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by crent 9 days ago
Equating a belief in gods with spiritual discovery is also a take.
1 comments

Belief in spirits is just as absurd as belief in deities, which are just a specialized category of spirit as far as these things are usually classified anyway.
spirituality doesn’t have to mean you believe in spirits in the sense of ghosts etc. I believe that if that’s where the definition of exploring one’s own inner world ends, then that person has missed the point.
If you don't mean to suggest you believe in some strange metaphysics without any grounding in reality, why do you call it spirituality? What "inner world" are you "exploring"? Can that be done in plain language without any mysticism? Why or why not?
we are monkeys following logic that was determined by other monkeys. our experience of reality is equivalent to that of a brain in a jar. blind belief is blind belief whether placed in science or religion. breaching the gap of blindness necessarily involves a leap to test ideas with personal faith. such a notion is not necessarily compatible with an atheistic perspective insisting reality is solely that which may be verbally quantified by monkeys. a dog knows to sit on command but has no idea about the concept of sitting, does that make the concept of sitting unreal?
I can see how they mean "the search for the unknown" in itself is already some sort of spirituality.
It doesn't have to be. Searching out the unknown is seeking out new knowledge, seeking to diminish ignorance. You don't need to believe in higher powers or anything like that to search for new knowledge. Spirituality is a shortcut to a unverifiable, unfalsifiable knowledge that some explanation for phenomena exists, but not at all the kind of thing anyone actually interested in truth or expanding their own knowledge would use to explain anything.
I agree that "metaphysical" and "unverifiable" are traits of spirituality, as i understand the word. I consider theorem and animism to be categories of spirituality, but not the totality of it.

I describe myself as a humanist, and to me that approximately means a spiritual existentialist with no belief in spirits. From existentialism you can, of course, reach nihilism, a philosophy that is not so much wrong as unhelpful. But existentialism doesn't teach that there is no meaning; it teaches us that meaning is whatever we want, and it's important because we say it is important. From there you can end up back in any school of philosophy you want, but with a grounding that's compatible with living on a ball of rock hurtling through space.

Militant atheists like you are almost as insufferable as militant theists
Or you could you know, answer the question…
I don't believe in any "God". I believe that only the universe is any "supreme being". Is that woo? Maybe. But it helps me be kinder than any religion seems to teach others.
There's an XKCD for that! https://xkcd.com/774/
You think asking for explanations and evidence makes someone a "militant atheist"?

What do you call yourself? A militant woo-merchant?