While the two of us usually disagree, I have no doubt of your intelligence and erudition. Yet, I cannot get what you are saying in this Reply. I sincerely want to understand the point you are making. This is important stuff.

Your first sentence rejects a claim that "secularism" is the "sole reason" for totalitarianism. That is a claim you made (with your reference to "science" that I abstracted from your article), not me.

In my Reply to you I tried to make clear that I count ideology as a form of secularism. To me, ideologies are secular religions because they are based on beliefs as surely as sacral religions are. (I say Marx was a penultimately radical equalitarian who cloaked his ideology in 'scientific' garb.) It is because they are based on beliefs that both ideologies and theologies are prone to totalitarianism.

As for the rest of your Reply, as I have related to you previously, my studies have taught me that mutual respect is the ethic of justice--the "ought" that must govern all people's actions in all times and places. That ethic follows from a belief in equality, which can be secular or sacral. The Golden Rule is a form of that ethic.

I have demonstrated that it also follows from "what is"--the observation within material existence that human beings have no choice but to effect choices.

From that perspective it is especially easy to see that mutual respect, whatever its source, boils down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating (which includes lying, cheating, etc.) in our relations with one another. Any such behavior is a form of co-opting or (otherwise) preempting another person's capacity to choose, the forms of conduct that not respecting that capacity in another person must entail.