masukuma wrote:we are products of our environment and that implies the times you live in as well. Religion to me is a way of living. mostly a code to follow. that dictates to a large extent what is right and what is wrong and if wrong what the punishment is to be (and sometimes who will do the punishing). that is always fairly easy to master and hack. the concept of an all seeing eye that watches your every move and keeps records of wrong and good deeds is also a common theme. Spirituality to me is OTHERNESS... it's what the first humans who became conscious had... the thought of this "otherness". We feel it and think of it and philosophize about it. Perhaps it's a product of a brain that crosses a certain threshold in development and sometimes it's "detection" is similar to how a radio "understands" radio waves that are invisible to the naked eye and "makes sense" out of it! Perhaps spirituality is a dimension that can only be "realised" or "comprehended" by highly complex brains. perhaps our brains are just cross that threshold and we are able to tell there is something "other" than what we detect with our 5 senses and measure with our instruments. but we cannot quantify it. perhaps the complex brain prerequisite explains why roaches don't give a shit about the passing of their compatriots. I tend to however think that it's more a product of the brain as opposed to it being a realization simply because if it was a realization based on the multiple diverse and conflicting ways we comprehend spirituality! or perhaps it's a case of the blindfolded touching elephant and describing it - we are all describing the same animal but different aspects of it. If you think of it - most people you know who are great adherents of a certain religion - they have hacked the "religion" bit! they don't do A and B and do C as required. Their fixation right now is on the spiritual aspects... "the chills giving" aspect of spirituality! the one that tries to make sense of this life we live and strives to answer the question "why are we here?".
Spirituality appears to have much to do with consciousness, especially reflexiveness. It's like an aspect of the 'I'. For me, the 'I' appears to emerge from brain functions, and linguistic complexity. I guess this creates the sense of 'otherness' and a feeling that there's meaning to everything around us, and we feel, and perhaps justifiably, that we're not exclusively responsible for this experience. If the roaches had books and texts, they'd probably mourn and bury their kin.
That's why perhaps the different answers offered by diverse religions are different in narrative but united in purpose, and interestingly, method.
Consider this, what happened on the day of Pentecost? If we consider 'spirituality' as 'otherness' then the answer would be, the believers heightened their sense of otherness that they were fired up to go all over the world and share their new ideology. And they spoke in 'tongues' - other languages that they had each learned in the past but neglected?
But in all these things, at least we're assured of the essential humanism of religions. Which basically means we can think without fear!