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Originally posted by slank
First of all a 'coping mechanism' is in no sense a necessarily 'bad' thing.
A toothpick is a toothpick & can be very useful for picking teeth as well as other unintended purposes.
I think spirituality relates to our more delicate, ethereal methods & capacities.
To dis that entirely is sort of like wanting to be a rock, devoid of the delicacy that is consciousness & other mental processes.
I think that from a technical stand point spirituality is [acts as] an interface &/or tools to access & utilize more refined, transcendent & fragile domains of operation.
Religion is often an attempt to industrialize, standardize some mechanical access to some more transcendent mode, but i think it often makes it almost mundane, perfunctory, & possibly not transcendent at all.
Even if it succeeds as a standard method to access transcendence it robs it of its rich variety, uniqueness, the personal, the intimate, which means it has a very hard time ever measuring up to what you are potentially capable of purely on your own.
Rocks flow in magma, fish swim in water, birds fly in air, & satellites orbit in the vacuum of space.
Spirituality is just part of the access to a different, usually higher, more ethereal domain.
Arguably it is an actual necessity for a higher consciousness organism, so there are likely to be some biological operations that relate to this activity.