What is the difference between SPIRITUALITY and RELIGION?

Answer 1

Religion refers to a set of doctrines that one follows, such as the rituals of Catholicism or celebrating the Jewish holy days. Spirituality refers to the ability to identify or feel connected with a "higher power" or to some other internal feelings or beliefs regarding god, gods, or whatever you want to call it.

So you can be spiritual without religion, or have religion with no spirituality.

Answer 2

Spirituality has nothing to do with religion. Religion is another insurance scam for the ignorant and the gullible. People for the most part are born into a religion and never get beyond it. Their parents, meaning well but not really very knowledgeable either sent their kids to the local church and Sunday school because it was the thing to do. As the kid grows up he or she becomes very resistant to outside criticism of their faith because we don't want to think our parents and teachers might be wrong. That then becomes the first hurdle to becoming an adult - you've got to start thinking for yourself. Meaning just because you were born there does not mean you have to stay there. However, we become so busy with family and career and bringing home the bacon we're usually just too tired to think much beyond it. Indeed 95% of people never get beyond this point. They spend their entire lives ignorant and gullible and seldom even dreaming there might be something better. That is just exactly where religion seeks to keep them. They want to keep you deaf dumb blind and stupid where you are, so they can continue to fleece you. And you, too busy or too tired, let them do it because it's easier to give someone some money and ask to be told what to do than to figure it out for ourselves. It's easier to fork over some dough than read a book or do anything that might threaten our time. We think we have bought some insurance with the man upstairs if we give some money,even though we never took it very seriously.
Spirituality, on the other hand will try to enlighten you and show you how to think for yourself. Exactly what the religious people will not do because then you might get away,then they couldn't control you.
Then when they preach hate and violence and promise you 70 virgins in heaven if you only kill some people you won't believe it. Then you have learned to think for yourself.
Now you have graduated to the top 5% of humanity who are at least open to the possibility that there might be something better. If you are smart enough to realize you need to read up on these things and study with an open mind,then everything you encounter becomes an avenue to it, to further your understanding. By now you have discovered Hinduism and Buddism and maybe you have read Plotinus and Plato and Alice Bailey and Jane Roberts and A Course In Miracles and a thousand and one other worthy authors each with their own variation on things,and you begin to discover these people are really all saying the same thing, each in their own way. They are all talking about truth, the same truth. Indeed there are as many paths as there are people but they all lead to the same place. They all lead home. No matter how diverse you were when you started out you begin to suspect we might really be all the same. Not only the same point of view but the same person. Beginning to suspect we might be playing all the parts all the time and only pretending to be different we arrive at some clarity as to what the "son" really is. He is us and when we begin to accept that is the "second coming". The Holy Spirit, long a trusted companion and guide and infallible advisor begins to be seen in a new light as our higher self. And with further clarity we realize no difference between us and we are one. And this is the Grail Quest, and we realize we have been on it all our lives,and we are the "Grail" and we have discovered ourselves and all the time we thought we knew ourselves and didn't even know who or what we were looking for. We look back and marvel at how far we've come and we see it's but a single step and all the others are still there, still blind in their cocoons of unknown search and to some of these we reach out a hand and they bite and kick and we endure and try again and seldom do they listen or even seem to care and we see ourselves in them and we know it's as it should be and we smile and go among them as the road unfolds before us.

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Answer 3

You don't have to be religious to be spiritual. Spirituality is a form of religion, but a private and personal form of religion

Answer 4

Spirituality is the form you take when most challaged by life, and the emancipation of all that destroys you or other taken as a life style. You then become "guided" by your own terms on how to live your life in every or most aspects.

The elaborations of these "guides" that you take - become or have become the bases of what we call religion. Religion is simply a set of rules "guides" to live in order to achive a higher state of mind according to the belief.

Answer 5

Religion is a road guide to spirituality

Answer 6

Religion is an institution that provides a set of beliefs or values...spirituality requires no structure.

Answer 7

Religion is based on Gods,(who should have name!)church`/temple/mosque and his words written on the stone- unarguable, mostly moral guidance.
Spiritual person does believe in God,(not necessarily with name, but can be just highest Divinity) but does not need the special prayer house to take to the heaven but he practices inner discipline to achive higher state of consciousness to lift him out of ordinary human which is extremely limited compare to the high spiritual state.

Answer 8

Religion is a man-made set of standards and structure with a spirtitual basis. Spirituality is being led by the word of God and his teachings.

Answer 9

I think spirituality is believeing in God such...angels, miricles,...al of that.

Then religion is following a certin branch- cathlioc's have their own set of rules, traditions & beliefs, as do jews, methodist's, baptists ect, ect, ect.

I feel that i am spiritual but nor religious. I have a very hard time buying into a specific religion but I do believe in god, jesus, heaven and all of that.

Answer 10

Wow, deep question. There is quite a difference in Spirituality and Religion.
I am not a BIG religious person but I do understand that spiritualty comes in many ways and depths.

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