Altar

示 is generally read as an altar or offering-table, and as a verb it means to show, to reveal, to make manifest. Its importance is structural rather than lexical. In its combining form 礻 it sits inside 神 spirit, 祖 ancestor, 祝 to invoke, 禮 rite, 祭 sacrifice, 福 blessing and 禍 calamity — which is to say it is a semantic marker for an entire province of experience, announcing which world a character belongs to before you have read the rest of it. No alphabet does this. There is no letter whose presence in a word tells you the word is religious. A logographic script can carry its ontology inside the graphs, and 示 is the clearest case of it doing so.