Hmm. Interesting. I must ponder this.
A comment made by a user named Hierophant, found here:
"LOL @ science for trying to pin spirituality as brain damage. LOL @ Livescience even more for grasping at articles that already grasp at straws.
You know, I wish the profiles kept links to ALL our previous comments. I'd post a link to the comment I made months ago where I stated why science and religion have the exact same faults for the exact same reasons, in spite of methodological differences.
The funny part is, science depends more on spirituality than religion does. With religion you can make up anything you like out in La La Land, it doesn't have to be practical, or make any kind of sense. Science (at its best) reaches for higher conceptualization and tries to turn it into numbers. Art reaches for higher conceptualization and tries to turn it into sounds and imagery.
It does depend how you define spirituality though. Minus other possible attachments, I define it as applying non-reflexive cognitive processes. Any animal has reflex. It's spiritual when it's a choice, especially in matters that don't directly concern your well-being. That "reaching" I mentioned earlier is spiritual, because it moves beyond our basic needs. Before Galileo we had the idea that heavier objects fall to the earth faster than lighter ones. It took balls to shirk convention and try and prove something otherwise - you can bet your last dollar doing something like that is spiritual.
Personally I've also seen the application of spirituality as distinctly non-religious. Many people make a distinction between the two (I bet most number-thumpers here would be surprised to know many spiritual people hate religious people even more than scientific people do). As such the result is a rather amorphous concept - you do the better thing, even if it's harder, because it develops you more, but because it also has larger implications within familial and societal units. So it becomes part self-development, part (mutual) survival mechanism, part inspiration for development on all fronts, part pre-scientific explanatory device.
Before science kills that last part, it better be able to explain the universe and everything in it. We haven't even mapped the bottom of the oceans yet, so don't get too uppity and waste valuable resources with studies like this."
"LOL @ science for trying to pin spirituality as brain damage. LOL @ Livescience even more for grasping at articles that already grasp at straws.
You know, I wish the profiles kept links to ALL our previous comments. I'd post a link to the comment I made months ago where I stated why science and religion have the exact same faults for the exact same reasons, in spite of methodological differences.
The funny part is, science depends more on spirituality than religion does. With religion you can make up anything you like out in La La Land, it doesn't have to be practical, or make any kind of sense. Science (at its best) reaches for higher conceptualization and tries to turn it into numbers. Art reaches for higher conceptualization and tries to turn it into sounds and imagery.
It does depend how you define spirituality though. Minus other possible attachments, I define it as applying non-reflexive cognitive processes. Any animal has reflex. It's spiritual when it's a choice, especially in matters that don't directly concern your well-being. That "reaching" I mentioned earlier is spiritual, because it moves beyond our basic needs. Before Galileo we had the idea that heavier objects fall to the earth faster than lighter ones. It took balls to shirk convention and try and prove something otherwise - you can bet your last dollar doing something like that is spiritual.
Personally I've also seen the application of spirituality as distinctly non-religious. Many people make a distinction between the two (I bet most number-thumpers here would be surprised to know many spiritual people hate religious people even more than scientific people do). As such the result is a rather amorphous concept - you do the better thing, even if it's harder, because it develops you more, but because it also has larger implications within familial and societal units. So it becomes part self-development, part (mutual) survival mechanism, part inspiration for development on all fronts, part pre-scientific explanatory device.
Before science kills that last part, it better be able to explain the universe and everything in it. We haven't even mapped the bottom of the oceans yet, so don't get too uppity and waste valuable resources with studies like this."