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Enthalpy versus entropy for the spiritually inclined.

As a Buddhist, I think anyone who tries to "Do only good, cease from evil and purify their Heart/Mind"...is a spiritual being, despite also being a jangly ball of Karmic momentum.
Here, no person, religion, organization, tribe, race, culture, or group, has a lock on being any more particularly spiritual than anyone else.

If your cousin wishes to meet more people who are honest, upright, and principled in life, you could try telling him that likes attract likes.
If your cousin is finding a dearth of spiritual people around him, maybe he's only experiencing that same limited amount of spirituality that he is manifesting himself.

The human condition is imbued with a personal sense of separation from others.
A spiritual being is just someone trying to deconstruct the inertia of those conditioned behaviors. Even with the subtlest of attachments, those faint tugs on our heartstrings will continue to mock our morals of being spiritually accomplished at all.

Looking for others to share in our practices is understandable, given our susceptibility to the human condition.....
but
a transactional practitioner might also question just when do those meager appeasements to our social attachments end up being the actual limitation to one's progression along the path towards suffering's cessation?

Cheers all.

@Jeroen said:
I was apping my cousin a few days ago, and he said to me, I miss people that are honest, upright, principled in my life. And I told him that is one of the reasons that I spend time on Buddhist forums, they are generally more principled.

Of course for Buddhists there are the Five Precepts and the Bodhisattva ideal that encourage us to be better people. In our consumer society the people who get rewarded are those who will do anything to increase shareholder profits, which is basically a stance of selling out your moral backbone to the highest bidder. This chase towards making money is ultimately depraved, it is morally corrupt.

So what about spiritual people who do not feel a connection with Buddhist morality? Christians perhaps? They also have a morality that is perhaps more complex, less pure. So you could certainly argue that most spiritual people you are likely to meet have morals that would keep them from following money or power exclusively.

I’d say that they have the potential to, yes. But I also think multiple factors condition the opposite. Having studied and practiced in multiple religious traditions, I’ve become a perennialist of a sort because I see a great deal of similarities between them, especially within what many might call the mystical traditions in each religion. And one of those commonalities is a very deep ethical foundation on top of which most spiritual traditions are built upon and that forms the framework for the deeper, more contemplative teachings and practices. Nevertheless, I think one needs to be aware of the gap that often develops between the spiritual seeds planted by sages and the invasive institutional vines that spring up around the religious trunk that grows out of them. And those institutions always arise in conjunction with worldly powers and concerns and generally become dominated by them. So the potential is there for people with little dust in their eyes who study and practice the fundamental principles of whatever religion they’re a part of, but sadly the combined power of wealthy religious institutions and the omnipresent weight of any socioeconomic system fueled by greed tend to engender religious people who fail to live by those religious principles and instead become ensnared by greed, hatred, delusion and the pursuit of worldly aims. It’s hard not to when most of society expects you to care more about marketability and success rather than developing wisdom and peace and helping those in need around you.