@ABH3PO thanks for creating this poll.

I identify myself as spiritual but not religious™ on an agnostic-materialist spectrum 🧘‍♂️

I define #spirituality as, roughly speaking, whatever that has to do with subjectivity and intersubjectivity (psychology + culture, basically). In particular, practices that are specifically designed to make us individually or collectively better in some way, healthier, less detached from reality.

Roughly speaking, pre-modern confession is a modern psychotherapy (which makes us more free from distortions we project on others), and pre-modern praying is modern affirmations (a conscious self-hypnosis that, for instance, enhances a placebo effect or makes us more confident). The collective examples would be engaging in some ceremony, or a music festival, which can be something more than just entertaining but rather psychotherapeutic, enhanced with empathy to surrounding people.

The power of these practices has been known and rediscovered over and over again in every culture, including for whatever corrupt purposes (terrorism, psyops, etc.). Military marching with singing is one of the strongest spiritual practices that ever existed in a secular context IMO. When it's trained up to automatism, it becomes a somewhat hypnotic and even ecstatic experience of oneness with a group of people, as if it was a single congruent organism. It feels good and kind of becomes an addiction, because we may not usually experience such congruency within ourselves personally, but here you've got this on a collective level for a while. Yet sadly this is used to train submissiveness to those who control this "organism" and they are usually not of very high morals.

I also acknowledge that rare and somewhat extraordinary human abilities exist. But I reject supernaturalism. These abilities are both possible to study with science based on current paradigms, AND these abilities are also greatly over-exaggerated in our culture; they are not identical to what James Randi's paranormal challenges or whatever that kept constantly debunking. Life is not a literal Harry Potter movie.

There are some surprising rare phenomena, which are hard to study and explain with our current limited enough stage of science, but I believe satisfying explanations of them won't require something separate from what we call objective reality. Just very few notable and relatively easily verifiable examples of these abilities are Srinivasa Ramanujan's math creativity skills (the legacy keeps mathematicians proving this stuff), and more or less creepy accurate predictions of events from distant future expressed in somewhat confusing art (by Wachowskis, George Orwell, Matt Groening; and there are lots of relatively unpopular artists too, which makes it hard to reduce explanations to "somebody just watched the art and reproduced it" or "they initially cooperated"). The latter is basically identical to what biblical saints were capable of doing.

There is also some weird stuff that has to do solely with subjective experience, which is much more problematic to verify from the outside. Specifically, some of the states of consciousness where the outside perceptual reality, including random people, weirdly mirrors one's internal dialogue, with a horrific amount of Carl Jung's synchronicities per moment.

All this stuff exists; I don't reject it. I reject oversimplified explanations made both by idealists and materialist-atheists/nihilists.

I've got tons of stuff to say about it. Like many of us, I'm frustrated with the collective multi-layered confusion and with the existential loneliness as a result. I hope to record a video on all that at some point.