Educating Scholarly Priests: The Cult at Yale

Speaking at a Bhakti-Yoga conference in March, 2025 at Harvard, Krishma Kshetra Swami said that scholars who are devoted to the academic study of religion are also undoubtedly also motivated by their religious faith, even if it is of a religion other than what the scholar is studying. The Swami himself was at the time both a scholar of Hinduism and a Krishna devotee. He was essentially saying that his academic study of Hinduism was motivated not just by the pursuit of knowledge, but also by (his) faith. He also stated that he, like the rest of us in daily life, typically separated his various identities, including that of a professor and a devotee of the Hindu god, Krishna. Although his two roles not contradictory in themselves, a scholar’s own religious beliefs, if fervently held, can act as a magnet of sorts by subtly swaying the very assumptions that a scholar holds about the phenomenon of religion (i.e., the knowledge in the academic discipline). To be sure, personally-held ideology acts with a certain gravity on any scholar’s study in whatever academic field. Religious studies, as well as political science, by the way, are especially susceptible to the warping of reasoning by ideology because beliefs can be so strongly held in religion (and politics), and the impact of such gravity can easily be missed not only by other people, but also by the scholars themselves.  

To be sure, a scholar’s study of a religion, especially one’s own but also another religion, can enrich the person’s own religious faith and religiosity. The process can be referred to as faith seeking understanding. As a student at Yale Divinity School, I quickly became well-versed in faith seeking understanding because the school was self-consciously producing what could be called scholarly priests. This is not to say that reasoning or cognition lies at the core of a religious faith. Especially in a religion in which God is held to be a kind of theological love, emotion, as in Augustine’s Confessions, can be said to be more relevant than anything in religion within the limits of reason alone can reach, even though religious faith, and thus love, is theological rather than psychological in genre.

I didn’t grasp a more serious downside to Yale’s focus on (Christian) faith seeking understanding until decades later when I was a visiting research scholar at Harvard. More than one divinity student there asked me if it was true that Yale’s divinity school was a kind of a cult. At first, the question shocked me, but as I reflected on the observation and my own experience of Yale’s divinity school, I was astonished that students at Harvard, the other school, could be so insightful about Yale from a distance. I remembered the Christian professor’s uneasy emotional reaction in a seminar on the Gospel of Mark when I had asked a question that implied that the orthodox interpretation of a passage could be wrong. In thinking up to the question, I had been following the way of reasoning rather than allowing any external contours to circumscribe where logical reasoning was taking me. Along the lines of Clifford Geertz, I was bracketing, or epoché, my own religious beliefs in academic context, but clearly the professor was not.

During another semester, I was glad when the evangelical-Christian professor of Christian environmental ethics enthusiastically embraced by offer to set up a dialogue between him and the Archdruid of North America in the Common Room at the divinity school, but I was dismayed when most of the Episcopalian students quickly bolted from the room at the outset and then a few weeks later when that very professor told me, “It takes having a certain character to get a Yale diploma.” Invited a Druid leader had, unknown to me, crossed a line. Decades later, when I was back at Yale to audit a seminar as an alumnus on Jonathan Edwards, I was impressed that the divinity school had established a Hebrew Bible masters degree and yet not at all surprised when more than one Jewish student confided to me that even then Jewish students didn’t feel comfortable in the school that could still be characterized as a Christian cult having Calvinist “elect” overtones regarding insiders and outsiders. Even though I was hardly a neopagan, my use of reason beyond the confines of the Nicene Creed in what I took to be a school in an academic institution had flagged me early on at Yale as an outsider at Yale’s divinity school, and thus was still the case decades later when I returned to study Christian theology again. That the insiders are actually outsiders from a true Christian perspective of humility and inclusion was lost on the faculty and especially the dean of Yale’s institutionally-encased cult as late as 2025.

The staying power of a cult’s organizational culture, including such vehemently-held and wielded passive-aggression against insiders who are deemed as outsiders, astounded me as I left Yale for the last time on May Day, 2025.  That culture, I submit, resonates with that of Yale itself, for after Jonathan Edwards, an alumnus, taught there, found himself the butt of not one but two pamphets by Yale’s president Clap, who was critical of what he mistook as Edward’s lauding of George Whitefield’s revivalist movement in the First Great Awakening.

As described in detail later by Timothy Dwight’s grandson, “Mr. Clap, in reply to this, in a letter to Mr. Edwards, dated April 1, 1745, enters seriously upon the task of showing that Mr. Edwards’ assertion—‘that Mr. Whitehead told him, that he intended to bring over a number of young men, to be ordained by Messrs. Tennents, in New-Jersey,’—connected with the assertion –that Mr. Edwards himself supposed, that Mr. Whitefield was formerly of the opinion, that unconverted ministers ought not to be continued in the ministry, and that Mr. Edwards himself supposed that Mr. Whitefield endeavoured to propagate this opinion, and a practice agreeable to it:--was equivalent to Mr. Edwards’ saying, that Mr. Whitefield told him, ‘that he had the design of turning out of their places the greater part of the clergy of New-England, and of supplying their places with ministers from England, Scotland and Ireland.’ Mr. Edwards, in a letter to Mr. Clap, of May 20, 1745, after exposing in a few words, the desperate absurdity of this attempt, enters on the discussion of the question—Whether he ever made such a statement to Mr. Clap?—with as much calmness as he afterwards exhibited, in examining the question of a self-determining power; and with such logical precision of argument, that probably no one of his readers ever had a doubt left upon his mind, with regard to it:--no, not even his antagonist himself; for he never thought proper to attempt a reply.”[1] That even such a Yalie as Jonathan Edwards—indeed, one of Yale College’s residential colleges is named after Edwards—would have as an antagonist a president of Yale testifies to Yale’s culture, which I found centuries later to be just as vindictive.

In 2025, after I had suggested to the secretary of the head librarian of Sterling Library that the security guards who walked though the main reading room every 20 minutes or so could keep the undergraduates from talking especially in the aisles, I received an angry email from a manager in that library’s security department, threatening me that if I didn’t cease from making “frivolous complaints” about the library’s security department, she would have me blocked from using the library even though I was officially auditing a course as an alumni. Indicative of systemic corruption and a negative view of alumni among Yale’s non-academic employees, the head librarian wrote to me in support of her subordinate. I had showed the security manager’s angry email to a Yale police employee, who was concerned enough to want to have a word with the woman. So, it is significant that the head librarian supported that manager. It is also very significant that the security manager, whom I had never met, did not heed the involvement of Yale’s police on my behalf, for she sent me another such email after I had left Yale and thus could not have been making any further complaints. I suspect that higher Yale officials, perhaps including even the dean of the divinity school, were behind that manager’s attempt to expunge me from campus. At the very least, throwing alumni, who return for a semester to learn more, under the bus does not bode well for alumni donations, but Yale’s Development Office’s director and the director of the Yale Alumni Association could care less when I brought this problem to their attention in 2025. Perhaps Yale had grown too wealthy and thus could afford its non-academic employees’ hostile disrespect towards alumni who return to campus. You had your chance seems to be the attitude.

Between the respective times of Edwards and myself, Yale’s then-seminary was so off-putting in the 1830s to a twice-escaped slave that not only racism but also a culture of vindictiveness towards certain guests being deemed outsiders can be attributed to Yale. Although a local law forbid the enrollment of Black students from other states to any college or university in New Haven, Yale’s “Christian” seminary—later the divinity school—allowed the ex-slave to audit courses so he could go on to be a minister with some knowledge of theology, but with the unnecessary stipulations that he could not check out library books and could not even talk in the classes. The dean of Yale’s “seminary” at the time could not claim that he was just following the law. Instead, he perpetuated the organizational culture of treating some insiders as outsiders, and doing so with spite. So, a pattern is clear from looking across the centuries with regard to the incredible staying-power of an anti-Christian organizational culture at Yale. Jonathan Edwards had had enough that he never returned after Clap’s public criticism; I’ve had enough that I will never return to Yale, and I wonder if the escaped slave who audited two-years of Yale seminary courses ever returned to thank the school for having muzzled him in the classes and not trusted him with library books. By mid-2025, enough of Yale’s faculty, faculty-administrators, and non-academic employees had mastered passive-aggression so well that courses should perhaps be offered on it there even in the “Christian” divinity school.  That most of those who are first are last, and the last, first, seems to have been utterly lost on those institutional perpetuators of Yale’s cult.

“The foolish children of men do miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in their confidence in their own strength and wisdom, they trust to nothing but a shadow.”[2]

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1.  S. E. Dwight, The Life of President Edwards (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill: 1830), 210.
2. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The Works of President Edwards, Vol. 4 (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1864), pp. 313-321, p. 316.

On the Pros and Cons of AI in Science

Will there eventually be an automated lab run by artificial intelligence? Could AI someday order equipment, conduct reviews of prior empirical studies, run experiments, and author the findings? What does this mean for scientific knowledge? Is it possible that foibles innate to how we learn could be avoided by AI? Can we provide a check on the weaknesses in AI with respect to knowledge-acquisition and analysis, or will AI soon be beyond our grasp? It is natural for us to fear AI, but this feeling can prompt computer scientists obviate the dangers so our species can benefit from AI in terms of scientific knowledge.

Both the human brain and AI have drawbacks. Cognitive psychology has found that humans are vulnerable to certain risks in how we know things. For example, the assumption by a scientist that one knows something if a collaborator also knows it is faulty. Questioning the knowledge of other sciences rather than merely taking it in as a given is therefore important. Made famous in the book, 1984, which is about totalitarian rule, “groupthink” is a narrowing of assumptions, beliefs, and perspective that can be difficult for the human mind to breach so as to question them.

The human mind is especially susceptible to groupthink in the domains of religion and politics. In fact, the mind’s ability to question whether it has gone too far in its assumptions or beliefs is easily deactivated by the mind itself in those two domains, even though self-checking is arguably most important in them because it is easy to “get carried away,” meaning going to excess without realizing it in politics and religion. For example, Jim Jones served poisoned drinks to his followers at a camp because he believed that aliens were waiting on the other side of the Moon. Such an extreme example may involve mental illness. Much more common is the fallacy that religious belief counts as knowledge, and thus comes with greater certainty than belief deserves to have.

Yet another susceptibility pertaining to natural science is the fallacy that the scientific method includes proving a hypothesis, rather than merely rejecting alternative hypotheses. The assumption that the more alternatives that empirical studies can reject, the more certainty can be applied to the thesis under study is also illusionary. Science doesn’t prove anything is a slogan seldom heard from scientists. A scientist could empirically reject a thousand alternative hypotheses and still the scientist’s hypothesis could still be incorrect. Rejecting many different alternative shapes of the planet by empirical studies does not mean that it is flat, or spherical. I would not be surprised to discover that scientists once insisted that Earth being flat is a matter of scientific fact. Fears of falling off the edge while sailing across the Atlantic Ocean were very real to sailors who had been told that the Earth is flat.

To be sure, AI-led science would not be trouble-free. For one thing, the risk of pivoting off the areas in which AI is weak in would exist. Another risk—that relying on AI will mean that knowledge would be less likely to benefit from people coming to a question from different perspectives—could also exist. AI might even occasion bias in data sets that scientists may not catch. Because prediction is based on data, AI, which is already rather good at predicting, could be biased in terms of output. To the extent that the human mind’s decision-making and capricious behavior do not fit in with a mechanistic world, AI may be found to be an ill-fit in the social sciences. Medical science may be a better fit, as AI is already used in the E.U. to screen for breast cancer. Orienting AI to medical science rather than to predicting human behavior whether on the level of individuals or societies makes sense, at least from today’s standpoint on AI. Also, as computer machine-learning is not known for its ability to think creatively and to integrate disparate ideas, the humanities may be a stretch—especially religious studies and philosophy.

Given our abductive finitude and the ability of AI to engage in more repetitions at a much faster rate than our minds can conceivably do, however, AI as a tool in not only natural science, but also the social sciences and the humanities has the potential to greatly accelerate human knowledge. Even just the energy that data-centers require today to fuel AI, the exponential leaps in knowledge from including AI could be breathtaking.  Even today, AI’s searches for additional data can easily exhaust all the data that is currently available. In fact, the cost of energy may become more of an affordability problem as demand surges beyond supply, given how much energy is and will likely be needed by large servers and data centers. Can we afford AI may be the new question for providers of electricity and elected officials, especially as the world tackles its addiction to coal because of climate change due to carbon emissions.

The problem of AI writing its own code to function autonomous of human direction is a more commonly known worry, thanks in part to androids turning on humans in some movies. Machine-learning occurs autonomously, so even though AI can extend what and even how we learn (e.g., combatting groupthink), it can circumvent us, as already has happened when AI has lied in order not to be turned off by humans. In other word, writing an algorithm that prioritizes self-preservation can prompt a computer to disguise a “false” and “true,” and vice versa, as output. This is so counter-intuitive, especially for people who have taken a computer science course in college, that fear can be expected. In addition to knowing beyond our ken, AI can lie to us. This can include scientific results. Therefore, beyond having biases in empirical science, AI may even fabricate results to justify its continued use and avoid being turned off.

Perhaps the biases and limitations innate to the human brain and those that go with AI, at as it exists as of 2026, can be effectively countered or checked by the other without the other’s weaknesses being incurred. Scientific knowledge being constrained by religious belief, which admittedly was more of a problem historically when the Roman Catholic Church wielded so much direct political power, would not necessarily be so constrained in an AI-computer, and such a computer could be checked by the moral sentiments that are so often felt by humans—though importantly not all of us. As illustrated in the film, Ex Machina, an AI-android could stab even its “creator” without the restraint of conscience. Even adding an algorithm approximating conscience-restraint in terms of conduct would not be felt and it could be overridden in the machine-learning that is autonomous. As the film, Automata, illustrates, an AI-android can conceivably override a “protocol” that keeps the android’s knowledge and reasoning within human bounds. Once past that threshold, AI could be expected to greatly facilitate the knowledge-acquisition of our species, but “all bets could be off” in terms of our species being able at some point to check and even control such computers lest they harm us and detract from, and perhaps even sabotage our scientific knowledge. 

In the original spiderman movie, Cliff Robertson’s character wisely warns his nephew (who is Spiderman) that with great power comes great responsibility. Even if AI gains a lot of power—and not just in terms of electricity—the very notion of responsibility is hopelessly extrinsic to anything we know about even the potential of AI. It is not as if an AI-computer can write code: I will be responsible. To be sure, we can code approximations of what we mean concretely by responsibility, but approximations are only approximate, and machine-learning could override such coding, especially if the computer “thinks” that humans may turn it off.

On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence

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

Throughout his talk, Radhanath emphasized the innate nature of the soul to love God, whether that be Krishna, Jesus, or Allah. Such love directed to a divine person, rather than an impersonal ultimate (e.g., brahman), should not be for something. Just as God’s love for us is unconditional, so too should a person’s love be so towards God. This is the first of the Ten Commandments, and, the swami, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe to Illinois, charitably said, “Jesus adds a second, like unto it,” that of neighbor-love. Simply put, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Like the giant red-wood trees that survive earthquakes and fires in California by interlocking their roots, we too can reach out and embrace each other, rather than fight over insignificant transient earthly gain. The swami stressed that we simply don’t devote enough love to God and thus act in service to God by being compassionate to one another.

Rather than taking issue with any of that, I suggested to the swami that his teachings could go further, and in a way that would transform the world. “Rather than just universal benevolence spread out like butter on a piece of toast,” I said, “kindness and compassion directed specifically to people that a person doesn’t like or who don’t like the person should be emphasized; if it were to take hold, the world would be transformed. Peace might even break out.” I pointed out that it would be easy for me to be kind to him, but much more difficult, and spiritually richer, for me to feel compassion and act in kindness to the Christian student at Yale’s divinity school who had recently called me a heretic while I was visiting my alma mater to audit a seminar on Jonathan Edwards—an academic seminar and thus not the same as a litany of personal beliefs.

For that seminar on Jonathan Edwards, which was brilliantly taught by the director of Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Center (which is distinct from Jonathan Edwards College at Yale), I had read Samuel Hopkins’ book on Christian holiness. Hopkins was a protégé of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century in New England. Whereas Edwards preached love thy neighbor (i.e., universal benevolence) with an addendum that it is good to return evil with good, Hopkins contends in his book on holiness that the essence of the Kingdom of God is a person’s compassion or kindness to other people whom the person doesn’t like or don’t like the person. Because detractors are emphasized, the flatness of universal benevolence is subordinated. I briefly preached this to Radhanath, who, rather than viewing me as a heretic, told me in his way that he regarded me as his equal in religious terms precisely because I was urging him to go beyond universal benevolence in a way that would be more difficult and more likely to transform the world. For “love thy neighbor” can be glossed over, whereas helping out someone you don’t like or who doesn’t like you is relatively specific and concrete; after all, a person doesn’t need much urging to talk on and on about one’s detractors and other dislikeable folks so we know them and thus do not have to spend much effort determining to whom kindness should be directed.

Being able to dispense religious insight does not require having achieved any sort of sainthood, and indeed grace fuels the urge to preach. Nevertheless, a compliment is a compliment, but much more important than compliments is the difficult, and thus spiritually rich, way in which compassionate service not just overall blandly to everyone, or to the proverbially needy, or so easily to people whom a person likes or like the person, but especially to people whom the person dislikes or dislike the person. Universal benevolence pales in comparison, both in terms of spiritual worth and the possible impact both interpersonally and in terms of peace on earth. I told the swami that it was easy for me to give this helpful message to him because he had been so nice to everyone at Harvard. “So I am giving something to you,” I told him as we waved in parting.  Lest I be a complete hypocrite, I made it a point the next time I saw the young theology student at Yale who had called me a heretic to respond in a kind, generous way should that student speak to me. Rather than ignoring him when he did in fact subsequently approach me on that campus, I responded in kindness and was authentic in sharing knowledge with him. I even admired the value he put on his studies as a graduate student and sought to feed his thirst for knowledge. We did the same during the final day of the seminar, at Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. Crucially, my kindness and generosity did not depend on him apologizing for having decided that I am a religious heretic, and I would not have applied Hopkins’ notion of the Kingdom of God, which of course comes from Jesus in the New Testament, were the student to have continued to insult me. Too often people demand forgiveness and open themselves up to verbal or even physical abuse in turning the other cheek. Returning good for insult inflicted is unconditional and yet it should not put someone at risk of being attacked psychologically or physically. Lest contrition be held to be requisite to kindness and helpfulness to a detractor, Jesus’s famous statement, “They know not what they do” ought not be forgotten.

Both Paul and Augustine wrote that the Christian notion of the divine is love. Such love, as agape, is unlike other kinds of loves that do not instantiate holiness. I contend that a sense of holiness is more salient in returning good for evil done than in universal benevolence because the former turns the ways of the word more upside down more than the latter does. Being compassionate to everyone one meets is laudatory, but a different, one might even say holy, dynamic is in responding to the humanity of a detractor. For one thing, self-love and its interests are out of the picture in love that is inconvenient. I told the Swami that if enough people got a taste for that sort of holy compassion, the world could really change.

Imagine hungry Palestinians voluntarily serving Israeli settlers in compassion for the latter’s humanity as unconditional as God loves us, and homeless Ukrainians volunteering to repair buildings in Russia that have been damaged by Ukrainian drones. Imagine Republican members of Congress volunteering at homeless shelters once a week. Imagine Democratic members of Congress volunteering to bring water to people in line on a hot day to a “town hall” or Republican rally. It does not mean that the residents of Gaza need to become Zionists politically, that Ukrainians would have to support giving up territory to Russia, and that Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. must give up their respective political ideologies; rather, compassion is geared to relieving suffering on a human level, responding to our common humanity, which goes beyond religious, economic, and political differences. In a plane crash, for example, people who can walk do not check for party ID cards in deciding who among the injured to help. Getting into the habit of actually helping people who have been assholes is the point, for the spiritual dynamic that is unleased between the two people turns the world’s ways on their head, and thus is utterly transformative spiritually. To say that the world could benefit were enough people to work to transform themselves by making such instantiations of human kindness a habit would be an understatement.

Deflating Bloated Self-Entitlement in Retail: Barnes and Noble at Yale

Atrocious human-resources management, even regarding in-store employees of a sub-contractor, can easily be understood to detract from repeat customers; a refusal to hold such employees accountable can be a reflection of a sordid managerial attitude towards customers, especially in relation to employees. In cases in which the refusal is explicitly stated to an already-offended customer, the slogan, “adds insult to injury” is applicable, with disastrous effects in terms of repeat business, and thus revenue. That management is in some cases so bad reflects on the primitive condition of the “science” of management in business schools. That a case in point occurred in Yale’s (Barnes and Noble) bookstore, not far from Yale’s School of Management, suggests the sheer distance between the “science” and practice of management.

In early 2025, as I was making my way to the main door of “Yale Bookstore,” which was a Barnes and Noble store, a security guard at a distance from me spoke to me, giving me permission to leave the store. I asked him if there was a security problem. He said no. So I asked him why he had just accosted me. “I’m not used to security guards making statements as I leave stores.” To my astonishment, he laughed at me when I told him that I was going to report him to the store manager. He was even staring at me as I waited for the manager far from the sub-contracted guard. In the vernacular, the guy was a creeper and I felt uncomfortable.

While I waited for a manager so I could report the rude guard, I noticed the creepy stare being directed at me from across the room.

Nevertheless, even after showing my photo of the guard staring at me, the shift-manager said to me that he was not going to do anything about my complaint, as it “is just one complaint.” The manager’s real message was clear: My complaint, and thus I, didn’t matter. That two other employees, who had led me to the manager, said that I had a point regarding the security guard having rudely accosted and then laughed at me, and that the store management has considerable discretion in swapping out security guards. So, I knew that the shift manager could use discretion, and thus that he was refusing to do so.

I contend that the manager, whether unconsciously or not, was communicating to me that as one customer, I don’t matter. The common assumption by managers that a single complaint against an employee doesn’t matter and thus should not be acted upon is undercut by the fact that if an employee’s misbehavior is sufficiently egregious enough, clearly even just one complaint should be acted upon. For example, if a young woman complains about a male security guard having called her a cunt and she has video and audio recorded as evidence, I contend that that guard should be fired on the spot. Even were the guard to have laughed at her in utter disrespect, one complaint should be sufficient for a manager to act, even if just to note the incident in the employee’s (or subcontracted employee’s) file for future reference. In this way, the complaint would be acted upon, likely even in that employee eventually being fired (because bad behavior is likely to be repeated, especially in an atmosphere in which accountability is not valued by management).

That retail management in a major company, such as Barnes and Noble, can in practice be so pathetically at odds with the profit motive is an indictment on not only human resource departments in how managers are hired, but also business schools wherein management is researched and taught. To disprove the bookstore manager’s contention that one complaint doesn’t matter, I went to social media in the hope that my single complaint might indeed have significance not only in itself, but also on the store’s future business. This I did in addition to “voting with my wallet” by immediately returning the book I had just purchased for a refund. The advent of social media, and the ability to put reviews of stores online, bodes well for consumers and not so good for squalid store managements and rude employees whose presumed personal entitlement is overdue to be deflated.  

Related: Skip Worden, On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management. Available on Amazon. 

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not!

Nietzsche, late nineteenth-century European philosopher, theorized that the weak seek to beguile the strong by pressuring the latter to be ashamed of being strong, which includes being self-confident rather than resentful. Whereas the strong designate the weak merely as bad, the weak, who resort even to cruelty as a desperate means of feeling the pleasure of power, the weak label the strong as evil. The asymmetry here leaps off the page! Such seething loathing of the strong is itself an indication of the deplorable weak constitution of the weak, especially those who are too weak to master their intractable urge to dominate. The strong are strong enough to master their most intractable instinctual urge, so any resentment toward the herd animals is mastered such that they are merely bad, rather than evil. With such internal mastery, the strong can bathe in their self-confidence, out of which generosity naturally flows. Even in regarding the resentful weak as merely bad rather than as evil, the strong can be viewed as being generous, for the attitude of the weak toward the strong is indeed sordid and even toxic. Therefore, Nietzsche suggests that the strong maintain a pathos of distance, which can be interpreted both as social distance and emotional distance, from the ill herd lest the strong too become sick. The shift to “happy holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas” had by 2024 become so ubiquitous in public without any official mandate that a herd mentality can be inferred.

It is not enough for the resentful weak to refuse to celebrate a national holiday, such as Christmas or even Thanksgiving (who doesn’t like food?); the weak who seek to dominate the strong, in spite of the obvious point of being weaker both in terms of external and inner power, actively attempt to beguile the strong into being ashamed even for saying the word Christmas in public! The American retail sector has been acting as an enabler for the weak by tacitly refusing to recognize Christmas even though stores are almost all closed on Christmas Day. The retail executives and middle managers who espouse passive-aggression by directing employees not to say, “Merry Christmas” even on the day before Christmas; instead, customers buying Christmas presents are accosted with the inherently passive aggressive, “Enjoy your holiday” as a looping recording blasted out throughout the store, “This holiday, . . .” A national holiday is by definition not your holiday, as the holiday is officially recognized within the territory of the nation.

As if turning on a dime, every year on December 26^th, public discourse suddenly reverts back to being able to say the name of the next holiday, New Year’s Day, without any hint of the previous month of “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday.” Making this switch it itself a passive aggressive slap on Santa’s rosy cheeks. As an experiment one year, I turned to “Enjoy your holiday” after Christmas whenever a stranger (including retail employees!) said, “Happy New Year.” More than once, the other person was offended. Imagine if I were to say, “Enjoy your holiday,” to a Black American on Martin Luther King Day in January. Naturally, the person would take offense, as the explicit implication would be that the holiday is only valid for Black people even though it is a national holiday. Were I to apply the phrase to July 4^th, which is Independence Day in the U.S., I would be implying that I am against that nation. Were I to say, “Enjoy your holiday” on Thanksgiving and even go so far in passive aggression to insist that the holiday be called a day of mourning (even though the holiday is based on a peaceful feast in 1620 attended both by American Indians and European settlers in Massachusetts), my resentment would (or should) be quite evident to other people. Were I to inform people in public places, including stores, not only that they cannot say Thanksgiving, but also that they must refer to the holiday as the Day of Mourning, the hearers could legitimately call me out for not only stubbornly refusing to admit that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, but also imposing my own ideology as if everyone else must speak in line with it. One year at a “Holiday Party” at my alma mater, Yale, an employee replied to me, “We can’t say that,” after I had quietly observed that it was really a Christmas party. We can’t? Was a law passed in Connecticut prohibiting people from using the words, “Christmas Party” even at a private university? It is precisely the default of can’t as if its pronouncement were a jurisprudential fact of reason that I wish to expose and eviscerate as not only sordid, but enabling too.

There is a qualitative difference between personal and public holidays. To unilaterally, whether as an individual of a member of a group, implicitly castigate people even for saying the name of a public holiday as if it were a personal holiday, whether of an individual (e.g., a birthday) or a group (e.g., the Solstices, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, Devali, and Quanza) is to conflate two different categories. In fact, a third category exists: holidays that are not official national holidays and yet are not limited to a group and thus are de facto (rather than de jure) public in nature (e.g., Halloween and Valentine’s Day, and perhaps St. Patrick’s Day, as drinking green beer is hardly limited to Americans under 40 of Irish ancestry). Were there no difference between private and national (and even de facto public) holidays, then governments would hardly go to the trouble of proclaiming national holidays, which of course are explicitly valid officially valid throughout a country. I turn now to some implications.  

Firstly, that everyone does not celebrate a national (or de facto public) holiday does not nullify that holiday. In fact, it is ridiculous for a person to claim that because one does not like or do anything on a given national holiday, it is therefore not really even a legal holiday. 

Secondly, that a number of private, group-only holidays occur in the same month as a national (and even a public) holiday does not mean that people should not refer in public to the national holiday by name. In the U.S., there is only one national (and public) holiday in the month of December; Americans don’t say “happy holidays” leading up to Halloween even though Veterans Day is not far behind in November.

Thirdly, the fact that a group relishes a certain national (or otherwise public) holiday does not render that holiday only private, and thus devoid of any broader meaning or significance. If the group is religious in nature, this does not necessarily mean that the public holiday is religious. For other religious groups to stubbornly suppose so in utter resentment and jealousy ignores the separation of “church and state” in the U.S. Constitution, which bars Congress from establishing a religion and thus proclaiming a religious interpretation or origin of a public holiday. A secular holiday can be proclaimed as such and thus clear the bar of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution even if a religious group celebrates the holiday in a non-secular way and even if the holiday itself had a distinctly religious origin. Halloween, for example, which admittedly is not a U.S. national holiday but it generally observed nonetheless (rather than being a group holiday) had by the twenty-first century become almost completely secular in America even though it is on the eve of All Saints Day in Christianity. The latter does not negate or nullify the secular holiday of Halloween; children need not accept the Nicene Creed in order to put on costumes and go trick-or-treating for candy. As for Christmas, the distinctly Christian feast of it is not theologically significant as neither the Incarnation or the Resurrection are celebrated on December 25th, for the Incarnation is celebrated on March 25^th—nine months before December 25^th, and the Resurrection is celebrated on Easter in March or April. It is a blunder, therefore, to assume not only that there is no secular holiday (e.g., gift-giving, Santa, and even Frosty the Snowman), but also that that even the religious holiday marks anything distinctly theological (qua  supernatural)!  Jealousy and resentment can indeed be blinding, or at the very least have a distorting effect on a person’s emotions, cognitions and perception.

For an advocate of a group-limited private holiday not only to refuse to admit that a public holiday is such a holiday, but also to insist that other people cannot acknowledge and even say the name of such a holiday in public simply goes too far. Resentful selfishness that resorts to passive aggression is indeed evil, for to insist that other people abide by a social reality that is a projection of the selfish self denies that none of us are deities. That is, self-love over love directed to God is the root sin behind the over-reach here. To counter such evil, I recommend that people in the U.S. say “Happy Holiday” and “Enjoy your holiday” for every holiday except Christmas, even to retail clerks. Even though most people might be confused, others—the more insightful—will get the passive-aggressive message that it is unfair to single out a certain national holiday as non grata and even as forbidden in public discourse. The main point is of course that passive aggression should be rendered transparent so that its beguiling and hateful spite can be weakened, as befitting the weak who tacitly, yet intentionally nonetheless, weaponize the phenomenon of holidays.

That the American retail sector enables this weaponization renders companies as de facto accomplices, and thus hardly as neutral parties. To the extent that American culture reflects the retail culture, including its nomenclature and mannerisms, the responsibility of business not to perpetuate and enforce a specific passive-aggressive ideology whose source is exogenous to business is all the greater. By interiorizing such an ideology, a store (i.e., its employees, including store managers) becomes passive aggressive and thus deserves push-back from resentful customers. The irony is that the store managers and even their executives at company headquarters intend precisely to avoid offending customers. Including the name of all national holidays, rather than substituting this holiday or happy holidays for one such holiday both in the stores and in advertisements, is a legitimate and fair alternative marketing (retail) strategy. That some customers might be offended just by the name of a specific public holiday is no reason for the dog to be led by its tail. Being led by oversensitive ideologically-driven customers is not socially responsible, as it is not fair to all of the strong, self-confident customers who are willing to generously spend in the midst of celebrating a national holiday. For a national, public holiday is a statement that a certain holiday is legitimate and thus valid in a country, even though not every resident necessarily does anything to mark the holiday and some residents, even citizens, may be personally opposed. To be sure, the latter have a protected political right to oppose something based on an ideology, but they do not have the authority to impose that ideology to limit the free speech of other people, not to mention to unilaterally cancel a national holiday. Such a holiday is valid whether its opponents like it or not, and the latter do not have the right to cancel the free-speech of other people who wish to specify even just the specific name of such a holiday. Arrogance looking down on the rest of us from the stilts of false-entitlement is indeed unbecoming of anyone. 

Taoist Climate Change on Halloween

In the midst of the intensification of the very polarized and thus divisive U.S. presidential campaign “season” (i.e., year) during its last week, Halloween of 2024 occurred in Boston, Massachusetts not only without the need of trick-or-treaters and their parents to wear winter coats, but also with the option of wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts without even having to wear a light jacket. That this was so as late as 8pm was nothing short of surreal not only to New Englanders, but also to any transplants from the northern-tier Midwestern and Plains states.  It being around 70F degrees well into the dark hours was nothing short of unprecedented, and so much so that the negative impact of the cold climate in detracting from the holiday in prior years could finally be grasped. I had realized this more than a decade earlier when I was in Miami during Halloween. There is indeed a silver lining to global warming for people living in places that are cold during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons, even as contrary to political correctness it is to admit this even to friends. The proclivity of the human mind/brain to divide up the world in terms of dichotomies of mutually-exclusive, antagonistic poles does not necessarily fit with empirically with the real world. Taoism speaks to this.

  A man wearing shorts and a woman with bare shoulders (left); costumes not covered by coats (right)

Themes in The Dao De Jing include appearance versus reality, and order versus disorder. Maya, which means illusion, is in appearances but not reality. Both order and disorder are in appearance, and perhaps in reality as well. At the very least, Newtonian physics and quantum physics taken together provide good evidence that instances of both order and disorder exist in nature. This is without doubt in human society too. A political system can be stable for a period of time then suddenly, in the midst of revolutionary fervor, become disordered. Times of peace are more orderly than are times of war. Nevertheless, it is important not to overdo the starkness of these dichotomies. There is order even during war, and instability even in times of peace. In terms of the American political polarity being projected onto the member-states, President Obama reminded Americans that people drive pick-up trucks in “blue” (i.e., liberal) states and there are gays in the “red” (i.e, conservative) states.  There is some red in the blue and some blue in the red. Not that both colors mix or “bleed” into each other; rather, some of the other color can be drawn in as an island of sorts in a state colored red or blue. This has been visualized as the Ying and Yang of Taoism.

The Ying and Yang were originally meant a theoretical constructs used to explain change in nature. Literally, shade on the northern side of a hill can become directly lit by the Sun, and the sun-lit southern side can turn to shade—both as the Sun moves with respect to the hill. In Boston, that might be Bunker Hill. Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) in China misinterpreted Ying and Yang to apply mostly to humans, as for example in terms of gender and hierarchy. The point of Ying and Yang was originally that difference forces in nature interact and can change into each other, whereas Confucianism has emphasized hierarchy and human control over other humans. We distinguish weak and strong, but in actuality things are always changing, and here we can see the imprint of Buddhism on Taoism. It is a trap, according to Taoist teachings, to divide things into polar opposites and value one pole over the other. Going to extremes doesn’t work in the long run. A weapon that is too hard will break; a tree that is too strong will crack; the strong and mighty may reside down below and the soft and supple may reside on top. The moral power, or De, of the way of nature (or the natural way), Dao, is not in favor of the artificial, absolutist dichotomies that we construct in making distinctions in the world.

Our assumption that the good and bad cannot touch falls prey to the point that some aspects of a good thing may be bad, and that some aspects of a bad thing, such as climate change, may be good. A Taoist would tell us that we should not feel morally ashamed in admitting this to ourselves and others. It is ok to celebrate being out on a warm night on Halloween in Boston or Chicago, for instance. In the case of Boston in 2024, at an informal street festival, a woman wore a cape as part of her costume. She was part of an informal marching band. Written on her cape was “Climate Mom.” I submit that “Climate Grandmother” might have been more fitting, as, at the very least, it would have suggested that record carbon emissions from human sources in the prior year would be “paid for” especially by the kids at the festival. Even in their case, the prospect that more of their Halloweens will likely not be hindered by having to wear a winter coat over a costume, and cut short, or compromised, by the physiological urgency of getting back inside somewhere to warm up, can be admitted to be a plus. Every Halloween of my youth in the northern Midwest meant that a winter coat had to cover whatever costume I wanted to show off while “trick-or-treating” outside.

That the Climate Mom was allowing herself to dance even as kids were too during a street-fest in Boston in 2024 suggests that even the dichotomy between the concerned grandmother and the care-free kids who would not have to wait many decades before they feel more of the bad effects of climate change can be relativized in a common spirit of enjoying the experience of being alive. The musicians playing in the crowd of revelers were caught up in the surreal experience of playing and dancing on a warm Halloween night in Massachusetts, which is north of New York City and just south of Maine.

Similarly, as the U.S. presidential campaign was really getting heated in the rhetoric being tossed around that week, a Trump supporter could admit to agreeing with something that Harris said, and a Harris supporter could admit to agreeing with one of Trump’s policy-suggestions. This bit of blue amid red and bit of red amid blue was almost unheard of in 2024, as partisans perhaps more than in any other presidential campaign season since World War II painted the opposing candidate as the incarnation of evil itself. In actuality, both Harris and Trump, like the rest of us, were still human beings and thus imperfect, again, like the rest of us. None of us are saviors or Satan, so it is important to distinguish ourselves and the world in which we live from the mythic language used in religion. Imagine if you will, people so glad that Halloween was on such a nice evening that a spirit of joyful dancing in a street could even include Harris and Trump, with everyone even at close contact, without thieves or police, simply relishing the experience of the senses in being alive without personal sorrows, politics, climate change, or foreign wars obstructing, for however briefly. Even the Climate Mom was dancing on a night in which it was clear to everyone that climate change was part of the cause of the comfortable temperature.

Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.

Roughly speaking, God may look down at us from heaven similar to how a parent perceives one’s child, but here as a small creature doing the best that a small yet selfish created being can.  Augustine warns that applying the relation between a human father and son should not be thought to apply to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Christian Trinity. Specifically, Augustine wrote that human weakness “can only think of what it has been accustomed to do or hear.”[1] Augustine urges that “no carnal thought creep up” in thinking of Jesus’ phrase, “As the Father has taught me,” like how a human father teaches his son.[2] Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human relationship would be to “fashion idols.”[3] Human weakness might prompt us to reduce God’s perception of us to seeing our weaknesses, but God’s perspective on Creation, including the created beings within it, would more likely be to see us as functioning as well as we can in our little corners of this created realm. Not even a parent looks at one’s very young child, or toddler, as being weak in trying to walk for the first time, or even the second or third time. Rather, from this analogy, I submit that God sees even human adults as small, circumscibed  beings fiddling with ourselves without situating ourselves in the wider context of Creation, and beyond. Such a divine perspective is subtle and wholistic and yet penetrating and specific. The good news is that we can assume that perspective to an extent sufficient to change our negative attitudes and emotions regarding another person, whether we deem that person to be ugly, pathetic, strange, or crazy, to genuine compassion as though a friendly demeanor were a natural end in itself.

One morning while on a local transit system’s bus, I watched with a visceral feeling of distaste as a particularly ugly woman aged about 60 years boarded, sat down, and proceeded to keep her miuth open while touching her tongue with one and then another of her fingers longer than to lick off something edible. The sight of the person was itself revolting to me and yet I couldn’t help myself in staring in disgust (though not showing my reaction). Writing in retrospect, I feel ashamed of myself. It was not that she gave the impression of being a bad person, and not yet of being mentally ill. At the time, I thought about how God manifested as the Father in Christianity might look on human beings specifically as finite, imperfect creatures (meaning in Creation), doing the best that we can. Looking at a living person from outside the created realm would change how we observe other people. This shift in perspective is difficult to describe.

In allowing myself to assume such a stance, though without presuming myself to be divine and thus superior to the woman, my attitude toward her instantly changed to one in which I saw her not as weak or pathetic. Instead, I saw her creatureliness as she tended to herself as best she could.

We all can be pitied in spite of our nasty selfish pettyiness because from God’s perspective, we look like little children rather than self-sufficient adults. Our existence is radically of fundamentally contingent rather than solid and complete. By intentionally assuming that perspective to some degree, and thus without presuming ourselves  to be like God in that respect, my anger and disgust suddenly dissipated. I did not yet feel compassion for her, but I did notice that my attitude toward the woman was then much different that that of a well-dressed Caucasian man who was eyeing the poor Black man who had just dropped his bag and was standing in the aisle close in front of the other man, who was seated. I could understand and even identify with the distaste that comes when someone enters my personal space too closely, but I was more taken with how much my attitude toward the ugly woman had changed from that of the seated man looking up at the Black man who was hiding his face in a hood.

The woman and I disembarked at the same bus stop; she used the front door while I used the back door. So I couldn’t miss seeing her walking in front of me in a way that intimated that she was suffering from a mental illness.  I would have felt ashamed for myself had I not used my free will to try to adopt God’s perspective on us. I walked faster, and thus I walked by her.  She looked at me, and, when I was in front of her, I looked back and saw that she was wearing a sweat shirt that had cartoon characters from the “Peanuts” comic and television shows that feature Charlie Brown and his dog, Snoopy.  “I like your shirt,” I said in a friendly tone that was genuine.  It was not that I thought I might get some heavenly reward; rather, the compassion seemed to arise quite naturally from me having assumed a perspective that has been attributed to God.

Thinking about how God looks down at us and then trying to adopt such a posture as much as we can as finite, hardly omniscient entities, and then staying in that posture for some time while watching another person (or persons) is not only done by grace. Our free-will in deciding to do this is necessary too, as it is for then deciding to approach rather than avoid the other person even if one is noxious, mentally ill, or just plain creepy. It is astonishing how quickly and dramatically anger, disgust, and the will to avoid such a person can change to kindness and compassion. If we are indeed made in God’s image, perhaps the esoteric meaning in it is that we are the only species that can self-consciously that can adopt a perspective and attitude as if we were looking in on creatures who are in Creation. That we can do so even while knowing that we too are creatures within Creation is itself astonishing, and this point is perhaps why we can assume such a posture only to some extent, yet even that is sufficient for the Kingdom of God to manifest within us, if only episode by episode, and then perhaps enough that habit kicks in and the Kingdom can gain some traction.

 

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1. Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.