The Traditions That Belong to No Single Place

"Global (Cross-Cultural)" is less a geographic region than an honest admission: some traditions have no single homeland, or are so widely diffused that naming one would mislead. Placed here are atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism, stances toward religion that arise wherever people question or set aside belief in the divine, and that cannot be located in any one culture. Organized disbelief and doubt have ancient roots in several civilizations at once: the materialist Carvaka school of ancient India denied an afterlife and the authority of the Vedas; strands of classical Greek and Roman thought (the Epicureans, the skeptics) questioned the gods; and comparable currents appear in classical Chinese thought.

The modern forms, systematic atheism, principled agnosticism (a term coined by T. H. Huxley in the nineteenth century), and secular humanism as an ethical worldview grounded in reason and human dignity rather than revelation, are genuinely transnational, gaining institutional shape through documents like the Humanist Manifestos and organizations spanning many countries. This category also implicitly covers the many new and syncretic movements that draw on sources worldwide. The designation marks a real feature of the modern religious landscape: the rise of worldviews defined precisely by their independence from any particular sacred geography, belonging to humanity in general rather than to a place.