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Jandila comments on 2011 Less Wrong Census / Survey - Less Wrong
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I completed the survey. Thanks, Yvain, for doing it!
The option "Atheist but spiritual" gave me a pause. What does it actually mean?
I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case it'd refer to someone who is an atheist and materialist ontologically, but who finds aesthetic reward and mental stability in certain forms of ritual and narrative applied to relatively specific domains of life (like holidays, rites of passage and other culturally and cognitively-significant stuff, as long as it's been vetted to strip out the more obvious kinds of crazymaking and irrationality such things can induce).
I guess, this is similar to the second part of thomblake's comment. Thank you for explaining this!
But, if it really can mean such different things, then that particular in the survey question wasn't formulated very carefully.
My impression was that something like that was intended. However, this seems to be a conflation of different categories. The normal category that occurs in this sort of context is "not religious but spiritual" which seems to generally mean people sort of like what you describe but also who ascribe to various supernatural entities (e.g. god, ghosts, spirits, maybe faeries). When given the choice between "atheist" and something like "no religion" or "none" such people will generally not put down atheist. And such people look demographically very different from atheists and agnostics. See e.g. this Pew study. My impression is that the religion questions were not phrased in a way that showed much familiarity with the underlying demographics or how such questions are generally phrased. In this particular context that's ok because I suspect that there are a fair number of people here who are atheist-but-spiritual under your definition but very few people here who would fall into the "not religious but spiritual" notion that is a subset of the nones in the general population.