Most arguments about God are arguments about whether God exists. But some of the people I talk with aren’t really stuck there. They’re stuck on what would follow if he did — and specifically on worship. The prospect of it is what makes the whole picture unattractive, and I think that’s worth taking seriously rather than treating it as a secondary matter to be sorted out after the metaphysics.

People aren’t generally saying worship is awkward, or embarrassing, or a waste of a Sunday morning. They’re saying that if the universe is ruled by something that requires endless praise on pain of punishment, that is a worse universe than one ruled by nothing at all. Praise that is commanded isn’t praise. A being who demands it, with consequences attached for withholding it, has told you what kind of being it is — and the honest response to such a being would be resistance, not devotion. However, I don’t believe this describes the God I follow, or the reason that worship has value for me.

We can start by comparing with something ordinary. We already have a grammar of respect. We shake hands, we stand when someone enters, we dress for occasions, we salute, we use titles. None of this is servility. It’s a way of recognizing something about a person or an office and letting the recognition take a physical form. In that sense, worship is the same impulse aimed at the largest possible object — an appropriate way of acknowledging a being I take to be the source of the universe and of myself.

But the analogy is limited. We shake hands with rough equals, inside institutions we’re free to leave, and nobody is punished for declining. Worship, as described above, is none of those things: it’s non-optional, infinitely asymmetric, and demanded. If worship were simply the handshake scaled up, the objection would hold and the analogy wouldn’t answer it. If God is a very large king — the biggest and most powerful item in the universe, with interests and needs and a temper — then I’d agree with the objection.

Here’s the thing, though. Another view is that God isn’t that kind of thing at all: rather, not an item within reality but whatever it is that reality depends on. A being like that can’t be flattered any more than a theorem can. The older theological claim was always that God gains nothing from being worshipped, because a being who needed praise would be lacking something, and therefore wouldn’t be God.

But it’s a mistake to conclude that I must be the one getting something instead, as though the transaction simply ran the other direction. Worship isn’t a transaction at all. It’s part of living out a belief, the way most of what any of us does is living out beliefs we hold. There are costs and benefits to all of it, but describing it that way misses what sort of thing it is.

What I can say is that living out a belief isn’t inert. Expressing a hope does something to the person expressing it.

Saying a thing aloud, in company, on a schedule, whether or not I feel it that particular morning, turns out to be different from believing it privately. It commits me, and in committing me it tells me what I’ve committed to. I learn what I actually hope for by hearing what I’m willing to say. Some mornings that’s uncomfortable — I sing a line and notice I don’t mean it, which is information I would not have gotten by introspection. Sitting quietly and asking myself what I believe produces a tidy answer. Saying it out loud produces an accurate one.

Aristotle thought character worked in this direction: we become just by doing just acts, rather than doing just acts because we’ve first become just. Pascal’s actual advice to the doubter was never “decide to believe,” which nobody can do on command; it was to take the holy water and kneel, and see what follows. Both are claims about human beings rather than claims about God, and they hold whether or not anyone is listening.

That’s why I don’t think the question of worship can be settled by first settling whether God exists and then deriving the appropriate posture. The practice is partly how the hope becomes legible — to me, before anyone else.

Which leaves me with something I’m curious about rather than something I’ve concluded.

If a hope is something you live out rather than merely hold, then this isn’t a religious problem. It’s a human one. Everyone has a view about where meaning comes from, and everyone does something about it. I think meaning is received rather than manufactured — that it comes from something transcendent — and worship is one of the ways I live that out. But that doesn’t mean that someone who thinks meaning is self-generated is left with nothing to do. Rather, the ongoing work of finding out what’s worth caring about, and then caring about it, is exactly what living out that view would look like. That’s not a ceremony, and I don’t think it should be made into one.

So I think the interesting question isn’t how someone expresses a lack of belief. Nobody’s deepest commitments are a negation, and framing it that way would make the question unanswerable. What’s more interesting is what someone takes meaning to be, and what living that out looks like in practice — and whether the practice teaches them anything about the commitment itself, the way I’ve found it does with mine.

This isn’t to claim that everyone is religious in some way, but to wonder how something within religion maps to life in general.