![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I weekly attended (and my parents donated to, served on the board and committees of, socialized with, and volunteered for) an agnostic liberal humanist church where adult content consisted of liberal politics, current events, and history; the children's religious education curriculum was made up of world religions, how the Bible was a fantasy, and an earnest Non-Judging Environment for sharing our thoughts and concerns; and one of the hottest topics of debate among adults was whether "Christian-bashing" (in retrospect I'm like uh guise you're really just gonna call it that???) is okay (pick one: even as a joke, in front of the children, at all, if and only if you were traumatized by Bad Childhood Experiences). Then I got in the car for a 20-minute drive home during which frequently my mom recapped people's dippy or cosmic mumbo-jumbo comments with sarcastic commentary like "Thanks for sharing" and my dad excoriated any reference to the supernatural or flaws in logic from the question & answer session.
There isn't actually any tension, to my mind, between liberal humanist values and (a) atheism, (b) a skeptical worldview, or (c) a fundamentally pessimistic attitude, but all three of those things tend to be minorities (but sizable ones seething with resentment about periodic scolding by overbearing proponents of the Cult of Nice) in Unitarian Universalism, which was the only available liberal humanist congregation. So this combined an abnormally high exposure to dippy, sentimental over-earnestness and cosmic mumbo-jumbo with an abnormally high exposure to people with an even lower tolerance for it than I ended up with (my parents and the other skeptics who often complained about the mumbo-jumboers and dippy huggers when given the opportunity).
Like, idk, growing up with the modern hippy-yuppie flavored liberal humanism framed by those angry Siskel & Ebert muppets.
Which I've never seen, actually. Maybe I should watch that.
Tumblr fandom reminds me of these groups of people frequently (though perhaps more of the similarity is coming from outside media-fandom-specific Tumblr). There's probably a longer train of thought here that hasn't finished percolating yet.
And I really should remember to watch those muppets. Or maybe Mystery Science Theater? I've never seen that either. In both cases, I sometimes forget I haven't because of gifs.
There isn't actually any tension, to my mind, between liberal humanist values and (a) atheism, (b) a skeptical worldview, or (c) a fundamentally pessimistic attitude, but all three of those things tend to be minorities (but sizable ones seething with resentment about periodic scolding by overbearing proponents of the Cult of Nice) in Unitarian Universalism, which was the only available liberal humanist congregation. So this combined an abnormally high exposure to dippy, sentimental over-earnestness and cosmic mumbo-jumbo with an abnormally high exposure to people with an even lower tolerance for it than I ended up with (my parents and the other skeptics who often complained about the mumbo-jumboers and dippy huggers when given the opportunity).
Like, idk, growing up with the modern hippy-yuppie flavored liberal humanism framed by those angry Siskel & Ebert muppets.
Which I've never seen, actually. Maybe I should watch that.
Tumblr fandom reminds me of these groups of people frequently (though perhaps more of the similarity is coming from outside media-fandom-specific Tumblr). There's probably a longer train of thought here that hasn't finished percolating yet.
And I really should remember to watch those muppets. Or maybe Mystery Science Theater? I've never seen that either. In both cases, I sometimes forget I haven't because of gifs.
