Excerpt from Contact by Carl Sagan

Like doctors and lawyers, the vendors of religion rarely criticize one another's wares,Joss observed. But one night he attended services at the new Church of God, Crusader, to hear the younger Billy Jo Rankin, triumphantly returned from Odessa, preach to the multitude. Billy Jo enunciated a stark doctrine of Reward, Retribution, and the Rapture. But tonight was a healing night. The curative instrument, the congregation was told, was the holiest of relics-holier than a splinter of the True Cross, holier even than the thigh bone of Saint Teresa of Avila that Generalissimo Francisco Franco had kept in his office to intimidate the pious. What Billy Jo Rankin Brandished was the actual amniotic fluid that surrounded and protected our Lord. The liquid had been carefully preserved in an ancient earthenware vessel that once belonged, so it was said, to Saint Ann. The tiniest drop of it would cure what ails you, he promised, through a special act of Divine Grace. This holiest of holy waters was with us tonight.

Joss was appalled, not so much that Rankin would attempt so transparent a scam but that any of the parishioners were so credulous as to accept it. In his previous life he had witnessed many attempts to bamboozle the public. But that was entertainment. This was different. This was religion. Religion was too important to gloss the truth, much less to manufacture miracles. He took to denouncing this imposture from the pulpit.

Joss argued that in ever religion there was a doctrinal line beyond which it insulted the intelligence of its practitioners. Reasonable people might disagree as to where that line should be drawn, but religions trespassed well beyond it at their peril. People were not fools, he said.

 ***

"The theologians seem to have recognized a special, nonrational--I wouldn't call it
irrational--aspect of the feeling of sacred or holy. They call it 'numinous.' The term was first
used by... let's see... somebody named Rudolph Otto in a 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy. He believed that humans were predisposed to detect and revere the numinous. He called it the misterium tremendum. Even my Latin is good enough for that.
"In the presence of the misterium tremendum, people feel utterly insignificant but, if I read this right, not personally alienated. He thought of the numinous as a thing 'wholly other,' and the human response to it as 'absolute astonishment.'

Now, if that's what religious people talk about when they use words like sacred or holy, I'm with them. I felt something like that just in listening for a signal, never mind in actually receiving it. I think all of science elicits that sense of awe."

"Now listen to this." She read from the text:
Throughout the past hundred years a number of philosophers and social scientists have
asserted the disappearance of the sacred, and predicted the demise of religion. A study of the history of religions shows that religious forms change and that there has never been unanimity on the nature and expression of religion Whether or not man..."Sexists write and edit religious articles, too, of course." She returned to the text.
Whether or not man is now in a new situation for developing structures of ultimate
values radically different from those provided in the traditionally affirmed awareness of the sacred is a vital question.
"So?"
"So, I think the bureaucratic religions try to institutionalize your perception of the numinous instead of providing the means so you can perceive the numinous directly--like looking through a six-inch telescope. If sensing the numinous is at the heart of religion, who's more religious would you say--the people who follow the bureaucratic religions or the people who teach themselves science?"