Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge

A contemporary scholar of Chinese philosophy wrote, “myths often contain an element of historical truth, and what passes for historical truth often has mythical elements.”[1] By implication, not everything that seems to be historically valid in a religious story is, for it is fair-game in that genre to assuage and even invent “historical” events to make theological points. Lest it be thought that histories are written objectively, it should not be forgotten that historical accounts are written by human beings, and thus are subject to our limitations, including bias. Nevertheless, religious stories, or myth, and historical accounts are different genres of writing, and have very different purposes and criteria. To conflate the two genres, or, moreover, any other domain with that of religion, is to deny the uniqueness of religion (as well as that of other, even related domains). Religion and ethics, for instance, are two, admittedly very closely related, domains of human experience.

The full essay is at "Confucius on the Ethics of Religious Knowledge."

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1. Bryan W. Van Norden, Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2011), p. 2.

Devil’s Advocate

In the film, Devil’s Advocate (1997), human free-will plays a very important role. It has implications not only for whether humans tend to be good or evil, but also on how culpable God is for the evil that committed by humans. One of the devil’s sons by a mortal woman, Kevin Lomax, must choose whether or not to impregnate his half-sister, Christabella Andreoli, to produce the Anti-Christ, which John Milton, who is the devil, wants so much. In Christian theology, both the extent of free-will and how tainted it is from the Fall have been debated. Even within Augustine’s works, his thought changes. The one thing that cannot be asserted is that free-will both does and does not exist. Also, that so many greedy people have been so destructive of democracies and even the planet does not necessarily mean that God is responsible or that humans are not capable of choosing to do good over evil.

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

Ex Machina

The Latin noun, machina, can be translated as “machine, engine, military machine, contrivance, trick, or artifice.” The Latin word, e, or ex, means “from” or “out of.” Hence, ex machina can mean out of a machine, which figuratively interpreted can refer to a certain function of a machine that does not seem possible for a mere machine to do.  Artificial intelligence, which is simply machine-learning, in a computer can seem to be outside or apart from what a mere machine built by humans can do. Ex machina is actually part of the phrase deus ex machina, which originally referred to a god or goddess appearing above the stage in a Greek tragedy—the deity being pulled across the top by pulleys (i.e., machina). A sacred deity appears above the other actors by means of profane, mechanical pulleys that do not seem capable of presenting deities, so the latter seem to come out of rather than being of the former. AI, or artificial intelligence, may seem to be coming out of an android because the “human” body is made of materials, including pullies perhaps, that do not seem capable of learning and other human likenesses. In fact, machine learning, which is beyond the programming that is written by humans, might seem at least initially like a miracle, or even as godlike relative to the materials that make up a computer and android “body.” Deus ex machina. More realistically, such an android is likely to appear human rather than divine. David Hume claimed that the human brain inexorably hangs human attributes on divine simplicity (i.e., a pure notion of the divine as One); perhaps today he would point out that we do the same thing when we encounter AI. The danger of the all-too-alluring anthropomorphism of which the human brain is so capable can not only be in viewing an android with AI as human, but also in lauding the inventor/programmer of the AI android as a god for having “created” such a “living” entity that can think for itself and even appear to feel and act as we do.  The movie, Ex Machina (2014) easily dispels both applications of deification. Furthermore, any anthropomorphic illusion that the androids are human and can be taken ethically as being so is also dismissed by the end of the film. Any apotheosis (i.e., rendering someone or something as divine) is so tenuous that the film’s main two human characters illustrate for us just how fallible we are in our understanding and perception of AI in an android-form. The danger is real that AI could get ahead of our emotions and reasoning such that we could leave ourselves vulnerable to being harmed by AI androids by projecting the human conscience into what is actually computer programmed coding. 

The full essay is at "Ex Machina."

AI on Falling in Love: A Potential Course

In the film, Wall-E (2008), a robot “falls in love” with another, whose anthropomorphic pronoun is she/her rather than it as is fitting for a machine. As a robot does not have genitalia, neither the masculine or feminine single pronoun applies, and because a robot is an entity, the plural pronouns also do not apply. Word-games aside, the more substantive and interesting matter of whether a robot, and even AI (i.e., machine learning), can (or could potentially) understand the phenomenological experience of falling in love, and, whether yes or no, be able beyond mere prediction to match couples who would fall in love were they to meet. A college course on these questions, especially with relevant films including Wall-E and The Matrix being assigned, would be incredibly popular and capable of tremendous mind-stretching. 

The full essay is at "AI on Falling in Love."

Faith Seeking Understanding: On Religious Experience

On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of Christ and heard it beating.”[1] She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience, and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be renewed in the love of Christ.”[2] The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.

The full essay is at "Faith Seeking Understanding."

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1. Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.

The Resurrected Body of Jesus: A Viable Launching Pad for Mysticism

Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301) was a Christian nun whose sensitivity to mystical experience can be characterized as a bridal mysticism within a Christ mysticism. Think of Christ; turn yourself over to Christ. She brings in the related theme of light, which is salient in the Gospel of John, with Christ saying, I am the light of the word. Yet her mystical sensitivity was such that she could transcend even Christ’s resurrected body, which can be said to have been her favorite mask of eternity through which love, which, as Paul and Augustine had claimed, is God. This does not mean that the mask is finally tossed aside as somehow erroneous; rather, it is to say more generally that people who have an enhanced sensitivity to the mystical in a religious, or transcendent, sense, are oriented to going beyond God in our likeness to experience God as wholly other—as radically transcendent—and thus leave oneself behind.

The full essay is at "The Resurrected Body of Jesus: Mysticism."

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.

The full essay is at "Holiness and  Mystery of God in Judaism."

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.

The full essay is at "Hinduism and Judaism on Deities."

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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.

Rosemary's Baby: The Supernatural in Religion

The film narrative centers on Satan impregnating Rosemary, a married woman in New York City. According to Roman Polanski, the film’s director, the decisive point is actually that neither Rosemary in the film nor the film’s viewers can know whether it was the devil who impregnated her. Beyond the more matter of being able to distinguish a psychosis from a more “objective” or external religious event, the importance of the supernatural to religion is also, albeit subtly, in play, according to Polanski.

The full essay is at "Rosemary's Baby."

Religion as Metaphysics: A Category Mistake

The claim that God is real, or even that God's existence is reality, is problematic chiefly because it incurs the category mistake of treating religion as through it were metaphysics. Rather than being an atheistic argument, obviating the mistake privileges God's radical transcendence.

The full essay is at "Religion as Metaphysics."

Related: Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, a short book that is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.

Experience of Transcendence: The Core of Religion and Spirituality

Transcendence beyond the limits of human cognition, and thus reason and even religious beliefs is notoriously difficult for the human mind to grasp; even if as I suspect the human mind has an instinctual urge to yearn to go beyond cognitive and perceptual boundaries (i.e., beyond our ordinary experience), that same mind also has a dogged proclivity to cloth wholly-other religious objects (e.g., a deity) in familiar garb. Transcendent experience itself is immune, hence focusing on the experience itself is superior to getting caught up with the presumably certain divine attributes of a religious object, yet even such experience can be held back, or unduly circumscribed, when the transcendent reference-point is rendered conveniently familiar. Hence the dictum against graven images.  

The full essay is at "Experience of Transcendence."

The essay pertains to chapter 3, "Spiritual Leadership Revised," in Spiritual Leadership in Business: Transcending the Ethical, which is available at Amazon in print and as an ebook.