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RE: A Note to Fellow Atheists About Spirituality
I look at science and spirituality as two sides of the same coin, neither more valid than the other. Everyone leans more in the direction of one or the other. If they lean to far, they become unbalanced. I have spiritual beliefs but I treat them as theories that I put faith in, I do my own personal experiments with them and collect data the way a scientist would, though not nearly as formally.
I don't see how any experience of reality could be defined as more accurate than another....maybe more verifiable, but even that, I'm not sure.
Balance is key though. I like your attitude and what you have to say.
This attitude is exactly the one I am prescribing in my post. It is an enlightened state of mind to be flexible in your beliefs and to be open to being proven wrong. We are all misguided and ill informed in some way, and the only way to grow is to accept that and do your best to understand the world around you. And to be spiritual to me means nothing more than to revere in the fact that we are alive and we are experiencing life together, as a species, as members of the animal kingdom and as kinfolk to all living things, on the beautiful pale blue dot we call our planet.
I love it! Hahaa I've had problems with some evangelical atheists before but your attitude and ideas are great :-D Stick around!
I used to be a militant atheist. I have some Facebook notes from a few years back which are pretty hard nosed when it comes to the beliefs of Christians. I am much more relaxed and unconcerned with what other people believe nowadays. I still think that the type of thinking promoted by most religions is harmful to the forward, informed thinking that is necessary for the general populace to possess if we are to progress as a society. Science and technological advances are things to be celebrated and supported. But when there is a certain undercurrent of society that is deeply skeptical and resistive to these new ideas, it hampers progress and sometimes regresses into silly debates over reproductive rights of women, over whether established scientific theories (evolution) are actually valid despite decades of supporting evidence, etc etc.
Basically, the problem with society nowadays is ignorance. People think that democracy applies to everything, not just politics. Facts, beliefs, ideas, everything in their minds is subject to approval. But facts exist whether you approve of them or not. In the words of one of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov,
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' "