I was reading the NYT this morning and Charles M. Blow’s op-ed piece, “Defecting to Faith” (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/opinion/02blow.html?ref=opinion) fits in well with the discussion here. The article describes something similar to your own experience Nathan of the move from a secular life to a religious one. And what he describes isn’t necessarily belief in God but rather what he refers to as the fulfilment of “the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism”.

Richard Rubenstein’s 1966 book, After Auschwitz, which I discovered on my parents’ bookshelf at age 17, did more than any other work to shatter my teenaged relatively traditional theology of a present God. But unlike Rubenstein and most other “radical” theologians dating back to Nietzsche’s madman, I found the “death of God” to be an utterly liberating event. God was dead, the question of why-bad-things-happen-to-good-people was a bit closer to an answer, and for the love of the world, anything was possible.

I very much share your sense of liberation in the death of God, but I’ve felt a similar liberation also in the life of God too; both repeatedly. Here’s a passage from a comment I made last year on a post by Saba Mahmood at The Immanent Frame:

Secularists rejoice in the experience of liberation in secularism, and it is true, this liberation comes from a critique. It can be emotionally exhilarating, filled with the thrill of unsettling old dogmas and seeing the world with fresh eyes. I give it that.

But this is not lost on so-called religion either. Much the same exhilaration, built also on a kind of critique, is part of the experience of cradle-secularists who “find religion.” I myself was one; when I was 18 years old, I converted to Catholicism from my secular upbringing. It was a thrilling experience, a liberating one, built on a critique of how secularism had fallen short. Since, I have undergone a number of pendulum-swings back and forth between secular and religious thinking. Each move has been infused with its own form of critique and its own sense of exhilarated liberation.

In fact, people who consider themselves irreligious so far as Abrahamic traditions often end up getting quite religious in non-Abrahamic “religions”—like Sam Harris, for instance.

The other interesting thing about this image is how the religious architecture is limited to representations of Abrahamic religions.