In a recent statement, Khoren Arisian comments "I have long felt that the most needlessly corrosive debate that goes on in our own ranks is the pointless polemic between alleged secular and religious humanists." I disagree with him. There is a basic and significant difference between the two points of view, though they, like all other human outlooks on life, overlap. The distinction has been with us for thousands of years. Plato, as a contemporary, with his pie-in-the-sky "reality," would now be a religious humanist; Aristotle, a secular humanist. Kant, with his near-divine Categorical Imperatives, would be a religious humanist; Hume, the ultimate skeptic, a secular humanist. William James who accepted that which works as true, would be a religious humanist. Bertrand Russell coldly analyzed the world as it is would be a secular humanist.

True, concerned thinkers hedge their positions. John Dewy, for example, in his awe for Democracy and his aspirations for humanity, leaned toward religious humanism, but in his Quest for Certainty, underneath his typical redundancies and obtuseness, he makes it clear that certainty is an illusion. Dewey was a secularist, but was uncomfortable about it.

It is unfortunate that the composers of The Manifesto (1933) chose the term humanism for their point of view, which was basically an atheistic-agnostic stance, though surrounded with all manner of embroidery to make it less blunt to their Unitarian flocks. The term humanism gets confused with literary and Renaissance humanism, with humanitarianism, and among others, with being humane. Well over twenty years ago, Bette Chambers thought it important to have a New York City phone number for the American Humanist Association; accordingly we listed the AHA in the Manhattan directory, with my personal telephone number. During the two years in which I maintained the line, I received many calls wanting to know how to take care of cats and dogs, and one student called me for a bibliography on the Renaissance; but not one call did I receive about what we know as humanism. The title the "founding fathers" gave us for the proclamation of nontheism was unfortunate, but it has become so thoroughly implanted in our minds that I doubt it can be undone. I am afraid we will have to live with the vagueness and multiple use of the term humanism as a polite designation for a nontheist interpretation of the cosmos.

Khoren Arisian is clearly a religious humanist. He was recently elected president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists which publishes a quarterly Religious Humanist, He changed the name of the organization to Friends of Religious Humanism, but note that he retained the word "religious." The Friends of Religious Humanism is the only humanist organization that makes the differentiation between religious and secular in its title. Why retain the title if it is so pointless and corrosive? In the statement quoted above, he writes "the secularization of society doesn't necessarily entail disappearance of desire or search for that which is holy, of ultimate worth." No secular humanist would write that.

A secular humanist insists that humanism is not a religion, and does not believe or invent a belief or give allegiance to anything that cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt. A religious humanist, as Arisian puts it, will "invent as well as discover meaning," and "deliberately structure, craft and focus life so that it makes sense to us."

There is much overlap in belief between Catholics, Protestants and Jews. All are believers in a personal God and personal immortality. Yet there are also profound differences among them. Therefore, we rarely lump them together as Theists. The difference between religious and secular humanists is also significant and will become increasingly so in the future. It demands further discussion. There is an important place in humanist media for both the Religious Humanist of which Arisian is the current editor, and for Free Inquiry, published by Paul Kurtz and his associates at the Council for Secular Humanism.