communitynotdeity

You've probably heard, every couple months or so, of some town in the U.S. with atheist-themed billboards or bus signs, and angry people reacting with protest, stonewalling, or vandalism. Nontheists tend to see this reaction in terms of "see, they're so crazy even a completely inoffensive sign that we exist sets them off."

Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.

We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.

If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.

But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.