Introducing the Secular Right
I was Catholic for over half of my life. Born in Italy, I came to America when I was two and was raised Roman Catholic. But I left at twenty-four, after witnessing the horrors of war with my own eyes in Iraq, and also because the system was incoherent.
A big part of it was learning that my government had been lying to me, following those rabbit holes, and then realizing that the foundations of nearly every religion in the world are connected to each other. Most of them are copy-paste, borrowing stories from previous ones. So which one is true? I couldn’t know. The questions kept compiling, and it became impossible to still believe.
After that I became an atheist for a while. Then I said no, there’s got to be something. So I became a deist. But then I asked myself: why would there be a God that makes everything and just walks away? What kind of heavenly “father” abandons his children? Then I looked into pantheism. Maybe God is the universe itself. But pantheism is basically atheism because you’re saying God is the material world and there is no one actually there. So where does that leave me? Agnostic.
But recently, a friend of mine in a conversation forced me to choose, claiming agnosticism is a cop out. So, I told him I’d say atheist—specifically because I reject the idea of a personal entity being the foundation of reality.
Here’s why. Personhood entails a boundary—what the person is and what they’re not. If God is the most fundamental reality, it cannot be a person, because then it wouldn’t be boundless, it wouldn’t be infinite, and those attributes couldn’t hold. Maybe there’s a being—the most powerful, the most intelligent, eternal—but without the omnitraits. It created everything while being fallible, which, looking around, actually makes more sense. But no religions believe this.
I don’t rule out the possibility of some kind of god-like force entirely—something like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, an impersonal first cause that set everything in motion, or Plotinus’ concept of the One, a fundamental principle underlying all reality. What I reject is the personal God of the Abrahamic traditions—one who intervenes in our affairs, who has preferences and rewards and demands. If such a being interacts with our world, there should be detectable traces of that interaction. Otherwise it has the same problem as every other dualist system—two things that are supposed to affect each other with no mechanism for how. So far, the evidence doesn’t lead there.
And I want to be clear: I don’t care if you believe. That’s your business and I’ll defend your right to it. What I won’t accept is having those beliefs written into law, pushed into public institutions, or used to govern people who don’t share them. Believe what you want. Just don’t make it my problem.
Politically Homeless
This leaves me with nowhere to go.
I don’t belong in the GOP. I don’t belong with the Democrats. Politics in America is dominated by religious people, and I’m not religious. But the secular left isn’t my home either, because they’ve replaced one religion with another. Their gospel is the false god of egalitarianism, race denial, and ninety-nine genders. Their eternal punishment isn’t hell but cancel culture and censorship.
Nearly every atheist stream I turn on, every call-in show, is concerned with hate speech and promotes some form of Wokism. I can’t take them seriously, so I don’t belong with them either.
What Actually Drives the World
I believe the will to power is what drives things in this world. Not prayers or complaints but action. Nature is hierarchical. That’s not an ideology—that’s an observation. Some ideas are better than others because they produce better results. Some people are more capable in certain areas than others. Nature has never distributed ability equally, and pretending it does is a fantasy as baseless as any religion.
The strong will survive. The best should rule, not arbitrarily, but through the execution of proper action guided by intelligence, integrity, and the courage to face reality as it actually is.
That’s meritocracy.
What We Stand For
People like us don’t believe in handouts because people feel bad. We don’t apologize for what we’ve earned. We reject the slave mentality in both directions—the religious version that has you worshipping a deity who is supposedly all-powerful but needs your rituals and your prayers and your guilt, and the left-wing version that demands you surrender what you’ve built for people who didn’t build it.
We do believe in equality under the law because we believe in justice. But justice is not charity. And strength is not cruelty.
What I want to inspire is the creation of a secular right—a home for people like me who are done choosing between two flavors of magical thinking. We’re not waiting for God nor are we waiting for the government. We don’t believe anyone’s coming to save us. Not from above. Not from Washington. And that’s scary to the left who expects the government to do everything, and scary to the right who expects God to do everything.
We don’t suffer from that delusion.
Grounded in Logic and Reason
Here’s what both sides miss. The highest moral acts are the ones done because they are right—not because you’re afraid to burn in hell, not because you want social approval, not because guilt was programmed into you from childhood. An act of integrity performed freely is worth more than the same act performed under threat. We don’t do what’s right out of fear. We do it because it’s in our nature to be good.
“But what is good without God?”
Simple. Good is what aligns with truth, creates coherence, and builds—for yourself, for those around you, for those who come after you. Bad is what distorts truth, creates incoherence, and destroys.
This grounds our morality in something real—alignment with reality and its consequences—without needing God, without needing divine command, and without collapsing into pure subjectivity. Reality is the ultimate judge. Bad isn’t just “things we don’t like.” Bad is demonstrably destructive and demonstrably false.
“But how do you know what’s true without God?”
We have to figure it out. The truth isn’t handed to us the way religious people claim it is. This is why we use logic, reason, and science—to get as close to the truth as possible, keeping our beliefs open to revision as new information comes in, precisely because we know we are fallible.
The only “truths” we can be certain of are those we define or that exist within systems we know the rules of. “All unmarried men are bachelors” is true by definition. “2+2=4” is true because of mathematics. We can have statements that are true based on the rules of logic and grammar, but none of these tells us the true nature of reality as it is, in and of itself. In these cases, truth is just a stamp of coherence within a system. These systems can help us map the territory, but they are not the territory. Theists consistently make this category error, mistaking the coherence of their internal belief system for evidence about the nature of reality itself.
We accept that absolute certainty about the external world is unavailable to finite minds like ours—and by accepting that, we know we can always learn more. Our knowledge evolves, allowing us continous growth. It’s this kind of knowledge that improves our lives in this world. If we completely rejected science as “the tool of the Devil,” we’d still be dying of infections and blaming demons for the weather. This honesty is more rigorous than dogmatic assertions with no room for correction, especially unfalsifiable ones, which aren’t knowledge at all but unwarranted claims.
This isn’t a casual position. I’ve developed a formal epistemological framework called PIE that demonstrates exactly this. I know PIE is true because any attempt to deny it leads to self-refutation. Those who have attacked it thus far have failed to refute a single one of its premises—because they can’t. The full argument is here for those who want to go deeper.
Why We Reject Religion
The most committed religious people deny everything we have learned as a species in exchange for the comforting promises their religions make—promises that have never been proven to any of their adherents at any point in history. It’s the ultimate carrot and stick. These are comfortable stories for adults, no different than Santa Claus. Their religious texts are what I call cosmic comic books. Perhaps these books bring comfort and help people cope with the difficulties of life—and if so, that’s fine. But people like me don’t need them. We face reality as it is, and we find meaning in that rather than in spite of it.
Aside from moral codes and some comfort, we have never received a single piece of technological knowledge from these books. No medicine. No engineering. No physics. Everything that has actually improved human life came from observation, experimentation, and the willingness to be wrong—not from revelation.
For texts that claim to explain how the world works, they get virtually everything wrong, so what makes them divine? What kind of God fails to properly explain the basics of his own creation? This forces religious adherents to deny science and defend lies written by men that claim to be the word of God.
If God is infallible and these texts are holy scripture directly from his mouth, there cannot be a single incorrect sentence. If men misinterpreted his word, then God failed to deliver his message to his own creation—which shows incompetence. Either way, the Bible, along with every other religious text, contains endless contradictions and flat-out falsehoods. This eliminates the idea that they were produced by an infallible gods, so they must have come from fallible men.
The “smarter” religions have evolved and adapted alongside our growing knowledge. For example, Catholicism no longer denies evolution. Others still resist what’s right in front of them to preserve their dogma. For what? A reward in an afterlife they have no evidence for?
We don’t need fantastic promises without proof. We move forward because it’s in our nature to do so. Our goal is to improve and evolve—as life already does, naturally.
Driven by Nature, Not Fear
We look to no god and no government to rescue us. We take what we have—our intelligence, our integrity, our courage, our technology—and we use it to improve our lives and move humanity forward. Those who move with us move forward. Those who’d rather wait for their savior, whether that’s Jesus or the federal government, can do so. They can complain about inequality and injustice while we take action.
We’re not afraid of death. We know it’s coming. That doesn’t crush us, it clarifies things. Because we’re not counting on paradise, the world we actually have matters more, not less. We build for those who are with us and who come after us—our families, our communities, our people.
We act because it’s who we are, not because we’re expecting a reward we’ll never see. We don’t worship death, we don’t fear death, and we don’t build our whole lives around it the way these belief systems do.
We believe in life. We serve life. We create life.
The Balance That’s Been Missing
The left has been gaining ground for decades running on emotional manipulation and guilt. The religious right has become weak and paralyzed, waiting for a savior to do the work they won’t do themselves. We are the balance that’s been missing, and we’ve been missing because nobody knew this was even a choice.
If you’re done pretending you belong somewhere you don’t—if you reject the supernatural without apology, believe in human excellence over human excuses, embrace nature as it actually is, and are tired of being represented by people whose worldview you fundamentally don’t share—then your home is with us.
Read the Qur'an with English translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali