If everything that has ever lived is dead and everything that is alive is going to die, where does the sacred part come in to play?

To me it comes into play in the vastness of the visible universe, the scale and breadth of the natural world, and how the living portion is but a tiny touch of paint on the edge of the canvas.

Even on the earth the portions of the earth that are life friendly are dwarfed by the portions that are not. Get ship wrecked 10 miles off the coast without food or water and float in the ocean for a few days . . . . life is fleeting.

As human beings we seek out rare things, we desire rarity above all else.

The most rare thing in the universe is life and it thus should be sacred, but sadly most people never learn of this great vastness, nor of the specialness of life, we see life all around us and become jaded . . .

What is really the true meaning of "sacred?" How would you describe it? Priceless? No... that's not it.

To be worshiped? ..Don't think so.

Awe inspiring? I don't think so.

Highly Valued?

What is sacred to one person may not be to another person. I might feel that my life is "sacred" but then its MY life.

I will step on a bug.

When you're on death row, having extinguished one.

For me, it is just a sense of connectedness, of being attached to even inaminate participants because they were created by the same mechanism that a pulsing lump of life was. And no, I don't think birth or parents create a person, besides a gateway provision.

Sacred is to hold something in view that is so great and wonderful that you're sure you're not the first to set gaze upon it. Life phenonmena is a miracle that still stands outside scientific understanding. It has to do with consiousness, and to bridge that gap between world view of physics and life experience is a daunting task.

To take a historic look at it, Einstein said (in jist) that one who doesn't think life has a meaning doesn't deservve to be alive. He held in another statement that people live on in their children, which I have always taken to mean at least partially that there is some effect in the continuation of what one does in their life into a new generation. But perhaps many would say that Einstain was just an old sentimental type at that age, though I believe that his step daughter said of his death that he neither had sentimentality or fear, he just viewed it as a event in nature. Still, continuing in this track, even a statistic quantum physicist like Max Born dedicated much of his later life (after the horrors of the world wars) to reducing nuclear armament for fear of continuation of life that it threatened. He thought he could make a better world for his kids and grankids, and that feeling too is perhaps shared timelessly, though mayhap not as often as is needed.

So there are lots of takes on it, but in brief the sacred is a type of ritual behavoir, met often in this strange arrangement of events.