Spirituality is learned through direct experience and personal change and growth. Isaiah had direct experience. So did Jesus, John the Baptist, Buddha, Zoroaster, Gandhi, Krishna, Baha'Ullah, and many other such beings. The experience of spirituality can lead to enlightenment.

Religion is learned by rote. It is learned from books, from priests, and from churches. It is learned by imitation (monkey see...monkey do). It is enforced by conformity. It results in people with fixed, rigid opinions based not upon their own experience but on what someone else told them to believe...and it very seldom leads to enlightenment.

Spirituality is not confined to any single religion...nor is God.

And yes, Guest, most people create the God of their imagining in their own image...or their own chosen or borrowed-from-others image (which may be radically different in some respects from their image of themselves), but that doesn't mean God doesn't exist. Most people create the World in their own image too, baby! And the World exists.

What do I mean? A person who always looks at the glass as half-empty sees the World as a hard and cruel place, and likely sees God (if he believes in God) as a harsh and demanding judge. A person who see the glass as half full sees the World as a place of much positive possibility, a beautiful place, and he probably sees God (if he believes in God) as a beneficent and loving power. The person who sees the glass as brimming over is in the best shape of all, and has probably achieved enlightenment or something close to it.

Now you...you appear to be the guy who says...aw, that's just a friggin' glass! Too bad for you. :-) It makes for a mighty prosaic and mundane existence.

- LH