The title, of course, is my opinion on the matter..
I was getting a coffee this evening at a Peet's Coffee House and the person working there asked me if I had anything fun I was doing tonight, you know, employee & customer small talk, lol.. I said I had about 4 and a half hours of homework to do. Some Psychology and some Sociology.
This employee further inquired and so I mentioned that I want to do an emphasis in Sociology on religious and secular communities, how they are similar, and how they are intrinsically different and why.. I mentioned that there are literally no good secular alternatives to the church, to which the worker surprised me a little by saying,
"Well, isn't that kind of the point, because you have all these secular options of things to do outside in society and isn't that a better idea than doing all this within the confines of a church?" (I am cleaning up a little of what this person said, but this was basically their point.)
So I didn't know what to say, the worker wished me a good day, and I headed over to where I was going to do homework and thought..
I finally realized this person was confusing "community" with "society". Yes, there is definitely a secular society in our country with all these options that are out there. But there are basically no "secular communities" like there are "religious communities", the most common form being a church.
The Peet's Coffee House worker did bring up an intuitive point that was brought up many times when I and a dozen other where thinking about how create a secular community several years ago. And the two competing questions were:
1) Do we need a physical building, a physical single location to house our programs and activities?
&
2) Or should we meet in numerous different places, embracing the different aspects of secular society and not be tied down to any one place?
And I think it was mainly me and several others, who had been raised in churches for much of our lives, who most loudly promoted number 1 of the two options. And even though I was biased to the idea of having a physical building, there are a lot of good points to having a place to call your own, that were surfaced during those debates. And I would like to share what those points were and then finally mention why I don't feel most secular Americans have any vision anymore of a community outside of their friends and family..
....JOURNAL ENTRY, FEBRUARY 5, 2013:
I still plan to respond to definitely this last paragraph, but life has taken me by storm over these last 3 months. Who knows, I may have to also wait till I'm done with my 10 part series to pick these inquiry up...
