Reply To: Spiritual atheist.

[Noel]

I experience a sense of awe and wonder every night when I walk the dog and look up at the night sky. I experience it when I contemplate the vastness of the cosmos, the smallness of an atom, the power of an atom, the amazing mechanisms that make us humans, the mechanics of the human eye. I experience emotion’s akin to elation and euphoria when I gaze at my children and contemplate their amazing entrance into this world. But I just can’t call that Spiritual.

The word spirit, to me anyway, just carries too much negative baggage. The word spirit, to latino’s in the Caribbean, brings up images of so called “Espiritista’s” who practice voodoo and chant spells in order to bring harm to other’s. I experienced this every Sunday morning as a child with my own step mother, who practiced this woo, and kept plaster saints and an alter in her bedroom. Not that I believed in it but it made it difficult to explore the real world with all that “Spiritual” nonsense going on at home.

If calling myself a spiritual atheist brings me closer to defining my feelings and exploring the wonder of my existence without all the supernatural bullshit then I guess it’s not a bad thing. But I can’t erase those images I’ve carried with me since I was a boy and it’s just negative.