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Wei_Dai comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong
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That's not my response at all. I'm afraid you seem to be reading things into my response that are simply not there. There seems to be some sort of misunderstanding here that's causing you to set up (what is from my perspective) a straw man about objections to religion and then extensively knocking it down with arguments that have little bearing on what I've said.
I don't know why that is; perhaps I've been unclear; perhaps you are rounding to the nearest common objection? In any case, my objection has nothing directly to do with these rituals "smacking of religion". I do think, as I've mentioned in a previous post, that the desire for such rituals is stronger in people who come from a religious background and are used to such things from their youth. (I also have to wonder — and this is a bit of an aside — why we should use rituals that draw so directly from religion in form: someone (juliawise?) mentioned saying grace at the meal, and that strikes me as incredibly unlikely to be something an entirely non-religious person would come up with if given the task of "think of some cool and effective rituals".)
I do experience the emotion of sacredness. What I find extremely offputting and downright scary is the collectivization of that emotion. I don't like spectator sports, protests, and other mass actions for the same reason (substitute pride, righteous anger, or whatever other appropriate emotion for sacredness in those examples). I have absolutely no desire to subordinate my feelings of exaltation and transcendence to a group. While I can't say that triggering sacredness in a collective "secular" context is as bad as triggering it in a collective religious context, the fundamental problem is the same.
Can you explain what you did to experience it? (Sorry to go off on a tangent, but I'm curious what it feels like.)
Hmm. Well, first of all, I don't guarantee that what I'm thinking of is the same (or analogous) emotion as what everyone else here is talking about; after all, if I don't experience it in the same way, or in the same condition, who's to say it's even the same thing at all? But to pursue that line of reasoning is to get into the problem of other minds, and that's probably an unnecessary tangent. (Although this may be empirically investigated; perhaps check to see whether the same parts of my brain and e.g. Raemon's brain trigger in situations we would both describe as being consistent with emotional responses to sacredness, etc.)
Anyway, to your question: the most recent thing I can think of was watching Cosmos (as in the Carl Sagan series, and yes, I really hadn't ever seen it before this year). Some parts of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality trigger a similar feeling.
As an aside, I think sacredness is not the most apt term for this emotion; I think a better word might be exaltation.
I think of sacredness and exaltation as overlapping circles in a ven diagram. The parts of HP:MoR that I assume you're talking to are both exalting and sacred to me. They're specifically about humanity rising up and conquering a powerful challenge.
Wandering out into the night and looking at the stars gives me a sense of sacredness that is not inherently about exaltation - My connotation of exaltation is a sort of power, and the stars make me feel simultaneously big and small, but in such a way that power is almost irrelevant. I'm just experiencing being this small but meaningful part of the universe. I'm not sure if my use of the words here is common though.
Mmm... I sort of see what you mean. What I meant was that "sacredness" does not feel grammatically appropriate to be naming an emotion. Also, "sacredness" in the moral-philosophy sense in which I've seen it used refers to an infinite value, something which may not be traded off. I wouldn't apply the term to stars (don't get me wrong, contemplating the cosmos does trigger in me that-emotion-to-which-I-think-we're-both-referring, I just don't think they have infinite value; to the extent that I think anything could sensibly be construed to have infinite value, stars just don't qualify).