Ben-Hur

By 2026, the world hardly needed any convincing regarding the strident zeal for endless vengeance in the Middle East, given the genocide still occurring in Gaza against the Palestinian people. In 1945, the world had needed no convincing on just how severe, and at what tremendous scale, state-sponsored (and engineered) hatred against a people deemed “subhuman” could be. The 1959 film-version of Ben-Hur is saturated with the desire for vengeance, with the antipodal motive of forgiveness only being shown as a more powerful, and thus stronger, phenomenon at the end of the film when Judah Ben-Hur’s mother and sister are spontaneously cured of leprosy at the very moment in which Jesus dies on the Cross. Only in aiding Jesus with water on his arduous way to the Cross does the Jewish man, Judah, realize the value of the suffering man’s righteous, unmerited suffering, especially relative to the value of even satisfied vengeance. At the moment of his death, Jesus, freed of a mortal body, cures the two women as a result of Judah’s change of heart. The message is that forgiveness wins over resentment and vengeance from a spiritual standpoint.

The full essay is at "Ben-Hur."

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.

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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.

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."

Secularized Religion in Nazi Ideology

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

The full essay is at "Political Religion."

Comparative Devotionalism: Hinduism and Christianity

I suspect that many people would feel very uncomfortable watching a religious person express devotional love to that person’s chosen deity in a very emotional and effusive manner. The sheer emotional intensity amid the dancing and chanting in a Hare Krishna temple can be daunting to a visitor. The phenomenon of what in Hinduism is called bhukti is hardly rare, and this begs the question of whether there is a human instinctual urge to feel and express even lifelong loving devotion to an entity that is not based in the created realm and thus cannot be realized and instantiated as another human being can be and is. Whether there is a phenomenon that is human, thus beyond the manifestations in various religions can go a long way in answering the question of whether an innate instinctual urge exists, even if it is more pressing in some people than in others. Some people, for instance, work their whole life in business, while other business practitioners reach a certain point in years when they “check out,” and head to a divinity school or seminary. Still other people assume religious vocations as young adults and spend the rest of their life ministering to people and officiating at religious rituals. Some people spend their entire life without feeling devotional love directed to a deity, while other people, such as the Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna, are utterly consumed by the inward fire of religious devotion. Was Ramakrishna’s devotion different in kind from a Christian’s intense love of Jesus, or is there what can be termed a human bhakti phenomenon, and if so, is it capable of breaking down religious barriers that can excite animosity and even hatred?

Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in March, 2025, discussed comparative Bhakti by looking at Hindu and Christian parallels. Bhakti yoga is the practice of loving devotion. There is a coherent thread back to the Vedas, and devotion to Krishna is salient in several of the chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita. In chapter 7 alone, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Here (now), O son-of-Pritha, how, [with] the mind attached to Me, engaged in Yoga, [with] Me as refuge, you may know Me fully, without doubt.”[1] Taking refuge is other than epistemological (i.e., knowing), as dependence is involved. Furthermore, Krishna says that people who act meritoriously and for “whom evil has come to an end” are those who “worship” Krishna rather than the other deities.[2] Because the early-medieval Hindu theologian and philosopher Shankara claims that even in the Gita, achieving the realization that one’s self (atman) is identical to brahman, which is being itself and is conscious or aware, it is important to stress that Bhakti devotion to a deity involves more than just knowing the deity’s higher nature; loving devotion, such as is evinced in worshipping a deity, is the essence of bhakti.

Although it is problematic to apply the Hindu term bhakti to other religions, such as Christianity, just as applying the word “God” to brahman is also problematic, devotion to a deity is in other religions besides Hinduism, and by looking at the similarities, the phenomenon of religious devotion can be better understood because the artifacts of particular religions can be distinguished from the trans-religious phenomenon itself. This, by the way, is an excellent reason for studying comparative religion or theology, though such an orientation comes with the opportunity cost of the foregone benefits of specializing in one religion.

One such bhukti parallel pertains to Jesus washing the disciples’ feet[3] and Krishna washing Sudama’s feet.[4] Both Lord Jesus and Lord Krishna commend service by leading by example. Also, both highlight the closeness of God and the intimacy that is possible in loving devotion.  Finally, both passages imply the personal care and attention that the Son of God and Lord Krishna give to humans, who should thus be humble (and grateful) in return, for such care and attention is voluntary.

Another parallel of devotion to God pertains to Judaism and Christianity, and this similarity will lead us to back to making Hindu-Christian comparisons. Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength” and Matthew 22:37-40 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Although the latter extends love to interpersonal relations, both passages are very direct in issuing the imperative that devotional love is to be directed to God. Of the thought of Gregory of Nyssa (4^th century), Navarette wrote, “The perfection of human nature consists in being united with God by a kind of devotion which leads the soul to love Him above all things.”  Furthermore, Francis of Assisi’s prayer includes “to be loved as to love.”

It may that in the Hindu Gita, love itself is not so explicitly mentioned by Krishna, whereas taking refuge in and worshiping Krishna are more explicitly demanded, yet this does not mean that devotional love is not much desired by Krishna in the Gita as by the Christian God. Rather, it may be the case that Christianity builds on the passage in Deuteronomy to be known as the religion of love, hence both Paul and Augustine wrote that God is love. Devotion is to be directed to pure (agape) love itself. Is this the epitome of bhukti, or is the Hindu articulation really all that different from being devoted to love personified (or as an entity, rather than impersonal), especially considering the example of Ramakrishna in the nineteenth century?  After all, as a Hindu devotee of Kali the goddess of death, Ramakrishna was so authentically and lovingly devoted to her that a brahmin priest let Ramakrishna speak extemporaneously during a ritual. His devotion to Kali was certainly no less than that of Thérèse of Lisieux and that of Gertrud of Helfta to the Christian Lord Jesus. Both women were cloistered Christian nuns; at the very least they had few distractions, so they could devote themselves entirely to being devoted in love to Jesus.

Taking refuge in Krishna is not so far off, and, as stated above, it is more emotional than knowing Krishna’s higher nature epistemologically. It may be that the intimacy itself (e.g., high trust) that is inherent in taking refuge in a deity is none other than love, as in the old expression, where there’s smoke, there’s fire; or, taking refuge could be in terms of ontological dependence that is a micro reflection of the fact that creation is dependent on Krishna’s creative force. Perhaps in teasing out the relationship between love and radical dependence, taking refuge in Krishna can be compared with the bridal imagery that has been so often appropriated by Christian mystics—nuns being known as brides of Christ. Certainly historically, there has been much interpersonal and societally-structured dependence in the marriage relationship between a husband and a wife; presumably love has existed in at least some of those relationships in spite of the dependence of (especially pregnant) wives on their respective “bread winners.”

Origen of Alexandria (185-254 CE) wrote on the Song of Songs of the Old Testament, treating the religious poem as an allegory of the relationship between the soul and God. According to Navarette, for Origin “the bride symbolizes the soul, while the bridegroom represents Christ”, and the objective is to “cultivate an intimate relationship with the Divine.”  In his presentation, Navarette also cited Bernard of Clairvaux, who, in his book, On Loving God, advances the idea that, according to Navarette, “besides reverence, there is the intimacy such that a bride has with her bridegroom.”  For Bonaventure too, “to attain God includes the imagery of a bride and bridegroom.” Similarly, Ramakrishna thought of himself as married to Kali, and to be married to the goddess of death is no small commitment. Moreover, how could any loving devotion of a creature such as Man not involve radical dependence, for neither in Hinduism nor in Christianity does a divinity need to create a world out of some kind of lack in the divine itself.

Even though Christianity’s core is that God itself is (selfless) love, love devoted to Krishna is certainly salient in the devotionalism. Even so, devotional love being directed to love itself (agape) does seem to be a good candidate to be known as the epitome of bhakti. This is not to say that Christian devotionalism is superior to Hindu bhakti; rather, it is to raise the thought, what if Krishna’s higher nature were exclusively love itself? Would that change how devotion to Krishna is to be interpreted in the Gita and practiced by bhukti practitioners?

In his presentation, Navarette discussed the work the scholar, Francis Clooney, who pioneered the field of comparative theology. Navarette cited Clooney’s contention that “even partial common ground can strengthen our own religious convictions.” Perhaps Krishna’s description of devotion to Him can be useful to a Christian who is trying to love Jesus better. Moreover, in Hindu God, Christian God, Clooney, according to Navarette, predicts that the “fixed boundaries separating religions become all the less plausible . . . because the theological insights arising in comparative study will push those boundaries.” For example, Clooney claims that a Christian could accept the virtues of Narayana, who is the protector of all who has supreme mercy.[5] Sounds a lot like Jesus, doesn’t it? Preaching God’s mercy instead of drumming divine wrath into everyone’s heads in the Gospel stories, Jesus can be seen as a reformer in Judaism. To be sure, unrepentant sinners, such as “Christian” clergy who rape children, deserve divine wrath, but this should not prevent other people from realizing that divine mercy opens up the possibility of love, which presumably includes that which a religious devotee directs to a deity. Given the ontological chasm between deities and the created realm, which includes us, mercy opening up a space for love can create the sort of intimacy that collapses distance, and this can apply not only vertically, but also as benevolentia universalis.

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1. Gita 7.1 in Georg and Brenda Feuerstein, The Bhagavad-Gita: A New Translation (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), p. 171.
2. Gita 7.28 in Ibid., p. 177.
3. John 13:1-17 (in The New Testament).
4. Bhagavata Purana, tenth canto 80:20-26.
5. Vedanta Desika, Rahasya Traya Saram (14^th century).

On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

In the Book of Exodus, the anthropomorphism as a narrative device in myth is not problem-free, so it is important to emphasize the leitmotif of distance between God and humans. “Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”[1] God remembers, which is an interesting anthropomorphism considering that omniscience is a divine attribute. That God remembers the covenant seems to imply that God had not been paying attention when the “Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service.”[2] So as to avoid the obvious incompatibility of omniscience and needing to remember, one commentator claims that the word, “’remember,’ when used with God as subject, typically means that God has determined to initiate action.”[3] But perhaps the two things—recalling and deciding—merely occur together (i.e., positively correlated) rather than mean the same thing even when applied to God as the subject. God is depicted nevertheless as being distant, moreover, looking upon the Israelites rather than being among them, and coming “down to deliver” the Israelites, which is a fundamental change from Genesis, where God is so close that God makes clothes for Adam and Eve once they realize they are naked.[4]

“What was God doing, during those years the Israelites suffered under the Egyptians?”[5] It is as if the hands-on deity had gone up to attend to other business, and turned back to the Israelites because their groans had reached a sufficient volume or intensity. Then God would be with Moses as he returns to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Alternatively, being omniscient and omnipotent, God may have been allowing the increased subjugation of the chosen people so they would experience their dependence on God, but the Israelites could not fathom this divine plan and thought instead that their god had been away. Such a divine plan is distinct from the infliction or permitting of suffering by God as punishment for the Israelites having violated the covenant. As one commentator admits, the Israelites in Egypt “are not accused of having done anything wrong.”[6] So the prophets’ association of the absence of God with “judgment for Israel’s sins” cannot apply here.[7] As in the Book of (righteous) Job, no “rationalization of the absence of God is ever attempted, but the issue,” according to one commentator, “is resolved by the coming of the God who saves.”[8] I disagree that the issue of God’s absence in the midst of undeserved suffering in the case of the Israelites in Egypt is resolved by the return of God, even if only in terms of God’s attention, for unlike Job, no wager calling for the slaves’ undeserved suffering to test their faith is mentioned in the text. In my view, the absence of God when the Israelites’ servitude was especially harsh is simply necessary for there to be the harshness, which in turn serves as the reason why leaving Egypt makes sense. God is anthropomorphized by the author here as God needing to remember, as a human does, for this narrative purpose. Were it the case as in Wisdom of Solomon that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them,”[9] then presumably there would be no need for the Israelites to leave Egypt, and thus for God to save them.

In Exodus 3, there is also distance, but here the reason is easily understood. God at the burning bush tells Moses, ”Come no closer! . . . for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”[10] Here it is not that God goes off as if on other business; rather, it is humanity that should maintain a distance from God out of respect for God’s inherent holiness. Indeed, as one commentator states, “’Holiness’ has been identified as the quality of divinity itself . . .”[11] The definitive quality in experiencing holiness as analyzed by Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy, can be understood to be the numinous quality in which a wholly other, or “supernatural,” presence is sensed or inferred in the immediate context of liminality, as if the person were momentarily suspended between two types of existence or fundamental modes of reality. This core of holiness goes beyond what we can grasp as rationality or moral goodness and even “defies language.”[12] To use the term, “supernatural,” for instance, does not do the phenomenon justice.

Furthermore, sensing of a numen in a liminal situation is more fundamental than are the qualities of being fascinated and terrified. The latter two can be considered to be reactions rather than as primary. Projected outwards, God can be said to be fascinating or angry, but more to the point is God’s transcendence tangent to our realm. Put another way, something holy has sufficient deep significance to be sensed as ontologically different, or “other,” in a fundamental way.  God is the very definition, referent, or epitome of holiness.

Mankind is already tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve by Exodus. Therefore, in Exodus, “Moses said to the Lord, ‘The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you yourself warned us, saying, ‘Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.’”[13] So even though “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God,” they “took their stand at the foot of the mountain.”[14] Even the priests were to stand at that distance from God, who had “descended upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”[15] After God spoke to the people, who then said to Moses, “do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”[16] “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”[17] Although “God’s appearance on the mountain is . . . described as both frightening and attractive, daunting and fascinating,”[18] the thick darkness, itself ontologically significant next to daylight, as the experience of a full solar eclipse may intimate to a degree, suggests the liminal presence of a numen—that something that is fundamentally other than ordinary is now present in our world.

Drawing on Otto’s terminology, the mysterium experienced from the sense of a transcendent, numinous presence can be understood to be more fundamental than the tremendum (terrifying, as daunting, as distinct from simply being afraid[19]) and fascinans (fascinating) qualities of a religious experience of the holy. Including the presence of mystery is perhaps just another way of saying that a religious experience, unlike experiences in other domains such as science, politics, and even ethics, go beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. In this way, Otto can be situated with the Christian theologian of the sixth century, (Pseudo) Dionysius.

One implication of the Otto-Dionysius “synthesis” or “nexus” is that even the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible falls short, as evinced in the Book of Job. Job’s “friends,” who insist rather harshly that Job must have been impious to suffer so, invite Yahweh’s anger, for in the “repeated attempts to reinterpret Job’s situation against all appearances in accordance with [Wisdom] teaching, they demonstrate that the attempt to interpret human fate according to fixed rules can become deeply inhuman.”[20] Initially sympathetic, lying on the dirt with Job for seven days, the “friends” essentially kick the guy when he’s down because they think they know God by building “entirely on the [Wisdom] teaching and its infallibility.[21] Thus, “God’s wrath burns against [Job’s friends] because,” God says, they have “’not spoken of me what is right.’”[22] God says to Eliphaz the Temanite, “’My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’”[23] Job’s three “friends” must “seek atonement” by performing a sacrifice to God; paradoxically, the “friends” “have to rely on Job’s petition on their behalf.”[24]

In contrast, Job does not try to “force God’s actions into any kind of theory,” then he recognizes the inappropriateness of his attitude after a dressing-down by God.[25] Job tells God, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in  dust and ashes.”[26] Job’s realization and repentance tells us that God’s initial claim that Job is a righteous man is correct after all. Job is blameless, not perfect, for he calls “God to account, indeed even accusing him” at one point, but he does so without the assumption of infallibility because, unlike his friends, questions the traditional human teaching that a “recognizable link” exists between what a person does and how much one suffers.[27] God rightly applies blame instead to Job’s self-righteous “friends,” for they have spoken of God without understanding, as they presumed that they could not be wrong about that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought and thus of theories. Humans cannot “understand God’s actions in terms of comprehensible and manageable rules.”[28] Faith seeking understanding should not put the cart before the horse, lest Aristotle’s notion of misordered concupiscence—putting a lower good above a higher one—apply.

Admittedly, it is tempting to stop at the anthropomorphist language of myth, or even to take that language literally, but God as wholly other necessitates mystery that goes with the inherent distance between us and a transcendent referent. Throughout the natural history of religion, the human proclivity to fixate on divine attributes at the expense of the distant mysterium of the divine, which relativizes even viewing it as a being (beings as entities being familiar to us in our realm), can at some point in a person’s experience of the divine compromise the sense of mystery and distance itself in yearning for that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought, senses, and feelings. It is thus important to keep in mind God’s command to stay off the mountain and the quality of mysterium in Otto’s theory, which, as a mere theory, does not exhaust God’s ways.

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1. Ex 2:23-25
2. Ex 1:13-14
3. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):5.
4. The quoted text is from Exodus 3:8.
5. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):4.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. 3:1
10. Ex 3:5
11. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):26.
12. Ibid., p. 31.
13. Ex. 14:23
14. Ex. 14:17
15. Ex 14:20, italics added.
16. Ex 20:19
17. Ex 20:21
18. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):28.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
21. Ibid., italics added. Ignorance that presumes that it cannot be wrong evinces the arrogance of false entitlement, as if the creature were above its Creator.
22. Ibid., p. 354. God’s statement is in Job 42:7.
23. Job 42:7.
24. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
25. Ibid.
26. Job 42:5-6.
27. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
28. Ibid., p. 357.

Hinduism and Judaism on Deities and Transcendence

A basic tenet of the Advaita (non-dualist) Hindu philosophy of Shankara holds, “If saguna points to brahman’s immanence, nirguna points to brahman’s transcendence. . . . superiority should not be accorded to the nirguna mode of discourse.”[1] Being a non-dualist, Shankara held that brahman is one, since reality or existence is unitary, and thus brahman as existence and reality of all is indivisible ontologically. Applying David Hume’s separability thesis from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the distinction between nirguna and saguna can be understood as one made only by human reason, which does not mean that nirguna and saguna are separate entities. In short, we make the distinction; it does not belong to brahman itself. Lest it be thought that nirguna brahman has no analogue in Western philosophy of religion, we need only bring in Spinoza, whose nirguna-like God is so different from the saguna-comparable Abrahamic personal deity that both Judaism and Christianity banished his texts; Judaism excommunicated him. The tremendous qualitative difference between saguna and nirguna brahman can be useful to anyone trying to understand why Judaism excommunicated Spinoza, which is not my task here. Rather, taking nirguna brahman as reality or existence of everything, which, like Spinoza’s notion of God, itself has awareness, I want to stress both how much this differs in kind (i.e., qualitatively) from both Hindu deities and the Abrahamic deity, and the more fundamental point that brahman is One. In spite of the qualitative difference, keeping the Hindu concept of nirguna brahman in mind while thinking about the personal deities that are consistent with saguna brahman is useful.

Nirguna brahman is simply unrecognizable as God in the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity and Islam), whose deity is personal (i.e., an intelligent being), and thus can be classified under saguna brahman. Yet as Hume points out in his Natural History of Religion, anthromorphism (i.e., applying human qualities onto non-human entities) applied to the original idea of divine simplicity says more about us than the divine. Hence saguna is not sufficient to account for transcendence. As Dionysius wrote, God (or the divine) goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (emotion). Nirguna brahman is a concept that meets this need—if there is such a human instinct for transcendence as defined by Dionysius, while saguna satisfies the desire of the human mind, as postulated by Hume, to comprehend things that have at least some degree of likeness to ideas (from sense impressions, according to Hume) that are already in the human mind.  I first discuss the transcendence of nirguna brahman, which bringing in Spinoza will facilitate, after which I consider saguna brahman by looking at creation and, related, the word “God.”

The Taittiriya Upanishad twice (2.4.1 and 2.9.1) “describes brahman as that from which all words, with the mind, return, having failed to reach. Even the Vedas, in speaking about brahman, are constrained to use conventional words derived from everyday usage and, since these emerge from our experiences of finitude, they can never directly signify brahman. . . . Words are mere pointers to that which is beyond the meaning of all words and definitions.”[2] This is vintage Dionysius on God going beyond human ideas. The orientation is to beyond, or beyondness itself, rather than to what is familiar. As Hume writes, the human brain has a lot of trouble holding onto something like sheer beyondness, and it is difficult to yearn experientially for a naked beyond sans even the distinction between substance and attributes (or accidents). Hence the human need for saguna brahman in Hindu philosophy and a personal God in the Abrahamic religions. Nevertheless, nirguna brahman even as a transcendence-oriented concept can help us to keep saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity from becoming human, all too human.

Reflecting on saguna brahman and the Abrahamic deity with nirguna brahman in mind can highlight the qualitative difference between gods and mere mortals. “To posit omnipotence as an attribute of brahman . . . does not mean that brahman possess (sic) the attribute of omnipotence in the same way that a lotus has the color blue as its attribute. The act of creation and being in relation to the creation does not alter the unity of brahman’s nature.”[3] Indeed, nirguna brahman transcends substance and attributes altogether. So rather than stipulating the law of karma from past lives as Shankara does to obviate the problem of evil, or limiting God’s omnipotence to that which is logically possible as Aquinas does, treating brahman’s omnipotence as qualitatively different than what it means for a human to have an attribute, and thus power in this case, may be sufficient to solve the problem of evil, at least in the case of Hinduism. Brahman’s holding of an attribute is, in other words, “wholly other,” and thus we cannot say using language that an all-powerful brahman is responsible for evil and thus is not good.

We can draw on the notion of nirguna brahman even in the West because the notion exists in Western philosophy of religion, even if in apparent opposition to the dominant conception of the divine as a personal deity. “The essential nature of brahman is indicated by the words satyam (reality), jnanam (awareness), and anantam (infinite).”[4] This is how Spinoza describes God as “reality or nature,” by which he means everything that exists. As God is a mode, according to Spinoza’s philosophy, God has awareness, but God is not a personal deity, as that would reek of anthropomorphism, and Spinoza was no fan of humanism in spite of the fact that his Jewish congregation and the Catholic Church excoriated him for being an atheist. Similarly, Nietzsche has been wrongfully accused of the same thing, even though he was pointing out the internal contradiction in a particular conception of God (i.e., Abrahamic). At any rate, Spinoza’s conception of God is in sync with distinguishing nirguna brahman from saguna brahman, in that the latter represents specific deities but without any doctrine of creation. Spinoza would agree that “the attribution of creatorship to brahman is limiting and defective. The world is also devalued when it is regarded as the product of a nonessential nature of brahman.”[5]

For Spinoza, God is not apart from the world (i.e., all that exists/nature), but is the entire world. Thus, he has been said to be a pantheist. Similarly, the original body, prior to the creation even of the gods, of purusa merges pre-creation materiality with the divine, though later Shiva and Vishnu were said to be purusa (i.e., the original body, out of which the multiplicity in the world comes).   Spinoza’s God is of course not a personal deity, as such a conception of the divine is anthropomorphic.  

Spinoza’s claim that redemption from suffering is like a person realizing, by reasoning, that one is not a specific wave, but instead the entire ocean, which analogously represents the whole of nature, or reality, and thus God. This is very similar to saying that atman is essentially brahman. The entire ocean has awareness, and is everything, and is not created, so Spinoza can once again be interpreted as viewing the God as being like nirguna brahman.

Keeping nirguna brahman in mind, we can hedge against excessive likeness of even saguna brahman to us. The suggestion in the Taittiriya Upanishad (3.6.1) is that brahman chooses to create the world from the limitless bliss-nature (ananda) of brahman, an “outpouring of the fullness of brahman and not an act motivated by any sense of incompleteness.”[6] Shankara “does admit the fact of desire on the part of brahman.”[7] But the desire does not presuppose or come out of a lack of something in brahman. Shankara writes, “What then are these (desires of brahman)? They are by nature truth and knowledge, and they are pure by virtue of their identity with brahman.”[8] Thus, the desires are not like ours, as that which we desire is not identical with us, but, rather, is external and extrinsic to us. Even the notion of the purpose or telos of brahman is qualitatively different than what it is for a human being to have a purpose. “While being cognizant of the limits of reasoning and the inadequacies of analogies, it is not impossible, with the aid of the Upanishads, to glimpse the significance of brahman’s desire to share its plenitude through self-multiplication. The desire for meaning, as numerous personal stories in the Upanishads reveal, is fundamental to the human being. The meaning of human existence, however, cannot be understood apart from the purpose of the one who brought all things into being.”[9] The one here must be saguna brahman, whose purposes include creation.

Unlike in the Abrahamic religions, the world is not “fallen” in the Hindu creation myths. “If the world . . . is seen positively as the outcome of the intentional creativity of brahman, expressing and sharing the fullness of brahman, the world does not have to be negated or rejected.”[10] Christianity comes to this only by the sacrificial atonement of Jesus Christ on the Cross; creation is redeemed, or restored, to a right relationship with God.

Also unlike case of the Abrahamic deity, God, Hindu creation is not ex nihilo (i.e., from nothing), for purusa already exists to be cut up as a sacrifice that gives rise to the world and the gods as we know and experience them. However, the fact that the repeated phrase, “And God said,” which immediately precedes God distinguishing or separating things, does not precede the earth as “a formless void,” which is not empty but is of “waters,”[11] may suggest that Yahweh distinguishes things rather than creates ontologically ex nihilo. That is, the message may be like that of Wittgenstein, wherein naming or stating is crucial to classifying something as something (and as distinct, or separate ontologically) from something else. It follows that the name of God is very important, even ontologically. That is to say, the word, “God,” is, according to Karl Rahner, “itself a reality” because the word “asks about reality as a whole and in its original ground.”[12] By implication, the word and its unique reality are qualitatively different from all other words and the sort of reality that they have. Just look at the salience of God’s name in the following passages from the Hebrew Bible:

“(A)ll the people of the earth will know your name.” (1 Kgs 8.43) According to Rendtorff, this means that “(t)o know the name of God means to acknowledge God himself.”[13] “Swearing by the name of YHWH is also an act of confession: ‘Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name’ (Deut 6:13; 10.20).”[14] In Deuteronomy, “there is repeated discussion of the ‘place which the LORD will choose to let his name dwell.’”[15] “Here God will be present in his name.”[16] Deuteronomy “makes it clear that the prime concern is not with where God ‘lives,’ but with the presence of the divine name.”[17] I submit that this takes the significance of language too far, which I think Wittgenstein does too in claiming that there is no pre-classification awareness of something as a something prior to it having a name. I submit that God’s attributes, such as omnibenevolence and omnipotence, are more critical than God’s name, for, as Rendtorff points out, there are four names for God in the Hebrew Bible, and the name of something simply points to it, whereas the qualities and character of something are interior and inherent. Again, recalling nirsuna brahman is helpful; that brahman transcends and thus relativizes substance and attribute (or, peripatetically, accident) suggests just how integral the attributes of any personal deity that can be classified under saguna brahman are to the divine nature. Bringing in Dionysius, if God goes beyond the limits of human cognition, then God goes beyond words, and thus names. In other words, transcendent reality transcends the unique reality of the Abrahamic God’s name.

So, we can and should go beyond the Biblical statements, “We trust in your holy name” (Ps 106.21) “whose name is holy.” (Isa 57.15) Rendtorff makes the crucial point that, “But above all it is God himself who hallows his name.”[18] God’s name is holy because God is holy, not vice versa. Holiness is not based on the name of a god, and ultimately not even in a god’s qualities or attributes, but, rather, on that which any word for “God” (as per saguna brahman) points to, which in turn is ontologically not limited to human experience, cognition, perception, and emotion. If there is a human instinctual urge, or even attraction, to think beyond thought and yearn or reach beyond even reality or existence, then the momentum of secularity in modernity must be more a rejection of hollow or worn-out institutional religion than a permanent shift away from religion per se. Even the atheist David Hume posited such an enduring urge of the mind to behold divine simplicity, which our minds muck up by anthropomorphizing that which is transcendent into something familiar, and thus, human, all too human.

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1. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 90.
2. Ibid., p. 89.
3. Ibid., p. 90.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., pp. 92-3.
7. Ibid., p. 93. See Taittiriya Upanishad (2.6.1).
8. Anantanand Rambachan, The Advaita Worldview: God, World, and Humanity (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), p. 95. 
9. Ibid., p. 97.
10. Ibid.
11. Gen. 1:1-3.
12. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, William V. Dych, trans. (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978): 49-50.
13. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005): 592.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., p. 594.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 593.

Religion, Ethics, and Psychology: Three Distinct Domains

Compassion is so salient in so many religions that it is natural to assume that religious conduct is moral, which is to say that it issues in ethical conduct. Yet, as Kierkegaard emphasizes in Fear and Trembling, the divine decree that Abraham receives in the Book of Genesis translates into murder on the (universally accessible) level of ethics. In being almost going through with sacrificing his only son, Isaac, Abraham is guilty of attempted murder, which is unethical. Abraham’s faith in the validity of the divine decree can thus be distinguished from morality. Unlike ethics, religion is sourced beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotions, and is the domain is thus transcendent even as it is also immanent in the world. Even though ethical principles and faith can dovetail, as in five of the Ten Commandments, it is important that the two domains—morality and religion—are regarded as distinct, and thus with their own distinctive bases and criteria owing to the respective natures of each domain. In his book, A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber attempts a mega-synthesis of many fields of knowledge. Such a broad project carries with it the pitfall of making conjectures that draw on or involve domains of knowledge outside of one’s own. I think the risk of such over-stepping is significant coming from both vantage-points in morality and religion (i.e., ethics and theology) when the two domains are mingled or intertwined without due recognition of how they are sui generis, of their own genus (type). Wilber even conflates a third domain, that of psychology, with those of ethics and religion. I begin by looking at morals and religion in general, holding off psychology until I address Wilber’s theory specifically.

In Christianity, it seems at first glance that it would be more difficult to differentiate the two domains, for God, which both Paul and Augustine wrote is love itself, lies in neighbor-love, which presumably includes compassion and thus results in ethical conduct. However, both in theory and practice, unethical conduct may (and has) stemmed from defending the faith, such as in the Crusades. It has been too easy for Christian leaders to relegate or dismiss outright the love-thy-enemy preachment in the Gospels to defend Christ (or His Church) from internal and external threats. Nevertheless, it is difficult to square of love of neighbor, which especially includes (or is epitomized by) love of enemies, with (verbally or physically) attacking and even killing detractors instead of helping them at a human level. Even if Christian faith is ever characterized explicitly and foremost in terms of compassion especially to people who insult or even go after us, faith and morality can still be distinguished as being in two distinct domains whose respective foundations and criteria differ qualitatively (i.e., fundamentally). Most crucially, distinctly religious faith has a transcendent reference point, or source, that is beyond the limits of our realm, whereas ethical theories do not; they pertain only within our earthly realm to personal and interpersonal conduct. Put another way, only God is wholly other, even as God is immanent in Creation; that which is in the created realm does not exhaust God. Otherwise, God could simply be a creation of human understanding, using stuff of this world such as ethical theories to furnish the content of that which is held to be divine.

I contend that religion, or faith, and ethics are two distinct domains even they obviously can influence each other. I am not contending that people of religious faith should treat other people unethically or engage in vices. The story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac can be read as the claim that faith in (or, more crudely, obedience to) a divine decree (or revelation, moreover) is not subject or confined to human morality. The divine decree that Abraham sacrifice his only son even though Yahweh has also promised the old man that his seed would populate the land is known only to him, whereas the ethical principle that killing someone is murder is universally accessible to anyone’s knowledge. The Ten Commandments have yet to arrive in the story, so there is no tension within faith between the immorality of murder—Thou shalt not kill—and Abraham’s sacrifice; the tension there is that Yahweh both demands that Abraham sacrifice his only son and promises that Abraham’s descendants will multiply throughout the land. Even in its internal tension, which Yahweh of course resolves in calling off the sacrifice at the last minute, faith is quite another thing than morality, and can even legitimately violate its strictures. The legitimacy if faith as a domain (and a human phenomenon) is not based on an ethical theory or principle; nor, for that matter, is the legitimacy of an ethical theory necessarily based on faith. Even if faith is a factor, something more—something native to ethics—is necessary. The assumption that it is wrong that the innocent suffer is ethical in nature. The qualitatively different assumption that Abraham holds that it is really Yahweh that is commanding the sacrifice is distinctly theological in nature. Only the latter assumption is based on a metaphysic that includes a transcendent (and immanent) deity. Even if the innocent should not be harmed because there exists a transcendent deity, the latter can legitimately nullify this ethical claim, as is the case with Abraham.

When the content of a divine decree is moral, as is the case for half of the Ten Commandments, and in the case of Jesus’ preaching on neighbor-love as compassion towards others (even and especially assholes), the two domains dovetail. This does not mean that the content of faith is exhausted or sourced in ethical conduct; rather, the latter can manifest from faith. Intense, repeated prayer or meditation that transcends the world, for example, may, upon return to daily existence in the world, cause a person to have an enhanced sensitivity in terms of empirical senses and thus to other people, which in turn may trigger compassion, and the resulting conduct may be termed ethical in nature, but the prayer or meditation oriented metaphysically is not itself in the ethical domain and is thus not justified by ethical principles or theory. 

Is it true that a person doesn’t have to be moral to believe in God, by which I mean that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? Whether or not a person unjustifiably harms another person is separate from whether a person has a cognitive belief that an intelligent being exists not only within, but also outside of Creation. Where the substance of that being is believed to be love, including in neighbor-love as expressed in compassionate acts towards other people, and here I have Christianity in mind, then it is contradictory to not believe in such acts while believing in God; failing to do such acts, or doing the opposite, can occur even if the person believes in neighbor-love; this does not involve two beliefs in contradiction. So a Christian cannot hold both that one’s enemies should not in principle be treated with compassion, but rather, with vengeance, and believe in the Christian conception of God. Such a belief, and the related faith in being saved, is for naught, Paul wrote, if there is not love. To be sure, it is possible to hold that enemies should not be loved and still believe that an intelligent being exists outside of Creation, as the first claim involves moral conduct (as well as love) whereas the second claim is metaphysical (or metaphysical-experiential). Looked at from this standpoint, the moral and theological domains can be seen to be very different, and thus distinct, indeed.  

To sum up the argument thus far, even in cases in which the content of a divine decree has ethical meaning or significance, the deity itself transcends the ethical domain because the latter, being that it concerns conduct, is only in our realm (i.e., no transcendent extension). Put another way, the divine reaching into the human domain does not limit the divine to be within the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion.[1] The Creator extends beyond its Creation.

To claim that spirituality (or religious development) is simply a more advanced or higher level of moral development is thus a flawed assertion that conflates two distinct domains. Faith, which can include a metaphysical belief (i.e., that God exists), is not a “super” moral principle, as if religion were the cherry atop an ethical sundae. To put both theology and ethics as intervals on a linear line as if one were a development from or of the other is to conflate two different types of things. This is precisely the error that Ken Wilber commits in his desire to come up with a theory of everything. To understand why, it is necessary to briefly discuss Kohlberg’s theory of moral development because Wilber bases his own theory of stages of consciousness in transpersonal psychology on that theory.

On a macro level of generalization, I contend that psychology, ethics, and religion or spirituality are  different and distinct domains, even though they often interrelate. Wilber, however, treats them almost as synonymous, or at least as de facto species of the same domain. He thus jumps between them in terms of stages of development, such that developing in one domain is necessary before a stage of development in another domain can be reached. His focus is on the incremental nature of growth. He writes, “We don’t go from an acorn to a forest in a quantum leap. There are stages in all growth, including human.”[2] That a given growth is of just one thing, such as moral development, while growth in something else is another growth, is missing from his theory as he conflates growths in different things together.

In his theory of moral development, Lawrence Kohlberg posts six stages, grouped into three levels: preconventional, conventional, and post-conventional. Individual rights and principles of conscience characterize the highest level of moral development. Wilber situates Abraham Maslow’s notion of self-actualization at this level even though self-actualization is in the domain of ethics. Wilber does not provide an explanation for how the ethical contents of individual rights and conscience necessarily correspond with self-actualized people. Doing so is necessary because ethical principles and psychology are two different academic disciplines and domains. Even if the sentiment of disapprobation is ethical judgment itself, as Hume contends, it is not the psychology itself, but what it points to in the ethical domain (e.g., a cognition that something wrong happened from seeing someone lying on the sidewalk stabbed in the back). Applying Hume’s notion of the naturalistic fallacy, an emotion itself merely is, and is thus not an ought. One must make moves to the ethical domain in terms of ethical justification before one can make an ought statement. Wilber merely states that self-actualization is at Kohlberg’s highest stage of moral development, as if the description of psychological self-actualization implied an ought.

Wilber also joins Kohlberg in positing a spiritual stage on top of the moral stages, defying the contention that spirituality (or religion) is distinct from psychology and morality. Kohlberg suggests that a higher level, called universal spiritual, is above his sixth moral stage. For both Kohlberg and Wilber, a person must develop morally through the successive moral stages before being able to reach a state of sustained spirituality rather than just occasionally having peak experiences. According to Wilber, the “genuinely spiritual or transpersonal stages of development (Kohlberg’s stage 7 and beyond) depend on their development upon all of the previous developments in stages 6, 5, 4, 3, and so on. Each of those stages contributes something absolutely essential for the manifestation of stage 7.”[3] But I submit that a spiritual experience, unlike psychological and moral ones, is capable of the sort of “intense interior illumination” that Wilber claims “can profoundly change a person’s life and open [a person] to new worlds, new dimensions, new modes of awareness.”[4] Such paradigmatic perceptual changes may be accompanied by psychological emotions but to reduce the former to the latter ignores the non-emotional aspects of being oriented to a reference point that transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Also, having such an orientation in an experience is not in itself moral or immoral; rather, both are transcended as they pertain to our realm, which is within our limits.

Furthermore, there are several specific problems with the claim that a person must pass through stages of moral development before universal spirituality (as distinct from psychological peak experiences, which Wilber conflates with episodic spirituality) can take hold. Firstly, Maslow’s claim that lower physiological needs must be satisfied before a person can self-actualize has been nullified by empirical studies. Someone who is hungry or homeless can attend to the higher need for self-actualization. While this does not necessarily mean that a person can be both at a high and low stage of moral development, as morality is another domain, that the “all lower stages must first be reached” assumption has been invalidated in one domain suggests that it may be invalid in other domains, pending research in those domains. Even if spirituality sits on top of moral development, the stages of the latter may not have to be reached in order to be a spiritual person.

Wilber does not say that all moral stages must be reached before a person can have a temporary spiritual experience. In fact, he claims that a spiritual experience can cause a person to shift one’s moral basis from the approval of other people to law and order. He contends that “a person at moral stage 3 who has a profound spiritual experience might be motivated to move to the next stage—in this case, to stage 4. They do not, under any circumstances, go from stage 3 to stage 7,” which is the spiritual stage.[5] It does not follow, however, that yearning for a transcendent dimension in meditation or for union with God (i.e., having a transcendent experience) in prayer would necessarily make a person feel the need to obey local laws, for example, because doing so is ethical or results in ethical conduct. Also, why can’t a person whose moral campus is set to obeying laws be a spiritual person? Obeying laws is salient in Judaism, for example. Half of the Decalogue is divine laws that have moral content yet the point is to obey God to demonstrate fidelity rather than to behave morally.

Therefore, a spiritual person can have a law-obeying orientation to morality and still not reduce religion to morality. If faith and morality are two distinct (albeit interrelated) domains, then it does not follow that only people who are highly developed morally can have a religious faith or sustained experience. Tapping into universal spirituality in terms of access to another dimension—one that is transcendent—or having an expanded awareness (also with a transcendent aspect), which is how Wilber describes the spiritual stage, need not depend on a person’s recognition of individual rights and principles of conscience.

I am not suggesting that people of faith should behave unethically, or that they should get a pass for doing so. Rather, I am challenging the claim that spirituality is simply a higher-order level of development on top of moral stages. Were this the case, then the content of spirituality could simply be the purest expression of someone’s ethical ideal, which, although of great value, is still a human artifact, or construction. That which has a transcendent “beyondness” (i.e., going beyond our realm, and thus being inherently beyond our reaches) cannot by definition be limited to anything that is within our realm. In Christian terms, this notion has been argued by pointing out that God’s divine power, or omnipotence, being unlimited or full, cannot be constrained or limited by an ethical theory devised by us, for God goes beyond our earthly realm and thus cannot possibly be constrained or limited by it or anything within it. That a divine command can have ethical content, such as Thou shalt not kill, is not to say that God is limited by a human ethic, for the ethical content comes from God in revelation. When we add to such ethical conduct our own ethical principles and theories, it would be impious to assume that God is thereby constrained.

It follows that a person may be spiritual and behave ethically to avoid punishment or for approval from other people; Kohlberg’s highest moral level of development need not be reached. To be spiritual often issues out in ethical, compassionate treatment of other people (and even salient beings, as in Jainism), and this is of course a good thing. People who hurt other people for religious reasons are justifiably condemned, and this is possible because people with normally-functioning brains have access to the ethical dimension of human existence. Divine decrees, and faith, moreover, go beyond such existence to reach its source, or very condition. Being oriented to it is not of ethical content unless a divine decree is itself ethical (i.e., a command how to treat other people). Even then, yearning for union with God in an experience of transcendence cannot be exhausted in one’s conduct in this world because transcendent experience goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and feelings. Put another way, if union sought with the divine transcends the self, then how the self behaves in the world cannot possibility reach far enough to match the inner experience. This is not to say that faith and experience that is transcendent cannot naturally issue out in compassionate conduct, but such faith is not a “super” kind of conduct.

Therefore, Ken Wilber is incorrect in A Brief History of Everything in claiming that the “genuinely spiritual or transpersonal stages of development (Kohlberg’s stage 7 and beyond) depend for their development upon all of the previous developments,” or stages of moral development.[6] The term spiritual is not synonymous with transpersonal, as if spirituality were inconsistent with the human ideology of individual and consistent with collectivism. Confining the transcendently-sourced by a human ideology is to place a higher good below a lower one, which Aristotle calls misordered concupiscence. Subjecting spirituality, for faith that has a transcendent aspect, to an ethical theory or principle is better than placing an ideology in the driver’s seat, but the underlying problem is the same: placing a lower above a higher, or a smaller above a larger. The distinction between human ideology and an ethical principle is not as clear as we might suppose, and may even be in part illusionary, as ideological agendas can be adept at clothing themselves in ethical ideals. Wilber’s spiritual cherry atop of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development is anti-individualist, yet union with God need not exclude the individual soul as such. Selfishness and greed are indeed sordid, and they often exclude ethical conduct, but this does not mean that spirituality is therefore transpersonal in the sense that it is necessary first for a soul to transcend or even lose itself. In short, the temptation that comes with placing spirituality atop morality may be to furnish the content from one’s own ideology. So even though we should expect spiritual people to behave ethically, the religious and ethical domains are distinct, and thus have their own respective foundations and criteria. Furthermore, neither should be reduced to psychology, for that domain does not include the logical justification of ethical positions (and principles) and transcendence beyond the limits of not only human conception and perception, but also emotion. In Wilber’s terms, spirituality as awareness of another dimension or reality is not in itself a psychological state.  

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1. I am drawing here on the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.
2. Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), p. 151.
3. Ibid., p. 150.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

The Devil’s Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic (1999) can be classified superficially as a coming-of-age film, for Hanna, the protagonist, starts out being immaturely contemptuous of her family’s ethnic and religious heritage and current practice. She tries to skip the Passover Seder at her grandparents’ house. That her aunt Eva had been a prisoner at a Nazi death camp makes no difference to Hanna—that is, until she is transported back as her aunt’s cousin (for whom Hanna was named) and experiences the camp herself. Whether she is really transported back in time (and if so, how?) or is merely dreaming is answered in the end but not so blatantly as would insult the viewers’ intelligence. Then again, it’s not every film that has allusions both to theology and The Wizard of Oz. The different ways in which that movie is incorporated and alluded to in this film are actually quite sophisticated in extending the viewers’ sense of synchronicity beyond the film’s narrative.

The full essay is at "The Devil's Arithmetic."

Religion as a Credible Academic Field of Study

What is religion? What does the domain of religion cover? What is excluded? Does opinion eclipse knowledge in marking the boundaries? Should we allow empirical self-identification claims from self-proclaimed religionists to veto any offending established knowledge of what the religion is? I contend that an atheist who claims he is nonetheless a practitioner of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam does not alter the fact that the three Abrahamic religions are monotheist. Atheist Judaism, for instance, is an oxymoron born of an arrogant subjectivity that offends reason itself and therefore cannot be valid. 

An opinion of a religious practitioner as to what core beliefs a religion should include does not mean that the knowledge we have of that religion is obliged to truncate itself or make room as if the opinion counts as much as the knowledge. For one thing, knowledge has more to back it up than does opinion. Knowledge of Christianity as a religion from Christian Scripture, for example, need not make room for a practitioner’s opinion that Christianity includes atheism, for that view is diametrically opposed to the existence of a deity in the scripture. An opinion seeking to remake or turn a religion against itself may insist on being recognized as valid, but this does not mean that the knowledge we have of Christianity (i.e., what it is as a religion) need be altered or contradicted.

Surely knowledge of something is not on par with opinions, for the basis of knowledge is not an aggregation of subjectivities. Rather, knowledge has a basis that is not so flimsy, so knowledge can serve as an anchor by which subjectivities can situate their respective opinions. For example, Christianity is classified as a monotheist religion. This theological classification does not come from subjectivity, but, rather, what the Old and New Testaments state, even if they are not considered to be the inerrant Word of God. That there is one god is a major theme rather than the offspring of an interpretation. Even though an interpretation can be said to be an opinion, even an informed one, the knowledge we have of Christianity is too certain to be a bunch of opinions shared by even many people. It follows that starting from the assumption that every opinion is valid with respect to knowledge is problematic. We are indeed an impious lot with regard to our religious opinions, supposing them to trump that which is known. Such arrogance belies any claim of being a monotheist.

I submit that knowledge in the religious-studies discipline is vulnerable to the presumptuous onslaught of religious ideologues who wrongly view knowledge of a religion to be subordinate to their individual self-identifications, ethnographically. Moreover, the problem is that some practitioners give ethnography a veto over other sources of knowledge of religions. They may even claim that the very term religion is up for grabs even though the fact that a discipline exists is predicated on there being some idea of what religion means (i.e., of what counts as religious).

Also, knowledge of a religion may be transmitted by biased scholars who allow their own respective religious opinions to overrun the duty to teach knowledge unfettered. We may even ask: Does knowledge of religion (and particular religions) exist, or have scholars of religion merely been spouting their own opinions through the lenses of reason? I submit that although scholarly subjectivity has played a role in the accumulated knowledge of religion, this pathogen can be constrained by the academic methodologies on how knowledge can legitimately be acquired.

For example, a scholar who is Christian may want a survey to show that a lot of a city’s residents are Christian, but that same scholar would be obliged to use random sampling and calculate  “N,” the sample size using a method that cannot be bent by the scholar’s own preferences. Such a survey could thus be replicated by other scholars. The scholar may be ideologically in favor of the self-identification of a respondent as an atheist Christian, but other scholars could invalidate that data-point because the knowledge we do have of the Christian religion includes that it is monotheist, and therefore a person who self-identifies as an atheist cannot be classified as a Christian. 

What about the teaching of religion? At seminaries and even some divinity schools, the study of Christian tends to be skewed in a sectarian direction. At Yale’s school of divinity, for example, an evangelical Christian assistant professor (who did not get tenure) told students who were asking questions that they professor deemed exogenous (i.e., outside the contours of the dogma) that only students with a good character receive the school’s masters of divinity degree. To be sure, that degree is chiefly though not exclusively ministry-oriented, but Yale itself was by that time not a Christian university. It was originally founded in 1703 by Congregational ministers who resented the Unitarian influence in Harvard’s divinity school (that influence has its own biases, often at the expense of religion itself). In fact, when I attended Yale, the president, Rick Levin, was Jewish. At one point, he attempted to move the divinity school closer to the main campus from being located on top of a hill—a city on a hill. One opposing divinity student said in a seminar, “But they are relativists” at the bottom of the hill, and “Hitler was a relativist!” Suffice it to say that the Divinity School was able to remain on the fringes of Yale’s campus. Perhaps this continued to thwart Yale’s administration from being able to act as a check on its divinity school’s academic bias. That the department of religious studies was located at the heart of the main campus meant that academic standards could be protected in the study of religion from non-sectarian standpoints.

Yet scholars in departments of religious studies are hardly objective; we are, after all, subjective beings, and we all have our biases, whether religious or political. Many years after I had graduated from Yale, a retired instructor from Arizona State University’s department of religious studies fraudulently misrepresented himself to me as a scholar even though he did not have a doctorate in the field. I became suspicious because he contended that how people “self-identify” themselves in religious terms trumps how a particular religion is classified theologically. According to the man with a masters in church history, ethnographic surveys decide the content and contours of a given religion even in regard to how it is classified theologically. “The theology doesn’t matter,” he told me. So if someone self-identifies as an agnostic practitioner of Judaism (i.e., a religious Jew), then scholars are obliged to consider agnostic Judaism to be a part of Judaism rather than as Jews with a weak religious faith.

I told the pretend-scholar that Judaism is classified as a monotheistic religion. “That’s just your opinion,” he relied dismissively. Just as he had dismissed the fact that scholars in the liberal arts have doctorates, he dismissed theology even as regards a theological classification! Why, I wondered, would he stoop to misrepresent himself as a scholar how little he respected actual scholars and knowledge itself. He was an ideologue who wanted to defend people who feel oppressed by religion. God forbid that a scholar might reply, “agnosticism is exogenous to Judaism rather than a type of it.” Like Socrates’ interlocutor Euthyphro, the modern-day interloper suddenly decided he no longer wanted to talk to me and said, “I’ve never approached you” in the café where we met. He had also said at the end of one of our conversations, “After the ten minutes I gave you, the rest was charity.” Such must be the arrogance of non-scholars at Arizona State University that even authentic scholars are considered lower.

That a university would allow an ideologue who relegates inconvenient knowledge as subservient to opinion even just to teach caught me by surprise, though admittedly Yale had been allowing Christian scholar-ministers to teach at that university’s divinity school in a way that delimited questions to those that fit within those professors’ own interpretations of Christian scripture. The difference is perhaps that those scholarly priests respected knowledge, for the pretended scholar from Arizona State University so obviously did not. “Some religious Jews self-identify as atheist Jews, so there is a type of Judaism that is not monotheist,” he told me once. He bristled at my reply that such Jews could be wrong. To the pretend scholar, it was the knowledge that would be wrong if confronted with a conflicting self-identification.

The knowledge we have of a religion should not bow to a convenient self-identification by a practitioner because knowledge trumps opinion. That is to say, we can legitimately have more confidence in knowledge within the academic field than in the opinions of non-academic practitioners. Scholars do not throw out knowledge simply because it runs against an ideology, especially if the ideologue is not a scholar in the field. The pretend-scholar I met had no problem misrepresenting himself as a scholar because he had no respect for the knowledge in the field. What mattered to him was that no one could refute a self-identification as incorrect from the standpoint of what we know of the religion based on itself rather than any other religion.

Were self-identifications permitted to set the contours of a religion, it could change beyond all recognition into another religion even as it retains its sacred texts, symbols, and rituals. A religion could be turned on its head. This has in fact occurred. The General Conference of Friends (Quakers), which covers the Northeast of the United States, has declared itself not to be Christian because enough Quakers there do not self-identify as Christians. From my visits at those Meetings while I studied at Yale, I suspect that the ideological opinion that Christianity has historically been dogmatic and oppressive to heretics and other religions was a factor in a significant number of the self-identifications at odds with Quakerism being a Christian denomination/sect.  In contrast, Quaker Meetings west of the Mississippi River tend to be evangelical Christian. Friends there doubtlessly do not recognize the faiths of the Friends in the General Conference. Indeed, Quakerism as paganism is not recognizable, for the reason that self-identifications of especially new practitioners have been allowed to be determinative for what Quakerism is.

What if enough religious Jews were to self-identify as atheists? Would there be such a thing as atheist Judaism—Judaism without God? An ideological stance wherein Yahweh is deemed to be oppressive and even cruel to people of other religions could prompt some religious Jews to self-identify as atheist observant Jews (i.e., practitioners of Judaism). Would scholars be obliged to reclassify Judaism from being monotheistic in spite of the Hebrew Scriptures? I submit that the answer is no because ideology, as highly subjective, is not sufficient to trump knowledge, especially if the latter is based on the religion itself rather than being from a comparative classification scheme that ignores the knowledge we have of the religions themselves.

This is not to say that scholars are objective founts of knowledge. Because the knowledge learned by scholars of religion does not reduce to opinions, those of the scholars themselves should not bias the knowledge, just as self-identifications by practitioners of a religion should not. Universities, whether Yale or Arizona State University, are responsible for seeing to it that scholars and especially non-doctoral instructors do not treat knowledge as mere opinion in order to privilege certain opinions that are not in keeping with the knowledge.

It may be that religious practitioners generally are vulnerable to this propensity to disvalue knowledge when it contradicts a religious belief or interpretation. For example, some evangelical Christians claim that Christianity is not a religion, whereas all other religions are. In the academic field of religious studies, Christianity is indeed classified as a religion nevertheless. It would be sad indeed were scholarship to serve the interests of the religious ideologues rather than serve existing knowledge and reason seeking greater understanding.

The man from ASU who misrepresented himself as a scholar (i.e., holding a doctorate in the field) reflected the culture in Arizona wherein "book" knowledge is not respected generally and especially when it runs afoul of ideological opinions. For instance, many riders of the light rail could be seen not wearing a mask as protection against the coronavirus in 2020. Also, the ideological claim that climate change does not really exist so the scientists are wrong has had considerable currency there. Scholarship can be easily dismissed if it is at odds with an ideological stance even when a theology is funneled to serve an ideology or as a defense-mechanism to protect the ego. 

Religion (including theology) can indeed be regarded as a credible field in academia, for the constraints in scientific methodology and logic can both be used to resist the encroachments of ideological bias and other exogenous agendas that can admittedly easily warp the pursuit of knowledge.  My only degree in the field is the Masters of Divinity, which is really a bachelors degree (just as the MD and JD are actually bachelors) because it is the first degree in a school (e.g., Divinity). So I cannot regard myself as a scholar of religion. Even so, I greatly value knowledge that has not been warped by ideologies or other vested interests even of scholars of religion, and I disvalue the intellectual dishonesty that is involved in claiming as knowledge that which is really an instinctual urge to promote one's own worldview. 

Preaching, for instance, should not be done under the explicit auspices of scholarly inquiry. Schools such as Yale's divinity school whose mission includes educating scholarly ministers and priests should take pains to distinguish the two pursuits while holding that both are of value. Professors of divinity who are themselves ministers or priests need to be especially self-aware so as not to yield to the temptations to 1) restrict academic discourse to the ideologically comfortable confines of their preachments, and 2) present those preachments as though they satisfy the criteria for academic knowledge. It is quite common, for example, for Christians to conflate the faith-belief that Jesus of the New Testament was a historical (empirical) person in the ancient Middle East with historical knowledge that comes from historical accounts rather than faith narratives. The latter prioritizes theological points, and thus can ethically adapt (rather than merely adopt) historical events to make such points. 

The synoptic gospels differ on which night of Passover the Last Supper was on; putting that event on the second night serves the theological metaphor of Jesus as the lamb to be slaughtered for the forgiveness of sins. The writer would not have been bothered in the least had he known that the event actually taken place on the first night because he would have known that he was not writing a historical account. This is not to say that the field of theology is not as credible as a field of knowledge than is history. It is to say that the two fields have different criteria (and source-types) and thus should not be conflated. A historian would look for historical accounts that are as objective as possible (e.g., not from the disciples) to answer the question of whether the Last Supper actually took place (and, if so, on which night), whereas a theologian would assess the fit of the metaphor to soteriology (i.e., Jesus Christ as Savior). 

Lay Christians and even many preachers may be surprised to learn that the only historical reference to Jesus, that which the Jewish historian Josephus made, is suspect as it regards Jesus as having preached the truth. Rather than being written by a Jewish person, the sentence was more likely inserted by a Christian copyist. Historians know to look at the credibility of a source that is presumably a historical account, for slyness is not a small part of human nature.

In conclusion, religious studies as an academic discipline can be distinguished from that of history and the ministerial profession of preaching.  Moreover, academic pursuits should not succumb to the lure of ideology or preaching. Given the omnipresent desire that others adopt one's ideology or religious faith, the towers of knowledge that we construct should be subject to critique on a regular basis and by people of different vantage-points.