religion, spirituality and secularism

I had listened to Oprah talk about religion and spirituality specially with regard to Eckhart Tolle's book and how people prefer to be spiritual than religion; and I also went back to the days when it was and probably is fashionable to be secular rather than religious. Today I was going through a buddhist lecture and it struck me hard.. I remember about 2 years or more when i wanted to convey to egroup moderator as to why Hinduism was not a religion and is simply a path and probably the British or Westerners grouped the multiple paths or "marga" in India into one single "religion" for convenience or divide and rule. And the reason for this is that being religious as opposed to being secular or spiritual implies that one is fanatic or backward or whaterver; when all that happens with people is that some of them follow the path prescribed by some authority be it church or a priest or a rabbi or whatever while others prefer the path of "thinking" and following their own path which is equally illusory and thats all the difference is!

Comments

prats said…
Interesting ,

in true sense and if not misused
spirituality gives peace , Religion a structure to achieve that .

Earlier used to think why are their so many displines in religion dont do this, do this etc however later have understood. It is to bring calm in chaos .

After all , even buddha whose buddism has embraced the world and is more towards attaining spirituality is also a religion with its structure .

The difference between religion and spirutality same as b/w a person who has travelled and has widened his horizons of his mind and with the person who has travelled and thinks that is the world .

so if there is a maturity both these two can coexist . and if no maturity then its like your conclusion.
8:24 am
Shreekanth said…
thanks prats - didnt realise i had concluded i do mean that both can coexist and it needs tremendous maturity to see both the method and accept them - your analogy of people who travel and who didnt is interesting and makes a lot of sense - however do want to point out that in your view being spiritual is better - if you go back to history, a person who became enlightened tried to communicate to his followers who in turn interpreted them in their own way and when this became a huge following, it came to be called religion and the mass of people followed one or more such religion - there are a set of others who prefer to follow their own path and that is called spiritual
in india and some eastern countries the interesting part is that such enlightened people apart from communicating to their followers who were ready and mature, created a set of practice called marga in sanskrit which is nothing but path - and the interesting part was that these set of activities became completely integrated with their daily life that even though such people didnt clearly understand, they practiced these path - unlike religion where one had to believe
1:07 am
deepa said…
My view is that religion is the method adopted since age old days to inculcate feelings of spirituality in human beings as not all are "born spiritual" According to me being religious is like getting graduated while being spiritual is like getting a doctorate. Thus religion is the ladder which leads u to spirituality provided u are able to appreciate the real meaning behind religion and do not reduce it to a mere ritualistic approach
11:14 pm
Shreekanth said…
thanks
just go back to indian history or for that matter any asian nations - there was no word and still no word for religion in any of asian languages be it sanskrit or hindi or tamil or chinese or japanese
closest word in these languages are marga, magga or Dao
westerners used the word religion and we have adopted it since we almost know no language other than english
11:30 pm
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