How does spirituality benefit an individual and society as a whole?

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Spirituality, for some people, becomes an unavoidable component of their lifestyles. When I was a teenager, I professed atheism, much to the chagrin of my mother. Fast forward to my twenties and the spirituality / religion section was the only section that interested me at the bookstore. When I had learned enough to start having my own experiences, I read less and thought and created and meditated more. Not having available resources and learning materials only means people will start conjuring up their own out of whole cloth. There’s just no option not to, so might as well provide decently non-offensive stuff for them to sink their teeth into.

I’ll tell you what spirituality did for me. I’m the kinda guy who read about Ender Wiggin killing his bullies and nodding saying, “yep can totally see that and I would have done that too.” I inherited my father’s temper. Anger is never 100% outside of the possibilities for how I might react to a situation, and it can be a real scary sight to behold. I took an anger management class as a teenager but really it was the understanding that I don’t have to manage and affect everything that kept me from building up the habit of using the energy of anger to solve all my problems.

Dissolving the feelings into meditation has helped me deconstruct them and allowed me to use them to provide useful energy and not just be counter-productive all the time. Every non-socially-friendly complex of emotions, I’ve been able to deconstruct and analyze due to things I’ve learned as a result of all the various spiritual techniques I’ve learned.

The materialist atheist might downplay all of this self-help as a poor man’s science. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re holding unexamined faith in something they don’t really understand, elevating science into something it isn’t in order to position it against God and religion.

But if you look at the history, there would have been no science without religious funding. Pope Clement VII, 99 years before Galileo was tried for heresy for it, was extremely pleased with Copernicus’ heliocentric model. The Greeks who developed science and math were for the most part quite devout, just interested in determining whether wisdom could be separated from individual divine ideation.

Spirituality is a phenomenal driver of creativity and growth. This benefits individuals, and it benefits society as a result.