Atheism is not simply the absence of religious belief but its own position — an insistence that evidence and reason are the proper grounds for understanding the world, and that the human is not diminished by having no supernatural guarantor. Secular identity, more broadly, locates meaning in the human without needing to look past it: in relationship, in ethics, in the particular and perishable beauty of a life that will not come again. These positions require, as much as any religious one, the work of building a framework robust enough to sustain a full human life.
Each step builds on the last.