Why can't I be spiritual and religious? Why make a distinction between the two?

Question

This is in reference the numerous amount of comments/questions/answers of people who say they are spiritual but not religious. Yet they are reffering to the connatative meaning of religious and not the denotative meaning. I mean usually when they say they are being spiritual, and you listen to what they believe and such, you find out that they are in fact a religious follower.

Answer 1

You can certainly be both. The fact that you ask this question is good, in my opinion. You can think for yourself and that is good.

Answer 2

Maybe they feel something inside but never attended a religious school or went to church... I think that is where religion started.. people had a hunch, smoked some weed, and feared a higher being.

- a christian girl

Answer 3

A distinction between spirituality and religion may be necessary. Spirituality may be something, religion something else. Spirituality may be about the soul's own and free imaginary adventures thru oftenmost immaterial yonder worlds where only metaphor may connect onto reality, while religion may be about more or less bluntly binding (re-binding!) oneself, oftenmost as an obedient humble disciple, onto a set of dogmatic saintly rules condified into holy books dictated by haughty religious leaders. Religion with all its rich rituals and huge temples may be quite material, and even quite much in the merciless clutches of mammon.

Spirituality may be about the fiercy pure and free prevalently immaterial breath of life. Spirituality may be quite private in one's life, quite of oneself.

Yes, you may be both spiritual and religious, depending on what strategical way you choose, depending on how satisfactorily you combine your submission onto a religion with the cravings of your own soul, depending on how freely or less freely your soul's life is allowed to plunge into the spiritual dreams and reveries that may be met with dissuasion and condemnation by the particular religion of yours.

A religious person, let's say one among our Christian monks, or a Catholic priest, is never free neither materially nor spiritually. He has abdicated his spiritual freedom, surrendered his life, body and soul and attire, onto his religion, he blindly obeys his superiors, he gets no family and no off-spring of his own (thereby in fact contravening the holy biblical law of Almighty God that is reported to declare that man must get wife and get off-spring so they may populate the World).

A spiritual person may be spiritual in his/her own free secret masterly way, yet fiercely engaged in the hard life struggle for survival on the proud way onto perfection and friendship thru an ever relentless and bright sense of virtuosity and virtuality.

Answer 4

you can be both.
religion - an organised set of guidelines to worship by.
spiritual - being connected to the world around you.

at least this is what these things mean to me.

it just seems that for some people when they "find" religion they lose sight of their spirituality.

it doesn't have to be that way.
eclectic pagan

Answer 5

Sure you can be but the two are not the same things. Religion usually entails accepting a specific creed of a specific denomination. Spritual is more freelance.

Answer 6

Perhaps, but people make themselves believe what they want.

let's say I believe in Mother Nature. Isn't that another term for "God"? But that makes me into spiritualism, as I believe in a deity not "connected" to a real faith, unlike God or Jehovah or Allah or Ahura-Mazda

Answer 7

spiritual means you are in touch with whatever it is that makes us more than animals.
religious means you are against gay marriage and pre-marital sex because your favorite book tells you it's wrong.

these are just generalizations, but spirituality is healthy, normal, justifiable. Religion can be, but can also go very wrong very quickly.

Answer 8

I see organized religion as being a repetition of action, whereas being spiritual can be from a persons life journey, faith, hope, love. Or they can be spiritual from their life journey of hate, greed, etc....

good luck & bless

Answer 9

You can