spirituality doesn’t have to mean you believe in spirits in the sense of ghosts etc. I believe that if that’s where the definition of exploring one’s own inner world ends, then that person has missed the point.
The big religions of the world all explicitly teach kindness - personal and concrete kindness practiced by you, the follower.
Is that what they effectively teach? Or is it just window dressing on top of underlying hegemonisation?
A/B testing is likely impossible and i can't see how you would measure kindness. Nonetheless, my conjecture is that religion likely shifts people in the direction of kindness. I suspect that believers who are cruel would typically also be cruel without the religion.
I assert that there are more direct and effective waits of developing compassion, but that they require a base level of self-awareness higher than the median found in neoliberal nations. Perhaps religion is close to optimal for those who need extrinsic motivation to develop any self-government.
Furthermore, it looks to me like neoliberalism leaves a philosophical vacuum which demands filling with something, and that something is all too eagerly supplied by charlatans. We should evaluate religion relative to whatever philosophy would take its place. Tribalism, fascism, supremacy: these are perennially seductive. Religion is not incompatible with these, but it might crowd them out.
What do you call yourself? A militant woo-merchant?
I describe myself as a humanist, and to me that approximately means a spiritual existentialist with no belief in spirits. From existentialism you can, of course, reach nihilism, a philosophy that is not so much wrong as unhelpful. But existentialism doesn't teach that there is no meaning; it teaches us that meaning is whatever we want, and it's important because we say it is important. From there you can end up back in any school of philosophy you want, but with a grounding that's compatible with living on a ball of rock hurtling through space.