Are you spiritual or religious?

A question raised to many, each individual answered based on their own perception and belief. Spirituality & religion are often used interchangeably by people as there is small amount of clarity on these two words. For many, religious person is the one who believes in God and, spiritual person is the one who does not believe in God. If we move past from what we were taught, we’ll come to a realization that these two words are not similar.
When by someone else’s experience makes you belief in something it is generally religion and when a person builds in faith by his own experiences it is being spiritual. Various cultures, value systems, beliefs and worldviews combine to form religion and with elevation of oneself for getting connected to higher power that need not be easily seen or felt come spirituality. Spirituality is nothing but thinking that body & soul exists and soul is having inestimable potential. There is a fear established in connection to religion that states that if a person does not visit a particular temple, or perform a particular ritual etc. will have a bad phase of life, whereas spiritual is above fear and there are no rules to be followed into it. Spiritual person is self – empowered to simply follow his heart, listen to his intuition and is encouraged from within to do right for self and others.
Religion is more about an unquestionable set of norms that will tell you about eternal life, gives promise of an afterlife, it divides people in different categories, forces you to accept inventions by other people, which sometimes feeds on their ego and fear and lets you maintain a dogmatic view of life. While on the other hand spirituality awakens you to discover things, preaches logic and makes you conscious about inner peace.
Having talked about spirituality and religion, there is an essential concept of Gurus which cannot be ignored. The recent news on Gurus who developed faith in many individuals and then, they themselves dived into evil practices have left people shattered and a few blind believers in lot of grief. Just by chanting names of God and narrating stories of historical angels, Gods etc. Gurus did create incorrect system of belief that led to fights and broke peace established in various geographies. With a simple thought that religion cannot separate, it needs to unite and religion can lead to path of spirituality. Spirituality makes one belief on an old saying that says helping oneself is followed by God’s help in your deeds. It means that if one takes right actions, even God will provide strength. There are religious Gurus who are named as spiritual Gurus but in turn they make an individual fearful of not following whatever the Guru says and this is misleading. Zero confidence on oneself leads to failure and prayers or self realization of the super power leads to self awareness and in turn brings a person closer to God. Also, it leads oneself to supreme power which even science believes is the creator of nature. Creating self –importance of oneself in front of crowd of people as done by Gurus has led to disasters and has created entire system of false beliefs.
So, all that matters is how good decisions do we make in life, how we create our own path rather than following other journey. It does not matter if you call yourself religious or spiritual until we all don’t forget the divine code of humanity that makes all of us human beings.