Letters to the Editor
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@palindromebeta
Well, IMHO, spirituality is the recognition that there is a truth to existence that is beyond the confirmatory power of objective observation; i.e., it's purely subjective and dependent on one's own perceptions and experience. It doesn't have to be supernatural. For Einstein, it was science and the incredible complexity of the universe. For others it could be organized religion, nature, music, the ineffable nature of consciousness, the concept of a holographic cosmos, or the idea that all the wisdom of the ages is contained in Stephen Colbert's cockeyed right ear (what is UP with that thing, anyway?)
The key points (and again, this is just my view): spirituality recognizes and respects the reality and significance of subjective psychological and mental experience, rather than just dismissing it as an epiphenomenon of the brain, and it is individual, rather than shaped by, as Alkaline said, a deliberate dogmatic desire to create false certainly. Unless I subscribe to a religious creed, my spirituality will be like no one else's——and maybe not even then, since I know Catholics whose beliefs diverge completely within the framework of the church.
I'm spiritual, but I'm an atheist. The two are completely compatible. One can deny the existence of a Big Daddy deity that's clearly an outmoded human construct while acknowledging the astonishing realities of consciousness, quantum mechanics and other mysteries that may bind us all together in ways we don't yet understand. I do think that organized religion, at least as it stands now, is dying and deserves to have the plug pulled. Exceptions might be made for groups like the Quakers, a tiny sect that in their history have become symbols of all the good religion COULD do if human egos could be divorced from it.
One thing Burns certainly reminds me of: not knowing is exhilarating. Mysteries are what drive humanity's passions.
Howzzat, Homey?