originally posted in:Secular Sevens
There's a pretty big disconnect between spirituality and religion. I'm most certainly an atheist, but I still feel a sense of spirituality.
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What the dick is 'spirituality' anyway?
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Edited by Ric_Adbur: 4/16/2013 2:40:09 AMI think the real problem here is that, since Humanity has avoided these discussions violently for the past 2 millennia, language tends to fail us as we explore these sorts of new intellectual territories. Those of us who, while not adhering to any religious doctrines or accepting any 'supernatural' explanations for observable phenomena in the real world, still feel a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, or major life events, or even just while relaxing and doing nothing at all - we have no recourse but to borrow our terminology for these feelings from existing sources. The problem arises in that religion has held the monopoly on these experiences for the entirety of Human history until now. So when we have such an experience, and wish to describe it, the only language available to us is religious or supernatural in nature; things like 'revelation,' or 'spiritual.' I think this is part of why people think atheists are all cold, robotic science machines, and not perfectly normal people who feel everything a person feels. When we say we reject concepts like 'spirituality,' or 'revelation,' we are referring to one aspect of these ambiguous terms that tend to have multiple meanings and multiple uses, but everyone else thinks we're rejecting [i]every[/i] possible sense of the term.
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spot on.
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I fully agree.