I keep hearing from people in my life that spirituality is an essential part of living a meaningful existence. I hear the phrase "let go and let God" and "everything happens for a reason" used a lot as advice and comfort. However, I'm an atheist and a materialist. I don't know how I could even be spiritual with those beliefs. At the same time, my life is not fulfilling despite the fact that I am not struggling financially. Moreover, I feel paralyzed when I try to get off my privileged ass and do even the bare minimum for socialist organizing because I realize that it goes directly against my labor aristocratic class interests. I feel like knowing that sticking my neck out and contributing to the real movement to change the present state of things is the morally correct thing to do isn't enough to drive me.

In short, what is spirituality? Is it compatible with materialism? If so, how? And if spirituality is the wrong tree to bark up, how can I drive myself to do what is to be done?

  • HamManBad [he/him]
    ·
    3 months ago

    For me, it's kind of like love. Can love be reduced to purely biochemical processes? Of course. But we interact with it as a meaningful thing, informed through superstructural social relationships. Spirituality is a similar phenomenon, where the underlying processes are biochemical and informed by our evolutionary history, but play an important role in our psychology and lived experience. Getting more detailed than that gets tricky, because the language we use to describe it is socially constructed and shaped by the forces of historical materialism in complex ways

    • heggs_bayer [none/use name]
      ·
      3 months ago

      That makes sense to me. While I've not experienced love or spirituality, I can see how the capitalist superstructure corrupts those concepts in a way that both cheapens them and makes them harder to find.