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WillowOne's Positions

Spirituality

My Positions

  1. "Spiritual but not religious" describes a real set of experiences (awe, connection, transcendence, loss of self) attached to a false explanation (spirits, energies, a universe with intentions).
  2. I reject the explanation and keep the experiences, which are available to anyone with a night sky and a working brain.
  3. I do not describe myself as spiritual, because the word smuggles the explanation in with the experience. "Awe" and "wonder" do the same work without the invoice.

Notes

  1. What people mean. Around a quarter of American adults describe themselves as spiritual but not religious, and the proportion in Britain is similar. Asked what they mean, they describe states: feeling part of something larger, being overwhelmed by a landscape or a piece of music, moments of flow or of love in which the self seems to drop away, and sometimes the effects of psychedelics or meditation. None of this is in dispute. These are among the best experiences a human being can have, and they are well studied under the name of self-transcendent experience, with identifiable neural signatures.
  2. Where the claim creeps in. The trouble starts with the explanation. "Energy", "vibration" and "frequency" are borrowed from physics and used to mean nothing in particular (Equivocation). "The universe wants", "everything happens for a reason" and "I was sent a sign" are agency detection applied to coincidence. "We are all connected" is true at the level of carbon and false at the level it is meant. The experience is a fact about the experiencer; the explanation is a claim about the world, and it is the claim that fails.
  3. The feeling without the furniture. Carl Sagan wrote that science is not only compatible with spirituality but a profound source of it, and Albert Einstein spoke of a "cosmic religious feeling" that had no personal god in it. I accept the feeling they describe: the scale of the universe, the age of the light, the fact of being a temporary arrangement of matter that can know this. I would rather call it awe, because "spiritual" has been claimed by people who sell crystals, but the thing itself needs no supernatural account and is, if anything, diminished by one. A universe designed for us is smaller than one that was not.
  4. Spirituality is religion's successor product. It keeps the consolation, the sense of meaning and the community of the religious package and drops the doctrine and the institution (see The human need for religion). That is in some ways an improvement; it is also, as a matter of record, correlated with higher belief in astrology, psychics, reincarnation and alternative medicine, because the habit of accepting claims on the strength of how they feel is the same habit. Religion at least had a theology that could be argued with.
  5. The honest version is available. Watch the Perseids from a dark field, sit with a piece of Bach, hold a newborn, take a long walk with someone you love, learn what the Hubble deep field is a picture of. Then decline to add a story about what it means. The meaning is the experience (Meaning); the story is the part that gets you into trouble.

Sources

  • Pew Research Center, "More Americans now say they're spiritual but not religious", 2017; and "'New Age' beliefs common among both religious and nonreligious Americans", 2018
  • Yaden, D. B. and Newberg, A. B., The Varieties of Spiritual Experience: 21st Century Research and Perspectives (2022)
  • Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995), chapter 2
  • Einstein, A., "Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930

Also see