Why I won’t be going to Skeptic or Atheist meetings anymore

[daaron]

28. Not just my experience alone.

I don't do much navel-gazing, so it's misapplied to me. I was speaking of the navel-gazing that occurs regularly in religious groups - that is, I'm using the term such that is spans group study to group prayer and liturgy. (Did I mention fretting? THAT I'll do all I want, thx, but never alone. )

SOME people like to be with like minded people. For some us, like minded people are if anything worse than dissimilar minded people. For instance, I lived in a town in NM populated by a 98% liberal, multicultural crowd. Couldn't stand 'em. Rural Missouri is a step up, because at least so far people aren't badgering me to believe every oovy-groovy New Age woo imaginable - from astrology to the Mayan apocalypse. Gah.

And SOME people are introverts and recluses - and there's nothing wrong with them for avoiding interpersonal contact. Yes, I'm a 'member' of groups (including this one, A/A, science, and Scientific American subscriber - does that count?). These are online groups. They are qualitatively different from actual groups of preening humans. You on DU are all disembodied, thinly-veiled personalities, from this side of the screen - as, I imagine, I am to you. (As I sit in my cluttered shop behind the farmhouse, hiding from grandma and missing my sons on this father's day - so, yeah, hence a little crabby. Plus, my ma-not-in-law and her crazier-than-thou hubby are dining with us PRECISELY at 5pm, so that makes me crabby, too.)

Why do I feel this way about people in general? Because, in general, I'm an introvert. In general, I prefer to be alone. I'm a loner, not a lone wolf. Why bother, even with the internet? Thank you, internet: for this.

Thank you internet for people like you, who come here to actually talk about these subjects, not like in my real life, where these subjects are taboo for the sake of social stability - to maintain the status quo. People in groups become intimidated or intimidating, to me - like scorpions in a cage, equidistant and rigid. Individual creativity is stifled in groups, proportional to the size of the group. Like my dad used to say, "You got one kid, you got a kid. You got two kids, you got half a kid. You got three kids, you got no kid at'all."

That's why I don't join, but do come here - I can stop and chew out my 16 yo nephew-not-in-law for stealing my bike last night before he got in a brawl and had himself arrested. Just now. We didn't have a chance to get into how his perception of hypocrisy in his hypocritical, hyper-religious Methodist father has caused him to misdirect his rebellion at me, another father who has never treated him with anything but respect. But there it is - a religious subject I could have discussed with someone in my real life, who would've walked away, deaf to it all. Here, people only reply if they want to, and nothing's riding on the debate.