If there was space, the full title would have read “What some irreligious people are missing, and perhaps some religious people too.”
To be clear, what follows is not an argument for or a recommendation that anyone join an organized religion.
Recently I visited an old church in a nearby town which had begun construction in the 12th century but due to many setbacks was not completed until the 16th century. I visited the church principally to examine the architecture and artwork contained in it and not for religious reasons. Visiting the church was also not the reason for me visiting the town, it was just something I did on a whim while I was there.
Inside the church there were high vaulted ceilings and at the time it was dimly lit only by sun shining through the windows and candle flame producing a dusky ambiance. (The pictures aren’t mine)
There was a large triptich by a Flemish artist which held my attention for a great part of my visit, depicting a scene from the life of Christ in Rome.
These and other sights caused me to think how strange it was that so much of our secular public spaces lack historical consciousness (including work places, restaurants, shopping malls, where a great majority of people spend much of their time). There was also a mural in the church depicting a succession of animals and humans as well as their buildings and the celestial spheres above. That, as well as other sights in the church, caused me to think about how much of our modern secular culture lacks thinking about how mysterious existence is or considering our greater context of our individual lives. I have sometimes found that there is a tendency of atheists to explain away all of nature by saying it is “normal” or “natural”, as if that really said anything about why and how we exist the way we do and is not rather a way of circumventing its consideration.
It seems to me that the Romantics tried to depict these considerations in something like a secular or else pantheistic sense, where nature is itself a mysterious force and a source of wonder:
It makes me wonder if we don’t lose something by forgetting this mysteriousness. Perhaps a source of inspiration or else the potential to form a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.