What are your definitions of spiritual aspects of living, spiritual studies, spirituality, etc. But not using just the study of religion as an answer. It was suggested by an atheist below that this term cannot defined, so why study what cannot be defined.
To me it is an all encompassing term that covers many areas outside of the body but will have to give it more thought today.
What is “spirit”? Without knowing what you mean by the word, one can’t
know what you mean. What do you mean by “agnostic”? In philisopical
discussions, it means that you believe the nature of something is
unknowable. It does not mean that you aren’t sure.
No, I just don’t know and have not found anyone that has the answer
that has convinced me.
Why study something for which you not only have no evidence, but not even a definition?
For the sake of argument I could accept the first part of your premise, but not the second. “Life force” could be trancendental without being everlasting. I don’t see much reason to accept either part as being likely; that is to say I’ve never seen compelling reasons to think that’s the case.
At the same time, I think we all want to believe we’re not just a temporary container of meat and bones, that we’re something more. I’d like to believe that.
I would agree. Why do you suppose we all want to believe that? Did someone a zillion years ago come up with the idea, and it just stuck, or is it more complex than that?
I’d say it’s simpler than that. We’re: 1) self aware and 2) self centered. The fact that we’re aware of ourselves and our mortality, and desiring to continue it in perpetuity, makes such a desire inevitable, I would posit. We’ve been raised to believe we’re all rare, beautiful snowflakes, irreplaceable. Religion also helps fuel this myth. It’s hard to imagine not being, after becoming so used to existing. We have a natural psychological need to contextualize this problem.
I agree that the popular Judaism, Christianity and Islam are a long way off from what I would call “spiritual movementsâ€, but you can’t really generalise. I think that we have to accept the state of mankind as being “sinful†in the sense of being at odds with the promise that he has in him, which does seem to blind him to certain truths that would be a release from his self-inflicted bondage, and of course wrong religion can be an example of such bondage. However, you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater – which again seems to be a human habit.
There is also a difference between the teaching of presumptuous pupils and the spiritual beginnings. God doesn’t answer in the way a man would, because God isn’t a man. God is a no-thing that denies the possibility of being portrayed in images, and we are left with the ineffable Mystery, echoing out of a timeless void from whence life and order itself at one time came forth. The ineffable Mystery is the divine Hypothesis of creation, the font of reason and purpose and the hope of every generation. The ineffable Mystery is a finding more than an invention, a startling discovery which suddenly reveals itself something like when we discover a new star at night and suddenly it fades in the light of the day or is hidden behind clouds, leaving us waiting to detect it again.
These discoveries needed a form of transportation, and Myth is the timeless mode of story-telling, used by experts who can differentiate between the important and the trite. Of course these stories are written by men and address human issues; there is no information about the reality behind the ineffable Mystery, but these stories are inseminated by the revelation of a truth which pulsates or shines out of eternity and show a development of human thought before it was broken off in the modern. With regard to his own spirituality, humankind seems to have been moving backwards for some time.
Our one connection anything “spiritual†is our own mind. Our subjectiveness makes it impossible to dispense with the notion that there is a moreâ€subtle†dimension to the phenomenal world. The behaviorists, e.g. B.F. Skinner, tried to develop a mindless psychology and failed.
Our mind is a clue that there may be an inwardness to things that is not accessible to our senses. My inwardness suggests that other beings may have inwardness that I cannot perceive directly The evolution of the human mind is evidence that even inanimate matter has the potential for life and thought.
The dictim “know thyself†speaks to speaks directly to the idea that there is more to the world than can be observed directly. Since I am a universe unto myself, every other subjective being may be a universe onto itself, at least potentially. If the notions of mind,soul, psyche and/or spirit mean no more than this, they must be retained for us to be fully human.