Sacred/Secular Is A False Dichotomy

"If religious symbols are to be understood, on the analogy with words, as vehicles for meaning, can such meanings be established independently of the form of life in which they are used? If religious symbols are to be taken as the signatures of a sacred text, can we know what they mean without regard to the social disciplines by which their 'correct reading' [scare quotes added] is secured? If religious symbols are to be thought of as the concepts by which [certain] experiences are organized, can we say much about them without considering how they come to be [so] authorized? Even if it be claimed that what is experienced 'through' [scare quotes added] religious symbols is not, in essence, the social world but the spiritual, is it possible to assert that conditions in the social world have nothing to do with making that kind of experience accessible? Is the concept of religious training entirely vacuous?" Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Johns Hopkins University Press (1993), 53.

The answer to Asad's final, rhetorical question is: No. The kind of religious training one has (or the kind of religious culture one inhabits) is absolutely determinative of the kind of religious experience one will report. Individual interpretations, no matter how far they may deviate from normative consensus, are always arrived at by means of the mediation of interpretive communities. The "sacred" is not "stand alone" or sui generis. It is manufactured.

But, then, so are bullets. And if one hits you, you may be changed forever.

The Reality we inhabit is sufficiently mysterious; it is not in need of deus ex machina intervention or augmentation.

Thus Spinoza mocked those who require miracles to convince them of the need for piety: as if the universe were not miracle enough.

The sacred/secular distinction is sometimes promoted by statecraft, sometimes by priestcraft, often (in the modern world) by statecraft and priestcraft in mutual collusion. In any case, it represents an exercise of the will-to-power over one's perceptions. One must always inquire: cui bono? Who benefits?

To paraphrase Wittgenstein: She who would understand the world rightly must finally recognize all such distinctions as senseless and, thus, surmount them.

Both Nietzsche and Muhammad understood that, sometimes, to philosophize requires a hammer.