It’s really simple — come up with a whole bunch of rules and make other people follow them, or else…
Maybe I should clarify something. If people believe that a person can be spiritual but not religious, then it makes sense that a person could be religious but not spiritual. What I defined is exactly that. It’s going through the motions of church without any relationship to God — or rather, without a healthy relationship with God.
Does this mean we should all drop religion and just be spiritual? No, I don’t think so. It’s hard to do spiritual on your own. And who says there isn’t room for spiritual in church anyway. We can be both religious and spiritual. The best of both worlds is the idea of worshiping God in community — a community that experiences God, where we are fed, and we are sent out from the community to our individual lives to carry out our vocations, but looking forward to coming back together again in community — all so we can be fed again and sent out again.
