"Religion is for people afraid to go to hell --- Spirituality is for people who have already been there."
Since the birth of humankind, our biggest inner struggle has been to achieve a level of complete peacefulness through religion or spirituality. Even though, religion has evolved and shifted through many individual beliefs, yet the essence spirituality has always been the same. First, I will try to explain religion and spiritually in a broader sense, and then I will explain why I prefer spirituality to religion.
According to one of the religion writer, Malik Khan, Religion in actual practice is applied to a great variety of human ideas, acts, and institutions. All attempts to sift out from these some common element, which would represent the "essence" of religion, have ended in failure . Considering the wide range of concerns called religious, it is at least clear to me that altogether they have played a highly significant part in human history. Men have fought and died for their religion. Art and literature have flowered forth as expressions of faith. I met many individuals have who acknowledged religion as the basis for strength, hope, and significance in their lives. Generally speaking, I regard religion as significant in the degree to which it concerns the whole range of man s experience. From this point of view, a religion, which is relevant only to a part of man s life, would be relatively trivial. A second view of significance or importance is the extent to which the religion deals with "ultimate" rather than merely preliminary matters. Furthermore, a religion is trivial unless it continually leads one out from immediate and particular concerns to questions about ever-wider meanings, more extensive connections, and deeper implications. A principal of standard of goodness in religion can be summarized in one word, "community". Broadly speaking, I believe community is the harmonious inter-relation of individual entities. By this approach, a religion...