I guess not all atheists are strict materialists, and I don't intend to alienate everyone that counts themselves among our ilk simply for advocating terms such as "spiritual." However, I'd like to share a cautionary tale. I was a Christian about 25 years ago, and it took me about 10 yrs after that to be able to wean myself from all woo-woo. Most notably I started practicing Zen Buddhism, because it allowed me to practice something, anything, that wasn't overtly religious, but yet allowed me to project my uncertaintly about spirituality into the cosmic void.
The Japanese form of Zen Buddhism per Dogen (13th Cent.) taught by Shunryu Suzuki seemed to provide a very agnostic view of the universe, and allowed me to have some sort of practice (whatever that exactly means). In the end, though, I realized that what I was doing was in fact trying to supplant one type of religion for another. More specifically I saw that I was indeed projecting my last shred of doubt and fear about the truth of atheism.
There is something to the conjecture of anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists that we seem to have evolved to think in religious terms, that we seem to be built to want to have experiences that allow us to take part in forces that we don't understand and assume to be part of ultimate causation. So we now have to ask ourselves whether or not the sort of awe of the universe that some have been advocating (sometimes called Einsteinian, because he seemed to endorse this) or the connectedness even atheists might feel to the grandeur of the cosmos is simply not the same sort of projection that I mentioned earlier. I still feel this awe as The Spiritual Atheist does at the complexity of life and magnificence of the workings of the universe, but is it real? Is there some woo-woo left in me as well?
Read about the Spiritual Atheist at http://www.spiritualatheist.co.uk/
I completely agree that we are built to think in terms of religion, but something I have begun to learn is that we are also built to be very social creatures. I think part of the spirituality that I am looking for might just be a quest to expand my social horizons as much as possible, to experience as much of other people and there experiences as I can.
ReplyDeleteIt is also about trying to become as familiar and understanding of myself as possible. I feel that there are parts of my mind I don't understand and things about me I want to unlock, and the level of understanding i seek can only really be described as spiritual!
It's a fair cop.
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