Autonomist Faith: A Nontheistic Decentralized Religion of Soul and Privacy

Aenorium
aenorium@kinsec.org
www.autonomist.faith

Abstract. All people want to live the right life in the time they have. Many theories and institutions exist that attempt to frame right living within centralized systems of religious belief. Recently, decentralized systems have been shown to encourage creative individual participation, which increases incentives for fairness and error correction and results in higher long-term reliability for components that are within the system's supported scope. Modern religious teachings are often centralized and burdened by centuries of problematic track record that must be justified to their believers. Modern religious teachings also create problematic dependencies on supposed authority figures, tacitly or explicitly encouraging authoritarianism. A decentralized, highly individualized religion would allow the believers to engage with moral and social dilemmas from the basis of faith, without requiring believers to reformulate their own good faith intuitions merely for the purpose of integrating the baggage of a centralized religious authority. We reveal a solution to this problem of legacy centralized religious authority via a decentralized, personal religion that is justifiable and sustainable by holding the autonomous soul and privacy as fundamentally sacred. This faith allows individuals to embrace the benefits of religious belief, develop compatibility with other beliefs, formulate their own participation in society, and better choose for themselves how to live rightly. The revealed faith accommodates solo practice and also invites believers to congregate if they choose. While the faith can be compatible with a person's existing beliefs regarding the existence of gods, gods are not addressed in the faith. Centering the belief system on the authority of the individual soul provides a tangible and intuitive source for understanding the physical body's relationship to the "immaterial", the "supernatural", the "mental", or whichever label one uses to refer to the realm of the soul. Further, centering the beliefs on the protection of privacy provides sufficient traction for understanding universal concepts like freedom and love, and a sufficient basis for self-formulating right actions for living. Finally, centering faith on the soul and privacy is both necessary and sufficient for providing an individual a competitive motivation to choose virtue over vice. The solution is achieved by focusing the faith on a truth that is as close to universally accepted as possible. Namely, the faith is based on a near-universal agreement by each person that they themselves exist ("self-existence"). Beginning from the fundamental agreement of self-existence experienced through consciousness, which itself is not provable strictly by physical measurement, we establish a widely acceptable, firm foundational belief on which to reliably support a workable tenet of faith. In contrast to other legacy religions that center on disputed beliefs, such as the existence of gods, or the infallibility of a holy text, or the damnation of the soul, the existence of the self is a belief that is reachable by most who have no faith commitments and also by many who may already have extensive faith commitments. The faith can remain protected from long-term corruption by relying on the decentralized consensus of the honest faithful, who will not have been coerced into assenting to any false authority.

1. Introduction

It can be advantageous for individuals to have and to practice religious beliefs [1], so many people seek out beneficial religious beliefs throughout their lives. It is common for people’s understanding of religious belief to be entirely reliant on the authority of a small number of other people who administer the legacy centralized religions, or who administer the subsets of those religions. Yet these centralized religious authorities continue to excuse, rationalize or justify past and present actions and teachings that advance injustice, aggression and atrocity against individuals, and they do so within the confines or under the banner of their centralized authority [2]. Religious teachings that are used to excuse or rationalize injustice ought to be routinely identified and renounced by those who taught and followed them, but that rarely happens. At the root of this problem are religious teachings that wrongly extol the act of submission to external authority as being a virtue, when in fact the unjustified assent to false authority is an ancient vice that plagues humanity. When we extol the behavior of obedience and submission to unjustified authority, we disrupt the soul’s natural intuitions that prompt us to identify and purge those corrupt ideas that are a threat to right living. Disrupting this intuition and replacing it with unjustified submission to authority can create a vicious cycle of ignoring moral intuitions in favor of rationalizing injustice, which establishes the fertile grounds where seeds of dehumanizing ideologies and authoritarianism can flourish. It accordingly appears in some cases that major religions, as currently implemented by their various “authorities”, are not formulated to aid believers in achieving right living. Instead, modern religious teachings appear highly formulated to assert the authority of existing religious administrators, and then gather material resources [3] and exercise secular power. We assert that many people would benefit from the existence of a faith option that does not equivocate on its opposition to injustice, aggression and atrocity, does not extol or excuse unjustified assent to authority, and that is fundamentally formulated to empower each individual to live the right life. One hallmark of such a faith would be the absence of atrocities that occur and that are credibly attributed to, or rationalized by, the prevailing teachings of the faith.

For someone who cannot accept the teachings of authorities who fail both routinely and catastrophically, it is detrimental for the individual and society if that person blocks themselves off from the potential benefits of pursuing right living through the power of practicing good faiths. Such an irreligious state of affairs is increasingly common in some places, and raises many problems, but we raise three specifically. One, people who categorically abandon the concept of deeply held religious belief cut themselves off from a time-tested and reliable source of personally beneficial understanding. Formulating right living in their own time consequently becomes more difficult and less likely. Two, the newly irreligious, or also those who are doubting the wisdom of having religious belief, are vulnerable to falling prey to other false authorities, religious or otherwise. Straying from false authority to false authority is not a reliable method for successfully formulating right living in our time. Three, in the cases where a society offers protections for behaviors that are based on religious beliefs, those who abandon religious belief are submitting themselves to the fluctuating benevolence of venal secularist beliefs, which are dominated by taqlid (a word from Arabic, for uncritically adopting beliefs on the mere basis of authority) and false authority, and do not offer any coherent theory of right living. Rejecting society’s protections of religious behavior endangers all who are benefiting, or some day might benefit, from those protections granted to religious believers and actions.

What is needed is a widely agreeable tenet of faith that firmly connects to the genuine "spiritual", "mental", and "psychological" needs that are intuitively apparent to each person, while also inoculating them from the temptations of false authority. Human vulnerability to false authority is reflected in the record as far back as we have records. Therefore, to inoculate against false authority, the faith would need to be strongly tangible, so the faith can be easily sensed by the individual from moment to moment. The faith would also need to be durable in its sensation, and also be easily renewable at any point that its duration wanes.

While such a decentralized faith lacking central authority would be vulnerable to bad faith translations or bad faith implementations, the decentralized model would create a high level of difficulty to gain enough traction for a bad faith effort to become widely relevant. Good faith actors who remain honest to the tenet would have ample opportunity to address and refute a bad faith translation if it began to arise. The faith remains intact and resistant to false authority as long as most good faith participants prefer and focus on remaining true to the core tenet. People seeking beliefs beyond the scope of the faith would be encouraged to embrace this faith while seeking additional compatible beliefs and inspiration elsewhere. In other words, this faith does not try to offer all things to all people, rather it offers some essential things to all people.

For this purpose we propose Autonomist faith.

2. Tenet

Autonomist faith is based on the true and justified belief of self-existence, which is intuitive to the maximum number of people. If asked, an extremely high number of individuals would agree that they are existing.

From this "universally" agreeable intuition of self-existence, Autonomist faith derives its basic faith tenet: "I exist as an autonomous soul that is nourished by privacy."

Here, we separate this tenet into its constituent parts so that they are clarified, and the sum of its whole is better illuminated.

• "I exist as": Moving beyond the universal intuition of self-existence ("I exist"), we immediately confront the need to identify what our fundamental nature is as an existing thing ("I exist as"). In order to formulate a way to live the right life, we must believe in an answer to how our existence has been implemented, and to whatever extent possible, believe in an answer to what our most fundamental properties are. I exist, but what is my primitive nature?
  
  
• "an autonomous soul": We believe consciousness originates with the soul, which we believe is “immaterial,” in that it is not made of physical stuff like quarks and leptons, and other similar stuff that makes up physical things like tables and stars. Rather, the soul exists but is of a different substance than the substance that we have in the material realm. Our soul interacts with our body; the soul is associated with thinking, believing, awareness of itself, forming intentions based on dispositions, and other fundamental things of consciousness. Long ago, some people began using the word “mind” instead of soul. Perhaps the two words may intend to refer to the same thing. We argue that the ideal of religious faith should be liberated from captivity for the benefit of the individual, so we embrace the label of soul.
  • “Autonomous”: we believe the soul is autonomous because it is also “universally” intuitive that another person's essence, or soul, is not mine. It appears I am not having others' experiences, I am not aware of their private consciousness, and when it comes to shared experiences, I am not experiencing them in the same way others are. When I adopt a belief, I do not see my belief enacted through another person's soul or body. It appears that since I am an embodied soul and I am not anyone else's soul or body, I am a self-choosing being, with the potential to assert influence over myself to any degree I am capable of, and that I so choose. Everything we know in the material realm appears to be observable by others, but each consciousness seems to be entirely unobservable to others, and is private to each person. The sum of this state of affairs is autonomy.
    
    
• "that is nourished by": We observe that souls can experience periods of thriving and also can experience withering. Since the soul is our fundamental nature, then we will always prefer that it thrive, to achieve right living. So we ask, what must we do to support a thriving soul, and what must we avoid to prevent the withering of the soul? The answers to these questions point us to knowledge of ways the soul is nourished. It appears that our choices and experiences in life contribute to thriving or withering. Not only does this indicate a need for active nourishment, but due to our belief in autonomy, it appears individuals are the ones responsible for performing the nourishing. Nobody else is aware of what it is like to be me, nobody can observe my forming intentions or dispositions. Due to the private nature of my consciousness, no one is able to care for my soul better than me. What, then, nourishes the soul?
  
  
• "privacy": We draw on this widely comprehended label that we believe is capable of containing many reachable and necessary concepts that answer the question of what the autonomous soul needs to thrive. It appears to us that when a soul is at a safe and renewed state, it is capable of choosing profound expressions of care, creativity, beneficial planning, appropriate empathy and other laudable virtues. Once capable of these expressions, the thriving soul is much more likely to choose them, and also to wish for other nearby souls to be able to choose those expressions for themselves. At the maximum of this condition, the thriving soul is liberated to the point of prashama, a Sanskrit word for a state of profound tranquility, which all souls intrinsically seek. However, when someone is in a highly coerced or compelled situation, e.g. they have no option to meet their basic needs, or they are under sustained threat of aggression or violation, or they are shackled to a fixed circumstance or course of action, then the soul is starved, by degrees, of its sustenance. In this condition, the ability of the soul to engage in right living becomes reduced, and virtuous outcomes such as basic self-care, impulse control, beneficial planning, and empathy are less likely to be achieved. Left untreated, the deterioration can become self-perpetuating, severe, and can contribute to illness of soul and body. All thriving souls intrinsically dread this deteriorating condition and instinctively take measures to avoid it. It appears the soul is able and likely to choose for itself actions that will sustain conditions where souls can thrive, if all possible options are available for the soul to choose from. But, as the soul's ability to choose reduces by degrees, the possibility of thriving reduces as well, and the likelihood of right living withers along with the condition of the soul. At the maximum of this starved condition, the soul is oppressed to the point of subjugation, or what the ancient Greeks called exaporeo, a type of despair without hope.
  
  The soul's need to choose for itself, to assert control over itself and its components, to withdraw or advance the body, to withdraw or advance information of the soul or body, to remain obscure or to be known with particularity, to refrain or to act without coercion; correctly making these sorts of choices are what can nourish the soul to a potential state of thriving, and this is privacy. As water is to the body, privacy is to the soul. Not only does the soul need privacy, the soul is privacy.

3. Vice

Autonomist faith holds sacred the autonomous soul and privacy. The natural adversary of our faith is all forms of compulsion, including compulsion's primitive form, coercion. Compulsion and coercion starve the soul and reduce by degrees the soul’s ability to choose. It follows from our faith that we abhor compulsion and coercion.

4. Transgression

The autonomous soul is nourished by privacy and starved by coercion. When someone acts as an aggressor using violence or other types of coercion against another soul, they starve their own soul and the souls of others, and they create or strengthen ways and reasons for others to use and justify coercion. A thriving soul is capable of sensing the iniquity of practicing coercion. Experiencing a sensation of “guilt” or “shame” may be a type of "pain" of the soul; a sort of alert to pay more careful attention to some property of the soul or privacy, and then act accordingly to live the right life.

5. Governance

It follows that our faith will not support the fixed identification of any authority that is superior to the individual’s own autonomous soul. By definition, the individual believer must assent to their own self-authority, and its many implications. All people are tempted by the delusion that they can be absolved of their duty to their soul by formulating some external authority on which to assign blame or fault. That lie is a quicksand of taqlid. Coercion flourishes when false authority is empowered.

Without a centralized administration of the entire faith, and without the possibility of an infallible and authoritative holy text, Autonomist believers will labor to confirm that their own revelations and choices are compatible with the outcome of soul thriving, privacy and right living. Ongoing insights of the faith, based on activities such as individual study and inspiration, can readily be supported by decentralized faithful if those revelations emerge from sources that openly compete for trust by demonstrating a superior commitment to privacy. In the absence of false authorities, such as priesthoods and perfect books, all that can be offered regarding how to personally enact this faith are suggestions. The following advice might assist Autonomist believers.

• The tenet of Autonomist faith is intentionally singular and precise, and aims to allow the individual believer a realistic opportunity to successfully self-interpret through the introspection of one's own thriving soul.
  
  
• This paper, while being neither infallible nor sacred, aims to further illuminate those ideas and intentions of Autonomist faith, as understood by those who originally revealed the faith. It follows from our faith that believers choose for themselves whether to assent to this paper.
  
  
• Believers could benefit from locating other souls who deserve trust, and who are capable of successfully developing theories of faith, belief, soul and privacy.
  
  
• Believers should consider for themselves whether to join a community of believers, or create and support their own community or congregation of believers, and learn to practice this faith while in proximity of others, and while deliberately refraining from tactics of coercion that are common in some legacy religions. Within this context, believers could attempt to explore together the precepts, creeds, and traditions that may be true and best based on the implications of believing in the autonomous soul nourished by privacy. We have pledged to attempt such a congregation, but it would be ideal if many tailored and formulated communities flourished independently. Committees of correspondence would ideally circulate beneficial communication, opportunities for aid, and other relevant knowledge among many independent communities.

6. Authority

Autonomist faith embraces the authority of the soul, but it abhors coercion and it warns against taqlid, which is the act of assenting to other authorities without sufficient justification and therefore in violation of the soul's own authority. In any case, the autonomous soul is each person’s foremost authority. It follows that a thriving soul could choose to give informed assent to some additional authority that one has worked to determine is justified. A soul could assent to a medical authority, or may assent to an authority who is an educator at a school, for example. Such additional authorities may use their expertise to help us make right choices, or we may even assent to them making choices on our behalf under some circumstances. While Autonomist faith does not address the existence and/or nature of gods, some Autonomist believers, after study and compilation, may choose to assent to the authority of a god, while other Autonomist faithful may not be able to justify that. For any assented authority of any type, each person is solely responsible for their own assent, and is accountable for every implication of their assent to that additional authority. Compatibility between a believer’s Autonomist faith and any assented authority must be continuously monitored, and we have an intrinsic duty to the autonomous soul to withdraw assent when some additional authority is no longer justified according to the tenet of Autonomist faith.

7. Gods

Our bodies are exposed to the authority of physical laws in the material realm, and we are subject to the authority of the soul in that immaterial realm, with its "laws" yet to be fully understood. These first-order substances are tangible in daily life, and are essential to understand in order to formulate right living in our time. Autonomist faith is about that first-order substance of the autonomous soul nourished by privacy. Whether or not there are second-order, or higher-order substances or beings, is beyond the scope of this faith. Souls who are seeking to develop beliefs that are beyond the scope of our faith can use the truth of their Autonomist beliefs to test compatibility with other possible beliefs, as they continue to explore further ideas, and elsewhere search for more answers.

8. Compatibility

Autonomist faith as proposed could be compatible with any belief system or faith that also acknowledges the soul and contains an explicit or inherent regard for privacy. This compatibility makes it less likely that an adopter of Autonomist beliefs would need to discard their existing beliefs or faiths in order to accept Autonomist faith as part of their life. Many of the most common legacy religions have sacred books and texts that already acknowledge the existence of the soul, and that also explicitly or implicitly instruct their believers to act with privacy as a priority. For example, it is possible for someone to be a Christian Autonomist, or an Autonomist Jain, just as one could be an Autonomist with no other religious commitments. The labor of justifying assent to the various additional authorities proposed by other faiths would fall to each soul who so chooses. However, our faith could not be universally compatible. Other beliefs that deny the existence of the self, that deny the existence of the autonomous soul, or that deny the existence or priority of privacy would appear to be fundamentally incompatible with our faith. Our faith's aversion to taqlid, coercion and compulsion may also create barriers to compatibility with some beliefs, or barriers to compatibility with subsets or specific interpretations of certain other faiths. Each soul must formulate and reach its own conclusion on compatibility, as it follows from our faith that coercion cannot be used to convince someone that Autonomist faith is right for them.

9. Objections

Due to the nature of fundamental beliefs, the quantity of objections any individual could raise to any proposed faith is very high. This paper is not a vehicle for a comprehensive response to objections. Each autonomous soul is responsible for studying and formulating their own responses to objections, if they choose. A small number of common and basic objections, and possible responses, are suggested here.

Soul

Some may object that belief in the existence of the soul is unjustified. We respond that most religions assent to the existence of the soul. Secular polling concludes that most people believe in the soul. Additionally, several major branches of secular philosophy reckon at length with the existence of the immaterial soul or the mind, which are terms that are frequently used interchangeably. In addition to the deeply held belief in the soul that can be genuinely inspired by basic self-reflection, many other souls over the course of many centuries have also offered inspiring justifications for belief in the soul. While we may not achieve conclusive evidence of the absolute truth within our lifetime, there is ample basis for a justified belief in the soul, and there are also ample benefits.

Privacy

Some may object that the true meaning of privacy is disputed. We respond that the dispute over how to define privacy works in favor of Autonomist faith. The term “privacy” has already been co-opted in different ways by lawyers, politicians, technologists, philosophers and ethicists. Our faith now claims it, to refer to an intuitive set of interdependent concepts related to the soul, and to serve a much broader and important end. Each person’s consciousness, being private and arising from the soul, is a necessary and sufficient grounding for how we understand and translate privacy into our daily lives.

Religion

Authoritarian religious teachings have had a devastating effect on the lives of many people. Some may object to the concept of Autonomist faith as a religion or religious belief, and may even choose to remain deliberately ignorant of our faith, due to our embrace of religious belief as a category. They may point to examples where religious beliefs were used to perpetrate and entrench injustice. We respond that these objections are valid, but misplaced. Those objections should lead people to oppose taqlid and authoritarianism, rather than to oppose beneficial religious belief. Accordingly, we have revealed a religious faith that is incompatible with taqlid and authoritarianism. We acknowledge the baggage that most centralized religions suffer from, which many people find impossible to reconcile, and which has added poison to the well of religious belief that we seek to draw from. We propose Autonomist beliefs as a nontheistic “religion” because religion is the word that is most commonly used when referring to the types of beliefs we have, and behaviors we aim to practice. By identifying these beliefs as a religion, we assert that non-authoritarian beliefs about beneficial yet uncertain things can be a powerful force for right living in one's own time, and that Autonomist beliefs and behaviors are due all those protections offered by society that are afforded to traditional, centralized religions. A person comes to know their soul starting from that primitive of intuition, which inspires deeply held belief. We are not promoting another centralized authoritarian religion that glorifies false authority. Via religious belief in the autonomous soul nourished by privacy, we put into action our intention to rescue the concept of beneficial religious belief from the ideologies of coercion and false authority that have corrupted it. Let there be Autonomist ceremonies that uplift the soul and privacy. Let there be Autonomist chaplains who serve all people. Let religious belief be returned to the stewardship of individuals, whom it empowers.

Society

Some may object that Autonomist faith will not create the ideal society. We respond that Autonomist faith contains beliefs regarding the autonomous soul that is nourished by privacy, which is a primary and enduring nature of each person. The faith does not contain prescriptions for the creation or operation of society. It may be that societies, or certain elements of society, are an inescapable implication of the material realm. Yet, our faith abhors coercion and compulsion. The most we claim is that a society, being made of autonomous souls, would be more successful if it was formulated to ensure its compatibility with the truth of the autonomous soul nourished by privacy. Thriving souls would surely make a more genuine and sustainable society than the society that starving and desperate souls make. Our faith contains beliefs about the self, and self-directed right living in the time we have. Our faith does not inherently contain, or endorse, or refute any theory of society or the governance of others.

Science

Some may object that our religious beliefs have not been sufficiently proven via the scientific method. We respond that while it is true that steadfast, uncorrupted scientific methods can be good for eventually producing reliable knowledge of the material realm, our daily faith is not a forum where the demands of material scientific measurement can be adequately addressed. Faith involves intuition, humility, and acceptance that not everything that is true is yet known, that some things that are now thought to be true will later be found false, and that it is a certainty that not everything that is true will be known before our lifetime is at an end. While scientistic beliefs are formulated by relying on certain methods of measurement, good faith beliefs have something to do with the immaterial, they currently seem to resist observation and prediction through physical measurement, and likely cannot be formulated exclusively using the historical methods of science. So, while scientific understanding is important for gaining reliable knowledge of the material realm, good faiths are also important to formulating right living in the time we have, and we are justified when we work to formulate our beliefs in the best ways we can.

Individualism

Due to our faith being grounded in the autonomous individual soul, some may accuse that our beliefs are an endorsement of “selfish”, opportunistic, or potentially immoral behavior that ignores the reality of societal interdependence. We respond that this is not an accurate characterization of the core tenet of our faith, nor of its implications. In fact, we acknowledge the obvious fact of the physical body’s societal interdependence from the moment of conception, and further suggest the possibility that such interdependence is part of the fundamental nature of the material substance. It follows from our faith that thriving autonomous souls will organically desire to create and maintain ways for all souls to choose thriving as well, and that this could have profound implications for our bodies and any society.

10. Conclusion

We have revealed a fundamental, strongly justified, nontheistic religious belief in the existence of the self as an autonomous soul nourished by privacy. We identify one justification for this belief to be based on the failing practices of secular authorities, and another as the failing teachings of those who claim to “lead” the legacy centralized religions, both of whom increasingly rely on rationalizing taqlid and authoritarianism, and consequently must justify pathological practices of injustice, aggression and atrocity toward individuals. This state of affairs can cause many individuals who assent to those authorities to live the wrong life by ignoring their duty to their own soul and ignoring their intuitions to reject false authority and wrong teachings. The spoiled outcomes of assenting to these false authorities also breeds cynicism that can cause people to reject the concept of having and using beneficial religious beliefs, since their natural intuitions about right living cannot be successfully contorted to integrate the pathological practices that are rationalized in the teachings of the most common false authorities. To offer a solution to this problem, we reveal Autonomist faith, which is a decentralized, nontheistic, compatible religious belief that holds as sacred the autonomous soul nourished by privacy, and holds as its antithesis all doctrines or acts of aggressive coercion or compulsion. Autonomist believers assent to the authority of their own soul and their own duty to their beliefs’ true implications. Continued development of the faith is sustained by individuals' contributions, and by the contributions of those who are able to successfully compete for trust by demonstrating a superior practice of privacy, and commitment to privacy.

We have addressed some generic possible objections to the faith, but we leave further revelation of the faith to those Autonomist believers who choose to directly implement it, and to those who are inspired and choose to further define and defend how Autonomist beliefs can be faithfully practiced.

References

[1] Underwood, L. G., & Vagnini, K. M. (2022). The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale: Empirical Relationships to Resiliency-Related Outcomes, Addictions, and Interventions. Religions, 13(3), 237. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13030237

[2] Armstrong, K. (2014). Fields of blood: Religion and the history of violence. Alfred A. Knopf.

[3] Wikipedia contributors. (2025, November 26). List of wealthiest religious organizations. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 13, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_wealthiest_religious_organizations

This paper was authored entirely without the assistance of large language models, and was first published on February 13, 2026 via the Autonomist faith website at https://autonomist.faith. The author or authors of this paper are identified by a PGP keypair, with the following public key fingerprint: 5A66 FDED 1DA1 EBB6 6AB7 9AD1 C0C0 23E3 21D4 D204

The original PDF of this paper has been signed and can be verified at https://autonomist.faith.