Interesting.
Though ...
"This Medieval Christian pilgrimage route has been revived and recreated in the last 30 years"
No, the revival started in the 1965 Holy Year.
"Second, it measures motivation with a single item instead of a reliable scale"
This is spot on though !!
Except that "religious and atheist individuals" is unfortunately just as reductionist.
"the psychological literature on the motivational aspects of religiosity and to the emerging literature on atheism"
Here too is a methodological bias.
Why not a question of "the psychological literature on the motivational aspects of ... atheism" ?
And this is pure nonsense : "Compared to the religious, there is evidence that atheists are more open to experience, less dogmatic, favor analytic thinking styles over intuitions, demonstrate lower social conformity"
If intellectual bias is a basis of your "study", you make it worthless.
"Another area of overlap between atheists and the religious can be found in their shared sense of appreciation for ritual"
Ritual as such is intrinsically religious in nature, so that I'm unsure what this means.
the profile of a “ritual atheist-agnostic”
Another error in basic concepts -- an agnostic is not an atheist. The whole concept of this "profile" is absurd. Looks frankly like projection.
"the awe-deprived rationality of an atheistic worldview"
And yet he claims that it involves "transcendence".
"phenomenologically similar experiences while framing their underlying ontology differently"
And this is just postmodernist word-salad.
Underlying ontology must by necessity be unique, not multiple choice. Else it's just worldview, and not ontological. This is "my truth" stuff.
"Horizontal forms of transcendence are purely naturalistic in their orientations as opposed to vertical forms, which take the supernatural as their key dimension"
This is a false statement, and directly antithetical to the very purpose and nature of pilgrimage as such.
The Way of Saint James is precisely horizontal, and yet its orientation is in the Spirit, and not in this person's imaginary "pure" naturalism.
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I'll stop here, except to say that this is a clumsy attempt to try and redefine the religious and the spiritual into atheistic requirements.
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And to say that it is with very good reason that we refrain from discussing religion in these forums.