Religion is often thought of as irrelevant these days. But isn’t it the case that religion is really just the story a civilization tells itself to make sense of its existence — whether that story is literally true or not?

Even our modern, scientific civilization has its own religion-like story. It has prophets, martyrs, rituals, and gods of a sort. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution gave us figures like Newton under the apple tree and much later figures like Ramanujan dreaming of equations revealed by a goddess — demi-myths that capture the mystery and poetry of discovery. Science, too, lives through stories, symbols, and shared meanings.

In that sense, religion is the living, unfolding story of a civilization. Some parts may be made up, but that doesn’t matter — every civilization needs a shared narrative to hold it together. I can’t think of a flourishing society or historical epoch without some common story at its heart. What changes across time are the values and rituals that define that story.

The only era I can imagine without a shared, civilizational narrative is the time before the agricultural revolution — when humans were scattered, local, and nomadic, telling small stories of their own tribes and landscapes. Once we began to settle, we needed larger stories — about origins, order, and meaning — to bind us together. In that way, religion might be our defining feature as a species.

If that’s true, then maybe we haven’t lost religion at all. Maybe we’ve just moved from a religion that lived in an unseen, heavenly realm to one whose substance is all here and now — in this world. The sacred has come down to earth.

For that reason, the modern religion of secular humanism, which I'd like to call sacred humanism, a choice which I explain later, is perhaps the only truly living religion today. Most older religions are built around fixed, unchangeable rules; their authority comes from something beyond time. But humanism is different — it’s alive precisely because it accepts change as sacred. It’s a faith in humanity’s ability to learn, to grow, and to take responsibility for itself.

If I were to put this into personal terms, I would say the sacred is humanity, nature, the individual, and the great mystery of the cosmos. Our sacred duties are to pursue and engage with that mystery — to do science honestly, carefully, and open-mindedly; to face the unknown with humility rather than arrogance. It is also sacred to create art sincerely, without pretense or fear, and to practice compassion and kindness toward all people. We should value the common good more than the self, hold a deep ecological reverence for nature, and respect the inviolable autonomy of each individual.

Now for why I think secular humanism is perhaps better called sacred humanism — a view that does not dismantle the sacred, but simply changes what is sacred. The word secular carries a kind of dryness. It defines itself by what it rejects — the sacred, the divine, the supernatural — rather than by what it loves or affirms. It feels political, utilitarian,  procedural, even bureaucratic: good for organizing rights and ethics, but not for nourishing the human soul. It’s a philosophy of reason and ethics, but it often lacks a language of wonder — the sense that life itself is a mystery worthy of reverence. Sacred humanism restores that sense of awe. It isn’t a rebellion against religion, but the next chapter in its evolution. It simply is an invitatition to particpate with all the sensuality and rationality turned on in the actively happening theater of existence, where no one, not even the universe "knows" what the future holds, as Laplace had (incorrectly) envisioned.