What exactly do you mean when you say you have a tremendous amount of respect for religion? Specific religious institutions? Specific religious concepts?
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I haven't conceptualized it much. Off the cuff I would say subjective religious experience, the experience of feeling the presence of God, the kind of thing catalogued by William James. I've had those kinds of experiences and I'm not even religious, in particular when listening to Beethoven. Beethoven's Ninth is like Distilled Essence of the Deity. Maybe Schopenhauer was right about music being the pure expression of the metaphysical foundation of reality after all. ;)
One could always say that they are "just the result of processes in the brain," but isn't every cognitive experience "just a result of processes in the brain"?
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