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.
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.
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.
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.
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.