A Responsible, Secular, and Plural State - DANA and Belonging Without Conversion

When a belief tries to become the owner of a territory

Let us imagine a child standing beside a river.

Her family may teach that the river was created by God. Another community may recognize it as an ancestral presence. A teacher may explain it as an ecosystem formed by water, microorganisms, plants, animals, sediments, and climatic cycles. Someone else may attribute no spiritual dimension to it.

A secular State does not need to determine which interpretation contains the ultimate truth.

But it must prevent someone from poisoning the river.

This distinction leads us to the center of the DANA proposal:

The State must remain neutral toward transcendental truths, but it can never remain indifferent to the material consequences of beliefs for people and biomes.

Not every faith is colonial. Rituals can comfort grief, strengthen bonds, preserve memories, and mobilize communities to care for people and territories. The problem begins when a religion, market, political party, or ideology uses public power to transform its particular truth into a collective obligation.

DANA is not a new religion

In the BrainLatam formulation, DANA begins with the idea that life expresses information before any flag, religion, or ideology. DNA participates in the formation of organisms through continuous interaction with the environment, but it does not contain a closed script for consciousness, morality, or destiny.

DANA must therefore be presented as a BrainLatam philosophical and regulatory interpretation, not as a scientific fact proving a particular spirituality.

It has no temples, priests, or compulsory revelation. Nor does it authorize the State to declare that “DNA is God.” That would merely replace one official religion with another language of conversion.

DANA does not offer the State a neutral cosmology. It offers a principle of active neutrality: protecting the freedom of life to express itself without deciding which heaven is true.

In BrainLatam’s original text, the DANA secular State protects the right to believe, not believe, doubt, and change one’s beliefs, especially during childhood development. It also establishes limits when fear, humiliation, violence, or the prohibition of questioning threatens a person’s integrity.

The DNA of biomes

This formulation must be expanded.

DANA does not protect only human DNA.

A biome does not possess a single DNA as though it were one individual organism. It contains countless genomes belonging to plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, and human populations, connected through water, soil, climate, movement, and ecological relationships.

BrainLatam may use the expression “the DNA of biomes” as a metaphor for this living memory: the genetic and relational diversity accumulated through long evolutionary processes.

A forest is not simply a collection of trees.

It contains seeds, fungi, pollinators, predators, microorganisms, water cycles, and genetic combinations that science may not yet have studied. When a species or population disappears, we do not lose only an isolated element. We may lose relationships, adaptations, and future possibilities for life.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, established goals to preserve ecosystem integrity, halt human-caused extinctions, and conserve genetic diversity within and among populations of wild and domesticated species. It also recognizes different systems of value, including biodiversity, Mother Earth, and systems of life, without requiring all of them to be reduced to a single cosmology.

We may therefore say:

DANA neutrality is cosmologically neutral but biologically responsible.

The State does not decide whether a forest has a spirit. It prevents its destruction because the forest contains and sustains life.

It does not declare whether a river is an ancestral being. It protects the river’s continuity because people and other species depend on it.

It does not transform science into a religion. It uses evidence to recognize contamination, extinction, violence, illness, and loss of diversity.

Religious freedom is not permission to sacrifice other lives

A person may guide their life through a belief in reward after death. That belongs to freedom of conscience.

The State, however, cannot offer transcendence instead of material dignity. It cannot replace food with promises, healthcare with compulsory prayer, or justice with obedience.

Nor can it allow a spiritual, economic, or political mission to transform lives into acceptable sacrifices.

The promise may be:

“God will reward you later.”

“The market will eventually correct everything.”

“Development requires losses.”

“We are destroying in order to save the nation.”

In each case, we must ask:

Who will enjoy the promised future?

Who will receive the wound?

Which people, species, rivers, and forests were excluded from that future?

In The Spirit of the Forest, Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert present reflections developed with Yanomami inhabitants of Watoriki about forest biodiversity and the consequences of its destruction. This voice should not be used to decorate a policy that has already been completed. It should interrupt the comfortable separation between environmental harm and human harm.

Ailton Krenak also displaces the future from an abstract promise toward present relationships with rivers, territories, and other forms of life. In Ancestral Future, he questions a world that recognizes value only in what can be exploited or transformed into merchandise.

A secular State must be active

Neutrality cannot mean abandonment.

A child may formally possess religious freedom while being threatened with rejection, eternal punishment, or loss of family belonging for expressing doubt.

A religious community may formally possess freedom of worship while another tradition receives public funding, institutional access, and authority over public education.

A corporation may invoke economic freedom while transferring pollution and destruction to populations that did not participate in the decision.

A DANA State must protect freedom of conscience while also evaluating consequences for multiple Bodies-Territories.

UNESCO recommends that education strengthen freedom of thought, conscience, belief, religion, and expression, together with pluralism, democratic participation, shared responsibility, and recognition of the interdependence among communities, natural resources, and ecosystems.

Public schools may therefore study religions, atheisms, Indigenous cosmologies, Afro-descendant traditions, and philosophies without selecting an official transcendental truth.

They can welcome faith without proselytizing.

They can teach science without ridiculing spiritual experience.

They can protect doubt without requiring anyone to abandon their community.

What archaeology returns to us

The Americas before colonization never possessed a single religion or political organization.

Archaeological research at Chiantla Viejo in Guatemala found that Maya Mam communities rebuilt Indigenous ritual spaces even after colonial records described them as converted to Christianity. The case shows that declared conversion and lived belonging may be different, and that public spaces can preserve and reactivate ancestral religious memories.

This does not prove that pre-Columbian societies were always tolerant. Hierarchies, war, and coercion also existed.

Archaeology offers another contribution: it prevents colonization from being presented as the beginning of spirituality, politics, or territorial organization.

Argentine archaeologist Félix Acuto advocates an intercultural archaeology committed to living Indigenous peoples and their territorial struggles, rather than imprisoning them within a past administered exclusively by external institutions.

DANA as a public principle

We can now construct a more complete formulation together:

DANA is a BrainLatam philosophical and regulatory principle according to which the secular State must protect the freedom of expression of the human and more-than-human lives that constitute a territory.

It guarantees the right to believe, not believe, doubt, and change one’s beliefs.

It protects childhood from coercive conversion.

It does not decide the truth of God, spirit, karma, or life after death.

It establishes limits when religions, companies, political parties, or ideologies produce violence, discrimination, contamination, extinction, or irreversible destruction of the conditions of existence.

Latin America already offers an important legal window. In the Los Cedros Forest case, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court recognized violations of the rights of nature, water, and community participation caused by the authorization of mining activities in an area of exceptional biodiversity.

DANA therefore expands Jiwasa.

The “we” no longer includes only the humans who are alive today. It also recognizes the networks of life upon which our breathing, nourishment, consciousness, and future depend.

The State must not tell people which heaven they should pursue. It must ensure that no religion, market, or ideology transforms the shared Earth into a compulsory sacrifice for reaching its own heaven.

The question remains open:

How can we build public belonging without requiring citizens to surrender their freedom of conscience—and without allowing their belief, profit, or mission to destroy the multiple DNA expressions that keep a territory alive?

Commented references

BrainLatam (2025). Libertad de Expresión del ADN y Estado Laico DANA.
Presents DANA as a proposal for active neutrality, freedom of conscience, and protection of human development from coercive conversion.

UNESCO (2023). Recommendation on Education for Peace, Human Rights and Sustainable Development.
Connects education with pluralism, freedom of conscience, democratic participation, and responsibility toward ecosystems.

Convention on Biological Diversity (2022). Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Establishes goals for protecting ecosystems, species, genetic diversity, and the rights and knowledge of Indigenous peoples.

Kopenawa, D.; Albert, B. (2023). O espírito da floresta — The Spirit of the Forest.
Brings together Yanomami reflections on the forest, biodiversity, and the human and cosmological consequences of its destruction.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral — Ancestral Future.
Challenges the reduction of nature to an economic resource and returns rivers, territories, and other beings to our imagination of the future.

Castillo, V. (2022). Conquest and Revival at Chiantla Viejo.
Archaeologically documents the public persistence and renewal of Maya Mam religious practices after the Spanish conquest.

Acuto, F. A. (2025). Indigenous Archaeology in Latin America.
Advocates an intercultural archaeology committed to living Indigenous peoples, collective rights, and territorial protection.

Constitutional Court of Ecuador (2021–2022). Los Cedros Judgment.
Recognizes the rights of nature, water, and community participation in response to mining risks in a protected forest.