Pretty sure my atheism rejects spirituality too–
I don’t believe in gods. I don’t believe in religion, organized or informal. But am I still spiritual? Can atheists be spiritual? This is a tough question to ask because spirituality is often very poorly defined, perhaps even less well defined than religion is. There are people who claim they are spiritual but not religious and I guess, depending on how they define things, that might be possible to reconcile logically.
But I still see some problems with this.
What I’ve noticed in reading on the subject is that people who make this distinction between spirituality and religion seem to saddle everything that’s bad with religion and everything that’s good with spirituality. Me, as an atheist, I guess don’t have a problem with associating religion with negative things but I’m pretty sure there are religious people who’d object to that.
The other thing I’ve noticed in reading about these subjects and growing up as the child of hippies, is that this sort of distinction really only started to become prominent in the rise of the New Age. And some might call the New Age just another religion, alternative though it may be. And it seems to be something mostly confined to the US and other Western countries so I don’t really know if Non-Western countries would observe the same distinctions.
But given those distinctions I suppose it’s possible for someone to be a Buddhist or a Hindu or Wiccan or whatever and still be an atheist. They don’t believe in gods, they don’t believe in organized religion but they are still spiritual.
But I think a more valid way to think about this is that spirituality is just another, informal and highly personal form of religion. It’s not organized or taken from organizations from the outside, it’s arrived at from within personal experience. But here’s the thing, my distinction still says spirituality is a religion even if one is making up for oneself. And one’s personal religion could still be just as rule-bound and straitjacketed as organized and traditional religion is.
But having said that, I think it’s possible for some atheists to be very spiritual yet still not believing a god or gods.
But that’s not the way I go. My atheism rejects spirituality as well as traditional religion and gods. It goes all the way. I suppose if we vaguely and only define spirituality as having feelings of emotional depth, resonance and deep meaning with or for something, maybe in that really vague sense, I could be called spiritual. But I’d much prefer to say instead that something, science perhaps, is something I like, respect and find deep meaning it. I would not say, I have a spirituality based around science because that strikes me as nonsense.
I reject things based around words like sacred, spiritual and so on because those words are laced with a lot of baggage that I, as a secular humanist atheist, just don’t want to associate myself with.
Anyway, I just figured I would clarify that bit to the Internet at large.
Hi Pace,
How’s everything? I saw something about Jeff and it made me think of you, so I looked up your web site.
You never mentioned in this discussion spending a large amount of your formative years surrounded by Catholics. Was that a factor in any way?
I notice that you have an extensive page on music, but you never mention that two entire albums of songs were written about you during your teen years. One tape has apparently been lost, but I have the other tape still. How can we forget, “Down at Pace’s Bar and Grill,” Pace’s Stomach Has Never Seen the Sun,” “As Pace Lay Dying in the Forest from the Fungus Between His Toes,” and all those other great songs? Also, you never mention the pinnacle to date in the series of songs about Pace. Of course I’m referring to “Hot Pace Funk,” which was always one of our best received songs, even though most people had no idea what we were singing about. Anne Marie came to see us once at the Maple Leaf Grill, and she was laughing through the whole thing.
I think your web site needs an anthem, or at least an official song, and clearly it should be Hot Pace Funk. What do you say? If you need a copy of it I can send it to you, but I’m sure you have a copy squirreled away somewhere. Don’t be embarrassed – it’s a cool song, and your alter ego needs to be known.
I hope all is good with you,
Jon
No, it wasn’t growing up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood. I’m pretty sure the roots of my atheism go back further than that, to before I moved up to Washington in 1974. I could cite several key examples from my early childhood where I began to smell a rat. I just didn’t have the brain hardware in place yet to articulate it properly until I was in my teens.
My alter ego has many, many incarnations, any one of which would appreciate the awesomeness of “Hot Pace Funk!” But, out of all those nutty tunes you and Jeff composed back in the days, my most favorite was “Down at Pace’s Bar and Grill.”
As you may know Jeff’s on FB now and, under duress, so am I.