The sacred places of people who are not religious

I've been reading more of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis, including Chapter 9, titled "Divinity With or Without God." Haidt's travels through India led him to conclude that divinity and disgust were located on the same axis. As evidence of this, consider that throughout the world, cultures hold that divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times. The relevant practices include "food, body products, animal's, sex, death, body envelope violations and hygiene." Haidt found that people recruit disgust "to support so many of the norms, rituals and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves." (Page 186). To know that which is sacred, identify that which elicits disgust and travel the opposite direction:

If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that "cleanliness is next to godliness." If you don't perceive this third dimension, then it is not clear why God would care about the amount of dirt on your skin or in your home. But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob's Ladder: it is rooted in the earth, and our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven--or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow "up."

Haidt, an atheist Jew, is not suggesting a particular path to that which is Divine. He is certainly not concluding, for instance, that religion is the only path to that which is divine.  Rather, he is emphasizing that we all have a sense of what is sacred to us, what is "divine," and we justify it in various ways.  He cites Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, agreeing with Eliade that "sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of "crypto-religious" behavior." He specifically cites Eliade's conclusion that even a person who is committed to a "profane existence" has

privileged places, qualitatively different from all others--a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

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Religion in the White House: a history

Richard Balmer is a historian of religion. On Jon Stewart's show, he surveyed the relationship between religion and the Presidency since John F. Kennedy:

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Why no worries about life before life?

This is a comment in the February/March 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind - Letters section. The author is "identified as Farlo":

[W]hy do we perceive death to be different from prebirth or, more precisely, pre-conception? That is also a time when our brain is not functioning--when it does not exist. Yet we do not spend nearly as much time pondering what happened to us or where our minds were before we were born.

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I ask; will the apologists answer?

Following from this post, which describes questions assembled by apparent atheist-to-theist convert Lee Strobel, posed to Hemant Mehta (and destroyed by Greta Christina and Ebonmuse) I decided I'd ask one or two questions of my own of theologists/apologists. Obviously I have my own thoughts on these questions but I really want to see answers from believers on these matters (even from non-believers who are playing Devil's Advocate!). Also, I realise my questions may be in some ways incomplete or even naive, both to theists and non-theists alike, however the following are what occurred to me after reading Strobel's questions (and the ensuing dismemberment of them), and I present them more or less how they appeared in my mind. Without further ado, let us begin.

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Strobel asks; atheists answer and ask “is that the best you’ve got?”

Two of my favourite heathens: Ebonmuse and Greta Christina recently answered what were assumed (before they were read) to be atheist-stumping questions, assembled by some bloke called Lee Strobel. The questions, summarised, were of this calibre: (1) Assuming that events of Jesus' life are accepted historical facts, please provide a naturalistic explanation of the events following the crucifixion. (2) The universe is remarkably fine-tuned for life, doesn't this suggest involvement by a higher entity? (3) Explain how something can come from nothing. (4) Do you ever doubt your atheism? (5) Can we trust our minds to be relaying to us an accurate picture of the universe? Both Greta's and Ebonmuses's responses, while more or less echoing my own thoughts on each topic, are of a succintness and calibre that for now escapes me

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