Sunday, September 28, 2025

On Arjuna's Vision of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita

In chapter 11 of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna reveals his real form to Arjuna. The chapter seems like a departure from the surrounding chapters, which focus on bhukti (i.e., devotion to Krishna). For example, in chapter 9, Krishna gives Arjuna the following imperative: “Always think of Me and become my devotee.” Unlike seeing the deity as he really is, sincere devotion to that which is based beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion is possible without being given “divine eyes.” The metaphysically, ontologically real is an attention-getter in the text, but it is the devotion, or bhukti, that is more important from a practical standpoint. Even theologically, the experience of transcendence, of which the human brain is capable, can be said to be more important than “seeing” divinity as it really is because the latter, unlike the former, lies beyond our grasp. In fact, seeing Krishna as he really exists is not necessary, for in chapter 10, Krishna says, “Here are some ways you can recognize and think of Me in the things around you [in the world].” This is yet another reason why the devotion rather than seeing Krishna as he really is, ontologically, should be the attention-getter in the Gita.

A movie focusing on chapter 11 would highlight special effects, and indeed at least one does this to gaudy excess, whereas a movie based on the compassion of Krishna and devotion of Arjuna would be a melodrama, at least if Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic who lived in the nineteenth century, is any indication. His devotion was so intense that a guru allowed Ramakrishna to perform ritual as he intuited. I contend that this, rather than hoping to see the divine as it really is, ought to be the goal of a religious person.

Benkata Bhatta, speaking at a Bhakti Yoga Conference in 2025, asked why, given that Krishna tells Arjuna when he is seeing Krishna as the deity really is, “Now see for yourself how everything in creation is within Me,” why does Arjuna request to see Krishna as the deity really is? Bhatta’s answer was that we are visual creatures. Hence, Jesus says in the Gospels, blessed are those who do not see me yet believe. Yet even in the case of Jesus, the incarnated Logos, he is not seen by even his disciples as the Word itself, by which God created the world. In contrast, Krishna is giving Arjuna a way of accessing something that is already there in front of us, only Arjuna needs divine eyes to see Krishna as the deity really is. Just before revealing Himself, Krishna tells Arjuna, “but you cannot see Me with our present eyes. Therefore, I give you divine eyes.” Although Jesus’s disciples do not see Jesus as the Logos, they do not need divine eyes to see Jesus ascending to heaven as resurrected. The resurrected body is itself at least how the incarnated Logos really is, even if it does not show the Logos as it is before being incarnated by God’s self-emptying, or lowering, of itself. Paul’s vision of Jesus, as well as that of the disciples when they see Jesus next to Elijah and Moses, can also be said to be transcendent and thus as Jesus really is, as incarnated. Nevertheless, it can be argued that seeing the Logos as it really is, sans being incarnated, requires “divine eyes.”

In his talk, Bhatta said that vision defies enumeration, and is brighter than “hundreds of thousands of suns.” All living being. No beginning, middle or end; without limit or boundaries. How can this be encapsulated in the vision?  A person would need divine eyes, which Krishna gives to Arjuna to see Krishna as that Supreme Person is. Simultaneous unity and unending multiplicity. Innumerable arms, faces, mouths, bellies, and many terrible teeth. This is, I submit, intentionally overwhelming, and this can be treated as an indication that being provided such a vision goes too far for us mere mortals.

 In The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto’s descriptors of terrifying, fancinating, mysterious pertaining to the human experience of the holy aptly describe Arjuna’s reaction to seeing Krishna. For instance, Arjuna says, “Oh great one, seeing this wondrous and terrible form. . . . Your many terrible teeth; and as they are disturbed, so am I. . . . my mind is perturbed by fear. I can no longer maintain my steadiness or equilibrium of mind.” Arjuna sees the soldiers on both sides, their heads smashed by Krishna’s teeth. He is bewildered, terrified, and humbled. “What are you?” Arjuna asks. Krishna answers, “Time (or death) I am, the great destroyer of all worlds.” This ontological basis of Krishna is the metaphysical basis of the Gita’s main ethical teaching for Arjuna, who is in a confused state ethically on whether to fight against some of his relatives on the battlefield in a civil war: death is already fated, so an instrument. Don’t worry about the ethics of killing your former teachers and even some of your relatives. Yet even as destiny exists, there is still space for free will. Arjuna can decide to walk away from the battlefield.

Arjuna calls Krishna the god of gods. Arjuna begs forgiveness for having been so informally friendly with the supreme deity. “You are my dear friend, but simultaneously you are so much greater than I am,” Arjuna now realizes. Krishna forgives Arjuna, and thus treats the latter as a friend. Arjuna says, “I am gladdened, but at the same time my mind is disturbed with fear . . .” According to Bhatta, Arjuna is grateful for being shown the divine vision, but is also afraid—too much so, in fact. The fear is making it difficult for Arjuna to love Krishna. So, Arjuna asks to see the four-armed Narayana form of Krishna. The four-arms reminds him that Krishna is the Supreme Person and yet is less terrifying. Krishna grants this wish. To encourage Arjuna, Krishna further withdraws to a two-armed human-like form. This is divinity seen as human-like, just as Jesus is the Logos in human form. Just as seeing the Logos as it is may be too terrifying for mere mortls, Arjuna tells Krishna, “Seeing this beautiful human-like form, now I am myself . . .” Krishna sympathizes with the confused warrior, saying during the vision, “this form of Mine you are now seeing is very difficult to behold. The form you are seeing you’re your transcendental eyes cannot be understood simply by studying the Vedas, or by undergoing serious penances, nor by charity, nor by worship.” Lest this line be construed as privileging the ontological vision over bhukti, Krishna goes on to say, “only by undivided devotional service can I be understood as I am, standing before you, and thus be seen directly. Only in this way can you enter into the mysteries of My understanding . . .”  Krishna appears to be saying that only by bhukti can He not only be understood as he is, but also seen, thus in a way that does not require divine eyes. To be sure, Arjuna is able to see Krishna in human form (i.e., with only two arms) differently after having seen the deity as He really is, but, according to Bhatta, the source of divine power is coming down to a loving relationship with Arjuna. Even though there is admittedly a power to having a healthy kind of fear if it facilitates a fuller, personal, intimate relationship, for otherwise such a relationship may be taken for granted, seeing Krishna as He really exists is not necessary to be even intensely devoted to the deity and even understanding and seeing the deity as it really is.

Therefore, reading the Gita as if the vision in chapter 11 is the most important part may be a mistake borne in part from the sensationalism of how the vision is described in the text. The descriptors theorized by Otto, especially that of tremendum, can and should be tempered, and this can be done by focusing on loving devotion instead of a vision of a deity as it really is. It is not as if we have divine eyes, whereas devotion to a transcendent entity or object is within our purview.


Friday, September 26, 2025

On the Ethics of Dispensational Pre-Millennialism

The Christian “belief in the ‘rapture’ of believers at the time of Jesus’ return to Earth is rooted in a particular form of biblical interpretation that emerged in the 19th century. Known as dispensational pre-millennialism, it is especially popular among American evangelicals.”[1] This biblical interpretation is based on the following from one of Paul’s letters to a church:

“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”[2]

Presumably the “trump of God” in the King James version of the Bible is distinct from Trump as God, for that eventuality would raise a myriad of questions and difficulties, and at least two difficulties pertain to the verse and, moreover, to dispensational pre-millennialism as a Christian doctrine. That it was constructed only recently by Christian standards raises the question of why the idea did not dawn on Christians closer to Paul’s time. That Paul does not represent himself in his letters as having met Jesus prior to the Resurrection and Paul’s use of mythological/Revelations language, such as “with the voice of the archangel,” also provide support for not taking the passage literally. After his resurrection in the Gospels, Jesus does not have the voice of an archangel. With Paul’s passage viewed figuratively or symbolically, rather than empirically and literally, the underlying religious meaning would of course remain unperturbed: keeping the faith is of value and thus in holding on to one’s distinctly religious (and Christian) faith, this strength will be vindicated even if no signs of this emerge during a person’s life. In other words, faith in vindication is part of having a religious faith, which is not limited our experience. The Resurrection itself can be construed as vindication with a capital V, regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead empirically and thus as a historical event. In fact, a historical account or claim is extrinsic to religious narrative even though the sui generis genre can legitimately make selective use of, and even alter, historical reports to make theological points. The writers of the Gospels would have considered this perfectly legitimate, given that they were writing faith narratives and not history books. Making this distinction is vital, I submit, to obviating the risk that one’s theological interpretations lead to supporting unethical state-actors on the world stage, such as Israel, which as of 2025 was serially committing genocidal and perhaps even holocaust crimes against humanity in Gaza. In short, the theological belief that supporting Israel will result in the Second Coming happening sooner than otherwise can be understood to be an unethical stance based on a category mistake. American Evangelical Christians may have been unwittingly enabling another Hitler for the sake of the salvation of Christians, while the Vatican stood by merely making statements rather than acting to help the innocent Palestinians, whether with food and medicine, or in actually going to Gaza’s southern border (or joining the flotilla) to protest as Gandhi would have done.

One problem with dispensational pre-millennialism itself is that predictors keep getting the date wrong, and this may be because a category mistake has been commonly committed between the faith-narrative genre and those of history and empirical science. Joshua Mhlakela, an African, whose dream in 2018 predicted that Jesus would return on September 23rd or 24, 2025, obviously did not pan out, for I write this essay on September 25, 2025 and the Christians are still with us here below. That the Second Coming presumably comes at the end of time means that today should not exist, which would mean that I am not writing this essay (and you are not reading it). Lest we have slipped into a supercomputer’s Matrix, named after the famous solipsistic movie, other people had predicted the Second Coming, also without success. William Miller, a Baptist pastor, had read the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation and concluded that “Jesus would return sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844. When this date passed, he recalculated the date several times and finally landed on Oct. 22, 1844.”[3] Similarly, “Ellen G. White, a founder of the Seventh-day Adventist movement” and “Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted Jesus’ return in 1914. Over time, many others have attempted to predict Jesus’ Second Coming. Harold Camping’s 12 failed predictions being the most famous.”[4] Interestingly, all of these Christians had forgotten “Jesus’ own warning that no one knows the timing of this event (Matthew 24:36).”[5]

Moreover, I contend that applying calculation of empirical events from mythic language involves making a category mistake regarding qualitatively different domains. A person would not try to predict next year’s gross domestic product from calculations based on passages in Revelations, for example. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize category mistakes when they are made from the other direction.

Furthermore, Jesus not only says that no one but the Father (i.e., not even Jesus himself) knows when the last judgment will occur—and notice that Jesus is thus not omniscient by his own admission—but also that “this generation will not pass away” until the Son of Man will come “in the clouds with power and great glory.”[6] It is interesting that Jesus would make any prediction, since he is aware that only the Father knows, but, in any case, even this prediction is wrong. Such an uncomfortable conclusion points back to a conflation of history and myth, two distinct genres and domains, each with its own type of valid meaning that cannot be touched by the other domain even in overreaching.

Besides those problems, dispensational pre-millennialism can lead to rather unethical political and ethical stances. Many Christians “influenced by dispensationalism believe that the re-establishment of Israel and the return of the Jews to Palestine, especially since the 1920s, is a sign that the end is near. The centering of the re-establishment of Israel has important political implications, including unquestioned support for Israeli actions by many evangelicals.”[7] Conflating myth, such as is evinced by the Book of Revelations, and empirical, historical events can give rise to giving even a genocidal regime a blank slate and lots of military hardware. Both politically and ethically, even supporting Israel politically in 2025, when God was supposed to take humanity out of its self-imposed misery even in acting as bystanders, had become deeply problematic—especially ethically. In the Gospels, Jesus would obviously not encourage his disciples to support a genocidal regime even though he does not support the zealots acting against the Romans in the Gospel narratives. Giving what is Caesar’s (i.e., Roman coins) to the Romans does not mean actively supporting Rome. Were the imperator Romanorum to decide in the story to kill every Jew in Judea so to build Roman luxury resorts in and around the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus would likely urge turning the other cheek and loving the enemies rather than either helping them to kill Jews or fighting the Romans as they do so.

To respond to the humanity of those whom a person dislikes (or is disliked by), according to Samuel Hopkins, who was Jonathan Edwards protégé, is the essence of the Kingdom of God available here and now, rather than after a final judgment. In fact, choosing to value and incorporate in practice such a kingdom as Hopkins sketches survives any Jansenist, strict Augustinian, view of free-will as profoundly wounded by the Fall. Looking the other way, not to mention supporting politically, ideologically, or ethically a heinous regime that is starving and killing millions intentionally out of sheer hatred, even relegating the other as subhuman, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or Palestinians in Gaza nearly a century later, reflects how deplorable a human’s use of one’s free-will can be, post-lapsarian (i.e., due to original sin). Even given the mythic fall of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis, we are all responsible for how we use our free-will, even though it is tainted.

It may even be said that there is a special place in hell for Christians who look the other way on Israel’s extermination of the Gazans, as if all of them were culpable for Hama’s day of attack in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and a few hundred taken hostage by a subjugated people occupied by an apartheid regime. The doctrine of collective justice, which Yahweh, not human beings, apply to Israel in the Hebrew Bible, is in human hands nothing but a weaponized fallacy. To give this a blank slate because Israel’s existence empirically is requisite to the Second Coming even raises the question of whether the human brain is inherently compromised cognitively and ethically in relating the domains of ethics to religion/theology. It used to be asked whether atheists could be ethical. Perhaps the question has become whether pre-millennialist theists (i.e., evangelical Christians) can be ethical and politically responsible.




1. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen,” MSNBC.com, September 25, 2025.
2. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 (KJV)
3. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen."
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. This prediction is in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21.
7. Robert D. Cornwall, “The Roots of Belief in the 2025 Rapture that Didn’t Happen."

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Mary

The film, Mary (2024), is pregnant with intimations of the theological implications of her unborn and then newly born son, Jesus. That story is of course well-known grace á the Gospels, and the theology of agape love associated with that faith narrative is at least available through the writings of Paul and many later Christian theologians. What we know of Mary is much less, given that her role in the Gospels is not central even though the heavy title, Mother of God, has been applied to her without of course implying that she is the source of God. The film, like the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church has done, endeavors to “evolve the myth” by adding to Mary’s story even though the additions are not meant to be taken as seriously as, for example, the Catholic doctrine that Mary is assumed bodily into heaven. The movie comes closest to the magisterium in suggesting that Mary’s birth is miraculous; the magisterium holds that Mary is born without sin, and that Jesus inherited this because of the Incarnation (i.e. God, rather than Joseph, impregnates Mary). Suffice it to say that the perception of myth as static is the exception rather than rule; it is natural for the human mind to work with myths such that they can evolve rather than take them as given in a final form or extent. This is not to say that we should focus on the faith narratives as if they were ends in themselves and thus unalterable; rather, as the film demonstrates, religious transcendence is of greater value.


The full essay is at "Mary."

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

On Presumptuous Pride: Netanyahu Castigates Europe

While conducting a genocide and even a holocaust in Gaza from 2023 through at least the summer of 2025, the Israeli government was in no position to launch diplomatic threats against either the E.U. or any of its states for recognizing a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state.[1] At the time, the warrants issued by the ICC for the arrest of Netanyahu and a former defense minister were still outstanding, and no doubt more warrants would be issued for other culprits in the Israeli government and military. I applaud Jews around the world, and especially in Israel, who have had the guts to protest publicly on behalf of human rights in Gaza and against Israel's savage militaristic incursion into Gaza and the related death of tens of thousands and starvation of millions. The human urge of self-preservation is astonishing in that as of August, 2025, so many residents of Gaza were still alive. So, for Netanyahu to charge government officials in the E.U. with being antisemitic is not only incorrect and unfair, but highly presumptuous given the severity of the atrocities unleashed by Netanyahu and his governmental cadre. Regarding both the Israeli protesters and the Netanyahu government, distinguishing the ethical from the theological domains, which are admittedly very much related, is helpful.

Any religion that would applaud the behavior of Israel since that country started bombing civilians (and their homes and even entire cities) in Gaza does not deserve the appellation of religion, much less faith. In the Torah, we can find examples where Yahweh punishes Israel for disobeying the covenant, which includes the Ten Commandments, which in turn include the prohibition against murder, especially of an entire population as if every resident were culpable.

Nietzsche castigates the line, "Vengeance is Mine, sayeth the Lord," because it contradicts omnibenevolence, which is a divine attribute. Even so, Israel might want to heed the line, for even though collective justice does not apply outside of Israel, the Torah applies it to Israel. That Israel includes even the Israelis who have protested the genocide and holocaust in Gaza confirms the vital point that divine decrees in a scripture do not always subscribe to our notions of what is ethical, for otherwise Yahweh’s omnipotence would be constrained by our moral principles. Of course, this point does not give us an “out” for behaving unethically in harming other people, especially innocents, especially if in God’s name, and this is precisely the fallacy into which Netanyahu and his cadre as well as supporters have fallen, even if implicitly rather than consciously.

Put another way, in the Book of Exodus, not even the Hebrews who have not been worshipping the Golden Calf in the desert while Moses is on the mountain can enter the promised land for 40 years; all of Israel is being punished. Similarly, a divine decree against Israel for having broken the commandment against murder so severely would include even the Israelis who have publicly protested Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza (as well as his enabling of attacks by Israeli “settlers” against Palestinians in the occupied territories). That more Israelis could have stopped working and protested such that the Netanyahu governing coalition might change course or even collapse is not the point. Rather, my point here is that collective justice is unethical even when issued by a divine decree, so Israel’s collective punishment of all of the residents of Gaza cannot be justified, either in ethical terms or as if Netanyahu could issue divine decrees that transcend the ethical realm.

Furthermore, the Final Act in terms of Yahweh’s judgment is beyond Israel’s control, given that atrocities have already been committed, and the Christian unqualified (in both senses of this word!) enablers of Israel might remember this too. To presume that a Last Judgment goes your way, or does not apply to oneself, is impious and presumptuous, and in line with the pre-eminence of self-love rather than faith in caritas seu benevolentia universalis. It is ironic that any Christian would forget this very practical faith, and even enable people who violate it so severely. Similarly, it is interesting that the governing coalition of Israel would dismiss Hillel’s teaching not to treat others as you would not want to be treated. Take out the two nots, and Jesus’s Second Commandment is revealed. 

In other words, the means of supporting Israel’s teleological-theological role in salvation history should not violate divine decrees, or else the Final Judgement may come as a surprise because means are arguably just as important as goals. In fact, the choice of means, rather than the ends being sought (e.g., the triumph of Israel for theological purposes), may be what Yahweh looks at in judging human creatures. 

Even though the theological and ethical dimensions of means are important, and may even be more important to the ends being sought, a distinctly theological point does not reduce to one of ethics, for otherwise Yahweh would be subject to our ethical ideas, rather than vice versa. Even though it has been quipped that there is nothing like gods on Earth than Generals on a battlefield, not even their commander-in-chief is capable of issuing divine decrees, and thus should be held ethically and legally accountable; this is two degrees of separation from such a person as Netanyahu lashing out hate-speech slurs against government officials in Europe because they object to what is arguably a genocide and even a holocaust in Gaza and want to help the residents thereof.  

Sunday, August 10, 2025

Arjuna’s Vision of Krishna: On the Edge of Transcendence

In reading the Bhagavad-Gita from chapter four on, it may be tempting to collapse all of Hinduism into a monotheism in which Lord Krishna is God. Even in the context of bhukti being directed exclusively to Krishna, other deities are alluded to in the text. To claim that those other deities came out of Krishna, and even that Krishna surpasses even Brahman, which is infinite being that is imperishable awareness, thought (but not mind), power, and bliss, in terms of ultimacy does not mean that the Gita is a monotheist scriptural faith-narrative. Not even Krishna’s unmanifest form by which the deity’s creative energy gives rise to the cosmos transcends form itself, and thus reaches the unmanifest and formless brahman. To be sure, that Krishna, as the Supreme Person metaphysically and ontologically, is ultimately Self renders the deity identical to brahman, but this does not mean that Krishna transcends brahman. Regardless of where the Krishna-Brahman debate lands, and there are admittedly shlokas in the Gita that support the ultimacy of Krishna and shlokas that favor the ultimacy of Brahman, Krishna need not be more ultimate than brahman for a devotee of the deity to be able to experience a lot of transcendence from ordinary experience. In fact, because either referent that is the Absolute lies beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), according to the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, the human experience of distinctly religious transcendence is where our attention can fruitfully be directed. This is not to say that a referent (i.e., a divine, transcendent object) is thereby relegated or even discarded in favor of the quality of experience as its own referent. Rather, it is to say that we can know a lot more than we do about distinctly religious, and thus transcending, experience, and that such knowledge is part of the human condition—part of being human as homo religios as distinct from being a political, economic, and social species. First I investigate the question of whether the Gita is monotheist, after which I argue that Arjuna’s vision of Krishna in chapter 11 of the Gita is can be viewed as the “event horizon” of sorts in terms of how much we can transcend as we approach the limits of our faculties.

One scholar argues that even though Krishna “is manifold in his appearances,” his form “is the one and only” in “relationship to the manifold character of the cosmos.”[1] In his “cosmic form all beings, including the Vedic gods, reside and find their place.”[2] This is not, however, to say that Krishna is the only deity referenced in the Gita, and, moreover, that Krishna is synonymous with brahman even though Krishna’s unmanifest form of fullness “is a product of the god’s yogic [creative] power and . . . expresses sovereignty” and is thus “not his highest state of being as the transcendent ‘self’ beyond the cosmos,” the latter being how brahman too is described.[3]  Krishna, unlike Brahman, is not just the transcendent “self,” and even a king is described, in The Law of Manu (7.4ff), as “consisting of and uniting different gods” and therefore should “be regarded as a ‘universal form’.”[4] Being the protector of a social, economic, and political order (i.e., a kingdom), a king embodies “the divine powers of the gods who contribute to his sovereignty,” hence “he is called ‘a mighty godhead that lives in the form (body) of a man.”[5] Indeed Krishna’s cosmic body, within which Arjuna sees the created realm, is explicitly related to human kingship in that the “cosmic and royal aspects of Krsna’s form converge not only at the moment of creation, but also in times of destruction, which serve the double purpose of punishment and purification, as well as re-establishing order and legitimate kings.”[6] Krishna’s relation to royal sovereignty and thus functionality inhibits the deity being synonymous with Brahman, and thus ultimately ultimate even though Arjuna needs “divine eyes” to see Krishna’s infinite overwhelming and terrifying form. Transcendence, like a Hindu temple, has more than one layer, and human “sight,” even with “divine eyes,” can only go so far. This is the idea.

In short, even if, as one scholar claims, Krishna “is the one and only encompassing cosmic god,”[7] and is thus the creator and destroyer of worlds in being the protector of the cosmic order, Brahman transcends cosmic functions because Brahman is not a doer, just as an individual atman is immutable (i.e., unchanging) too. My point is that not even Krishna as depicted as his cosmic form in the Gita can be regarded as the Absolute or Ultimate metaphysically, ontologically, and even theologically.

Even as a deity, Krishna is not exclusively so. In Gita 11.21, “Yonder, these hosts of deities enter into You. Some, terrified, praise (You) . . . ,” the very existence of those other deities is presupposed, for it would make no sense to claim that things that don’t exist enter into Krishna.[8] Also, Gita 11.54 states that the other deities would like to see the vision of Krishna. These two slokas are enough to refute the view that the other deities are merely imaginary and thus Krishna alone is God. That is, shlokas 11.21 and 11.54 are polytheist rather than monotheist statements.

Even so, Malinar claims that Gita, chapter 9, “and the subsequent chapters present the theological basis for Krsna’s revelation as the highest, the one and only god.”[9] That Krishna can be both the highest and yet the only deity is itself problematic unless the other gods are illusory, an interpretation that the two shlokas in Gita 11 contradict. To be sure, the other deities, in being formed, are not ultimate; unlike Krishna, they do not have an unmanifest form, but not even that form is ultimate ontologically. As manifested to Arjuna, Krishna’s “flaming many-colored, (with) gaping mouths and flaming vast eyes” is said to touch “the world-sky.”[10] Even though brahman creates space, Ramanuja identifies that sky “with the transcendental ‘space’ of the Ultimate Being beyond the world-ground.”[11] Feuerstein, however, objects to this interpretation by noting that the “transcendental Reality is formless and ‘beyond-the-three-primary-qualities’ (nirguna).”[12] The reality that is Brahman transcends even Krishna’s unmanifest form by which Krishna’s creative energy creates the cosmos. Hence the errancy of positing Krishna as more ultimate than Brahman. Even so, the extent of transcendence that Arjuna experiences when he beholds the vision of Krishna that that deity enables Arjuna to see “with divine eyes” is such that Arjuna’s cognitive, perceptual, and emotive capacities are reached as they start to buckle even though the Absolute or Ultimate transcends even that point. It is the buckling, or warping, of Arjuna’s faculties that is so indicative of what it is like to push oneself to one’s limits in transcendence. Whether Krishna or Brahman is the Absolute (i.e., personal or impersonal), the yearning to transcend more and more is itself significant and thus worthy of study and praxis.

As described both by Samjaya and Arjuna, the vision of Krishna is admittedly nothing short of inspiring of awe in its wholistic totality. Narrating the past event of the vision of Krishna to King Dhritarashtra, Samjaya describes Krishna as “infinite (and) omnipresent,” as the “Great Self” of greater “splendor” than were “a thousand suns were to arise at once in the sky,” as “the God of gods,” with “the whole universe . . . abiding in the One, there in [Krishna’s] body.”[13] Referring to that body, Arjuna says, “I behold the gods and all the (various) kinds of beings” enter. Moreover, Arjuna characterizes Krishna as being “of endless form,” even “All-Form!”[14]  Overwhelmed, Arjuna states his conviction as a devotee to Krishna: “You ought to be known as the supreme Imperishable. You are the supreme receptacle of all this. You are the Immutable, the Guardian of the eternal law. You are the everlasting Spirit.”[15] By the latter is mean purusha, which is Brahman’s creative energy, which brahman itself transcends.[16]

Even though bhukti to Krishna is all-encompassing for a devotee, the perception of Krishna as the Absolute and other deities as within Krishna’s body or illusory doesn’t necessarily translate into an ontological claim that those deities do not really exist whereas Krishna transcends. Moreover, the contention that since “it is Krsna’s body in which the whole world resides, he is not only the supreme lord of the universe (visva-isvara), but also its universal, encompassing form (visvarupa)”[17] actually situates Krishna behind brahman, which as inherently unmanifest transcends form itself and every conceivable form, even Krishna’s unmanifest cosmic form that contains the created realm and even the other deities, including Brahma.

Yet in terms of transcendental experience, Arjuna’s vision of Krishna pushes the envelope up to the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. This is not to infer an ontological or metaphysical claim regarding Krishna; rather, I contend that the vision in this case comes up so close to the rim beyond which human thought, perception, and emotion cannot go that warping of their respective contours is evident.

In the Christian Gospels, the disciples’ vision of Jesus’s transformed resurrected body is perhaps not as close to the limits. To be sure, the nature of that body eclipses our understanding, at least so far, but it cannot be said, as Krishna tells Arjuna: “Very-difficult-to-see is this My form which you have seen. Even the gods are forever hankering after a glimpse of this form.”[18] Even the gods! Of course, in Christian theology, there are no other deities than the trinitarian deity, but unlike Arjuna, Jesus’s disciples have no difficulty in seeing the resurrected body. Whereas the vision of Krishna departs from that deity’s human form substantially, Jesus’s resurrected body does not. The greater anthropomorphism comes at the cost of not being able to approach the boundaries of the human faculties in terms of transcendence. This is the idea.

In short, in having to be given “divine eyes” to see Krishna as that deity really is, which other deities can only wish to see, and in seeing an infinite number of arms and heads, the vision warps the cognitive and perceptual framework that operates nonstop as the paradigmatic contours of our ordinary waking experience in life. We are not used to thinking that we can see what is refused to deities, and seeing the entire created realm in a deity’s body, which in turn is distended in heads and arms, in a golden radiance that is brighter than a thousand suns in the sky is not something we see in our daily lives.

In fact, not only is space warped in the world being shown in Krishna’s body, but time too is warped when Krishna, “in his appearance as time, shows those [warriors] whom Arjuna should kill as having been killed already.”[19] This warping of time is “based on a suspension of the otherwise chronological sequence of past, present, and future. . . . The future is presented as already past; conversely, the present appears as the moment in which this future is disclosed as an actual fact.”[20] The Kantian a priori impact of reason itself on the paradigmatic framework that structures and organizes our cognitions and perceptions of the empirical realm is thus warped, and the warping of the time-space fabric by gravity that Einstein theorized and has since been empirically verified (e.g., gravity waves in space; time differences between sea-level and Mt Washington in North America) can be thought of analogically in which gravity is like Krishna in that both are capable of warping space and time. To be sure, whereas gravity is an impersonal warping of time-space, it is the Supreme Person as Krishna really is that is presented “as time,” which “is regarded as a form of the cosmic god as sovereign who brings about a necessary and purifying destruction in order to re-establish order.”[21] In other words, “Arjuna’s task is to recognize Krsna as the agent in the form of time. Conversely, time has been given a form and even an agent.”[22] Being presented with time in a distinctly theological sense stretches Arjuna’s cognitive faculty to its limit.

The situs of the vision of Krishna being at the “event horizon” is evident too in Arjuna’s emotional reaction, for he is, as it were, at the end of his tether. As one scholar describes this, “After confirming that Arjuna has indeed seen the whole world in the one body of Krsna (11.13) . . . , Samjaya describes the reaction: ‘Filled with amazement (awe) with his hair standing on end, and bowing his head and folding his hands to pay reverence, Arjuna spoke.’”[23]  Arjuna’s emotional condition is thus “highlighted” in the text.[24] Seeing Krishna’s “many formidable fangs,” Arjuna states that he, as well as the “worlds,” shudder” and that he can “find no shelter,” presumably from his fright.[25] Arjuna’s “inmost self quakes,” and he can “find no fortitude or tranquility.”[26] It is no wonder that he is suddenly petrified, for he sees his army’s leading warriors “swiftly enter [Krishna’s] mouths with formidable fear-instilling fangs. Some [of the warriors] are seen with pulverized heads sticking in between [Krishna’s] teeth.”[27] Arjuna is “trembling,” and “with stammering (voice), very frightened.”[28] Arjuna’s trembling “underscores the amazement and awe caused by the vision.”[29] In such a state, Arjuna’s praise of Krishna can be interpreted as being “indicative of Arjuna’s position as the composer of hymnic praise”, which is associated in the Rigveda with “poetic creativity,” which is an expression of “vibrant excitement.”[30] In other words, Arjuna’s praise is expressive of the extreme emotion of his “poetic-ecstatic state,”[31] rather than constituting religious belief-claims that reality is ultimately a Supreme Person rather than brahman and that the other deities are imaginary whereas Krishna is ontologically and metaphysically existent.

Out of incredible angst, Arjuna cannot say enough about Krishna, declaring that deity to be the unsurpassable Ultimate, “greater even than Brahman, the primordial creator,” “the Imperishable, existence and nonexistence and what is beyond that,” “the Primordial God, the ancient Spirit (purusha),” and again of being of all-consuming “infinite form.”[32] Because Arjuna is emotionally overwhelmed, these laudatory statements can be interpreted as being emotionally expressive rather than ontologically or metaphysical statements.

I totally disagree with the assertion that in Arjuna addressing Krishna as being the “all” (sarvah), rather than merely as being powerful in “bringing together ‘all’ as the cosmic ruler, a “monotheistic framework” applies.[33] For one thing, logically it does not follow from Arjuna’s praises of Krishna as being “of infinite strength, and immeasurable prowess,” such that Krishna has “brought together the all (sarvam),” that “therefore you are all (sarvo).”[34] Likewise, it does not follow logically that a king who brings together all of his kingdom is that kingdom, even if one were to exclaim, l’état est moi! Even if Krishna were “all,” it would still need to be argued how that is a monotheist claim, but Arjuna is not really asserting claims.

Rather, because his emotions are so intense that they, like the vision itself, are all-consuming, his over-the-top praises of Krishna can be reckoned as emotive expressions in “poetic and ritual language.”[35] To impose rationality on such language is to incur a category mistake. Reflecting the overwhelming vision, Arjuna’s praises are indicative of the warping effect of the sheer intensity of heightened emotions, as could be expected given the overwhelming tremendum (i.e., terror) that Arjuna feels as a reaction to seeing the bodies of his teachers, fellow warriors, and relatives in Krishna’s sharp, gnawing fangs. Therefore, in an emotive sense too, the vision can be reckoned as lying on the rim, or “event horizon,” of human faculties, beyond which they shut down or are otherwise incapable of experiencing in a coherent fashion. I submit that it is precisely because Arjuna is up against the rim of what he is capable of feeling without passing out that he experiences the flood of emotions as “all,” and his praises are expressions of emotion that project the all-consuming sense he has of his emotions and the vision itself.

My basic point is that the warping, or blurring, of each of the basic contours of cognition, perception, and emotion indicates that Arjuna is on the cusp of the boundary beyond which is like a black hole in outer space. Unlike Jesus’s resurrected body being visible to the disciples, the vision of Krishna is at the event-horizon, where the normal parameters for cognition, perception and emotion warp similar to how the intense gravity of a dense black hole warps the fabric of space-time at the rim beyond which not even light can escape.  Of course, this analogy breaks down in that revelation “gets out” of the theological “black hole,” albeit through a window darkened by centuries of candle-smoke as revelation passes through our human, all too human atmosphere. 



1. Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 166.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., p. 170.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 171.
6. Ibid., p. 172.
7. Ibid.
8. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 227.
9. Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 144.
10. Gita 11.24 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 229.
11. Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 229.
12. Ibid.
13. Gita 11.11-13, in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 223.
14. Gita 11.15-16, in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 225.
15. Gita 11.18, in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 225.
16. Similarly, in Christian theology, God transcends the Logos (Word), by which God creates the world.  No theologian would state that God is a manifestation of Logos, and yet Krishna as the Supreme Person is said to be more ultimate than is brahman. David Hume would doubtlessly bring in the problem of anthropomorphism.
17. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 169.
18. Gita 11.52 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 245.
19. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita: Doctrines and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 175.
20. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 175.
21. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 178.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 168.
24. Ibid.
25. Gita 11.24-25 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 229.
26. Gita 11.24 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 229.
27. Gita 11.27 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 231.
28. Gita 11.35 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 235.
29. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 180.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Gita 11.37-38 in Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 237.
33. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 183.
34. Gita 11.40, in Angelika Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 183.
35. Malinar, The Bhagavadgita, p. 181. The Gita “is similar to the original poetic situation described in Vedic texts, in which the hymns are said to have been composed in reaction to a vision, and then handed down and used by sacrificial priests as ritual liturgy.” Indeed, “poetic skill and expression remained part and parcel of the encounter (darsana) with the beloved god or goddess in many bhakti traditions” (Ibid., p. 182).

Thursday, August 7, 2025

Sikh Ethics on Netanyahu

Israeli state officials met on August 7, 2025 to debate Prime Minister Netanyahu’s plan to expand the presence of the IDF, Israel’s military, to include all of the territory in Gaza, which had been under Israeli occupation anyway for many decades. With Gaza already under Israeli occupation, characterizing Netanyahu’s plan as being “to conquer all or parts of Gaza not yet under Israeli control” is strange.[1] Similarly, mischaracterizing the E.U. as a bloc even though that union has the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial is odd. The media’s artful way of reporting is without doubt superficial relative to Netanyahu’s unvirtuous decisions and their respective consequences to which the labels of genocide and holocaust have justifiably been applied around the world. Behind the relevant vice lies an extreme egocentricity that the ethical theory of Sikhism describes quite well, even to the level of ontology or metaphysics.

Netanyahu’s office released a statement claiming that the prime minister’s plan to station armed Israeli troops throughout the occupied territory is a way to “further achieve Israel’s goals in Gaza.”[2] Excluded was any compassion or even thought for the well-being of the residents of Gaza, as if no such responsibilities are entailed in being an occupier. I contend that the vice of wrath lies behind the egocentricity of the statement, and that this vice in turn is predicated on the supposition that anyone opposing one’s self-interest or that of one’s side is merely an object and thus can be used to further one’s own aims. This duality flies in the face of a metaphysic of Oneness, wherein everyone is connected rather than separate. This is none other than the Sikh theory of the five vices being sourced in haumai.

That Netanyahu’s wrath is egocentric can be gleaned even from how he treated opposition within the IDF as being easily expendable, as if the Chief of the General Staff Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir were merely a puppet for the prime minister to toss away the moment Zamir showed pushed back publicly on Netanyahu’s plan. Zamir suggested “that the plan would endanger the lives of the [Israeli] hostages and further stretch Israel’s military.”[3] “That prompted Netanyahu to say in a post on X that if [Zamir] objected to the plans, he could resign.”[4] Ouch! Zamir stated that the IDF would “continue to express our positions without fear, in a substantive, independent, and professional manner,” and puppets, which are mere objects, do not behave as such. In other words, Netanyahu’s hasty reaction evinces or points back to an egocentric perspective in which other people are objects rather than other human beings, whom, Kant wrote, should, as rational beings, be treated as ends in themselves rather than merely as means. This applies even to the starving, emaciated 2 million humans still alive in Gaza, whom the Israelis are puppeteering to fight like dogs over scant food-drops.

Kant’s ethic against treating other rational beings as mere objects is also in the Sikh religious ethic, which is useful here in describing Netanyahu’s mentality and what it implies metaphysically. The Sikh ethic actually focuses on five vices, each of which is sourced in haumai. “Fundamentally,” according to Keshav Singh, “haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use.[5] At its extreme, haumai is “a kind of ethical solipsism: an inability to conceive of anyone or anything but oneself as an ethical subject.”[6] In other words, Haumai “is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others.”[7] Whereas virtue is related to the “recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One,”[8] haumai, and thus each of the five vices that are sourced in it, involve the illusion (maia) of separateness wherein only oneself (or one’s group) counts as significant.

Sikhism makes the leap from ethics and ontology/metaphysics to theology in viewing the One as divinity and not just as real. “The Divine, in Sikhism, is conceived of as absolute and all-encompassing, and is often referred to as literally (the) One. . . . the Divine as a kind of all-encompassing unity.”[9] A unity that grounds everything, rather than everything being divine (i.e., pantheism), is not reality per se, but pertains to what is ultimately real. It is important, I submit, to distinguish ontology and metaphysics from the sui generis, or unique, domain of theology. In Sikhism, “enlightenment consists in experiencing ultimate reality, thereby merging with the Divine,” whereas “haumai creates a duality between self and other, cutting one off from ultimate reality and preventing enlightenment.”[10]

So if it seems like in going to such an extreme as committing a genocide and even a holocaust, Netanyahu and his cadre have lost touch with reality, Sikhist ethics would say yes because viewing and treating people as objects is inconsistent with the Oneness whose unity makes duality wherein only oneself is significant (and a human being) an illusion. In this regard, Sikhism is in line with Shakara’s non-dualist Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism wherein the soul of every people is in essence Brahman, which is infinite being.

It only remains for us to identify the specific Sikh vice that pertains to Netanyahu, for once known, it can be related back to raumai, which is predicated on the metaphysical illusion (or delusion) of duality between oneself and everyone else. That vice that is most salient in the dogmatic mentality and actions of Israel’s prime minister and his cadre of high officials is krodh, which, as appetitive wrath, is “a kind of vengeful, consuming anger” that is not righteous anger at injustice.[11] In the Sikh scripture, SGGS, is written, “O wrath, you are the root of strife; compassion never rises up in you.”[12] This definitely applies to the Israeli troops going ultimately from orders from Netanyahu. Instead, of any mercy and compassion, krodh is a“vengeful appetite that controls people like puppets.”[13] This can be seen even in how Netanyahu lashed out at Zamir when he resisted being merely a puppet. As for Netanyahu’s underlying motivation, meaning being even more motivating that his desire to make the Palestinians in Gaza suffer and even die, it is worth observing that krodh “manifests haumai” in that “the wrathful person wants to hurt others to improve his own status or make himself feel better. In this way, he views others as mere objects, and considers only the importance of his own inward-facing desires.”[14] 

Singh’s comment that self-interest is one way of understanding haumai is in my view too generous; selfishness, wherein benefits are intentionally excluded from other people (unless, as a byproduct, oneself benefits) is more apt. But even selfishness does not account for using other people as objects absent any compassion or mercy. Maimonides’ point that the Abrahamic deity, or “God,” can judge a mentality so bad in terms of sin that God removes even the possibility of such a person asking God for forgiveness. Hence Yahweh hardens Pharaoh’s heart in the Book of Exodus. So too, it seems, that deity has hardened Netanyahu’s heart. Divine wrath can be understood to be a reaction to krodh sourced in haumai and evinced so horrifically as by government officials persecuting a genocide or holocaust on millions of other human beings.



1. Gavin Blackburn, “Israel’s Security Cabinet Debates Expanding Gaza Operation Despite Opposition,” Euronews.com, August 7, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Keshav Singh, “Vice and Virtue in Sikh Ethics,” The Monist, Vol. 104 (2021): 319-36, p. 320.
6. Ibid, p. 321.
7. Ibid, p. 319.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 321.
10. Ibid., p. 322.
11. Ibid., p. 326.
12. Ibid., p. 326 (1358 in SGGS).
13. Ibid. p. 326.
14. Ibid., p. 326.

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

In The Eight Chapters, the medieval Jewish scholar writes, “If you consider most of the commandments in this way, you will find that all of them discipline the powers of the soul.”[2] Such disciplining is necessary for a person to keep the mean (i.e., feelings and actions that are fitting and proper, rather than too little or too much) and thus be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense of virtue. “For example,” Maimonides continues, “they [i.e., most of the commandments] eliminate revenge and vengeance by His saying: You shall not take revenge nor bear a grudge, You shall surely release it, and You shall surely help to lift them up, etc.; these aim at weakening the power of rage and irascibility.”[3] A person who ignores or dismisses these divine commands and violates them “does not know that he goes all the way to one extreme, completely leaving the mean,”[4] by which Maimonides means Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean as pertains to the moral virtues.

Given that the ongoing, gradual decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure and of the residents themselves by the Israeli government for more than a year and a half by the late summer of 2025, it is evident that the vice (i.e., extreme) of hateful vengeance had become a habituated pattern for those officials in charge of the Israeli government, and especially in the military. Allowing oneself to continue in a bad (i.e., not virtuous) habit is antipodal to Maimonides’ advice: “the perfect man needs to inspect his moral habits continually, weigh his actions, and reflect upon the state of his soul every single day. Whenever he sees his soul inclining toward one of the extremes, he should rush to cure it and not let the evil state become established by the repetition of a bad action.”[5] A person having intentionally or unwittingly developed such a sordid habit “should attend to the defective moral habit in himself and continually seek to cure it, for a [human being] inevitably has defects.”[6] Even though “Solomon said absolutely: There is no man who is just upon the earth, who does only good and does not sin,”[7] by no means does this justify going to the other extreme and remaining there, such that a habit of vice can establish deep groves in the road such that turning around becomes virtually impossible, given the human penchant for stubbornness and intractability.  For I submit that by the summer of 2025, Netanyahu and his cabinet officials had reached such a point that only external force could be capable of pushing those men back from the extreme in the sense of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean.

Moreover, it is so easy for humans to will to stay the course in what is an immoral extreme that Yahweh issues divine commands concerning particular actions, such as to forbid daytime sex so to keep lust in moderation rather than going to an extreme. Maimonides views such laws as being oriented to Aristotle’s philosophy on virtue, and thus risks reducing theology to ethics. This risk may be worth it, given the stubborn presumptuousness of Netanyahu in the presumably righteous determination to exterminate a subjugated people in Israel’s Gaza territory in a habituated extreme case of vengeance. Nietzsche points out that positing Yahweh as both omnibenevolent and vengeful is self-contradictory and thus discredits that concept of God. Even given Netanyahu’s extreme vengeance as routinized as a genocide and even holocaust, the divine command not to be vengeful does not need the additional scriptural text, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. To leave a vacuum without a credible concept of a deity puts too much weight on human subjectivity to fill the gap—hence Sartre claimed that human choices are so weighty and Husserl treated subjectivity as the only possible basis for a philosophy. In other words, that the Nazi Holocaust and the Gaza Holocaust have both followed the Age of Reason and Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead leaves us with the vital question of what is left upon which a moral and, moreover, existential philosophy can be built. In short, even without positing vengeance as pertaining to Yahweh, Maimonides’ reading of the Torah and the Talmud in line with Aristotle’s moral philosophy (without conflating the two or reducing one to the other) is enough to base the claim that Netanyahu and his cabinet members have become extremists both in terms of their religion and an established theory of virtue. It is upon this basis that the Gaza Holocaust rests.



1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.
2. Maimonides. Ethical Writings of Maimonides, ed. Raymond L. Weiss and Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1975), p. 72.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 73.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Sunday, July 20, 2025

Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice: The Case of Israel in Gaza

One of the many pitfalls in the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, whereby government officials acting as government can literally get away with murder domestically given the lack of credible de jure and de facto enforcement of international “law,” is the ability to inflict collective punishment based on group-identity, including the ideologies that hinge on identity politics. Going the actual culprits of a crime or even a revolt, collective punishment inflicts harm and even mass murder on an entire group, including individuals thereof who are not at all culpable. Unlike “collateral damage,” the ideology of collective justice includes intentionally harming such individuals. It is an ideology because it is based on beliefs about a group rather than an ethic that would justify normatively the infliction of pain and suffering on the innocent. Furthermore, collective justice is an ideology because it includes the artificial elevation of a group (i.e., the collective) over the individual even though members of a group are arguably foremost individuals, who typically belong to more than one group or organization. To put the collective abstraction first ontologically is thus tenuous at best. A person may be a Texan, a Democrat, a Catholic, and a member of a football team, for example, so the claim that that person is essentially any one of these would be dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. In privileging a part over a whole, thus being partisan, an ideology is in a sense arbitrary, even in claiming that a state of affairs that is favored or desired is the present state of affairs, as if the statement were a fact of reason rather than a counter-factual statement.


The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Fallacy of Collective Justice."

Monday, July 7, 2025

Hypocrisy in Institutional Religion

Religion plays a prominent role in the film, Lykke-Per, or A Fortunate Man (2018). On the surface, Peter Sidenius, a young engineer, must navigate around an old, entrenched government bureaucrat to secure approval for his ambitious renewable-energy project. The two men clash, which reflects more general tension that exists everywhere between progressives and conservatives regarding economic, social, religious, and political change. Although pride may be the ruin of Peter and his project, the role played by religion is much greater than pride manifesting as arrogance, if indeed it is arrogant to stand up to abuse of power, whether by a government bureaucrat or one’s own father.


The full essay is at "A Fortunate Man."

Wednesday, June 11, 2025

On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence

In late April, 2025, Richard Slavin, whose Hindu name and title are Radhanath Swami, spoke on the essence of bhukti at the conclusion of the Bhukti Yoga Conference at Harvard University. Ultimately, the concept bhukti, which translates as devotionalism directed to a deity, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers to the nature of the human soul. The immediate context is selfless love, which is directed to a deity, and this context immediately involves extending universal benevolence to other people (and other species), and even to nature (i.e., the environment). After Radhanath’s talk, he walked directly to me. I thanked him for his talk and went on to suggest refinement to compassion being extended universally, as in universal benevolence even to other species. To my great surprise, he touched my head with his, which I learned afterward was his way of blessing people, while he whispered, “I think I want to follow you” or “You make me want to follow you.” A Hindu from Bangladesh later translated the swami’s statement for me. “He was telling you that he considers you to be his equal,” the taxi driver said. I replied that being regarded as that swami’s equal felt a lot better than had he regarded me as his superior, for in my view, we are all spiritually-compromised finite, time-limited beings learning from each other.


The full essay is at "On Kindness to Detractors."

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Selfishness and Damnation on a Subway

Imagine, if you will, a crowded, standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious: an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them. Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e., all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.


John Calvin, a Protestant reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1] All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating Christian pro-wealth paradigm of their respective times.[2]

Much less problematic is the attribution by observing selfishness of someone not being among the elect saved by the shedding of blood by the Son of God, for, as Paul and Augustine both claimed, God is love and it emanates not only in a person’s love directed to God, but also to one’s neighbors in benevolentia universalis. Intentionally depriving another subway passenger on a crowded train of a seat by taking one up with one’s backpack is antipodal to benevolence, which manifests divine love according to Christianity.

In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom one dislikes.[3] Literally “rubbing shoulders” with another passenger on a subway car is much less inconvenient than being charitable towards adversaries. The root of the word charity is love rather than philanthropy.

In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passenger moved his backpack, who knows, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat? 

Nevertheless, Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences, which are in a person's self-interest, the root is still a sin. Needless to say, this point applies to the naked underlying narrow selfishness of the baker and the consumer in Adam Smith's theory of a competitive market, where not even moral sentiments can be assumed to be in the calculus of either participant. In relying on market-level unintended beneficial consequences of selfish economic pursuits by the crucially price-based impersonal mechanism of the proverbial "invisible hand," Smith does not even acknowledge or rely on intentional benefits for others from the enlightened or "compound" self-interest of market participants. Smith's view of human nature in the economic domain is thus relatively pessimistic. I submit that the business world empirically bears this out, as evinced, for example, by how corporations market their marketing under the subterfuge of "corporate social responsibility." Even attempts to reconcile organizational and societal norms are not ethical in nature, given Hume's notion of the naturalistic fallacy, which states that ethical principles are necessary to get from "is" to "ought." I submit that still another fallacy is instantiated by conflating the ethical and theological domains. In short, God transcends and thus is not limited to "ought." The profane world of business greed is oceans of time from the realm of godliness. 

As preferable as damning selfishness is to reckoning a rich person as being favored by God, distinguishing the ethical domain from that of salvation is important because the two domains are, I submit, qualitatively different even though they do interrelate. Hence Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling distinguishes the universally-accessible moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives.  What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son, Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated, divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical itself is theological in nature.

So while it is tempting to relegate a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which is a manifestation of “God is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction between acting unethically and being saved or damned mitigate against making such a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake as superimposes stuff of our realm onto God. It could be, for example, that the man on the subway suffers from PTSD and thus God has mercy on such a trifling thing as the man taking up an extra seat. Furthermore, it could be that the man was on his way to care for his sick grandmother and triggering his social anxiety on the train would compromise the care he could give.



1. Skip Worden, God’s Gold: Beneath the Shifting Sands of Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth. See also the author’s related academic treatise, Godliness and Greed: Shifting Christian Thought on Profit-Seeking and Wealth (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). The first text is of the non-fiction genre for the general educated reader, whereas the second text is of the academic genre. Ironically, God’s Gold not only contains additional chapters, but is also an ideational improvement on God’s Gold, especially concerning the concluding chapter of both books. A Christian apologist, for instance, would prefer the conclusion of God’s Gold, which hinges on the Logos in answering a critique of anthropomorphism from David Hume’s Natural History of Religion. Sometimes better ideas reach a general readership rather than cloistered, over-specialized academia.
2. Ibid.
3. Samuel Hopkins, An Eenquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).
4. Jonathan Edwards, The Nature of True Virtue (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1960).