Despite the fact that human beings often report experiencing "the sacred" or the Divine "break through" mundane time and space, such reports cannot be taken at face value. Human beings make time and space for that which they consider Divine or sacred. And there is no way to distinguish the construction of such time or space from the "event" which is said to occupy it.
The history of religions is the history of human subjectivity and its interpretation. It is through such interpretations that subjective experience is turned "inside out" as it were: made public via performances (verbal, physical). The residuum of these performances, where preserved, become artifacts--evidence of human activity, most certainly, but evidence of extra-human activity? This is something one can neither rule in or out.
The honest historian of religions cannot sing the old hymn "Glory, glory/Somebody touched me/Must have been the finger of the Lord" with any real conviction. She is denied the "first naivete," and Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete" isn't naivete at all: it is a consciously creative act, like midrash.
Religion is spilled poetry. It is a prayer-rug woven with impassioned intelligence, with "heart-sense," and put to daily use.
As the Romantics understood, "supernaturalism" is only natural.
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