Really like this except… "spirituality".

Pullman writes at length about his lack of understanding of: spirit, spirituality and God. See, for example, his essay: God and Dust.

I agree with every word of them, except the words I don’t understand; and that the words I don’t understand are those such as spirit, spiritual and God.

…

Nevertheless, it’s not a game I choose to enter. I would never begin to talk of a person’s spiritual life, or refer to someone’s profound spirituality, or anything of that sort, because it doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t talk about that sort of thing at all, because when other people talk about spirituality I can see nothing in it, in reality, except a sense of vague uplift combined at one end with genuine goodness and modesty, and at the other with self-righteousness and pride. That’s what they’re displaying. That’s what seems to be on offer when they interact with the world. And to my mind it’s easier, clearer, and more truthful just to talk about the goodness and modesty, or about the self-righteousness and pride, without going into the other stuff at all. So the good qualities that the word ‘spiritual’ implies can be perfectly well covered, and more honestly covered, it seems to me, by other positive words, and we don’t need ‘spiritual’ at all.

He goes further:

But in fact my reaction to the word ‘spiritual’ is even a little more strongly felt than that; I even feel a slight revulsion. I’m thinking of those portraits of saints and martyrs by painters of the Baroque period and the Counter-Reformation: horrible grubby-looking old men with rotten teeth wearing dark dusty robes and gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour; or beautiful young women in sumptuous clothes with wide eyes and parted lips gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour; or martyrs having the flesh ripped from their bones gazing upwards with an expression of fanatical fervour – gazing at the Virgin Mary, or a vision of the Cross, or something else that’s hovering in the air just above them. And you know that what they’re seeing isn’t really there; that if you were there in front of them, you wouldn’t see the Virgin sitting on a little cloud six feet above the floor – all you’d see would be the rotten teeth or the sumptuous clothes or the torture and the expression of fanatical fervour. They’re seeing things. They’re deluded, in fact.

So the word spiritual, for me, has overtones that are entirely negative. It seems to me that whenever anyone uses the word, it’s a sign that either they’re deluding themselves, or they’re pulling the wool over the eyes of others. And when I hear it, or see it in print, my reaction is one of immediate scepticism.