I don't mind if others believe there is something after life and hopefully it is a better place.

That shouldn't put off living in the present and making the best of it, but the great majority of the parishioners of the mainstream churches near to me seem to do that anyway.

For myself I would add my sincere hope that the various mongrels who make life awful for others eventually get their comeuppance.

Belief seems to have positive outcomes,

"Why Be Spiritual? Five Benefits of Spirituality
Spiritual people are gracious, optimistic, compassionate, and self-actualized"
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cant-buy-happiness/201302/why-be-spiritual-five-benefits-spirituality

OtB, I agree that spirituality is a positive thing in general. It is like an arbour for a grape vine that provides a structure which the vine can climb and take strength from.

However, if the arbor is rotten, it can collapse and leave the vine in a heap to rot. If that happens, even the shoots at the top won't last long, regardless of how plump their bunches were.

I think the organised religions, some more than others, are full of rotten arbors that have been painted up to look impressive but that have no real moral strength. It's time to think about ways to replace them with something more durable that will support the vines of humanity into the future.

The thing is that the rot always starts at the bottom, where the arbour meets the ground. If we do not have a good strong educational system that provides a proper moral basis to guide our decisions, we cannot hope to have a good strong society.

onthebeach,

Spiritualism defined as “search for something sacred”, as in the link you provided, is a good definition if one can agree on what “sacred” is.

To me it is not clear what they mean by spiritualism or spirituality. In my dictionary “spiritual” means “of, relating to, or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things” or “of or relating to religion or religious belief”. In both cases the religious context is implicit.

However, there is also “secular spirituality” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_spirituality) which is explicitly “godless”, without relation to the divine. ("Search for something sacred" seems to be something in-between the two versions, religious and secular.)

Both are valid approaches to spirituality, although “religious spirituality” is broader, in the sense that it encompasses all the experiences of “secular spirituality” plus the additional awareness (or assumption if you like) of being in the presence of Something (“the divine”) outside the Self.

Antiseptic,

An interesting metaphor. I don’t know what your experience with “organised religions” was but it was obviously different from mine. I grew up in a society, where atheism (as it was called, although anti-theism is a better description) was institutionalized. For us, the fact that spirituality, religion (Christianity) had an “institutionalized” history that dwarfed that of Communism, was an additional source of comfort and reassurance. [True, it also had a non-religious aspect: a formal expression of continuity with European tradition and heritage, so different from the imposed from above Soviet political culture.]

In spite of that, I like your metaphor. Here is another one - my story of the three little pigs, if you see spirituality as those flowers: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2909&page=0#66836.

.

Dear George,

.

I have just returned from a trip to Australia and take up from where I left off our discussion.

You wrote on 24 July:

“ Actually what I was trying to argue was that it is not the business of science to "prove" anything about reality, only to form theories that agree with observed phenomena, can make verifiable predictions and thus explain reality through these theories”.

This would seem to indicate that in the absence of any scientific evidence of the existence of a god or gods or any other supernatural entity, the way forward for science would appear to be to “form theories that agree with observed phenomena” such as the belief in such existence as well as the apparent need “observed” among large masses of humanity for such belief.

This, of course, is historically a domain of research occupied by the humanities though recent inroads in the domain have been made by so-called neurotheology scientists.

From all accounts, the human brain has yet to reveal all its secrets, including, perhaps, the origin of the god concept and its subsequent elaboration.

Future “verifiable predictions” promise to be interesting as well as the long awaited “explanation of reality” which scientific theories may possibly manage to provide.

That is not to say that I, for one, should expect anybody to change their minds on the subject, one way or the other, whatever science may happen to establish as a result of its research.

But having said that, I am not sure that I have correctly applied your definition of “the business of science” as you described it here.

.

from georges link..secular/spirituality
..<<..Spirituality in this context..may be a matter of nurturing thoughts, emotions, words and actions..that are in harmony with a belief..that everything in the universe is mutually dependent.>>

my issue is if its a matter..of institutional humanities
holding 'teachings'..creed limitations definitions interpretations..etc..

then who..is the science authoritative peer
to differentiate valid from error..

from georges link..i found this link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_But_Not_Religious

..<<..the word spiritual..came to be associated with the private realm of thought and experience..while the word religious came to be connected..with the public realm of membership in a religious institution with official denominational doctrines.>>..

yet the 4 gospels[proper]..[hold first person witness]..
should of themselves stand alone..separate from..the creed largely from paul'

<<..Zinnbauer and Pargament(2005) write that in the early 1900s psychology scholars such as William James, Edwin Starbuck, G. Stanley Hall, and George Coe investigated religiosity and spirituality through a lens of social science.[13]>>

where is their church?
preserving these holy texts?

<<..pirituality has emerged as a distinct social construct and focus of research since the 1980s. With the emergence of spirituality as a distinct concept from religion in both academic circles and common language, a tension has arisen between the two constructs.[13]

One possible differentiation among the three constructs religion, religiosity, and spirituality, is to view religion as primarily a social phenomenon while understanding spirituality on an individual level.[16]

Religiosity is generally viewed as being rooted in religion, whereas this is not necessarily the case for spirituality. A study of the differences between those self-identified as spiritual and those self-identified as religious found that the former have a loving, forgiving, and nonjudgmental view of the numinous, while those identifying themselves as religious see their god as more judgmenta..>>

George, thanks for that anecdote and for your own metaphor, which is addressing a somewhat different conceptual aspect of the topic - that of the way that individuals use the same raw materials differently depending on their perception of what is salient. Our Western model is very much that of the first two pigs, who cut off the pretty flower and were soon left with dead blooms to dispose of. They looked at their narrow self-interest instead of the whole picture. It's that narrow utilitarianism that has been so destructive socially.

It's also become entrenched as a model of doing research, with even PhD theses now exploring very small and tightly controlled topics, constrained by budget, time and publication demands, rather than by a search for novelty, which used to be the standard to separate a PhD from a Masters. I'm not sure precisely how the difference is defined today. As a result, people become narrowly focussed very early in their careers and have little incentive or even latitude to explore outside the bounds of their specialty. In a recent first-year lecture, for example, the work of Carol Gilligan was discussed and the lecturer made the comment that women are socialised to be nurturers in the second of Gilligan's 3 stages of female moral development. I spoke to her during the half-time break and suggested that it may be an evolutionary adaptation, which to her credit she did mention later in the lecture, but what interested me more, was that her reaction to my question about her own subject, which is developmental psych. She said "yes, cognitive and emotional" and disavowed any knowledge of evolutionary aspects, which seem pretty fundamental to understanding development at more than a cookbook level.

I'm not criticising her, she is obviously highly qualified and skilled in her field, but it does illustrate how knowledge is chopped ever finer.

We need more creative synthesis and that means we need to give people time and freedom to follow their curiosity, even down dead-ends.