“The Ritual Self: Reaching for the Sacred with No Help from God “
In light of all this supposed heterogeneity of meaning and intention, you now realize that “God” is just a poetic word, with powerful historic reverberations and resonances, and that people use it as a lowest-common-denominator, generic, term to help coordinate something else that they are doing together, namely creating a psychological environment in which they can touch the realm of the sacred. An actual God, the sort of God that atheism rejects, need not be there. Humans have created this environment, for themselves and by themselves, for their own spiritual purposes.
