I contend that all ideologies are secular religions because all are based on secular beliefs, such as a belief in a moral equality among human beings. As with spiritual religions, with ideologies there are believers and then there are Believers; with any system of beliefs there will be people who are more or less fervent, less or more open to questioning and alternative positions.

Since you asked, my positions follow from what I call ’real justice’. It follows from an ethic of justice (mutual respect in effecting choices) that follows from observation within material existence: human beings have no choice but to effect choices and humans are social beings, i.e. we live together in groups we call societies.

Co-existing human beings must respect the capacity all people have to choose for themselves. To do so is to recognize others as fellow human beings: no more, no less.

To act otherwise is to assert some other relative status regarding the beings involved. Any attempt at justifying such behavior requires reaching outside material existence (to a belief, an intuition, etc.).

With those observations determining the ethic of justice and its domain limited to interactions among human beings in the process of effecting choices, both the determiners and the referents of justice are located within material existence. Going outside material existence — to beliefs, etc. — to justify violating that ethic within that domain is thereby legitimately de-legitimated.

Skipping to the economy (an inevitable social process of co-existing human beings which is nothing but people effecting choices), I have come to understand that real justice has three conditions of justice for a monetary economy (one with a legal tender): freedom (to choose for oneself how and to what extent to participate in the economy), the existence of a ‘democratically distributed income’ for citizens (the monetary equivalent of the democratic distribution of political rights), and an absence of exploitation (i.e. some people using the labor of others — ‘employing’ them, using them as machines in what Marx correctly called “wage slavery” — for their own monetary gain). An economy will be more just the more of those conditions that are met.