Sincere question: when did you join JW, and what was your immediate reason for doing so?
The reason I ask is that there are a lot of people recommending churches (of various kinds) in this thread, and I take it most of the non-religious among us would very much not be comfortable regularly attending a religious organization's meetings purely for community, while not believing any the things that organization believes. (With the exception of religious organizations that are explicitly accepting of people with any faith, such as Unitarian Universalists.)
To me, it's sort of implicit in the question that what we are looking for is something you can show up to and get involved purely because you want somewhere to show up and get involved, without people side-eyeing you because of that or expecting something more than that (like a declaration of faith) in the months or years to come.
At least for Protestant Christian churches, there can be ambiguity about the purpose / audience of a church meeting.
Some meetings are intended as outreach to non-Christians. E.g., to present reasons for being Christian, or to let outsiders see what a typical worship service is actually like.
Some meetings (or parts of meetings) only make sense for actual Christians: singing worship songs, testifying what they believe God is doing in the world, or taking communion.
I think a lot of awkward discomfort stems from lack of clarity on these points, and confusion about which attendees are professing Christians.
I was raised around it but decided to become baptized at 19. I'm in my 40's now. Reason? Life, the world around me, and pretty much everything just made better sense. I feel secure and happy this way, and I like it. I'm plenty open minded, and I've studied other belief systems, but I made a conscious choice that I stick to because it makes the most sense to me.
Some people think that because many of us have left other ways behind that we're fanatical or something- nope, we just found something that makes more sense to us than anything else, and genuinely believe we've found the things most others are still looking for- meaning to life, answers to why things are the way they are, and a secure future.
We're welcoming of anybody who wants to visit and check us out. We expect that if somebody doesn't want to share in our beliefs that they'll probably move on, and that's fine. We aren't about membership, we're about showing people what the Bible says about things.
To that end, we've re-evaluated the Bible without any pre-conceptions, which is why a lot of other religious that believe in things like the Trinity or the immortal soul look at us as heretical or crazy. But, when we objectively looked at the Bible (KJV originally) we didn't find those things, so we don't believe them. Pretty simple really.
> we've re-evaluated the Bible without any pre-conceptions, which is why a lot of other religious that believe in things like the Trinity or the immortal soul look at us as heretical or crazy
The reason I ask is that there are a lot of people recommending churches (of various kinds) in this thread, and I take it most of the non-religious among us would very much not be comfortable regularly attending a religious organization's meetings purely for community, while not believing any the things that organization believes. (With the exception of religious organizations that are explicitly accepting of people with any faith, such as Unitarian Universalists.)
To me, it's sort of implicit in the question that what we are looking for is something you can show up to and get involved purely because you want somewhere to show up and get involved, without people side-eyeing you because of that or expecting something more than that (like a declaration of faith) in the months or years to come.