As I explained here, “How And Why Does Christianity Conflate Spirituality With Religion?“, Christianity conflates religion with spirituality in an effort to prove it’s existence.
This article Religion is a fact of life that even atheists must accept on the Catholic website LifeSiteNews.com is an excellent example of this.
First they establish the universal nature of religions throughout history and societies:
All over the world, at every time and in every place, we find evidence that human beings are religious.
The theologian Mgr. Gerard Van Noort wrote: No one, not even an atheist, is ignorant of the existence of religion. Religion is as commonplace as trees, and like trees it grows in an endless variety of shapes, sizes, and colors all over the world. And as some trees are gigantic in size and others small; some flowering and some stunted; some beautiful in form and others grotesque, so too is it with the variant forms of religion.
And the philosopher A. M. Woodbury S.M. noted: No one today can deny the existence of religious facts. For among various peoples, various religions have flourished and still flourish, and indeed so universally, that the human race viewed in general must be held to be genuinely religious.
Then they describe religions in terms that closely mirror spirituality…
- Spirituality: Mankind’s innate need to understand the world and his place in it.
On every continent, among every people, and in every era, human beings have sought knowledge about the divine power that governs and directs the world. They have striven not only to possess knowledge, but to order their lives according to that knowledge.
They specifically acknowledge the universal nature of religion.
This universality of religion is a fact which demands explanation, according to the principle that “every effect must have a proportionate cause.”
Then they ask a logical question:
Now that we have established the fact that man is a religious animal, we are ready to ask why this is so. There must be an explanation that adequately accounts for the phenomenon observed.
The unstated assumption here is that the universal nature of religions prove the existence of God.
But religion is just a form of spirituality. So this is actually just proof of the universal nature of spirituality.
Ultimately, this argument attempts to prove that God exists by conflating religion with spirituality, the universal nature of religions with the universal nature of spirituality.
This is very similar to an argument that I discuss in this earlier post Some excellent Muslim insights into human nature.
Humanity’s enduring fascination with the same set of existential questions—life after death, the human soul, morality, ethics and the nature of God—has compelled some anthropologists to describe us as Homo Religiosus, distinct as a species based not on ‘sapience’ (wisdom, intelligence) but on shared religious activity. Even in modern times with the decline of traditional religion, human beings cannot escape these so-called religious questions. “Why Is Shirk the Greatest Sin of All?” located here: https://yaqeeninstitute.org/read/paper/why-is-shirk-the-greatest-sin-of-all.
The takeaway here is that both Christianity and Islam (unknowingly) conflate the universal nature of religion with universal nature of spirituality in an effort to prove themselves