spir·it·u·al–adjective- of, pertaining to, or consisting of spirit; incorporeal.
- of or pertaining to the spirit or soul, as distinguished from the physical nature: a spiritual approach to life.
- closely akin in interests, attitude, outlook, etc.: the professor's spiritual heir in linguistics.
- of or pertaining to spirits or to spiritualists; supernatural or spiritualistic.
- characterized by or suggesting predominance of the spirit; ethereal or delicately refined: She is more of a spiritual type than her rowdy brother.
- of or pertaining to the spirit as the seat of the moral or religious nature.
- of or pertaining to sacred things or matters; religious; devotional; sacred.
- of or belonging to the church; ecclesiastical: lords spiritual and temporal.
- of or relating to the mind or intellect.
Of course, dictionary definitions are one thing. How people use a word, and all the unspoken baggage that goes along with a word like this, can be quite another.
Even as an atheist and skeptic I have an understanding (among multiple understandings) of the word "spiritual" that puts the word in a positive light: The side of people involved in the emotional lives of themselves and others, the side which is more concerned with peace and happiness than material pursuits, which is more concerned with understanding than possessing, the side which is capable of experiencing a sense of awe and wonder.
Much like an Episcopalian or liberal Catholic, however, who might hesitate to call himself simply "a Christian" for fear that others might take him to mean "fundie whacko", as fundie wackos have very much appropriated and co-opted the word "Christian", I'd be loathe to describe myself as "spiritual". In part because I don't live up to my own idealized version of that word very well, but also because, even if I were trying to flatter myself, I don't much care for the excess baggage that goes along with the word.
What's the "excess baggage" that goes along with the word "spiritual" for me?
For one thing, literal belief in "spirits", in the mystical, other-worldly, ghostly apparition sense of "spirit". That certainly doesn't apply to me.
For another, my impressions of many of the people who call themselves "spiritual", who at best typically come across as a bit wacky to me, and worse, who often don't seem very spiritual in any positive sense of that word to me. For some people their so-called "spiritualism" strikes me more like a grab bag of wishful thinking and/or an excuse for intellectual laziness. For others their self-described spirituality comes across as a boastful claims of Deep Wisdom, a kind of competitive one-upsmanship that seems more unseemly than "spiritual".
Even when people describe themselves as "spiritual", and they clearly don't want to sound boastful about it, when they're eager to deny that their spirituality makes them "better" than anyone else, I find the rhetorical backflips employed in an attempt to hold onto humility less than consistent or believable (talk about different "levels" or "paths" or "stages", "I was once like you, and there's nothing wrong with that", etc.).
I negatively associate the word "spiritual" with people who eschew, even scorn, reason, who think their "feelings" are automatically superior to any other possible guide: silly things like logic and evidence, for example. These are people who, no matter how they screw up any decisions they make in life, they will always in retrospect place the blame for their mistakes on not going with their "TRUE feelings" (i.e., using the gift of hindsight, whichever ideas among many that went through their head in the past which would have turned out better than whatever they actually choose to do), thus always ensuring a personal revisionist history where TRUE feelings were, are, and always will the right answer, and where whatever feeble attempts they might make at reason must be what screws them up and throws them off course.
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