baumgarten said:
To me, something sacred is hallowed and worthy of reverence. It is intimately connected with the identity of my people and invokes a sense of the vastness of the universe and ages past.
"Sacred" is one of those words whose real meaning gets lost by overusage. I think the original meaning was "not of this world".
I can't really ascribe meaning to the word divinity.
Most of all I think it refers to a quality of human experience associated with "meaning" and "beauty". A thing can be more beautiful or less beautiful than another, which suggests we have some internal mechanism for measuring beauty. But there is a certain intensity of the subjective experience of beauty after which a thing ceases to be merely beautiful and acquires a new quality. Perhaps I could say that a thing is perceived as divine if its "beauty" ceases to be merely aesthetic and becomes instead a key to understand the universe.
This is difficult to explain, perhaps an analogy may help. Consider the feelings you have about other people: you can say you "like" a person, or you can say you "love" that person. There is a sense in which the difference between "loving" and "liking" is simply a matter of intensity, but that's not the only difference. There are some people whom you like so much, your feelings about them acquire a new meaning and they become special people, people unlike any other you might know. You may not treat these people differently from the ones you merely like; you may even enjoy the company of the people you merely like more than you enjoy the company of many people you love. But when you love someone, that love ceases to be simply something you feel about the person and becomes part of what defines you.
In the case of divinity, some aesthetic experiences can be so profound that they change what you are, how you see yourself and your relationship with the cosmos. It's as if the universe reveals its meaning and purpose not by describing itself as a laundry list of objects and attributes, but as a thing of supreme beauty - divine beauty.
Now if you look past the verbal nonsense in religion, you can see this clearly: religion is mostly the pursuit of meaningful beauty. Religious art, music, architecture, literature, are not beautiful for the sake of aesthetics; religion uses beauty to impart a sense of meaning to our lives. And it is quite successful at that. Even the "verbal nonsense" reveals itself not to be nonsensical at all, but simply an extremely beautiful form of folk literature.
All this requires sensibility. For instance, some people read the story of Jesus as an inconsistent tale of a man who spoke mostly gibberish; others read it as the story of the Creator of the universe making an unbearable sacrifice to rescue humankind from its cruel fate. It's a story of incredible beauty if you manage to see it, so much beauty that it can make you a different person.
