• I certainly don't think that a place of worship in itself is guaranteed to make you feel religious. It can happen, but it'll depend on lots of factors other than it being a 'place of worship'.

    Places of worship are generally kitted out to make you feel religious, or at least reinforce the sense of being part of the communal group through all the various rituals that are usually involved (Mass, tefillin etc).

    I did once read something that divided the religious experience into two broad groups; one was the large-scale group where people would do the same regular, not-very-dramatic rituals daily / weekly with a bunch of other people (the big three, or mostly what we think of as 'religion' in general), and the other was the small-scale stuff where you'd have much smaller groups of people who would every so often do a massive blow-out ritual thing as a dramatic life event, usually only within a sub-group of other believers who had reached the same life stage as you (so think Shamanistic or coming-of-age rituals in small groups).

    Anyway, the suggestion was basically that both setups are designed to inspire religious experiences, but the large-scale one uses continual, tiny reinforcement through regular rituals to top it up, so to speak, and the other uses once-in-a-lifetime, high drama experiences to reinforce the religious experience with much less frequency. Following from that you're less likely to have a major religious experience with one of the big three because the structure of the ritual system isn't really kitted out for it.

    CSB

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