@TruthSandwich @lednabm That’s an interesting way of looking at it. As an atheist, it never occurred to me to consider that someone might consider appreciation and response by the worshippee as a sine qua non for worship, since that is completely lacking in theistic worship where people worship a non-existent idea.

I have always considered worship to be a one-sided thing, that meets some psychological or spiritual needs of the worshipper, independent of whether what they are worshipping exists, is sentient, or is aware of their worship. In the case of a celebrity, for example, fans often worship them even more after their deaths (Presley, Kobain, Lennon, etc.).

So for me, respect, honor, and devotion make perfect sense with what you call “inanimate objects.” But that is probably because I am an animist, and I see all objects as endowed with anima, from humans to animals to trees, from the fusing gravitationally-attracted ball of plasma to clumps of rock orbiting it, to each tree and each rock on the surface of the 3rd rock from the sun.

How, you might ask, can a lump of quartzite be endowed with anima? The same way that a complex conglomeration of eukaryotic cells derived themselves through symbiogenesis from multiple prokaryotes can be endowed with anima. And that comes down to personal introspection of myself, observation of meat-sacks that appear similar to myself, and ultimately a decision that I would rather live in a reality where I am not a solipsistic mind living in a biological or virtual simulation, and the humans around me are people like me. What distinguishes a programmed meat-sack from a person? I don’t know, but the term anima is as good an identifier as any to represent that difference.

From that observationally-influenced but essentially arbitrary decision to endow anima to other humans, one must then decide what other objects possess anima. The nihilist will say, there is no such thing as reality. Anattā in Buddhism says there is no anima, and there are some materialists who reject the idea that there is anything other than chemical and electrical reactions. The solipsist will say that he or she alone possesses anima. A racist may believe that only humans with their skin color or culture has anima. A humanist may ascribe anima to all Homo sapiens. Many Hindu adherents endow all animals with anima. And an animist sees anima in everything.

An animist sees no difference between rocks and humans because both are made of matter and endowed with anima. A materialist sees no difference between rocks and humans because both are made of matter and that’s it.

I like my choice of reality better, and for me, that’s what life is all about.

[ edited to get rid of repetitive uses of “ultimately” ]