Solderpunk shared a link to an article on getting your attention
back [0], I agree it was not very insightful. But it made me think
of how digital books can sometimes impact attention negatively, at
least for me.

The bane of e-readers and digital books is that there is too much
there. Instant access to more books than one could ever read. I have
perhaps 20 books in various stages of completion on mine, and I find
it difficult to read just one, night after night. I want to
constantly see what else is available. So I decided to take a
different approach while traveling back to the States for this past
holiday weekend. I picked one book - a physical book - that I wanted
to read and brought it along. That's it. I figured over the course
of three days I wouldn't need to read anything else, and that was a
good strategy. I suppose a non-internet connected e-reader would
also work the same way, if you were careful not to dump too many
books on it at once.

c25l talks about perspectives on atheism [1]. I think the
reactionary form is sometimes called 'hard atheism', in that it
takes a fairly hard stance against religion, to include belief in a
god or gods and the associated actions of a religion's adherents
(Christopher Hitchens was a good example of this). A softer form of
atheism is more true to the dictionary definition - as in "I'm
atheist and so don't believe in god", and it pretty much stops
there. However I don't think the two perspectives are mutually
exclusive, they exist on a continuum. Also, if religion did not
exist, hard atheism would just default to the softer variety, but I
agree that in some sense it relies on religion to exist, in the same
way the civil rights movement in the 60s relied on racism and civil
rights abuses to exist - it was a reaction to them. It's not a
completely accurate analogy, since there are some aspects to
religion that are beneficial, most notably the community aspect that
c25l mentions. Still, the idea that hard atheism is a reaction to
religion is accurate, but not necessarily bad.

Communities can form wherever people have something in common, they
keep us as humans connected to others and provide friendship and
support. From that perspective there is nothing special about
religious communities. My wife has been part of a bike-riding
community for years, she has made lasting friendships and has had
some great support since her mountain bike accident and concussion
last year. I'm part of a tabletop gaming group that provides some of
the same social benefits, I started it five years ago to share an
interest, but it has grown in other ways since then. So I'd ask c25l
what void he or she is trying to fill? Answering that might help.

[0] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/article-on-attention.txt
[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~c25l/phlog/20171223-atheism.txt