Shinto says that the sacred is not in a building but in a waterfall, a twisted tree, a particular stone — that the world is populated by kami, spirits whose presence deserves acknowledgment and respect. This is not animism in the dismissive sense; it is an extraordinarily sophisticated relationship with the particular, the local, the irreplaceable. Nasreddin would have recognized it immediately: he, too, found the divine in the absurd specificity of the everyday.
Each step builds on the last.