For this one we're going to be talking about two primary words. One is spirituality and the other is religion. In previous insights or essays which you can find in our back catalog we gave, at different times, what we feel are the two best simple definitions of each. And those are that "spirituality" is "full spectrum nature" while "religion" is "any system of faith, worship, or practice".
So a lot of heavily religious people think that their system or menu they subscribe to, and only eat food off that one menu, receive their spirituality only through that menu because religion = spirituality. While a lot of secular folks (meaning those that have no religious affiliation) are turned off by the word 'spiritual' because they think it's owned by religion and you must be religious to be spiritual because they've also been tricked into thinking spirituality=religion. Well... neither are correct. And we would say each way of thinking is a product of imperial (meaning of the empire's) mind control programming because the goal of empire is to slow, stop, or full-on contract the spiritual growth of each individual.
The United States has historically been founded with an enlightenment view. Although its founding was far from enlightened due to its psychotic imperial settler colonialism against Native Americans, to allow for all religions, through the first amendment of the constitution's "Free Exercise Clause" that guarantees individuals the right to freely exercise their religion while also simultaneously having the "Establishment Clause" that ensures that the government cannot favor one religion over another and protects individuals' rights to practice any faith without interference from the state. So you're free to not have a religion, or have one, with no specific one being superior. This is why Christian Nationalism, which is really just Christian Supremacy, is fundamentally of empire, not to mention anti-American being more analogous to the Taliban's ideology, and those trying to put the 10 Commandments in schools are dark imperial agents.
Although the US is still a quite heavily religious country, church attendance has been steadily declining for the last half century while during this time, interest in spirituality has been steadily increasing. This is a very good trend because we are absolutely spiritual beings having a human experience, and are all on what we call "the spiritual path" but not religious beings" on a religious path because any formal system of faith, worship, or practice is not needed for that. They're are thousands of religions, and any of them can be used or accessed, but none of them are required. It's like saying, I want to go exercise, but I don't need formal team sports to do that. I can do it myself. You can access a more full spectrum of nature (or could also be said as "multidimensional" nature) on your own, by meditating, going in a flotation tank, taking an entheogen, going on a hike in nature, getting a good therapist, being a more loving and compassionate person, any combination of those things, and much more... The main way that the individual accesses spirituality is through an internal individual process. And getting out into nature only amplifies accessing more full spectrum nature. Indigenous people have known this for millions of years. And it shows because they live, unless co-opted by the empire, in harmony and balance with nature.
Now we are not hostile to religion if it has a personal esoteric path, we're hostile to big corporate imperial religion which promotes a theocracy that tries to push its view on others and then actually becomes hostile to nature with a dogshit prosperity gospel that says God put the oil in the ground for us to extract drill baby drill Dumbfuckistan yee ha and is generally hostile to the natural world, evolution, and the material sciences. This is the problem with missionaries who were absolutely of the empire, whose goals have been to assimilate other cultures, especially indigenous ones like the Borg collective. Because what are many of the world's big religions doing? They are taking the natural systems and hierarchies of nature, such as the elements of nature earth, air, fire, water, their associated spirits, the moon, the sun, the cosmos, the divine, and natural alchemical evolutionary processes which are both exoteric (out there) and esoteric (in here) and replacing them with only an external hierarchy of men. God or Allah (male), Jesus (male), Satan (male) and then a priest class (which also happens to be, shocker, primarily male) that they say you need to be subservient to or go through in order to supposedly access the divine.
The problem here is that for the most part, big religion is not interested in the spiritual self development of the individual, the internal individual's difficult path, but more interested in spoon feeding large swaths of people dogma through doctrine and far too often correlating that with regressive politics because it's very hierarchical. Because signing up to someone else's menu wholesale means you can outsource the work which is easy and why many people do it. But less people are wanting to do it, which is an evolutionary process.