Not sure who needs to hear this, but if you want to eliminate the influence of religion, you need to give people an alternative to their local church.
We can attack religion all day long and not get anywhere with the general public. Here’s why: Your local church is entrenched in everyone’s community. And it can be a church or mosque or temple. It doesn’t matter. It is the center of the community in a whole hell of a lot of places.
The older I get the more I see this from family, friends and neighbors. None of them are hardcore religious fanatics, but these “regular” people are the ones who give religious institutions their power. Yeah, the really hard core religious people are the ones who get the headlines, but average parishioners who give their weekly donation and go to church a couple of times a month are the ones who fill the coffers of the various churches around the country and around the world.
Why do these people go? Again, most average people aren’t hard core religious fanatics. They aren’t trying to follow every last word of the Bible. But they also aren’t trying to push those ideas on peoples throat either. They aren’t the “bad” kind of religious people. But they go to church because ultimately life is hard. And boring. And lonely. And average people just feel the need to have a sense of community. It doesn’t matter where that place is, but people are social animals and need a certain level of human interaction once in a while. A community church gives them that. It gives them a place to get married. And to hold funerals in. There might be a local strawberry festival at the church where they see their aunt Mary or at service every few weeks where they see that cute girl they have been trying to build up the nerve to talk to. People don’t have a ton of those opportunities elsewhere. They really don’t. Once you are out of college, the number of friends you have drops dramatically and the opportunities to make new ones drops even more. You aren’t typically going to be going out to the bars every week past your 30s and asking someone out at a grocery story is creepy. Worse yet is trying to make friends or find partners at work. Your ability to actually socialize is incredibly limited after a certain age and church is a very easy way to do that.
But it isn’t just a way to socialize. When a flood hits or there’s a fire or some other disaster, a church is an easy location to organize these things. Some places use it as a voting location. It is an easy way for the church to embed itself into the community.
So why am I saying all these things? Because if atheists really want to rid the world of religion, it has to give people an alternative to the local church. Atheist groups should hold festivals. You don’t need to push the atheist-angle, but give people something to do and somewhere to go. If some building collapses and people are out of a house, try to organize shelter for them. Hold gathering celebrations for your town’s centennial or something along those lines. Make it a regular event that gives folks a sense of community that isn’t tied to a religious event.
I realize that very few people (if anyone) will actually read this, but as someone who has despised religion for a long, long time I see the uphill battle that atheists fight and unfortunately we fight the wrong people. The older I get, I realize that fighting the hard core religious fanatics is a waste of time. Giving the average people an alternative to going to church is the single best way to attack religion. No one event, no matter how heinous (i.e. priests and kids) will kill off a church, but a slow decline in attendance over the years will.
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