“Why do we (atheists) need a ceremony for anything? It’s like trying to play the religious at their own game, when we know that there is no game.”

Why are you assuming that rites that serve to celebrate/acknowledge milestones in life [i]have[/i] to be ‘religious’ in nature? What’s so terribly confounding about perhaps wanting to participate in such rites despite having no belief in the supernatural?

ceremonies for births and deaths

Ceremonies for birth? What for? Atheists don’t need to say grace before a meal …

ceremonies for births and deaths

Why do we (atheists) need a ceremony for anything? It’s like trying to play the religious at their own game, when we know that there is no game.

Slow news day, I suppose.

Correct me if I’m wrong but, UU’s still believe in the supernatural. That won’t work for me. I would like community w/o the supernatural.

Okay, I’ll correct you. UUs are creedless, meaning they demand no shared doctrinal beliefs, supernatural or otherwise. Most but not all UUs are non-theistic. They are organized around seven very admirable humanistic principles.

As for UUs being the automatic answer for these parents, as one commenter has already noted, many still find them too churchy-liturgical-ritualistic.

I wonder if our New England Unitarian Universalist congregations are just not meeting humanist family ministry needs or if something else is going on here that we don’t know about.

My understanding (from the minister of my UU church wayyyy out here on the west coast) is that the New England UU churches indeed have much more of a Christian-church flavor (in fitting w/ their long history as mainstream US churches in their neck of the woods).

Not that a bunch of humanists etc couldn’t join the established structure of one and focus on their own reasons for being there. That would completely fit w/ the 7 UU principles (in which “spiritual growth” can totally mean “growth of community” and/or “skeptical inquiry for ourselves and our kids”).