C/D: "I'm not religious but I am spiritual."

Dud. Meaningless. Vapid. Empty. Probably believes in Astrology.

heh does anyone really say this anymore? its an eyeroller for sure

v 90s

C:D: strawmen

dude you've already got the Dawkins thread for proving you're smarter than the god-botherers, are you on a mission or something?

people say this

people like my mom

she does believe in astrology too

most dud thing ever.

i'd 100% of the time prefer "i'm not spiritual but i'm religious"

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

wait we had this thread right?

I'm not spiritual but I am sexy

People definitely still say this, always makes my skin crawl a bit.

"i'm not religious but i am opinionated"

xxp few dozen times iirc

Wait, wtf is dud about this? You're not allowed to have a sense of spirituality without being connected to some kind of organized religion?

"I'm a deeply spiritual person"?

If the most vociferous Christians weren't insufferable fun-hating busybodies, this phrase would be unnecessary. So I blame them.

C:D: strawmen

― american thinker (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, 12 May 2011 19:34 (3 minutes ago)

This is not a strawman, "God is everything, maaaan"-dude, we've all heard people say this.

is this like when non-Christians say they believe in "free will"

"i'm not philosophical but i am a sophist"

Dud - but only because I highly doubt those people actually look for spiritual explanations/experiences they just want to sound open-minded.

You ever hear girls say that? "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." I like to reply with "I'm not honest, but you're interesting!"--Daniel Tosh

This is not a strawman, "God is everything, maaaan"-dude, we've all heard people say this.

keep digging

"i'm not a rationalist but i have got a rash"

If the most vociferous Christians weren't insufferable fun-hating busybodies, this phrase would be unnecessary. So I blame them.

I don't think that has anything to do with it. I mean you can believe in god or something without being a Christian. You can have some vague spiritual beliefs without being devout about them. In which case you would be "spiritual" but not religious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzvZmQaJo68

"I'm not a positivist but I'm not very negative, either..."

ILX Religiosity and Spirituality and Agnosticity and Atheicity Poll

This reminds me of an old Frank Kogan line--something about the age-old debate between Free Willy and Determinismy.

"i'm not a racist but"
About 1,150,000 results (0.29 seconds)

"i'm not philosophical but i am a sophist"

― wanking on the moon (Noodle Vague), Thursday, May 12, 2011 7:40 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

<3

"call me old-fashioned, but..."

I used to think
I had the answers to everything,
But now I know
Life doesn't always go my way, yeah...
Feels like I'm caught in the middle
That's when I realize...

[Chorus:]
I'm not a girl,
Not yet a woman.
All I need is time,
A moment that is mine,
While I'm in between.

[Verse 2]
I'm not a girl,
There is no need to protect me.
It's time that I
Learn to face up to this on my own.
I've seen so much more than you know now,
So don't tell me to shut my eyes.

[Chorus]

I'm not a girl,
But if you look at me closely,
You will see it my eyes.
This girl will always find
Her way.

I'm not a girl
(I'm not a girl don't tell me what to believe).
Not Yet a woman
(I'm just trying to find the woman in me, yeah).
All I need is time (All I need),
A moment that is mine (That is mine),
While I'm in between.

I'm not a girl
Not yet a woman
All I need is time (All I need),
A moment that is mine,
While I'm in between.

I'm not a girl,
Not yet a woman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dajn9Bk24CY&feature=related

i believe in astrology

astrologomy

can't decide whether to SB u for the astrology or the display name

http://www.birdsasart.com/rootjpegs/AtlanticPuffin4.jpg

Anyway, here is a puffin. He looks like he might be kinda spiritual but i doubt he has a fully developed cosmology.

wth?

I'm not spiritual but I am religious!
~~Pharisee 4 Lyfe~~

puffin looks more "soulful" imo

http://www.fairislebirdobs.co.uk/images/Puffin.jpg

contemplating the demiurge, urlier today

guys how does meaning work, im worried i might be vapid

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01318/bittern_1318554c.jpg

Bitterns, on the other hand, are predominantly agnostic.

http://thumbsforhire.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/dancing-blue-footed-booby.jpg

The Blue-footed Booby practises a variant of Sufism.

guys how does meaning work, im worried i might be vapid

― ogmor, Thursday, May 12, 2011 7:49 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

board descrip plz

Wait, wtf is dud about this? You're not allowed to have a sense of spirituality without being connected to some kind of organized religion?

― geir was right (wk), Thursday, May 12, 2011 3:39 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

its just a cliche & its easy 2 react cynically when someone says it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ORCnvGnaAM

http://www.realbirder.com/NorthEast%20England/Shag3.JPG

I don't like seabirds much, but I do like a nice shag.

it it like how people get mad at the simpsons Viking thing?

Old answer: dud, mostly
New answer: classic, mostly
But:

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

― iatee, Thursday, 12 May 2011 19:38 (nine years ago)

afaic spirituality is anything that isn't positivistic atheist materialism*

religion (*let's include this for a gratuitous hot take) seems to require the kind of cultural rootedness and historical continuity which is probably great if you're not some kind of misfit, the kind who doesn't want to be saved in the prescribed ways- or if you're in a religious community that's so open and nondogmatic it might as well be SBNR

Being this - potentially classic. Saying it - dud.

If it were phrased as, "I recognize in myself an innate need for belief in something intangible that makes the world meaningful to me and helps me keep my fear of death at bay, but I refuse to connect that to any organized religion," I don't think anyone would have a problem with it. The "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" line is a dud because it's a.) cliched and b.) permanently associated with white people co-opting indigenous cultural traditions.

i don't even own a spirit

complaining about the line is as much a cliche as the line itself but b) is a serious problem

this is white problem in general but it comes through a lot in the spiritual stuff. probably it's still perceived as a kind of frontier, maybe also as a potential source of some kind of moral absolution or existential justification in the colonial context idk

Lily Dale otm

lol mookie

but i cant start a thread at all, like?

Let people say things imo

Feeling feverish atm and self-isolating, sorry if this is incoherent
Dud because it's ambiguously critical of religious observance without making clear any distinction in name or (imo) in practice a lot of the time. "Spirituality" could mean asceticism. Or it could mean superstition, or animism, or universality or religious mysticism, or any combination of these things and others which are very often properties of "religion" as well. Since there are names for these things, we might as well use them imo instead of drawing distinctions where perhaps there are none and creating false dichotomy.

It's easy enough to say that you're a solitary practitioner, or have indeterminate supernatural beliefs, or dabble in the practices of one or more religions without observing any of them stringently.

Re: white people co-opting indigenous and nonwestern modalities- It irks me, for example, when "seekers" refer to religious traditions like Buddhism or Daoism as "philosophy". Like, maybe to you? Western Yijing studies for example have been plagued by a Sinophobic attitude that the Chinese are unfit custodians of their own heritage imo.

Assuming RBNS = observing religious traditions in which you do not necessarily believe, its meaning is much clearer than SBNR

Wonder why

RBNS honestly describes probably 75% of self-professed "Christians" ime. The other 25% are evangelicals who hear voices telling them to stone unbelievers.

It's ALL one big thread man.

― geir was right (wk), Friday, 13 May 2011 00:18 (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

#

this is one of those topics that ilx is particularly insufferable about. 100% classic. there is nothing wrong with this statement. in fact it's unalloyed Good. the appropriation argument is so phony. one version of white fragility over another. and the cliche argument is just like, are you permanently in high school or something.

this is one of those topics that ilx is particularly insufferable about.

sure, and I don't think ilx needs to cover every topic, or should

the appropriation argument is so phony

ehh I don't know if "appropriation" is the problem exactly tho it has consequences
I def see a lot of whitewashing that is very racist tho
idk how much of my day I want to spend here, and I def don't want to anonymously slander talented and well meaning people I have worked for and with on a messageboard they do not read.
but I'll try and come back to this.

I def see a lot of whitewashing that is very racist tho

yeah i can see this. i was weirdly prickly coming in here. i've never actually heard anyone say the thread title statement tbh. maybe it correlates with other attitudes, i don't really know.

i think i was responding to the beginning of this thread, ye olde ilx, wherein saying something like "spirituality is important" would be sneered at by a certain kind of person, which ilx was full of at the time. it's definitely a friendlier place today than it was, with some thoughtful spiritual people among mostly society-and-culture atheist types. it's still a place where discussing spirituality freely would feel fraught and potentially embarrassing, but that's probably true of anywhere.

i remember an old thread, i'm sure i'm forgetting key parts of it, where someone was making a solid argument that appropriation by itself, if it's ever done without racism involved, isn't a bad thing. that taken to an extreme, the appropriation = bad pov preemptively marks ethnic religious traditions off-limits based on identity. i tend to agree with those things, broadly, but realize on this subject it's easy to overstep and put foot in mouth.

I get it. 'can the thoughtful spiritual ilxors create a space to talk about it comfortably and openly' is a constructive approach.

but that's probably true of anywhere.

and that's a very interesting topic itself. I'm not sure that's true fwiw, but I would say that a lot of the spaces devoted to this are not the most "intellectual" (and some are anti-intellectual for various reasons both good and not good)

I'll come back to all of this!

<3

like remember this guy? this kind of thing was / is so dumb. and yet so convinced of its own brilliance.

this is the 'everything but country and rap' of religion

― iatee, Thursday, May 12, 2011 8:38 PM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think you could make an argument that saying "I'm not religious but I am spiritual" is a consumptive attitude because the statement is received from hyper-mediated sources, if my suspicion is right that it emanates somewhat from a type of person in films and tv and pop novels and, these days, instagram. but on the other hand, what isn't these days? it doesn't necessarily negate the qualitative potential in the statement being made by an individual person imo.

i'm also broadly very suspicious of organized religion and supportive of individual exploration and choice when it comes to spirituality. i'm sure that attitude is shaped by my background and blind spots. it's worked very well for me leaving an especially parasitic cult/religion and needing to put spiritual roots down in a friendlier space in order to not be miserable.

there is nothing wrong with this statement. in fact it's unalloyed Good

In my own mind I connect this statement to ideas Lao-Tzu expressed long ago in the Tao-Teh-Ching, basically saying that religion begins in our valiant attempts through ritual to create a bridge from the quotidian sense of things-as-usual to the sense of awe and wonder at things-as-they-truly-are, but that these attempts are doomed to fail, because the creation of ritual unavoidably runs the risk of becoming empty of meaning, as the formality of going through the prescribed motions, or from mere superstition and ignorance of things-as-they-truly-are.

The criticism of the statement in this thread appears to be about people who are adopting rituals they understand only ignorantly, and practicing them in an attitude that amounts to little more than empty superstition with a dash of racism thrown in for good measure.

leaving an especially parasitic cult/religion and needing to put spiritual roots down in a friendlier space in order to not be miserable.

yes, I've known and understood this about you (and known and worked with a lot of people coming from the same place)

what are the practices, modalities or beliefs that are working well for you? that's great to hear!

heya dm, thanks :)

i'm finally starting a daily meditation practice. it's pretty messy and free-form right now. just quieting my mind for a few minutes is great though. i am finding clearer access to light and peace because of it though, and it reflects in how i speak to myself and others.

i've been an exercise freak for years and it hasn't always been a spiritual thing, but over the last few years it's become more that way. movement, presence, and possibility combining together enough times to feed my spirit, almost as a byproduct.

xp to aimless that's a nice thought from lao-tzu, thanks for sharing it.

Hey map, I'm not sure if this is what you intended, but I was in the middle of a housemate meeting, popped onto ilx for a second, saw this:

the appropriation argument is so phony. one version of white fragility over another. and the cliche argument is just like, are you permanently in high school or something.

scrolled up and saw you seemed to be angrily belittling me for something I wrote three years ago. And it made me feel pretty shitty, and I had to explain to my housemates that I wasn't reacting to what we were talking about but to something on the internet.

And yes, I am permanently in high school; it's what I teach.

The individualism of “being spiritual sans religion” has always been unappealing to me as I don’t know how you extend out of yourself and meet others in communal understanding if your spirituality is just that: your spirituality.
Communal understanding is an irreducibly positive thing to me and I fear “spirituality” clouds that. This extends from what I understand religion to be: shared spiritual belief and practice. So it’s kinda like, if your spirituality is shared by others, if others are involved as subjects, not just objects in your practice, then it is religion to me by definition?

It’s not that I wholesale dismiss the individualistic. Religion (communal/exterior) without spirituality (individualistic/interior) is just as unappealing for ya know… obvious reasons. Without the individualistic there is no humanity, no faith, no risk, no life, no challenge, no beauty. I’m skeptical of anything that dissects the symbiotic relationship of religion and spirituality for the above reasons.

Anyways, my definition/dichotomy of spirituality/religion is maybe not shared? Interested on your thoughts on this if you’re willing to share map. I haven’t thought all this through, and I don’t mean to imply that practices which are obviously good (meditation, mindfulness, gratitude, etc.) are bad because they’re “individualistic”. The health of the individual is a good thing in and of itself too….. I just like…. Feel like it misses something if it stays in the individual realm? Just as I think the ritual/aesthetics or religious practices are good but miss something if it they just stay there.

i'm sorry lily :(

i revived this with some baggage and ended up being callous. i love your presence here and i wish you well.

Thank you map. I am sorry in turn if what I wrote upthread upset you. I probably wasn't thinking it through enough.

haha no, no need to apologize for that. :)

I like your interpretation of (I assume) verse 38, Aimless. Beautifully worded. Of course, the Daodejing is much more ambiguous than that :D

map, of course, I should have known. all of that sounds really nice. I can't seem to come to grips with body work myself. It's something I know I'm missing and need to integrate in order to become whole but I can't find an agreeable enough point of entry except...

our valiant attempts through ritual to create a bridge from the quotidian sense of things-as-usual to the sense of awe and wonder at things-as-they-truly-are

...like, just shooting hoops in my friend's driveway (again, beautifully put). It helps, IME, to keep rituals quotidian. Not Samhain, but Halloween. Maybe it’s harder for rites to become empty form when they are your own real life.

About whitewashing. There's a New Yorker article that ought to be linked here about the Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi

Ah dang, paywalled

But I think these kinds of “translations” regard Islam as too ugly, so ugly that they can’t allow the ugliness of Islam to sully these beautiful poems. And you might think, these poems are showing how Islam is beautiful.

The healers, acupuncturists and herbalists in my life have at least one thing in common- They all have that damn Daniel Ladinsky “Hafez” book on their shelf .
…

Okay the thing I was talking about 4 years ago re: Yijing studies has to do with how the “modern” scholarly understanding of the book has slowly started to influence or infiltrate the popular tradition of Yijing practice in the west.

L1 F3ng (who I know IRL) starts his book on the history of Early China by introducing the Doubting Antiquity School of the early 20th c:

The deepening frustration with China’s political reality since the late nineteenth century had come to a head in the May Fourth Movement in 1919. The reflection of this political–cultural current in historical studies was the so-called “Doubting Antiquity” movement led by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), a young graduate from Beijing University who began in 1921 to formulate his own theory of Chinese history. To Gu, the received textual tradition about China’s antiquity was the piling up of layered fabrications produced in the later periods, because quite obviously texts dated later, particularly from the Han Dynasty, often have more to say than early texts about their contemporary time. Although these sources can be used to study the intellectual mentality of the Warring States to Han times, they are ultimately invalid as sources for early history. In the words of Gu’s spiritual mentor Hu Shih, China’s history has to be cut short by at least two thousand years, to start only with the Eastern Zhou period (770–256 BC).

He goes on to say, essentially, that even though much of this approach has long since been debunked in China on the grounds it’s built on the logical fallacy that absence of evidence = evidence of absence, the Doubting Antiquity School still has an outsize influence on western scholarship of ancient China today.

Now, Martin Kern (in a recent essay, ‘Beyond Nativism’) talks about the attacks on “doubting antiquity” in China today as equivalent to a rejection of modernity. It

“reflects a premodern mind that insists on a mythological, idealized past that cannot be questioned, where tradition must be taken as literally “true” as long as it cannot be “proven” otherwise.

I think that’s representative of the western view, more or less. As more western diviner/practitioners encounter these ideas in some shape or form, I see more often the attitude that the Chinese are not skeptical enough (rich, coming from fortune tellers!), that they’re “premodern” in some way. That in fact the Yijing may not even be Chinese because “there was no China”. I’ve even heard it argued that readers educated in the PRC with literacy in Chinese have no advantage over those with access to English translations of excavated manuscripts- And I gotta admit, it was a really big deal for me personally to be able to approach the text without the air of profundity I associated with “Zhexue”. The influence of “doubting antiquity” gave me permission to be playful with it, and without this I prob would’ve walked.

The other thing I meant: a lot of Westerners approach this practice expressly for “self-development” carrying ideas about “ego death” and the like from other modalities, but asking only personal questions. There’s lots of “how can I get a boyfriend”, “how can I get a better job”, and very little “what is the nature of cats and dogs”- That’s fine! No judgement whatsoever. But some of these people frown upon more “superstitious” or “predictive” approaches, whereas most popular traditions of fortune telling in China don’t really have what you might call a “psychological” aspect. It’s more like, “will the Eagles win the super bowl.” Wenwanggua and Meihua Yishu, for example, are purely predictive subsystems of Yijing divination which are really “big” in China but haven’t been written about much in English. On one Yijing messageboard, although people can and do ask predictive questions, any mention of these subsystems is immediately and aggressively policed off the main threads and relegated to the “off topic” section of the board. Because these systems are based on later manuals which “are not the Yijing” and unsuspecting n00bs might become confused or something. IOW the Chinese have not differentiated sufficiently between the *actual* Yijing and other texts.

^ Its “true calling” or “true destiny” was to become the ultimate western self-help book

the actual thread had plenty of takedown of the initial statement as well as plenty of varied viewpoints and discussion, even tho it was a pun bump i think that's worth pointing out

Making my way through this (excellent, only read a 1/3 tho') thread for the first time.

Contendrizer made some excellent posts. This is from one for them, and might just be where I am at in regards to this question. Mostly due to getting a deeper practice of yoga in the West for a decade now:

"your core beliefs don't change, but your relationship to the idea of belief does."

In class just this weekend we were doing tree pose. Its one of the easiest poses in yoga. Balance on one leg and hey presto! But while a lot of people get the balance they do not keep the hips level while taking the knee back, so they end up distorting the outline of the pose.

One student was very resistant to the idea there was anything wrong but my teacher wouldn't have it. At one point she said, what about 'satya'? Which means truth. The reality the student wouldn't face is she didn't have enough opening to extend the knee back (its fine, an extension you can practice and that you can get). What was interesting is how from doing something physical we went into something ethical, and we could have gone on to a philosophical realm, but what my teacher said was: what about your spiritual growth?

Which was fucking funny. But a few years of practicing I am taking that stuff in. I wasn't laughing.

Unfortunately also want to map this to politics.

10+ years on from this thread I see people at Trump rallies...I mean every political rally is sort of like this congregation, but to listen to a guy for god knows how many hours ramble on...and he has a good chnace of winning too! But many ppl are like going 'this is our guy' to congregate around with like a big happy family, feeding their souls in some way.

Then look at something like climate change, which has a discourse built on a rational, verifiable system that tells you the planet is heating, all to at least half of the audience being schooled to some of the ways this is quantified. Outcome: The planet is going to burn to some extent that a lot of bad things have not only happened but even worse ones will occur. Its been a disaster.

I think what this thread needs is some Rusted Root Neologisms

Of course, the Daodejing is much more ambiguous than that :D

That ambiguity is much better designed to its purpose than my dried and diced version, but we live in a more prosaic age with less patience for ambiguity.

Maybe it’s harder for rites to become empty form when they are your own real life.

Q: When are the Ten Thousand Things not Ten Thousand Things?
A: ;-)

Aimless that's it!

(^there was more of this but I had to abort and go to work)

I meant to throw this up here re: whitewashing and appropriation
Translations of Laozi by People Who Do Not Know Chinese

this too:
https://www.itzhakbeery.com/the-bitter-side-of-ayahuasca.html

I have a lot of critical stuff to say about the author of this second one but

The collision of a gift economy with a money economy is never going to be pretty for the gift economy. It's not hard to understand why.

just reread... this guy sucks
but i like his suggestion that everyone should go hug a tree and ask it to tell you something

Foreigners and local non-tribal people venture into the Amazon jungle buying land and opening retreats. Yes, at first they employ shamans, but only until they feel they have learned how to lead the ceremonies themselves. Then the shamans are dismissed. Meanwhile, the newcomer’s presence raises real-estate prices for the natives.

Richard Lynn:

Where this anomalous trend originated and why it so tenaciously persists are questions that can actually be found during the early days of Laozi translation, when interpretation was largely in terms foreign to the Chinese tradition but congenial to Westerners already familiar with the “Oriental” thought of Hinduism and Indian Buddhism who could relate the Dao to Brahman and Dharma. The classically educated also could associate it with the religious thought of Pythagorus, the anima mundi (world soul) of Plato and the Neo-Platonists, Gnosticism and other ancient and medieval traditions of mysticism. Its first Western students, Jesuit missionaries, started a trend to detach the Laozi from the Chinese tradition and universalize it by supposedly finding Christian dogma, especially the Trinity, prefigured in it. Such forced similarity of concepts provided access to a text that for translators and readers seemed otherwise inaccessible. Present-day Laozi “translations,” examples of “Eastern and Oriental Thought,” “Religion and Spirituality,” or “Self-Help and Self- Realization,” are products of a process in which similar is passed off as same, and difference is downplayed or ignored. Such “translations” seamlessly join East and West in palatable servings, with accessibility and marketability the watchwords of all concerned. Other characteristics include (1) Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, introductions to such “translations” largely continue to assert that Laozi (Master Lao) was its single author, avoiding the thorny issue of authorship. Readers thus are assured they have access to a “scripture” by a genuine Oriental sage with whom to identify. (2) Anything not easily accessible in literal translation is paraphrased in terms of familiar experience. The Good News Bible (1966) similarly paraphrases the deeply learned and sophisticated prose of the King James Version of the Holy Bible (1611), which while easier to read loses much in accuracy of meaning. (3) As an exemplar of wisdom literature, the Laozi is largely de-sinified, because if too “Chinese” it would threaten accessibility and offend a non-Chinese readership.

word document: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-John-Lynn-2/publication/360289524_Reception_and_Translation_of_Laozi_Final_Draft_2022/links/626d705e0df856128f8a9361/Reception-and-Translation-of-Laozi-Final-Draft-2022

Lynn otfm

I don't think M4rtin K3rn himself is even slightly racist tbc, I think he's terrific. I think he feels China is richer for its disunity and discontinuity so why sweep that under the rug … whatever I was going to say about the ten thousand things the other day, it probably had to do with that, and with people from a diversity of traditions coming together maybe.

I started taking an interest in witchcraft when I was in high school, for kinda superficial reasons- I had a crush on a boy who claimed to be into Wicca (I also got into the Yijing because of a Pink Floyd song initially, we all start somewhere :D) Mostly, I was reading books and staging rituals alone.

At that time, the idea that you could practice Wicca -or I guess by extension witchcraft - by yourself *at all* was, I would say, not so widely accepted. There were books aimed at “solitaries” who really wanted to practice but didn’t have access to a coven or community. But being a solitary in a place like NYC, I don’t think anyone in the community would have taken that very seriously then, because in their view you needed a group to do “real” magick.

I thought that was a very narrowminded attitude, at the time, and I was utterly intimidated by the community “gatekeepers” then. But when I was around 30, I went through something traumatic that made me want to rededicate myself to witchcraft, and sought out one of the originators of the NYC Wiccan community. I ended up becoming her “apprentice” and working at her occult store in the Bronx. And I got to regularly experience the kind of energy field that a coven or any group of people working magick together could generate. It was *incredible*!! Just astonishing.

And then I understood what the gatekeepers had meant, who had said you can’t practice Wicca by yourself. Because you’re not really getting the full experience. It just isn’t possible. And yet, I still think that’s a very narrow definition of what Wicca can be, or how the material can be used. It took me years to notice how influential my early solitary study and practice had been on my general worldview, how I think and what about, and how much it’s enriched my life. That stuff is deeply ingrained. And in that light, the question of whether to call it religion or spirituality… it’s just so unimportant, it’s a non-thing. Doesn’t matter in the slightest. It would never occur to me to consider it. I have no idea.

Would I call it either one? I don't know. Maybe neither. It is what it is.

I used to get together and chant Dhikr once a week with a small group in my neighborhood. And two of the people were deeply devoted exclusively to Sufism and Islam. But most of us were incorporating this into our own personal gumbo, occasionally we'd get someone who just wanted to dabble or try it out. And we'd talk about other modalities we were exploring. And chanting Dhikr with this group was absolutely ecstatic.

I'm not really sure what's meant by "communal understanding", I've been to church and temples and there's a sort of quiet understanding or acknowledgement that I've experienced but this is an area I really know nothing about.

But working in the store, we were able to generate these very potent energy fields with basically whoever showed up, with people who were into all kinds of stuff, and push that out into the world... I don't think there was a shared religion, maybe there was some amount of overlap or commonality, maybe not. But I think mutual curiosity could be enough. As long as everyone was sincere, and willing to participate fully.

fwiw my understanding had been that "religion" implies some aderence to a doctrine, I mean obv in our modern secular world there are degrees, there are liberties taken, and source material is always endlessly reinterpreted- but just as a broader... uh, thing :D "spirituality" might be understood to mean there's more openness and freedom to deviate from that and explore other areas.

And the other edge of that sword is what Richard Lynn is describing, where sometimes people look at another tradition and are only able to see in it what they already know, and there's a flattening out of "the ten thousand things" into "the only thing"

I mean, even at the store where I worked, Wicca was very popular in 1998 but sort of a punchline by 2014. We'd get a lot more people to show up for Santeria workshops.

But like initiation into Santeria demands a lot of lifestyle changes- NY Yankees grooming standards, abstinence from intoxicants and other things that your average NYC queer witch doesn't want to deal with. And for every person who was really serious about Santeria there were 10-20 people who were looking for material to appropriate or incorporate (depending on how you see this), and who ended up basically practicing Wicca with a thin Santeria veneer...