Can Spirituality Be Rational?
If you take the dogma out of it… what’s left?
Spirituality.
The very word sends shivers down my suspicious, ever-skeptical spine. Images flash through my mind of healing crystals, supernatural investigation “documentaries”, and various wantonly stereotypical crackpots and cranks.
Perhaps you’re different from me, and spirituality hasn’t been such a dirty word for you — but I hazard a bet that a majority of skeptics out there share my general intuition: spirituality is not something that lends itself easily to our sort.
But put it this way: millions of people, if not billions, throughout all of human history, across all religions and cultures, have had experiences we might generally term “spiritual”. That is, they have been made aware, or think they have been made aware, of something beyond the purely physical confines of ordinary reality. Something “super-ordinary”, above and beyond the everyday, has happened to them, and their consciousness has been at least temporarily raised.
Much of what I just wrote makes my very soul writhe (or would, if I thought that such a thing existed). But I’m trying to train myself out of that response, because there must be a way of discussing such a widespread phenomenon in empirical and rational terms.
