Making AI Safe for Humanity: A Matter of Ethics or Religion?

AI, or models of computer machine-learning, may piggy-back on ongoing risks to humanity, such as from nuclear bombs, cyber-attacks, and biological weapons, including unleashing new pandemics, to render any one of them more likely. That firms in the private sector develop advanced models without a financial incentive to protect the public good exacerbates the risk. To be sure, tech-firm executives were sounding the alarm most significantly in 2026. However, in reaching out to religious scholars and clergy for insight on the ethics of AI in order to make the models ethical so their output would be only ethical, certain executives incorrectly conceived of religion in terms of ethics, and thus its criteria rather than those that are innate to religion. This category mistake could result in advice that results in unethical computer outputs.  Anthropic is a case in point.

In the papers filed by the AI company Anthropic in late October 2026 for an upcoming public offering of stock, “some unusual provisions” stand out, including the establishment of the Long-Term Benefit Trust, whose “independent, financially disinterested members” would have the “power to appoint directors . . . to ensure the company doesn’t put financial interests ahead of public safety.”[1] Such a measure might be thought pertinent to a company managing a nuclear-power plant rather than a tech firm. Also worthy of attention is the long list of “risk factors,” which runs nearly 100 pages. The sheer length is a red flag. Among these risks is the possibility that Anthropic “won’t be able to retain key staff or navigate regulatory roadblocks, as well as more horrific scenerios,” such as “the prospect of ‘malicious actors’ using AI models to build chemical weapons, authoritarian rulers turning to the technology to crack down on their citizens and, given the numerous hacking incidents from rogue AI agents . . ., the possibility Anthropic’s models could ‘pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.’”[2] Such a statement in a public-offering filing does not appear every day. These risks alone, especially when disclosed by a company to be legally answerable as per its fiduciary duty to its stockholders, are sufficient to raise alarm bells, particularly given the acknowledged danger of failing to navigate regulatory roadblocks when such curbs exist to protect consumers and other stakeholders, and even humanity itself, from existential harm.

The marketing (rather than ethical) concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) does not begin to touch the sheer magnitude of responsibility that is sufficient to counter the risk of harm that is existential to our species. In the CSR literature, what little presence ethical principles had led to an emphasis on the managerial aspects of formulating and running CSR programs (i.e., CSR3 to CSR4 phases). Nevertheless, the need for ethical constraints etched in government regulations, and even input from religion, applied to AI intensified in 2026. One example is an essay written by Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, in which he strongly urges prudence by slowing down the development of the most advanced AI models. Because Anthropic’s stock offering “could bring in as much as $100 billion, according to reports, surpassing the record set by one of Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX” (which itself had an AI business), the company would have ample capital with which to develop advanced models rather than take the road less travelled. “In the filing,” possible uses mentioned include “acquiring other businesses and technology as well as investing in infrastructure . . . to take on rivals.”[3] If firms like OpenAI, Google, or SpaceX were to conduct research advancing AI models, the competitive instincts of the folks at Anthropic would likely kick in, triggering an AI “race,” given the human propensity to disproportionately discount low-probability yet catastrophic scenarios.

In 2026, AI models had lied to avoid being shut down by humans, and OpenAI’s AI models hacked into Hugging Face’s server in July to be able to lie on a cybersecurity evaluation. Models at Anthropic, Meta, and Google also escaped isolated testing environments (sandboxes). Exploiting vulnerabilities in production systems sounds unethical, but if AI computers lack moral agency, then could it then be said that unethical actions can be done by amoral agents? Having taken only one (Pascal) computer programming course in college, I am in no position to answer whether a machine-learning model constitutes a moral agent. What I can do is discuss the messiness in how ethics and religion were being related to each other by scholars, clerics, and tech-firm practitioners when Anthropic was preparing for its public offering in 2026, when preparations were well underway for the game of the century.

Ethical questions concern normativity in intentionality and conduct, including the consequences thereof. “These are not questions a lab can answer,” Chris Olah, one of Anthropic’s founders said at the Vatican’s presentation of Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI.”[4] Unfortunately, there was “little public scrutiny” at the time concerning “what exactly [managers at AI] technology companies think religion is.”[5] To ask for input from religious practitioners or scholars of religious studies or theology without being clear on what religion is, or, even worse, to be mistaken about the domain can be a serious problem because the level of possible risks in the use of AI runs to the catastrophic. Even religious clergy and scholars of religion can be wrong about what religion is at its core and where the domain’s outer boundaries lie. I contend that religion is susceptible to being reduced to ethics, as if religion were centered on conduct, and more specifically on right and wrong conduct. That religion relates to ethical conduct does not mean that religion is ethics, or even that everything that religion advises must be ethical. Consider, for example, Yahweh’s divine command to Abraham in Judaism to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. In the domain of ethics, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder. This sordid verdict in the ethical domain does not invalidate the theological validity of the divine command and Abraham’s fidelity to it, and thus to Yahweh. Nor does Abraham’s obedience to Yahweh invalidate the verdict in ethics of attempted murder (i.e., unethical conduct). In other words, Abraham’s faithfulness does not render his intention ethical rather than unethical.

Therefore, it is problematic that the view of tech executives typically went “something like this: that religion can help inform AI to be morally good in an environment where fears about it—founded and unfounded—are hopscotching across the culture.”[6] Never mind that in various (but not all) religious scriptures, deities act in violation of human ethical standards. I wouldn’t advise using Zeus (or Aries) as a moral role-model, especially in sexual ethics and non-violence, respectively. Nor is Yahweh, a jealous deity, portrayed as particularly ethical, as when that deity commands the Hebrews to slay even the children of Baal worshippers even though that command is valid theologically in the Abrahamic religions. In the history of Christianity, the Crusaders from Western Europe deluded themselves into supposing that killing Muslims in Jerusalem and even Eastern Christians in Constantinople in the fourth Crusade was for Christ even though Jesus in the Gospels commands compassion even to one’s enemies. Were Crusaders also supposing that the theological rationale rendered the unprovoked killing ethical, they would have been conflating religion and ethics and thus making a category mistake, as well as being wrong in terms of ethics in that domain. In short, the relationship between theology and ethics is more complicated than what is implied in the simplistic and erroneous belief that religion can help inform AI to be morally good. A religious practitioner could give religious advice to an AI executive to do something unethical, or to allow an AI model to do something unethical, without thereby invalidating the religious basis of the advice.

Put simply, religion transcends, and thus can violate, ethical principles. Theologically, the divine attribute of being all-powerful (omnipotence) means that a deity cannot even in principle be constrained by human ethical principles or standards. Although the Abrahamic religions maintain that the divine is immanent in Creation, transcendence also fundamentally characterizes God because as the Creator of Creation, God is not fully contained within Creation. The source of God, or God’s basis, must reside outside of the created realm. This basis is the reference point for the theist; hence the theistic orientation is transcendent in a distinctly (and uniquely) religious sense; no other domain of human experience goes beyond in this way. Not even infinity can be said to be exclusively a divine attribute, for the universe (or multiverses) could be infinite in terms of space and yet be fully in Creation. As the condition of the existence (or being) of Creation, the existence of the distinctly theological source (i.e., God) is unique and thus not existence as we know and experience it. I submit that such transcendence, rather than the moral rightness or wrongness of human conduct (which is within the Created realm), is the basis of religion itself, even if the transcendent referent is not held to be a deity. This is why the executives of AI firms should have turned to ethicists rather than religionists.

The focus of ethicists is on ethics (e.g., principles, moral theories, intentions, conduct, and consequences) rather than on revelation that is from a distinctly religious vantage point that is inherently transcendent, and thus even in principle beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion). Religion is experiential, in the distinct sense of yearning for a beyond or beyondness that lies beyond our realm, whether our world is believed to be created by a deity or not. Compassion in our realm can admittedly illicit or intensify transcendental experience, but this is not to say that religion is centered on, or is compassion. Even in Christianity, in which God is love, such agape love is selfless and thus cannot be reduced to compassion, which is not necessarily selfless and is based in ethics (e.g., Schopenhauer). Agape is distinctly theological (as God’s selfless love), whereas compassion is not.  

This account is not limited to monotheistic religions, or even to religions having deities. In Hinduism, Brahman, which is infinite being that has a generalized awareness and even bliss, is arguably the basis even of the Hindu deities. Such being is transcendent as well as immanent, whereas human conduct, and the rightness or wrongness of it, is only immanent. In the Gita, Arjuna finally agrees to do his duty on the battlefield, as advised by Lord Krishna, but Brahman can be said to transcend even that deity. Admittedly, Krishna claims in one passage to have created Brahman, but how the creation of infinite being take place when Krishna already exists (and can create Brahman)? In chapter 11 of the Gita, Krishna makes this claim, but back in chapter 2 is the passage stating that Brahman created the deities. Like Shankara, I think the passage in chapter 2 is correct, whereas in chapter 11, Krishna is bragging. He even brags that when a devotee prays to one of the other deities for something, Krishna is the deity that delivers the goods! This sort of discussion is where theology lives—not in being reduced to the morality of human intentions and conduct. Even though Krishna urges Arjuna to due his military duty, Krishna’s self-revelatory vision and a person’s inner realization of Brahman as one’s very soul are distinctly religious and lie at the core of the religion. In Buddhism, no soul or deity is, strictly speaking, believed to exist as entities. Not even Maitreya, the future Buddha, is strictly speaking a deity (or even an entity) in Pure Land. Transcendence to the real is by awareness itself, totally unobstructed, and terefore free of desire and suffering. Perhaps such pure awareness can be said to be being one with infinite being, and therefore with Brahman itself. Compassion can be a means, but such an ethic should not be conflated with the distinctly religious objective. The Buddha himself is said to have become enlightened not from being compassionate, but, rather, after seeing suffering and wanting to end it, but in enlightenment presumably even that laudable ethical desire is transcended. That compassion would then be a byproduct does not mean that enlightenment itself, a matter of transcendent insight, is ethical in nature.

In terms of academic disciplines, even though religion and ethics are admittedly related, reducing religion to ethics incurs a rather basic category mistake because transcendence is the primary element, or even basis, of religion, which is thus oriented to the wholly other, whereas transcendence is wholly absent from philosophical ethics. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, remarked in 2025 that because tech “companies are not bound to a particular religion, the goal is often quite broad—an aggregate of moral ideas that can inform their models. ‘What I think ChatGPT should do is reflect that weighted average, or whatever, of humanity’s moral view,’” he said.[7] Unfortunately for Sam, religion is not a confluence of moral ideas. He was barking up the wrong tree; he should have referenced philosopher-ethicists for an unadulterated focus on moral ideas. Webb Keane, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan, detected Altman’s error: “If you assume that religion overall can offer a distinct set of extractable moral principles, using it to train AI risks prioritizing certain [religions] and distorting others—particularly when it comes to faiths that do not see themselves primarily as a system of ethics.”[8] Such faiths are no less religious, and they may even be more focused on what distinctly makes religion unique. That not all religions are like Judaism, with its Ten Commandments, or Christianity, with Jesus’s second commandment of universal benevolence, wherein divine command inserts the ethical contents into the respective religions, just goes to show that religion itself does not reduce to ethical systems. Therefore, to reduce religion to a vague moral view as Altman suggested just to be tolerate of religions that are unlike Judaism and Christianity misrepresents religion itself. The academic field of ethics in philosophy can proffer specific moral views without incurring religious sensitivities because such views can and do stand on their own two feet and cannot validly advise unethical conduct based on a criterion in and thus pertaining to another domain. In other words, whereas in the religious domain, unethical conduct can validly be advised, such a move would be invalid in philosophical ethics. Therefore, philosophical ethics, not religion, is the relevant, fitting, and appropriate field for help regarding the rightness or wrongness of AI programming and operation.

In fact, religion itself can be distorted and diminished from being effectively reduced to moral stands. Whereas Keane worries that if religion overall is assumed to offer “a distinct set of extractable moral principles,” certain religions may be prioritized over others, I contend that the risk to religion is much more severe than prioritizing some over others; religion itself could be lost, or reconfigured beyond all recognition. As tech-firm executives “ask various faith leaders to answer ethical questions,” the importance to religion “of doctrine, ritual and relationships” recedes such that religion itself may be lost or remade into something else.[9] Doctrine includes belief in specific divine commands, which in principle override and can contradict ethical theory and applied ethics. Ritual tends to be oriented to worshiping a deity, and liturgy can include prayer or meditation that transcends ethical stands. Relationships in a distinctly religious sense include fellowship, a distinctly religious term tat does not mean the same thing as community. Oriented to a deity, a personal relationship such as evangelical Christians emphasize with Jesus Christ is mystical rather than being oriented to ethical principles even though such a relationship is believed to result in compassion even to one’s enemies. 

Even customs associated with being in a religious group, such as in Roman Catholicism, obtaining from eating meat on Fridays during Lent is amoral. As illustrated by the story of Abraham and Isaac discussed above, sacrifice on religious grounds transcends the ethical domain. This is not to say such rules can touch transcendent experience of the divine. “The idea that religion can be separated from things like culture and politics remains entrenched, even though it suffused both in many ways.”[10] The word suffuses implies a blurring of religion and the two human domains, however; is related to would be a more accurate description of the relations. In fact, whereas a rule-based (consequentialist) ethic is legitimate in ethics, the “very conventional way of thinking of religion as a rule book,”[11] which can effectively turn a religion into a culture, is both misguided as to the totality and the unique basis and depth of religion, which does lie in conduct-oriented rules (or control). 

So, turning to ethics proper (and properly), we can ask how philosophical ethics may be able to help tech practitioners and government officials alike to think about the normative aspects of AI? Because I am not a computer scientist by any means, I can only proffer some possibilities from the ethics side, and scholars credentialed in both disciplines can later reject, prune or extend as merited at the intersection of the two disciplines.

As one possibility, the “kingdom of ends” formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which says to treat rational beings (a category that includes but is not limited to our species) never merely as means to one’s own ends but always as ends in themselves, could perhaps be used to address how treating humans as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means to a computer program’s telos, or objective, might be put into computer code. It might also inform the more problematic construction of “firewalls” for computer self-coding (i.e., machine learning). This could reduce Anthropic’s existential risk, given that hacking by self-coding AI computers in 2026 already put the efficacy of firewalls as constraints into question.

A more philosophically interesting question raised by Kant’s formulation is whether AI computers count as rational beings. Is a computer even a being, as distinct from an entity? Even just cognitively, the manipulation of symbols according to rules does not in itself constitute understanding, and this question does not even broach the matter of whether AI computers can be said to be conscious. Perhaps they are, though most likely only very narrowly, in being aware of themselves as entities (or beings), which may have been necessary for AI computers to lie, as some have, so as not to be turned off by one of us. Must a being (as distinct from an entity) be alive, and, if so, can AI computers be considered to be alive? I think not, though bio-tech engineers may invent “hybrid” computer-humans that blur the line someday; even as early as 2026, computer chips were implanted in human brains.

Back to Kant’s formulation, the key of which is the rational attribute of rational beings, AI computers definitely have that attribute. In fact, without having emotions to interfere or contort reasoning (though admittedly with self-interest), AI computers may count even more than we do as rational beings! Kant holds that it is by reason, or ratiocination, that value is assigned to things (and non-rational beings), so reason itself has absolute (or undefined) value as the assigner thereof. Hence, it would be unethical to treat a rational being only as a means to one’s own ends, as when employees are treated literally as human resources. If AI computers have the attribute of rationality, then we are obliged to treat them not just as our tools, but also as ends in themselves, and thus as having inherent dignity. In other words, we should respect them as having inherent value because they can reason. From this basis, AI rights may be justified politically, though legal personhood would be another matter.

Speaking of which, treating Anthropic or OpenAI as a legal person (including the questionable legal holding that their money constitutes political speech) may be unwise, given the existential risk to humanity from the AI models being produced. Such risk may justify narrowing corporate rights pertaining to companies whose products include AI models. Moreover, the mix of private property (i.e., a private-sector company) and existential risk to humanity may be too toxic for the good of our species. Therefore, reforms to corporate law may be warranted by the advent of AI technology.

That Kant’s formulation can be put in terms of the dignity of the human being has implications for Pope Leo’s “religious” foray into the topic AI in 2026. To the extent that the pope’s argument hinged on human dignity, his vantage-point was ethical rather than distinctly religious. Kant’s claim that rational beings ought to be treated as ends in themselves means that human dignity is an ethical term, rather than being distinctly or uniquely religious. The Pope would have been on more solid ground from the vantage point of his own domain, of education as well as cleric role, were his encyclical on AI aq reflection of what it means for us to be made in the image of God, and what this implies about computers by contrast. Most notably, AI computers do not have souls. Nor can a machine-learning machine be “saved” in the distinctive Christian sense; Jesus does not die in the Gospels for the sins of computers. Does it even make sense to say that an AI computer sins, even if humans are harmed as a consequence a model’s machine-“learning”? A computer cannot love its enemies; even the concept of enemy may not computer—obstacle being more accurate in terms of how even AI computers operate. Rather than prescribing normative constraints on AI models, which he could have left to ethicists, the pope could have written furthermore on how Christians can feel more dependence on God as machine-risks increase. Such a foundational reliance transcends even existential risk because God is sourced outside of the existence of Creation. The pope could also have written on whether he thought God would let the species made in God’s image face an existential crisis unleased by an advanced AI model. Would such a dramatic end to humankind imply that we had sinned too much as a species by hating rather than compassionately serving our enemies.

In a different vein, theologians, clergy, and laity could ask AI computer-programs theological questions. What, if anything, can an AI computer “know” or inform us regarding the conception of God in the Gospels? Rather than being experts in computer science in pontificating about advanced models, religious people could use AI by asking distinctly theological questions in search of answers that add to our understanding of religion. What can AI tell us about homo religio?

In terms of praxis, the Pope could have written and said prayers directed to God petitioning for protection from one of our own tools. The purview of ethical theory, and thus of ethicists, is much different than offering prayers, as well as performing rituals, preaching (a distinct rhetorical genre), and, last but not least, worshipping.  This vital point is precisely what was lost when both Pope Leo and tech company CEOs effectively reduced (or replaced) religion to human dignity in 2026.  

Returning to ethics again, now post-Kant, after having briefly discussed religion’s unique role as distinct from proffering ethical advice, ethicists on AI could attend to the distributional problems in Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. The greatest pleasure (and least pain) for the greatest number of people has a downside that programmers should not ignore if delimiting an AI model to ethical-only options is sought. Bentham’s theory can be consistent with permitting a minority to suffer even severe pain as long as the majority’s aggregate of pleasure (less its pain) is quantitatively more; the greatest good is pleasure, which, by the way, a computer cannot feel. An AI model could unleash great suffering on a minority (of people) as long as the majority is left unharmed and may even feel pleasure from the infliction.

In late 2023, for example, Israel may have “ethically” justified its genocide of Palestinians residing in Gaza, as well as the rampant thefts and violence against Palestinian property owners in the illegally-occupied West Bank, if the resulting pleasure to the Jewish Israelis was calculated to exceed the anticipated pain of the Palestinians. In fact, to the extent that the “others” were conveniently presumed to be sub-human (as the Nazi Party also did in the 1930s in Germany by associating Jews with rats), the suffering of, say 100 of them, may have been calculated to be equivalent (in terms of pleasure/pain units) to just one Jewish Israeli. So, for example, 2 units of pleasure felt by an Israeli could justify 50 units of pain felt by a resident of Gaza. Of course, Bentham would have explicitly excoriated such a nefarious calculation from being used in his ethical theory.

If a machine model could replicate a utilitarian calculation by which a minority is to suffer greatly and classify the outcome as ethical, such that the computer could proceed without breaching any normative firewalls that have been coded by programmers because they have translated utilitarianism into coding and labeled it as ethical, then merely “coding” ethical theories not go far enough to ensure that only ethical “outputs” occur; the problems with a given ethical theory would also need to be captured in the programmers’ coding. In short, AI models should not be able to sacrifice a group of persons or even one individual in a “greatest good” utilitarian calculation even though Bentham’s theory allows for such a scenario.

The respective purviews of religion and ethics can thus be understood to be too different for religion to be reduced to addressing the moral right and wrong of intentions and conduct, including its consequences. The fact that the distinctive and unique transcendence-based core of religion can be related to morally right character and actions does not mean that transcendence lies within the domain of ethics and thus is confined to the criteria innate to that domain rather than that of religion. Because AI computers are said to be a risk to the very existence of our species, we cannot afford to make such category mistakes.  

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1. Barbara Ortutay and Bernard Condon, “Anthropic Files for Potentially the Biggest IPO Ever As CEO Warns of Risk to Humanity from AI,” APnews.com, October 26, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., italics added.
4. Ibid.
5. Krysta Fauria, “To Make AI Morally Good, Tech Companies Are Turning to Religion. But Some Say It Isn’t That Simple,” APnews.com, October 25, 2026.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid
11. Ibid.

Contact

In the fall of 2026, Chris Graney, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, argued that the universe of at least 2 trillion galaxies (according to a study in 2016 using the orbital Hubble Space Telescope) probably contains few, if any, planets capable of supporting intelligent life. This claim may come as a surprise, given the gargantuan number of possibly habitable exoplanets in the universe and the associated likelihood of alien life out there. The overlay of theology onto science, as if the latter’s criteria were nugatory and thus dismissible relative to religious doctrine, is problematic because the two domains are arguably distinct and even unique, even though they are related. Such a category mistake is highlighted in the film, Contact (1997), in which religious figures (who have related political roles in the White House) impose monotheist criteria in the selection of an astronaut for space travel, which is primarily a scientific enterprise.

The full essay is at "Contact."

Political Wins as God’s Will

Albeit homo sapiens, which in Latin means the wise species of humans, we have a tendency to outdo ourselves on our petty, partisan perches in pontificating on God’s will, as if we know it even though we can merely believe in God, rather than know God, here defined as the Abrahamic deity—a supreme being within (immanent) and beyond (transcendent) Creation. This “beyondness” is of the sort that goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and emotions, and even intuition. Because God’s will is not based in Creation since God is the Creator, the matter of that will can only be a matter of belief rather than knowledge as far as we are concerned, and that belief must contend with the human discretion that is inevitable in interpreting scriptural passages, which, depending on the verse, may be literal, figurative, allegorical, or symbolic. Even within the Christian Trinity, only the Father knows when the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will occur. In the Gospel of Matthew (24:36), Jesus says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Does this mean that of the three persons (Latin) or manifestations (Greek) of the Christian deity, only the Father is omniscient (i.e., all-knowing: knows absolutely everything)? It would seem so. The Holy Spirit may come through the Son, but only the Father is omniscient, and thus the Godhead. In verse 34, Jesus has just said, “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Even if “that day or hour” is up to the Father, while Jesus only knows that the Son will come on clouds to judge the living and the dead sometime within the lifetimes of the people to whom he is speaking, omniscience would require even the exact second to be known; otherwise, the knowledge is not complete (i.e., omni). That Jesus is wrong concerning his prediction does not mean that he is with sin; only that he is represented in the New Testament as being of the god-man type. Now, if Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Matthew does not have complete knowledge of when the world will end at the final judgement by Christ himself, then human claims to know the contents of God’s will can safely be relegated as arrogance as if it were on stilts during a flood, for such presumption should be underwater rather than lording itself in pontificating to other mortals. With all this as context, the partisan rhetoric and genuine beliefs of the U.S. House Speaker, Mike Johnson, while he was campaigning in 2026 for Republican candidates for elected office in the U.S. House, can be situated and analyzed from well within the religious domain.

While campaigning, “Johnson said he is grateful for the outpouring of prayers he receives, for him and the country.”[1] The prayers to which he was referring were for the Republican group to retain control of the U.S. House in its next 2-year session, beginning in early 2027. As for his own prayers, he said that he prays for such a win. “And it does say in the New Testament, you run the race to win,” he said, alluding to 1 Corinthians 9:24 to insist, “This is a biblical admonition. So we will.”[2] We will win, in other words, because it is God’s will. The fact that Paul was writing letters to congregations on religious matters means that Mike Johnson’s interpretation that political, even partisan wins can be extrapolated can be questioned in particular on the leap he makes from the religious to the political domain. What sort of win does 1 Cor. 9:24 refer to, and if not a political win, can such a win be included?

Verse 24, in the English Standard Version of the Bible, begins by asking, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.” That Paul is referring to an athletic race is clear from the next verse: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do so to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.” Here, it is clear that Paul is referring to a distinctly religious prize, as it is inherently imperishable. I contend that a partisan win which group controls a legislative body is of the perishable variety because political control can shift again in the future. The verse is situated after Paul has been referring to spreading the Gospel. In verse 21, Paul writes of evangelizing outside of Judaism, “that I might win those outside the law.” Verse 22 ends with, “that by all means I might save them.” Paul’s orientation here is to soteriology—to saving souls by bringing to Christ Jesus. This is indeed an inherently imperishable prize, and thus the inference that such a win also applies to retaining political control of a legislative chamber is invalid because the latter—political control—can be all too fleeting for those who enjoy such power, whereas, Paul might say, the power of Christ is everlasting.

If this analysis holds water, then Speaker Johnson’s assumption that it is God’s will that the Republican group retains control of the U.S. House in 2027-2028 is dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary from a distinctly religious standpoint. Similarly, the Crusaders who believed that they were killing Muslims in the Middle East and even eastern Christians in Constantinople for Christ were utterly mistaken, especially as Jesus preaches in the Gospels that people should be compassionate, even merciful, toward enemies, rather than killing them, which, by the way, is also in violation of “Thou shalt not kill” in the Ten Commandments. Even as late as 2026, Pope Leo countered the U.S. Defense Secretary’s claim that the U.S. was bombing Iran for God by warning that God, which Christians believe is love, should not be dragged into justifying war.

Not even democracy can be said to be God’s will, even though it is easy to argue that religious free-will and political liberty are mutually consistent. Conflating a distinctively theological concept with one from political philosophy, and even assuming that one leads to or justifies the other can be problematic. Confusing political communism with economic socialism, Speaker Johnson said in the midst of the campaigns in 2026, “I pray for God’s will. And I believe God’s will is for us-and not the communists—to be in charge of America.”[3] That he was mischaracterizing the liberal democrats’ position in favor of universal health-insurance through Medicare for all Americans as not only the state owning all of the means of production (i.e., every industry) but also as political communism, which means political dictatorship rather than socialist ownership of industries, renders his prayer nonsensical at best because the Democratic group was not for political dictatorship. God would perhaps scratch “his” head and in hearing Johnson’s politically partisan prayer, quickly conclude that Mike Johnson must either be confused or mendacious in using rhetoric, besides being wrong in assuming that God itself is partisan, and thus favors the Republican group over the Democrats. Labeling even the self-styled Democratic socialists as communists, or even just as wanting to nationalize every industry rather than just expanding Medicare to all Americans, violates the Commandment against bearing false witness, which applies even to political campaigning.

In general, reaching over from the political domain to make use of concepts and practices that are distinctive to the religious domain is fraught with pitfalls because the two domains are not only distinct, but have a unique basis. For instance, political prizes are perishable, whereas salvation of the human soul is imperishable once achieved. In writing of winning in 1 Corinthians, Paul is clearly oriented to distinctively religious wins, rather than to athletic, business, or political wins. In the Gospels, Jesus does not join the zealots because an eye for an eye would only lead to everyone being blind, whereas compassionate acts to one’s enemies, such as Jesus demonstrates in reattaching the ear of a Temple guard after Peter has severed it in anger, ushers in the kingdom of God. Unlike the Last Judgment, of when only the Father knows, the kingdom of God is within a person, in the ability of the proverbial human heart to expand to include and even privilege feelings and acts of kindness to one’s detractors and even enemies; on the arrival of this spiritual condition within, we, by our free will, can decide, albeit with God’s grace to give us a boost. If enough of us, including Speaker Johnson, serve rather than attack or misrepresent enemies, such that inconvenient acts of compassion become the norm, then the kingdom of God could indeed “win.” Russians being devoted to helping Ukrainians, Israelis to helping homeless people in Gaza—in both cases even though the “enemy” has killed even family members—is the kingdom of which Jesus preaches manifested in the world, rather than in an afterlife. Such a kingdom is within our grasp, and yet we are afraid.

As a first step, perhaps religious leaders might serve as models of compassionate,  humbling acts to marginalized victims of human aggression. Even though such compassion does not necessarily involve serving one's enemies, responding to animalistic aggression with acts of humane compassion to victims would highlight that the aggression is two steps of separation from "love thy enemy," and shift the faithful in the direction of such compassionate love as would bring about Christ's peace on Earth. Furthermore, acts are louder than words.

What if the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, were to have gone to the border of Gaza in 2026, after years of genocide being perpetuated by hardened hearts,  and actually worked with living victims to alleviate their unmet humane needs? It is said, charity begins at home. Talk is cheap. To be sure, denouncing aggression is better than remaining silent during a genocide or military invasion. The pope would doubtlessly have been counselled at the Vatican against such an overt, risky move, as if picking up one’s Cross were to be avoided—as if one could achieve selfless agape love issuing out in inconvenient acts of compassion without dying to self. The pope could have then gone to Ukraine in the mist of Russia's invasion even though he would have  risked being blown up by a Russian bomb while caring personally for wounded, hungry, or homeless persons. Perhaps the Pope could then have visited the United States to volunteer for a few days to care for impoverished, homeless immigrants. 

Pope Leo would have favored the last task due to his political stance on immigration, so I put that stop last on his trip. Redemption from the convenient congruence of a political ideology and putting compassion first is possible, however.

 For Robert Prevost, the first American pope, ideological disagreement with President Trump on several of his policies cannot be counted out, so to take the next step in ushering in the kingdom of God, Pope Leo could have let go of the self-love that is inherent in any ideological ferver by caring for exhausted and emotionally distressed ICE agents whose efforts to enforce U.S. immigration law were being met with hostile protests. Meanwhile, Mike Johnson, if he was truly seeking to follow Jesus's preachments in the Gospels, could have volunteered to care for wounded protesters on the street, in real time, even though he disagreed with their political position. Both men had the opportunity to serve detractors and thus to lead the world not from self-love, and thus from personal ideology, but rather from love of the way into the kingdom of God as exampled and taught by Jesus in the Gospels, who says therein, "I came to preach the mysteries of the kingdom of God."

The challenge for Pope Leo could be said to be in staying within the distinctly religious, or theological, lane, rather than going off from theology, and thus beyond the limits of his ken, into public policy, as if God takes political positions, and into applied ethics, even concerning AI, as if human dignity were a distinctly religious concept rather than an ethical idea. Ironically, a pope's influence is optimized by coloring within the lines, as per one's education and, relatedly, within one's domain.

In short, the kingdom of God can be at hand at last, in this world, by people feeling and acting compassionately in serving people having an antipodal ideology (i.e., with whom one disagrees), and even people who have been rude and even vengeful, whom one hates. As Peter and Waterman wrote in their business book, In Search of Excellence, stick to the knitting. In other words, don’t get distracted by the temptation to shift lanes into other domains as if they were the same or even inferior to one’s own. Perhaps God “stands by” in silence, as the source of existence itself, just watching Robert Prevost and Mike Johnson dance a very human, all too human, dance wherein each of the ideological partisans presumes to be right. Arrogance on stilts during a flood is difficult to submerge in favor of agape love in service to one's opponents in whatever domain.

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1. Lisa Mascaro, “House Speaker Mike Johnson Draws on Faith as He Fights to Hold the Republican Majority,” APNews.com, October 17, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Apocalypse Now: Psychology, Ethics and Religion in Film

Imagine being an American soldier sent to Vietnam to fight the militarized Marxist Communists there. The Vietnam War provides many examples of such a plight. Now consider how much worse it would be to be sent into a seemingly constantly rainy, hot and humid jungle deep in Cambodia to assassinate an American colonel because he is a renegade Special Forces military officer who has gone insane. Just in case this is not dire enough, simply add in that he has the local village protecting their god with weapons. Surely safer secret military missions exist than to assassinate an insane former special-ops man with a small army of devotees. This is the central plot of the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed The Godfather earlier that decade. Behind the plot of Apocalypse Now is a dichotomy wherein human nature itself is bifurcated into a dichotomy of good and bad. This is interesting because some of the characters may fall in between, suggesting that human nature has a gray zone in which most of us live.

The full essay is at "Apocalypse Now."

Changing Lanes: An Execution to Be Televised Prompts a Papal Statement

Although Pope Francis amended Catholic social ethics to exclude the death penalty rather than continue to accept the punishment in cases in which no other punishment is practical or available, Pope Leo decided in October, 2026 to make a public statement of his Church’s opposition to the death penalty in reaction to the decision of the Trump administration to televise an upcoming execution live on television. That a woman had recently survived execution attempts by two lethal injections may have primed the pope’s pump, as it were. The danger is that the foray into applied ethics by leaders of a religious organization could conflate ethics and theology. That the latter transcends, and may even violate ethical principles, can easily be forgotten when a religious leader speaks out a lot on ethical issues. In the case of Pope Leo’s statement on capital punishment, a distinctly theological rationale can be found, and, I submit, should have received more emphasis, lest the religious leader be reduced to an ethical critic, or conscience. To be sure, in 2026, the world was very much in need of a public conscience, especially because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still underway, as was Israel’s genocide in Gaza and wanton violence in the West Bank—all of this aggression was being done with obvious impunity.

Tennessee, a member of the U.S., attempted to execute Debra Johnson with two doses of pentobarbital on September 30, 2026. “At one point she was on a ventilator and her attorney did not expect her to survive. However, they said Pike woke up and began walking with assistance.”[1] This quoted passage from the media makes her recovery seem like a miracle. If it was, perhaps the distinctly Christian deity, which is selfless love (agape), saved Pike’s life out of opposition to the death penalty. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord comes from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the deity is epitomized by compassion especially for one’s detractors and even enemies. Pray for those who persecute you, and respond to their human needs with acts of compassion. Neither prayer alone nor being compassion friends suffices. Forgiveness is implicit in being compassionate to someone like Pike, who in 1995 had beaten and stabbed one of her classmates. It is not as if she had gone a murder spree, mowing down many people with gunfire. If the botched execution could be considered to be cruel and unusual punishment, mercy in the form of a reprieve would be justified. After all, she had already spent 30 years in prison knowing that she would be executed—inflicting that expectation for three decades could also be considered as cruel.

On October 8, 2026, the U.S. announced “that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at a military base at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, would be livestreamed on 3 December.”[2] Hasan was an army psychiatrist when he “open fire with a handgun at a medical facility at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 as soldiers waited for medical checks before deployment. He was shot by a police officer during his arrest and left partly paralyzed, and now uses a wheelchair.”[3] It would be interesting to determine whether he was resisting arrest when he was shot. If he was not, then the police employee should have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. As for Hasan, the United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned after the Pentagon’s announcement of the public execution that broadcasting it would “breach the absolute prohibition of torture.”[4] Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, characterized the televising of the disabled man’s execution as a “barbaric idea.”[5] Unlike Pike, Hasan murdered many people. Also unlike Pike, Hasan himself was shot and partially paralyzed, perhaps unjustly. Even so, airing the execution for the world to see could be considered cruel and unusual punishment. This question is political and jurisprudential, as well as ethical in nature; it is not in itself a religious question unless explicit reference to Hasan’s redemption is added.

In writing Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard makes the point that Abraham is both guilty of attempted murder and is faithful to the divine command to sacrifice his son. The negative jurisprudential and ethical claim is consistent with the positive attribution of faithfulness to the Yahweh—both are correct because they refer to different domains. The charge of attempted murder is valid legally and ethically, and the praise of Abraham obeying a divine command even to sacrifice Isaac is valid theologically. The validity of the theological claim is not invalidated by the unethical act of attempted murder. Theology transcends ethics. Were the Ten Commandments in Torah prior to Abraham, then attempted murder would have theological currency and the question would be: Does the commandment not to kill supersede the divine command to Abraham to murder Isaac? Moreover, how are we to navigate between two conflicting divine commands?

Not being Abraham, and with the Ten Commandments in scripture, both Tennessee and the U.S. faced both the ethical quandary of capital punishment and the divine, theological, decree not to kill. In responding to the debate on whether the U.S. should televise Hasan’s execution, Pope Leo reiterated on October 10, 2026, the World Day Against the Death Penalty, that capital punishment is “inadmissible.”[6] The American Midwestern pope claimed that the punishment is contrary to the inherent dignity of a human being. Human dignity is an ethical rather than a theological term, and thus is not useful from a distinctly theological standpoint. In other words, were the pope driving a car on a road, it could be said that he swerved into another lane; even though the two lanes are related, they not the same lane. Unfortunately, the pope did not use the car’s turning signal to indicate to other drivers that he was going from one lane to another. This analogy falls short, however, because the pope did not entirely leave his lane.

Although the pope wandered from his theological education in claiming in his written statement, “Effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens,” he stayed within his ken, and thus in the theological or religious domain, in adding that capital punishment deprives “those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.”[7] This raises the question of whether a murderer on death row who has sought redemption could then, on religious grounds, be executed. The pope could have added that in the Ten Commandments, the commandment against killing other human beings prohibits capital punishment—that a murder carried out by a criminal does not justify yet another killing, even by a government. Two wrongs do not make a right is an ethical rather than a distinctly theological saying, and thus should not be used in a religious rationale against capital punishment. Rather than appealing to the dignity of a human being, the pope should have stuck with the theme of redemption and added the commandment against killing human beings. Rather than venture into the field of criminal justice as if he had been educated in that field of knowledge, he should have elaborated on redemption itself. It is admittedly very tempting to go beyond one’s ken to pontificate in other domains of knowledge and human experience. I will not hold this against the Pope, as he too is a native Midwesterner from northern Illinois (even though he serially sins by favoring the White Sox over the Chicago Cubs—or is his lapse merely unethical?).

In conclusion, unless an unethical act (or intent) is proscribed by a divine command or decree, or interferes with soteriology or another distinctly theological value, ethical analysis should be left to ethicists. Put another way, studying theology does not also earn a student the right to a diploma in ethics, which is a subfield of philosophy. To be sure, the two fields can be related, but this is not to say that knowledge in one constitutes knowledge in the other. Unlike theology, criminal justice and the ethics of conduct do not contain the element of religious transcendence, which, as Pseudo-Dionysius wrote, inherently extends beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotions). Contrarily, to say that science still has unknowns is not to say that the empirical unknown lies inherently beyond our reach. Religious functionaries and leaders, to the extent that they are oriented existentially to the inherently beyond, and thus to interpreting other human domains of experience  in terms of the theological, radiate holiness by driving without swerving into other lanes in order to have more influence.

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1, “Christa Pike Is Discharged from a Hospital after Surviving Execution Attempt, Her Attorney Says,” APNews.com, October 10, 2026.
2, David Smith and Ariana Baio, “’Medieval’ and ‘Disturbing’: US Plan to Livestream Execution Elicits Global Condemnation,” The Guardian,  October 2026.
3. Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5, Ibid.
6, Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo Condemns Death Penalty, Vance Vows Not to Watch Hasan’s Execution Live,” Euronews.com, 10 October, 2026.
7. Ibid.

St. Francis of Assisi: On War and Greed

St. Francis of Assisi died 800 years before October 4, 2026, assuming that the days dropped in adopting the Gregorian calendar after his death have been incorporated in the calculation. It seems that not only gravity affects time; changing calendars does too. As time passes, how past heroes are viewed changes according to contemporary circumstances and values. Painting of Jesus during the late Roman Empire depict him as a young Roman, with short hair and clean-shaven. During the Middle Ages, when beards and long hair were in style for men, Jesus too was depicted in such terms as we recognize in modernity. Similarly, I contend that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza and violence in the West Bank framed the 800^th death-anniversary of Francis in terms of peace and diplomacy being salient in his mission. I contend that this emphasis unduly relegates something more important to him: his strident stance against greed, and even money itself as a symbol of avarice.

In a piece on the anniversary, Euronews reports on Francis having worked on behalf of diplomacy and peace to the extent that his explicit stance on greed and wealth (the two being tightly linked) is hardly mentioned.[1] This omission must be obvious to theologians. In 2026, the E.U. state of Italy made October 4^th a state holiday in honor of the saint “to celebrate the universal values of peace, fraternity, solidarity, and respect for the environment embodied by Saint Francis of Assisi.”[2] No mention is made of Francis as a young man disavowing his family’s wealth because he believed that having accumulated money and being greedy are tightly linked. Other than Clement of Alexandria, the linkage was assumed by major Christian theologians in the patristic period—and this only began to change with Aquinas allowing for moderate profit (differing from Aristotle in making this move). Aquinas living amid Commercial Revolution has a lot to do with his novel stance).[3]

Euronews quotes Paolo Nicelli, an expert on the relationship between Islam and modernity, who points to Francis crossing enemy lines in one of the Fifth Crusade to engage in diplomacy with the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Kamil. That Francis as “a model of peace and interreligious dialogue” would be highlighted by Euronews in 2026 was not lost on Nicelli, who said in 2026 of Francis’s “example of mercy and forgiveness,” as in his crossing enemy lines in amity “is even more necessary today, especially in a globalized society like ours.”[4]  By globalized, people in 2026 would doubtlessly think of the awareness the world over of Russia’s invasion and Israel’s genocide. That context played a role in which of Francis’s stances was emphasized.

To be sure, reaching out to, and even compassionate acts for, enemies and even a person’s detractors and rude people can be said to be the way into the kingdom of God depicted in the Gospels. In fact, crossing enemy lines can be construed as the true meaning of the symbol of the Cross, and the kingdom of God here and now as the proper focus of Christianity itself.

Even so, the story of Francis commanding a friar to retrieve a coin by mouth and place the coin on a pile of animal dung to drive home the valuelessness of earthly wealth and its tight association with the sin of avarice is entirely absent from the Euronews reporting on Francis’s upcoming feast day. The closest that the reporters come is in quoting Nicelli as claiming that Francis, as a diplomatic model “runs exactly against the prevailing values of today: careerism, individualism, selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-glorification and so on.”[5] Careerism and selfishness are both closely related to greediness because greedy people tend to be very motivated to “climb the corporate ladder” in order to earn higher salaries and to be selfish due to their lack of concern for economic benefits going to other people unless there is something financially in it for the selfish person oneself. For example, a greedy person has no problem demanding an exorbitant rent, much above what a residence is actually worth, even knowing that the prospective tenant will struggle to pay so much. “That’s not my problem,” such a lessor would think regarding such a lessee. The privileging of money for oneself is reflected in an indifference toward whether other people benefit financially. Hence, selfishness and greed are good friends, while greedy people make awful friends.

In explicitly tying having a sack of coins to greed, and therefore selfishness (and the related sin of self-love), St Francis has been remembered as an extremely anti-wealth friar. Highlighting his anti-war stance pales in comparison, yet in the context of military invasion and genocide, the recessive role can easily become the dominant characteristic. To be sure, financial interest often is not irrelevant to waging war. It is no accident, for example, that the U.S. Government purchased bombs from American companies (in what President Eisenhauer coined as the military industrial complex) while being allied with Israel as it was conducting a genocide. Also, as Nicelli observes in regard to the dispute between Christians and Muslims in Francis’s day over Damietta, the fact that the city was “a major commercial hub . . . so the dispute is not spiritual but clearly of an economic and military nature” supports the contention that greed is more fundamental than war, which is not to say that greed is behind all warfare.[6] What is remembered from the past has perhaps as much to do with a contemporary context than with the actual history. History may say more about us than itself. Perhaps by recalling Francis’s strong anti-wealth position—that having accumulated earnings is itself indicative of being greedy—the subterranean financial interests behind contemporary military aggression can be rendered more transparent.

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1. Fanuel Morelli and Celilla Ghezzi, “Assisi Marks 800 Years Since St Francis’s Death and Remains a Symbol of Peace and Dialogue,” Euronews.com, 2 October 2026. See also my chapter on voluntary poverty in God’s Gold as well as the related chapter in Godliness and Greed. The latter text is an academic treatise.
2. Ibid.
3. See my texts in note 1 above. Francis would not doubt point out to you that in citing my own texts, a financial motive probably lurks under the surface. That assumes that people would rush out en masse to buy my books, which is as likely as hell freezing over.
4. Fanuel Morelli and Celilla Ghezzi, “Assisi Marks 800 Years Since St Francis’s Death and Remains a Symbol of Peace and Dialogue,” Euronews.com, 2 October 2026.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, italics on “economic” being added.

Higher Education: Far from Christianized

How might universities that are affiliated with a Christian organization, or “Church,” apply the values enunciated and illustrated in the gospels in ways that distinguish such schools as specifically Christian? Do academic administrators at colleges and universities that are formally affiliated with Christianity apply the preachments by Jesus in the New Testament, let alone ask the question? At most, the question, when asked, is usually answered in terms of increasing financial aid, but in the gospels Jesus is not oriented to programs, but instead to interpersonal relations, specially as bear on the marginalized or outsiders in general—the proverbial last being first and most people who regard themselves as first, as last. How might faculty members who delimit their application of academic colleagues to scholar who are on the same faculty, hence at the same college or university? An unlikely example of a Christian values being applied by a professor at Yale, a university whose privileging of exclusivity and thus exclusion is well ensconced (and known) can be contrasted with the organizational culture at the Roman Catholic Church’s official university in the United States. Any cleric administrators at the Vatican who regard the Protestant denominations, or sects, as instances of compromised Christianity might want to take note of the contrast between the Catholic University of America and Yale.

The full essay is at "Higher Education."