I am in your camp. I began life in a high demand religion, spent two years as a missionary and a decade in local congregation leadership positions.

When I saw how the community was treating marginalized people, because I got to know several, I looked in the mirror and realized I couldn't support it anymore. Leaving was hard, as the community would not allow you to leave with your dignity intact, but worth it.

I fluttered between different communities for a few months before realizing I was just solidly apatheist (deist or atheist, just don't really care one way or another) and an existentialist. We have fantastic opportunities at our disposal and they are what we make of them.

I'm 100% with you on the "not even sure what spiritual means as I've never heard a coherent definition". If anyone is interested, this position is known as theological non-cognitivism, ignosticism, or igtheism

> Theological noncognitivism is the non-theist position that religious language, particularly theological terminology such as "God", is not intelligible or meaningful, and thus sentences like "God exists" are cognitively meaningless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_noncognitivism

> Ignosticism or igtheism is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the word "God" has no coherent and unambiguous definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism

Fellow outlier here, perhaps we should begin to meet regularly to discuss our shared beliefs and how to proliferate them?

I wouldn’t expect us to be outliers here to be honest but it’s always interesting to see what other replies there are in this crowd.

Nature is king. I don’t think it’s just because I’m more into it but there really does seem to be a growing trend of recognising the importance of being in nature

My wife and I celebrate winter solstice on the 24th (being solidari to the rest of the world) with a nice tree. We still search for planet ornaments.

We also celebrated the launch of James Webb.

My wife, son and I do the same. Happy solstice!

When possible, I try to see myself as part of nature. For example, making it clear to me and others that I'm an animal. I think this help me respect my surroundings more, puts me on the ground of reality. In comparison to the idea of "humans are above everything".

Used to not be religious, too RCIA at Harvard and became Catholic. Love contemplating free will, since by most definitions it is supernatural.

Religious practice adds so much color to my life, especially in terms of contemplating gratitude. The central worship of Catholics is the Eucharist which translates into giving thanks.

If life has no meaning, nothing is lost, because it has certainly improved my life.

I'll take a stab at defining "spiritual", at least the way I understand it. I think of it as a "recipe" or pattern for something in reality. A little bit related to Plato's "forms" but not exactly. "Recipe" is a better way to think of it. In traditional cosmology, they used the word "heaven" to refer to "patterns" or "recipes" or "seeds". A seed is another good way to think of it. A seed is tiny and contains the recipe or pattern for the thing it will grow into.

In traditional cosmology, if you have "heaven", you also have "earth", which means potential, or chaos, or unorganized matter. Or if we want to keep the "recipe" metaphor, this would be the "ingredients".

So we have a recipe (the spiritual pattern) and we have the ingredients (matter), and we combine the ingredients using the recipe (we are co-creating with God) a new substance. We transform the ingredients into a new object (bread, in our case) which gets a new name, because it is related to the ingredients, but is now unified by being transformed as we co-create a new object with God. Each new object is slightly different (a "particular"), but it's following a pattern or recipe, so we still recognize it as a particular example of a pattern we call "bread".

This same pattern of "heaven" and "earth" applies to seeds and soil, or an idea and a project, or a film script and a film. This is what is meant when traditional cultures and books speak of "heaven" and "earth".

So to live a "spiritual" life would mean to seek out and learn to identify "patterns" and to manifest them bodily by acting them out or by transforming matter to make a new object. Which is what all humans do all day every day, but our materialist minds have been blinded to how essential and common this is to the human experience, because we get caught up trying to "scientifically" understand what "heaven" is, but heaven is an ontological category, not a scientific place.

"I get my sense of awe, wonder and beauty from the natural world, whether that's star gazing or studying and appreciating nature."

Yeah man... I'd dare to say there is some kind of religion in that.

I too fulfill my needs for awe and wonder from studying nature and its wonderful complexity.

I also consider that the supernatural is unknowable and that if it somehow exist it is undetectable. It's not exactly like your direct lack of belief in it but the implications are identical.

Finally, here is my definition of spiritual: beliefs and practices that stems from an answer to that question: why existence instead nothingness.

How is this as a definition of spiritual? “The practice of engaging with the unknown for practical effect.”

God is not unknown. God is very much known, otherwise religions wouldn't have existed.

But no one can completely understand God and their motivations, after all, they're a being much beyond our understanding.