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Originally Posted by Honza
Is it true that there are many people who do not actually believe in God who are spiritual? Maybe here lies the crux of the difference between religion and spirituality? Religion is a firm faith and belief in God. Spirituality is a spiritual practice which aims to help oneself and the human race (but God is not a necessity here).
I find that many people here at SF talk about spirituality but they often fail to include God. There are all sorts of methods mentioned which help this or that in the spiritual sense; but God is somehow omitted.
This is what strikes me about much mysticism - particularly Eastern mysticism. It talks of reaching enlightenment but it somehow circumnavigates talk of God.
I have faith and am a firm believer in God's existence. I'm not talking pure consciousness here or I AM; but rather a living breathing God. Much like a 'super-person'.
I think this may be the reason why I struggle with Eastern mysticism and the New Age.
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People today subscribe to what they call a more logical spirituality. Sometimes that path is more scientific than spiritual, sometimes it just focuses on the self and at other times focuses on helping others or the planet. No matter how you slice it, the logical spiritual path, sometimes is not that logical at all. For instance, some individuals will discount the existence of God, but espouse the idea that aliens seeded our planet with life; and are therefore responsible for all of the lifeforms on earth. With all the variations of different creatures, and all the different complexities of the different cells and DNA strands .... Wouldn't that make the aliens at least somewhat Godlike? Somewhere along the line, there had to be a first cause, and that first cause would have to be pretty high on the totem pole of beings in order to create all the complex lifeforms on even a single planet. But then, we must ask, where did those all those planets come from? And where did those high beings on the totem pole come from? Who seeded or made them? Eventually, we're going to get to an ultimate life form, that made every other life form possible. What is it? Where did it come from? Where did it get its intelligence? Hence a concept of God is not far from determining at this point, nor is it a far-fetched concept.
Secondly, we must look at the out of body experience, and the near-death experience. Enough research has been done on these topics in modern times, to cast much shadow of doubt over the old dying brain concept. Where do these consciousnesses go after death? What is the light that all claim to see and feel that they are part of? What are the beings of light and voices that speak to these consciousnesses? Why do people return from these experiences and say that they saw or felt the presence of God? It is obvious that we go somewhere after death, whom or what are we returning to? If we are our own gods,as some of the logical spiritualists believe, then are returning to ourselves? Are we returning to the aliens? Those possibilities don't even make logical sense. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that someone or something put us here, and when we finish our time on this earth, we return to that something or someone.
Some individuals believe that we are the gods who created this material world and then came here to learn. That again, doesn't make so much sense. If we were Godlike, and could create this material world and everything in it, then why in blazes would we need to come here to learn anything? Did we not have anything better to do? Were we like cosmic infants who had no clue about compassion, love and morality? So we had to create this elaborate playground and then expose ourselves to all kinds of hurt and harm in order to learn these things? Again, logically thought out, this just doesn't really make much sense.
So in the end, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a spiritual path that looks inward. Every reasonable spiritual path should encourage us to do that. I'm not saying that any concept of God would have to be the God of organized religion. Those are man-made gods that reflect the shortcomings and foibles of human beings. But to think this equation through, logically, without leaning too heavily on all of the miss information that we have been spoon fed by the new atheists and Company ... the idea and concept of God is actually just as logical, if not more so, than some of the other theories that are out there.
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