Spirituality and Atheism. What does it mean to you? (quotes, believing, service)
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I operate under the Thai system where pronouns are not as specific to gender.
Ha, but seriously, I wish we had an non-gender-specific pronoun, although "they/them" is taking over for the transgendered, and I noticed that FB uses it for everyone.
The question of what spirituality means to me came up in another thread - so I'm starting a thread about it so as not to derail the other thread (thanks cb2008).
We have discussed this over on the A&A forum many times but it's been a while, and perhaps there are people who think atheists either can't be spiritual people or don't believe in spirituality, so let's discuss.
First of all, you can define yourself what you think spirituality means.
Honestly I don't feel qualified to define what it means in the traditional religious sense of the word, and being an atheist that wouldn't be how I would understand it. I can only speak for myself.
To me spirituality is simply anything that lifts me up. To expand on that by example it is anything that brings me joy or a sense of oneness or respect or beauty in the universe or my immediate environment. I'm a very visual person. When I say the word 'universe' (and I find myself using that word a lot) I'm always actually visualizing the universe in color to I suppose the extent my human brain can visualize something like the universe. A vast blackness of space with millions of bright galaxies swirling within it.. Even saying the word 'universe' to myself fills me with a sort of calm and I can feel myself breathing differently. It's hard to really describe but it's a similar feeling to the one I get when I see my kids sleeping. The closest I can describe is similar to that feeling you get when you are deeply in love.
I'm an artist so the other things that pop into my mind a lot are particular scenes that I see that sort of flash by: A red mountain with red light reflecting off it; A white and blue mountain top on a clear day. An ocean just before sunrise and all the accompanying sounds.
I only recently discovered that there is a condition called aphantasia which means that some people cannot visualize anything in their minds eye. I'm the opposite. I visualize things clearly. I plan things in my head. Anyway, this is a convoluted way of explaining that these thoughts bring me a sort of oneness with things that make me feel my place within the universe and it brings me joy.
Now I know other atheists that will dismiss all that as complete hogwash. Our recently passed poster called Grandstander always disagreed with me on this. He didn't believe spirituality was a thing at all. I do miss my arguments with him about it.
Please help me help our theist friends, by sharing your perspective on spirituality and how it fits with atheism (or not as the case may be).
Okay, I'm going to try my best to address your questions, but I suspect I may fail miserably. I get what you're saying about spirituality being "anything that lifts you up." Where I disagree is that I don't believe our brain, as an organ, in and of itself, is wired to respond to "uplifting" things. I see being "uplifted" as being a response of the spirit, the immaterial life force that connects us to a Creator. We listen in awe to a Beethoven symphony or catch a spectacular sunset at the exact moment when it is at its peak or feel a little baby grasp our finger with his fist or just feel an inexplicable feeling of love for someone else. To me, these things are proof of God's existence because they elicit feelings I don't see the brain itself as generating. The ability to recognize beauty is, to me, something that goes deeper than is explained by speaking of electrical impulses to the brain, the release of chemicals into the bloodstream, etc. There is also, for many people, a feeling of a link with the divine; this was the case before religion was really even a part of human culture. So yes, I think an atheist can experience spirituality; I just think the atheist fails to recognize the uplifting feeling as coming from a spirit created by God. I hope this explanation of mine doesn't offend anybody. It's just how I see it.
Okay, I'm going to try my best to address your questions, but I suspect I may fail miserably. I get what you're saying about spirituality being "anything that lifts you up." Where I disagree is that I don't believe our brain, as an organ, in and of itself, is wired to respond to "uplifting" things. I see being "uplifted" as being a response of the spirit, the immaterial life force that connects us to a Creator. We listen in awe to a Beethoven symphony or catch a spectacular sunset at the exact moment when it is at its peak or feel a little baby grasp our finger with his fist or just feel an inexplicable feeling of love for someone else. To me, these things are proof of God's existence because they elicit feelings I don't see the brain itself as generating. The ability to recognize beauty is, to me, something that goes deeper than is explained by speaking of electrical impulses to the brain, the release of chemicals into the bloodstream, etc. There is also, for many people, a feeling of a link with the divine; this was the case before religion was really even a part of human culture. So yes, I think an atheist can experience spirituality; I just think the atheist fails to recognize the uplifting feeling as coming from a spirit created by God. I hope this explanation of mine doesn't offend anybody. It's just how I see it.
Okay, I'm going to try my best to address your questions, but I suspect I may fail miserably. I get what you're saying about spirituality being "anything that lifts you up." Where I disagree is that I don't believe our brain, as an organ, in and of itself, is wired to respond to "uplifting" things. I see being "uplifted" as being a response of the spirit, the immaterial life force that connects us to a Creator. We listen in awe to a Beethoven symphony or catch a spectacular sunset at the exact moment when it is at its peak or feel a little baby grasp our finger with his fist or just feel an inexplicable feeling of love for someone else. To me, these things are proof of God's existence because they elicit feelings I don't see the brain itself as generating. The ability to recognize beauty is, to me, something that goes deeper than is explained by speaking of electrical impulses to the brain, the release of chemicals into the bloodstream, etc. There is also, for many people, a feeling of a link with the divine; this was the case before religion was really even a part of human culture. So yes, I think an atheist can experience spirituality; I just think the atheist fails to recognize the uplifting feeling as coming from a spirit created by God. I hope this explanation of mine doesn't offend anybody. It's just how I see it.
I think you did a fine job of explaining your view of spirituality, Katz. I find it hard to imagine anyone taking offense at it. Although I generate offenses so easily, I am probably not a very good judge of what triggers offense. As a former atheist, I nonetheless had a concept of spirituality as the experiences only my consciousness could have. Things like music and melody are separate and distinct from what comprises them. Music and melody involve composition and sequencing of notes that acquire what I would call a spiritual character that engenders experiences that are above and beyond their mere constituent physical vibrations. Milic Capek describes music as similar to cosmic becoming which mirrors my spirituality as a theist. As Capek suggests,
Let us consider a piece of music . . . It is hardly necessary to underscore its successive character. As long as its movement is going on, it remains incomplete and in its successive unfolding, we grasp in the most vivid and concrete way the incompleteness of every becoming. At each particular moment, a new tone is added to the previous ones. . . The quality of a new tone, in spite of its irreducible individuality, is tinged by the whole antecedent musical context which, in turn, is retroactively changed by the emergence of a new musical quality.. . . Every musical structure is by its own nature unfolding and incomplete; so is cosmic becoming, the time-space of modern physics.
Arthur Schopenhauer captured what I consider the spiritual aspect of music in the following excerpts from The World as Will and Idea,
. . .in its language, which is understood with absolute directness, but which is yet untranslatable into that of the reason, the inner nature of all life and existence expresses itself.
. . . As quick transition from wish to satisfaction . . . is happiness and well-being, so quick melodies without great deviations are cheerful; slow melodies, striking painful discords, and only winding back through many bars to the key note are, as analogous to the delayed and hardly won satisfaction, sad.
. . . The short intelligible subjects of quick dance music seem to speak only of easily attained common pleasure. On the other hand, the 'Allegro maestoso,' in elaborate movements, long passages, and wide deviations, signifies a greater, nobler effort towards a more distant end, and its final attainment.
. . . All that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, . . . always according to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon, without the body.
. . . According to all this, we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing, which is, therefore, itself the only medium of their analogy, so that a knowledge of it is demanded in order to understand that analogy.
While Schopenhauer's sensitivity enabled this discernment, he was unable to employ his own mandate that "a knowledge of it is demanded in order to understand that analogy." His highly philosophical approach was the only way he could support what he knew to be true, since contemporary physics was unknown to him. Today it is obvious how music and nature are "two different expressions of the same thing," once a knowledge of Quantum theory is employed. After all, music is merely waves of sound at varying frequencies, and matter is merely waves of energy at varying frequencies.
This is why now as a theist, I tend to consider my Spirit to be my consciousness. Unlike you, Katz, I don't see my spirit as preexisting me. AS most now know, I see it being inseminated by God at my physical birth in a specific area of the cosmos (consciousness of God) and developing as a fetal Spirit throughout my life. I expect to be reborn as a newborn Spirit upon my physical demise.
Okay, I'm going to try my best to address your questions, but I suspect I may fail miserably. I get what you're saying about spirituality being "anything that lifts you up." Where I disagree is that I don't believe our brain, as an organ, in and of itself, is wired to respond to "uplifting" things. I see being "uplifted" as being a response of the spirit, the immaterial life force that connects us to a Creator. We listen in awe to a Beethoven symphony or catch a spectacular sunset at the exact moment when it is at its peak or feel a little baby grasp our finger with his fist or just feel an inexplicable feeling of love for someone else. To me, these things are proof of God's existence because they elicit feelings I don't see the brain itself as generating. The ability to recognize beauty is, to me, something that goes deeper than is explained by speaking of electrical impulses to the brain, the release of chemicals into the bloodstream, etc. There is also, for many people, a feeling of a link with the divine; this was the case before religion was really even a part of human culture. So yes, I think an atheist can experience spirituality; I just think the atheist fails to recognize the uplifting feeling as coming from a spirit created by God. I hope this explanation of mine doesn't offend anybody. It's just how I see it.
I look at a more pragmatic view. I am an atheist, so it has to at least has match the science. Imagine in a forest.
If you just look at loosely held valance shell electrons and you saw them as white dots. You would be in a sea of white dots moving all around. they would not be in a fixed location. they come into you, in you, through you, and out into the world again. they literally would pass through you like wind through a screen.
Now look in you. Like all the life makes a forest. all the non living parts in you (there is not one piece that is alive in any cell) work together to make you. If I take you apart and will not find you. does that mean you don't exist?
I have to zoom out. I zoom out until the parts working together form a "thing". At first its you, then its the system around you, then its the planet. I zoom in and out until I can identify an "object". One that anybody else would identify. I stop there just because its not empirical past that.
everything in our volume of space acts more like a unit than individual pies. that just the facts. I as an atheist wish I could tell people it was bull. Its just not. My spiritualty comes understanding my place in the reality stack. Its really an infinite reality stack. The cosmic web is an information pathway. It can be said, Just like neurons are a information path way.
that is what my atheist spirituality means. We might just be in a living system and some of us feel that aliveness. I apologize too for the the lack of ability to write.
I look at a more pragmatic view. I am an atheist, so it has to at least has match the science. Imagine in a forest.
If you just look at loosely held valance shell electrons and you saw them as white dots. You would be in a sea of white dots moving all around. they would not be in a fixed location. they come into you, in you, through you, and out into the world again. they literally would pass through you like wind through a screen.
Now look in you. Like all the life makes a forest. all the non living parts in you (there is not one piece that is alive in any cell) work together to make you. If I take you apart and will not find you. does that mean you don't exist?
I have to zoom out. I zoom out until the parts working together form a "thing". At first its you, then its the system around you, then its the planet. I zoom in and out until I can identify an "object". One that anybody else would identify. I stop there just because its not empirical past that.
everything in our volume of space acts more like a unit than individual pies. that just the facts. I as an atheist wish I could tell people it was bull. Its just not. My spiritualty comes understanding my place in the reality stack. Its really an infinite reality stack. The cosmic web is an information pathway. It can be said, Just like neurons are a information path way.
that is what my atheist spirituality means. We might just be in a living system and some of us feel that aliveness. I apologize too for the the lack of ability to write.
Science accepts the Big Bang theory without it being empirical truth. Do you include the Big Bang when you evaluate what parts of reality match known science?
Science accepts the Big Bang theory without it being empirical truth. Do you include the Big Bang when you evaluate what parts of reality match known science?
The first sentence here is not stated well at all. You need to look up the definition to understand what a theory is.
Okay, I'm going to try my best to address your questions, but I suspect I may fail miserably. I get what you're saying about spirituality being "anything that lifts you up." Where I disagree is that I don't believe our brain, as an organ, in and of itself, is wired to respond to "uplifting" things. I see being "uplifted" as being a response of the spirit, the immaterial life force that connects us to a Creator. We listen in awe to a Beethoven symphony or catch a spectacular sunset at the exact moment when it is at its peak or feel a little baby grasp our finger with his fist or just feel an inexplicable feeling of love for someone else. To me, these things are proof of God's existence because they elicit feelings I don't see the brain itself as generating. The ability to recognize beauty is, to me, something that goes deeper than is explained by speaking of electrical impulses to the brain, the release of chemicals into the bloodstream, etc. There is also, for many people, a feeling of a link with the divine; this was the case before religion was really even a part of human culture. So yes, I think an atheist can experience spirituality; I just think the atheist fails to recognize the uplifting feeling as coming from a spirit created by God. I hope this explanation of mine doesn't offend anybody. It's just how I see it.
Very well said, though not for the first time. The answer to which (as usual) is that No, I do not see it as proof of a god to appeal to beauty, uplift etc. It wasn't even when there was no explanation for them as just a product of the mind. I think (just as was the case for morality not too many decades ago) there are hints at why we may have such instinctive feelings as an evolved survival trait. I'm not saying it's 'all sorted out', but the possibility that there is a natural (rather than divine) origin and purpose for these feelings (particularly the response to the stuff that babies do to our heads) can't be any means be ruled out.
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