Lagayscienza wrote
It may be an indication of my own limitations, but I have trouble getting my head around this section of the middle area of the spectrum. If one does not believe in the supernatural then surely one is an atheist, no? What does it mean, what could it mean, to be a “spiritual” atheist? Is it just trying to keep a foot in both camps? Is there a way to be a spiritual atheist and still maintain a straight face? Are there any spiritual atheists here who could tell us how they manage it?
Look at it like this: You have essentially been "read into" the beliefs that stand in your way toward any meaningful affirmations. It is not as if the world and all of its depth wears all of this on its sleeve. You have to now read yourself out of this doxastic setting it took so long to enculturate. This is about beliefs of your everydayness. The task of rising out of this toward an understanding that can validate your, well, your otherwise compromised spirituality is to read your way out. This begins with Kant, sorry to say, but Kant comes before Heidegger, and Husserl before Heidegger, and on back to Kant. Why Kant? Because it is very likely you are held within a certain naturalistic attitude that has to turned on its head, and this ain't easy to to do...at all!
Kant's Copernican Revolution is the first step toward liberating yourself from the norms of paying taxes, walking the dog and thinking wisdom is something Neil DeGrasse Tyson says.
The next step is getting beyond Kant.. Unless, that is, you thought the matter could be addressed in a glib response to a post. This is the kind of thing that requires time and one has to really care about fundamental religious issues. One has to be a bit like Kierkegaard who loses sleep over basic questions. For me, the original question that that cannot be rationalized away but is at the very foundation of religious possibility is, why are born to suffer and die? This is something Kant is terrible at. One might turn to Wittgenstein's Tractatus in his disavowal of talk about metaphysics. Here, the question throws one into faith, resigned to the impossibility of talking about such a thing. But Wittgenstein was far too committed to positivism, the idea that what can be said must be said clearly or not at all. But Husserl, now there is a beginning. He was, of course, not a religious writer at all, but he made the terms for discovery of a method for seeing beneath the veil of normalcy the center of philosophical concern.
One has to first realize, however, the Kantian turn toward the subject and the way the world is made in the perceptual act itself. This is a powerful move away form the presumption of science into metaphysics (essentially its declaration that one need not bother). Metaphysics is a study of the threshold of spirituality and familiarity, one might say.
What you call spiritual atheism is the deliverance from historical fictions into a proper analytic of our existence. Atheism itself is just more bad metaphysics. One must approach human existence as a scienctist approaches her empirical world: carefully, and with painstaking detail. This is Kant, Kierkegaard, Husserl, and on and to greatness with the post modern French Turn, so called. Not many have the patience or the caring to pursue this. But if you really want to understand spirituality, this is the only way: tons of deprogramming to counter the working assumptions that condition everyday engagement. Not even remotely easy.
- By The Beast
- By Fanman
- By Pattern-chaser