You can't kill the spirit

[dormant_dragon]

Here's a question I've been wanting to throw open to discussion for quite some time. What are your views on spirituality? Note that this is distinct from religion - my personal view is that organised religion is just an attempt to curtail human spirituality and keep it within controllable boundaries.

That aside, as anyone who has been reading my journal lately will be aware, I am about as much of an atheist as an ex-Christian can be - that is to say, my daily existence is ungoverned by any consciousness of the presence of any God. Even in those moments where I fancy that it's possible there might be a god, the god I imagine is nothing like the god represented in the Bible.

However, I do continue to wonder if there is a spiritual aspect to the universe. I know part of this is based on a very deeply-ingrained desire to believe that death is not the ending of myself, or of any other person. I'm not sure what kind of evidence would convince me either way as to the existence of souls. What I do feel certain of - what I have always felt certain of, even when I was a committed Catholic - is that if there is indeed a spiritual aspect to the universe, that it is all-inclusive, or at least common to all life. I've never bought into the idea that humans are specially created with souls that no other animal possesses.

So, what do others think?

Comments

[alamark.livejournal.com]

I consider it to be a sad reflection of our times that despite our increasing freedoms and liberties, we feel uncomfortable talking about religion and spirituality. Apart from the fundamentalists, of course. I don't think they have much going on in the "feeling" department...

Anyway, someone once said it takes more courage to believe that death is the end than to believe in an afterlife. I guess it's because if they're wrong, they're screwed, and if they're right, they'd better not make a hash of their lives or they've blown their one and only chance!

If death is The End of us, what a sad and frightening thought that is!

If I live my life according to my spiritual beliefs, if I'm wrong and there is no afterlife, well I've denied myself some pleasures, but I will have made some people happy.

I believe religion is a necessary thing for mankind, but not for God. God doesn't need rituals, prayers and things; WE DO!

People need to be able to label, categorise and explain the unknown to themselves because their minds have difficulty in grasping something that is unknown and unknowable.

When we talk about something, it forces us to formulate thoughts coherently in our minds before speaking. Before we do that, we usually have half-formed thoughts and ideas swirling around in our mind. Similarly, we need our religions to be spelled out in detail because our minds don't work well with acting on half-formed ideas.

Obviously, religion is a great tool for the megalomaniacs to flog the masses with to achieve their ends, but we still need it on some level.

Every single large group of people over time has felt the need to have some explanation for how they came into being, from the Dreaming, to Genesis, to evolution. We have a real need to know, but how we come by that knowledge varies widely.

For the record, I'm Greek Orthodox. I'm open to reading and hearing about other faiths, (aside from obvious scams like $cientology...)

I have this saying about Catholicism: Orthodoxy was narrow-minded first! ;)

(Actually a lot of people don't realise Orthodoxy is frequently consensus-driven in structure and operation, but that's another story...

Anyway, hopefully my ramblings made some sense! Maybe I should post them on my own LJ...

[dormant-dragon.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your thoughts :) I have to admit that I'm inclined to agree that we are hardwired to need some form of spirituality, some form of belief in things that are not just the things we can see and touch. Apart from belief in an afterlife, there are plenty of things that people aren't prepared to deny the existence of - such as spirits, magic, supernatural stuff - no matter how rational we like to think we are. It used to be that such things filled in the gaps in our knowledge about how the world works, but it seems that now that we know a lot about the laws of physics and so forth, there is still no direct evidence that these other things don't exist - it's just that there's no conclusive evidence that they do exist, either. There's still room for belief.