Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

While perhaps a loaded suggestion, if you have the tolerance for it, I’d suggest attending a church. You can utilize the social aspect without fully committing to the spiritual aspects.

The reason I suggest it is because of it’s role as the post-college college where you can build deep relationships and people of all ages are genuinely wanting to network specifically to build a community. They’re not doing happy hours etc. to boost their social capital, they’re in it for the long haul. Also, building relationships with people of all ages is extremely important and rewarding/fulfilling.

I agree with moving to a city or trying to tap into more social stuff. But i also find those relationships to be quite shallow. You bounce around a lot from one shallow connection to another. Dinner once/twice a month with group A. A group to play a sport with on Saturday Afternoon. Another group to do X scheduled event with on cadence Y. For me, and my wife, we found ourselves in that pattern in our 30s. She had her friend circles/silos and I had mine and then we had the a third type of circle for us as a couple. It was nearly impossible for these to overlap. Why would her floral design hobby girls be interested in attending a heavy metal concert with some of my metal head friends.

We missed having deeper friendships. We always used the example of of how when we were younger and not even necessarily coupled at the time we both had friends that just popped in our houses. Never had to be planned or for any purpose. They were always welcomed and were just a constant in our lives. Going to church helped us build those types of friendships.

I’m not even spiritual and I avoid a lot of the overly churchy parts. I do agree with the high level value/moral systems being promoted and enjoy the sermon parts. I look for the speaker who delivers nearly secular messages. It can feel like a life lesson or motivational speech that’s based on teachings of whatever book they believe in.

Can you really decouple all the religious things and just focus on friends building? As an atheist I would feel like an impostor there and to myself for using that place just to make friends.

Also sounds like you skip most of the talks and just go for the church afterparty?

This truly is terrible advice.

The worst thing that could happen would be your life gets wrapped into a religious community. This is why people of seeming average intelligence stay in churches. Everyone is pretending to believe the nonsense because if anyone admits (often even just to themselves) just how stupid it is, poof goes their friends, community, perhaps even their marriage.

> I’m not even spiritual and I avoid a lot of the overly churchy parts.

Literally EVERY SINGLE PERSON in a church says this. I knew of a literal cult, whose leaders ended up in jail, and THEY said this. Everyone says this because what's written in these books is indefensibly stupid that it's embarrassing.

I'm an atheist or at best agnostic, but I've met and known many highly intelligent people who are also religious. It's not mutually exclusive.

So we have an idea that is false. Demonstrably false we can agree. Also, anecdotes aside for a moment overwhelmingly higher religious beliefs correlate with lower intelligence.

So, back to the anecdote, why in the case of someone being intelligent by your judgement would they believe this story, with ample evidence easily accessible to refute it?

- They've never considered it critically--ok that's possible - They've considered it critically and decided it's true--I'd argue they either haven't or they're not - They have developed a cognitive disconnect to protect themselves from loss of community, connection to their family, or fear of death

I am nearly certain that the last item accounts for the great majority, which is why this is such a dangerous suggestion. There is a real risk of losing your agency as an individual for of the rest of your life. I have seen this happen to many many people. I have seen many many people (literally 100s) who joined a church around when they were in their 30s just drawn in by the "community" only to become deeply disillusioned now in their 60 and 70 and feel that they had lost or wasted their youth and full of regrets. These institutions have spent thousands of years refining techniques for manipulating people, and their preferred primary prey is children and 30-somethings who feel "lost" exactly as the OP describes. They literally produce videos and training materials stating such.

To veer a little off track, I used to be a huge fan of Richard Dawkins back in college until I realized his approach just creates friction and polarization. The opposite of what he crusades for.

The astrophysicists have a way better approach than the biologists. It's non-confrontational.

But my point is that I don't think it's impossible for atheists and religious folks to be friends. Or even date and get married. Mutual respect and communication goes a long way.

Yeah I don't think on HN I'm actually talking to very many people who would for example, not believe that species evolved via natural selection, that there was global flood that killed everyone except one family, that the earth is 6000 years old, that all the inhabitants of the new world before 1492 were sent to hell by a Mesopotamian sky-god, or that gay men and disobedient children should be stoned to death. No, I think I'm preaching to the choir here, to borrow a phrase, and I don't engage in this kind of debate anyway because it isn't worth my time.

Specifically I'm saying going to church for community is a terrible, dangerous idea. That even if you don't believe in what they're saying, that it is like going to a Neo-Nazi meetup for the pancakes. Even if they're like really, really good pancakes and you can't find pancakes anywhere else as good and these particular Nazis are not too serious about the whole Nazi thing, you may find yourself getting involved with more than you expected and find that leaving or even admitting you want to is more difficult that you expected.

This is not innocuous; there are many, many religious groups out there deliberately and strategically targeting people like the OP, and train their members to do the same. This is the primary way that cults recruit people who aren't indoctrinated as children.

You're right and wrong. It can be culty or not. It's buyer beware and requires due diligence.

I suggested this and my relationship with the church is openly agnostic. I have no qualms about discussing my opinions of religion as it relates to my belief. I don't feel the need to bend to their world view, change my beliefs, etc.

Regarding the people that get sucked into those types of churches. The ones you say they're actively recruiting (I would not disagree). But, this may be controversial, but I believe those folks typically have some void in their life to begin with. They're going to fill that void with something eventually and probably at an unhealthy dosage. It might be drugs, religion, politics, sex, abusive relationship, etc. They may not realize it, but they have a desire to be in a "cult". So, I don't fully believe the cult is to blame. There simply is a market for cults and demand will get met.

I think especially for our HN audience here, it's more about not falling into that trap. Doing your due diligence. Stay true to yourself and avoid any of this BS cult stuff you bring up as a valid concern. Honestly it sounds like you just live in a very racist part of the country where the KKK's never disappeared they just moved the meetings to church. That or you're very much indoctrinated in the bad parts of religion while ignoring the healthy parts.

> To veer a little off track, I used to be a huge fan of Richard Dawkins back in college until I realized his approach just creates friction and polarization. The opposite of what he crusades for.

That's exactly what he crusades for; he’s not anti-friction or anti-polarization (on religion or any of his other pet issues), he's a zealous bigot.

> The astrophysicists have a way better approach than the biologists. It's non-confrontational.

There are plenty of non-confrontational biologists. Dawkins doesn't represent “biologists” he represents Dawkins.

Thank you for posting this. I was reconsidering writing a response to that, but you phrased it very well.

An excellent eye opening article I have read about this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2pENnTPB75sfc9kb/outside-th... which discusses scientists believing in religion. The arguments also apply to any rational person who forms beliefs based on evidence which I would say is a necessary property to be intelligent. Hence it irks me when someone says "intelligent people believe in god too"

There are tons of things like this outside of religion. Almost every coherent group of people believes in some sort of nonsense for political reasons, and as a form of identity signaling.

- Many people in this community believe that a female soul can be mis-allocated to a male body, for example.

- Many people in this community believe that Trump was involved in a conspiracy with Putin to take over the USA.

- Many people in this community believe that democracy is a form of government that gives the population more power than other forms of government.

All of these beliefs are rather silly, but are accepted as dogma and critique is unwelcome.

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I do agree, however, that the Christian church is predatory. It is matriarchal and is basically a system of domestication. However, the fact that they employ dogma is not the problem, all groups employ dogma.

Seems like this is political flamebait, but I don't think I've ever seen the first point phrased in such a way that it refers to a soul. This makes me wonder, what part of that do you believe is nonsense? The existence of the soul?

I have no interest in arguing against any of these points here.

All I am claiming is that they are a form of dogma. These beliefs look very silly to everyone outside of this culture.

They seem silly to everyone. To every other culture in the world, and to every culture of the past.

And yet, critiquing them within this culture is dangerous.

It seems to me quite plainly clear that people exist who are confused about their gender and my understanding is that people like this exist in all cultures. I actually learned many years ago that Native Americans had a concept of something of a "third gender" which suggested to me that it's a universal human variation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-spirit

What I had never considered was to mix in the idea of a soul - it's actually curious because I never thought that the soul (if you believe in such a thing) would be gendered and it adds a curious layer to the whole situation. But now reading a little more about native beliefs, it seems that the two-spirit term actually thinks about it more as two souls within one body.

I find it all rather fascinating and hard to reduce down to silly dogma.

The Thais have similar concept as well (third gender), but it isn't the same as the western Transgenderism construct.

> I find it all rather fascinating and hard to reduce down to silly dogma.

The phenomena itself isn't what I'm talking about. The specific belief that "Transgender women are women and they were born that way", and the enforcement of that belief, that is dogma.

Similarly, the belief that "some people are homosexual and some people are not, they are born one way or the other". This isn't consistent with reality, and isn't what other cultures believe. However, this is considered foundational, unquestionable truth in our culture.

Ah, I think I can spot the difference, but it seems like a fairly trivial one to me. I bet cultures that categorize these people into a third gender would be offended if you mis-gendered them as well. And lol, I'm not too interested in going down the sexuality rabbit hole (hey-oh!) but suffice it to say it seems like in both instances you've got some people who see a spectrum and some who see a dichotomy. I don't think it's any surprise that I'm in the camp who sees a spectrum. I also understand wishing it all were a lot simpler.

> but it seems like a fairly trivial one to me.

I don't see the difference as trivial.

The reality is that, across many cultures, there are men that have a strong desire to abandon the masculine role and to live quasi-female lives. The Thai and native american understanding matches this reality.

Our culture-makers decided to apply a specific dogma to this phenomena, and to propagate that dogma by force. That dogma has effects on society and was implemented because of it's effects on society. (For example, reality does not imply that this phenomena should be tolerated or that efforts to minimize it are pointless, but the dogma does)

Now compare this to the original topic. It was claimed that belief in God is stupid, and for stupid people.

However, almost every culture has some sort of concept of god(s). When people interact with god(s), something consistent is happening inside their experience. It is a real phenomena (like the Third Gender stuff is a real phenomena).

Christianity takes this phenomena and captures it inside a specific set of beliefs. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving. He sent his son to die for your sins. Blah, blah.

These beliefs form a dogma. However, the reality of the god-phenomena does not justify the god-dogma. And, when people argue against the belief in God, they argue against the specific dogmatic god-construct that exists in modern Christianity.

But Christian culture is built on the god-dogma. So, christians reject people that reject the dogma, and continue to accept the dogma in the face of critique.

This is a direct parallel to the Transgenderism dogma. That's what I'm arguing. Almost all smart people submit to dogmas.

The reason why smart people are suddenly rejecting the Christian dogma (after submitting to it for centuries) is that they are strongly incentivized to do so. And you can see that in how smart people are simply submitting to new dogmas, instead of now rejecting all dogmas.

The move away from Christiantity isn't a triumph over dogma, it's just a new religion taking hold.

My personal view on Transgenderism is that it should be seen in basically the same way as drug addiction.

Drugs also occur naturally and many people dabble in them without much harm. But drug addiction is truly destructive, and almost impossible to escape from.

We shouldn't be encouraging people that we care about to sterilize themselves, or treating the path to that lightly.

This view is quite unacceptable within the dogma.

I would guess that sterilization is among the most common medical procedures that people under-go between vasectomies, tubal litigations, IUDs, and hormonal options. Transgenderism might be the most elaborate way to go about it, though I believe in some cases they can remain fertile or delay procedures until after having children - I'd imagine it's a consideration when they talk to a doctor.

Triviality is in the eye of the beholder no doubt, so I'm not surprised that we differ.

But I just have a hard time seeing any one dogma in modern US society surrounding gender identity. Certainly there are people who believe they are women from birth, and with modern medicine like hormonal and surgical treatments, they can do far more to alter their biology to get closer to their preferred gender; an option only recently available in any human culture. But there are also people who consider themselves truly non-binary, and I'm sure many identities that I'm unaware of.

Mostly the only dogma I see (and the one I try to hold to) could basically just be summed up as "try to be nice to people and address them as they'd like you to". I've known a fairly surprising number of transgender people at all stages of transition, and it's actually never something I've needed to talk with them about or make a big deal of.

> I do agree, however, that the Christian church is predatory. It is matriarchal and is basically a system of domestication.

First, outside of the increasingly unrealized ecumenical aspirations of the various Christian Churches, there is no “the Christian Church” in the sense of a single human institution.

And virtually none of the various Christian Churches are matriarchal, they tend to be quite patriarchal, both internally and in the structure they advocate for broader society.

The real litmus test for high intelligence is if they were not anti-vaxxers and actively sought vaccinations.

Honest question - was this sarcasm?

It's not sarcastic at all but I suppose it's sort of tongue-in-cheek?

Antivaxxers are probably not highly intelligent.. But they will think they are because of Dunning-Kruger effect.

> Antivaxxers are probably not highly intelligent.. But they will think they are because of Dunning-Kruger effect.

DK is basically “people of all ability levels tend to see themselves slightly closer to the 70th percentile than they are”, not “people at the bottom see themselves at the top”.

Wow, ok. So it's meant as an idea which in today's world is often unconventional yet used to be very normal not very long ago. Whether we/you like it or not, organizing around faith is quite foundational to humans in general.

Obviously the OP and any reader needs to evaluate their personal situation and appetite for this and also evaluate any church they attend. Not all churches are cults. Most modern churches with younger crowds have steered away from preachy aspects and see themselves as building a faith based community. Being good citizens in a community that loosely believe in the same thing. That's why nondenominational christian churches are increasingly popular. The concerns you raised are true of traditional and culty type churches, certain denominations, etc that make waves and I think you're projecting the headlines/horror stories you've heard onto religion as a whole while ignoring Millions of people have healthy relationships with their church so this blanket statement of terrible advice is just ignorant.

FWIW, I consider myself agnostic and can filter away BS that isn't aligned with my personal take or just avoid the stuff that I have no interest in (eg. bible school). It's very much like politics. I don't have to believe what you believe we can coexist and maybe we have some minor overlap that we can connect on.

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