You look at a sunset, you find it pretty, your brain floods with chemicals, not spirituality. Emotional response.

The problem is here that our understanding of such things goes a long back before we came up with the notion of 'chemicals in the brain'. You don't look at a sunset and dispassionately conclude that what you are experiencing isn't, in fact, a sunset at all, but an optical illusion consequent on the ever rising western horizon of the third planet in the heliocentric scheme which results in the atmosphere becoming a light filter until the sun appears to be red, casting its light on the sea and clouds.

It's like sex and death - how do we rationalise desire & fear? They are primal, instinctive, impulsive, powerful and define pretty much everything we are no matter how much we think we know the mechanisms, chemicals, stimulus & responses. Sex is nature's way of conning us into reproduction, itself a random by-product of a procedure many of us regard as Holy Communion given the transcendent vastness of its significance, potency & influence upon our culture. And yet people dare to say homosexuality is somehow 'unnatural'.

Emotional response is only one small part of the Spiritual equation; it prefigures the notion for sure, but it doesn't define it. This has nothing to do with The Supernatural or the Mystical. Mystery there is, for sure, and Weird Shit happens all the time (ghosts, phantoms, UFOs, meaningful coincidence, visions & other such Forteana) but Human Beings are the only creatures on this planet who have come up with Religion, likewise the notion of a Creator. Religion derives from our Spiritual sense as we engage with our inner Nature vs Nurture debate (the classical dilemma between the head & the heart) and realise that Myth and Rationality are born from the same alchemical egg and are not (and never were) mutually exclusive. From whence our capacity to fear ghosts if there are no ghosts to fear? Oo-er...

I don't agree that everyone feels the same about abstract concepts such as love, sorrow, joy, music, inspiration, poetry, death, beauty, good food, wine, beer, fags & mountaineering*.

Absolutely, we all experience them uniquely, and most of us have specialism, be it an allotment or model railway or melodeon. I personally get nothing out of poetry (with few exceptions) and the very idea of mountaineering terrifies me, but whatever floats your boat.

I assume by fags, you mean cigarettes?

I do indeed. Sorry for the confusion.