For me, religion has never really been about belief. To me, arguments for the existence of God are philosophically unconvincing at best. At worst, they seem metaphysically desperate.
I can see a power and intelligence working in the universe that strikes me with awe but my mental images of that mysterious something are thumbnail sketches for my feelings of awe, not pretensions that I can define the infinite; which, by the way, is a contradiction in terms.
Nor has religious art ever seemed more than a meagre pantomime of a depth and breadth beyond my widest imaginings. I have never seen a stained glassed window that rivaled a sunrise, nor a hymn that measured up to the sound of the stingiest waterfall or the smallest bird.
So what does it mean to call something “sacred?”
Immanuel Kant spoke about a sense of reverence he called “the sublime.” The sublime is when something like a beach or a starry night strikes us with a sense of the infinite. If I am understanding him, Kant understood the sublime as when something like a lightening storm triggers within us a sense of that transcendent power bringing us into being.
For me, the sacred is not when we put a value on something beautiful, it is when we recognize anything at all as an expression of value itself.
The sacred is when something inspires us with a sense belonging that almost feels like the arms of a parent.
The sacred is when we almost feel ourselves addressed by the intelligence manifested in the periodic chart, or hear the music of the whole universe in the song of a cricket.