Question by Jei: Why does one think that an Atheist cannot be spiritual?
Spirituality may include introspection, and the development of an individual’s inner life through practices such as meditation, prayer and contemplation.
Spirit in the sence of ‘essence’ implies that spirituality also is how you deal with the ‘essential’ in life. The metaphysical includes deeper realizations about the relationships between things – it is non-physical, but not necessarily supernatural (cosmology is a part of metaphysics for example). Buddhism, Taoism, and ancient Greek Stoicism all have worldviews which need not include supernatural realms or transcendent phenomena. If you have a path that is sacred, and disciplined on the more profound things about Nature and life, has ritual, and so on, but is all based on a naturalistic understanding of the universe – that is spirituality as well.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirituality
You never contemplate or look at relationships? The conscious mind? None of these things are physical. It doesn’t mean you have to believe in a deity.
@G C you did not answer the question. How is the fact that I have deep thoughts, contemplation, introspection, I think about my life and where it’s going, and where I want to be, that I meditate to relax myself to reach mental clarity, and constantly question the things I see and have philosophical standpoints, although I am an Atheist, not make me spiritual?
So when I die I rot in the ground, yet I am connected to the world in which maggots will live and feed off of me, and enrich the soil, so the grass can grow, and the animals can feed, thus making me a part of the world, and I see myself when I am alive as being a part of this big abstract concept of the universe. Still not spiritual enough for you?
Best answer:
Answer by Donna, GO YANKEES!!!
Well, I’m not spiritual at all.
What do you think? Answer below!
Many atheists shun the notion of spirituality.
You’ve made your point well and I agree.
Because theists like to think they can have a dig at atheists by saying you can’t be spiritual or have any hope is another unless you believe exactly what they believe.
And then you die and become dirt.
Good luck with that.
religions hijack our capacity for spiritual experience and then claim it as their own, therefore by their logic anyone that is not religious cannot have spritual experience, which is demonstrably false but they like to keep telling themselves that
Being good is defined by God, not culture. How can they be good if they do not know God? What is good in this culture is horrible in that. Culture is fickle and no place to determine what is good or evil. There must be a law upon which we can rest our understanding. God has written that law so that we may know what is right and wrong, no matter the culture.
I have a natural understanding of the universe. which says the universe and I are connected. God created both it and I, and he imparted some of himself in me in the process.
To know you and the trees, and the sidewalk are all made of the same heavy elements that account for all the physical substance matter in the universe is not spiritual, its science.
To acknowledge we are connected and created of the same substances because its by design of a creator is spiritual.
Even Yogi believe in a source from which all things emanate, and that there is the physical and spiritual planes. That is spiritual. Self introspection is not spiritual, it is simply looking into ones self, mind, attempting to activate the subconscious, but acknowledges no other being or essence. How can you have a spirit if all there is, is you. Spirit does not decay, only the physical does, atheist claim at death its all over, end of story.
Because they have no insight.