Explores the possibilities for a secular society. Such a society is radically open to its environment, to a wide range of opportunities and dangers, and it is therefore agnostic about the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. Its own beliefs and ethics would also be open, evolutionary, procedural, and open to contestation and revision. There would be opportunities for individuals to give their own accounts of their personal experience without seeking recognition and legitimacy from institutionalized sources of authority. The individual's identity would be able to develop with bei ... More

Explores the possibilities for a secular society. Such a society is radically open to its environment, to a wide range of opportunities and dangers, and it is therefore agnostic about the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. Its own beliefs and ethics would also be open, evolutionary, procedural, and open to contestation and revision. There would be opportunities for individuals to give their own accounts of their personal experience without seeking recognition and legitimacy from institutionalized sources of authority. The individual's identity would be able to develop with being shaped by ritual or conformed to a society's pantheon of heroes. The present would be open to the past without being controlled or obligated to it, and the future would be an emergent aspect of the present rather than a reservoir of unfulfilled aspiration. Language would be subject to negotiation and contest, even regarding the meanings of sacred speech. The mysterious and the occult, along with other aspects of the sacred, would be subject to discourse rather than veneration. The political and cultural center would lose its monopoly on the sacred, and the periphery would become more assertive in defining is own forms of the sacred against those of the center. Religious institutions would become less successful in reducing the sacred to particular interpretations, times, and places.