“Standing room only” scene of Muslim pilgrims at the Kabaa (the cube-shaped black box) during their Hadj (pilgrimage) to the most sacred site of the Islamic faith, located in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

The desire for simple, absolute truth is a constantly beckoning security blanket, and not all Protestants (or followers of other world faiths) can resist the allure. The term “fundamentalist” is tossed about promiscuously, but it can be seen as an “insistence on a monopoly of knowledge grounded in the fear of alternative knowledges, particularly ‘scientific’ modes of knowledge generated in modernity, which the ‘God-knowledge’ people cannot control.” Fear, then, is at the very pulse of fundamentalism. There is a lot of fundamentalism in the United States and increasingly in Latin America.

refer to Sacred Choices, by Daniel C. Maguire, p. 123

The experience of God cannot be separated from a stroll with a friend, a shared meal, the love that we feel, the idea that we defend, the conversation that unfolds, the pain we endure — discovering in all this a third dimension of depth, of love, of the infinite — and hence the ineffable. It is a discovery that discloses the value that lies hidden in the deepest and most real of our human acts.

The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery
  Raimon Panikkar