Variations in Post-Religious Growth

This is one of the more thoughtful pieces I've read on post-religious development.

Its central insight, that people often confuse the collapse of a religious framework with the collapse of spiritual experience itself, resonates with me as a cultural Catholic. For that reason, it also reads as distinctly post-Christian: you inherit belief, you outgrow it, and maturity means learning to construct meaning on your own terms.

My own tradition offers a different starting point.

Buddhism warns against rigid attachment to doctrine, but it also warns against what you might call spiritual individualism: the assumption that outgrowing institutions means you can simply invent your own path. The lineage matters precisely because the mind is slippery. Left entirely to ourselves, we tend to reinvent the wheel and often reinvent it badly.

The Buddhist path doesn't solve the problem the essay describes. But that turns out to be a feature, not a bug. What practice reveals isn't a freer, more self-authored version of ourselves. It exposes our conditioning: attachment to pleasure, recurring anger, perfectionism, discouragement, and the persistent mental habits that keep us stuck. More important, the self-authoring independent self isn't a valid destination. It's merely another illusion to examine.

What comes after inherited belief isn't necessarily freedom from structure. Sometimes it's the beginning of understanding why structure existed in the first place.