Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?
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Just watched a sort of funny movie - Hippopotamus - that's about a boy with 'miraculous' powers. Language and sex is definitely not PG. The acting is great, the poetic references worthwhile and the plot is congruous with the beliefs we all discuss here - do stay for its entirely or skip ahead to the last 10-15 minutes.
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Best thing ever
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I was busy binge-ing The Handmaid's Tale
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I love the Handmaid's Tale. Don't love that we may be heading that way though, would prefer it remain fiction
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Ananda8: that touched me in the deepest sense. My life is so overwhelming right now for so many reasons. I sent a copy to my boss. We are both overwhelmed in a field that can mean life or death. Sometimes just reading words that we don’t have time to express is so healing. Thanks
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Funny - I too just re-read the Handmaid's Tale. Since I haven't seen any of the TV shows, it was almost new. I liked it as much as I did when it first came out.
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ananda, I agree with TB90, that busy quote is great.
I just started watching the Handmaids tale and am enjoying it but it also makes me angry from anatheist and child free by choice view, that whole you’re nothing but a breeder BS really irks me. After a few episodes I usually watch a female lead detective show for balance.
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Ananda...An eye opening reality
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Ananda, That is great!!!
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I've saved that to share with my friends. And some not-so-friends. 😏
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illimae - I am also childfree (tubes tied 19 years ago). I can't cook, can't bear kids so I guess in the Handmaid's world I'd have to go to the camps.
Love the meme Ananda
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Interesting article about creating a "church" community w/o God
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MinusTwo,
Thanks for the article. The one aspect of the non religious that the article left out is the need for community. I think many people drop out of religion in part because they aren't 'joiners' to begin with. As for atheists, most of us have only two or three things in common at the start. We have no belief in a deity. We tend to read more than the average person. We are comfortable with solitude. Any two of those three things make joining as supporting a secular church only mildly attractive. Just my opinion but perhaps my hypothesis is more about me than about the average atheist.
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Minus...Informative article about forming a community without god or other central focus and no tithing for financial support. Communities to which I belong are all activity/interest related and because many of those activities occur on the weekends, most members (use that term loosely) are not churchgoers. Steady doses of sitting inside listening to sermons, talks, and the like are not my cup of tea, but I expect are for many as that provides an avenue for creating community in other realms.
I noticed when talking to a new neighbor she repeatedly used the words "blessed' or, 'thank god' which I see as words that determine if I was likewise god focused. On the other hand, when I use words like 'fortunate' or 'random' maybe I too am looking to see if we belong to the same 'community'. Obviously, we did not. Sex and politics are definitely out of initial conversations, so a powerful way to determine if another belongs to my god/not god community is with the use of those terms.
Ananda, agree that being part of some community is pretty important. As another mostly non-joiner I relish lots of alone time and enthusiastically embraced solo travel. On one of those solo trips in Europe I stayed at a convent that earned its livelihood by providing lodging. Most enjoyable.
Conversations in this thread do feed my need for community and deeply appreciate all here. Guess this is my Sunday morning community
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There's an Ethical Society where I live that provides the community feel for those who need it without religion. They have speakers on a variety of topics, plus a lot of evening programs. I keep thinking I'll go ... twenty years later, it still hasn't happened. My laziness is stronger than my curiosity or sense of community.
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magiclight, In the spirit of your last comment, here is a link to one of the most interesting articles on upward mobility I have ever read. Upward mobility as appeared to stall in America today, but this gentleman may have found a possible solution. The article is rather long, perfect for a Sunday morning with coffee.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/...
Please let me know if anyone has trouble downloading the article.
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Alice. I so hear you. Your avatar reminds me of this photo.
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I worry about finding community if we move to a smaller place. Seattle has become so expensive that we should move to conserve our savings. Our problem is where to move. Another large city would be expensive and a small place might be pretty closed to newcomers. Senior centers have lots of activities where you can meet people, but really small places might not have one. I think the woman saying God bless all the time would mark her as someone I wouldn't want to be close friends with. Ok to know casually, but nothing more.
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Ananda. there is so much to chew on in the Raj Cheety article on his research. As to the data about church membership, two parent families and upward mobility, I'm a bit dubious. A pew study found that black communities have least unaffiliated church members, so is it the church affiliation or where the church is located that is the influencer.
Seeing people like us is also an influencer as his data on the influence of women researchers on young girls career choices demonstrates.
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Wren, We moved from Southern California to a small town in the Ozarks of Arkansas of 11,000 people.
The major drawback is we are two hours from the nearest airport. It is also a very religious area and very conservative but not a problem if one doesn't bring up politics or religion.
The plusses:
One out of three people are over 65 so all the doctors in town are experts in geriatric medicine.
We have an active senior center, a regional hospital, a community college that is tuition free
A Unitarian church that is welcoming to atheists if one is a joiner.
One of the best non-profit hospice programs in the state.
In California, for every $1.00 spent one gets $0.88 in goods and services. In Arkansas for every $1.00 spent one gets $1.22 in goods and services.
We have two huge lakes with clean water and lots of fish.
The medium home price is $160,000.
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I found the article interesting, but something kept prodding my conscience. I finally figured it out. These experts, like Chetty, see people as pieces in a huge board game, to be moved around with little regard for human connections. Instead of "It takes a village" it is "Your village is broken, let's split it up and move it to different villages." It all seems so ... I dunno, cold?
Magiclight, how cool, thank you! My avatar is from a family vacation when I was four. We stayed at my great-uncle's cabin in Wisconsin, and I think this was my idea of "going outside to play!"
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I don't think the author said anything about forcing people to move. He actually stated that one of the complexities of any program for moving people would be their reluctance to give up the connections they have with their existing community and that moving would not be a solution for everyone or would even work, long term. He wants more data. He is interested in data and what analysis of data shows. I agree that data is cool in the same way emotion is warm. Data can be misinterpreted and emotion can blur the facts. He is using his data as medicine would use a microscope; to study the problem. Here is a quote from the article.
"To help cities like Charlotte, Chetty takes inspiration from medicine. For thousands of years, he explained, little progress was made in understanding disease, until technologies like the microscope gave scientists novel ways to understand biology, and thus the pathologies that make people ill. In October, Chetty's institute released an interactive map of the United States called the Opportunity Atlas, revealing the terrain of opportunity down to the level of individual neighborhoods. This, he says, will be his microscope."
Give him and others time to use this microscope to understand the pathologies of reduce opportunity.
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Yes, I saw the map as the base of the board game. It's true that HE isn't moving people around, but some of his data is from social experiments that did.
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Right now cannot get the 'link' to cite work but if interested an informative web cite is
CDC.gov/500cities
The data intersects with Ray Chetty research
Thanks for a great morning conversation.
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Ananda - I found your comment about being comfortable with solitude very apt. I have friends who don't understand how I can live alone & eat dinners alone & travel alone, etc. I'm active in my small neighborhood, but I have definite boundaries.
Wren - my problem exactly. Once I can no longer drive, I'll have to move somewhere. Texas is known as an car state for good reason. Basically no mass transit. I can't imagine moving into a small community where I live w/o being bombarded with 'god'. Or "activity planners". Well you lived in Texas so you know.
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magiclight, I know the section you are talking about. Here it is. Note that the people received vouchers and were not forced to move. If it were forced, they wouldn't have used vouchers.
'In the 1990s, the federal government launched Moving to Opportunity, a program designed to relocate families living in public housing to safer neighborhoods, where they had access to better jobs and schools. Thousands of families in five cities were randomly selected to receive housing vouchers and support services to help them move to lower-poverty areas. After a decade of study, researchers concluded that while these "mover" families experienced some physical and mental-health benefits, test scores among the kids didn't rise, and there were no signs of financial benefit for adults or older children.
In 2014, Chetty, Hendren, and the Harvard economist Lawrence Katz asked the IRS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had overseen the program, for permission to take another look at what had happened to the children. When the earlier follow-up had been done, the youngest kids, who had moved before they were teenagers, had not yet reached their earning years, and this turned out to make all the difference. This young group of movers, the economists found, had gone on to earn 31 percent more than those who hadn't moved, and 4 percent more of them attended college. They calculated that for an 8-year-old child, the value of the extra future earnings over a lifetime was almost $100,000, a substantial sum for a poor family. For a family with two children, the taxes paid on the extra income more than covered the costs of the program. "The big insight," Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Princeton, told me, "is that it took a generation for the effects to manifest."'
This is just one small section of the article. It goes on to say that no one knows why one neighborhood has upward mobility and an adjoining neighborhood does not. Chetty is interested in putting his 'microscope' on this issue or issues.
Elizabeth Warren was asked a question in the first debate that she said she needed more data to answer. The moderator thought she was refusing to answer the question. She was not. She said she couldn't until the research was done to provide the data so any solution could be informed by what worked. (I can't remember the question.) At a time when the Trump administration is refusing to collect data, projects like Chetty's are key.
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By the way, as I am sure magiclight knows, we are not arguing. We are discussing a complex issue as described in a very long and complex article. The last time this board tried to have a discussion, someone misinterpreted it as an argument.
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I think Chetty's work is fascinating and important. It's just that I've seen the human element left out of too many urban projects. And the vouchers may have been voluntary, but in too many instances, those types of enticements have been misrepresented to the recipients. A lot of low-income residents were lured into high-rise housing in the 50s and 60s, and those were almost universally disasters. And I just saw a news story about a town in Wisconsin that put all its financial eggs in one development basket a few years ago, and so far they haven't seen a single chick. So "voluntary" can mean a lot of things in urban planning and commercial development lingo.
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