Atheist 'church'?

[Angrboda]

How does it make "it" more obscure? What does that mean? Or do you mean it makes it harder for what you mean when you say you are an atheist to be understood, and you'd rather avoid that specific misunderstanding? If it's the latter, I don't see how that's any less than what I said. Do you?

Well, I hardly feel like I'm "surrendering some of (my) autonomy and freedom to avoid false persecution," by not wishing to confuse religious folks further by naming a gathering by atheists a "church." I have zero problem standing up to them and do so comfortably and regularly. It isn't for my personal sake that I have a preference to avoid using the word, "church," in reference to atheist gatherings. It's because use of that term has specific meaning to many people -- particularly among the religious. So it gives rise to even more confusion among the religious than already exists. I see no reason to do that.

If it pleases you to think I'm just making things more comfortable for myself, then that's ok. You are certainly entitled to think it. But I don't feel the concept I'm conveying here is so difficult to grasp.

In the social psychological construct known as "minority stress," the stress that minorities of sexual orientation (or other minority staus) suffer is divided into two kinds, proximal and distal.

Minority status and distal stressors

The first tenet of minority stress theory holds that being in a minority group is associated with increased exposure to distal stressors, such as prejudice and discrimination. Indeed, despite significant improvement over the past several decades, numerous studies have confirmed that minority individuals continue to face high rates of distal stressors. For example, in large-scale national surveys, LGB individuals report high rates of prejudice and discrimination across the lifespan. One survey found that one-fourth of LGB adults have experienced victimization related to their sexual orientation, and another found that as many as 90% of LGBT youth report hearing prejudiced remarks at school. Similarly, up to 60% of African Americans report experiencing distal stressors throughout their lives, ranging from social rejection at school to housing discrimination and employment discrimination. In one study, 37 African American respondents recalled over 100 discrete experiences with racist prejudice in a two-year period. In another study, 98% of Black participants reported experiencing at least one incidence of prejudice in the past year.

Rates of exposure to distal stressors are much higher among racial and sexual minorities than among majority individuals. For example, LGB adults are twice as likely to recall experiencing prejudice throughout their lives compared to heterosexuals, and LGBT youth report significantly higher rates of prejudice and discrimination compared to their heterosexual peers. In one carefully controlled study, researchers compared rates of victimization among LGBT youth and their heterosexual siblings, and they found significantly higher rates of abuse among the LGB individuals. Comparing rates of perceived discrimination among African American and White individuals, researchers have found large differences in reports of discrimination: 30.9% of Whites reported experiencing “major discrimination” throughout their lives compared to 48.9% of African Americans. Similarly, 3.4% of Whites reported experiencing discrimination “often” in their lives, compared to 24.8% of African Americans. Thus, collectively, research suggests that minority individuals face frequent exposure to distal stressors compared to their majority group counterparts.

Minority status and proximal stressors

Proximal stressors are internal processes that are presumed to occur following exposure to distal stressors. Examples of proximal stressors include fear of rejection, rumination (psychology) on previous experiences with prejudice, and distaste for one’s own minority group following a prejudice event. Most research on this topic focuses on either sexual minorities or African Americans, and it is unclear whether the proximal stress processes are conceptually similar between these two groups. Thus, it is necessary to review proximal stress processes separately for sexual minority and African American populations.

Suppressing or disguising your identity is a form of proximal stressor in minority stress. We have a number of transgendered individuals on this forum. How much do you want to bet that they disguise or otherwise hide their transgendered status from people who would "be confused" by the concept of their transgender and want to treat them as less than full men or full women on account of knowing, in a confused way, that they are transgendered. Do you see that as healthy? I've been misunderstood as a bisexual and an ambi-gendered (aka gender queer individual) individual. Should I avoid doing things that might contribute to that misunderstanding, regardless of what they mean to me? Maybe I shouldn't wear men's clothing. Maybe I should learn to be more ladylike. Wouldn't wanna confuse the straights, now would we? Do you see the suppression of identity by sexual and gender minorities as dissimilar to what you are doing? I see an awful lot of parallels. Or do you just not see the value of an atheist church, so any negative is one bridge too far? But thank you for implying that I am too dull to understand concepts that aren't all that difficult to grasp.