Pure Brutality

[Leonardo17]

So AI is rather good at these things. I believe we will have AI generated professors at some point. But it still seems to skip on the “Soul” thing.
 
In fact “Soul” means consciousness. That’s the true nature of it. The weird thing is that animals and even flowers are said to have it. But I’m going to stop here before the conversation gets really spiritual.

If soul and spirit mean consciousness, then spirituality is the province of psychology and neuroscience, not religion.  Like a lot of reformists, you're equivocating upon the meaning of terms, implying the older meaning while explicitly referencing the modern equivalence.  This is retconning to avoid having to face the fact that your religion and spirituality have nothing of substance to say about the things they claim to have something to offer regarding.

   I think will agree with that too. Marianne Williamson says that True spirituality is actually the same thing as true psychotherapy. Besides, one of the reason we are promoting spiritual practices like regular meditation is that there is some amount of scientific research on the subject. We know that meditation activates our frontal lobes, the region of the brain that is responsible for impulse control, rational thinking and creativity.
 
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2...-patients/
 
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/what-ha...u-meditate
 
And I’m not a reformist. I believe that ordinary theists are the reformists because, during all those centuries, they are the ones who gradually shifted from the original teachings of all religions and managed to creates some mostly ego based nonsense that has very limited benefits in spiritual terms.
 
Grand Nudger:
 
- I believe that the way of seeing thing as I do existed long before the 1960’s and 1970’s. As you said the 90’s style New-Age thought is mostly over. But that’s not because it’s over. It’s mostly happening because there are increasingly better books on the market. So although some older books are not completely outdated, we simply have much better stuff now than some UFO theory based, fantastical, wishful thinking books of the late 20th century.
 
On Spirituality:

---

 
I do understand the anti-theism movement more then you can imagine. I’m currently seing this 2014 German Movie called “Stations of the Cross” (Ger: Kreuzweg).

 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3465916/
 
It’s only available in in Amazon Prime (in the US) and on Apple TV if you have it. But it should be available illegally if you are good at these things

Anyway, as we see in this 2014 movie, religion can and is being used as some sort of dogmatic ideology that does a lot of harm (especially on younger generations) and is leading us to assumptions that cannot be further from truth. So that’s something we all know of.
 
The other fact is that, throughout history there has always been some smaller groups of people who understood all of this stuff more differently and step in to the realm of what I call “true spirituality”.
 
So that’s what I mean by “spirit”. It’s a deeper subject. It’s actually what separates people like me from the “religious” approach that is so well portrayed in the movie I just shared. And if you ask me the reason, yogis will tell you that Dwapara Yug (the second age of mankind) has just begun one of two centuries ago. The previous age (which lasted some 2400 years) is a spiritual dark age. Dark age people do not understand some energy-based realities. All they know is firm dogmatic beliefs, robotic / automated religious rituals and fear based thoughts that are supposed to keep them in line.
 
   The new approach that actually started at some level in the middle ages in Islam and in the renaissance era in Christianity is actually a new paradigm. We don’t need to fear God for instance. We believe in greater autonomy and in making the better choices all by ourselves (this and many other things).

---

 
   So this “Old approach” is rightfully hated by atheists and other anti-theist simply because it doesn’t really have a place in our time. The newer approach is simply an interpretation of the same teaching in a more rational and more self-respecting way.
 
   And although it hasn’t yet happened in many places, I think we will all get there at some point.