Can you have spirituality/faith/belief without it's counterpart, religion or God? Does an atheist still participate in spirituality/belief/faith without the God or religion?
I don't see how the atheist can answer no. If the atheist is correct then God, faith, and that spiritual feeling that other claim to experience is only a feeling - can only be a feeling that others claim to experience. God is the name they give to a feeling. It's a brain state - a state of mind - for the atheist it can be nothing more.
If it's a feeling that children and adults have had down through time and across cultures it's probably relatively accessible. Different from asking a man if he's ever had menstrual cramps - that's more inaccessible - they can have similar body discomfort and pain - they can call it cramps. Even if we're constructed differently, cramps and headaches and spiritual feelings are all personal and interior. Who can ever deny someone's feelings.
Spiritual feelings are warm, inclusive, wonderful, life affirming experiences of oneness. They can be feelings of awe, mystery, or childlike innocence. They can even be feelings about emptiness, desolation, death and the abyss.
If you achieve an elevated feeling walking into a forest with cathedral lighting from the sun and the next person gets an elevated feeling walking into a cathedral who can say one is spiritual and one is not.
If a Christian and an atheist sit around the campfire and stare at the night sky and both feel awe and wonder and their own insignificance against the vastness, does the Christian experience it as spiritual because somewhere he's added an extra ingredient - God?
If you are with your kid and you see a deer in the woods and he stops and his eyes get big and you are captured by his wonder at the world around him can you not name it as spiritual.
And what of the peace and calm that comes being held in the arms of the one you love. Do the arms have to be Jesus' to call it spiritual?
Spiritual is a feeling. Ain't no way to tell what faith feels like unless you've felt it. If you have felt it and lost it and feel it anew on a morning walk in golden spring sunshine are you really going to accept some fundamentalist telling you - nope, you never had it - it's not the same thing - you obviously didn't do it right.
We're all human and all have pretty much the same feelings. I don't know exactly what it feels like to jump out of a plane with a parachute but I've stood on the edge of the mountain with the wind blowing me back. It's in a small way similar. A tinier thrill, but sufficiently distanced from the mundane to be felt as spiritual.
