I just got back from a solo motorcycle trip through Uttarakhand. Met over a hundred travelers along the way — hostels, dhabas, roadside chai stops. The kind of people who have left their regular lives behind, even if briefly, to go find something in the mountains. Naturally, religion came up a lot.
I’d ask people: are you religious?
Almost every single one of them said the same thing. I’m not religious. I’m spiritual.
I’ve heard this before, obviously. But hearing it so many times, from people of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities — I got a little sick of it. It feels less like a personal philosophy and more like an anthropological cop-out.
The dishonesty
When I’d push a little — what does spiritual mean to you? — they’d say things like “I believe in a higher power” or “there’s something within me that guides me.”
But watch the behaviour. They fold their hands when they pray. They sit cross-legged in temples. They nod along when the conversation turns to mantras, to Om, to rituals handed down for generations. Put them in a room full of religious people and they’ll agree with almost everything. Put them in a room full of atheists and suddenly they’re “not really religious”. They are somehow not okay with eating beef or pork because they “just don’t like it” — not because religion considers them sacred or haraam. They’re okay with eating chicken peacefully though. All good there.
The behaviour doesn’t lie really!
Sure, you can believe in God without practicing religion. Belief and practice are technically decoupled. But if that’s your position, it’s more honest to own the word believer and not hide behind spiritual. Spiritual is so vague it means everything and nothing. It’s a word that lets you sit in both camps without owning either one.
Saying I’m spiritual, not religious is like saying you’re half pregnant.
Religion ain’t cool
Why does this dishonesty exist?
One obvious reason: being religious isn’t cool anymore. Not in urban, educated, modern circles. It carries baggage — dogma, institutional corruption, historical violence, superstition. Calling yourself religious invites a certain kind of judgment. Spiritual sidesteps all of that. Same beliefs, none of the social cost. It’s belief with a PR upgrade.
There’s also this moral convenience. If you believe in God, morality isn’t something you have to think through or struggle with. It’s prescribed and comes from the Gods. You don’t have to sit with hard questions about what’s right — you just follow what’s been handed down. That’s an appealing arrangement. The spiritual person wants this — they just don’t want to acknowledge where they’re getting it from.
And then there’s the comfort. Belief in some higher power genuinely makes life feel so much more manageable. When you’re scared, you can pray. When an outcome is uncertain, you can “manifest” or ask the higher power for it. When something terrible happens, you can believe it’s part of a plan for the greater good. The feeling that something larger is watching over you — that you’re not alone in a cold, indifferent universe — is a powerful psychological tool. This sense of hope really works wonders.
I don’t want to debate whether it’s true or not - not in this post anyway. But there’s a way of engaging with that honestly, and a way of hiding from it. The spiritual person is doing the latter — holding onto the belief, keeping the comfort, without being willing to own what they actually believe.
Which brings me to the other option.
Atheism is a pain
I’m an atheist. And I want to be upfront: it’s not easy.
When I have a panic attack — and I’ve had them — there’s no one to pray to. Just my heart pounding, clothes wet with sweat, my thoughts assuming the worst and me trying to make sense of what’s going on in a not-so-stable state. No placebo of divine reassurance. Just me and my brain doing something terrifying, and the knowledge that I have to sit with it and move through it. When something terrible happens, I don’t get to believe it’s part of a plan for the greater good.
When I need a moral framework, I can’t outsource it to a higher power. When I make a choice about right and wrong, it’s my choice. I have the power to make it and the responsibility for the outcome. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes you end up reinventing the wheel, screwing things up and learning. I’m not complaining (maybe I am), but it is how it is.
Being an atheist is harder. I get why people reach for something. Prayer works the way a placebo works — it silences the mind, creates focus, gives the sense of control. It works.
That said, there has been a lot of research on human body and psychology that has been giving atheists tools to manage their lives without depending on faith. Meditation, mindfulness, CBT, breathing techniques — these have solid scientific backing and measurable effects on anxiety, sleep, and mood. Science-backed ways to control your state of mind, no institutional framework required. I was dealing with anxiety and sleep issues for the longest time and used Buteyko breathing [0] to fix it — worked wonders for me.
I don’t know — and that’s fine
People tell me: science is starting to understand that mantras help you feel peaceful and energized. Mantras are spiritual. Yes and no. And that’s exactly the point.
When you chant a mantra, you’re focusing on one thing, regulating your breath, being present. Not drifting into the past, not worrying about the future. That’s attention and breathwork — it works because of what the mind is doing, not because of what the words mean. Similarly, temples feel peaceful. Maybe it’s the people gathering. Maybe it’s the shape of the space, the acoustics, the silence, the ritual structure telling your body to slow down. We don’t fully know.
And that’s fine. I don’t know is a completely acceptable answer. The universe is full of things we haven’t figured out yet.
But when faced with that uncertainty, people tend to go one of two ways. Atheists sit with it — I don’t know, and I’ll revisit when there’s more to go on. Believers attribute it to God. Both are honest positions. What’s not honest is the third option: I want to attribute it to something, I just don’t know what it is. That something you can’t name? That’s God. You just won’t say it.
Soul searching spiritualists
A lot of people say they’re spiritual because they’re searching — for the meaning of life, for purpose, for some explanation of why any of this exists. But actually there’s nothing spiritual about being baffled by the mysteries of existence. It’s just human. That kind of questioning is more in the philosophical realm, not a theological one, and it has nothing to do with whether you believe in God.
If anything, genuinely sitting with those questions, without reaching for ready-made answers, puts you closer to atheism than to religion. Because religion isn’t confused about the meaning of life. It has answers. Confident, prescribed, institutional answers. If you’ve rejected those and are still searching, congrats, but there’s nothing spiritual about it. You’ve just found the starting point the rest of us are working from.
The real problem
Now here’s what actually concerns me. The spiritual middle ground isn’t just intellectually lazy — it makes you exploitable.
A committed religious person knows what they believe. They have doctrine, community, a whole framework that, whatever its flaws, has coherence. They know where they stand.
An atheist has done the hard work of accepting there’s no higher power and built their life accordingly. Also a stable position.
But someone in the spiritual middle? They believe in something — some vague higher power, some divine inner self, some energy science hasn’t named yet. No framework. No ground to stand on. And that makes them the perfect entry point for organizations that know exactly how to move them.
It starts with inner engineering. Art of living. The early courses are about wellness, breath, presence — secular enough to feel safe. But gradually the framework shifts, and by the time it becomes explicitly religious, they’ve already been brought in through the side door, and they never made a conscious choice. The whole funnel is designed for people who believe in something but haven’t committed to what.
The spiritual person ends up with the worst of both worlds. Neither the honest engagement with a religious tradition, nor the hard-won clarity of atheism. Just a soft, formless belief that makes them easy to guide in whatever direction someone else decides.
Pick a side.
If you believe in a higher power — if you pray, if you sit in temples, if you feel something in the rituals you practice — you’re a believer. Own it. There’s nothing embarrassing about it. Engage seriously with your tradition, understand what it actually claims, and make an honest reckoning with whether you believe it.
If you don’t — if you think consciousness is the brain, morality evolved, and the universe is indifferent — then you’re an atheist. It’s harder, and lonelier in some ways, but it’s honest IMO. Build your meaning from things that are real: work, friendships, relationships, purpose, sports, the fact that we’re briefly alive and get to decide what to do with that.
What you cannot do — or at least, what you shouldn’t pretend is a coherent position — is believe in God and call it spirituality.
The half-pregnant thing doesn’t hold up. And more importantly, it leaves you nowhere.
References
- [0] - Buteyko Breathing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buteyko_method