1. Not everyone has a religion, but everybody has a worldview that acts exactly like a religion.

Having a worldview is part of our common humanity; we can’t get away from it. Everybody has a worldview, whether we realize it or not, have thought it through, or can articulate it. People usually just assume that the way they look at the world is the right way. So the big controversy is not between people who “think scientifically” and those who “need religion.” No matter whether people consider themselves religious or not, all people live religiously by their worldview assumptions. 

2. All worldviews begin with a set of assumptions that can only be take "by faith."

No worldview is established by the sheer force of logic or unassailable proofs. For example, some people say confidently that there is no God or that God cannot be real. But how can they know that? To know there is no God you’d have to know everything in the universe, and you’d have to be present everywhere in the universe to be able to know that God wasn’t hiding somewhere. To claim there is no God is not provable—it’s an article of faith. 

An apparently less extreme position is to say that even if there were a God, we can’t ever know for sure that God exists. But again, how could any human being, limited as he or she is by space, time, and intellect, claim to know for sure that God can’t be known? It’s a ridiculously audacious claim! 

...Everybody has a faith starting point, even if that starting point is a set of assumptions about non-belief.

3. Worldview assumptions are rarely acknowledged openly, questioned, or challenged by those who hold them.

Worldview is the intellectual and cultural furniture in the room. We use it all the time and don’t think much about it. Worldview is unseen, like the air we breathe. It’s under our noses, but we don’t notice. It is the real Matrix, if you will. Worldview assumptions pass under our radar screens, yet they control much of our life and behavior. As we think, so we do. And we act on what we truly believe not necessarily on what we say we believe. 

4. No worldview is totally open-minded; every worldview forces some narrowing of the mind. 

If it’s total open-mindedness you’re after, you’ve got a problem because no worldview is (or can be) completely open-minded. All worldviews make truth claims that exclude other worldviews. It’s what makes a worldview a worldview...

In short, it’s not just the Bible that demands allegiance to truth to the exclusion of other worldviews. All worldviews draw lines. All worldviews have “fundamentalist” exclusion factors working. 

5. Every worldview has strict and inflexible rules, or absolutes, that must never be broken. 

Absolutes—the strict, inflexible rules of each worldview—must be obeyed without fail. They are revealed in superstitions and daily rituals, in religious rulings or secular laws, in a general sense of moral propriety, in philosophical ideas, in discussions of what we can and can’t “know,” in definitions of important words, in taboos, or in mockery and ridicule. Absolutes are unmistakably present in every worldview. 

...No worldview is value-free or rule-free. All worldviews expect their rules to be followed, period.