I haven't read the rest of the thread yet so apologies if this has already been addressed. I just wanted to comment as I was reading this.
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Originally Posted by Hainesy_2KT
to answer as succinctly as possible: a person who develops spiritually relies on an internal process akin to intuition to untangle truth from the world around them...
The thing that struck me here, which applies very much to religion, is that intuition is quite often wrong. Theists are fond of talking about things like "emotional logic" or "feeling something is right" (and I'm lumping intuition into this area)... in the real world, when this stuff is tested, we learn that feelings/intuition and "emotional logic" are pretty unreliable. I think its important to stress this since its the answer we're given quite often as justification for beliefs.
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..., books, people talking, experiences etc. charlatans selling snake-oils or bending spoons set off the bull-o-meter and get treated as such. true spirituality is not concerned with such things. in fact, i would go so far as to say that a genuinely spiritual person is more impervious to bull than the norm.
First - charlatons are successful precisely because people rely on feelings, intuition and emotional logic. The difference (and we see it here on this forum all the time) is that followers of religion 'A' use their 'feelings' to know the truth... which happens to be their religion. They dismiss followers of religion 'B' who also rely on the same emotional logic.
This alone should make bells go off that this is not a good method of determining the truth! Yet... relying on the "Faith" or "emotional" argument allows people to rest comfortable in the beliefs they have without applying those beliefs to any scrutiny. They can rest comfortably knowing they are right and everyone else is wrong because they feel good about it or their intuition tells them so. (again... the same way the followers of other beliefs approach it)
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a deep understanding of your own human condition and your place in the world must be reached through introspection, meditation, analysis, reflection etc. before a person can even begin to tackle matters of the spirit which runs even deeper than all. wisdom relating to the deep motivating energies of the human psyche is the single most important asset a spiritual person has, being able to see things the way they truly are, not just the surface levels of meaning a lot of people only ever deal with; fanciful beliefs and the like can only come afterwards, and then only for a reason.
Again... no offense, people do this all over the world, come to radically different conclusions for believing things that don't without scrutiny more then they feel good and right about their beliefs... logic and science be damned.
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i don't see things the way you do, so you will always file me away under the airy-fairy section. true spirituality however couldn't be further from the damning perception a lot of atheists have of it.
plenty of atheists are spiritual. Let's not confuse spirituality with a belief in a particular religion or even a belief in a god(s)