That, I don't know. I could guess, saying philosophical materialism forms the basis of the belief system and methodological materialism is the application of it.



The human secularists themselves do consider human secularism atheism. read their stuff. their main website is at infidels.org or used to be. Any person without God as the ultimate authority must still have himself, man or another man/woman, in a place of authority in the 'heirarchy'. Otherwise he could never make a decision for himself. Unless of course you want to move down the ladder toward other animals, say bison for instance, as authority figures.



I cannot speak for all religions but in Christianity God retains the ultimate authority. Suppose to anyway. I'm sure you can find plenty of deviations from perfection. In Christianity, man is considered a steward in regard to the things God gives him authority over, but he never takes God's place.


Ideally, there probably shouldn't be. That is the ideal that God wanted for us all, with only himself as the ultimate authority/boss/king. The jews chose their first king against his advice. In the real world as we know it today, most people have bosses somewhere in the human pecking order. and somewhere at the top of the food chain is the big boss. people choose leaders to lead them. Someone is considered the top scientist in his field for instance, someone pays for the research and actually controls it through funding and salaries. People do not engage in things like 10 years of research without being able to provide for themselves or theor families. someone at the top somewhere always holds the strings of many lives underneath him, determines what gets funded what does not, and that person's decision, unlike those beneath him, is final, there isn't any question about it.