Sacred and Profane

To utilize the notion of a sacred and a profane is to suggest an explanation and ordering of the world encountered that looks back to the Judeo-Christian traditions often claimed as the foundations of Western society. The term sacred and profane, bound together often as a figure of speech, suggests the defining differences between a number of oppositions: good and evil, Godly and Godless or diabolical, civilized and uncivilized or savage, worthwhile and worthless, white and black, and so forth. The absolute definition of such differences in relation to each other effectively divides the world into two: a “theory of everything,” which imposed a binary view. The sacred and the profane thus becomes the vector through which the world, as encountered, is interpreted and processed: ...