A Place for Religious Atheism in 21st Century Spirituality?

In revisiting William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, Charles Taylor points out that in our post-Durkheimian world, individuals will make what they can of their religious experience. The individual (or small groups of individuals) pays little or no attention to how this attitude affects organized religion or wellestablished churches. One of the consequences of these fractures, Taylor explains, is a rise in number of people calling themselves atheists, agnostics or non-religious. Furthermore, there seems to be a significant increase of individuals holding seemingly untenable religious positions, e.g. Catholics not accepting crucial dogmas; individuals combining elements of Christianity with certain aspects of Buddhism and so forth. One other of those positions that might be considered as untenable is the socalled religious (or spiritual) atheism. As atheism is mostly viewed as the absolute counterpart of religion or the religious, religious atheism therefore must equal a contradictio in terminis. The point of my presentation will be to show otherwise and to indicate that there is room for and proof of spirituality and religious experience for atheists. My own doctoral research, mainly based on William James's analysis, clearly showed that, al