Is it possible to construct universalizing notions of such principles as human rights, freedom of conscience, religious toleration and the rest from a particular tradition? My answer is an emphatic and historically-based yes.

For though the notion of human rights and its accompaniments, such as civil liberties, citizen's rights, democracy, freedom of expression, civil society, separation of state and religion, are of modern European origin and provenance – conventionally attributed and traced back to the Enlightenment – they have indisputably come to acquire by now a universal significance that has turned them into a common human good and into today's compelling and pervasive normative paradigm on all matters pertaining to rights, citizenship, human dignity, democracy, civil society, government accountability and so on.

This is what I call the secular humanist paradigm which comprehends both the set of values recognized above as well as the social and political institutions, practices and attitudes embodying and supporting those values. Let me emphasize that what is important here is not the name “secular humanism”, but the values, practices and institutions named, and you may choose any name you wish as long as you remember that a rose still smells just as sweet under any other name.

Let me emphasize as well, first, that the modest localized European origins of this modem paradigm do not detract, in my view, from its later paradigmatic universality anymore than the humble rise of Islam in two insignificant desert towns on the edge of the Roman Empire detracted from its consequent universality and sweep. Similar things may be said about the relationship of Christianity's equally modest and localized origins in a neglected and despised district of the same Roman Empire to its subsequent paradigmatic universality, hegemony and comprehensiveness.

And second, that the common good represented in this “secular humanist model” did not come about gratis, but had to be painfully, slowly and very imperfectly conquered over several centuries and at a very heavy price in terms of wars, revolutions and much sacrifice and human suffering. This is one very good reason why it deserves to be defended, elaborated and expanded along with the other human goods that we know of and have come to take for granted.