I find myself growing increasingly uneasy with the frequent use of the word spirit in humanist writings. The president of the humanists of Georgia, Tom Malone, is currently exploring and defending the term as a legitimate humanist expression defining the inner essence of an individual. Khoren Arisian, a leading humanist in the Ethical Culture Society, writes about humanists as spiritual models and the Ethical Culture movement as a spiritual community. Jean Kotkin, executive director of the Humanist Institute, writes about the lack of spirituality in humanism and the need for a spiritual principle to energize the humanist movement.

I understand what all three of my friends and fellow humanists are advocating and I agree with their premises. However, I feel there are non-theistic, descriptive terms that will accurately communicate their messages. My objection to connecting the basic word spirit and the list of it derivatives, i.e., spiritual, spirituality, spiritualism, spiritualist, spiritualize, to humanism is the connotation of supernaturalism associated with them.

As a result of more than three-thousand years of religions using the word spirit dualistically to indicate a separate entity from the material body, it seems to me to be an exercise in futility for humanists to expect the word to have a non-theistic acceptance. We have the same problem in defensively using the words religion, mystery, holy and sacred.

Proponents say we cannot permit our adversaries to limit or define our humanist vocabulary. That may be a legitimate argument, but should we define our meaning of those words every time we use them or, on the other hand, expect our listeners and readers to automatically understand the meanings we intend? Why waste time, space and energy defending the humanist meanings when we could easily find a more meaningful and appropriate word that would clearly communicate our intended message. To quote Tom Flynn, senior editor of Free Inquiry, Why go on using a weasel word that can only sow confusion...?

--Flo Wineriter