"The case for showing up to church—even if you don’t believe in God"

[pikachu]

I tried doing my version of this for the reasons others have laid out here - finding a sense of meaning and community and tbqh, I found the experience to not be fulfilling. This might speak to my personal sense of insecurity, but it just felt very weird to be around people who really believed while I was there for different reasons. I have sympathy for the functional argument for religion, but I'm not sure how well it works on a personal level if you don't actually believe.

(As a tangent, I wish there were more articles in this genre from people with a non-Christian background. I've gotten the suggestion of going to church from some people irl, but that strikes me as trading in one form of alienation for another.)

[pikachu]

I tried doing my version of this for the reasons others have laid out here - finding a sense of meaning and community and tbqh, I found the experience to not be fulfilling. This might speak to my personal sense of insecurity, but it just felt very weird to be around people who really believed while I was there for different reasons. I have sympathy for the functional argument for religion, but I'm not sure how well it works on a personal level if you don't actually believe.

(As a tangent, I wish there were more articles in this genre from people with a non-Christian background. I've gotten the suggestion of going to church from some people irl, but that strikes me as trading in one form of alienation for another.)

Yeah, this is why I tried to emphasize in my post that what works for one person might not work for another.  I also think that where someone is in his/her life makes a huge difference, and I don't just mean someone's age.  While I never lost an intellectual belief in SOME type of God and certainly remained a cultural/nominal Lutheran at least in name in my decade plus of not attending church, I am not sure I would have "taken to" going to church again if my wife weren't pregnant (great excuse to prevent you from being out super late on Saturday nights, lol...) with our son on the way.  It kind of started with me wanting him baptized as everyone else in our family on both sides had been, and that powerful-if-surface-level motivator kind of morphed into an actual and true theology that I'm not even sure I knew I had.  And, of course, some other people might try the exact same thing in the exact same situation and not really be moved.

Out of curiosity, if you don't mind sharing, what denomination did you try out?

A bunch of Hindu temples around NYC haha, which is where the interest in non-Christian perspectives comes from. Even as someone who grew in a secular Indian household and with most of my South Asian friends now being secular too, being a regular church attendee would obv be a massive social/cultural shift in a way that it isn't for a typical American none. 

[pikachu]

I tried doing my version of this for the reasons others have laid out here - finding a sense of meaning and community and tbqh, I found the experience to not be fulfilling. This might speak to my personal sense of insecurity, but it just felt very weird to be around people who really believed while I was there for different reasons. I have sympathy for the functional argument for religion, but I'm not sure how well it works on a personal level if you don't actually believe.

(As a tangent, I wish there were more articles in this genre from people with a non-Christian background. I've gotten the suggestion of going to church from some people irl, but that strikes me as trading in one form of alienation for another.)

Something I was thinking recently was how the lack of a collective Hindu community/lack of congregationalism in contrast to the communities formed by adherents of Abrahamic faiths affects the faith of second gen Indians in the diaspora who come from Hindu families. If you are a young person belonging to a family who identifies as being Hindu in the United States, often you aren't that religious and since there is no Hindu community you visit the temple a few times a year a most and it feels tailored to our parents and once people get older you become more atheistic or agnostic and only identify as Hindu on a cultural basis.

Yeah, the lack of congregationalism leads to a very different dynamic. That being said, as I've gotten older, I have been surprised by how many Indian Hindus I know fall more into the 'lapsed' category than agnosticism/atheism. While there's selection bias in who I know, I am surprised by the number of people who'll visit a temple every few months or stick with the dietary restriction they grew up with. I do wonder how Hinduism changes as the second generation of Indians rapidly comes of age - from a non-religious perspective, being Indian now feels different from what it was only 10-15 years ago.