Critical Race Theory as Ideology

The word theory signifies proposed knowledge that is not merely subjective sentiment or belief that is being prescribed or advocated as an ideology; the purpose of a theory is rather to explain. Only in terms of better understanding is the implication that a better world could result (i.e., from the enhanced understanding). Even though a theory does not constitute established knowledge, that ideologues have seized on the label as a way of legitimating their respective cherished ideologies should come as no surprise because ideology sells better in the guise of knowledge even though a theory has yet to gain sufficient support epistemologically to be recognized as established knowledge. The epistemological subterfuge—a Trojan horse of sorts—also hides the fact that the ideologue seeks to persuade or advocate rather than primarily explain. Under the patina of a knowledge-claim lies quite another instinctual urge. Nietzsche’s claim that the content of a thought is none other than an instinctual urge of sufficient power to burst into consciousness—a manifestation of the will to power—provides an explanation for why the slight of hand is so easy for ideologues to make in sliding over to present the veneer of knowledge-claims even though such claims do in fact differ qualitatively from ideological claims. I contend that critical race “theory,” as well as the related interactionist “theory,” is in its very substance ideological in nature, rather than knowledge or even a theory.

The full essay is at "Critical Race Theory as Ideology."

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.

Global Warming Accelerating

When I took calculus in my first college-degree program, the graduate-student instructor didn’t bother to tell the class that a derivative signifies changes in the rate of acceleration. A derivative is not the rate itself, but, rather, the change in the rate—something much more difficult to detect empirically, as in watching an accelerating car. Formulae were the instructor’s focus, as if they constitute ends in themselves. By the time the climate numbers for 2025 came in, scientists could confidently say global warming was accelerating. The rate itself may have been increasing (i.e., a positive derivative), but attention to that by the media would have taken an educational reform as to how calculus was being taught. We think in terms of speed and acceleration. In this respect, we may be deficient in climate change itself as it has been unfolding. More decades than I care to admit had passed by 2025 since I had that course in calculus; only now can I say that I have used the math, albeit theoretically rather than via formulae.

The full essay is at "Global Warming Accelerating." 

Skepticism within Religion: A Prescription for Epistemological Humility

We tend to separate religion from skepticism, and we associate science with evidence even though of religion and science, only science is open to revision. Kierkegaard remarked that there is something absurd about religious belief, and yet a religionist should believe, and even without any evidence to back up the absurd. In fact, in the early-modern period in the West, religious belief was often assumed to have a higher epistemological status than philosophy and science even though the latter two are supported by the strictures of reason and the support of empirical evidence, respectively. I submit that it is precisely to the extent that religious beliefs are held to be certain that we should be modest about them in terms of what we can know. According to Peter Adamson, religions were once very open to skepticism, whereas the Aristotelian philosophers were certain of their epistemological certainty. Considering that varied assumptions have been applied by philosophers to their craft, they should be weary of their own claims of having achieved epistemological certainty. I contend that religionists should get back to being more tolerant of, and even invite skepticism, even within their own minds. Being humbly aware of falling short, both as an individual and as a species, of grasping true religious knowledge as it is, undeluded by our own limitations (e.g., opinions), is rarely the case as religionists make declarations as if with epistemological certainty.

The full essay is at "Skepticism within Religion." 

Transcendence in Hindu Bhakti

Edwin Byrant, a scholar of Hinduism who spoke at the Bhakti Yoga conference based at Harvard in March 2025, discussed the transcendence that is in bhukti devotion to a Hindu deity, such as Krishna. Such transcendence can end a person’s transactional approach in trying to please a deity in exchange from beneficial grace from the deity’s love. Both the steps and definitions of bhakti reveal the salience of transcendence in loving devotion to a deity.

The full essay is at "Transcendence in Hindu Bhakti."

Interreligious Learning

Jess Navarette, speaking at Harvard’s Bhakti Yoga conference in 2025, defined comparative theology as “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God’s relation to the world.” Because the capitalized word, “God,” is used and usually identified with the deity of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Navarette undoubtedly used the term as a general placeholder for divinity, whether in the form of a deity or impersonal, as in brahman in Hinduism. This begs the questions: what is divinity and could a definition apply to every religion? Answers to these questions can be fruitfully informed by what Navarette calls “interreligious learning” in theology, which in turn is not exclusively applicable to Christianity. Rather than presuming that I have answers, I want to explore how such learning can be fruitful in advancing knowledge of religion as an arguably sui generis domain.  

The full essay is at "Interreligious Learning."

Religious Vision Beyond Intellect: The Case of Hinduism

Can we think our way to religion, or does religious experience transcend cognition (i.e., thought)? Closely related is the question of whether theology is just a special case of philosophy or another domain altogether. The pivotal chapter 2 of the Bhagavad-Gita saga in Hinduism can be interpreted in favor of the latter: gnostic vision of the divine, such as of Krishna showing his fullness later in the myth to Arjuna, may launch off from the intellect, but without continuing as an intellectual pursuit once the threshold of religious experience is reached. By analogy, we can see the edges of a black hole in space, but we can’t see beyond its threshold, within the hole because light cannot bounce back out given the magnitude of the intense gravity that a black hole has. Similarly, a deity can be thought of as intense being—so dense that we mere mortals can only gasp in wonder when we are presented with something so far beyond the limits of human perception, emotions, and cognitions, hence the intellect too.

The full essay is at "Religious Vision Beyond Intellect."

On Lord Krishna’s Self-Revealing in Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita

Even as much as divine entities reveal themselves to particular human beings, our finiteness cannot completely perceive or know such an entity as it really exists. Created as limited beings with limited perception and far from perfect knowledge, it is impossible for a deity’s self-revelation to be received by us mere mortals in its totality because we are not gods. Even if a divine eye were made available to us, as Lord Krishna does for Arjuna in the Hindu mythic tale, the Bhagavad Gita, our minds are finite and subjective rather than unlimited and objectively able to comprehend reality in itself.[1] Before discussing the Gita, I want to draw on a bhukti (devotional) poem very briefly to demonstrate that human perception and knowledge of the divine in the form of a personal deity only goes so far relative to a deity both not only in regard to it going beyond its form (or forms), but also just in terms of being able to grasp the form (or forms) in its completeness.

The full essay is at "Krishna in Hinduism's Bhagavad-Gita."

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1. Kant uses the expression, “things in themselves,” in contrast to appearances. Shankara also distinguishes reality from appearances.

Undermining Progress: Power Enforcing Infallible Ignorance

Bleeding to heal. The Earth is flat. Earth is at the center of the solar system. Zeus lives on Mount Olympus. The divine right of kings to act even as tyrants (e.g., Henry VIII of England). Hitler died in his bunker. Turning the heater on in a local bus kills coronavirus. These are things that were thought in their respective times to be uncontrovertibly true. In some of these cases, the power of the establishment was not subtle in enforcing them even when they should have been questioned. How presumptuous this finite, mortal species is! If ignorance on stilts is bliss, then why is it such in need of power? Subconsciously, the human mind must realize that its assumption of not being able to be wrong is flawed. We are subjective beings with instinctual urges—one of which manifests in the unquestioned assumption that what we know cannot be wrong, and furthermore that we are entitled to impose our “facts” on others. As the homo sapiens (i.e., wise) species, we are too sure, and too proud, concerning our knowledge and especially beliefs. We would like to have the certainty and objectivity that computers have, but we are subjective biological animals, not inert machines.

The full essay is at "Power Enforced Infallible Ignorance."

The Imitation Game: Machines Imitating Man?

What does it mean to understand something? Put another way, what counts as understanding? The film, The Imitation Game (2014), touches on the question of whether machines (i.e., computers) can think, but the film falls needlessly short in pursuing the question. My aim here is to show how film can be more substantive along philosophical lines without sacrificing on entertainment value.

The full essay is at “The Imitation Game.”

Proof

If you are not careful, you could come away from the film, Proof (2005) as a scientist, for the scientific method enjoys a starring role, albeit mostly in subtle undertones rather than in stark instructional flourishes in Technicolor. Essentially, the message is that confirming proof eludes the human mind and its scientific method. Yet interestingly, the film also captures genius, even if its source cannot be proven.

The full essay is at “Proof”

Meteorology vs. Astronomy: Is It Spring Yet?

Advancing clocks an hour ahead to Daylight Savings Time conveniently announces itself as the easy-to-remember Spring Forward. Advancing democracy in the Middle East in the early years of the 2010s proclaimed to the world the Arab Spring. Advancing global warming foretells earlier springs encroaching on softened winters. Even as spring blooms in the sights of the popular press, the media quite stunningly often stumbles over when the season begins. The groundhog is no help, differing from year to year on whether spring begins four or six weeks from February 2nd. Astonishingly—and in no small measure my impetus in writing here out of no less than dumbfounded curiosity—even television meteorologists play to the popular ignorance, willingly succumbing to the common practice of taking astronomical “spring” as meteorological spring too. The “professionals’” declaratory tone alone reveals just how certain human beings can be even of presumed knowledge lacking any real foundation.  Sadly, this mentality of assertion, having become so widespread, or ubiquitous, in modern society, is virtually invisible to us; and yet, the shrill of the epistemological missionary zeal reverberates from no less than modernity’s default: faith in one’s own use of reason. In this essay, I present the first day of spring as a case in point rather than make the entire argument.

Sometime during the first week of March 2014, as yet another front of frigid Arctic air charged southward through North America, various weather personalities on television newscasts relished in the apparently startling fact that spring was just two weeks away. Viewers looking out at snow-covered landskips as far south as Kansas City could marvel at the return of nature’s colors and smells so soon. Most years, the grass is green there by the Ives of March.

Even as the popularly broadcast juxtaposition made for good copy, meteorological spring in the Northern Hemisphere had already come—that is to say, with regard to weather and climate. According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “(m)eteorologists and climatologists break the seasons down into groupings of three months based on the annual temperature cycle as well as our calendar. . . . Meteorological spring includes March, April, and May; meteorological summer includes June, July, and August; meteorological fall includes September, October, and November; and meteorological winter includes December, January and February.”[1] Therefore, by the first week of March 2014, spring had already arrived as far as the weather is concerned even as television meteorologists were publicly pointing to March 20^th as the first day. 

Even calling so much attention to the first day, as if suddenly the northern climes of the contiguous United States would suddenly return their fauna and flora to their other half-lives on that day, is horribly misleading. Assuming that the meteorologists were well aware that spring weather data begins on March 1^st of each year in the U.S., the next-most plausible explanation may be found in the lazy assumption that it is easier to go with popular misconceptions than expend the effort to stare one in the face and overcome its stolid inertia head-on (the excuse being not wanting to cause confusion).

As a result, Americans are left with the incredibly incongruent “expert” assertion that summer begins not with Memorial Day, but just a couple of weeks before July 4^th on June 21^st of each year. Essentially, we are to believe that summer begins in the middle of summer! That such a logical and experiential absurdity can long endure in spite of evidence to the contrary is itself evidence of just how much cognitive dissidence human beings are willing to endure in the face of declarations from perceived expertise. In other words, an erroneous or outdated status-quo societal default has tremendous hold even in the age of (rationalist) Enlightenment (i.e., from the fifteenth-century Renaissance period).

Lest it be said that the enabled popular misconception came spontaneous out of nothing ex nihilo, the basis of the confusion lies in the rather stupid decision to apply the names of the meteorological seasons (i.e., fall, winter, spring, and summer) to the four quadrants of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Whereas the meteorological seasons are based on the annual temperature cycle applied to the calendar, “astronomical seasons are based on the position of the Earth in relation to the sun.”[2] Due to the tilt of the planet, solar energy is maximized in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in different parts of the planet’s orbit. To label a certain interval of space as “spring” is not just highly misleading; the label is a category mistake, for the climatic seasons on Earth do not exist in the void of space.[3]

Astronomy is distinct from weather, even though the two are related (i.e., not disparate).

(Image source: NASA)

Put another way, astronomical “spring” in the Northern Hemisphere refers to the portion of the Earth’s orbit from the point at which the vertical rays from the Sun hit the Earth on its equator (on the “Spring” Equinox, usually on March 21^st) to point when the vertical rays are on the Tropic of Capricorn (the furthest north the vertical rays go, on the “Summer” Solstice, usually on June 21^st). In fact, Summer Solstice is better translated as the highpoint rather than beginning of summer. That is to say, the sun reaches its highest arc in the Northern sky on June 21^st, which is neither the pinnacle nor beginning of summer in terms of temperatures.[4]

 

In short, the piercing pronouncements on the public air-waves of the beginning of spring (and then three months later of summer) ring hollow. Nevertheless, the meteorologists who trumpet the good news do so year after year, as if deer caught in a car’s headlights (or speaking to such deer!). Perhaps the fix is as simple as changing the names of the Earth’s orbit’s four parts so they are not likened to climatic seasons. The puzzle would doubtless still present itself as to how it is that nonsensical claims can long endure as a societal (or even global) default, taken for granted in a way that strangely wards off reason’s piercing rays and those of our own experience. Something is oddly off in how human beings are hard-wired.

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[1] National Climatic Data Center, “Meteorological Versus Astronomical Summer—What’s the Difference?” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June 21, 2013 (accessed March 9, 2014).

[2] Ibid., italics added.

[3] As another example of a mislabeling that should have been known to trigger much confusion and even false claims, the three law instructors from Harvard who founded the law school at the University of Chicago at the beginning of the twentieth century should have known better than to replace the name of the bachelors in law, the L.L.B. (i.e., bachelors in the letters of law), with a name implying a doctorate (the J.D., or juris doctor). The actual (professional and academic) doctorate in Law is the J.S.D., the doctorate in juridical science, of which the LL.B., or J.D., along with the LL.M. (masters), is a prerequisite and thus not possibly a doctorate in itself. A doctoral degree must be the terminal degree in a school of knowledge, have comprehensive exams in a discipline of said knowledge (graded by professors rather than an industry regulatory body), and include a significant work of original research (i.e., a book-length study, except in a quantitative or scientific field) that the candidate defends before a committee of faculty. Yet how many Americans correct an American lawyer who declares himself to be a doctor?  The same goes for the M.D. as well (a program of survey-courses followed by a couple years of seminars—the typical substance of a bachelors program), and yet how many physicians and surgeons presume themselves entitled to use the doctoral title (Dr.) even as they dismiss the valid appellations that holders of the Ph.D., J.S.D., D.Sci.M. (Doctorate in the Science of Medicine), D.B.A. (business), D.D. (divinity/theology), and D. Ed. (education) use as per the rights and privileges of these doctoral degrees?  Meanwhile, the general public goes on grazing as if the snow were green grass.

[4] The word solstice in English comes from the Latin word, solstitium, which combines sol (sun) and stit (from sistere, to make stand).  In other words, the sun is made to stand (highest) in the Northern Hemisphere on June 21^st of each year. Nothing is thus implied about any beginning; rather, the implication is that of a pinnacle or high point. Yet even in this sense, meteorological summer is different, for its high point in terms of temperature comes in mid to late July. 

On the Entitlement to Exceptionalism

John Blake of CNN asks, “Have you ‘walked the aisle’ to ‘pray the prayer?’ Did you ever ‘name and claim’ something and, after getting it, announce, ‘I’m highly blessed and favored?’ . . . If this is you, some Christian pastors and scholars have some bad news: You may not know what you’re talking about. They say that many contemporary Christians have become pious parrots onstantly repeating Christian phrases that they don’t understand or distort.”[1] Unfortunately, the epistemological brain-freeze extends beyond religion onto business, thanks to marketers. 

The full essay is at "Entitlement to Exceptionalism."

1. John Blake, “Do You Speak Christian?” CNN, July 31, 2011.