"Spiritual but not religious." Oh Please

I spent the weekend talking about Church renewal. i.e how do we 1. get people to come to church 2. get people to come back to church 3. get people to join the church. I gained some valuable insights (that I will blog about later) but tonight's post isn't about anything that I learned while at annual meeting and it really has nothing to do with renewing the Church.
The argument that was constantly being made was, "Church attendance is down because many people are spiritual but not religious." I call B.S on that both as a Christian and a Religious Studies student.
The problem with that argument is that it really is not an argument.

Now for the fun part:

Neither spiritual or religious have set cultural definitions. Especially cross cultural definitions. But they both of cultural connotations.

Now for the really fun part:

1.  The religious studies "definition" of religion and what sets it apart from a philosophy is that religion has ritual and philosophy does not.
2. Religion has a negative connotation while spiritual has a positive connotation. This is why there is an "argument" about being spiritual but not religious.

Now for the crazy awesome seriously obvious conclusion
 Spiritual and religious are the same thing.
Yes, you read that correctly. They are the same thing.
Both point transcendence (duh! that's because they are the same thing). The only difference are the cultura connotations of the words.

So your choices are:
1. Stop trying to be all hip and cool. If you practice something that has rituals you are religious. If you practice something that doesn't have rituals you are a philosophist (note: i made that word up).

or

2. Keep arguing because you just might get lucky and one day people will stop searching for transcendence. (note: seek and ye shall find does not apply to transcendence)

I just noticed how sassy this post is. I'm not sorry and I'm not rewriting to edit out the sass. Deal with it.