1843: secular Jan 1, 2020

The word 'secular' has been around for a long time, but has only been antonymous with 'religious' since the Enlightenment. Before this, it meant 'of generations' and related to the passage of time in a fairly areligious sense. Even after the shift in meaning however, it is often difficult to transfer this term to other, non-western cultures, because many other religions do not hold the natural and supernatural world as dichotomous. This has led to Japan being legislatively both a secular and Shintoist nation.

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