Is the Religion of Numa true?

My shorthand for understanding Buddhism and Stoicism's approach to theism is that Buddhism (what I understand to be the older, purer kind, such as found in the Pali Canon, not the kinds that have been incorporated into local theistic traditions) is anti-speculative and Stoicism is agnostic. I understand both to approach the problem of existence with knowable existence itself as the starting point, rather than a flat assertion of the divine and its particular qualities. (Not the knowable that has to be talked into our awareness by theistic arguments. The raw experiential knowable.) We find ourselves alive. We find it difficult to make statements about the ultimate nature of reality that aren't problematic. How do we go from here? Buddhism's answer is salvation (in the broadest sense of the term) through the four noble truths and the eightfold path. Stoicism's answer is salvation through accommodating oneself to circumstance by bearing a correct perspective. This not making of closed, definitive statements by both systems of thought about theism frees you to come to your own conclusions and beliefs about the divine and still be, for the purposes of this line of thought, on the 'same path' prescribed by Buddhism or Stoicism. (Though the human psychology surrounding religious identity and group membership is an ugly briar patch to be entered with the utmost wariness, caution, and circumspection.)

To be sure, my shorthand is not wholly precise. If emptiness itself is empty of inherent existence, as the Heart Sutra says, that would rule out a certain kind of divinity. As for Stoicism, I simply don't know enough about its metaphysical side to talk about it. They may narrow the bounds under which divinity could occur. Yet, I've encountered many plain statements of agnosticism in Stoicism: "If there be gods," etc. I'm also suspicious that monotheists (not from malice) have misunderstood it and mischaracterized it. Sometimes describing the universe and its interlocking causes and effects can be misconstrued as a precise form of pantheism, when no pantheism is intended at all.

One could argue that the Religion of Numa (again, as I understand it), or something akin to it, is the most rational theism, if one is going to be theistic: (1) Material reality's hardness is an illusion, as both Buddhism and empirical evidence have pointed out. That doesn't mean anything in itself, but it does mean this--that material reality can't be used as a reference point completely to rule out any kind of divinity. To put it another way, there's no rock to place a lever against that wholly dislodges divinity. (2) As I've written before on this blog, material reality's lack of hardness also means that the things within it have a certain kind of divinity on their own terms, in and of themselves. They are thus worthy of a form of limited reverence and religious attention. (3) All of this aside, particular things in the world have an especially holy feeling about them, especially worthy of religious attention, regardless of whether they are transcendent or not. Human compassion, for example, is holy--at least to me--no matter whether it's a property of matter that emerges on the plane of reality on which we live or a manifestation of something transcendent from beyond our known universe. (I understand that my classification of elements of material reality as 'holy' based on 'feeling' is not a fixed or firm footing.)

It might be helpful to go further.  Because debates about theism and atheism in the West often take place within a Christian worldview, excessive focus is placed on transcendence. This may be hamstringing the debate. Christopher Langan says to speak of reality would be to speak of all that is, including God (he conceives of a single divine entity), and that it isn't meaningful to speak of a separate divine and a separate material reality. That certainly seems to solve the problem of how mere material things could have a holy feeling about them: They aren't displaying a transcendent nature. They are displaying characteristics of the nontranscendent divine. They don't form a single, unified divinity, except insofar as reality itself forms a whole. This isn't completely unproblematic, and it's not clear on what grounds the emergent properties of matter that I label divine and the objective nontranscendent divine would be distinguishable, but that's a post for another day.

If anyone reading this has a comment, I'd greatly appreciate your thoughts.