[Sigh] this is why I had to think about how to express this.
Within the context in which my feeling belonging occurs or does not occur - my mind - I am the only person unique in this particular manner.
Given also the possibility that the double empathy problem means that what other people mean by "feeling they belong" might be totally different to what I interpret them to mean, it's entirely possible that my sense of "not belonging" is in fact just the recognition that I am not them, felt by everyone about themselves as opposed to everyone else, but expressed differently.
Objective phenomena I associate with it - everyone else chatting with lots of people after the service and me awkwardly having stilted conversations may be simply the fact I can't do small talk and be of no further significance.
Or that many people (perhaps the majority) feel at least somewhat ill at ease some of the time in most situations.
But again, presumably you can reason by analogy from how your recognition that you aren't a member of your family operates (incidentally the only way I was able to arrive at the initial insight).
Objective phenomena I associate with it - everyone else chatting with lots of people after the service and me awkwardly having stilted conversations may be simply the fact I can't do small talk and be of no further significance.
So I think you maybe both be right about that not being a belonging indicator, and also in need of something you can comfortably do in that social situation. I’d be tempted to bring a book you were prepared to sit and read - and potentially discuss with anyone who asked you, or bring an activity you were willing to share over coffee if anyone showed an interest (portable chess set or similar) or provide yourself with a role. The latter might be getting yourself on the coffee rota or something similar.
The point of small talk is to signal you are friendly and allow you to gradually build up to knowing someone and having more interesting conversations - if you can’t do it via small talk you really need another strategy that does the same thing.
Depending on the group, you might also be able to just tell them this is an issue for you and ask if anyone else finds small talk a bit challenging and then see if you could brainstorm a post service alternative.
I still find myself relating to @KarlLB 's experience a lot. I hate small talk and sometimes feel terribly out of place after church or at other times when all the socially deft people are busy socializing and I just kinda stand around feeling vaguely overwhelmed by the noise, and lacking a particular focus for my attention.
Seriously. I do think I've been that guy, still am quite a few times. Give me a chair to move, a song to sing, something to distract me from the fact that I'm standing here!
If I may be bold, a few reflections of advice from my experience as a socially awkward guy:
Sometimes having something to do helps. Give me a task and I can get better at talking, because then there's a thing to talk about. Along those lines, a lot of after church talk, in my experience, runs like a bunch of little tiny business meetings. Find a thing to do and people will talk about that. Conversation for its own sake does get awkward, that's certainly my experience. Instead of making talk-for-its-own-sake, think of something worth doing and make that the point.
Also, one thing I've learned over time is that a lot of people really appreciate someone who has the ability to just sit back and listen, if you have the patience for it. That creates its own weird social dynamics, but it can generate appreciation.
I dunno. I've grown to be comfortable as a wallflower and people-watcher, sometimes it's just easier than finding random excuses to talk to people.
Sympathy and solidarity. The struggle is, as they say, real.
@KarlLB have you ever felt comfortable in any group ever? If so, what was that like? What about it made it comfortable, like you fitted in?
When you say about the G&S (Gilbert and Sullivan?) group, what do you mean that you didn't belong? You mean that you didn't enjoy singing comic operettas? Or something else?
For what it's worth, I think there's almost certainly a thing about being too tied to one type of thinking. I was talking to someone the other day who had spent their whole working life with physics and data and they were talking in quite a sad way about how they wanted to understand more about art history but they just could not bend their mind to that way of thinking. I remember decades ago when I was at university that science students were told how much better they were than arts students, encouraged to think in some ways and not others, encouraged to value quantitative understandings and not qualitative ones and so on.
Or that many people (perhaps the majority) feel at least somewhat ill at ease some of the time in most situations.
But again, presumably you can reason by analogy from how your recognition that you aren't a member of your family operates (incidentally the only way I was able to arrive at the initial insight).
I think probably most people avoid situations that they feel uncomfortable in.
There are also graduations and degrees of this; I was with my wife a while ago at a very large conference and was surprised to see that she was perfectly at ease in a large lecture room full of people but very nervous about striking up a conversation with random people. I was not aware that she was like this as she is often comfortable and social with people when I have seen her before.
It turns out that she is confident about her quite narrow knowledge and can converse easily with people in, or who overlap with, that knowledge group. But she doubts herself when she's in a group outside of the mental bounds of that group, even where the people are adjacent to it. She doesn't like looking stupid.
Whereas I have no problem looking stupid to random people.
I would describe the specific dilemma that KarlLB describes as follows: how does a unique person belong? This is something I've spent most of my life thinking about. Faced with this dilemma, I ended up negotiating belonging on my own terms, rather than taking what I could get (which was increasingly just leaving me miserable and annoyed).
Yes and I also think that you will find it problematic that it is not static. Even if you succeed in sorting out what the behaviour is once, there is a risk it will change because of others interactions.
Does that make sense.
Yes.
Is there anything that can be done? Does it have to be this way?
FWiW I left a G&S society because it was so clear that for reasons I could never figure out I Did Not Belong. So it's not just churches
I think this is a crucial consideration. Someone I know very well who has been a Christian all their life and is very theologically literate and who also has a wide range of interest has often found it hard to feel they belong in both church and other group settings.
As far as I can see it's not just about shared values or purpose (both of which imo help with a sense of belonging) but it's also about group members being able to accept and include people who might be different from themselves personality-wise.
So it's not all on you or me, the rest of us have a part to play and we sadly don't always do too well at helping one another feel we authentically belong.
In my own family neurodivergence features quite strongly and it's been a joy seeing one of my grandchildren who is on the autism spectrum finally begin to find their place of belonging and acceptance, much sooner than other family members did.
I missed the edit window whilst I typed an addendum which I then lost!
Now can't remember the exact phrasing (Hey ho) but it went something like:
As I near 70 years old I've finally realise that it's ok to feel I don't belong in some settings and to cut myself some slack.
In some other settings though that sense of not belonging is painful and so I take those scenarios to prayer and exploration in my personal spiritual direction.
Somewhere around middle age, I've got a wife and kids all that. I've got my own space. Rather than asking "do I belong to this group," I ask "does this group belong to me?"
I can claim my own personal gravity, and I think doing so can make it easier for people to deal with me as a human being. It takes some of the desperation off of socialization.
KarlLB, you sound very like my dad - who would almost certainly have had some sort of neurodivergent diagnosis if he hadn’t been born in the 1920s. He was talked out of his Anglican faith at school and, after a few years of being a dissatisfied atheist, became a fairly hardline evangelical Christian in his early 20s. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say he became the thorn in the side of every pastor he met for the rest of his life, as he felt strongly that every preacher was just slightly wrong about something and needed to be corrected afterwards, which he was incapable of doing tactfully. (This wasn’t easy for his family either, but that’s another story.)
I can’t remember why, but for some reason when I was in my late teens he started giving someone a lift to a charismatic Catholic prayer group midweek (he still went to a hardline evangelical church on Sundays). He joined the prayer group himself and I think this kept him (and us) sane. He never had any desire to convert to Catholicism, but the advantage of this group was that he knew from the start he was an outsider, there were things that all the rest of the group believed that he would never subscribe to, and if he wanted to attend the group he would have to concentrate on the things they had in common rather than the things they didn’t.
I will be eternally grateful for that group, though I never attended it myself.
Just a thought. Maybe you should look for something more different rather than more similar?
@Aravis : That sounds my uncle. I think I'd be like that if my social "talk to listen" ratio were higher. For good or ill I picked up early on that I shouldn't talk too much because that's what I'd turn into, and no shame in it.
Obviously, my online persona is somewhat different than my IRL persona.
First realise NO-ONE, not even the most "in" person you can think of, knows that they truly have it right! They can't, it's a group-produced thing and always in transition. From this stems, it is alright to not perform everything correctly, and for some communities, treating others as outsiders is how they function.
Second, certainly with churches, the responsibility for making people feel they belong lies both with the core and those who are finding their way in. You will note that the fact that the congregation was out of step on Ash Wednesday was not seen as a problem of the new people, but due to the core failing to provide the appropriate support.
Where do you feel you most belong? What things do they have in common? Does it matter if you join with a friend or being invited by someone? Do pamphlets with guidance on what to expect like this one for the Quakers help? Anything else?
I wonder if High Anglo-Catholicism works for some people on the ASD spectrum because they are in someways more explicit about the expectations. The pantomime aspect in this case actually works in their favour.
I don't want to be offensive with this story so let me preface it with a little more about me; I've been English and lived in England all my life. I've traveled to other places. I don't regard myself as an idiot, I understand my cultural identity to be English and British and my subculture to be very broadly Christian in that the times I was exposed to religion in my life would be broadly Christian. The focus of the thing I don't believe in is English Christianity. Does that make sense?
A while ago a friend was visiting from India and she wanted to take us to experience a little bit of her culture and we were fortunate to have something nearby. Which I know sounds a bit ridiculous and I know that "Indian food" in an English city has little in common with authentic Indian food in India or elsewhere in the subcontinent.
She meant visiting her Sikh religious compatriots for a meal in the temple. A strange experience for me as an English person in that it was very recognisable, very friendly and very English whilst also clearly being somewhere I was an outsider in a way that my friend from India was not.
Everything about it, other than those who welcomed me (including someone who went to the same school as me and another who named some people they knew who worked with my wife) was strange. I cannot imagine ever being a part of that group and yet there was something also very familiar and comforting about it.
Or that many people (perhaps the majority) feel at least somewhat ill at ease some of the time in most situations.
But again, presumably you can reason by analogy from how your recognition that you aren't a member of your family operates (incidentally the only way I was able to arrive at the initial insight).
I think probably most people avoid situations that they feel uncomfortable in.
That's true to a point, but as you go on to describe, most people frequently end up in situations they wouldn't necessarily choose to be in due to force of circumstances.
It should provide some material for reasoning from analogy at the very least.
@Basketactortale : For what it's worth, nothing in that felt offensive to me and I very much relate to the experience. I live in a wildly multi-ethnic neighborhood in the USA, and I still find migrating to other parts of the USA can be weird because every place has its own little quirks and peculiarities. Heck, I have enough of my own little quirks and peculiarities.
I also have a pet theory that "not fitting in" where one grew up leads to its own peculiar sense of never belonging and therefore being weird about belonging in a situation.
…
So the technology is those practices that taken together indicate that you belong within the community. This is a subset of the congregational culture.
However, from my perspective, what becomes really interesting is when there is a dissonance between an individual's own understanding of who they are and these practices. If the dissonance is small, most of the time the person will adapt to the practice. The bigger the dissonance is harder that comes. Then a person has three options
Adaptation
Change
Withdrawal
Thanks Jengie Jon (I'm still looking at Foucault's technologies of the self). As you say, where things become really interesting is when there is dissonance. A few more options occur to me:
Disruption: the individual actively seeks to undermine the prevailing practices, possibly indirectly.
Persistence: the individual carries on, out of a sense of duty or obligation. This is rarely sustainable in the long term.
Invention: the individual develops a persona that is better suited to the prevailing practices. They are able to engage, but may feel they are hiding their "true self".
Protest: the individual makes it clear that the prevailing practices are not compatible with who they are, but continues to "participate" as a form of protest. The extent to which the group is able to sustain this depends on a number of factors.
I've generally found comfort, if not relief, in not fitting in. It's definitely been a source of challenge among my own family, and in my marriage. I have reveled in it from time to time, but I know it's largely been a source of self-protection as well as self-preservation.
@Jengie Jon : When I was in undergrad, my favorite professor phrased those as "Voice, loyalty, or leave." It's really useful as a model for conflict.
Yes, that is good, I was working independently of said prof, but his coining is better than mine. Though whether the middle word should be loyalty or comply, I am not sure.
Pease Right:
Disruption and Protest are subforms of Change
Persistence and Invention are subforms of Adaptation.
Thanks. I suppose this isn't so much about the viability of an individual's response or the outcome and, continuing my train of thought, that Change is sufficiently broad to encompass abolition.
Elsewhere, I mentioned my congregation is calling a new pastor. Yesterday, we extended the call. In the discussion leading up to the final vote many of the questions were about how will his call change us. Over the past few years we have adopted a number of new liturgies, we love to sing, we have been using the Narrative lectionary (which uses just one reading, not three or four). People are concerned about reverting back to older ways, but they are also concerned about even more changes.
While changing a pastor is particularly challenging to a congregation, so is the introduction of any new person to the congregation. Even the baptism of a child changes the nature of the organization. As that child grows, so the congregation has to grow with the child. We all bring different talents, skills, personalities to an organization. If any organization, congregations in particular, is to survive it needs to be adaptable to change too. There may be some core principles that cannot change quickly, but there are always fringe practices that are adaptable
In the discussions above, I am seeing how a person has several choices in joining an organization, but I do not see anything being mentioned about how a congregation also has to change.
Sounds like something from the military "lead, follow or get out of the way"
That's a good one, I think I saw it on a poster in high school. I think the only difference is that "voice" does not guarantee obedience. But yes, that's not dissimilar.
Yes, that is good, I was working independently of said prof, but his coining is better than mine. Though whether the middle word should be loyalty or comply, I am not sure.
Point. Compliance is an external state, while loyalty is internal. One can exist without the other, though the bifurcation of self has its costs.
Some time ago (months? years?) I read a survey report that said that people join a congregation/religious community mainly for one of three things:
* They agree with the beliefs
* They feel comfortable being a member of that community
* They like the rituals they participate in.
I recall the report saying that the young people joining a Catholic church were attracted to participating in rituals. That seems to me much like the attraction of Orthodox Judaism.
I am a person that likes to feel part of a community, and communing is important to me. Some see the meaning of "religion" being joining together. I like that even if some prefer the definition given higher in the thread.
The Golden Rule, expressed in different ways by many religions, is the core belief for me. I have an inclusive attitude that I see as necessary for chaplains that provide spiritual care regardless of belief system. My Christian culture can be regarded as an accident of birth.
How is participating in rituals akin to the attraction of Orthodox Judaism?
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
All religious groups have rituals.
Even apparently 'free form' ones are often more ritualistic than their practitioners might acknowledge or admit.
I think it depends on who is attracted. Different religions appeal to different people for different reasons.
Also, there's something about the "we do the same the same old hymns every week and the pastor wears a suit and tie" and "we practice a liturgical structure that remains mostly intact from 1000 years ago and the priest wears a costume that hasn't been recognizably fashionable since the late middle ages."
I think sometimes there's an appeal to being exotic, especially for people who aren't content with the culture they were raised in.
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
Maybe I am reading this the wrong way. Are you suggesting Orthodox Judaism is closed to converts?
You might want to check out Mayim Bialik who appeared in The Big Bang Theory. She is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism. Also, novelist Faye Kellerman.
The Golden Rule, expressed in different ways by many religions, is the core belief for me. I have an inclusive attitude that I see as necessary for chaplains that provide spiritual care regardless of belief system. My Christian culture can be regarded as an accident of birth.
I'm afraid the Golden Rule makes my heart sink. Unless it's qualified by the question, "what do I know about how this person wants to be treated?", its usefulness is haphazard and arbitrary. In this regard, the Golden Rule only works if the way *we* want to be treated, is for other people to find out how we want to be treated. The problem with this is that the way in which people want to be treated varies widely. What happens when the way other people want to be treated conflicts with our values, our morality or even the law?
And maybe we take for granted that others will know how we want to be treated. The Golden Rule can lead to the perpetuation of whatever inequalities and misunderstandings and power disparities already exist between individuals. It's potentially pernicious in the way it intersects with privilege and entitlement. My observation is that many unprivileged people already have a pretty good idea of how privileged and entitled people want to be treated, while the converse is much less the case - this is part of what it means to be privileged and entitled.
The Golden Rule, expressed in different ways by many religions, is the core belief for me. I have an inclusive attitude that I see as necessary for chaplains that provide spiritual care regardless of belief system. My Christian culture can be regarded as an accident of birth.
I'm afraid the Golden Rule makes my heart sink. Unless it's qualified by the question, "what do I know about how this person wants to be treated?", its usefulness is haphazard and arbitrary. In this regard, the Golden Rule only works if the way *we* want to be treated, is for other people to find out how we want to be treated. The problem with this is that the way in which people want to be treated varies widely. What happens when the way other people want to be treated conflicts with our values, our morality or even the law?
1. Ask them.
2. Hard to imagine their want conflicting with my values or morality, since the Golden Rule is the guiding principle for my values and morality. The law would be a different matter potentially, but can you give me examples of any of these potential conflicts?
And maybe we take for granted that others will know how we want to be treated. The Golden Rule can lead to the perpetuation of whatever inequalities and misunderstandings and power disparities already exist between individuals. It's potentially pernicious in the way it intersects with privilege and entitlement. My observation is that many unprivileged people already have a pretty good idea of how privileged and entitled people want to be treated, while the converse is much less the case - this is part of what it means to be privileged and entitled.
I think there is a disconnect in the mind when we try to imagine what we would want compared to what we actually want if we were in that situation.
I'm fairly sure that people who are abusive to gays do it thinking that having a gay child is a sign of inadequate parenting and that if they personally had a gay child they would want someone with a clear vision of truth to point it out to them.
In reality I think most people are delusional and do not take the kind of moralistic lessons from other people they think they can dish out to others.
I think the truth is almost the other way round: allegedly objectively supported systems of belief are primarily signs of belonging. Attitudes (at least in the abstract) towards certain groups - gay men, trans people, migrants, women, etc. etc. - are fixed at group level, and often at variance with members' treatment of individuals they meet in real life. This is why objective argument is pointless and ineffective. Until people become convinced that membership of the group is not for them, nothing changes at that level.
I'm afraid the Golden Rule makes my heart sink. Unless it's qualified by the question, "what do I know about how this person wants to be treated?", its usefulness is haphazard and arbitrary. In this regard, the Golden Rule only works if the way *we* want to be treated, is for other people to find out how we want to be treated. The problem with this is that the way in which people want to be treated varies widely. What happens when the way other people want to be treated conflicts with our values, our morality or even the law?
1. Ask them.
2. Hard to imagine their want conflicting with my values or morality, since the Golden Rule is the guiding principle for my values and morality. The law would be a different matter potentially, but can you give me examples of any of these potential conflicts?
Maybe you value things like truth, honesty, integrity, selflessness, generosity, etc. How do you treat people whose values conflict with these? Or people with sexist or racist attitudes? Or who are willing to break the law to protest against injustice, or to evade paying tax? Or those who merely seek to avoid paying taxes?
How do you treat people who like being asked questions, or those don't like being asked questions? Or those people who don't like being asked how they want being treated?
I think finding out how people want to be treated is a reasonable principle, but just asking might not always be the best way of doing so. And more generally, the Golden Rule seems in practice to be one of a number of guiding beliefs or principles, and is usually subject to other beliefs and principles that are more fundamental.
I think there is a disconnect in the mind when we try to imagine what we would want compared to what we actually want if we were in that situation.
At the least, I think there's a significant difference between imagining ourselves in someone else's situation, and adopting their perspective when doing so (and that's assuming we're able to do either of those things).
Along the lines suggested by ThunderBunk's post, I suspect the Golden Rule is related to how we experience belonging, and how we treat people in the groups to which we belong, and secondarily, how people in the groups to which we belong should people in groups to which we don't belong (or at least what we believe about this).
I can't help thinking that the bigger problem with the golden rule (or similar formulations) is that most, maybe all of us, don't come close to living up to what understanding we already have.
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
Maybe I am reading this the wrong way. Are you suggesting Orthodox Judaism is closed to converts?
You might want to check out Mayim Bialik who appeared in The Big Bang Theory. She is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism. Also, novelist Faye Kellerman.
I meant more of a 'closed system' than closed to converts.
But I take your point and also the points @Bullfrog raises.
I can't help thinking that the bigger problem with the golden rule (or similar formulations) is that most, maybe all of us, don't come close to living up to what understanding we already have.
How is participating in rituals akin to the attraction of Orthodox Judaism?
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
All religious groups have rituals.
Attraction covers the keeping, which may be from birth, as well as the joining.
Regardless that all (religious) groups have rituals, for some the rituals are the attraction, while for others it's not the rituals that make the group attractive.
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
Maybe I am reading this the wrong way. Are you suggesting Orthodox Judaism is closed to converts?
You might want to check out Mayim Bialik who appeared in The Big Bang Theory. She is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism. Also, novelist Faye Kellerman.
Anecdotes are not data. Your argument is equivalent to:
Bullfrog: The fellowship of the world's astronauts aren't particularly open to new members.
You: Not true. My cousin's uncle became an astronaut.
Knowing someone who converted into X religion doesn't mean it's a common thing, or an easy one to do.
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
Maybe I am reading this the wrong way. Are you suggesting Orthodox Judaism is closed to converts?
You might want to check out Mayim Bialik who appeared in The Big Bang Theory. She is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism. Also, novelist Faye Kellerman.
Anecdotes are not data. Your argument is equivalent to:
Bullfrog: The fellowship of the world's astronauts aren't particularly open to new members.
You: Not true. My cousin's uncle became an astronaut.
Knowing someone who converted into X religion doesn't mean it's a common thing, or an easy one to do.
And I question whether “converting” is really an accurate description of someone from a Jewish family who was born into Judaism and raised as a Reform Jew moving into Orthodox Judaism.
Comments
Within the context in which my feeling belonging occurs or does not occur - my mind - I am the only person unique in this particular manner.
Given also the possibility that the double empathy problem means that what other people mean by "feeling they belong" might be totally different to what I interpret them to mean, it's entirely possible that my sense of "not belonging" is in fact just the recognition that I am not them, felt by everyone about themselves as opposed to everyone else, but expressed differently.
Objective phenomena I associate with it - everyone else chatting with lots of people after the service and me awkwardly having stilted conversations may be simply the fact I can't do small talk and be of no further significance.
Thing is though, we have no idea what is or isn't going on in other people's heads nor whether that accords with whatever is going on in ours.
But again, presumably you can reason by analogy from how your recognition that you aren't a member of your family operates (incidentally the only way I was able to arrive at the initial insight).
So I think you maybe both be right about that not being a belonging indicator, and also in need of something you can comfortably do in that social situation. I’d be tempted to bring a book you were prepared to sit and read - and potentially discuss with anyone who asked you, or bring an activity you were willing to share over coffee if anyone showed an interest (portable chess set or similar) or provide yourself with a role. The latter might be getting yourself on the coffee rota or something similar.
The point of small talk is to signal you are friendly and allow you to gradually build up to knowing someone and having more interesting conversations - if you can’t do it via small talk you really need another strategy that does the same thing.
Depending on the group, you might also be able to just tell them this is an issue for you and ask if anyone else finds small talk a bit challenging and then see if you could brainstorm a post service alternative.
I still find myself relating to @KarlLB 's experience a lot. I hate small talk and sometimes feel terribly out of place after church or at other times when all the socially deft people are busy socializing and I just kinda stand around feeling vaguely overwhelmed by the noise, and lacking a particular focus for my attention.
Seriously. I do think I've been that guy, still am quite a few times. Give me a chair to move, a song to sing, something to distract me from the fact that I'm standing here!
If I may be bold, a few reflections of advice from my experience as a socially awkward guy:
Sometimes having something to do helps. Give me a task and I can get better at talking, because then there's a thing to talk about. Along those lines, a lot of after church talk, in my experience, runs like a bunch of little tiny business meetings. Find a thing to do and people will talk about that. Conversation for its own sake does get awkward, that's certainly my experience. Instead of making talk-for-its-own-sake, think of something worth doing and make that the point.
Also, one thing I've learned over time is that a lot of people really appreciate someone who has the ability to just sit back and listen, if you have the patience for it. That creates its own weird social dynamics, but it can generate appreciation.
I dunno. I've grown to be comfortable as a wallflower and people-watcher, sometimes it's just easier than finding random excuses to talk to people.
Sympathy and solidarity. The struggle is, as they say, real.
When you say about the G&S (Gilbert and Sullivan?) group, what do you mean that you didn't belong? You mean that you didn't enjoy singing comic operettas? Or something else?
For what it's worth, I think there's almost certainly a thing about being too tied to one type of thinking. I was talking to someone the other day who had spent their whole working life with physics and data and they were talking in quite a sad way about how they wanted to understand more about art history but they just could not bend their mind to that way of thinking. I remember decades ago when I was at university that science students were told how much better they were than arts students, encouraged to think in some ways and not others, encouraged to value quantitative understandings and not qualitative ones and so on.
I think probably most people avoid situations that they feel uncomfortable in.
There are also graduations and degrees of this; I was with my wife a while ago at a very large conference and was surprised to see that she was perfectly at ease in a large lecture room full of people but very nervous about striking up a conversation with random people. I was not aware that she was like this as she is often comfortable and social with people when I have seen her before.
It turns out that she is confident about her quite narrow knowledge and can converse easily with people in, or who overlap with, that knowledge group. But she doubts herself when she's in a group outside of the mental bounds of that group, even where the people are adjacent to it. She doesn't like looking stupid.
Whereas I have no problem looking stupid to random people.
I think this is a crucial consideration. Someone I know very well who has been a Christian all their life and is very theologically literate and who also has a wide range of interest has often found it hard to feel they belong in both church and other group settings.
As far as I can see it's not just about shared values or purpose (both of which imo help with a sense of belonging) but it's also about group members being able to accept and include people who might be different from themselves personality-wise.
So it's not all on you or me, the rest of us have a part to play and we sadly don't always do too well at helping one another feel we authentically belong.
In my own family neurodivergence features quite strongly and it's been a joy seeing one of my grandchildren who is on the autism spectrum finally begin to find their place of belonging and acceptance, much sooner than other family members did.
Now can't remember the exact phrasing (Hey ho) but it went something like:
As I near 70 years old I've finally realise that it's ok to feel I don't belong in some settings and to cut myself some slack.
In some other settings though that sense of not belonging is painful and so I take those scenarios to prayer and exploration in my personal spiritual direction.
I can claim my own personal gravity, and I think doing so can make it easier for people to deal with me as a human being. It takes some of the desperation off of socialization.
I can’t remember why, but for some reason when I was in my late teens he started giving someone a lift to a charismatic Catholic prayer group midweek (he still went to a hardline evangelical church on Sundays). He joined the prayer group himself and I think this kept him (and us) sane. He never had any desire to convert to Catholicism, but the advantage of this group was that he knew from the start he was an outsider, there were things that all the rest of the group believed that he would never subscribe to, and if he wanted to attend the group he would have to concentrate on the things they had in common rather than the things they didn’t.
I will be eternally grateful for that group, though I never attended it myself.
Just a thought. Maybe you should look for something more different rather than more similar?
Yes, really helpful
Obviously, my online persona is somewhat different than my IRL persona.
First realise NO-ONE, not even the most "in" person you can think of, knows that they truly have it right! They can't, it's a group-produced thing and always in transition. From this stems, it is alright to not perform everything correctly, and for some communities, treating others as outsiders is how they function.
Second, certainly with churches, the responsibility for making people feel they belong lies both with the core and those who are finding their way in. You will note that the fact that the congregation was out of step on Ash Wednesday was not seen as a problem of the new people, but due to the core failing to provide the appropriate support.
Where do you feel you most belong? What things do they have in common? Does it matter if you join with a friend or being invited by someone? Do pamphlets with guidance on what to expect like this one for the Quakers help? Anything else?
I wonder if High Anglo-Catholicism works for some people on the ASD spectrum because they are in someways more explicit about the expectations. The pantomime aspect in this case actually works in their favour.
A while ago a friend was visiting from India and she wanted to take us to experience a little bit of her culture and we were fortunate to have something nearby. Which I know sounds a bit ridiculous and I know that "Indian food" in an English city has little in common with authentic Indian food in India or elsewhere in the subcontinent.
She meant visiting her Sikh religious compatriots for a meal in the temple. A strange experience for me as an English person in that it was very recognisable, very friendly and very English whilst also clearly being somewhere I was an outsider in a way that my friend from India was not.
Everything about it, other than those who welcomed me (including someone who went to the same school as me and another who named some people they knew who worked with my wife) was strange. I cannot imagine ever being a part of that group and yet there was something also very familiar and comforting about it.
That's true to a point, but as you go on to describe, most people frequently end up in situations they wouldn't necessarily choose to be in due to force of circumstances.
It should provide some material for reasoning from analogy at the very least.
I also have a pet theory that "not fitting in" where one grew up leads to its own peculiar sense of never belonging and therefore being weird about belonging in a situation.
Disruption and Protest are subforms of Change
Persistence and Invention are subforms of Adaptation.
Yes, that is good, I was working independently of said prof, but his coining is better than mine. Though whether the middle word should be loyalty or comply, I am not sure.
While changing a pastor is particularly challenging to a congregation, so is the introduction of any new person to the congregation. Even the baptism of a child changes the nature of the organization. As that child grows, so the congregation has to grow with the child. We all bring different talents, skills, personalities to an organization. If any organization, congregations in particular, is to survive it needs to be adaptable to change too. There may be some core principles that cannot change quickly, but there are always fringe practices that are adaptable
In the discussions above, I am seeing how a person has several choices in joining an organization, but I do not see anything being mentioned about how a congregation also has to change.
That's a good one, I think I saw it on a poster in high school. I think the only difference is that "voice" does not guarantee obedience. But yes, that's not dissimilar.
Point. Compliance is an external state, while loyalty is internal. One can exist without the other, though the bifurcation of self has its costs.
@pease the surest way for me to destroy something is to attempt to comply when it is against my inclinations
Some time ago (months? years?) I read a survey report that said that people join a congregation/religious community mainly for one of three things:
* They agree with the beliefs
* They feel comfortable being a member of that community
* They like the rituals they participate in.
I recall the report saying that the young people joining a Catholic church were attracted to participating in rituals. That seems to me much like the attraction of Orthodox Judaism.
I am a person that likes to feel part of a community, and communing is important to me. Some see the meaning of "religion" being joining together. I like that even if some prefer the definition given higher in the thread.
The Golden Rule, expressed in different ways by many religions, is the core belief for me. I have an inclusive attitude that I see as necessary for chaplains that provide spiritual care regardless of belief system. My Christian culture can be regarded as an accident of birth.
Another is "several of my friends already attend and if it works for them it'll probably work for me."
To be fair, these probably fall under "community is comfortable."
With all due respect to Orthodox Judaism it looks more 'closed' to me than the average RC parish.
All religious groups have rituals.
Even apparently 'free form' ones are often more ritualistic than their practitioners might acknowledge or admit.
I think it depends on who is attracted. Different religions appeal to different people for different reasons.
Also, there's something about the "we do the same the same old hymns every week and the pastor wears a suit and tie" and "we practice a liturgical structure that remains mostly intact from 1000 years ago and the priest wears a costume that hasn't been recognizably fashionable since the late middle ages."
I think sometimes there's an appeal to being exotic, especially for people who aren't content with the culture they were raised in.
Maybe I am reading this the wrong way. Are you suggesting Orthodox Judaism is closed to converts?
You might want to check out Mayim Bialik who appeared in The Big Bang Theory. She is a recent convert to Orthodox Judaism. Also, novelist Faye Kellerman.
And maybe we take for granted that others will know how we want to be treated. The Golden Rule can lead to the perpetuation of whatever inequalities and misunderstandings and power disparities already exist between individuals. It's potentially pernicious in the way it intersects with privilege and entitlement. My observation is that many unprivileged people already have a pretty good idea of how privileged and entitled people want to be treated, while the converse is much less the case - this is part of what it means to be privileged and entitled.
1. Ask them.
2. Hard to imagine their want conflicting with my values or morality, since the Golden Rule is the guiding principle for my values and morality. The law would be a different matter potentially, but can you give me examples of any of these potential conflicts?
The failure is a failure to find out.
I'm fairly sure that people who are abusive to gays do it thinking that having a gay child is a sign of inadequate parenting and that if they personally had a gay child they would want someone with a clear vision of truth to point it out to them.
In reality I think most people are delusional and do not take the kind of moralistic lessons from other people they think they can dish out to others.
How do you treat people who like being asked questions, or those don't like being asked questions? Or those people who don't like being asked how they want being treated?
I think finding out how people want to be treated is a reasonable principle, but just asking might not always be the best way of doing so. And more generally, the Golden Rule seems in practice to be one of a number of guiding beliefs or principles, and is usually subject to other beliefs and principles that are more fundamental.
At the least, I think there's a significant difference between imagining ourselves in someone else's situation, and adopting their perspective when doing so (and that's assuming we're able to do either of those things).
Along the lines suggested by ThunderBunk's post, I suspect the Golden Rule is related to how we experience belonging, and how we treat people in the groups to which we belong, and secondarily, how people in the groups to which we belong should people in groups to which we don't belong (or at least what we believe about this).
I meant more of a 'closed system' than closed to converts.
But I take your point and also the points @Bullfrog raises.
Seconded.
Attraction covers the keeping, which may be from birth, as well as the joining.
Regardless that all (religious) groups have rituals, for some the rituals are the attraction, while for others it's not the rituals that make the group attractive.
I put this Golden Rule poster up in the Multi-Faith room of our hospital.
Anecdotes are not data. Your argument is equivalent to:
Bullfrog: The fellowship of the world's astronauts aren't particularly open to new members.
You: Not true. My cousin's uncle became an astronaut.
Knowing someone who converted into X religion doesn't mean it's a common thing, or an easy one to do.