Sacredness in the context of "Religious"

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.

The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.

The meaning of spirituality has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man", oriented at "the image of God" as exemplified by the founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward the Holy Spirit and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include mental aspects of life.

In modern times, the term has spread to other religious traditions. It broadened to refer to a wider range of experiences, including a range of esoteric and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a sacred dimension, and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live", often in a context separate from organized religious institutions. This may involve belief in a supernatural realm beyond the ordinarily observable world, personal growth, a quest for an ultimate or sacred meaning, religious experience, or an encounter with one's own "inner dimension" or spirit.

Religious art is a visual representation of religious ideologies and their relationship with humans. Sacred art directly relates to religious art in the sense that its purpose is for worship and religious practices. According to one set of definitions, artworks that are inspired by religion but are not considered traditionally sacred remain under the umbrella term of religious art, but not sacred art.

Other terms often used for art of various religions are cult image, usually for the main image in a place of worship, icon in its more general sense (not restricted to Eastern Orthodox images), and "devotional image" usually meaning a smaller image for private prayer or worship. Images can often be divided into "iconic images", just showing one or more figures, and "narrative images" showing moments from an episode or story involving sacred figures.

Monotheism—the belief that there is only one deity—is a foundational tenet of the Abrahamic religions, which alike conceive God as the all-powerful and all-knowing deity from whom Abraham received a divine revelation, according to their respective narratives. The most prominent Abrahamic religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They—alongside Samaritanism, the Druze Faith, the Baháʼí Faith, and Rastafari—all share a common belief in the Abrahamic God. Likewise, the Abrahamic religions share similar features distinguishing them from other categories of religions:

• all of their theological traditions are, to some extent, influenced by the depiction of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, who is explicitly named Yahweh in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic;
• all of them trace their roots to Abraham as a common genealogical and spiritual patriarch.

In the Abrahamic tradition, God is one, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and the creator of the universe. God is typically referred to with masculine grammatical articles and pronouns only, and is further held to have the properties of holiness, justice, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions believe God is also transcendent, meaning he is outside of both space and time and therefore not subject to anything within his creation, but at the same time a personal God: intimately involved, listening to individual prayer, and reacting to the actions of his creatures.

Desecration is the act of depriving something of its sacred character, or the disrespectful, contemptuous, or destructive treatment of that which is held to be sacred or holy by a group or individual.