Spirituality, Religion and Stupidity

Spirituality, Religion and Stupidity

Spirituality;

“Spirituality means any experience that is thought to bring the experiencer  into contact with the divine. The traditional meaning of spirituality is a process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man, the image of God

 Spirituality, leans more toward  the internalization of your awareness of your soul. It is an inward journey that involves a shift in awareness, rather than some form of external activity. As such, spirituality is much more about inner understanding than outer worship. This is not to say that worship is not a part of spirituality; it’s a matter of where the devotion and worship are directed: To an external practice, object, or figurehead or To your soul, higher self, or divinity within.

 Spirituality though, breaks free from the restrictions and rigid structure, sometimes associated with traditional religion. The spiritual aspirant recognizes that he or she is on a “pathless path” of self-discovery. They are following not a set of external rules, but their own inner call to spirit.

In this way, spirituality can sometimes feel like a rebellious act of going solo, very much in the spirit of “To be yourself, in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else” is the greatest!

Religion;

By definition, religion is a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices; the service and worship of God or the supernatural.: Religions are most often based upon the lives, teachings, and beliefs of a historical figure (e.g.,Christ, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, Muhammad). The details of their lives as holy or highly evolved beings have been carried to us across the mists of time through oral tradition and written scriptures. These figures are the subject of worship and devotion and form the foundation of religious practices and rituals.. In other words, there is usually a greater focus on the externals: Houses of worship (e.g., a church), Books of scripture, Eternal rituals, Observances etc. This is the equivalent of object-referral in which your attention is placed upon the objects in your experience.

 It is a structured, frequently rule-based construct that to some degree governs the behavior of its members. Moral rules, laws, and doctrines, as well as specific codes and criteria, create the organized structure that contains the religion’s specific belief system. Religion helped to give society a sense of certainty and helped to guide and comfort those whose faith was lacking.

Stupidity;

 There is a group of people who thinks that  religious people tend to rely more on intuition in decision making. So, rather than having impaired general intelligence, they might be comparatively poor on tasks in which instead of intuition,  logic come into effect– and this might explain their  lower  IQ test results.

They believe that there is no God. An individual who believes in a God and thinks He (God)   actively intervenes in earthly events and keeps an eye on him personally, and listens and responds to his prayers,  is mistaken.

He doesn’t understand basic facts about the world and the provenance of worldly things like  phone from which he sends text messages, the car that he drives, the antibiotic that cures his bronchitis and the electricity that brightens in his home.

Shlomo Avineri* argues that “secular intellectuals” who think that “anyone who believes in God and religion is stupid and unenlightened intellectually, socially, or morally” commit the sin of arrogance.

    *(Shlomo Avineri 

*(Shlomo Avineri is  Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, served as Director-General of Israel’s foreign ministry under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.)_