Spirituality and Religion

Old World and New World mentalities have very different ideas about what should guide your life and to what extent that guide should be regarded as an authority.  Old World beliefs tend to be codified, they tend to be set out in texts, usually religious but not always, with set rules that followers are supposed to adhere to.  Thou shall not do this or that etc.  In contrast New World beliefs tend to be viewn as the opposite, with the focus placed more so on the individual, and the emphasis placed on choice, so much so that even the basic tenets of such beliefs are undefined, left for the individual themselves to decide.

In a world that is increasingly divided, membership of these two worlds has become almost exclusively religious in the former case and spiritual in the latter case.  Spirituality in this context is used as a moniker to refer to people who in essence behave as if they have a religious belief but one that is independent of the traditional concept of God.  In some cases you can go so far as to say Spirituality is the idea that you are God, not in an all-powerful context but rather in the sense of defining the highest authority.  Old World mentalities preferred to conform to a system where the highest authority is not considered to be human but a being beyond that level of evolution.  The trouble is no matter what those religions claimed no such God ever dictated verbatim what people should believe and how they should behave.  The scriptures that are considered the first point of reference for each of those religions were, ultimately, written by Man.  Men who claimed to know what God or Gods believed.  The problem with that system is that ultimately it is defined by faith, not in any higher power as they claim, but faith in mankind itself and faith that those who came before were sincere in their divine affinity.

By contrast with Spirituality and the definition of the self as the highest authority, your beliefs become defined only by that which you can directly experience.  That is incredibly limiting when we live in a world that is filled with many things we can never directly perceive and must accept what we are told.  To quote the Matrix the doubt comes when you get uncomfortable with the way things around you are and it becomes most apparent when you interact with "the system" - "when you pay your taxes" - you have a rough idea of where your money goes but when you stop and question that you realise you don't actually know.  As transparent as Governments can claim to be, you can't follow the money you paid to see what happens to it.  You have to accept what you are told about where it went and what it was used for.  Therein lies the inevitability of Spirituality, that it is not possible to be all knowing, all powerful, and the highest authority so long as you live in a system that has rules and regulations that you have no choice whether you follow them or not.

Spirituality I see as a craving from those who have left religion and abandoned its ideas but still want to hold onto the idea that their faith isn't ultimately placed in the hands of other people.  Spirituality is the idea that no faith is needed in anyone but yourself, much like solipsism it asserts that the self is the only thing you can truly know and therefore everything else is debatable and you should seek to live a life that does not cause conflict with the self - in other words living a life where you listen to the spirit within you, or a spirit within the Universe itself as opposed to a divine being.

The problem I have with both of these ideas is that ultimately, they are all defined by faith, and who or what you place that faith in.  Personally I'd rather live a life where that question is never answered.  I would rather live a life where you do not assert either way an answer to the question of higher powers.  I prefer to live a life that is perhaps best described as agnostic, which is to say that I am open to the idea of a God but have no evidence one exists, but do not assert lack of evidence implies the contrary to be true.  One of the fundamental principles of the scientific method is that you can't assert a negative as true, you can only disprove evidence for a positive statement.  This is how I prefer to live my life.  By letting my beliefs be defined by that which I experience first hand whilst remaining open to the possibility of something more.