[Serious] How many reasonable solutions are there to any particular social issue?

[Belacqua]

These are good words to use. 

I'm not doubting that there are elements of culture very early on which seem to us religion-like.

Again; tribal cultures show almost universal Shamanism. You get the odd outlier with some form of ancestor worship but nothing which could be described as 'Secular'. Indeed I'm not aware of any evidence of secular belief systems prior to the Greeks.

Yes, I agree with this. 

But that doesn't mean that the same categories existed then.

This started because I suggested using the word "secular" in its stricter sense, with a more specific meaning than just "non-religious." (The suggestion was rejected, but anyway.) I think that since we have the word "non-religious" we don't need another one with exactly the same meaning. "Secular" is useful to mean a policy or attitude taken in regard to religion. So obviously, you can't have something that's in regard to religion if religion doesn't exist. 

I used the fuzzy term "cavemen" because I thought that would be sufficiently clear. But now I see I should have said something even clearer -- maybe plants. Since plants can't have religion, it doesn't make sense to talk about religious plants and secular plants. 

To talk about things being secular, we need clear boundaries about what is religious and what isn't. I think that pre-modern people (e.g. cavemen, or the people who made the Venus figurines, probably) lacked these boundaries. Their categories were different. It wouldn't make sense to ask a caveman "what is your religion?" He doesn't have a sect or a set of spiritual beliefs -- he has a set of things he holds to be true and things that he practices. Some of these are things that we, as modern people, categorize as religious, but to him they were just -- what's true and what he does. (At some point things get categorized in our modern way; I'm just saying that it doesn't start out that way.) 

In a society where, say, the need to perform certain rituals is absolutely accepted as real, this necessity is not separate in their minds from the need to eat or sleep or anything else which we would categorize as non-religious. 

Later on, when it becomes possible to conceive of education or government as separate arenas, detachable from theology or ritual, then secularity becomes possible. 

The case that prompted me to think this way was what happened in China. Apparently what we currently called Taoism was for a very long time not considered to be a religion. It was just "how things are" and "what we should do." At that early point it was not detached from all other explanations and practices. This changed when Buddhism was imported, and an alternative became available. Then the old practices needed a separate label. But if the anthropologists I pointed to earlier are correct, modern people conceive of Taoism and Buddhism largely in ways that derive from European concepts of religion in the wake of Christianity. Chinese people before the introduction of these Western categories drew the boundaries differently. 

This has a number of parallels with a subject I know more about: aesthetic categories in China and Japan. The concept of "fine art" was imported fairly recently, and before that people had different ways of categorizing crafts, decorations, aesthetic judgements, etc. It's just a case of how categories that seem obvious and universal to us may in fact be contingent.