I think you misread their comment... They're saying we should rethink housing priorities rather than look to church.

EDIT: I see the confusion now, it is actually ambiguous, maybe you read it right

I think it would be less ambiguous if they wrote “comes to people's mind”

No you were right. Too late to edit my comment now, however.

There is Sunday Assemble, which attempts to replicate the church like experience in a non religious way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Assembly

There is no 'more church' if your an atheist. Social aspects of church are no different than that of a sports club, etc...

Church is foremost for worship and social second, third, etc...

Some people are not particularly social at church and thats ok. What makes them happy is fulfilling a spiritual need.

Churchgoers get moral guidance and philosophical discussion, communal introspection, and everyone knows they should go on their best behavior, bringing love to the congregation. Those things are fairly unique to places of worship, but there needn't be actual worship of God for them to exist, and that's something atheists tend to miss out on since not many other social groups/clubs have those qualities.

If you really want to get to know your fellow church goers, you’ll have a hard time passing as an atheist for long. Sooner or later you’ll be asked to lead a prayer, give ‘testimony’ to when you ‘got saved’, be tested on your working knowledge of the Bible in some way. And at a catholic church, there’s generally less close community beyond glad handing, but there’s a lot of ritual and recitation you’re expected to follow along with. On some level true believers will always be pinging you to determine your authenticity.

Maybe it's just me but I tend to lose interest in sports. That presents a dilemma. Either you have to attend something you are not interested in, or you stop hanging out with the people.

Like most things in life: You must be motivated by a need or really enjoy it. As you, sport do neither for me. As you get older working out will be more of a need and you find a good group of workout buddies and maybe a friend or two.

In Britain, Humanism was an early 20th century movement to try to bridge between the social benefits of church to - what was increasingly obvious to most people - the fallacies of legacy Christian doctrines.

It wasn't a total failure, but humanism never reached the mainstream.

Agreed, there is something unique about church. Maybe the spiritual and emotional aspect is too intertwined to separate. It is very easy to confuse emotions (i.e. feeling good about something) with spirituality when the two are very different.

Arguably humanism was an intellectually-driven pursuit. So it never crossed the chasm.

Growing up in Manchester, I found it was football that fulfilled the emotional and tribal needs of many of my peers.

Many people assume Britain and USA are the same. In many respects, that is true. But as to church and religion, they are poles apart. At least that was true in the nineties when I lived in USA.

> There is no 'more church' if your an atheist.

There are the Unitarian Universalists where many -- including atheists -- are not only welcome but also find worship.

I had been to a service, I think at a unitarian universalist church, which was accepting of atheists. As I remember it, it can still be a bit awkward with references to God being common, but you wouldn't be unwelcome on principle.

I dont know of any place of worship (christianity in particular) that is unwelcome to atheists.

unitarians simply take the parts they like from every religion to form another.

Having grown up in the Unitarian church, It’s more that Unitarians don’t tell anyone what to believe and everyone in a UU church might have different ideas.

I don't know how it might be called in the US but in the town I spend a good part of my childhood, we had a sort of hub for clubs.

Sports, craft, games, etc... it hosted scheduled activities like workouts, helped organize event like trips, there was a room with a piano where lessons were held but was otherwise freely accessible, a small library, a bunch of chessboards from the chess club, again, freely accessible, etc... A lot of activities were aimed at kids but it spanned all age groups, including elderly.

Of course, it created a strong, unreligious community. Unfortunately, as it is often the case with these organizations, the few key players lost interest and no one took over, so while it still exists, not much remains.

I get a kick off how consciousness is simultaneously fungible, able to react to stimuli without a nervous system, and ephemeral, with no ability to quantify any of that at all

Even the unorganized religions rely on this trichotomy without any explanation or coherence

I would be open to any outcome, just quantify the rules and mechanisms

Churches have been replaced by political party affiliation, and services are conducted virtually via the party-affiliated media TV networks.

There are some secular church equivalents as well. For example https://www.sundayassembly.com/ for people who want some celebration and community, but don't care about the religious aspects.

Otherwise as you mentioned, some hobbies are my church. Local coworking is my church too.

Soup kitchens? Many are run by religious institutions but you don't necessarily have to subscribe to all the ceremonies and such (there may be a perfunctory prayer at the beginning of the shift).

Plenty of secular NGOs. User groups (Linux, BSD). If you're into photography: photo walks.

The church of meetup.com

How about work in social services? Not the LCSW kind; the "volunteer to be of Service to society" kind.

WFM. YMMV.

> I just don't believe in the supernatural or any belief system that requires the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without any explanation of how.

Like the spontaneous generation of life that continuously grows more and more complex?

That’s not a violation of thermodynamics at all, since the earth is not a closed system, and it’s also about averages. You can have local fluctuations.

Well my fellow fluctuation of highly organized atoms, take luck. Let me know when somebody can explain how everything works without positing a magical thing we can't see, measure, or touch.

Hmm, I’m not sure I understand your point. Scientists explicitly try to avoid positing magical things, and even when things get into the realm of untestability at our scale, it’s hedged:

“Here’s a cosmological model that might be true given our current data”

Vs

“Here’s a magical anthropocentric religious explanation for anything I can’t immediately explain”

"Here’s a cosmological model that..." requires a magical explanation for anything I can't immediately explain. Let's call it... say... dark matter?

You’re revealing your ignorance of modern physics, as well as some pretty astonishing hubris. You’d compare dark mater, which has numerous possible explanations all of which are in search of empirical tests, to the panoply of human religions?

No. I'd compare faith to faith. One of which declares that there is something above this universe (God), while the other declares without proof that there isn't. (And then large numbers of proponents of the latter posit that we are living in a simulation, thus demonstrating that... they believe there is something above this universe. lol.) Either way it's faith.

Entropy must increase in a closed system (which is the bit that everyone conveniently forgets). Earth is not a closed system, receiving a significant daily energy input from a near-by star.