this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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I'm curious about this. I was raised somewhat religiously, but at this point, I can't imagine myself with religion, or spirituality, or any of it. Why do you think it's so essential?
One individual can live with religion or spirituality in religious form, but not humanity as a whole. There were experiments in totalitarian countries to violently exterminate religion, they didn't end up well. Usually it's brainwashing and freedom of conscience denial
Oh I'm certainly not advocating for forcing anyone to get rid of their religion (I'm not advocating for anything at all). It just struck me as interesting that you can't imagine a world without it.
I think it depends on how you frame 'spirituality'. Love for example can never be meaningfully measured empirically, it's a spiritual truth. You just know it. It cannot be reliably be proven or disproven, especially across different people.
I don't think the line between 'I truly believe in love' and 'I truly believe in god' is as crisp as people would like to believe. That's not at all to say they're the same thing, but they're more similar than a lot of people want to accept.
I personally don't think something is spiritual just because it can't be measured.
Of course, but from my perspective you almost certainly do need spiritual nourishment of your own, given my broader concept of the spiritual. Purely a matter of perspective.
Which is all to say when someone like me says people can't live without spirituality, it doesn't necessarily imply that they feel everyone needs to believe in some kind of supernatural power.
Interesting, how do you define spirituality?
Spirituality itself, as with anything spiritual, is a know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing. But that's an unsatisfying answer.
I do think 'the opposite of empirical' is a decent shorthand. The less a truth can be objectively defined, and the less consistent the nature of a truth is across different people, the more spiritual it is.
Enjoyment of music and wonder in the face of nature / the cosmos are two more spiritual truths I think most people know.
I would class those as psychological experiences, not spiritual ones. Just because we currently lack the tools to very precisely and objectively correlate brain activity with specific thoughts, that doesn't mean we can never quantify that at some future date.
This feels like a "spirituality-of-the-gaps". By this definition lightning was a purely spiritual experience until we figured out that it's electricity. Our lack of understanding on a subject doesn't make it magic, it's just something we don't understand yet, and that's ok. The laws of physics existed long before humans existed to describe them, and they'll continue to function long after we're extinct.
Correlating brain activity to thoughts is not the same as being able to distill love or emotional experience down to objective understanding. The difference is spiritual experience.
Oxytocin is a part of how people experience love, but it will never be possible to objectively assess whether someone is experiencing love by measuring it or any other physical quantity.
We can measure the wavelength of light and track how it stimulates cone cells and the brain, but we will never be able to measure the spiritual experience of color.
It is science that will always be chasing the 'gaps' in measuring spiritual experience. No matter how closely we can measure ourselves physically, the actual spiritual experience will always transcend it.
Trying even to describe spirituality at all is difficult because it's an inherently nebulous thing. It can only be known, never proven.
I respectfully disagree. There's nothing inherently preventing a future technology that's able to objectively measure personal experiences, since we don't have any evidence to suggest that thoughts and experiences happen anywhere other than physically in the brain.
Thus-far unobserved spirits are an unnecessary addition to the neurochemical processes we know to occur in the brain and know to drive thinking. By Occam's Razor, an evidence-based worldview must reject these unnecessary assumptions.
Also, no, science is not "filling gaps in spirituality". The claim that there are spirits is the positive case, and bears the burden of proof.
You assume I mean spirits that physically exist separately from people. I do not. You have missed my point entirely.
Even the simple question of what the experience of color is like is totally beyond empiricism.
Not everything has a scientific answer, and that's ok.
Oh, ok. I still think we might be able to measure such things in the future, but that's a much more defensible position. I don't see how that pertains to spiritualism tho, maybe there's a term that fits that better. Belief in qualia?
I'm not really talking about belief so much as the fact that people need nourishment in unmeasurable ways: love, wonder, etc. I don't think it makes sense to exclude that from spirituality. I have found that 'spirituality = supernatural' is unnecessarily reductive.
But, at the end of the day it's just individual perspective as to what constitutes the spiritual.
That's fair, I personally wouldn't use the word spiritual for those things either, but I think it just comes down to a difference of opinion.