Spiritual vs Religious

The Fool is going to tread lightly with this post, mainly because he knows how

you black people feel about certain things.

Throughout his life, the Fool has heard people refer to themselves as spiritual, but not religious. Not to start anything here and trying to be as delicate as possible, because people here in Amerikka take their beliefs very serious, The Fool wants to know what separates a spiritual person from a religious person. Aren't religious people spiritual? Or, aren't they supposed to be? I never really gave it much thought.

I like visiting forums and reading replies to news articles. In fact, I enjoy the replies more than the articles. Anyways, during the course of my wandering through the wonderful world of forumania; I've noticed how rude and sometimes downright vicious religious people can be. I found spiritual people a bit more tolerant, but not by much. This cogitation of reasoning sent me in search of the meaning of both religious and spiritual.

The results are below, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual's inner life; spiritual experience includes that of connectedness with a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine realm. Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. It can encompass belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world.

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

Now I know these are the simplistic explanations and there are those who would argue even them. Forumnites can be a hard and intractable bunch sometimes.

The religious aspect, I am familiar with. Not so much the spiritual, as I understand it. The way that a vast majority of spiritual forumnites speak about black people has me confused, because the threads consist mostly of the "transformation" that is to come and the new coming of the "one" and yet in another thread, these same "spiritual" forumnites are referring to black people as animals and apes. This confuses the Fool.

Does spirituality exclude black people? Will black people be part of this "transformation?" Does this new transformation excuse bad and rude behavior? Is it because these people will be transformed that they can afford to be racist and ignorant in their views? Is black spirituality less than white spirituality? Alternatively, is it all the same? The Fool wants to know.

I don't want to take up the space needed to write about religion as a whole. And as a side note, below is one of the 12 Rules that the Fool tries to follow.

The most terrible truth that anyone will ever learn while they are on Earth is… that they agreed to come here and to experience all that has, is, and will happen to them. The universe operates under this simple rule: all that happens is by prior agreement based on karmic justice between all the parties involved to balance past karma.

Enough said. Back to the hill I go.