The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mere Spirituality by Joshua Spatha

Episode Date: August 28, 2025

Mere Spirituality by Joshua Spatha Mperspective.org https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Spirituality-Joshua-Spatha/dp/1636986331 With new insights into ancient wisdom, Mere Spirituality will challenge people to embark on their own spiritual journey with practical and tangible results in mind. Western society is in cognitive dissonance, paying lip service to scientific materialism while simultaneously searching for meaning in life, believing in spiritual realities, and experimenting with different religious practices. Being fed an anemic diet of the shallow and superficial, society is starving for depth and searching for purpose. Mere Spirituality offers a concise commentary on the state of Western civilization, highlighting the successes and failures of its modern worldview and philosophy while reintroducing essential elements that formed its foundation. By diagnosing the current spirit of the age, it then prescribes a healthier alternative without sacrificing rationality, explaining the concept, reason, and practice of spiritual disciplines. Bridging the gap between the left and right brain, Mere Spirituality speaks the language of reason to establish the deeper purpose and meaning of life and the logical arrival at spiritual conclusions. The result is a fascinating and insightful study of humanity, society, and reality, with a greater understanding of the “what” and “why” of spiritual disciplines that don’t just preach to the choir. This inspirational guide will encourage people—whether they’re mystics or skeptics—to step out of their spiritual comfort zone.About the author Joshua Spatha majored in anthropology with a minor in Old Testament studies before he began serving in full-time missions in 2006, traveling primarily in the Middle East and Asia. An ordained minister, and a student of history and missiology, Joshua has led collegiate-level discipleship and missions training programs with Youth With A Mission (YWAM), has served on the leadership of several ministries, and is currently preparing to move long-term to Central Asia. He is married to a Singaporean and is the proud father of three multicultural boys. With a passion for discipleship, training, and equipping, he speaks, teaches, and writes frequently.

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Because you're about to go on a moment. monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, this Voss here from thecris Fos Show.com. Well, you know, and there, I'll listen to that makes official. Welcome to 16 years and over 2,400 episodes of the Chris Voss show. In the end of this month, August 25, we turn 17. What can you say about that?

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We're going to be talking with him about his new book that is out August 5th, 2025 called Mirr. spirituality. Joshua Spatha joins us on this show with us today. We're going to be talking to his insights and his experience of life and how you can utilize it to make your life better or else. I don't know what the or else means. I just made that up, folks. Joshua majored in anthropology with a minor in Old Testament studies before he began serving in full-time missions in 2006, traveling primarily in the Middle East and Asia, as an ordained minister in a student of history and miscellology? Am I pronouncing that right, Joshua? I learn new terms every day here. He led a collegiate level discipline and missions training programs with a youth with the mission, Y-W-A-M.

He served his leadership on several ministries and is currently preparing to move a long-term to Central Asia. He's married to a Singaporean and is the proud father of three multicultural boys with a passion for disciplinship, training, and equipping. Am I reading that right? Equipping. He speaks, teaches, and writes frequently with his book, Mere Spirituality, the Rational Embrace of the Supernatural in the Crisis of Our Age, available wherever fine books are sold. Welcome to the show, Joshua. How are you? Good.

Yeah. Good, good. So give us your dot-coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs and get to know you better? Yeah, M Perspective. Amazon mother. M-Prospective.org is the best place to get in touch with me. Now I notice, oh, I guess I see it here.

Mere Spirituality, Irrational Brace of the Supernatural and the Crisis of Our Age is the title of the book. It looks like Amazon needs to get the full subtitle in there. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's inside the new book? Yeah, it started as kind of a research project, if you will. There was a video series that I did a few years ago, just looking at kind of the overarching story of Western civilization and kind of where we were at in kind of the cycles of history.

When that kind of sparked, you know, studying with a few other guys, a very, I wouldn't say apocalyptic, but definitely a very sobering view of where we are in Western. society right now. And that was kind of where I thought I was going to leave it. And then this book idea came along. So this is a bit of the antidote, if you will, to the crisis. What is the crisis you see? How do you define what this issue is in modern Western worldview civilization? Yeah, well, there's a lot of different sociologists and historians who have documented different cycles within societies, within civilizations, whether it be

their overarching life cycle. Sir John Glob wrote a book on that kind of outlining seven stages of civilization with the sixth being decadence and then the seventh being collapse. And another prominent one, a lot of listeners have probably at least heard of some concepts from Strauss and Howe they wrote several books on kind of a four-stage societal cycle that happens in every society. And people may not have heard of them, but they've probably heard of some terms that they coined.

They coined the term millennial. And so their study was of generations and of societal cycles and several others. We kind of put all of these cycles together and looked at the interplay of them and realized that Western society is not in a good place right now. Yeah. Well, we're seeing a lot of interesting things. We're seeing decline in marriages, decline in families, decline in children. And, you know, well, on the face of it, people may say, oh, so what? You know, if your society or your country is not growing, I think it's a 1.2 ratio of new births to people passing away and cycling out, you're not a growing healthy society.

You have to be a growing society to be healthy. And so we're seeing that kind of in the Western Hemisphere, a place like Japan, other places in Europe, a lot of Europe countries are going to disappear. and over the next, I don't know, 25 to 50 years because they don't have enough new births and family and people coming in to feed the system. You've seen kind of the decline of that in the UK where, you know, pensioners, they're clawing back pensioners money because there's just not enough people to support paying the Social Security. We have the same problem with the boomers and everything else in our society and the debt we piled up to get here. And so, yeah, there's a lot of issues that are going on a Western society. You can probably go to a deeper level or other different levels of religiosity in that, if you want, or just how it affects our government, how it affects our culture, how it affects our economy for the very core, basically, of the economy.

So with your book, you get into some of the details of this. And you talk about a cold or cool worldview and a warm worldview. Why does that matter? What is that about in giving them those tonalities? Yeah, so any society or culture, civilization is going to be an amalgamation of the people that constitute it. And there's interplay back and forth between the individual and the society, obviously. But ultimately, humans are kind of hardwired, either right or left brain. So they're going to be more, you know, abstract or concrete, going to be more, you know, artistic or engineering focused, more emotional or more rationally wired.

And so when you get a bunch of those people together, they start to form a kind of a societal or cultural norm. And then the culture itself kind of emphasizes or pressures, if you will, people to kind of. kind of conform to those rather arbitrary, but amalgamated values. And so the cool kind of represents that left brain, very logical, analytical, concrete, while the warm represents that more artistic or emotional abstract side. And Western society as a whole, I think most would agree, is far more on the cool side of that spectrum. We kind of pride ourselves on being rational Greek thinkers and very analytical, very scientifically minded, which is fine, but there needs to be a balance there. What really

kind of a strength, if you will, of the Greek thinkers were that they weren't only philosophical or only on the cool side, but they also incorporated spirituality into their thinking, their culture. And as we have kind of strayed from that, as I put forth in the book, kind of as a product or a reaction, if you will, since the period of the Enlightenment, we've strayed further and further, skewed more and more into the cool side of the spectrum and have kind of forgotten about or even ostracized the right side. And our society has suffered as a result. now with the book you have a concept of three major lenses through which we view reality and talk to us about what those three major lenses are yeah it's theology philosophy and science which used to be called natural philosophy but it's these realization of a spiritual reality and abstract reality and a physical reality and how we understand each of those or accept or reject those different realities is going to then create our own

worldview. And we can come into that worldview, create that worldview through different lenses, or it can be a cultural byproduct or something that we kind of inherit from our parents or our society. And we can wrestle with that and kind of reconfigure our worldview through those three lenses, but every worldview is going to consist of ideas, concepts, or acceptance of those three realities. Now, the thing you were mentioning before, it sounded kind of like the masculine and feminine, as it were, where it was talking about maybe logic and reason versus emotion.

Is that a good analogy or am I wrong on that? Yeah, there's going to be, yeah, I think in broad strokes, that's a safe thing to say. you might offend some people who don't like the stereotypes. I mean, human nature is human nature. I mean, we all have masculine and feminine tendencies to us. But I mean, in the masculine, you have the logic and reason, which is the coolness, I think, that you referred to.

In the feminine, you have the emotion, the art, the beauty, and that might be the warmth. Is that a good analogy? Or my, I mean, this is your definition. That is trying to help you to find it. That is perfectly valid. And so, you know, yeah, we need both in this world. I mean, that's what makes the world a beautiful place is the combination of both those two.

And everybody has them. I mean, everybody can move between their feminine and their and they're masculine. And let's see, what else do we have on deck here for the questions? You talk about modern secular societies, often hold beliefs with only superficial and even semantic distinctions from their religious counterparts. That's a whole lot to think about. What does that mean? I think in our modern society,

the idea of evolution has really taken root, and we've kind of applied that to every aspect and element of life. And so we like to think that our society is more advanced or more intelligent or more evolved than previous societies, you know, and that's a very convenient, if not absolutely arrogant viewpoint, but because of that evolutionary concept or framework, we have a tendency to look at anything historical and kind of thumb our nose at it or just assume that we are better, more advanced or more enlightened today than our ancestors were. And therefore, we get into this kind of a binary or dichotomous thinking of either or rather than both and.

And when we look back in history and see religion, we kind of think, well, we're progressing beyond that. Now we've become a secular society. we're more enlightened. We understand the physical world around us more. Therefore, we have no need of those religious concepts, ideas, wisdom, et cetera, et cetera. And so though consciously we reject those religious concepts or truths, the reality is in the secular framework, we largely just substitute, again, rather semantic things, concepts for those religious ideas.

One example, I give in the book, well, let me go even simpler example. In a religious society, you would have some type of higher authority or greatest authority, whether that's in polytheism. You know, you have Zeus, for example, or in monotheism, obviously you have God, whether that be, you know, a Christian or Muslim or whatever concept of monotheism. But in secular societies, we don't stray from those concepts. We just attribute that power and authority to different things. Primarily in secular societies, we give it to government,

where we just assume and expect government to take care of every problem, to dictate morality, to care for society, society and that that concentration of power and authority can't possibly have any negative consequences because we just expect that government is somehow equivalent to the benevolent, you know, authority of a supreme God, even though of course we understand and experience on a daily basis the fallen nature of humankind, that we are not perfect, that we are very error prone, and we have a tendency to abuse power and authority rather than steward it. And so that's just one example.

We still have the same paradigms, the same structures, but we substitute other entities within that structure to typically worse effect. We have not really improved or gotten better as a result of these substitutions. Oftentimes it's actually worse. well that's that's how we roll as a human as a human species sometimes we just go right off the deep end yes but it's good that they have your book so that we can try and keep that from happening what do you think is driving this trend of making societies less religious but not but not less spiritual i guess i'm not sure how to parse that question well it's you know the kind of the

the old axiom. You can take man out of religion, but not religion out of man. So what happens is in quote-unquote secular societies, people move away from organized religion. They move away from institutions, particularly in Western society, because almost above all else, we value our independence and not individualism. And so the idea, that we have to submit to some other authority or figure or institution, which can tell us what is good and what isn't, or how to live and how not to, really ruffles our feathers. And so we've moved away from organized religion, or at least the past several decades, surveys would show that there's been a steep decline in organized religion in Western society.

And the thought was that people would be moving away from the church or whether it be Judaism or Islam or Christianity, whatever, moving away from the institution of a religion and into atheism or secularism. And there was a little blip on the radar. The new atheist movement did gain some steam there for a little while. But even that has largely collapsed here recently with prominently. with prominent leaders within that movement, saying it's essentially dead. And so what we saw alongside that movement in the polls and surveys was people were people moving out of organized religion, but not moving largely into atheism or even agnosticism,

but moving into a very nebulous category called spiritual but not religious by posters. And so what we saw were people were, you know, dissatisfied or disaffected or skeptical of organized religion, but they were not at all convinced that spirituality was not a thing, that the physical realm was all that existed. And therefore, they just moved into kind of an all-a-cart version of religion where they could dictate the terms and the ethics and morality and the do's and don'ts themselves, rather than having to rely on another authority to tell them. So you hope in your book to focus people on spirituality as opposed to some of the dictates of formalized religion.

Is that a good assessment? Well, I think formalized religion, you know, depending on which one you're looking at and what variety you're practicing, is an overall net benefit in that as we have moved into this very independent, individualized expression of spirituality, what we've lost in that is all of the wisdom that has been gained over millennia of human existence. It's kind of like handing your toddler, you know, the keys to the car and expecting them to drive well. it's just it's not very logical so we should not be rejecting the wisdom of our elders we should not be rejecting the gained and accumulated wisdom over millennia of of human existence and that does mean that we actually need to honor and investigate previous revelation if you will or previous experiences of people who have spent their lives you know in in service to and investigating these truth claims.

So the book is not at all, you know, hoping that we just move into this very nebulous category of everybody just do whatever they want as long as you call it spiritual. It's really re-investigating ancient spiritual disciplines why they are so applicable and beneficial in our modern society and how to re-engage in that truth. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? What were some of your influences?

Did you grow up in religion? Or what was your pathway? Yeah, I would say half and half. My mother was religious. My father was not. I wouldn't call him, you know, anti-religious. He wasn't atheist. He would have more fallen in the category of agnostic, but he was not really interested in anything spiritual.

My mother was, so I had a little bit of that tension growing up as a child. However, when I was very young, I kind of had a spiritual experience or encounter, which kind of set me on a course of not really questioning whether or not there was a spiritual reality or questioning whether or not there was a God. But certainly as you grow up, especially as you hit your teenage years and you're wrestling with all sorts of things, There was a season where I was investigating and trying to figure out what exactly I believed of who or what that spiritual reality was. So that, that then took me then through kind of my formative years, investigating a lot of different things. And then ultimately went to college studying anthropology, you know, all sorts of culture and religious worldviews.

and out of that then ended up in foreign missions. Ah, and so what prompted you want to write the book? What was the real motivation behind it? Yeah, well, that's an interesting story. I had absolutely no aspirations or interest in writing a book. Honestly, I was just having a quiet time one morning and really felt God put this book, the concept of this book on my heart. And I honestly, I put it off. I wasn't really wanting to do it.

I had a lot of other projects on my plate at the time. But when those wrapped up and I thought I was going to be launching immediately then to move overseas full time, when that didn't happen, I found myself with some free time and felt that I needed to be diligent and obedient to what I felt God put on my heart. So I did it, honestly, not even expecting it would go anywhere, do anything. I thought I would write a manuscript and be done with it. But then about here we are two years later. And it's been published and going through all the rigmarole of publishing a book. You got to love it, all the promotion, all that stuff that you do. Yeah, but it's good work and, you know, getting the stuff down.

Is there any future works you're working on in books? projects? Not currently. There's still several projects, audiobook and other things that I'm doing for this book that I'm not out of the woods yet, but

trying to get all that stuff done before I even think about future prospects. And on your website, is there any other services or offerings we want to promote? Anything else you do there for folks that make people reach out to you, talk to you, interact with

you coach for advice or anything like that yeah there's a lot of other resources videos articles etc on the website as well as a contact form if you so choose i think amazon right now is still out of stock on the book barns and nobles and books a million and others have it but you can also get the book on my website as well as some other freebies and add-ons that go with that looks like i was able to add it to cart so at the paperback and the Kindle should be easy to add because it's an electronic. But it looks like I was able to, oh, no, it does say temporarily out of stock. I've got a microphone in front of that part.

Yeah, so it does, and we'll deliver one available. So there you go. So it allowed me to add to the cart. That was kind of funky. Well, Joshua, it's been wonderful to have you on. Give people your final pitch out to order the book and dot coms and all that good stuff. Yeah, I think just in general kind of the vibe, the cultural zeitgeist, if you will, the spirit of the age, is people have become very skeptical of institutions. And rightly so, there's been a lot of abuses, both in secular and sacred spaces institutions.

So I totally understand that. But we have to be really careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject all things which came before us. And there's been recent surveys that has shown that there is a huge shift going on in our culture right now. And people are really hungry for spiritual truths. And there's been a huge shift, particularly in millennials and Jen's ears, actually back toward the church. And so I'm hoping that this book really answers some questions for those who are interested, curious, searching for some. answers, that this will give them not only a historical backdrop and explanation, but also a logical kind of introduction into spiritual practices.

Well, it should be wonderful, Joshua. Thank you very much for coming the show and sharing your message. We probably all need to be more spiritual and better in today's world because, you know, it doesn't seem like things are going well. It's 2025. It could be wrong. I don't know. Maybe next year it'll be better.

The longer I live, the more I lose faith and everything, I guess. But I try. There's hope. There's always hope, people. That's why we have the Chris Foss show, and we have great authors like Joshua Juan. Thanks, Joshua, for being on the show. Thanks, too much for tuning in. Ordered the book, wherever fine books are sold.

Mere spirituality, a rational embrace of the supernatural in the crisis of our age. Out August 5th, 2025. Thanks for tuning in. Be good at each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys. next time.