Before I became a rationalist, I would have scoffed at the concept of atheistic spirituality, focusing more on the irony of rejecting theism while embracing spirituality than on the genuine logical distinction between spirituality, theism, and religion. Now, as a rationalist who has contemplated the relationships between numerous ideas, I have found that many concepts and truths have very different connections or disparities than those that would be imagined by non-rationalists. Atheism is a philosophical stance on the existence of a deity, while spirituality is broad enough to not be limited to a single kind of religious practice--or to religious practice at all. Of course, this does not mean that all forms of spirituality are rational, true, or even consistent with each other.
What it does mean is that someone can explore spirituality in a personal sense without even being a theist, much less an adherent of a specific religion. Even an atheist is entirely capable of experiencing and recognizing the potential depth of introspective spirituality in all humans, even if that spirituality is aimed at nonreligious ideas and forms of expression. Spirituality can touch upon issues of theism and religion (which are themselves distinct things that can overlap), but spirit can refer to consciousness outside of a religious context. With or without awareness of the concept of a Christian (or non-Christian) afterlife and whether or not any religious type of theism is true, humans are embodied spirits. This much is true by necessity, meaning it could not have been any other way. Consciousness, or "spirit," is inherently a nonphysical thing.
The very presence of one's own conscious thoughts and other experiences provides constant proof that oneself exists from one moment to the next--for those who choose to think rationalistically about the matter, at least! Regardless of whether human consciousness persists after death without the physical body that housed it, there is such a thing as spirit, and one's own mind/spirit is one of the only things that can be self-evident by the very nature of epistemology. Everyone who inquires into the epistemology of consciousness can realize this much. Thus, even people who do not know or understand the logical necessity of an uncaused cause and make the non sequitur leap to atheism can be deeply aware of the immaterial nature of their own minds.
Atheists are no less capable than theists or agnostics of having penetrating introspective, existential experiences that provide self-illumination, inspiration, and a sense of philosophical urgency. They are just as capable of recognizing the spiritual/phenomenological, as opposed to materialistic, nature of consciousness and introspection. Perhaps this will even prompt them to contemplate theism and the fact that an uncaused cause preceding the universe is not some speculative, unverifiable possibility, but something logic reveals as being utterly necessary for anything with a beginning, like the universe or time, to exist at all [1].
However, even unflinching acknowledgment that the existence of the uncaused cause, whether it is one's own mind or some other entity, only encompasses part of the full rationalistic stance on matters related to spirituality or religion. The uncaused cause, in directly creating other beings with spiritual capacity or creating the material conditions that eventually give rise to human consciousness, has a link to spirituality that even atheists can grasp to some extent, however incomplete that comprehension might be. However, introspective spirituality, with its emphasis on understanding and exploring the human "spirit," is not only comprehensible to rationalistic theists. Even atheists who, the demonstrably false nature of atheism and its intrinsic epistemological flaws aside, are inconsistently rational at best in other parts of their worldview can realize the accessibility and importance of spirituality.
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