Spirituality, the sense of the sacred, faith, belief in the existence of God, religion as ideology, religion as system and as institution -- all are very different notions and do not necessarily intersect, and they are no longer univocal. There are religions that do not have any God (Taoism, for example); belief in God does not necessarily imply belief in a personal God. On the other hand, to imagine that all religious concerns could be permanently removed from mankind is, in our eyes, pure fantasy. Faith is neither repression nor illusion, and the best human reason can do is recognize that reason alone is not sufficient to exhaust all man's inner aspirations. As Schopenhauer observes: "Man is the only being who is astonished by his own existence; a brute animal lives in its tranquillity and is astonished by nothing ... This astonishment, which occurs especially in the face of death and in view of the destruction and disappearance of all other beings, is the source of our metaphysical needs; it is because of this that man is a metaphysical animal." The need for the sacred is a fundamental human need, in the same way as food or copulation. (If some choose to forgo any of these, so much better for them.) Mircea Eliade notes that "the experience of the sacred is a structure of consciousness," which one cannot hope to do without. Man needs some belief or some religion -- we distinguish here religion from ethics -- as ritual, as actions that comfort him by their unvarying regularity, forming part of the habitual patterns by which he is constructed. In this respect, the recent appearance of genuine disbelief is among those phenomena of decline that are destructuring man in what makes him distinctively human. (Is the man who has lost the capacity or the desire to believe still a man? One can at least pose the the question.) "It is possible," Régis Debray writes, "to have a society without God; it is not possible to have a society without religion." He adds: "States on the way to disbelief are also on the way to abdication." George Bataille's remarks are also pertinent: "Religion, the essence of which is the search for a lost intimacy, is essentially an effort of the clear consciousness to become entirely self-awareness." That is enough to condemn Western liberalism. We would certainly give Judeo-Christianity too much credit if we rejected all the concepts over which it claims a monopoly simply because it has claimed them. We need not reject the idea of God or the concept of the sacred simply because of the sickly form in which Christianity has expressed them, any more than we must break with aristocratic principles simply because they have been caricatured by the bourgeoisie. We should note as well that in pre-Christian antiquity the word "atheism" is practically meaningless. Ancient trials for "unbelief" or "impiety" are generally concerned, in reality, with other offenses. When the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus remarks that "there are some people for whom the sky is empty of gods," he specifies that they do believe, nevertheless, in magic and in the stars. In Rome it was the Christians who were accused of "atheism," since they showed no respect to images of the gods or to places of worship. In Greece, rational thought itself only reoriented theogony and mythical cosmology. That is why Claude Tresmontant, after having gratuitously likened pantheism to "atheism," is compelled to write that the latter is "eminently religious," that in fact "it is far too religious, since it unduly divinizes the universe." In ancient Europe, the sacred was not conceived in opposition to the profane, but rather embraced the profane and gave it meaning. There was no need for a Church to mediate between man and God; the whole city itself effected this mediation, and religious institutions constituted only one aspect of it. The conceptual antonym of Latin religio would be the verb negligere. To be religious is to be responsible, not to neglect. To be responsible is to be free -- to possess the concrete means of exercising a practical liberty. To be free is also, at the same time, to be connected to others through a common spirituality. -- From Alain de Benoist, The Path Toward The Sacred