Religion Overreaching: Euthanasia

The Nazi program of inflicting euthanasia on the severely mentally ill in the twentieth century can be distinguished from cases in which suffering people with incurable diseases desire to die voluntarily sooner rather than later. In cases in which such people are mentally ill, the question is more complex, especially if the cause of the suffering is mental. In 2026, the Roman Catholic Church castigated a court ruling allowing the euthanasia of a mentally-ill person whose suffering stemmed in part from severe bodily pain and an incurable diagnosis other than that of the mental illness. Ironically, the Church discounted the element of compassion in putting someone out of one’s misery that would only get worse, and instead focused on “the culture of death” even though Jesus is silent on that issue, as well as homosexuality and abortion, in the Gospels. This is a case, I contend, of religion overstepping onto another domains—ethics and medicine in particular—while shirking its native fauna.  

On March 27, 2026, 25-year-old Noelia Castillo died by euthanasia in the E.U. city of Barcelona. A court had sided with her decision to end her life voluntarily “because she suffered from a serious and incurable condition, with severe and chronic suffering.”[1] By this description, I assume that the condition was not that of mental illness even though the latter played a role in how she came to have the condition of such physical pain. So even though Noelia had “struggled with psychiatric illness since she was a teenager, and tried taking her life twice,” the second time (after she had been sexually assaulted) leaving her unable to use her legs, the severe and chronic suffering can be distinguished from her psychiatric suffering.[2] So even though her judgment may have been clouded by her psychiatric illness, the court could use a reasonable-person basis to assess whether the suffering from the non-psychiatric condition was enough to justify euthanasia. To be sure, if the incurable aspect refers to not being able to use her legs rather than a mortal illness, the court’s ruling could be criticized because future advances in medical science could potentially relieve her suffering and even restore the use of her legs, especially given her young age and the advances that would be possible in her lifetime. On the other hand, the combination of psychiatric and physical pain and suffering could be sufficient to justify Noelia’s early death out of sheer compassion. In this respect, the Church’s reaction can be criticized by drawing on the salient of compassion associated with Jesus in the Gospels.

Luis Arguello, president of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, said, “A doctor cannot act as the executioner for a death sentence, however legal, empowering or compassionate it may appear.”[3] The hyperbolic language of executioner and death sentence aside, the bishop’s claim that the compassion motivating euthanasia is merely apparent rather than actual can be countered by the fact that compassion does apply to relieving especially severe, unrelenting physical pain that is expected to continue for the rest of a person’s life. That advances in medical science could mean that the continuance-assumption can be questioned does not nullify my claim that compassion to relieve suffering, whether one’s own or that of another person, is authentic rather than merely apparent.

Also problematic, the organization Christian Lawyers put out the following statement: “If deliberately caused death is the solution to problems, then anything goes.”[4] It does not follow, however, that if euthanasia is the solution to some but not any problem, then anything goes ethically. In other words, euthanasia, which follows prescribed guidelines, does not imply nor lead to ethical relativism. The latter holds that if a cultural norm exists in a society, then that is enough to validate the norm ethically.

The reference to relativism, moreover, exemplifies the tendency of religion to overreach into another domain, in this case ethics. At the very least, relating euthanasia to relativism requires some study of ethical theory, which is an academic field distinct from theology. Nor does theology include societal analysis (which in turn is distinct from the field of ethics because norms are not ethical principles). So in making the claim, “we have all failed as a society,” regarding the euthanasia case, Bishop Perez was overreaching from the domain of religion and thus can be reckoned as a dilatant.[5]

---

1. Jesus Maturana and Cristian Caraballo, “Catholic Church Criticises Noelia Castillo’s Death by Euthanasia, Saying Society Failed,” Euronews.com, 27 March, 2026.
2 Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

The Count of Monte Cristo: On Vengeance and Forgiveness

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord” is a Biblical saying that is perhaps as well known as it is typically ignored in the midst of passion. Even the advice that revenge is better served up as a cold dish rather than immediately when the grill is still hot is difficult to heed. The 1975 film, The Count of Monte-Cristo, can be likened to a “how-to” recipe book on how to exact revenge against multiple people, one after the other until the sense dawns on the avenger that one’s one life has been utterly consumed by the desire and then feels empty once the deserved suffering has been sufficiently inflicted. It is admittedly very difficult to walk away from a grievous injustice if the agent of the harm is allowed to evade suffering that is deserved. In the film, however, Abbé Faria, a Christian priest who has been unjustly held in an island prison for fifteen years, nonetheless urges Edmond Dantes, whose prison cell is connected to Faria’s tunnel, to resist the temptation to ruin the lives of the four men who had unjustly imprisoned Edmund, including De Villefort, Danglars, and General Fernand Mondego. In the end, Dantes, as the Count of Monte-Crisco, pays dearly for having gone down the road of vengeance. Even if the suffering inflicted on the unjust is deserved ethically, distinctly religious implications should be considered lest avengers are left existentially empty rather than as one might expect, finally at peace. The Christian notion of the Kingdom of God is prominent in this distinctly religious regard.

The full essay is at "The Count of Monte Cristo." 

The Crow

Considering the amount of screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.

The full essay is at "The Crow."

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 19^th 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 23^rd 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."

Acting Morally: Bhukti Yoga and Kant Beyond Duty

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, a Hindu religious artist whose Hindu name is Srimati Syamarani, spoke on the art of spiritual life. A person is like the hand of Krishna. The hand puts food in Krishna’s body, so the entire body is nourished. The hand serving the body is a duty. So too is following the type of bhukti that is following rules and regulations out of duty. At some point, it will no longer be felt as a duty. In Kantian terms, this means not acting ethically by being compelled by reason—the necessity of the moral law that reason presents to us; rather, going beyond moral duty is to approximate the holy will, but not because it is the nature of finite rational beings to be good; rather, it is out of love of the moral law, including its necessitating us to act ethically. In bhukti devotion, however, it is not love of the form of moral law (i.e., it being an imperative, or command, of reason) that obviates the sense of duty to serve Krishna and other people, as in being a hand of Krishna serves Krishna’s body; rather, it is love directed to Krishna (and ensuing compassion to people) that transcends ethical obligation per se. This is not to say that bhukti practice can go beyond feeling obligated due to a feeling, whereas it is by the use of reason that Kantian gets beyond duty, for it is the feeling of respect that empirically motivates a person to treat people as not only means to one’s own goals, but also as ends in themselves. As rational beings, we partake in reasoning, albeit in a finite way, and reason itself has absolute value because it is by reason that value is assigned to things. Even so, it cannot be said that a devotee of Krishna in Hinduism can go beyond acting out of duty due to an emotion (i.e.., love or compassion) whereas for Kant it is just by reasoning that a person can go beyond acting because one is duty-bound.

To Kant, acting out of a maxim, which is simply a reason for doing something, that includes a desire for an empirical object is lower than having as a reason, acting out of the moral law. Material principles presuppose an object of desire. Getting that object is a condition of having the subjective, material principle. Kant didn’t want a material maxim, such as the desire for one’s own happiness, not to mention wealth, to have anything to do with the moral law. A material maxim cannot furnish the content of a moral law. “All practical principles that presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are, without exception, empirical and can furnish no practical laws.”[1] A moral law, which is practical in that it relates to actions rather than, say, metaphysics, cannot be oriented to getting something that is desired. Not even the desire to be happy can be admitted to a moral law. “All material practical principles as such are, without exception, of one and the same kind and come under the general principle of self-love or one’s own happiness.”[2] Even though self-love, unlike self-conceit, is constrained by moral law, self-love is sordid in that it can be the basis of a reason for doing something (i.e., a maxim) that is connected with a desire for something. Additionally, Kant maintains that “(t)he maxim of self-love (prudence) merely advises,” whereas “the law of morality commands. . . . there is a great difference between which we are advised to do and that to which we are obliged.”[3] In short, being motivated by self-love is not strong enough to get us to act morally. It is the form of a moral law, specifically as a command by reason, that turns out to be crucial in us, who have other inclinations, to be moral agents.  

Even enjoying doing your duty is a material practical principle because such a motive is empirical in nature, whereas being motivated to act because of the form of the moral law is not a material principle. The holy will of an infinite being can only be approximated by finite rational beings by trying to extirpate material desires (i.e., trying to rid oneself of all inclinations). But we can’t do that completely. Even so, we can be morally good agents because we can feel obligated to do something out of duty; we know we can be ethical because we are obligated. That is to say, we can be moved to do something just because it is our duty. Moral goodness is only possible for finite rational beings; if we were infinite, we wouldn’t be morally good—we would be good because that would be our nature. A fully rational agent would just do as a matter of its nature what it ought to do, so doing so would not even be thought of or felt as a duty. In bhukti, Krishna does not feel obliged to act ethically; rather, the deity does so out of compassion, which is the deity’s nature.

To Kant, Love and benevolence are a matter of duty to for finite beings such as us. In contrast, pathological love is from an inclination and thus cannot be a duty.  Practical love is the duty to make the following maxim: acting for others’ state rather than one’s own as a reason for doing something. Even though for Kant self-love is subject to the moral law (whereas self-conceit is not), it seems to me that the maxim of love and benevolence is difficult to reconcile with the idea that self-love is confined by the moral law. I think Kant’s desire to distinguish self-love from self-conceit is responsible for his over-estimation of self-love normatively (i.e., as a good thing).

Also, whereas love and benevolence are salient in bhukti devotion and the devotee’s interpersonal relations, for Kant, practical love can’t be the sole motive in acting on a moral duty because but there cannot be a duty to have a feeling. “If a rational being is to think of his maxims as practical universal laws, he can think of them only as principles that contain the determining ground of the will not by their matter but only by their form.”[4] The moral law has the form of an imperative by the nature of law itself, as necessitated by reason. Necessitation is the process by which a finite rational being brings oneself to do what one ought to do by what one takes as a command of reason to do. Necessitation is a psyche process in the phenomenal realm (i.e., of appearances) that is empirically motivated by means of the feeling of respect. But this is only empirically so; a priori (i.e., apart from experience), it is the duty itself that motivates us. Think of reason as commanding you. A person follows the command by being motivated by a feeling of respect for the moral law itself. It is precisely that feeling that can obviate the sense of duty itself; even though our nature, unlike Krishna’s or God’s, is not goodness itself (omnibenevolence), we can get beyond feeling obligated to act according to the duty required by reason and motivated by respect for other people as ends in themselves (because they too are rational beings). With sufficient respect for the form (i.e., imperative) of moral law itself, a person can act morally not out of a sense of duty.

In her talk, Srimati Syamarani spoke of following the rules and regulations first as her duty, but then out of love for Krishna. In contrast, Kant claims that love cannot be the sole motive for acting morally, whether out of duty or not. Respect for the imperative of reason itself in its capacity as a moral law-giver is very different than the love that a devotee directs to a deity, and yet these two ways can get finite moral agents acting morally and yet not out of a sense of duty.

---

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 5:36.
4. Ibid., 5:27.

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.  

---

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 Pope on AI: On the Ethical (Rather than Religious) Dimension

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

At its core, the human-machine distinction regarding decision-making comes down to AI making only “algorithmic choices,” that is, “technical choices ‘among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences,” whereas the human heart is capable of influencing the choices that we make and so only we can have wisdom.[1] The Pope’s definition of wisdom differs from that which describes wisdom as the combination of experience with knowledge. Even if experience comes into the equation as intuition, that is distinct from the proverbial heart. If statistical inferences don’t reach human intuition, then either conception of human wisdom suffices to distinguish human from (machine-learning) machine. In the philosophy of mind field, the difference between man and “thinking” machine can be put into the following question: Is understanding merely the manipulation of symbols according to rules? Do I, whose languages do not include Chinese, understand the answers I write to questions if I use a chart that indicates which Chinese characters to write if I’m presented with other Chinese characters? If understanding is more than merely the manipulation of symbols according to (linguistic) rules, then how much more different is human experience from statistical inference (and even learning itself), and how much even greater is the difference between human emotion, such as empathy or compassion, and AI. To the extent that ethical judgment is, as David Hume claimed, a sentiment of disapprobation (i.e., a visceral emotional reaction of disapproval), ethics can only be on the human side, where the heart resides.

The ethical dimension is salient in the advantages and (especially) the disadvantages of AI. On the one hand, the Pope said, AI has potential in regard to the “democratization of access to knowledge,” the “exponential advancement of scientific research,” and a reduction in “demanding and arduous work.”[2] Given the absolute value of reason (which assigns value to things), according to Kant, rational beings should be treated not just as means, but also as ends in ourselves. For all the advantages of specialization of labor as discussed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, at some point rote repetition of the same small action conflicts with Kant’s ethical imperative. In contrast, opening up knowledge and advancing it are fully in line both with rational nature and us being regarded as ends in ourselves and not merely means to other ends.

Even so, as the Pope pointed out, AI could also contribute towards a “greater injustice between advanced and developing nations or between dominant and oppressed social classes.”[3] Such a consequence would certainly violate Rawls’ ethical theory of justice in which societal systems, whether political, economic, or social, should be designed in such a way to disproportionately benefit the people at the bottom rather than disproportionately harm them.

Public policy enters the picture because we want to protect and perhaps even encourage the advantages and minimize or obviate the downsides by government policy. From Rawls theory, for instance, legislators might propose a law making college free for poor students in a society in which AI has a significant presence. Another law could mandate that the state provide computers to poor people free of charge. Rather than being technical policy prescriptions having the semblance of objectivity, these examples stem from the ethical dimension of AI.

Being that the Pope is the head of a religious institution, it is only natural that he would attempt to tack on the religious dimension. I submit that in doing so, he over-stepped. In discussing wisdom, for example, his addition of “listening to Sacred Scripture” in regard to the ancient Greek notion of phronesis (a type of intelligence concerned with practical action) doesn’t really fit, or is not pertinent.[4] It does not make phronesis religious in nature. Furthermore, he describes algorithms in terms of only being able to “examine realities formalized in numerical terms.”[5] The metaphysical term, realities, is out of place here. The Pope’s choice of the term was no accident. He sourced the mediating role of tools between us and our environment from us being “inclined to what lies outside of us,” which, and here is the stretch, in turn is in term so us being beings “radically open to the beyond.”[6] Such a beyond, as suggested by the use of the word radically, is transcendent, and thus in reference to God being wholly other rather than just immanent in Creation. In making this leap from humans needing to relate to the environment in which we live (e.g., for food) to humans having an aptitude for transcendence in a religious sense, the Pope jumped to another domain that is not relevant. For we do not use tools to grow or get food, for example, because we have an aptitude to transcend the limits of conception, perception, and emotion to posit or yearn for another world. AI pertains to what the Pope himself called the “techno-human condition.”[7] In contrast, the religious domain is sourced in, and thus relates to—as its reference point—that which transcends that condition. Even though AI represents “a true cognitive-industrial revolution” that will lead to “complex epochal transformations,” that revolution and the reverberating transformations emanating from it are firmly in this world. Even the ethical dimension of AI is likewise in the human condition; we need not be creatures radically open to beyondness to be able to address the ethical implications of AI.

I conclude, moreover, that only the religious domain includes the radically transcendent and in fact can be defined or characterized in terms of it. This is not to say that the domain cannot influence or be influenced by other domains; rather, that which makes domains distinct should not be skipped over lest category mistakes and faulty overreaches occur. Historically, the Church has overreached in superimposing the religious domain on that of natural science (e.g., astronomy). Likewise, the domain of history has been allowed to overreach in serving as a litmus test for religious truth or meaning, as if the latter were only valid pending credible historical evidence of an event or a person. Several neighborhood children at play who run onto the front yard of an elderly couple’s house and make noise—something I remember from my own childhood—is one thing; should they start moving the lawn furniture around and demand that the couple keep the chairs in their new positions—would be much worse. Imposing from one’s own domain implies a basic lack of recognition (or respect) of boundaries and thus of domains as distinct territories. The ethics house may be next door to the religious house, but the two are distinct. Similarly, AI might be next to human understanding, but the two are distinct. That algorithms are “neither objective nor neutral” does not men that they share in human subjectivity.[8] In fact, the Pope claimed that AI is not even really generative; it does not “develop new analyses or concepts.”[9] Instead, it “repeats those that it finds, giving them an appealing form.”[10] Whether this is so or not is beyond my fields of study, but my point is merely that a fundamental qualitative distinction between us and machines exists, and that the ethical dimension, as distinct from the religious, pertains to AI from our side.

---

1, Joseph Tulloch, “Pope to G7: AI Is ‘Neither Objective nor Neutral,” Vatican News, June 14, 2024.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.