Blog #3-Chris A-Spirituality and Religion

Spirituality is not religion. I will start out with religion. Religion has to deal with what goes on or exists further than the visible world. Where your operating through your intuition and faith, in contrast to reason. Religion deals with the existence of a single human being, a group of beings, or a "transcendental" spiritual higher power that has created the world and that governs it. Religion is a very specific set of beliefs AND practices that are understood and agreed on by a sect. Lastly, it is the idea of ritual, prayer, spiritual exercises, and or some principles that will make the religious person believe in
such a higher eternal principle (i.e. higher power)

Spirituality is a term that carries less argument than religion does. With spirituality comes an internal process of trying to find your personal authenticity, personality, and a wholeness as a person as a part of your self identity development. It is the ongoing process of continuously "transcending" one's current focus of centricity. (i.e. egocentricity) Spirituality is improving and developing your own self by connecting with your self through meditation, practices, and through relationships with community. Spirituality focuses on trying to direct your life in a direction that has meaning and purpose so that you don't feel like, "why do i belong here?" Lastly, spirituality makes you a lot more open minded with exploring an intangible higher power or "essence of center of value" that exists way beyond what we can all witness as humans.

1. http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/20568813?&Search=yes&searchText=meditation&list=hide&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dmeditation%2B%26acc%3Doff%26wc%3Don%26fc%3Doff&prevSearch=&item=4&ttl=73017&returnArticleService=showArticleInfo (JSTOR)
2. http://www.lavoisier.fr/livre/notice.asp?ouvrage=1785777 (Google Scholar)
3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15979795 (NCBI)

1. https://characterclearinghouse.fsu.edu/index.php/articles/perspectives/74-differentiating-spirituality-from-religion (Google)