Regardless of the existence of a deity, I think that belief makes people stronger. It’s not a “reliance”.. more like a foundation.

I would personally define spiritual strength as being comfortable in my own skin & confidence in the way I approach life. Maybe also to be completely unafraid of my own mortality.

I have no idea. I don’t believe in the spirit or anything spiritual. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

The term spiritual is too vague, and since spirits are vague and there’s no proof of them, I guess one’s spiritual strength can be made up as well.

There’s no comparing with others, this is only an individual thing. You will just have people saying “Well, I think spirituality involves this and this, so you have to feel these things to be as spiritual as I.”

All virtues can be considered “spiritual.”

Showing up in your integrity, doing no harm, being honest, kind and giving of yourself.

“Enlightenment” / spirituality, simply means recognizing on a deep FEELING lever, not a conceptual thought level, the interconnectedness of everything and a recognition that “you” are not your mind, body, thoughts, accomplishments, “You” are pure awareness, pure consciousness, the awareness that is aware of awareness. ;-)

To me the belief of a higher power can be something that helps you have spiritual strength. For some it has nothing to do with it and others it may be the lion share of it.

Spirituality is much more personal that just who, how, or if you believe at all in some higher power.

The hard but only True answer is this…..

Spirituality belongs to whom it belongs.

For it leaves absolutely no room for comparison, copies, clones or look-alikes…..

If one need to ask many questions, that in itself is their our exclusion from it.

Nevertheless this ignorance is not only expected but also purposeful.

For me, a spiritual strength would be how well I could meditate. I’m not very good at it, and I don’t really know what that says. Belief by itself does not appear to be a strength to me. It needs to be accompanied by works.

Can one have “spiritual” strengths while still maintaining their lack of traditional beliefs?

This is a matter of separating the thing from the various names it is called and the various ways it is packaged. “Traditional beliefs” are codified ways of seeing or explaining “spiritual” phenomena that perhaps are as plain as day for anyone to perceive (who is open to perceiving them). The multiplicity of “traditional” beliefs already suggests that there are numerous ways to call upon these phenomena or direct one’s attention towards them.

Judging from your details, you seem to equate “spiritual strength” with belief in an external deity, and your choice is either to accept or reject that deity. Speaking from experience, that’s a difficult place to be, because then you have nothing but angst. The rejection produces suffering, but mostly because you limit yourself to two choices, to accept or reject traditional beliefs. Relief comes when you realize that there is still the “thing” that traditional beliefs describe, but in your mind it’s no longer owned by those beliefs. Then it can be perceived perhaps more plainly or with the help of other reasoning or belief that makes more sense to you. Once you find a comfortable grip in your new understanding, then you can develop strength measured, say, by your ability to consciously maintain the flow.

What we have come to call “spirituality” is, I think, our persistent intuition that there’s another way of understanding reality.

Our intellect, rationality, deduction, analysis…these give us an understanding of the world as an assemblage of discrete parts, and of ourselves as one more part among the others. That’s a useful way of seeing things, precisely because this is the mode of understanding that populates the world with “things” in the first place. It takes the whole of experience and divides it conceptually into things with names and identities. The world that emerges from this understanding is one of differences, classifications and comparisons. Science depends on this kind of understanding.

But it is a common human experience to intuit that there is something that gets missed by this first mode of understanding. That intuition is the foundation of spirituality. Now, humans have responded to that intuition in many different ways. Some think this intuition comes from a different realm—a spirit realm—apart from this ordinary world of things. They think this is another being tugging at their heart, calling them to follow him.

I don’t share that view. I do feel that “spiritual” intuition, though. I just don’t think that it comes from another being, or that it comes from some other, hidden realm. I feel that it’s an intuition that springs from my own mind, and that it’s there because my mind knows there’s another way of seeing. This other way is concerned with commonality, not difference. It doesn’t compare, it embraces. It takes experience as a whole, rather than as a collection. The intellect, by its nature, can’t do that. For me, then, the “spiritual” is not a different world than our ordinary world of things. The world is as it is. But we have minds that are capable of understanding it in different ways, both of them valid, necessary, and simultaneously true.

I guess it would be possible to see this holistic way of understanding as a “higher being”, but that’s too awkward for me. The “higher” part is irksome. Hell, it’s just being, pure and simple, when you get right down to it. How can it be high or low?