Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." To deny the concept of sacredness is to condemn all organized religions; no religion can exist without the exclusion from rational inquiry granted by a designation of 'sacred.' Emerson was right. To designate something as "sacred" or "holy" is to deprive men of their right to experience each thing for what it is, and not for what it is said to be.

Emerson and the transcendentalists exalted man and nature. The transcendentalists were unabashed romantics, even to the point of mysticism. They took great pleasure in assigning meaning to nature, using illustrations such as a battle of ants or a worn path to draw analogies to the human condition. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau purposefully grounded these images in the mundane. They wanted men to be engaged in the physical world and live a full life on earth. The mundane world claimed their attention. Their genius was that they allowed the natural world to fill the place of religion. The world of the transcendentalists was not a purgatory or pit of temptations to struggle out of. It was itself a kind of heaven, but a 'do-it-yourself' version, without instructions and waiting to be assembled. The transcendentalists believed that men would be happier if they went out into the world and found truth themselves.

What, though, did they find wrong with established religion? I think they disliked the pre-established nature of the churches. Truth was received by the modest churchgoer through a long line of people: first the local minister and then the head of the local area, and then a larger area still, and somewhere at the top up there, God. The situation has not substantially changed today. Such a system of inherited dogma does little to stimulate curiosity; curiosity is dead when all questions are answered. Thoreau and Emerson found the boundaries of Puritan religion unbearably restrictive. They were freethinking people and, unlike Hawthorne, they could not surrender themselves to misery. They didn't believe in original sin. Any good religion should allow its members room for thought. The religion that does not do so does wrong.

Even if organized religion does in some way restrict freedom of thought, one might ask, doesn't it serve a need for divinity in people's lives? People need something of the supernatural in their lives to stop themselves from going insane. They need answers to questions of origin and questions of destination. Emerson would certainly have agreed: there is a need for spirituality within all of us. More generally, there is a need for beauty, a need for it all to make sense. This need is served by all popular religions today. A religion that does not attempt to fully make sense of the world is not a religion. It is a university, and a considerably larger number of people are members of religions than are students of universities. It is useful to judge religions on the basis of the answers that they can provide to the eternal questions: "What is life?" "What is truth?" and so on. The answers to such questions need not be literally true; it is ludicrous to think that there are single true answers to questions so broad and abstract. They need merely be satisfactory to a great enough number of people.