Religions are tools of control. Especially the monotheistic ones, which say that you must bow down to the rules of some supreme totalitarian dictator of the universe. Religions must always be learned from other people. For example, if you were raised in isolation from the rest of society and had no way of learning about Christianity or Islam, you would not arrive at these religions by yourself. The rules don't come from some booming voice in the sky, but rather from the priests. In olden times they had much more power to control society, because there were a lot more things which could not be explained through science. People thought that the weather, diseases, earthquakes and the like were created by invisible spirits that rule over us, and the priests were able to exploit the resulting fears by telling everybody that the "spirits" gave them certain rules, and if everybody followed the rules the "spirits" would be appeased. Go to church every Sunday and you won't suffer diseases, give money to the priests and there won't be any earthquakes, kill the infidels or there will be more storms, that kind of thing. But fortunately, as science advances religions are losing their grip on society, and people are starting to see things for how they really are. As we learn more about how the universe works, religion has been retreating into those extremely complex areas that today's science doesn't yet completely understand, like consciousness, sociology, the origin of life and so forth. Now the priests can only instill fear with vague statements which are less effective than those of yesteryear. Send money to the televangelists and your "soul" will be "saved", suppress your sexuality and there won't be any rips in the "moral fabric of society", vote for members of our religion and you won't burn forever in the "underworld", etc.

But spirituality, as you attempt to define it, is how the individual understands the workings of the universe by himself, without the need of any intermediaries trying to control society's thought patterns or ancient books written by such intermediaries. It is how one comes to terms with what they've experienced, what I like to call one's "worldview" or "weltanschauung". Unfortunately this is still often tainted by religious tenets, but less so than in the past. For example, it used to be that all Christians had to believe in Hell, had to believe the Bible to be the literal word of God, had to believe that homosexuals are all wicked sinners, and so forth, or else they weren't considered Christians at all. Now a lot of Christians are questioning those beliefs. Christianity itself is no longer this strict set of thousands of dogmatic rules, but at the very least a vague set of ideas about Jesus and God and immortality. You see the same thing happening with the other major religions. In the future I predict this trend will continue so that almost everybody forms their own worldviews based on their own experiences, without the need for dogmas, priests or ancient texts.