Having grown up in the Unitarian church, It’s more that Unitarians don’t tell anyone what to believe and everyone in a UU church might have different ideas.
Churchgoers get moral guidance and philosophical discussion, communal introspection, and everyone knows they should go on their best behavior, bringing love to the congregation. Those things are fairly unique to places of worship, but there needn't be actual worship of God for them to exist, and that's something atheists tend to miss out on since not many other social groups/clubs have those qualities.
If you really want to get to know your fellow church goers, you’ll have a hard time passing as an atheist for long. Sooner or later you’ll be asked to lead a prayer, give ‘testimony’ to when you ‘got saved’, be tested on your working knowledge of the Bible in some way. And at a catholic church, there’s generally less close community beyond glad handing, but there’s a lot of ritual and recitation you’re expected to follow along with. On some level true believers will always be pinging you to determine your authenticity.
Maybe it's just me but I tend to lose interest in sports. That presents a dilemma. Either you have to attend something you are not interested in, or you stop hanging out with the people.
Like most things in life: You must be motivated by a need or really enjoy it. As you, sport do neither for me. As you get older working out will be more of a need and you find a good group of workout buddies and maybe a friend or two.
In Britain, Humanism was an early 20th century movement to try to bridge between the social benefits of church to - what was increasingly obvious to most people - the fallacies of legacy Christian doctrines.
It wasn't a total failure, but humanism never reached the mainstream.
Agreed, there is something unique about church. Maybe the spiritual and emotional aspect is too intertwined to separate. It is very easy to confuse emotions (i.e. feeling good about something) with spirituality when the two are very different.
Arguably humanism was an intellectually-driven pursuit. So it never crossed the chasm.
Growing up in Manchester, I found it was football that fulfilled the emotional and tribal needs of many of my peers.
Many people assume Britain and USA are the same. In many respects, that is true. But as to church and religion, they are poles apart. At least that was true in the nineties when I lived in USA.
I disagree people want less privacy. I certainly want more places to walk and exercise but not more people. Its a-shame some parks look like outdoor gyms. Keep it clean, safe and natural.
A lot, majority, of local parks in China cities, which are largely apartment living, have outdoor areas with various iron equipment like dips and pullup bars, rowing, basically calisthenics, and spaces for older people to do synchronised dancing or taichi. Benches (for sitting, not presses). Quite communial. A big positive if stuck in an apartment. But the park doesn't look like a gym and not a lot of the frames will be occupied, but if you want it, it's invariably there and pretty social; all free.
A park nearby has installed workout equipment along the trails. Basic outdoor swing-set type stuff but a real bummer when you want to enjoy natural scenery. Most parts of the trail are concrete slabs now instead of dirt...
It’s just gym equipment that’s designed to be durable outdoors. Kind of like jungle gyms but for adults. I’ve seen it in Cape Town, Milan, London, Auckland and always they are busy.
I have seen that, yes. Those jungle gyms are generally on a flat piece of grass that normally would be open and also relatively small. I thought it was more of a proper park - think full of bushes, trees, ponds, trails, birds etc. I haven't seen jungle gyms in places like that, which of course would be detrimental to the nature.
You can use something such as awair (https://www.getawair.com/) to track your indoor air quality (voc's, etc.).
In the first few weeks of owning one we realized if we leave our bedroom door open the CO2 is much lower while we sleep. Our quality of sleep has improved.
Any furniture we buy we always leave it out in the sun as long as possible to off-gas (release toxins) then leave it in the garage for a few weeks to further loose that new 'furniture' smell of chemical.
Its insane. I always hear that level of chemical is so low it has no negative effect on a person. But you add up all the low levels of toxic chemicals and they add up to something significant! Pesticides, detergents, personal products such as perfumes, hair dye, make-up.. oh gosh. The list goes on. People are drenching themselves in chemicals then take pills to mask the effects.
And its expensive to avoid these things, my family of three spend about 2K per month on food alone trying to eat healthy. Nothing extravagant, fruits, vegetables, and organic when it matters. Sure we could live on $400 with highly processed or fast food... but you feel terrible afterword. The longer you stay away from them the more sensitive you are to toxic food.
I always see Americans with these crazy quotes for healthy food. I'm very curious what you spend the 2k on.
Here are some prices for central Europe. Kg of rice is 1 euro. Kg of oats is 1 euro. Potatoes and other tubers and root vegetables, even less. Cherry tomatoes, maybe 4 euros per kg. Lentils, peas, chickpeas less than 2 euros per kg. Whole chicken maybe 4 euros per kg. Chicken breasts are like 7 euros per kg if you don't want to bother with cutting it up. I think meat in general is cheaper in the USA (but quality may differ).
Do you guys eat a literal ton of vegetables a month, or do we have different ideas of what healthy food refers to?
Food in other countries is so much better and cheaper. We stayed in Mexico for a few months (not saying I want to live there) and food was all organic and dollars. A bag of about 15 avocados cost $1-$2 dollars. In the US that will buy you maybe one avocado.
Dozen eggs = $5-$8
Bag of apples = $5
We have some food allergies such as sensitive to gluten (wife is celiac).
Two things broken in US (that are pain points for us now) - food cost and healthcare. I pay about $800 month for healthcare that is essentially a safety net for an accident ($5K deductible). I am not sure why universal healthcare is not viewed the same as public schools. Many people dont have children but still pay taxes for schools and education. I would probably pay less than $800/month in extra taxes for healthcare.
american here, $2K per month sounds like a pretty wild food budget for a family of three (one of whom is presumably a child). I spend $300-400 a month to feed myself, and I could cut that down a lot if I didn't primarily shop at whole foods. if you aren't focused on saving money, there are a lot of opportunities to spend extra money on stuff that isn't healthier (eg, prime NY strip vs flank steak, fancy aged cheese, high end butter/oils). the nicest version of something in a grocery store can be 2-3x as expensive and nutritionally equivalent.
> Its insane. I always hear that level of chemical is so low it has no negative effect on a person.
At some point lead in gas was "safe", lead in paint was "safe", asbestos was "safe". Safety is an afterthought, and in some cases I'd bet my left nut that the long term negative effects are even desirable : cause a disease, sell the cure, profit
Longer yes, healthier... Hard to judge. We weeded out a dozen nasty things, but got others in return, for which "chemicals" might be an explanation. Parkinson's and Alzheimer's come to mind here.
We were smart enough to add lead to fuel, so I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if something we mindlessly use today is actually super unhealthy too. People often seem to suffer "End of History" syndrome when judging these things. "Yeah we were stupid back then but today's scientists are smart."
If people try to avoid processed food, products containing a lot of suspicious "chemicals", use the washer's program that does an extra rinse-run and whatnot I don't think that's entirely unjustified.
Life expectancy is going down in the US, obesity is skyrocketing, &c. The foundations are collapsing while we're maintained alive by machines and pills. You can live healthier than ever if you consciously chose to, most people don't make that choice.
> And yet we live longer, healthier lives than humans ever have.
Do we?
> Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours.
The major medical advances have been sanitation, antibiotics, and vaccination, which have saved the lives of millions of children. We are otherwise much unhealthier than most people in the past, unless they were unlucky enough to grow up in times of famine, which was not common - though, in all fairness to the modern world, famine has been essentially eradicated altogether in advanced countries.
I should also mention, we dont eat out / order in food. our budget is probably not much higher than most once you factor in the restaurant/takeout/food delivery budget.
There must be a better way. I work on a project that does lidar scanning now to track construction progress and its a beast. Keeping up with the latest data is a huge problem (and this is not a tech problem, its a people problem). Issues are raised that are not really issues and so forth due to ever changing data in a project.
Image scanning is a stepping stone to true project tracking which I am hoping to work on next! Wish I could say more.
Gathering more than one progress data set separately is the only way to get a single data set. If you try a single measurement or combine them to early you will get [many] layers of people making stuff up and the further up you go the more nonsensical the data gets.
If someone has only half (or less) of the data to forge his lies out of the creative book keeping window is almost gone. Employees with 10-20 years of experience generate lies of undetectable mind blowing quality. I've seen people negotiate their way out of 100% of their job arguing they didn't have time for it.
This is so true and absolutely correct. The issue though is not gathering our data (progress) its comparing it against they're engineering drawing etc.. that are constantly changing on a file share that we never know about.
You want it geo-referenced? Good luck.. so you end up putting a bunch of people on the team working for them to get decent data which bloats your budget and then you look bad to client.
unitarians simply take the parts they like from every religion to form another.