Hi Chris, I suspect you think those questions are rhetorical.
Like you I do think that spiritual practice can change us in profound ways. Or at least spiritual experience does (this leads to interesting places about grace and our spiritual self being our normal experience and so on and much else).
The problem is that sometimes spiritual practise falls well short of its intention.
The morality and ethics that the various religions propound conflict on some points. In my own tradition (Chrisitianity) the ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ seem to have different attitudes to war – and this is within the one faith.
Hi Evan — how did you guess that I thought those were rhetorical questions?
Yes, I think what you said about our spiritual self being our normal experience is insightful — we tend to label “peak moments” as the only spiritual experiences we undergo, not realizing how much is available to us in every moment. I think spiritual practices like meditation are about gaining that awareness.
On the subject of religious traditions and their different attitudes, I think there are (at least) two ways we could see the issue. The first would be to assume that every tenet of a given tradition had its roots in the spiritual experience of its founder, and the second would be to make some distinction between the core of each tradition’s teachings, which came from the mouth of the founder, and the periphery, which perhaps consists of later glosses on what the founder said. In the case of Christianity, for instance, there have been many efforts to distinguish between the actual sayings of Jesus and the interpretations or additions made by the writers of the gospels.
On the issue of whether we “can be good without God,” I like some philosophers’ distinction between moral epistemology and moral ontology. Anyone can know what’s moral and act morally, whether they are atheists or believers. So in that sense we can be “good without God.” But the ontological question is why “goodness” exists in the first place, and that is a question it is difficult to answer without positing a moral lawgiver, i.e., God.