Spirituality revisited

Thinking again about spirituality. Now, instead of trying to come up with a universal definition, I am a lot more comfortable with having separate definitions. I was specifically thinking about Native American spirituality, and I know that they thought about things significantly different than Christians. I checked the Internet and found this on Caroline Myss's site:

Indigenous peoples look on the cosmos as a living womb that nurtures their lives, and so they have less neeed to destroy or reshape it as more technologically developed cultures do (although they sometimes abuse the land and livestock as developed cultures do). Their goal could be described as achieving harmony in the personal, social, and cosmic realms, rather than gaining personal salvation or liberation as historical religions aim to do.

And she's right. It is different from Christian Spirituality. Christian Spirituality is primarily about connecting with the Holy Spirit.

Strangely enough, I looked for definitions of Spirituality before, but for some reason I hadn't looked at Wikipedia, which is strange, because that's usually my first stop. Anyway, I looked today, and what caught my attention was the section on spiritual practices:

1. Somatic practices, especially deprivation and diminishment. Deprivation aims to purify the body. Diminishment concerns the repulsement of ego-oriented impulses. Examples include fasting and poverty.
2. Psychological practices, for example meditation.
3. Social practices. Examples include the practice of obedience and communal ownership, reforming ego-orientedness into other-orientedness.
4. Spiritual. All practices aim at purifying ego-centeredness, and direct the abilities at the divine reality.

I'm giving the side eye to that last one. Maybe Supernatural would be a better description.

The interesting here though, is that even though there are wildly different definitions of spirituality, I think that in terms of practice, they all fall into these four categories.

I found some pretty good descriptions on Quora. Here's one: Anything that is not related to material world enters the domain of spirituality. I like this one because it is pretty all encompassing.

As I'm reading others definitions, what strikes me is that spirituality involves connecting to something. And this connection makes us better as people. To many people this connection is to the divine. Some people see the divine as God, some see it as nature. Some see it as a force that is present in all things. Some people see the connection as being with ourselves, to know ourselves better, to be better.

Self-love vs. selfishness

There is a difference between self-love or self-esteem and selfishness. And it is an important difference. Selfishness is basically what the bible equates as evil. The bible also advocates loving others, but I have learned that this is not possible unless one loves self first.

This is a topic that I definitely need to explore further, but right now, my studies are more pressing.

The opposite of cosmos

The opposite of cosmos is chaos. I wish I had known that sooner. That would have made my understanding of what cosmos means a lot easier.

Tribalism

For awhile now I have been talking about this mentality that I see in both political and religious circles of demonizing "the other." Somewhere I heard this described as tribalism. I searched for articles about this and found some good ones.

First I read this article by David P entitled How Tribalism Overrules Reason, and Makes Risky Times More Dangerous. He gives an example of religious tribalism from his youth, but explains that tribalism extends to politics, race, and gender as well. We choose tribalism, he says, to keep us safe, and it trumps morality, reason and anything else that would threaten our survival. But that's dangerous.

Amy Chua wrote about The Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism in the New York Times. She ends with this statement:

But the emergence of coastal elites as an insular minority is also rooted squarely in the breakdown of national unity — in the fracturing of our country into two (or more) Americas in which people from one tribe see others not just as the political opposition, but as immoral, evil and un-American. America desperately needs leaders with the courage to break out of the tribalist cycle, but where are we going to find them?

Toby Young follows up Chua's thinking in We are being destroyed by tribalism. Let's get rid of it.  He explains how Chua makes a correlation between Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump and how our political climate created an environment where working class whites were feeling disenfranchized and Trump stepped right in and gave them someone to rally behind.

Corporal Punishment

I just finished listening to Mayim Bialik's YouTube video on Hitting Kids. She is pretty clear at the beginning that she doesn't believe in hitting children. She wisely follows this up by addressing how she feels about what the bible says, which is basically that based on other questionable practices, like stoning disobedient children, she feels the bible should not be used as a parenting guide in the modern era.

The thing that frustrates me is that she goes back and forth between two types of statements:

• Spanking is wrong and should never done
• There are alternative methods to disciplining children besides spanking

I agree wholeheartedly with the second. And I understand the objections. I would even go so far as to say that I would discourage spanking in many households. But I wouldn't take it off the table completely. I was going to go a different direction here, but I just thought of this: the type of parents who use the tool of corporal punishment wrongly, to where it would constitute abuse, aren't going to do a better job simply because that tool is off the table.

Someone in the comments mentioned the APA, so I decided to check to see if they had a statement on this matter. They do. They oppose the use of corporal punishment in all institutions. Here's the part that stuck out to me the most:

Whereas research has shown that the effective use of punishment in eliminating undesirable behavior requires precision in timing, duration, intensity, and specificity, as well as considerable sophistication in controlling a variety of relevant environmental and cognitive factors, such that punishment administered in institutional settings, without attention to all these factors, is likely to instill hostility, rage, and a sense of powerlessness without reducing the undesirable behavior;

 I noticed that most of the comments on Bialik's article were speaking from their own negative experiences with spanking. I wonder if Bialik had negative experiences with it too. I did not. I experienced the precision in how corporal punishment was administered that the APA mentions above. Because my parents loved me and put a lot of thought into how to correct me so that I would grow up into a responsible adult. Punishment was never a knee jerk reaction, or a point of frustration for them. If they were frustrated with me, THEY took a time out, and THEN administered the spanking.

I realize that my experience may well be the exception, rather than the norm. Nevertheless, it is enough for me to emphatically state that corporal punishment is not categorically wrong and can be done in a loving manner. I am living proof of that. I also take note that the bible speaks of the rod and reproof hand in hand when disciplining a child.  Parents need to be thoughtful when it comes to correction, otherwise whether they use corporal punishment or not, abuse can still occur.

All About Love: Page Two

bell hooks is a woman after my own heart. Right away in her book, All About Love: New Visions, she starts off with definitions. Having a shared vocabulary is very important, so I am glad to see her starting with this first thing. She quotes M. Scott Peck from The Road Less Traveled:

[Love is] the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth...Love is as love does. Love is an act of will--namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

hooks goes on to poo-poo those who cite affection as being the primary component of love. hooks includes "care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication" as all being integral components of love.

Jesus was wrong?

I was looking for something about my marriage and I came across this article, The Best Christian Argument for Marriage Equality is that the Bible Got It Wrong. That title is pretty provocative, but I'm used to that now, so it wasn't a big deal. The tagline got me though: Christians need to accept that Jesus was sometimes wrong—in fact, he might even want us to. Say what?

I don't have time to go through the argument right now, but at some point, Pete Enns was invoked. His writings, and his podcast with Jared Byas, have had a pretty profound impact on me recently. But then as I was skimming the article, I am across a scripture reference: Matthew 24:34. I froze. I think I had blocked it out. Could this be THAT reference? Could it be anything but?

The article had a link to Bible Gateway, and a KJV reference at that. Here it is:

Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.

I can't remember if it was in Korea or Maryland, I think Korea, that I wrestled with this verse. And now I can't remember what conclusion I came to. But whatever I thought then, when I look at it now, there's only one thing that comes to mind: Jesus was wrong. Damn.