What can religious and secular traditions teach us about becoming human together?

 

Religious and secular worldviews have historically provided the principal frameworks through which people interpret identity, suffering, mortality, responsibility, community, and meaning. They can be understood as forms of existential interpretation rather than as alternatives to science or philosophy. Their narratives, symbols, rituals, and moral practices organize experiences of dependence, uncertainty, loss, and vulnerability within broader social or cosmic frameworks[1].

These traditions are valuable as historical sources of human self-understanding, not as unquestionable authorities. They reveal how cultures have interpreted shared conditions of existence, developed moral practices, organized communal identity, and transmitted responsibility across generations. Despite major metaphysical differences, many converge on the relational formation of identity, the vulnerability of human life, the possibility of moral development, and the fundamental need for meaning.

The relevant question is not which tradition offers the correct account of humanity. It is whether recurring interpretations of vulnerability, responsibility, community, transformation, and meaning illuminate dimensions of human existence that a relational-processual approach must address. Similar words do not necessarily express identical doctrines, and no tradition is internally homogeneous. Comparison can reveal overlapping concerns while leaving metaphysical disagreement intact and protecting the freedom of believers and non-believers to reject the framework offered by another tradition.

 

Tradition	Conception of human identity	Development and moral responsibility	Distinctive contribution
Theravāda Buddhism[2]	The self is a temporary configuration of bodily and mental processes rather than a fixed essence. Impermanence, non-self, and dependent origination explain identity as conditional and relational.	Meditation, ethical discipline, and insight allow people to recognize and transform patterns of craving, fear, and ignorance. Freedom means becoming less governed by automatic reactions.	Shared vulnerability and suffering support compassion, loving-kindness, nonviolence, and concern for all living beings.
Tibetan Buddhism[3]	Identity is a dynamic pattern arising within mental, relational, and cosmic interdependence. Buddha-nature represents a capacity for transformation rather than an immutable essence.	Consciousness is plastic and can be developed through meditation, visualization, ethical practice, and analytical reflection. The bodhisattva ideal connects personal development to the welfare of all beings.	Compassion and empathy are trainable capacities rather than spontaneous emotions alone. Wisdom and responsibility develop together.
Confucianism[4]	A person develops through family, community, social roles, rituals, and cultural practices rather than beginning as an isolated individual.	Moral character is cultivated through education, discipline, reflection, ritual participation, and social interaction. Ren expresses humane concern, while li structures practices that cultivate respect and responsibility.	Identity is intergenerational and historically transmitted. Social harmony is produced through moral formation rather than coercion, although relational roles can also become hierarchical.
Chinese Buddhist and Neo-Confucian syntheses[5]	Human identity combines dynamic consciousness, social embeddedness, and participation in a broader cosmic order.	Self-cultivation integrates study, reflection, ritual, emotional development, and community participation. Inner transformation and social responsibility reinforce each other.	Moral and cognitive development is multidimensional, joining Buddhist insights about conditioning with Confucian responsibility and Daoist cosmological sensitivity.
Judaism[6]	Identity is relational, historical, interpretative, and formed through covenant, community, texts, traditions, and collective memory.	Moral principles are continuously interpreted through debate and applied to changing circumstances. Freedom is connected to responsibility within an evolving moral tradition.	Dialogical interpretation sustains moral development. Justice includes structural responsibility for strangers, widows, orphans, and other vulnerable people.
Christianity[7]	Every person possesses intrinsic dignity through their relationship to God, not through achievement, status, or independence. Identity develops within relationships of care, solidarity, and community.	Moral development involves love of one’s neighbour, mercy, responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation, and recognition of human moral ambivalence.	Dignity becomes especially visible in vulnerability and dependence. Moral concern should cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and status.
Islam[8]	Human beings are morally responsible and relational participants in community, nature, and divine order. Freedom exists within a framework of justice, mercy, and responsibility.	Prayer, fasting, charity, reflection, and discipline develop compassion and responsibility. Human beings remain vulnerable to egoism, injustice, and the abuse of power.	Stewardship connects social responsibility with ecological care. Solidarity with vulnerable people is a structural duty rather than optional generosity.
Hinduism[9]	Identity is layered across bodily, psychological, social, moral, cosmic, and spiritual dimensions. The historical person exists in relation to deeper conceptions of self and cosmic reality.	Karma, saṃsāra, dharma, contemplation, devotion, discipline, and selfless action place development within extended moral and spiritual processes.	Ahimsa and compassion arise from the interconnectedness of life. Identity and responsibility extend across communities, generations, and cosmic relationships.
Daoism[10]	Human beings participate in a continuously transforming natural and cosmic process rather than standing apart from the world as autonomous controllers.	Wisdom consists of flexibility and alignment with complex processes. Wu wei describes non-coercive action that avoids imposing rigid control on dynamic systems.	Vulnerability can be a source of resilience. Human flourishing requires humility, restrained power, and ecological harmony.
Sikhism[11]	All people share intrinsic dignity because they arise from one ultimate reality. Identity develops through spiritual awareness, social responsibility, and communal practice.	Inner development must be expressed through honest work, moral discipline, service, and participation in community. Seva cultivates solidarity through selfless service.	Radical equality is enacted through practices such as the langar, where people share food without distinctions of caste, gender, origin, or status.
Ubuntu and African philosophies[12]	Personhood emerges through mutual recognition: individuals become people through relationships with others and participation in community.	Empathy, solidarity, care, communal decision-making, and responsibility form moral identity. Justice often prioritizes restoring damaged relationships.	Human identity is communal and intergenerational. Restorative justice, dialogue, and reconciliation support social repair and shared humanity.
Indigenous cosmologies[13]	Humans belong to a living network connecting communities, land, animals, plants, ancestors, future generations, and landscapes.	Development occurs through reciprocal relationships, ecological knowledge, ritual, cultural memory, and responsibility toward the natural world.	Land is a source of identity, knowledge, and moral obligation rather than merely property. Empathy extends beyond humans to ecosystems and other life forms.
Shinto[14]	Human beings participate in a living network of nature, community, ancestors, place, and spiritual presence. Identity is sustained through local and seasonal practices.	Rituals renew relationships and restore balance after disruption. Moral life emphasizes purification, harmony, and renewed participation rather than permanent guilt.	Human development is tied to place, landscape, ecological rhythms, and intergenerational continuity.
Zoroastrianism[15]	Human beings are free and responsible participants in a moral universe shaped by the conflict between truth and destructive disorder.	Good thoughts, words, and actions contribute to justice and the historical transformation of the world. Freedom gives human choices genuine moral significance.	Moral responsibility includes protecting fire, water, earth, and air. Human agency is simultaneously ethical, historical, and ecological.
Secular humanism[16]	Human beings create identity, meaning, and morality through reason, empathy, language, cooperation, and historical development without relying on supernatural authority.	Autonomy develops through education, knowledge, critical reflection, legal protection, public debate, and social recognition.	Open inquiry, democratic deliberation, human rights, and epistemic pluralism protect societies against dogmatism and authoritarian definitions of humanity.

 

Several major tensions recur across these traditions.

The first concerns stability and change[17]. Abrahamic traditions often connect identity to a soul, creation, or enduring moral status, while some Hindu traditions refer to a deeper spiritual self. Buddhism more radically rejects a permanent essence and understands the self as a conditional process. Human experience contains both dimensions: people experience continuity and responsibility, yet their identities continually change through relationships, cognition, culture, and history. Narrative identity connects these dimensions by explaining continuity as an evolving interpretative achievement rather than proof of an immutable core.

A second tension concerns autonomy and normative order. Humanist traditions strongly defend independent judgment, while religious and communitarian traditions emphasize that freedom is formed within duties, relationships, rituals, laws, and communities[18]. Autonomy is rarely absolute independence: language, upbringing, education, and institutions make self-determination possible. Yet inherited structures must remain open to criticism because relationality can support care and belonging while also legitimizing conformity, hierarchy, or paternalism. Freedom must therefore be relationally developed and simultaneously protected against imposed life goals.

A third tension concerns transcendence and immanence. Many religions ground dignity and responsibility in God, spiritual reality, or cosmic order. Secular perspectives base them on human capacities, relationships, and empirically shared conditions. Transcendent frameworks provide meaning for suffering, mortality, and moral responsibility, but normative claims must remain accessible to critical examination and cannot depend exclusively on religious authority in plural societies. Existential meaning and empirical legitimacy must therefore remain in dialogue.

A fourth tension concerns universal morality and cultural interpretation. Some traditions understand moral norms as divine or cosmic truths, while others regard morality as developing through reflection, social practice, and historical experience. Cross-cultural convergence exists around compassion, responsibility, care for vulnerable people, and opposition to extreme harm[19]. Concrete interpretations of justice, social roles, freedom, and authority nevertheless vary. Universal moral orientations are most defensible when developed through intercultural dialogue and kept open to reinterpretation.

Five broad anthropological patterns emerge across the traditions.

First, vulnerability is a constitutive condition of human existence. Illness, suffering, uncertainty, moral failure, ageing, and mortality are not exceptions to an otherwise independent life. Rituals and narratives help individuals and communities interpret these experiences, preserve psychological stability, and organize care[20].

Second, relationality is central to identity. People become who they are through family, community, tradition, recognition, language, shared practice, and relationships with ecological systems. Even traditions that emphasize autonomy generally recognize that the capacity for independent judgment requires social formation and institutional support.

Third, human beings are developable. Moral, cognitive, spiritual, and existential capacities can grow through education, meditation, discipline, reflection, ritual, participation, service, and dialogue. Development is neither automatic nor necessarily progressive. It can be supported or undermined by social stability, institutions, material conditions, and relations of power.

Fourth, humans possess a fundamental capacity for meaning. Narratives, symbols, rituals, and moral frameworks connect individual experience to larger histories, communities, and conceptions of reality. Meaning-making is not decorative but a central way of coping with suffering, uncertainty, and mortality.

Fifth, identity includes moral and intergenerational responsibility. Traditions express this through neighbourly love, stewardship, covenant, compassion, dharma, service, ancestral continuity, ecological reciprocity, and responsibility toward future communities. Individuals generally interpret their actions within temporal and collective horizons broader than immediate self-interest.

These convergences do not erase metaphysical and cultural differences. Religious traditions remain plural interpretations of shared conditions rather than interchangeable doctrines. Their value lies partly in preserving intergenerational archives of human experience that reveal how different societies have understood vulnerability, relationality, development, meaning, and responsibility.

Relational-processual anthropology integrates these insights without adopting their metaphysical doctrines as empirical facts or political foundations. Claims about souls, divine purposes, cosmic orders, or spiritual destinies can be understood as symbolic interpretations of human experience. Their anthropological insights are assessed according to their conceptual, experiential, and empirical relevance rather than accepted through religious authority.

This creates a bridge between religious interpretation and scientific knowledge. Religious and philosophical traditions articulate existential and normative dimensions of suffering, mortality, community, and responsibility. Developmental psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and ecology investigate the mechanisms through which identities, relationships, moral capacities, and ecological dependencies develop. These forms of knowledge are complementary when neither is treated as an exclusive explanation of human existence.

Freedom consequently appears as a developable capacity within relational and institutional contexts rather than as absolute independence[21]. Dignity does not depend on achievement, rational performance, spiritual status, culture, or religion. It is a universal claim grounded in shared vulnerability, relational dependence, developmental potential, and the capacity for meaning.

Human identity is ultimately open, narrative, and co-evolutionary. It develops through continuing interaction among biological processes, social relationships, cultural traditions, institutions, symbolic worlds, and ecological systems. A defensible conception of humanity must preserve religious and cultural plurality, remain open to empirical testing and philosophical criticism, and formulate universality through inclusive, dialogical, and revisable procedures.

 

Would you like to explore how a relational understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane, democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.

(PDF) Becoming Human Together: Rethinking Democracy, Power and Institutions for a Complex and Changing World

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[1] Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125; Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). These sources support the interpretative role of religion without reducing traditions to a single social function.

[2] Gethin, The Foundations of Buddhism; Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values and Issues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). These works support the discussion of impermanence, non-self, dependent origination, ethical discipline, and compassion.

[3] John Powers, Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2007); Śāntideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva, trans. Padmakara Translation Group, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 2006). The claim that compassion can be cultivated should be presented as a central normative and contemplative commitment, not as a uniform empirical result across all schools.

[4] Confucius, Analects, trans. Slingerland; Ames, Confucian Role Ethics. These sources support role-constituted personhood, ritual practice, moral cultivation, ren, and intergenerational responsibility.

[5] Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963). Because the row combines several historically diverse traditions, label it explicitly as a broad family of syntheses rather than one uniform doctrine.

[6] David Hartman, A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1985); Michael Fishbane, The Exegetical Imagination: On Jewish Thought and Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). These sources support covenantal identity, interpretative debate, historical memory, and continuing application of tradition.

[7] Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Luke 10:25–37, Matthew 25:31–46, and Galatians 3:28 in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (Washington, DC: National Council of Churches, 2021). Use the biblical texts as primary sources and Wolterstorff as a modern philosophical account of dignity and justice; avoid implying that all Christian traditions interpret these themes identically.

[8] The Qur’an 2:177, 4:135, 6:165, 16:90, and 55:7–9, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Mawil Izzi Dien, The Environmental Dimensions of Islam (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2000). These sources support justice, charity, stewardship, balance, and responsibility; the concepts and their institutional implications remain internally contested within Islamic thought.

[9] Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Laurie L. Patton (London: Penguin, 2008). These sources support the discussion of dharma, karma, disciplined action, devotion, and layered conceptions of personhood. Avoid presenting “Hinduism” as a single metaphysical position.

[10] Laozi, Dao De Jing: A Philosophical Translation, trans. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003); Zhuangzi, The Complete Writings, trans. Brook Ziporyn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2020). These texts support transformation, non-coercive action, flexibility, and suspicion of rigid control.

[11] Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, Sikhism: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011). Singh discusses Sikh scripture, ethics, community, service, gender, and the historical formation of Sikh identity. The langar example should be tied to the tradition’s practice of shared food and opposition to caste distinctions.

[12] Menkiti, “Person and Community in African Traditional Thought”; Metz, A Relational Moral Theory. Use the plural “African philosophies” consistently and acknowledge debates over whether communitarian accounts leave sufficient room for individuality, dissent, and universal rights.

[13] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013); Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes 55, nos. 1–2 (2017): 153–162, https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. Avoid treating highly diverse Indigenous peoples as possessing one shared cosmology.

[14] John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444317190. Their historical analysis is especially useful for avoiding the claim that Shinto is an unchanging essence of Japanese culture.

[15] Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). This source supports the themes of moral agency, truth, good action, historical responsibility, and care for the elements.

[16] Humanists International, Amsterdam Declaration 2022, adopted 5 August 2022, https://humanists.international/what-is-humanism/the-amsterdam-declaration/; Andrew Copson, Secularism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198747222.001.0001. Distinguish secular humanism from secularism: the first is a worldview, while the second principally concerns the political ordering of religion-state relations.

[17] McAdams and McLean, “Narrative Identity”; Strawson, “Against Narrativity”; Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System.”

[18] Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice; Kenneth I. Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice (New York: Guilford Press, 1997). Do not imply that rituals always improve coping; their effects depend on meaning, context, community, and the form of religious struggle.

[19] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other. Present the identified convergence as a comparative interpretation developed in this book, not as a demonstrated consensus among all adherents or schools.

[20] Crystal L. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature: An Integrative Review of Meaning Making and Its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life Events,” Psychological Bulletin 136, no. 2 (2010): 257–301, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018301.

[21] Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory.” These sources support a relational account while preserving personal self-determination as a limit on paternalism.