catbonny: Thanks for your comments. I really need to get to a Quaker meeting. I feel a reluctance to do so that I don’t really understand.

John: Thanks for your comments. I think you are absolute right–there are a lot of, if not most, communities which do not draw hard lines. And community does not need to be, itself, hard defined–any group of interconnected people becomes community and even though in my post I tried to distance myself from the idea, even small groups of friends are community and, in fact, some of the most important community.

Zenaida: Thanks for your comments. Especially this one: “I find that in a lot of ways, I am as marginalized as I choose to be.” I find this idea very moving and it’s giving me a lot to think about. When I feel lonely, or like I don’t belong, often I come to the realization that it’s all in my head. I truly believe that most people are good and compassion goes much longer and farther than being able to repeat a motto and creed. The bond between people is not in shared doctrines but in shared values.

It’s impossible to predict how things will develop in the future, but I am encouraged by people’s willingness to be open to new ideas and love me even when I am challenging their world view. It is odd to me how I spent almost two years feeling so distant and cut off from all those people, including my family, while I was still very much in the thick of things and on the outside, everything seemed to be business as usual. Now that I’ve been able to be more open with them and with myself, I feel very connected to them, even if our ideas are so divergent.

It’s very hard to get me to commit or identify myself with a group. I’ve never had a bumper sticker on my car. Ever. I always seem to have one foot in and one foot out to try to maintain an “objective” point of view. So, being able to feel connection to community is a big deal for me. (Please see blog post: http://the-exponent.com/2008/05/22/the-mormon-who-would-be-atheist/ )

When I read Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” I came across the idea of people who are social connectors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connector_%28social%29

It really appealed to me, and since then, I’ve striven to increase that tendency in myself. Maybe the communities that I’m a part of would have formed without my efforts, but it felt so difficult to overcome people’s emotional inertia.

I never joined a cult, but I did go to Caltech, which is close. They put us under emotional stresss, give us bad food, messed with our sleep schedules, isolated us from our previous support structures, told us how to think, and made us have sex with the charismatic leader.

Well, maybe not the last one.

I don’t think you -need- to give up anything to feel like part of a community. Only really weird ones demand that of you. There are lots of communities that don’t fit the either-or model.

This makes me think about being part of a community of pretty strong evangelical Chrisians, and a community of undefinied and very accepting and tolerant Quakers.

My initial conversion into Christianity definitely made me very exclusive. I lost my best friend in fifth grade because she wouldn’t convert, and I thought I couldn’t associate with her.

I guess what I am trying to say is that it feels good to be a part of community that is so undefined belief-wise (other than by it’s values), tolerant, and accepting. I appreciate that being a part of a new faith community doesn’t alienate me from my former faith Christian faith community, it just encourages me to understand them more.

I am not trying to plug Friends as much as saying thanks for this post… it has me thinking a lot about my current community.