I may disagree with religion strongly, but I'm into "spirituality", and it feels like religion came out of something genuine, like they were onto something super meaningful and then it got perverted into a 'set of information and rules about how the world operates.'
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And maybe it wasn't much of a perversion always - maybe the information and rules were just "symbolic structures pointing to the Something Genuine" - but human brains don't work like that, and soon down the line you get awful things like "no being gay or God will smite you"
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This is I think why astrology freaks me out. In the vaguely new-age, psychedelic-users realm, there's a lot of "symbolic structures" beliefs that ride a very blurred line of people taking them seriously and I am super not ok with it. Did we not learn anything from religion?
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That's definitely one leap you could take from that tweet. Maybe asking me if I'm an atheist would end up in a smaller leap.
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Right, yes, I mean there's the whole framework of "religion is a meme which kept societies together" and I definitely buy into that too.
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It's interesting that one theory for the etymology of the word 'religion' is that it derives from the Latin 'religare' - to fasten or bind.
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My experience is that people use "spirituality" to refer to religions that they like, such as Buddhism; and "religion" to refer to spirituality that they don't like, such as Christianity.
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You're on to something with "Spirituality". There's definitely something that binds to the Universe, and each other, beyond atoms, neurons and synapses. But anything generated by the Old Testament (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) ain't gettin it done. Maybe the Druids had it right.
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Bc difficulty transmitting internal experience/knowledge, maybe? Eg the Buddha achieved nirvana, but until one has personal, spiritual experience, the Buddhist canon is just a set of assumptions and rules to live by