Spiritual
This may be controversial. But useful for the many who are "spiritual but not religious".
Most organized religions create a sense of community and have regular practices, some individuals, most collective. Both have immense health benefits that have been documented and measured (singing and drumming in unison reduces stress and activates NK immune cells; being part of a community also reduces stress and supports mental health). I would add sacrifice to the mix: belonging, truly, requires giving a valuable part of yourself, for example your time or money, not necessarily a pound of flesh. It turns out that the act of giving also has health benefits.
But many of these actions and activities can be practiced without a formal set of beliefs in a supernatural entity. In his new Substack channel, Jim Rutt is making this distinction clear: beliefs and practices, bundled together as a package in religion, can be unbundled.
"Want the benefits of contemplative prayer? Great, we can call it meditation and strip out the theistic framework. Want weekly communal gathering? Excellent, let’s create a Sunday Assembly where we sing songs together, listen to a lecture on ideas worth grappling with, and then discuss it over lunch. Want ritual and ceremony? Let’s craft secular rituals that mark life passages with gravitas and beauty. Want a framework for ethical development? Philosophy has been in that business for 2,500 years without requiring supernatural enforcement."
I find this framework incredibly useful. At the same time, I differ with Jim on one point: "We can have community without cosmology". I think community IS cosmology, in the sense that it is a deep and mysterious manifestation of the beauty and richness of humanity. Similarly, to me, the beauty and richness of nature, the infinite complexity of the universe, participate in the sacred. I do not push back against the need to question, I embrace the empirical approach that is the scientific process (when done well), but, paraphrasing Feynman, I would argue that there is plenty of room in the unknown. And we need that room to live, to not despair. That space is sacred.
Or, as my partner says: "I believe in humanity". There is plenty of room there.