> Arguing over direction to preserve attendance may be pointless if you've built an organization around a fairy tale.
Doesn't matter. What other commenters here try to point out as well, a lot - if not most - organizations are built around one fiction or another. Some examples:
- Fanclubs, fandoms, convent attendees - those are literally communities built around fairy tales.
- Programming language communities - built around ever-changing artifacts of human imagination, they too have to deal with possible change of direction impacting attendance.
- Political parties - organized around some people's understanding of some ideas, + shitton of meaningless slogans that everyone interprets how they like. Exist mostly to self-perpetuate, as evidenced whenever any established party has anything meaningful to say or do; suddenly the official program takes second place towards what helps electability.
- Companies - the ultimate bubbles of meaninglessness, they in principle - and often in practice - exist as an ever charging group of people bound together by will to make money on ever changing product for ever changing market, lead by ever changing board.
I'd add nationalities, as there's plenty of crazy fiction going on in there, but they're at least usually bound geographically, so there's that.
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The point being, many if not most organizations are built around some fairy tale or other, and what an organization is built around rarely matters to anything. What matters is how strong the community is, and that's pretty much purely social factor, without any actual dependence on objective reality.
The difference being that religions lack the comfortable layer of detached irony that a modern fandom has. Star Trek fandoms don't insist that Star Trek is the genesis of human life and the only source of truth.
Yeah. But I feel that's just because that belief is not the part of their fandom.
When I look at people from $largeMainstreamReligion, I see people who will defend it as "the genesis of human life and the only source of truth" as a fact of the community you're supposed to accept. But then looking at their lives, they pay at best a lip service to the actual contents of that "source of truth", and instead only participate in the accepted traditions.
Basically, I feel that religions, fandoms, school associations ("I'm a Harvard Alumni"), etc. all work pretty much in the very same way.
You found some similarities between some groups of people. This just shows that some beings like to get together, based sometimes on common interests. Also bananas share 50% of its DNA with humans. So?
What's more relevant is the differences. Funclubs' purpose is fun, I presume. Programming is serving humanity, I have no doubt. Political parties are in a way like football, a gentlemen game played by thieves. Companies are far from meaninglessness, they serve clear organizational and legal and taxes etc purposes.
Religions (edit: I'm familiar with) are built on deception to control people, they are not like fanclubs, programming, companies.
Really, it's more useful to think of religion as a sort of memetic infection. While religion certainly has been used and in some instances/places still is being used quite explicitly to control people, most believers, and that includes most of the clergy, do themselves sincerely believe what they profess, and there is no intent to deceive, they are simply not competent at distinguishing rational beliefs from irrational beliefs, and often caught in a set of higher-order beliefs that make it difficult for them to recognize where their thinking goes wrong.
I agree completely with you and I don't think it contradicts what I said, more it completes it.
It looks like a viral infection, yes, that's how it spreads: an evil payload wrapped in good ideas. It's a tool to control people even if it's not used everywhere all the time, even if sometimes it's used for good. And finally, yes, the believers have no intention to deceive; they are the ones deceived and since most of them are essentially good people they naturally want to spread the "truth" by telling others about it.
I feel it's basically about how seriously people treat their fandom. For some people it can easily become a proxy for religious community. But that, again, is mostly detached from what is the "central object" of the community.
Doesn't matter. What other commenters here try to point out as well, a lot - if not most - organizations are built around one fiction or another. Some examples:
- Fanclubs, fandoms, convent attendees - those are literally communities built around fairy tales.
- Programming language communities - built around ever-changing artifacts of human imagination, they too have to deal with possible change of direction impacting attendance.
- Political parties - organized around some people's understanding of some ideas, + shitton of meaningless slogans that everyone interprets how they like. Exist mostly to self-perpetuate, as evidenced whenever any established party has anything meaningful to say or do; suddenly the official program takes second place towards what helps electability.
- Companies - the ultimate bubbles of meaninglessness, they in principle - and often in practice - exist as an ever charging group of people bound together by will to make money on ever changing product for ever changing market, lead by ever changing board.
I'd add nationalities, as there's plenty of crazy fiction going on in there, but they're at least usually bound geographically, so there's that.
--
The point being, many if not most organizations are built around some fairy tale or other, and what an organization is built around rarely matters to anything. What matters is how strong the community is, and that's pretty much purely social factor, without any actual dependence on objective reality.