Is spirituality stronger with or without faith?
In the West, and in all the Abrahamaic communities, whether Judaic, Christian or Islamic, spirituality is almost synonymous with faith.
Yet in the Confucian-Daoist communities of East Asia spirituality is essentially faith-free. Moreover, the use of faith to mobilise people for political goals has generally been sternly discouraged by secular but spiritually powerful Confucian administrators.
Generally, Western commentators have chosen not to address issues related to the comparative merits of these contrasting approaches to spirituality. The Anglo-American drive to create a global economic order and the superior economic performance of Confucian-Daoist communities within that order make it perilous, however, to continue to ignore such a fundamental contrast in institutional, social and spiritual ethos.
Moreover, the fact that Western religion often clashes with scientific aspirations while failing to provide any effective restraining discipline for such ambitions has been responsible for flawed mechanistic and reductionist scientific paradigms in the West. Even worse, the habit of faith has often been transferred from spirituality to science, giving it an unchecked and dangerous authority over many aspects of life. One authoritative writer has remarked that this has reduced contemporary life to a confusion of experiments that are beyond both comprehension and control.
In contrast, Confucian-Daoist communities, which led the world in most areas of science and technology until the early 19th Century, have long nurtured a scientific culture that is organic and holistic and guided by a disciplined consciousness that is educated to seek out relevant correspondences, resonances and inter-relationships in nature. In some areas, like understanding of qi in the context of human well-being, the West still lags seriously.
The use of faith in the West in both spirituality and science has had the result of often failing to apply a disciplined human consciousness in many areas of human activity.