Spirituality and atheism..

[Jane_the_Bane]

What are your thoughts on atheists being "spiritual" or attempting to be "spiritual"?

I guess it all depends on how you define "spiritual". If you stick to the historical (and, in parts, contemporary) usage of "belonging to the (Christian) church", then it will be nonsensical. But I'd say being "spiritual" just signifies an engagement with matters of the "spirit", or soul, or psyche. No belief in a deity or deities needs to be involved there (just as you can be religious without being a theist, see Buddhism).

For me, spirituality is all about looking inward (and sometimes outward), about finding connection to a larger frame of reference beyond the needs of the economy, society, or the entertainment industry.

 

[dzheremi]

I don't think so, structure and ground rules are pretty important for spiritual output. Not sure how much I'd have to talk with a wishy washy Christian.

Then why are you here?

In all seriousness now: Would be be fair then to say that you'd rather talk with a committed Christian of whatever type regarding this sort of question? I wonder why, if the point is to have some kind of spirituality that is devoid of religion specifically (but maybe I've misunderstood your OP), as the practicing Christian would almost certainly be practicing a religion (assuming they're not of the modern "Christianity is not a religion" type, who drive me batty), and hence view spirituality inextricably from that point of view.

Like me...I can talk about this stuff all day every day, but I'm never going to understand or endorse any kind of 'contentless' spirituality, as though the point of spiritual life is whatever we make it. That may be the reality (hence some people are of X religion, some of Y, some of Z, some apparently of none, etc.), but I wouldn't be a very good non-wishy washy Christian if I accepted all of these things on an equal basis just because they are in some sense 'spiritual'. There are, after all, in the traditional Christian way of thinking bad spirits that can be unknowingly called up in this way, and it is better to reject an angel unawares than to accidentally welcome a demon.

So I don't see how a talk with a committed Christian would necessarily be any more beneficial than one with a wishy-washy Christian. Seems like both of them would be an irritation to you in different ways.

I guess it goes back to my not understanding on what basis or for what reason an atheist would be 'spiritual'. What spirit is there that is generic enough to not be tied to a particular religion, yet specific enough to catch the interest of the non-theistic? Why not just put on an Enya CD, have a cup of coffee, and feel good about life in a general sense? Is that what atheist 'spirituality' is, or conceivably could be?

I'm sorry. I really don't understand this topic.

 

[Carbon]

@MehGuy

Your lost spirituality should in theory be recoverable without religion. Spirituality is after all just a category of subjective experiences, which reduce to states of consciousness, instantiated by electrical signals in the brain. No magic or gods required, even when the subjective observer believes they are required.

Depending on which kind of spiritual experience you are referring to, we may or may not already have a good secular pathway to that experience to replace the former religious pathway. Lots of smart people are working on reverse engineering spiritual states and have made some good progress.

To know for sure we would need to better explore the corners of your prior experience. Can you expand on what you mean when you say your spirituality boiled down to empathy? What were you usually doing, or what was externally happening, when this experience of spiritual empathy manifested? What did theistic belief contribute to the equation? Intuitively I would think empathy is available to anyone with or without a belief in gods, so I assume the god belief added some extra and indispensable element for you personally.

Eventually as neuroscience and psychology mature, I suspect we will develop secular pathways not only to replace everything lost from religion’s decline. We will also discover exponentially more pathways to new states of consciousness never before imagined.

For all we know the total set of possible pleasurable brain states, including ones you would call spiritual, is a thousand orders of magnitude more awesome than the set of brain states we currently know about. Understanding and eventually creating all of those states on demand, utterly transcending anything religion ever provided and much more, is simply an engineering problem, a matter of technology. Treating your quest like a science experiment, for example by exploring some of those questions above, you might discover a new secular pathway to the same destination. Or at the very least you will have contributed some valuable experimental data for the next atheist-empathy-spiritual-type.

 

[Occams Barber]

I guess it goes back to my not understanding on what basis or for what reason an atheist would be 'spiritual'. What spirit is there that is generic enough to not be tied to a particular religion, yet specific enough to catch the interest of the non-theistic? Why not just put on an Enya CD, have a cup of coffee, and feel good about life in a general sense? Is that what atheist 'spirituality' is, or conceivably could be?

I'm sorry. I really don't understand this topic.

If I was caught agreeing with a Christian I would probably be kicked out of the Atheist World Domination Club but...

I'm 100% with you (well... apart from the demon bit). I do not understand this insistence by some atheists that they are in some sense spiritual (but not religious). By definition spirituality is related to concepts of soul or spirit. A sensible atheist doesn't admit to owning either.
OB

 

[dzheremi]

If I was caught agreeing with a Christian I would probably be kicked out of the Atheist World Domination Club but...

I'm 100% with you

That's okay; I won't tell the other atheists.

 

[dlamberth]

By definition spirituality is related to concepts of soul or spirit.

I partly agree with your definition. Being spiritual, yes is related to the "awareness" of spirit in some manor. But not necessary to Soul. About also spirit, or Soul for that matter, need not be associated with deity.

 

[Occams Barber]

I partly agree with your definition. Being spiritual, yes is related to the "awareness" of spirit in some manor. But not necessary to Soul. About also spirit, or Soul for that matter, need not be associated with deity.

Outside of a religious context I have no idea what spirit or soul might refer to. I think there's a danger of confusing a metaphorical use of the terms with the literal meaning. There's also a tendency among non-theists to redefine terms like 'spiritual' to mean practically any intense feeling. This can tend to render the word meaningless (like 'love')

As far as I know I have never experienced 'spirituality' but, since I don't know what it is, I may not recognise it when I see (or feel?) it.
OB

 

[dlamberth]

Outside of a religious context I have no idea what spirit or soul might refer to. I think there's a danger of confusing a metaphorical use of the terms with the literal meaning. There's also a tendency among non-theists to redefine terms like 'spiritual' to mean practically any intense feeling. This can tend to render the word meaningless (like 'love')

As far as I know I have never experienced 'spirituality' but, since I don't know what it is, I may not recognise it when I see (or feel?) it.
OB

I can hear the disagreement. But I'll say it anyway, in it's simplest form, the awe one "experiences" when catching first sight of a rainbow is a spiritual experience. For even that brief moment a person is taken out of their selves while in wonderment. I think we tend to make the spiritual world harder and more mysterious than it really is.

 

[MehGuy]

@MehGuy

Your lost spirituality should in theory be recoverable without religion. Spirituality is after all just a category of subjective experiences, which reduce to states of consciousness, instantiated by electrical signals in the brain. No magic or gods required, even when the subjective observer believes they are required.

While no magic or Gods are required for spirituality, a certain mindset still does.

Depending on which kind of spiritual experience you are referring to, we may or may not already have a good secular pathway to that experience to replace the former religious pathway. Lots of smart people are working on reverse engineering spiritual states and have made some good progress.

Like Sam Harris? I'm happy to see atheists trying to find ways for other atheists to tap into "spiritual" processes, sadly I don't think we'll ultimately get very far.

To know for sure we would need to better explore the corners of your prior experience. Can you expand on what you mean when you say your spirituality boiled down to empathy?

Spirituality seems to largely boil down to putting a theory of mind into lifeless matter and concepts. Humans are an incredibly social species and much of our emotional happiness comes from emotional empathy which allows us to connect with others. The same applies to everything else. Nature can be emotionally filling when you put a theory of mind into it, or looking at the night sky.

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Atheists probably heavily engage in this as well, unless you're a psychopath it's probably impossible for the brain to fully disengage from spirituality. ​

What were you usually doing, or what was externally happening, when this experience of spiritual empathy manifested? What did theistic belief contribute to the equation? Intuitively I would think empathy is available to anyone with or without a belief in gods, so I assume the god belief added some extra and indispensable element for you personally.

I'm not sure how much I want to get into that. My empathetic spectrum heavily leads on the sadomasochistic side, and my spiritualty deeply reflected that.

I will say though, perhaps those who's empathy is low on the sadomasochistic spectrum do not run into as many problems as I do. Unless you're an immoral monster, sadomasochistic empathy can be hard to come by. My Christianity upbringing was just a super conductive outlet for it. Keep in mind it's a religion that heavily preaches persecution and for many glorifies suffering.

Eventually as neuroscience and psychology mature, I suspect we will develop secular pathways not only to replace everything lost from religion’s decline. We will also discover exponentially more pathways to new states of consciousness never before imagined.

Yes, transhumanism. Sadly I'll either be really old or most likely dead before the becomes a reality.

For all we know the total set of possible pleasurable brain states, including ones you would call spiritual, is a thousand orders of magnitude more awesome than the set of brain states we currently know about. Understanding and eventually creating all of those states on demand, utterly transcending anything religion ever provided and much more, is simply an engineering problem, a matter of technology.

Keep in mind that can also go in the other direction. I imagine there will be beings in the future who will endure unimaginable pain and suffering. So much so, that it might be better if humanity is wiped out before that can happen.

Treating your quest like a science experiment, for example by exploring some of those questions above, you might discover a new secular pathway to the same destination. Or at the very least you will have contributed some valuable experimental data for the next atheist-empathy-spiritual-type.

Yeah, I've had that mindset pretty much since becoming an atheist.

 

[Occams Barber]

I can hear the disagreement. But I'll say it anyway,

LOL. I think you're getting to know me too well.

in it's simplest form, the awe one "experiences" when catching first sight of a rainbow is a spiritual experience. For even that brief moment a person is taken out of their selves while in wonderment. I think we tend to make the spiritual world harder and more mysterious than it really is.

See - this is what I mean by redefining a word to the point it becomes meaningless. 'Awe' is 'awe' - as far as the dictionary is concerned it doesn't mean spiritual. OK - as a linguistic nerd I know that dictionaries have their limits, but you've managed to mash the two words together and stretch their meanings. This happens all the time with words like spiritual. If I were to say that I find that eating custard is a spiritual experience you would rightly question my usage of the word but this is exactly what happens (and what you just did with 'awe').
OB

 

[dlamberth]

If I were to say that I find that eating custard is a spiritual experience you would rightly question my usage of the word but this is exactly what happens (and what you just did with 'awe').
OB

Actually, I wouldn't question your custard eating spiritual experience at all. I'd be all for it.

But your a human being, that "awe" experience, we all know what it's like. It's not a mystery. With the Rainbow and the 'awe' experienced as a spiritual event, poets write about it, song's are sung, myths created, cool videos made, there's alot there.

I think it's about being aware of what goes on inwardly. Those who explore spiritually look inward at what happens there. Spiritually is a human consciousness thing. It's a verb. Not a noun.

 

[MehGuy]

The capacity for emotional empathy is just greater with a theistic outlook. It is pretty easy to match the power of being surrounded by thousands of empathy vessels at a rock concert with just simple spiritual mediation.

I have had and will continue to have some power empathetic connections with others as an atheist, but I did greatly lose a great engine for processing empathy. Especially the kind of empathy my brain is hardwired to process.

 

[Occams Barber]

Actually, I wouldn't question your custard eating spiritual experience at all. I'd be all for it.

But your a human being, that "awe" experience, we all know what it's like. It's not a mystery. With the Rainbow and the 'awe' experienced as a spiritual event, poets write about it, song's are sung, myths created, cool videos made, there's alot there.

I think it's about being aware of what goes on inwardly. Those who explore spiritually look inward at what happens there. Spiritually is a human consciousness thing. It's a verb. Not a noun.

I dunno DL - if being spiritual is like eating custard then I'm left wondering what all the hooha is about. I doubt that our Christian friends would accept your comparative description of what, to them, seems to be an experience of great moment and mystery.

Then again, they may not have come to appreciate the psychical intensity of a nice bowl of vanilla custard.
OB

 

[MehGuy]

Yeah, I don't see what's so spiritual about enjoying food. Then again, everyone's brain is wired differently. There are tons of spiritual experiences my mind could never tap nor understand.

 

[Occams Barber]

Yeah, I don't see what's so spiritual about enjoying food. Then again, everyone's brain is wired differently. There are tons of spiritual experiences my mind could never tap nor understand.

In your first post you talked about the 'excellent spirituality' you had as a theist. As you might have seen from my posts I have no clue what spirituality means - or even if it exists.

Can you describe what you mean by 'excellent spirituality'.
OB

 

[MehGuy]

In your first post you talked about the 'excellent spirituality' you had as a theist. As you might have seen from my posts I have no clue what spirituality means - or even if it exists.

Can you describe what you mean by 'excellent spirituality'.
OB

Very intense spirituality, pretty much feeling euphoria during all my waking hours. As far as it existing, I'm an atheist so I have no reason to think it wasn't just coming from my brain. As far as what I think spirituality is, my empathy example is the best I can come up with.

 

[Occams Barber]

Very intense spirituality, pretty much feeling euphoria during all my waking hours. As far as it existing, I'm an atheist so I have no reason to think it wasn't just coming from my brain. As far as what I think spirituality is, my empathy example is the best I can come up with.

If 'spirituality' is a feeling of constant euphoria then it's something I've never experienced. You now seem to think it (the euphoria) was something 'just coming from your brain'. Do you have any idea why you were always euphoric?

I have had and will continue to have some power empathetic connections with others as an atheist, but I did greatly lose a great engine for processing empathy. Especially the kind of empathy my brain is hardwired to process.

Why do you think that being an atheist makes you less empathetic? Is it just you or do you think that atheists in general are less empathetic than theists?
OB

 

[MehGuy]

If 'spirituality' is a feeling of constant euphoria then it's something I've never experienced. You now seem to think it (the euphoria) was something 'just coming from your brain'. Do you have any idea why you were always euphoric?

I explained why a few posts ago. I understand if you didn't read it.

Why do you think that being an atheist makes you less empathetic? Is it just you or do you think that atheists in general are less empathetic than theists?
OB

I don't think it effects the ability to be empathetic with other people. They just can't channel that empathy into mysterious supernatural beings.

 

[dzheremi]

I'm religious, but it's definitely not a source of constant or even intermittent euphoria for me. I dunno...maybe I'm not doing it right. Hahaha.

Also, if all of this is just chemical reactions in the brain or whatever, then why would you name it 'spiritual' at all? You don't consider it a spiritual experience when you crave something sweet, experience tiredness, or do anything else that can also be found to be the result of similar chemical reactions in the brain, do you? And when basically everything is or can be explained in those terms, it seems like there's less and less of a reason to name it in any other fashion.

I know Sam Harris and others have talked about the problem of a lack of language to express the range of human experiences without appealing to religious terms, so maybe that's what is at play here, but I think it's a bit more basic than that. Spirit, after all, originally meant something like "animating principle", and thus while it often probably went hand in hand with invocations of God or gods (the linked page does include 'breath of a god' as one of the extended definitions of the Latin), I guess it could be at least conceivable that someone could believe in such a thing without subscribing to any one particular god...except that, again, with the new understanding that everything is a matter of internal biological/chemical reactions, wouldn't you sort of be forced to declare those reactions to be your 'spirit' (animating principle), since there is no external force to believe in/thank/pray to/acknowledge for them?

So I still don't understand why atheist 'spirituality' would be labeled as such. Again, I'm going to assume that you don't call any other biological process 'spiritual' in the 'filled with awe' sense that was offered by another poster here. Even if you watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos all the time and stare at the stars in awe every single night, you're probably not in a constantly enraptured state at the realization that you are breathing and your heart is beating and all the other stuff that just sort of happens as part of being alive. If you are, you should probably see a therapist, because it seems like that would get in the way of actually living your life.

 

[MehGuy]

I'm religious, but it's definitely not a source of constant or even intermittent euphoria for me. I dunno...maybe I'm not doing it right. Hahaha.

Also, if all of this is just chemical reactions in the brain or whatever, then why would you name it 'spiritual' at all? You don't consider it a spiritual experience when you crave something sweet, experience tiredness, or do anything else that can also be found to be the result of similar chemical reactions in the brain, do you? And when basically everything is or can be explained in those terms, it seems like there's less and less of a reason to name it in any other fashion.

I know Sam Harris and others have talked about the problem of a lack of language to express the range of human experiences without appealing to religious terms, so maybe that's what is at play here, but I think it's a bit more basic than that. Spirit, after all, originally meant something like "animating principle", and thus while it often probably went hand in hand with invocations of God or gods (the linked page does include 'breath of a god' as one of the extended definitions of the Latin), I guess it could be at least conceivable that someone could believe in such a thing without subscribing to any one particular god...except that, again, with the new understanding that everything is a matter of internal biological/chemical reactions, wouldn't you sort of be forced to declare those reactions to be your 'spirit' (animating principle), since there is no external force to believe in/thank/pray to/acknowledge for them?

So I still don't understand why atheist 'spirituality' would be labeled as such. Again, I'm going to assume that you don't call any other biological process 'spiritual' in the 'filled with awe' sense that was offered by another poster here. Even if you watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos all the time and stare at the stars in awe every single night, you're probably not in a constantly enraptured state at the realization that you are breathing and your heart is beating and all the other stuff that just sort of happens as part of being alive. If you are, you should probably see a therapist, because it seems like that would get in the way of actually living your life.

Personally I don't like using the term "spiritual" as an atheist.. I just use "empathy". I don't know what else the use of a "spirit" is but to empathize with it.

I just use the term "spiritual" when I want to try to communicate with other likeminded atheists.

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