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Throwing Caution to the Wind

.
I began to wonder what people mean
when they say they are spiritual, but not religious.
"I don't go to church, but I am spiritual."

I think it has become a weasel-word. 

We used to think that people had souls,
or we used to be taught that people had souls. 

Souls are rather difficult to catch. 

I recall, from perhaps the mid-twentieth century,
reading how perfectly serious people did things such as
weighing people just before and just after they died
to see if they could detect what the weight of a soul would be.
No luck!  Apparently, souls are exceedingly light.

Another experiment was to try to capture whatever it was
a dying person exhaled, on the grounds that souls
were the breath of life.  No luck there, either!

But spiritual things are not tangible or material. 
They are . . . well . . . spiritual, something like God and angels.
And souls.  They are there, or course, but they cannot be detected,
because only crass material things can be detected. 

Nobody ever saw the wind!  Right?  Or love?  Or a soul.

"Well, maybe there is something out there.  I dunno.
Maybe like, something beyond, more than physical."

My roommate, when I attended Washington State College
(which became Washington State University, which became Wazzu),
aimed for a thrilling career in pharmacy; a cautious man.
(He occasionally became an irritatingly cautious man.
Once I had to tie him up with my ROTC tie, and throw him
into a cold shower.  I caught hell for turning my tie into a rope.)

My cautious, pharmaceutical friend did not go to church,
but he said he had decided to be a believer in God
and spiritual things because, although he did not think
there was a God, if there were one, he wanted to be
one of the believers, and it did not cost much to believe. 

I suspect that not being religious, but being vaguely spiritual,
is something like that:  it does not cost much to say so,
and if things turn out to be not as they appear,
they will be able to argue that they never gave up spiritual things.

That is better than being one of those buggering priests,
isn't it, or giving money to one of those preachers in a silk suit
driving off to a revival with his secretary at his side?
You can be spiritual sleeping in, or sleeping around, for that matter.

And, anyway, aren't scales now much more precise
than the beam scale the Goddess of Justice holds? 

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