Kristine H's Profile

For instance, the author says that forgiveness plays a role in spirituality. But
he doesn’t apply forgiveness, as one might expect, just to what others do to you
or to the world, i.e., to the agents of intentional actions. Solomon actually
extends the concept of forgiveness to life itself, as in: “This is also true
when the betrayer [of your trust] is not a person but life itself, when our
hopes and expectations have been thwarted. … It means, through our actions and
feelings as well as through our thoughts, forgiving the world” (p. 56). Come
again? Even Solomon immediately realizes that this, as he himself puts it,
smells of “implicit animism,” but that possibility doesn’t bother him because
“even the most hard-headed materialists tend, in their personal dealings with
the world, to be animists” (p. 56).

Second, this is precisely what is questionable about attempting to co-opt a word
like “spiritual” for purposes that most clearly are not reflected in its
historical and cultural use. One ends up on a linguistic slippery slope

Spiritual is in antithesis with material/natural, and it ought to be left that
way; to talk about spirituality for the skeptic is simply not helpful. It plays
straight into the hands of mystics and religionists who insist that there is
something missing from a naturalistic worldview. There is nothing missing
because there is nothing else to add. What we need instead is a new way to talk
about how one can have an aesthetic and compassionate view of life, how one can
be emotional in the positive sense of the word, and still understand the world
through reason and empirical evidence. Indeed, an argument can be made that
looking at the world the way it really is engenders true compassion and
appreciation, freed of the distorting filters of mysticism and religion.

"spiritual" ignoramuses tend to like to slide from "uncomprehended" to
"incomprehensible" (often enough playing a double-game with those nasty
insinuations of a "true" or "revealed" understanding that "materialists" lack).
Materialists, for their part, like to slide from "comprehended" to
"comprehensible in principle."