/ by Edward Mullany

I don’t have a quarrel with that particular word (‘humanely’), I should say, but cite it as an example of an approach to reality that finds it footing only when the context for it is right, by which I mean amenable to the person who is undertaking that approach. Let us call that approach ‘secular humanism’, because that is what it is; a morality or ethics that has no grounding in the supernatural but in what, in most instances, the prevailing culture sanctions, or condones — that is, in what that prevailing culture deems to be the ‘human’ response to a given set of circumstances.