What does it mean to be spiritual?
This is not a political post. Say it at once. But when Göran Greider (Aftonbladet 23 October 2023) writes indignantly about how Hamas and others are seen as "friends of the left" so I directly associate this with what spirituality really is, and if there can't be atheistic spirituality anyway?
This is how my Greiderian thoughts went once...
"What interests me... is the special attitude that is often associated with religion and spirituality. That is, a reverence, wonder, healthy subordination, before existence. Which I imagine can be found within mature new spirituality as well as, for example, Christianity.
However, the thought systems in themselves are no guarantee that this feeling will arise. That the individual's life experience should have this special existential quality. Degree of wonder, reverence for creation, or whatever you want to call it, seems to run along its own axis? At odds with ideology or philosophy.
I would go so far as to say that if you let wonder, a humbling sense of smallness, be what defines 'spirituality', it might as well be in an atheist. The atheist, the Christian, and the holistic 'newage' can be united by something, which in turn separates them from their respective like-minded people who have a simpler view of things. Well, spirituality or religion is not synonymous with wonder.”