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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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This already exists in the form of, e.g., Unitarian Universalism. It has not been hugely popular. I think there are a couple of reasons for this that similar proposals generally run into as well.

First, its teachings aren't different enough from intuitive "be nice" ethics to have any point. People who even think about the idea of ethical living generally do not need such basic levels of guidance, which makes the enterprise little more than a social club. But demanding more is too exclusionary or too "irrational", and therefore left to the other churches. I think that being exclusionary in at least some ways is critical to fostering a bond and creating a sense of actual belonging.

Related to this, the entire idea of religiosity without contradicting material existence is oxymoronic and counterproductive. The thing that people with a religious void feel they are missing is mystery, an insistence that there are some things that are beyond our comprehension, that are above and beyond us, forever. The peace that religion offers is from knowing that you don't have to think about it or justify it, you know and believe it without thinking. You cannot replicate the things that religion offers without offering undoubtable truth, but this is something that materialists cannot really bring themselves to do.

Another problem is that organizations without an unshakable grounding in text or canon will be highly vulnerable to entryism and taken over by activists. We saw this precise thing play out already in the Atheism movement, which tore itself apart when activists started trying to add political planks to the Atheism belief framework. Wishy-washy "be excellent to each other" churches will quickly succumb to the exact same issues simply because activists are more motivated than people who are there to sing hymns and pat each other on the back about how moral and ethical they are.

Strong agree on your comments about the New Atheism movement that went hard left, entryism, and the value of canon. This is why my loose proposal was framed in terms of 'Christian Atheism' or secular Judaism, instead of an example without a canon actively policed by the actually/avowedly faithful.