Hi Greenslade,

For your consideration:



First part true.
Second part conditionally qualified by the first part.
Third part false, or also conditionally true, but that's not the whole comprehensive truth of it.

Rather, it is spirituality that is inclusive of religion.

It just appears that spirituality 'comes out of' religion because for many and especially recently, religion has been a common and highly visible vehicle for human evolution, but that is changing...

God created and IS everything (including man).
Spirituality is the general ongoing process of enlightenment e.g., the evolution of/in the dynamic multiplicity REALIZING that all is God.

Life is the general process and the possibility of enlightenment beginning from ignorance and inconscience.
Human life is the potential for the inevitability of that realization, precisely because of the conscious deliberate approach by an intelligent will intrinsic to human life.
Therefore, Spirituality is God realizing Self, eventually in and through the human life.

Religion (which was at one time a radical departure in its own right) is a collective human institution which is a specific subsidiary form of Spirituality. In its various forms, it is a ‘stepping stone’ that has been a useful expedient to that evolutionary process during humanity’s infancy (which btw is largely over).
Accordingly…

Awakened individuals, i.e., now self-consciously aware of the Spiritual potential available within themselves,
are increasingly required to explore newer, more conscious, more deliberate forms of Spirituality in decentralized personal ways - self-initiated and intuitively directed - rather than assent by default to the imposition of external, uniform, conventional structures of ‘traditional’ religion, mostly inherited by region, family, tribe, nationality, etc., which will gradually diminish as a viable expedient as human beings evolve, and the culture 'globalizes'.

But still and all, spirituality is ever the general process of revelation and realization of true self-Identity,
especially when consciously and deliberately undertaken by human beings - which may include religion.
It's not an artifact or subset of religion per se, since spirituality precedes and supersedes religion, but religion can, does and has served as a conduit for an emergent spirituality during a phase of human evolution when that becomes conscious, personal and more self-directed.

In the future religion as we know it will not even exist...but spirituality will certainly persist.

~ J