Atheist 'church'?

[Angrboda]

It serves to allow otherwise marginalized people, atheists, to get together and share a sense of community and feel not so marginal. I see nothing wrong with that. Plus, it allows atheists to learn from and support each other (not everyone has this forum).

It's more the religious connotations that come with labelling themselves as a 'church' which pisses me off. And the fact they are trying to represent all atheists with this bollocks. Or at least they seem to be.

It's a double edged sword. That previous identification makes it easy to understand and resonates with pre-existing memes in a way that "atheist community center" or what have you does not. You can leverage that identifiability, or you can let the lack of a structured meme to use to bind people be your enemy. Personally, I see nothing wrong with rebooting the concept of a church to secular ends, the way the UU's rebooted conventional spirituality. And it seems more a reaction based on emotional revulsion than practicality to diss on using the church idea for atheism or humanism. I get together with a group of Buddhists for meditation in what they term a Sangha. The word Sangha typically refers to a community of monks. They've rebooted it to make the purpose of their organizing once a week to meditate both appealing in terms of traditions, as well as a way to communicate a lot of information about the weekly meeting without a lot of explanation. I generally dislike Buddhists, but this shared communal activity is something I'm glad to take advantage of. Am I repulsed by the fact that they call it a Sangha instead of something else? No, it served it's purpose in helping me find this group that shares an interest in deep meditational practice. And I've been to many "meditation groups" that were just amateurish introductions to meditation, designed to draw people in. If I have to choose that* kind of two tiered approach to just using the framework existing in the concept of a Sangha, I'll take the mild discomfort that I feel being part of an ostensibly Buddhist "community" when I'm not Buddhist and don't care for Buddhist religious beliefs. We share community without sharing belief. I could care less that some might misunderstand an anti-Buddhist Hindu being part of a Buddhist Sangha. It sounds to me like you prefer throwing out the baby with the bathwater, provided you dislike the bathwater enough.