Reply To: Spiritual atheist.

[Simon Mathews]

@earthheart, I think your definition fits well with what you wrote in your original post. Here is a definition of spiritual from good old Google that fits more with my understanding of it:

Spiritual: relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.

The emphasis here is on things that are not material or physical. Emotions are both of these things as they are a manifestation of physical brain processes and physiology (although of course our experience of them is very different from this dry explanation).

Conversely, non-material or non-physical things, to me, refers to things like ghosts, fairies, what a lot of religions refer to as the “soul”, and God. Whilst I see no reason why an atheist can’t believe in stuff like ghosts my question to them would always be why reject God and not ghosts.