What is Sacred? (religion)

[lunamoth]

What does it mean to consider something sacred?

Is it possible to consider something sacred outside of a religion?

If we don't consider anything sacred, of having ultimate value for its own sake, does that mean we are OK with a utilitarian approach to most everything in life?

What would you consider sacred if either you don't adhere to a religion or if you can imagine yourself not within a religion.

[Random]

Originally Posted by lunamoth

What does it mean to consider something sacred?

To me, it means simply that something is worthy of preservation and care above and beyond the call of nature. Life is sacred, because it has to be.

Originally Posted by lunamoth

Is it possible to consider something sacred outside of a religion?

Yes: human life is sacrosanct to a secular humanist, no?

Originally Posted by lunamoth

If we don't consider anything sacred, of having ultimate value for its own sake, does that mean we are OK with a utilitarian approach to most everything in life?

This is the dark side of who we are: society itself is like an organism, responding to stimulus and ruthlessly seeking to preserve itself and condition its subjects to conform. Utilitarianism is the opposite of sanctity, it's where nothing-is-sacred, and our world thrives on this because it is built upon self-perpetuating Systems, which ensures for example that an indivdual life is willfully sacrificed to achieve a worldy end (political, financial etc). One player is taken out and it means nothing because another is @ once ready to fill the void and ensure business-as-usual. There is nothing sacred in this, which people who despair of the lengths we will go to consolidate and retain power look for the hidden truths of man's nature in religion: this then becoming their vestige of sanctity.

Originally Posted by lunamoth

What would you consider sacred if either you don't adhere to a religion or if you can imagine yourself not within a religion

Love. More specifically the laws of attraction upon which it blooms: this to me is a sacred aspect of our nature as a race/species, special and peculiar to us as the differences between male and female themselves.