I agree with your observation that religion and spirituality are fundamentally different. We've already touched on this earlier in the thread. Religion -- e.g., Christianity or Islam -- consists of fixed dogmas which are unexperienceable and unverifiable and must therefore be accepted on faith whereas spirituality without religion is simply a recognition of deeper, more occult levels of reality and may involve an open-ended exploration of the paranormal/nonphysical without fixed ideological assumptions. This is the fundamental difference which separates the two.Pixel--Dude wrote: ↑August 13th, 2022, 8:42 amI'll kick off with the basics. Spirituality is different to both Atheism and Christianity. It elevates the individual to the position of potential god rather than an accidental spawn of some primordial soup or a servant to an authoritarian god. Although proponents of spirituality do have their own gods and goddesses with which we hold in reverence.
Unlike Christianity, a religion for the collective with set doctrines and rules, Spirituality is more about the individual. It is about expanding your own consciousness and general growth of one's self. It is the purpose of everything to grow and flourish and the human soul is no different.
Unlike Atheism, which is a belief system that reduces the human being to a biological machine and consciousness is nothing but a series of chemical reactions in the brain, Spirituality is a belief system for those who recognise that the human body is nothing more than a vessel for our soul to experience and navigate the material world so that we may grow through those experiences.
Christian fundamentalists for example assert that human beings are born into sin but that believers may be redeemed from the supposed wages of sin (i.e., death and hell) through faith in the blood sacrifice of Yahweh's firstborn son Jesus and will be resurrected into the "New Earth" at the end of time; however, as I've explained before, none of these things can be experienced or verified -- not even by believers -- and merely constitute abstract concepts which exist in the collective imagination of theologians and churchgoers. Any thinking rational person has absolutely no reason to believe that any of this stuff is really happening since it has no empirical or experiential basis. Christianity's core theological doctrines have no foundation at all in the real world. There's really no reason to believe in that religion other than a desire to do so or a personal affinity to its belief system. But a personal affinity doesn't equal truth.
Spiritual people on the other hand may experience deeper, more occult levels of reality and things that are generally regarded as supernatural or outside of immediate material reality such as qi phenomena, Kundalini, distance healing, encounters with nonphysical entities, or a near-death experience with veridical perception and come to the conclusion that such things exist and are part of a much greater spiritual realm or the creation of some greater intelligence, but without limiting ourselves to dogmatic and unempirical doctrines. I myself have had direct experience of qi phenomena and Kundalini (albeit the latter in a very negative context) as well as distance healing and a few other paranormal phenomena but I'm not forced to interpret them through a fixed ideological prism like Christians are. Rather my conception of spirituality and the deeper, more occult levels of reality is open-ended and able to accommodate new data and experiences. I believe that this kind of approach is much healthier than the closed dogmatism of organized religion.
Religious fundamentalists often criticize the spiritual-be-not-religious types like ourselves as people without consistency or otherwise assert that we simply wish to deny Christian doctrine in order to justify our participation in "sin" but this is just them projecting their own preconceived cultural notions onto others. What they fail to recognize is that some of us have a high level of conscientiousness and value truth and the open-ended investigation of reality and therefore cannot simply accept baseless dogmas just because they are popular with society or a certain community.
As for atheism, I observe that it works in a way that is very similar to that of organized religion. Like Christianity or Islam, the modern atheistic worldview is also a closed dogmatic ideology and is based on nothing more than abstract assumptions despite all of the tubthumping on the part of proponents of scientism about it supposedly being scientific. I could go on for longer about this but it would simply mirror what I've already written about organized religion.
That's all for now. I'll come back later to talk about some other points.