Why Sacredness Must Be Human-Made in a Universe That Offers None
There is only one world, and it is this one:
an entropic, physical cosmos where everything—from galaxies to memories—tends toward disorder unless life holds the line.
For most of human history, we papered over this truth with myth.
We imagined gods to steady the chaos, name the meaning, and stand guard over our fragile sense of order.
Those stories served a purpose: they gave us the feeling of coherence in a world we barely understood.
But the truth has always been simpler, more grounded, and more demanding:
Sacredness is not a cosmic property.
It is a human vocation.
Nothing is inherently holy.
Not time.
Not space.
Not life.
And in a universe that trends toward dissolution, meaning doesn’t survive on its own.
It must be created, named, protected, and renewed—repeatedly—through human attention, discipline, and coherence.
This is the forgotten heart of sanctification.
Sanctification was never about magic.
It was never about divine presence.
It was never about some supernatural infusion of holiness into the world.
Sanctification has always been a human response to entropy.
It is the deliberate act of marking reality as worthy—
of refusing to let the world slip into indifference
or our lives dissolve into drift.
Sanctification is how conscious beings push back against the collapse of meaning.
It is how we carve coherence into time,
give structure to our days,
create rhythm where there is only flow,
designate space as significant,
and treat life—our own and others’—as something that must be honored rather than consumed.
Every culture once knew this.
They just explained it with gods because they didn’t yet trust their own agency.
Today, we no longer have that illusion.
We stand in the real cosmos,
and that reality asks something of us:
If the world is to be sacred,
we must sanctify it.
No one else is coming to do that work.
In this series, we will explore what sanctification means in a godless universe:
Why rhythm—bells, alarms, rituals, appointments—is the first architecture of sacred time.
How space becomes sacred when it is shaped with intention rather than magic.
Why the sanctification of life is a moral, ecological, and existential necessity—especially now.
And how naming, attention, and coherence form the mechanics of sacredness itself.
This is not a backward reach for the religions of the past,
but the emergence of religion grounded in what is real.
It is a sober recognition that human beings must actively create the conditions that allow meaning, coherence, and care to flourish in an entropic universe.
We have always been the ones who did this work—now we do it consciously.
The ancients said, “God makes things holy.”
But the truth is clearer than ever:
If anything is to become sacred in this world,
we will be the ones who make it so.
We always were.
Welcome to the Sanctification Series.