Followup to:  Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute?

So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him.  Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred.  I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about.  It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean.  Or the birth of a child, say.  That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.

Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion.  As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.

The Constant Fire quotes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:

Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

And this theme is developed further:  Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

Which completely nonplussed me.  Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize?  Why not?  Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching?  Why, when we all have the same brain design?  Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique?  (But "unique" is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so's "unique experience of the sacred".)  Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience?  Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?

The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism.  You can say, "You can't criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it."

But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.

Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of sacredness: