Transcript Spirituality and the Non

Spirituality and the Non-Spiritual
Good Person
Sea of Faith September 2010
What is Spirituality?
Widely held to be
1. Conceptually independent of religion.
2. Universal.
3. Other-Centred.
4. Distinct from other categories (e.g. aesthetics
or ethics).
5. Positive.
Really?
We found that
1. definitions fell into two broad categories
–
–
Quasi-religious
Psychological
2. Both categories of definition excluded certain people.
3. Dubious dichotomies were used to separate religion
from spirituality and to assign a positive value to
spirituality.
4. Spirituality was conflated with ethics. Benefits
normally associated with ethical conduct were
attributed to spirituality.
The Dalai Lama’s Definition
Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims of
one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is the
acceptance of some form of heaven or nirvana.
Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma,
ritual prayer, and so on.
Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of
the human spirit – such as love and compassion,
patience tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense
of responsibility, a sense of harmony – which brings
happiness to both self and others. (Dalai Lama, 1999,
pp. 22-23)
Comment on Definition
• It manages conceptual independence from
religion.
• It is universal because anyone can develop the
qualities.
• It is other-centred because most of the
qualities are concerned with care for others.
• It is positive.
• But it takes ethical virtues and labels them as
spiritual.
A Quasi-Religious Definition
Spirituality is the basic belief that there is a Supreme Power, a
Being, a Force, whatever you call it, that governs the entire
universe – there is a purpose for everything and everyone
... It asserts that there is a transcendent Power which is
responsible for the creation and care of the universe
...Thus, God or a Higher Power, is also immanent in the
world. In other words, God is not only transcendent but
everywhere present as well.
Mitroff and Denton, 1999, summarized by Schwartz, 2006.
Mitroff went on to urge people not to promote religion in the
guise of spirituality.
Comments
• It is neither independent of religion nor
universal.
• A secular or naturalized spirituality would be
impossible.
• Atheists, humanists and other non-believers
are reduced to the margins because they lack
certain metaphysical commitments.
• It is not obvious that it is other-centred.
A Psychological Definition
[Workplace spirituality] is a framework of
organizational values evidenced in the culture
that promotes employees’ experience of
transcendence through the work process,
facilitating their sense of being connected to
others in a way that provides feelings of
completeness and joy.
Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2003. Italics added.
Spiritual Well-Being
Fry (2005) expanded the previous definition to
explain spiritual well-being as
a result of satisfying the spiritual survival needs for:
(1) transcendence or calling manifested in the
desire to strive for those purposes and values
that express whatever a person feels is ultimately
meaningful to him or her and (2) membership
which is the desire for people, especially at work,
to feel understood, and appreciated resulting in a
sense of belonging or partnership.
Comments
• These are universal because anyone can
experience such psychological states.
• They are independent of religion.
• They are not distinct because they are drawn
from humanistic and positive psychology.
• They are not other-centred:
– The states are only contingently related to an othercentred orientation.
– The other-centred virtues are reduced to feelings,
which may be unjustified.
Contemporary Perceptions of Religion
and Spirituality
Religion
• Organized
• Substantive (obligatory
beliefs and practices)
• Mundane and harmful
Spirituality
• Personal
• Functional
• Lofty and helpful
Zinnbauer et al. 1999. However this polarization is very
misleading.
Marler and Hadaway (2002)
• Most people think the concepts of spirituality
and religion are interdependent.
• Few describe themselves as only religious or
only spiritual.
• Few claim to be neither religious nor spiritual.
Spirituality and Ethics
• Spirituality severed from its religious roots is
individual, private and oriented to the self
(Carrette and King, 2005).
• These are barriers to ethical action.
• Spirituality returned to its religious foundations
regains the communal, public and other-oriented
dimensions necessary for ethics.
• It does so at the cost of excluding the nonreligious.
What about Virtue?
• The non-spiritual and the authentically
spiritual may have in common the desire to be
virtuous.
• The Dalai Lama’s list of spiritual qualities is
largely the same as the list of ethical virtues
that a good person might aspire to.
• They will both have to adopt disciplined
practices to achieve them because they desire
a transformation of themselves.
What about Virtue?
• The Dalai Lama accords equal respect to the
secular and sacred paths to virtue.
• This is rare but encouraging. It suggests that the
beliefs a person holds matter very little.
• The Buddhist tradition also offers a corrective to
the psychological versions of spirituality
emphasising self-actualization and selfcentredness. Forget yourself, lose the illusion of
having a Self and concentrate on the suffering of
others.
The Non-Spiritual
• We don’t believe there are purposes or meanings
outside those that humans construct for
themselves.
• We are happy, psychologically healthy and
undisturbed by the evolutionary view of the
world.
• We treat the question ‘How should I live?’ as an
ethical question and see no benefit to labelling it
as a spiritual one. (We also don’t know what
people mean when they say it has a spiritual
dimension.)
Emotions as Spirituality
• Dawkins rather rashly said we should be thankful for being
alive given the incredible sequence of chances that brought
us about. There is no one to thank so maybe what we
should be is glad.
• Dawkins experiences awe as he contemplates the universe.
This could be a naturalized spiritual emotion.
• We often experience a sense of reaching the limits of what
we can say about the foundations of our most fundamental
values. Maybe that feeling of being at the end and on the
brink at the same time is appropriately labelled ‘spiritual’. (I
am getting a suggestion of Tim Dare’s slightly wrong here.)
• Or maybe we can do without the term altogether.