New Way of practicing Old Beliefs

[Belacqua]

I think it's an open question that interrogates what we mean by spirituality. 

Yep, I think that's what it comes down to. We answer the questions when we define the word.

First I'd say we could make a distinction between the ethical meaning and the ontological meaning. 

So ethical spiritual vs. material would be about what you value in your life. Do you want to be a good person or do you want good stuff. 

The ontological approach would claim that spirit is a separate thing from matter. People who believe this might go for life-after-death or something like that. Their practices for living spiritually might be the same as those of ethically spiritual people, but they would see it as grounded differently.

So far I've been thinking of the former more ethical meaning. I think that a strict scientist who believes in ontological materialism could still be spiritual in the sense of wanting to be a good person first and foremost. This would mean that the choices he made in life would be determined by what is best for other people and the world. 

(On the old Amazon forums there was a very spiritual lady who swore by meditation and several new-age kind of practices. It turned out that she worked making high-tech guidance systems for the weapons industry. So personally I felt that her spirituality was fake -- perhaps a way of assuaging guilt. But I'm sure she meant what she said.) 

If one doesn't like those, then what about Scientology.  It seems the ostensible goal of Scientology is to fine-tune the mind / spirit for optimum flourishing.  

Here I guess it depends on what you think of Scientology. Someone who thinks it's real will hold that he's improving his spirit. More skeptical people might well think he's a dupe who's giving away his money to unscrupulous people. 

I lean more toward the second option, but I've never really looked into Scientology.