Things of the spirit
I have been given much to think by this discussion over in ajhalluk's lj.
I was brought up a very practising Methodist and my family were very involved with the local church (I also went - for reasons of proximity - to a C of E primary school): my grandfather was a local preacher, my grandmother was involved with all sorts of activites like the Women's Fellowship and singing in the choir, my mother and father ran various youth groups, my mother taught in the Sunday School, my father held various steward posts. Even things like Brownies and Guides with which my family weren't involved so closely were held on church premises. So throughout my childhood a lot of my life revolved around the church and its premises (although it's long been pulled down it still features in my dreams, both the church itself and the various associated halls and meeting rooms).
But somehow it didn't 'take' particularly: it was a thing one did, I didn't actively rebel perhaps because I wasn't deeply engaged (maybe). I just drifted away (partly in order to spare family feelings) once I left home to go to university, though I had been having doubts (on the sort of intellectual grounds that one associates with serious-minded Victorians - particularly the discovery of The Golden Bough) before that.
In a way I didn't have a faith to lose, only a habit and a sense of obligation that it was quite easy to drop, with the change in circumstance. The analogy that strikes me is that it was like someone in a musical family who is either tone-deaf or just not that musical who is finally able to give up the endless piano practice and involvement in avocations that do not interest her and may be actively boring.
I know that many people do have a sense of the spiritual and have had spiritual experiences (just as I know that there are all sorts of other kinds of experiences that some other people have that I don't, and vice versa). But I don't think that it's an element in my life that I need to find some framework for. Because, of course, it would possible to accept my Doubts about the literal truth of religious beliefs and still go on taking them as a productive metaphor. Or to find some other belief system that provided a better fit. But I don't. Even though I find the subject, as a subject, fascinating.