‘Spiritual but not religious’ — the catchphrase for the latter days of the West
We live in an age of peculiar category errors. Modernism with its scientific worldview has literalised and objectified the world, condemned the religious for not living up to its standards of objective proof, and left us in a strange place of exile. We are human, we still long for transcendence, meaning, eternity still presses upon our shoulders. But when it comes to the forms through which mankind has encountered these things since we first woke dewy eyed to look upon the stars, the way has become barred. Religion is, apparently, full of cliches, irrationality and moral tropes we have long since risen above. So we have abandoned its structures, flooded our world with the hedonism that has followed, pornography, a culture of superficial sensationalism and gratification, and all of the benefits that come with the apparent freedom of iconoclasm.
One way we have come to justify this apparent incongruity between the materialism of our world and our longing for the transcendent is found in the phrase ‘spiritual but not religious’. A kind of have your cake and eat it reflection of a desire to integrate subjective kinds of spiritual experience and self-observation into the objective world in which we live.
What the ‘spiritual’ constitutes is a fairly broad phenomenon. It can include…
