a serious suggestion, but worth the laugh)
• interthought (suggested by Hemaht Mehta)
• rerumstitional (a play of superstition/institution, and De Rerum Nature; suggested by Alex Vera)
• interatheist (Since no theist believes in all the deities humans have created, everyone is an atheist with respect to most of the deities. Suggested by Scott Romanowski.)
• intersecularist (suggested by Andrew Wilke)
• interhumanist or interhuman (suggested by Andrew Wilke)
• metatheistic (suggested by Rick Mueller)
• intercommunal (suggested by Josiah Van Vliet)
• intergroup (suggested by Maria G.)
• transfaith (proposed by Ed Clint at the 2010 SSA Conference, cited by Evan Clark)
• interworldview (suggested by Evan Clark)
• religiously diverse  (suggested by Evan Clark) 
• metadiversity  (suggested by Evan Clark)
• existential pluralism  (suggested by Evan Clark)
• JIP (Justice, Interfaith, Pluralism; suggested by Evan Clark)
• interconfessional (suggested by yours truly, following from the German use of the words konfession and konfessionlos)
• interpath (suggested by Derek Lewis Knox, theology student at Andover Newton)

The horniness of bonobos as an argument for secular churches

(In which I relate some notes from reading to an argument for close-knit congregational communities. I emphasize, these are notes; I don't explicitly connect the dots here to argue that the two factors I discuss -- an innate tendency toward promiscuity in humans, and cognitive limits on our capacity to empathize with others -- suggest that secular "churches" are a good thing for secular folks. That said, I do think these factors support that conclusion; these notes are part of my process for preparing to make that case more explicitly. )

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From Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá:

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband-wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fat a culturally imposed aberration for our species -- as ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? Dare we ask whether mothers, fathers, and children are all being shoe-horned into a family structure that suits none of us? Might the contemporary pandemics of fracturing families, parental exhaustion, and confused, resentful children be predictable consequences of what is, in truth, a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species? [p.109]

A reader with an agenda different from mine might wish to recruit the arguments laid out in Sex at Dawn to their own argument that a more sexually or erotically liberal society would lead to better outcomes than the present state of affairs. As it happens, my attention is attracted more to the prosocial rather than the prosexual potential of this line of reasoning.

As forcefully as Ryan and Jethá argue that Homo sapiens seems much more naturally (with all the caveats that attend that term) inclined to promiscuity than the standard narrative allows for, they imply that the current family and community structures incentivized by Western social mores is something of a mistake. Let's say promiscuity facilitated peace and cooperation in the small bands of foraging primates where our minds evolved. Setting aside the differences between the sexual habits of such a society and those of our own, we might focus as much on how difference that scheme of organizing social relationships or from our own.

Consider the answer seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune received when he explained to a Montagnais Indian man that the men of a culture that does not value strict monogamy face the danger of caring for children that are not their biological offspring:

Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we all love all the children of our tribe. [Sex at Dawn, p.107]

Which is the more favorable state of affairs -- a social system organized into many small units whose members are bound together by a sense of shared interest and identity made real by their geographical closeness, common investment in interdependent forms of enterprise, and internal bonds of kinship, friendship, loyalty, and attraction; or, a social system consisting of larger, state-sized units, whose members are unknown to each other but nonetheless bound together by the nonlocal facts of common nationality or ethnicity, political identity, and participation in a widely distributed and complex economy?

I suspect the most desirable state of affairs is one in which the smaller, village-sized units (call them assemblies or congregations if you like) are the constituent pieces of the larger, state-sized units.  Citizens who relate to each other only through the relationships mediated at the level of the larger unit are susceptible to political and commercial exploitation; yet isn't this the kind of relatedness fostered by commercial and social media?

A society structured so members can enjoy promiscuity without shame, household disruption, or threat of exploitation, might well be a society structured to maximize other beneficial kinds of interpersonal relationships. If you're close enough to copulate, you're close enough to care.

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Some problems in utilitarian ethics relate to relatedness. (A classic example goes something like this: If the building is on fire, and you only have time to rescue one person inside, do you save 1) the rich man whose personal wealth and influence in the field of social justice means he improved the lines of countless people, or 2) the rich man's maid, who happens to be your mother?) But other problems in utilitarianism relate to distance. If you have five dollars to donate to charity, do you give it to the local mission to support a program to feed the poor in your city, or do you send it to the charity that works to feed the poor in a distant country?

I've long found myself saying that local is better, since it seems to me more likely to result in efficient and resilient allocation of limited resources. By circumventing the challenges of transportation and communication over a long distance (and across a wide social divide), more value can be converted into material aid rather than overhead. Consider this excerpt from Stephen Asma's essay at The Stone, "The Myth of Universal Love":

The feeling of care is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time — duration, energy, systemic warm-up and cool-down, practice and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted. The limbic system can’t handle the kind of constant stimulation that Rifkin and the cosmic love proponents  expect of it. And that’s because they don’t take into account the biology of empathy, and imagine instead that care is more like a thought.

If Asma is arguing that "care or empathy is a very limited resource", I'd assert that the best way to distribute that resource is to the people with whom you share the closest social relationship. An argument favoring care based on proximity sounds to my ear like an argument favoring communities whose sense of shared interest and identity emerges from geographic closeness. Does this sound to you more like a neighborhood congregation in the physical world, or a distributed network of humans who interact online?

(The graphic above is taken from the essay in The Stone. It is a terrific visual representation of the utilitarian problem of proximity.)