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Marcello comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong
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Incidentally, I agree that using the term "spirituality" is not necessarily bad. Though, I'm careful to try to use it to refer to the general emotion of awe/wonder/curiosity about the universe. To me the word means something quite opposed to religion. I mean the emotion I felt years ago when I watched Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".... To me religion looks like what happens when spirituality is snuffed out by an answer which isn't as wonderfully strange and satisfyingly true as it could have been.
It's a word with positive connotations, and we might want to steal it. It would certainly help counteract the vulcan stereotype.
I question whether awe and wonder about this giant mostly-unstructured human-hostile death trap we call a universe is an appropriate emotion for a rationalist. Morbid fascination, maybe -- Lovecraft and Teller, not Sagan.
The place has potential if it were fixed up a bit. That's what gets me up in the morning.
"Wonder" is the emotion that smells a bit off to me. Can you feel that if you are not enamored of mysterious answers?
Yes. See Sense of Wonder for examples.
If we could do this, if we could really do this, in a way that is genuine, and unforced, if we could show people that religion has hijacked their deepest needs and that there are better ways to fill those needs, I really think that could be the opening move to winning this thing. I think that could be what finally gets people to pull their fingers out of their ears, stop screaming "can't hear you, you can't make me think!" and maybe, just maybe learn something.
I can't think of 100 posts of mine which fit that description, can you? Why yes, this is one of my not-so-hidden agendas.
Oh, absolutely. I'd only been an atheist for about a month when you posted Explaining vs. Explaining Away, and I can't tell you what a relief it was to feel that yes, it was going to be alright.
I was quoting "Bad scientist! No poems for you, gnomekiller!" for days after that =)
My religious friends didn't find it as funny though, if I recall. I worry that maybe there's still an activation energy left to deal with -- that the comfort of joy in the merely real doesn't start to become attractive until you've already confronted, to some extent, the fact of atheism.