I recently joined my local Elks club and the experience has been amazing.
Being social is effortless. I just show up at the lodge and people I know will be there.
As a parent I can let the kids run wild with other kids within the safe confines of the lodge and have adult conversations.
If I don’t have plans, I don’t need to sit home reading the internet. I go to the lodge.
It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.
Belief is a spectrum and there is no way to externally verify it. In fact, even if you could externally verify, you'll find that there is a wide range of beliefs even among those who "legitimately" believe.
A cult of personality around a magic man in the sky is in the grand scheme of things not much different than a cult of personality around some celebrity or politician/party.
A requirement to "believe" in god has the advantage to provide a common ground for members as well as a set of baseline manners/behaviors. In retrospect, this is actually an advantage. Most social clubs/etc always need some common ground and a shared activity/belief they can congregate around. Whether it's a celebrity or a magic man in the sky doesn't particularly matter, but something is needed.
Unless the very tenets of the religion are so revolting to you (or if you actually believe in something else and this religion would be against what you believe), just fake it. Unless it's a very secluded and "practicing" religious group, you may find that a lot of other people have also varying beliefs but choose to play the game because the value of being part of the group outweighs the downside of faking it.
Also, most mainstream religions have at least some tenets you can get behind, even as an atheist. Just that the atheist would agree with them because it's just good morals as opposed to having to follow some magic man's orders, but they don't have to know that.
I was borna Muslim but I consider myself a "cultural Muslim" and do not look into it any further.
It does not stop me volunteering at my local mosque food bank etc. The social interaction and doing some good for the community trumps any views I have on the religion.
They do indeed that rule. It’s somewhat controversial internally and I can imagine it eventually going away, but is there now.
Fortunately they are pretty relaxed about what you mean by God. I’m a pantheist (everything is God and individual consciousness is an illusion) and AFAICT that’s fine. Nobody dug into my beliefs you find out exactly what I thought.
I think the key intention is that you can’t be a hedonist who cares only about yourself. You need to care about living a life of service to something greater than yourself. I’m on board with that.
I've gone as far as filling out the form given to me by an Elk who was willing to sponsor me but when I got to the part where you have to affirm that belief I just couldn't make a solid case to myself.
It seems there are plenty of Elks who are aware this is a problem, but change is slow.
> It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.
Social orgs can supplement a healthy community. They can't replace one, however.
A healthy community is one where it is trivial for kids to go on their own to a safe space. A place where they can Kid together, free from interfering adults.
To some extent the Elks is a healthy community. Our lodge is definitely a place where kids can hang out together free from interfering adults - that’s what our kids do there with their friends all the time.
We show up, they run off and do their thing with the other kids. We find them when it’s time to go home.
It’s a place with a fence so they can’t wander of, where you know everyone is safe to be around, and where you know if something bad happened another Elk would see and sort it and and come tell you.
> To some extent the Elks is a healthy community. Our lodge is definitely a place where kids can hang out together free from interfering adults
I do get that. Between scouting and youth leadership I have been part of organizing and running similar environments many times over.
But they are not communities. They are adult-generated, curated experiences. They are facsimiles, built out of patchy facades.
One facade: Moving the adults to an adjacent space and pretending that is adult-free time (I've done it).
As far as we think these simulations meet kids basic needs, we're fooling ourselves. Placing kids in adult constructs denies kids their autonomy. Every time. Mostly by design.
Worthwhile autonomy includes kids being able to come and go fully on their own. Trivially.
It's through autonomy (and genuine independence) that kids' critical growth happens. Organic kid-spaces are fertile soil where ambition grows.
They are the safe spaces (safe from adults) to make the kind of mistakes that teach strong interpersonal relationship and vital problem solving skills.
It's what every generation of kids had throughout human history, until we adults eradicated it - seemingly everywhere we could.
We adults put cars everywhere. We blast out false stranger danger messaging. We made criminal trespassing the default and maximized development. And we made lots of other kid-hostile changes to society that I'm certainly missing here.
sidebar: Compounding this is that parents are stupidly expected to fill all those new gaps in kids needs. Parents are now required to have the wisdom of all those nearby adults that disappeared with communities. And parents now have to spend 10x the time parenting, compared to their recent ancestors.
Together, this is all an unimaginably enormous loss for kids. These simulations you and I put on aren't really capable of mitigating it.
> Kidding together means setting a cat on fire and laughing when it's screaming running around. It means beating the fat kid till he can't stand up.
This is very rarely true. I grew up with rural hill people and I was a skittish, annoying kid who got bullied a lot.
Bullying was something that mostly happened in isolation. I was at-risk at school or if I was out alone and ran into the wrong kids, like the local neanderthal who started shaving at 10.
Where I was safe was in groups. These were rough kids, sometimes brutally so. Feuds between youth could be extreme and the injuries were often serious. But those were between individuals or sometimes families. In groups, there were boundaries - a truce could be assumed.
Animal cruelty existed but wasn't overly common. It sometimes happened within feuds. ex:A pet would disappear and be found down a well. And like bullying, that happened in isolation.
Animal cruelty was never a social thing. Ever. Someone who entertained the notion could expect to get beat by the other kids until they thought differently. There was no tolerance for it.
Being social is effortless. I just show up at the lodge and people I know will be there.
As a parent I can let the kids run wild with other kids within the safe confines of the lodge and have adult conversations.
If I don’t have plans, I don’t need to sit home reading the internet. I go to the lodge.
It’s weird that groups like the Elks have declined so much in recent decades, because it feels they really are the solution to a problem everyone complains about.