Comment by selfhifive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by selfhifive | Hacker News Reader

I practice my religion, believe in god, and pray for some minutes during the evening.

Believing in spirituality without religion leads to a cognitive dissonance.

My philosophy is that there are too many things that we simply cannot observe due to the limitations of our senses and thought/imagination, so to dismiss god is not truly rational.

Spirituality is removed from any material success, so to go into any spiritual practice for an "edge" is not right.

If you want an edge in the material world then persuasion psychology and probability theory are your friends.

Also we tend to forget that science is a philosophy that does not say this is how the world is, but says this is how we understand the world. It's important to keep that distinction in mind.

I'd almost think that believing in a particular religion would lead to cognitive dissonance rather than the other way around. Could you expand on that a bit?

Let's say you do not practice any religion but believe in a higher power.

What is the goal of spirituality? Self knowledge. And self knowledge is also the knowledge about how you are related to said higher power and the people around you.

If you believe in spirituality but not religion it can be almost impossible to know what your relationship with the higher power is and how you stand in the community. Yes you can have your assumptions but they are unverified.

Religion gives you a framework where spirituality exists. Without that framework the idea of spirituality enters a domain where it has an extremely vague definition which, from a utilitarian perspective, is not useful.

So if the idea of spirituality loses its specificity to the point where it doesn't signify any particular idea which is grounded in some manner it creates a dissonance. You end up believing, say, the idea of crops without roots.

It's okay to revise particular beliefs with the times, but the central philosophies and practices of any religion (Eg. Fasting for a set number of days/abstaining from certain foods or activities for a set number of days) are essential.

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