Why People Go to Church

NEWSFLASH: people hang out with other like-minded people… and enjoy it!

Actually, I felt the very real pang of cognitive dissonance when I was thrown into a group of .NET developers. I consider myself primarily a PHP/Linux programmer, but after a few months of cursing and ranting, I finally grew to like .NET.

The moral of the story? ANYONE who believes ANYTHING with conviction will respond with emotional friction to contrary ideas. The key is to take a deep breath and realize that these conflicts help us grow if we let them.

I think it’s a gross simplification to say people go to church because it makes them feel good. I certainly think that’s true of some churchgoers, but having spent the better part of two decades of my life in church, I’ve seen a lot of different people who have a lot of different reasons for attending.

@ncloud

I think you’re missing the point. The argument is that if one is solid in a faith they should doing it alone, or with a family, or in a small church with little fanfare.

What happens instead, however, is many people join massive churches — megachurches even — and they enjoy the group dynamic of having their actions affirmed by others.

In other words, it’s not the beliefs that they enjoy as much as the affirmation of them by others.

Daniel,your response to ncloud contains assertions that are not supported by the article you posted. Nowhere in the article is there even a HINT of the argument that “if one is solid in a faith they should doing it alone, or with a family, or in a small church with little fanfare.” I’m not sure where you’ve come up with that. Your second paragraph goes a bit beyond the article, but is certainly true (but there’s no reason given that enjoying the sharing of a belief system with others is a bad thing – surely you enjoy having your own beliefs confirmed by others you respect). Anyway, it’s your third paragraph I find most interesting. You seem to imply that it should be the other way around. That is, you seem to imply that religious people should ENJOY their beliefs. Are beliefs to be enjoyed? That hardly seems the point.

No, they didn’t say it should be done alone, but they did clearly imply that it was interesting that people seemed to get together for the SUPPORT of the faith rather than for the faith itself.

Actually, wait…I think I’m making a separate argument altogether.

Nevermind.

All they were saying is that people like to get vibrated at the same frequency they are already vibrating at, and hate to be vibrated at other frequencies. So they weren’t going into what I was.

Sorry. Good points, ncloud and Carl. I took it in another direction better suited for another post. :)

Oh, by the way, Carl.

Atheists only enjoy talking about their “beliefs” because theists exists. If people didn’t run around believing things that weren’t true (and attempting to push them on others) then we wouldn’t be talking about the lack of those beliefs.

Atheists exist only because theists do. If it weren’t for them there would be no reason to even assign a name. You can see this in the name itself:

a (not, against) theist (believer in god or gods)

It’s nothing by itself. It’s just a lack of something else.