atheist sunday service

What do they believe? What do you think? Talk about religion as it exists today.

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beowulf
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Joined: Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:09 am

Re: atheist sunday service

Post by beowulf »

http://sundayassembly.com/assemblies/

Find Your Nearest Assembly
iskander
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Joined: Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:38 pm

Re: atheist sunday service

Post by iskander »

An update on the Sunday Assembly :)

" The Sunday Assembly was started by Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, two comedians who were on the way to a gig in Bath when they discovered they both wanted to do something that was like church but totally secular and inclusive of all—no matter what they believed.
The first ever Sunday Assembly meeting took place on January 6th 2013 at The Nave in Islington. Almost 200 people turned up at the first meeting, 300 at the second and soon people all over the world asked to start one.
Now there are 68 Sunday Assembly chapters in 8 different countries where people sing songs, hear inspiring talks, and create community together.
Why do we exist? Life is short, it is brilliant, it is sometimes tough, we build communities that help everyone live life as fully as possible "

https://www.sundayassembly.com/story
https://www.sundayassembly.com/
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lpetrich
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Joined: Fri Jul 04, 2014 6:20 am

Re: atheist sunday service

Post by lpetrich »

Sunday Assembly – Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More -- titled link for the SA's home page.

Assemblies – Sunday Assembly has their locations. Mainly the US and the UK, with some in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Holland, Belgium, Germany, France, and Hungary.

Groups – The Sunday Assembly gives a hint as to what new locations are being talked about. Locations like Copenhagen DK, Sheffield UK, Aberdeen UK, Austin TX US, and Hong Kong, China.

I might want to try to dig up when the various SA groups got started. But so far, it's mostly spread among English speakers, as far as I can tell.

Here's another one: The Oasis Network | Communities of reason and compassion, celebrating the human experience. It's more recent, and it has much fewer locations. But it also is growing. About Oasis | The Oasis Network -- clock on "Locations" on the left.
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lpetrich
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Joined: Fri Jul 04, 2014 6:20 am

Re: atheist sunday service

Post by lpetrich »

There's an oddity in the history of freethought that I have not been able to find much about, the "Religion of Humanity" invented by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857, also at philosophyprofessor.com).

Auguste Comte had invented the word "sociology" for the study of human society, and he had proposed that ideas and theories develop through three stages:
  1. Theological - explanation by supernatural sentient entities: gods, ghosts, spirits, demons, etc.
  2. Metaphysical - explanation by abstractions.
  3. Positive - explanation by empirically-derived regularities; rigorous science.
Historians and philosophers of science will likely dismiss it as ludicrously oversimplified, but that's another story.

But later in life he turned to his "Religion of Humanity", and here's what I've been able to find out about it online.

From Corliss Lamont's The Philosophy of Humanism (a free download from his memorial site):
For example, Auguste Comte, French thinker of the middle nineteenth century, made a stimulating if somewhat erratic approach to a consistent Humanism. Taking the facts and methods of science as his starting point, Comte worked out a far-reaching system, which he called Positivism. He used the word positive, not as the opposite of negative, but as meaning scientifically certain or assured.

During his late forties Comte reacted against his earlier intellectualism following a deep emotional crisis associated with his passionate, though Platonic, love for a beautiful and intelligent woman, Clotilde de Vaux, and her untimely death at thirty-one after he had known her for only a year. Comte mourned at her tomb once a week and invoked her memory in prayer three times a day. He referred to her as his angel of inspiration and as a second Beatrice. Finally, he formally ensconced her in his system as a virtual saint and as the personification of the Ideal Female symbolizing the Great Being (humanity).

All this accompanied Comte's unfortunate transformation of Positivism into a complex Religion of Humanity, replete with rituals, sacraments, priests, and temples. For the worship of God he substituted the worship of humankind and for the calendar of Christian saints a select list of the heroes of human progress. Positivism, patterning its liturgy closely after that of the Roman Catholic Church, assumed some of the objectionable features of a religious cult, and was soon dubbed "Catholicism minus Christianity." It was, moreover, a cult overpersonalized in the image of its egotistic founder, who in effect became the high priest of the new religion and whose statue was prominently displayed in all the Positivist temples.

Comte had a considerable vogue throughout the Western world, but his thought took deeper root in Latin America than in the United States. His followers have been particularly active in Brazil, where in 1881 they established a Positivist Church. Its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro still functions on a regular basis. Comte's lasting influence on Brazil is seen in the fact that inscribed on the national flag is his maxim, "Order and Progress." This is the only national emblem in the world that perpetuates the words of a philosopher.

(pp. 47-48)
That church has its own site, Igreja Positivista do Brasil (Positivist Church of Brazil). I checked out the English versions of its pages, and they looked awkwardly translated and possibly autotranslated.

Comte also proposed a positivist calendar of 13 months with 28 days each:
  1. Moses
  2. Homer
  3. Aristotle
  4. Archimedes
  5. Caesar
  6. Saint Paul
  7. Charlemagne
  8. Dante
  9. Gutenberg
  10. Shakespeare
  11. Descartes
  12. Frederic
  13. Bichat
The days were named after various lesser heroes. The weeks are still 7 days long, and every month starts on a Monday. Outside of the week cycle are these special days:

A festival celebrating the dead
On leap years, a festival celebrating holy women
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