08/25/2026
Where Science, Spirituality & Faith Meet: Finding Unity in a Divided World
I’ve kept my mouth closed about a lot of the behavior I’ve witnessed from people unless I’m directly prompted or antagonized. It isn’t because I don’t notice it. I do. I just believe adults should be held accountable for how we treat one another. We are supposed to be the example.
So when I encounter someone being immature, rude, selfish, inconsiderate, judgmental, or just completely unwilling to consider another person’s perspective, I try to remind myself of something that took me years to understand:
People can only see the world through the level of understanding they currently have.
I spent a long time trying to understand God, spirituality, people, and honestly, existence itself. I’ve read about different religions, spiritual traditions, philosophy, psychology, science, consciousness, human behavior, healing, and anything else that helped me look at the bigger picture.
I wasn’t searching because I wanted someone to hand me a belief system. I wanted to understand why we are here, why human beings experience the things we do, and why people from completely different places and periods of history have spent thousands of years asking so many of the same questions.
The more I learned, the harder it became for me to see everything as separate.
That doesn’t mean I believe every religion is the same, because it isn’t. It doesn’t mean science and spirituality are interchangeable either.
What interests me is where things overlap, where they challenge each other, and where one perspective might help us understand something another perspective cannot fully explain on its own.
I think we have become far too comfortable believing that understanding someone means agreeing with them.
It doesn’t.
I can learn about your religion without converting to it. I can listen to a scientific explanation without feeling like my spirituality is being threatened. I can understand why someone thinks differently than I do without abandoning what I believe.
I can respect another person’s sexuality, culture, faith, lack of faith, or way of living without needing any of those things to become my own.
Understanding is not agreement. It is simply the willingness to look beyond yourself.
I especially don’t understand the fear surrounding science and spirituality existing in the same conversation.
If something I’ve experienced has a psychological explanation, I want to hear it.
If something we’ve called spiritual for centuries can now be better understood through neuroscience or biology, I want to know that too.
If ancient people observed something about the human experience that science is only beginning to study, I want to explore that conversation as well.
Learning how something works has never made it less meaningful to me.
Understanding how the brain processes love doesn’t make love less real.
Understanding what happens in the body during grief doesn’t make grief less profound.
Knowing how a flower grows doesn’t make the flower any less beautiful.
Knowledge doesn’t have to destroy wonder. Sometimes it gives us another reason to have it.
I think this matters because fear keeps people from healing.
People become afraid to ask questions because they’ve been taught that questioning means betraying their faith, their family, their community, or everything they’ve ever known.
Meanwhile, other people are so determined to prove that spirituality is ridiculous that they stop listening altogether.
Then we divide ourselves into sides and wonder why nobody understands each other.
I don’t want to contribute to that.
I want this space to be somewhere we can ask questions.
Somewhere spirituality can sit beside psychology, science, religion, history, and our own lived experiences without somebody immediately needing to win the conversation.
I want people to be able to explore what they believe without being scared into believing it.
Because after everything I’ve read, experienced, questioned, changed my mind about, and come back to, unity is one belief I cannot shake.
Unity doesn’t mean sameness. That’s important.
We aren’t supposed to look alike, love alike, worship alike, think alike, or experience life exactly alike.
Diversity isn’t the problem.
The walls we build because of those differences are.
Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, spiritual, atheist, gay, straight, black, white, left, right, somewhere in between or completely outside of every box we’ve created.
Before any of those words, there is a human being standing in front of you.
You don’t have to become like me for me to recognize the humanity in you.
I will stand ten toes down on this: fear has been one of humanity’s greatest tools for creating division.
Fear of people we don’t understand. Fear of asking questions. Fear of being wrong. Fear of people who worship differently, love differently, think differently, or simply live differently.
But fear can be unlearned.
Maybe healing begins when we become curious instead of afraid.
Maybe instead of asking, “How are you different from me?” we start asking, “What can I understand about you?”
We don’t need to erase our differences to find unity.
We just have to stop using those differences as reasons to forget that we belong to each other.
The older I get and the more I learn, the more I believe we’re looking at an enormous picture while each of us is holding a different piece of it.
I don’t expect any one person, religion, book, scientific theory, or spiritual teaching to hand me the entire picture.
I just want to keep putting the pieces together.
I love every single one of you, and hope you have a beautiful day today. 🤍
— CJ
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