The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I'm looking for a new Church... do you all have any advice on how to find one?
Preferably something like Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, I want a more traditional place.
Not the place so I'll keep it brief, but I don't think it's worth diving headfirst into a large number of cosmic-scale factual and moral claims that are both historically contingent on political and social arrangements that seem unlikely to produce truth and are also knowably false just because you find modern value systems to be spiritually bereft. Even given that progressive or liberal values are false, that doesn't make the values they replaced true! Closing your eyes doesn't make the technology and social changes that precipitated modern values go away!
To actually answer your question: churches are everywhere, just google <my area> plus 'church', or optionally 'catholic church'. Good advice I've heard is to just try service at quite a few different churches, one after the other, there a lot of variation both between sects and between individual churches in the pastor's style, and see which ones you like. Sometimes people worry this is disrespectful, but I've been told it isn't at all.
Other commenters who note that catholicism and eastern orthodoxy are very different ... that's true within the values of the churches themselves, but isn't true from an outside perspective that views religion as an aesthetic way of organizing social relationships - potentially a valuable one - than a divinely ordained and accurate set of claims about the structure of the universe. Some intelligent devoted christians spend years 'discerning', agonizing over the subtle doctrinal differences separating sects. But, with the Filioque as the obvious example, these doctrinal differences have little practical relationship to the moral and aesthetic differences between sects, which are (as indicated by your preference for Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy due to ritual and moral gravity) arguably much more important. And ... clearly, just viewing the causal structure that leads you and similar people to religion, the outside perspective is a more accurate description of what you're looking for, revealed-preference-wise, than the other!
You're right, it's not the place! You didn't really keep it brief either... ;P
This depends on what you see as truth. From a purely empirical standpoint, sure, religion is bullshit and there's no way Jesus rose from the dead etc etc. That being said, I've come to realize there is far more to the idea of truth than most rationalists believe. There is experiential knowledge that exists and can be verified by ourselves. Sure our consciousness isn't foolproof and we can trick ourselves, but there is factual knowledge to be gained there. In fact, it's the one frontier that science really hasn't been able to penetrate yet.
And if you take that view, then
seems pretty facile and wrong. These religious traditions are the honed core of wisdom that has persisted for thousands of years, through societal upheavals and persecutions and all sorts of other trials. This wisdom has persisted longer than any kingdom, state or empire. The truths extolled in religions are literally the central truths for the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.
Regardless, I'm not trying to rehash the athiest culture wars, just explaining how I've arrived at my current post-rationalist or meta-rationalist opinions. Also, at the end of the day, rationality doesn't seem to make people very happy. In fact in my experience, and the experience of most I've seen in the rationalist/EA spaces, it does the exact opposite. So even if religion does happen to be totally wrong on all counts, which I doubt, at the very least it's a useful and positive delusion for most people.
I've noticed this too, but then I took a step back and recognized a larger pattern. This is something like the stages of grief. I think rationality causes people to go through many stages/emotions and unhappiness is just one they can temporarily land on.
If you look at other examples of people radically changing their belief system later in life you will often observe that they go through a cycle of emotional states.
Do these emotional states just appear from nothing? I'd argue that they become happier because they find some other belief system above and beyond rationality that helps them integrate their psyche.
Rationality alone is cold comfort.
In the acceptance stage (the last stage) of grief:
I don't know why it is human nature that most people have to go through all the other stages before they can come to acceptance. I just observe that it happens. When something unfair/unjust happens in the world many people will become angry initially. Many eventually come around to acceptance over time. Just because things are unfair the rational action isn't to waste your energy being upset/angry forever.
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