Spiritual Doesn’t Cut It
Spiritual: concerned with or affecting the spirit or soul; “a spiritual approach to life”; “spiritual fulfillment”; “spiritual values”; “unearthly love”
I think we need to new word that describes ’spiritual.’ ‘Spiritual’ simply has too much baggage, not to mention steeped in the assumption of superstitious ideals like the ’spirit’ or ’soul’ of which there is no evidence for. I chose the definition above for ’spiritual’ as being the closest out of a list of them that described what I’m talking about when I use the word. Yet, this definition is not close to the concept I am trying to describe.
Even though we have no soul or immaterial part of ourselves, there is part of us – our brains – that seek an understanding of the world we live in. It drives us to take what we know and create new things – things that have never been done before, and perhaps in some cases, never even been imagined before. It’s this drive to learn and create that I refer to when I say ’spiritual.’ It is spiritual, because as we do these things, we gain an understanding of the transcendental – a world that isn’t so much beyond matter, but beyond ourselves. We have the humbling realization that we are just one person on a world full of many, on a planet that is around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy, in an ordinary cluster, et cettera. There is nothing inherently special about us, yet we are here, and that is an extraordinary event in and of itself.
Our existence, as insignificant as it is, is something to be cherished. While there is nothing necessarily divine about it, the word holy can almost be applied.
I am an agnostic atheist, which means I don’t believe in god, and I don’t think it’s possible to be absolutely sure one way or another if god exists. But that fact about me doesn’t diminish that drive I mentioned before. In fact, just the opposite is true. I am a much more ’spiritual’ person as an atheist than I ever was as a Christian. Perhaps that’s merely a product of my maturity however.
Never-the-less, the fact remains that I can’t really just call myself ’spiritual.’ Most people won’t understand it, or will get the wrong impression. I can’t use words like ‘holy,’ as it implies a dogmatic devotion to some ideal that’s not to be question, instead of a description of a bigger perspective. I can’t use the word ‘transcendental’ to describe an idea that transcends our own individual existence, because it implies something non-material. These words simply have too much baggage.
There is much more that can be said. One possible solution is to find new words, but there are problems with that idea. Another possibility is to just get people to use these words in different ways, and force the definitions to expand, but there are obvious problems with that as well. I have no doubt that with disbelief on the rise, we’ll figure this out one way or another, and I’ll be very interested to see just what happens.
