Subject: A point of pedantry.
Author:
Posted on: 2014-09-16 13:56:00 UTC
We are all, in view of our posting here, secular. The term 'secular,' despite its common misuse in an increasingly polarized media, does not generally refer to people. It's more of a term that describes cultural happenings - holidays, concerts, meetings, for example. Christmas is a great example because it's got both sides - the secular, which is along the lines of Santa Clause, songs like "Jingle Bells" and "Suzy Snowflake," and so on - and then there's the sacred (which is the opposite meaning of 'secular') side: the season of Advent, the stories of Christ's birth, songs like "Joy to the World" and "The First Noel." I personally dislike the secular holiday immensely, mainly because I used to work retail. *shudder* Many people observe the secular side of the holiday, but see no point in keeping the religious holiday - which, too, is fine. Some people would like to separate the two, leading to the immensely irritating media bone of "War on Christmas," which... well, that's another rant for another day. (Another example, fwiw, would be Halloween. Secular entirely to me, and probably to most people, but quite sacred to many pagans as Samhain.)
Anyway! You can be both secular and sacred. For the past many-thousand years, at least, humans have done both. Worshipped at temples and pyramids, then gone out into the market to hawk their wares. Put out all their fires and watched the great temple-pyramid in reverent silence at sunrise, then three days later continues their lives. Etc.
