Sealchan..... Excellent post, you cover a lot of territory. But you seem to be saying 'yes an atheist could be spiritual if he did this and this, or believed this and that..' but isn't that the point? It seems to me that a strict atheist is rooted in reality and can't accept the 'notion' of a spirit without some basic reality, some 'being', behind the word. And I'm not so sure that there is so 'much more' of an irrational basis to knowing, isn't that the whole idea behind the scientific method,? Isn't our success in the world largely a product of knowing, rather than believing? And the psyche doesn't seem 'immensely' irrational, granted though, it seems immensely confused following the brainwashing given it from birth. Why would a mind 'choose' atheism if it were interested in the spiritual and such? I can appreciate the evolution of spirituality in humans, over the millennia, because there was so little knowing. But shouldn't knowing take the place of believing now that our minds have evolved to the state we now have? It's a very, very deep subject obviously.........
You ask good questions and I can only say that my own faith is close to what some might label spiritual atheism and so I am trying to situate myself when I am speaking about all of this. I self-identify as a Christian but my epistemology is not typical of most Christians.
In a way analogous to how we might in certain cultural circles develop out of a childhood naive belief in Santa Claus and into a cooperative adult "conspiracy" to perpetuate the illusion of Santa Claus for the sake of a more intense experience of the power and value of giving and blessing, just so might we start with a naive belief in a fictional idea and grow into a more scientifically informed one.
The realm of irrationality is not one of non-sense but of disconnected facts and specific experiential certainties that we each individually accumulate through our life experience. There are so many options as far as what we concern ourselves with that we are often immersed in a wide world of arbitrarily chosen concerns. We develop our own personal interests and aptitudes based on what life provides to us as options sometimes under restrictive circumstances, sometimes under a wide field of opportunity.
Navigating this area of largely ambiguous choices is something we take for granted as our preferences and opportunities start with what we are given as children and only as we grow do we begin to perceive what other options might exist. But by then our biases have set in and we have a particular orientation that we are often more or less pleased to pursue. It is in this wide field of variability that we have to find our personal meaning and endure our suffering. But whether I am upset because I don't become a movie star or I find that my fame as a movie star is loosing its appeal, we have a spiritual problem on our hands that science may help us with but often doesn't have a clear rational solution for. We can reason about our logical options but finding the motivation to move forward is a challenge not for logic, but for the soul.
This dimension of human experience I believe is universal and calls for a marriage of the subjective incidental experience of the individual to be creatively united with the facts of their experience and the possibility latent in the world and the Universe in which the individual finds him or herself. This problem is, perhaps, acute for the atheist but sometimes buried by the believer in the pat answers of their traditional culture.
In this view whatsoever one finds one's passion to be one has at least occassionally to want to understand why they have this passion and what it means for them and others that they do. Sometimes they may have to justify to others why they should spend time and resources making themselves happy in this way. Sometimes that passion leads to activity that may impact the lives of others in a way that it is clear their personal interest and effort has a more universal meaning. Here lies the beginnings of a spiritual attitude.
One does not have to go in for any of the traditional beliefs in Gods or Universal Truths but one may resort to a simple sense of destiny even if it is not applied by a sentient creator. The demands of the tribe, the collective, somewhat force upon the individual an answer appropriate to that culture, a justification for his or her individual pursuits. A calling, a manifest destiny, a revelation...whatever.
When I watch the TV series Star Trek I am often reminded of certain beliefs and values that I hold as being deeply embedded in the moral and practical outlook of that shared universe first invented by Gene Roddenberry. I think about the faith in human morality and the challenges to it from the moral standards of other species, I think about how one should respond to circumstances in which one's life is on the line, I think about what kind of world I would like to live in and how I can personally contribute to that kind of world. I want Earth to really be a place in which a Federation of Planets might originate. All of these science fiction fantasies of mine serve as a spiritual meditation. The Star Trek episodes as sermons to consider. Some even gather at conferences and otherwise join in communities to further immerse themselves in this "sacred" landscape of story and fictional belief.
But this fiction is very useful for many who look for an ideal and an experience which puts them in touch with what they hold most valuable in life and morals and practices they want to put to the test of danger and conflict. As such fiction can be an excellent source for the spiritual experience. What a person might not find an opportunity for can be readily found in fictional encounters. The vicarious experience can lead to the courage to pursue an immediately personal one. And it is this play at stoking our courage and our resolve that is a deep part of our need for spiritual truth.
In fact fiction always has been a source for spiritual experiences in spite of any cultural developments which have tended to demote such a view. Many religions have undergone a sort of literary-spiritual death as they transitioned into cultural power hierarchies that lost sight of the creative tradition out of which their religions stories and visions originated. Dogma supplants personal experience in many cases. And this leaves the natural inclination to spirituality as having a bad taste in the mouth of those open to a more direct experience of truth.
So a big part of the distaste for the spiritual comes from the centuries of ownership that the old religions have claimed and their lack of adaptation to the living experience of humanity as it has moved on from one or two thousand years ago. We are still spiritual creatures who need fictions to help guide us. The visions, the dreams and the stories that call to us are our spiritual adventure.
