Like many people in my generation, I was raised with religion. Although I can't remember the first encounter with faith, I can remember many Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings reading from the Bible, taking part in arts and crafts, ultimately treating the presented subjects with the same general indifference as early Math and English. Yet it was ingrained into me. There were times in my childhood when I pleaded with God to give me solutions to my problems and sometimes I even thought I received answers by interpreting things around me. I would say "If things are going to be alright, please make the wind blow." And if I felt the tiniest breeze through my hair, on my skin, I would posit that things were going to be just fine. This mentality went on for a time then ended.
The transition to atheism wasn't sudden. It was something I grappled with daily, because it meant no one was around to tell me things were going to be alright. I was alone in life and the idea of death now terrified me. Instead of heaven and the ability to carry out all the things I would never get a chance to on earth, death became a void; it became the moment when the lights go out and existence ceased. I would have brief relapses thinking there needs to be a God because I need to live forever. But this became unreasonable and eventually I stopped thinking about faith as a rational option. It became a fairy-tale no different from Santa Claus.
I can't say whether any of my friends were feeling the same thing around the same time because I didn't talk about my feelings with anyone. The subject didn't come up and I was very shy, a follower of who I interpreted as stronger, more capable classmates. But in my mid-twenties the subject comes up a little more often. Not necessarily because I bring it up, but when meeting new people, it's a "getting to know you" topic. Whether or not a person has faith is very telling of their personality, or at least most people think it is.
This leads me to a conversation I was having the other day with a new friend at a local bar. In fact it's the conversation that provoked this post. She told me that she doesn't believe in organized religion, but maintains that she is a spiritual person. I'm no stranger to this ideology. But it's difficult to define such a belief system because it means something different for every person who believes it.
I would normally dismiss the stance, shamelessly and coldly proclaiming that any amount of faith is ridiculous. But I find myself more open-minded these days, maybe not so open-minded to adopt the spiritual ideology as my own, but open-minded enough to relax my interpretation of spirituality so that I can accept that one can be rational and still believe in something that can't readily be sensed.
But why would one need spirituality? Is being spiritual just a relaxed sense of religion for those too stubborn to dismiss the relentless brainwashing of their childhood, or is it the ultimate ideology that is destined to thrive in a modern society?
My interpretation of spirituality is this: It's important for a person to feel like his or her life has a purpose and that their existence is part of something bigger. But, instead of equating this personal need to anything supernatural it's enough to simply understand that the human race is a species of the earth, and your purpose is simply to contribute to the success of our species. This might seem so obvious but when you take a second to think about it within the context of modern society, the concept of the human race as a species is incredibly foreign.
Most of us get up from our warm beds, go to work, come home, engage in some leisurely activity and go to sleep in an endless cycle of "productivity," but what is the purpose of such an existence? The simple truth is that for many people there is no purpose to their life because capitalism is not compatible with the idea that the human race is a species of animal. In the model of capitalism, the ultimate purpose is not bettering our neighbors, the ultimate purpose is growing individual wealth. This means that the focus in our current economic system is on creating opportunities for people to grow as individuals. These opportunities are in the form of jobs, but jobs aren't created with an explicit purpose of helping society, rather jobs are created to give someone the chance to make money. We go about our daily lives with the goal of "getting by" or making enough money to sustain a successful life, but we have no connection to the rest of our species. We're left to imagine the connection with our brethren and with the earth. And this act of imagining our place in the world can easily be interpreted as spirituality.
This is admittedly a big jump in logic, assuming a connection with the earth and the need to explain that connection, but I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable one. In this explanation the earth is a symbol for the origin of life and we as a species have been obsessed with our origin since we had the good sense to question it. This is, in fact, the most common argument in any theist v. atheist debate. Since we haven't figured out how the first strand of DNA was created, we can't positively reject any explanation for the creation of life. So the theist naturally concludes that a god is responsible. Theists, or in context to my argument, spiritual people, attempt to answer difficult questions with easy answers. In this case, the question is "Do I have a purpose?" and the answer is "Of course I do because I feel a connection to something bigger." But instead of realizing this connection might be to our species and millions of years of evolution by natural selection, they explain the connection in terms of their individual life, their individual success, which was ingrained in them by our selfish society model. And since there is no purpose of an individual life, the average person is forced to make one up in the form of some faith-based ideology.
So is spirituality the best explanation for our purpose in modern society? I think for right now it is, because it gives people the motivation to educate themselves, to educate others and to grow. As long as capitalism reigns as the dominant economic system of modern society, we'll keep interpreting the world in terms of our individual growth and success and require faith to keep us prosperous. But, if in the future we start thinking about progress in terms of the species rather than our individual importance then there will be no need to explain our purpose with spirituality. We'll understand that we are born of the earth to further our species and will return to it in death.
