The modern Unitarian Universalist (UU) church is very welcoming to people of all faiths, religions, and creeds. You do not need to be atheist to join, nor do you need to believe in anything. Most congregations are very welcoming of new members.
Four US Presidents, eleven Nobel prize winners, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee are Unitarians. There are many Unitarians out there, though they do not tend to proselytize much, which is maybe why you haven't heard of them.
As always, finding the right congregation is very important. The UU church has a good site here to help:
With the current Covid-19 crisis, local churches near you may be closed or only doing virtual services. Please check with the minister.
People were united by a monopoly on education and political power. It's too bad that we're losing that ubiquitous societal fabric, but in the face of the alternative, seriously, good riddance.
If spiritualism is your thing though, do drop by at a Unitarian Church close to you. It's an interesting experience. Not for me, but still warmly recommended.
As someone who grew up in a small, rural Christian community, this is a nice sentiment, but far from true in my experience. People instead become highly punitive and disparaging towards anyone who does not think and behave exactly like them. Whatever community exists is built around a hateful exclusion of “the other.”
That being said, there was definitely a “fear of the other “ with people being extremely suspicious of the few handful of outsiders who moved in and didn’t have any connection like relatives, existing connections, or children going to school there.
That might work for some people? I don't know?
But I do know that the Charleston church shooter sat down with a bunch of little old ladies for the duration of a bible study engaging in, what I can only assume was, a calm in-person discussion. Then he blew their heads off.
Point is that, for some reason, the internet has a much stronger hold over people than do in person connections. People deeply believe they are more connected to people in their virtual spaces than they are to their neighbors or even physical friends. That sense of connection is real to those people. To some of those people, it's real enough to kill for.
are there some people for whom virtual spaces are more real than their neighbors and IRL friends? sure, but most people don't seem to be like that. as far as I can tell, most people use social media to interact with an extended network of IRL friends/family. some people do try to get tons of followers that they don't know on instagram, but I think even this is best understood as jockeying for status among IRL peers.
note: IRL is a somewhat antiquated term this days, but I use it as a shorthand for "relationships that originate in in-person interactions". so if I had a friend A who moved away and befriended B there, but we all play video games together, B is still an IRL friend to me.
I get that the World, and Europe in particular, got badly burnt by Utopias in the 20th century. But still seems like something is needed - especially given the looming geopolitical changes.
It seems true to me that most individuals (myself included) are not up to the task of inventing a reason to exist. You can moan about how the stories are made up til Kingdom come, the point of it is practicing the belief. Otherwise you get what we're talking about in this thread, billions of people growing up believing nothing, having no rational reason to believe they are valuable, no reason to think the future warrants their contribution.
this is a rather ethnocentric view of religion based on what is clearly a limited historical understanding evidently informed mostly by judeo-christianity. just to pick one counter-example: the ancient greeks sought virtue and purpose from philosophical inquiry, not from their religious practices, which were much more transactional.
(Just found the author of the study/studies: Sosis[3]
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...
[2]: A commune being defined as a group of people not sharing kinship deciding to live and work together.
[3]: https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/944/...
Maybe that is why the devil and the hell were introduced at some point ;-)
I expect that there will be a strong reaction on this forum to the word 'socialist', but the communities you describe definitely still exist.
I agree that they do exist. But they don't seem to be mainstream as they once were, and I'd very much like to change that.
But also, historically, these sorts of communities have been targeted by governments. Police literally went to war with unions to break up community power for coal miners. While communism is different than socialism, there's a huge public smear campaign trying to couple those two together. (And, in fact, historically there were major pushes to blacklist folks who were connected to communism.)
I try to look at the long arc of human history as basically the story of how we grow the size of the "in-group" and shrink the size of the "out-group". It isn't easy, but we have made significant progress over the centuries.
You're essentially describing (secular) Humanism, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism