[fufmaya]

Secular beliefs are invariably religious positions.

It comes down to what you believe is axiomatic about the world.

For example, asserting that life is soulless and meaningless is to take a stand on something that you cannot know. It's a religious position.

All secular beliefs stem from similarly foundationless religious positions.

Or maybe not foundationless, but without acknowledgement of the religious roots (that is, positions that require faith), which is probably worse than acknowledging that the beliefs you hold cannot be proven.

It's worse because it leads people to believe they have a leg up on those religious clods with their backwards ways. When you don't recognize the things you assume about the world require faith, there is no corrective mechanism capable of opening your mind to other possibilities. Secular people and secular beliefs are ironically very close minded.

Take all the things that you believe to be true and work backwards to first principles. What are the assumptions that those principles require to be true?

[8note]

Your soul example is not axiomatic.

The actual axiom is that real things are observable/that empiricism is true. That's not even a required secular thing; secular folks can believe in souls as well, or be rationalists, where what's real does not depend on what you can observe.

But for some subset of us, the soul is not measurable, nor can youcreate a test to determine whether something has a soul or not, so souls do not exist, by comparison to something like the electrical charge.