I agree completely, and I think it would be great if there were more books about developing mental health and well-being for non-theists.

Look at what happened to the Raving A/Theist. I strongly suspect that he adopted the worst kind of superstitions because he felt that atheism lacked meaning and a sense of purpose.

Religions have been very successful in persuading people that life is not worth living if you don’t believe in gods. Look at how theists respond when you show them the holes in their beliefs. As often as not, they eventually fall back on something akin to “If I stopped believing, my life would be empty and I’d do nothing but murder, steel, and go to orgies.”

The more honest among them will admit that they’d rather have a pretty lie than an ugly truth, and they define ugliness as living without a god.

I think it’s important to talk about the mental and emotional positives associated with freethought.

I’m not sure about deeper meanings, greater universes and being connected to them. I understand what the words mean but as phrases they’re too vague to mean anything, they need at least a bit of context. When religious people say “deeper meaning” they mean intentionality of the supernatural variety.

Of course, but language is metaphorical, so I think reengineering vocabulary is unnecessary.

People turn to the spirit because they can’t figure out (or accept) that their consciousness is meat-based, an experience of the brain. As such, “the spirit” is not so much religion as folk science. In this context, we all agree that there’s something really interesting and quite singular about consciousness.

Check out “they’re made of meat” on youtube. It really puts it all into context.

For that difficult to describe thing that many people here may mean when they say “spirituality,” I suggest the more mundane but more to-the-point term, “emotional health.”

Spirituality, to me, is about awe and wonder in the universe. Carl Sagan captures it best, if you’re familiar with Cosmos. Thinking about how big the unverse is does it. How precious this blue planet is. How infinitely short our time span is on this earth, and how miniscule the time since we started banging rocks together. Or how amazing this illusion of consciousness is, created by the three pounds of dog breakfast between our ears. As Douglas Adams said, “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” It is a deeply weird universe we live in, and recognizing and appreciating it is my version of spirituality — and probably that of a lot of other scientifically-minded atheists as well. We’re all looking for “deeper meaning” and some sense of connection to the greater universe. Some people express it in religion, others in bland pantheism, and other is astronomy. If you don’t see ’sprituality’ among atheism, it’s because you don’t know what you’re looking for.

Nicely put, and I agree 100% with the sentiment. I have some problems with a piece of the vocabulary, however. “Spirituality” implies “spirit” somewhere in the mix. While awe and wonder in the universe may feel essentially the same as spirituality, it simply cannot be the same thing for literal reasons. (I know that won’t bother most people, but I’m a very literal-minded person.) So I guess we need a new word to describe it. Too bad “reality” is already taken — that’s the obvious parallel term.

~David D.G.

It may be completely unconnected to how helpful it is. Popularity says nothing about how helpful it is.

Not by itself, no, but it does tell how people feel if it’s helpful. And if it feels helpful, it probably is helpful in some small way. The placebo effect is not without its charms. Aspirin is even more popular, and actually IS helpful in a scientific way.

But, yes, you still may be horrified that people feel books are helpful. Nobody is going to take that away from you.

Also, on spirituality… I don’t really think atheists are, in general, that different from religious people when it comes to wanting to understand and feel connected to the universe. People say “spiritual but not religious” because they don’t want to live a joyless, mechanical existence. Some atheists just have gone one step further and realized that joy and wonder arise from this joyless mechanical existence, that they are one in the same, and that we don’t have to create a plane of “spirituality” to explain the things like love and curiosity that make life worth living. The natural human yearning to enjoy life and put it in some larger context is the same for everyone, from the most religious to the most godless.

Your mileage may vary.

Spirituality disconnected from spirits is meaningless to me, I’ve asked and people who use the term don’t know what they mean. To say that people have a “real need” for it isn’t supported at all.

I support Sam Harris’s research into religious practics: ritual, meditation, fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation or using psychotropic drugs. I wouldn’t say these are necessarily connected natural phenomena so to group them under spirituality and to say we need them is beyond hasty. It also denies the variety of religious practice, and equivocates it all into one.

Would people enjoy or benefit from doing these activities? Sure, but they’re relatively few of many activities that would.

inkadu,

…which may correlates to how helpful it is.

It may be completely unconnected to how helpful it is. Popularity says nothing about how helpful it is.

…but it’s still going to be emotionally disorienting!

Change usually is.

so people coming to atheism may also be leaving a church.

People need other people, no one denies this.

…just the fact that there ARE atheists living normal, healthy, fulfilling lives may be reassuring for people.

If that was the goal of the book, documenting how some atheists live their lives, it wouldn’t have received the reaction it did. It definitely would dispel some myths about atheists.