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galen  ·  3735 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Spirituality and Religion -TNG Podcast featuring members of the Hubski Community

I tend to think of spirituality as the pursuit of the transcendent, or perhaps the numinous. Religion, on the other hand, is specifically a belief system )often incorporating spirituality) about the nature of the universe, existence, and the divine. Personally, in the past I've been both spiritual and religious (I was raised Methodist), but I've sort of moved past my religion now. It didn't have much to do with my decision to leave the church*, but an interesting thing I've noticed in retrospect is that while spirituality has certainly helped me survive certain experiences or get through tough times, I didn't get anything close to that from religion. So it's interesting that religion for me was never really a source of comfort.

Actually, there's one notable exception to that - I don't remember exactly when, but at some point during a worship service a couple years back I felt incredibly connected to the larger community of believers and humanity as a whole. So religion in that case served as sort of a jumping-off point that led me to the spiritual, which I think it is for a lot of people.

* I use the phrase "leave the church" figuratively; I still attend church in spite of my non-theism.

P.S. I don't think I'll ever tire of hearing y'all's voices. So interesting putting a sound to the name! And these podcasts have consistently been amazingly well-produced, so cheers for that TNG, steve, et al.