As a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Radford University in Virginia, one of my areas of scholarship was Philosophy of Religion and the study of World Religions. When I taught the course in World Religions, my emphasis was on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Although, in fact, historically all of these religions exerted powerful influences over the governing systems in the areas and centuries where they were dominant, all of these five religions also envisioned a relation of human persons to an ultimate dimension that far transcends any identification with an emperor, king, or nation-state governing system. To speak of an Islamic state, a Jewish state, a Christian state, or a Buddhist state (e.g., Thailand) amounts to a perversion of the essential religious vision of each of these human movements.

Each of these religions articulates a powerful vision that can be actualized in human awareness of our relation to the groundless-ground (Infinity) of the cosmos. Each shows a way to an expanded consciousness of the whole (the relation of finite and Infinite). But human beings are not so much “fallen” as they are simply small. We rarely find persons in any religious culture who have enlarged their awareness to the level of the groundless-ground (Infinity). Inwardly, persons limit their awareness to some constricted, finite identity—ego identity, national identity, racial identity, religious identity, or cultural identity—when the essential thrust of all these religions is to move human beings beyond such limited identities to a cosmic consciousness of the groundless-ground (Infinity) of all existence.

I could cite excellent works that illustrate my claims regarding each of these religions. However, here I want to focus on Judaism in relation to the state of Israel and the nation-state called the USA. The three main Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) recognize the Ten Commandments as authoritative. The first four of these commandments describe the proper relation between humans and God; the last six (between humans) follow as a consequence of the first four (“Thou shalt not kill,” etc.).

The Commandments begin with the prohibition of idolatry: “I am the Lord your God; You shall have no other god set against me. You shall not make a carved image for yourself nor the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or on the Earth below, or in the waters under the Earth. You shall not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus 20: 2–17). In sum—do not treat as sacred anything finite, nothing that is above, on, or below the Earth. Do not confuse the finite with the Infinite, for no images are possible of God. For this very reason, of course, we do not find images of either humans or divine beings in the mosques of Islam.

Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas states that the human face radiates something deeper than its ego-identity; it reveals “Infinity.” The “I” is deeper than its ego-identity because the “I” comes from God. He writes: “A separated being fixed in its identity, the same, nevertheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive in virtue of its own identity” (1969, 26–27). The human face reflects “Infinity.” That is why we have universal, inviolable human rights, because the light of Infinity shines in the human face alone. Otherwise, unless we have an inviolable dignity that transcends our biological existences as members of a natural species, there can be no such thing as universal human rights (I argue this in my 2024 book Human Dignity and World Order).

In his book Eclipse of God, Jewish thinker Martin Buber comments on the Biblical command to “love thy neighbor”: “Love thy re’ah [the one nearby, the near] therefore means in our language: be lovingly disposed towards men with whom thou hast to do in the course of thy life… Do not hate thy brother (synonym for re’ah) in thy heart… Meet with love also the ger, the non-Jewish ‘sojourner’ who lives in Israel; ‘for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt’, which means, ye have yourselves known what it means to be sojourners, unloved” (1961, 70–71). Every Jew who annually performs the Seder ceremony repeats these words.

In his famous book I and Thou, Buber distinguishes the relationship of I and You from the relation of I and It. The depths of the “I” have the capacity to say “you” to other humans because this involves the gift of our capacity to say “You” to God. God addresses us as a Thou, and we can respond to God as Thou. But human beings everywhere have dehumanized other persons into an “It,” and in doing so dehumanize their own “I” from something participating in Infinity into its own “It”—engaging as an “It” that is treating the world and other persons as an It: in racism, nationalism, egoism, hatred, apartheid, war, etc.

In Eclipse of God, Buber writes: “Time and again, when I ask well-conditioned young souls, ‘Why do you give up your dearest possession, your personal integrity?’ the reply is a utilitarian reply that this sacrifice is ‘for something greater.’” Buber concludes: “In the realm of Moloch honest men lie, and compassionate men torture. And they really and truly believe that brother-murder will prepare the way for brotherhood! There appears to be no escape from the most evil of all idolatry” (1961, 120).

It is idolatry to think that causal manipulation of historical forces with violence, war, and destruction can bring about Tikkun, Messiah, the living presence of God among us. Yet we murder and torture and lie in some twisted and naïve belief that immoral actions in the present can engineer the future. The ethical system called “Utility” (from John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham) is the stance of the twisted world system and its corrupted progenitors—“Any action X may be done in the present if the goal is a noble and valuable one in the future.”

Erich Gutkind was a Jewish intellectual who, because of his written and outspoken opposition to the Nazis, narrowly escaped Germany with his wife to immigrate to New York City in 1933. Until he died in 1965, he wrote several books on Judaism and many articles for such publications as The Jewish Press. In his article, “Why Do The Nations Rage?”, he writes:

The nations—ha goyim—rage, and rage they must because they conceive themselves as being natural, as being products of a natural process, and take great pride in it. What is biologically strong has expansionist urges. Israel is not a natural group but a founded unity. There is a profound difference between goi (nation) and am (people). Am is centered around HIM; it is neither a natural nor a political structure.

(1969, 151)

God has spoken to Israel as a Thou, treated them as an AM (as people), yet Jews throw this living I-Thou relationship away to huddle together in a political, militarized nation-state.

Similarly, in “The Danger for the State of Israel and the Two Zionisms,” Gutkind declares: “It was a glorious deed to reestablish the People, which had been founded for the Torah and had been focused by the Torah. It was, however, fallacious to conceive the Jewish people as a ‘political’ unity… As a political factor, Israel has always been a mere pawn in the hands of the empires and their satellites.” (Ibid., 147). The revelation from God prohibits idolatry: worship of the finite in the mistaken belief that the finite can bring us closer to the Infinite. The unity of the Jewish people is not and cannot be political. It is perverted by nation-state worship.

Yet not only has Israel as a political entity been a pawn in the hands of the US empire, requiring both people in Israel and the US to sacrifice their dearest possession, their personal integrity, for utilitarian lying, torture, and murder in the service of “ideals.” It is also clear that such “ideals” will not and cannot appear as a product of the “natural” nation-state system and its spurious notions of historical, cultural, economic, and political causality. You cannot cause a better world to emerge through bombing, murder, and genocide. From the time of Plato to the works of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, the ends can never justify any means, and evil means inevitably corrupt and destroy all supposedly moral ends.

James Petras, who is professor emeritus of the sociology of geopolitical world systems, in his book The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel, and the Middle East, documents the drive to genocide of the people of Gaza that began not after October 7, 2023, but in the Israeli attack on Gaza in November 2012 (with the full support of the Obama Administration). Yet far from being a pawn in the hands of the empire, the empire is today close to being a pawn in the hands of the tiny satellite. Petras documents the incredible influence of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) on the legislative and executive branches of the US government. Their defense of the oppression of Palestinians is “open and flagrant.”

Petras writes: “This obscene Israeli-Jewish behavior is intentionally open and flagrant: Flaunting Jewish military superiority over the defenseless Arabs is a vital part of the psychological war reinforcing the idea of Arab inferiority and of Palestinians as aliens in their own country.

Israel’s underlying slogan ‘Arab Raus!’ (Arabs Get Out!) echoes the Nazi screed ‘Juden Raus!’ (Jews Get Out!). The message is clear: ‘If you are not a Jew, then you do not exist! Your very alien presence is an abomination in the eyes of the Zionist God. So if you won’t leave politely we will hasten your departure with a few thousand bombs, missiles, and a rain of white phosphorous.’ That is the deeper meaning of Israel’s rape of Gaza” (2014, 134).

We can see in the light of the above discussion that this “Zionist God” is an idol, a lie, a deification of the finite as a false Infinite. But why then would the government of the United States support this genocidal behavior so faithfully? Is US nationalism itself a form of idolatry? US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, concludes his 2026 book Crisis of the Common Goodwith a reflection on the theme emphasized by former President Ronald Reagan but repeated throughout US history: the idea of “The Shining City on the Hill.”

Going all the way back to John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, US presidents and politicians have thought that the US stood for values (human rights and freedoms) not found as fully elsewhere in the world. American exceptionalism: “the shining city on the hill.”

They claim that the United States is not simply a “natural nation,” but one with a special mission and superiority: to bring freedom and human rights to humanity. Ignored is the brutal history of this contingent, finite political entity: founded on a genocide of the Indigenous peoples of North America in conjunction with a racist regime of slavery for imported and purchased Black Africans.

Most of the Founding Fathers of the US who met in Philadelphia in 1787 were enslavers. And historians such as Ward Churchill have pointed out that a major incentive for the Revolutionary War of 1776 was the Royal Proclamation of King George of 1763. In an attempt to mitigate or stop the Indian wars that were happening throughout the colonies, King George drew a line through the Appalachian Mountains, North to South. He forbade further colonization West of that line.

However, the wealthy landowners and enslavers who led the Revolutionary War saw nothing but profit and endless riches awaiting them from the further theft of Indian lands West of the Appalachian Mountains. This served as a fundamental motivation behind the Revolutionary War even though Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence spoke of “God-given rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The creation of the United States in this sense was quite similar to the creation of Israel. In 1948, armed Jewish Zionists forced some 700 thousand Palestinians from their homes and lands (the “Nakba”). They established the political “nation” of Israel on this stolen land, billed publicly as a “beacon of democracy” in a sea of Arab ignorance and corruption. The visions of these Israeli colonists of a secure “home” for the Jews in a political state were not in principle different from the visions of the US Founding Fathers for a government run by the wealthy, educated, white males of the time and dedicated to further Westward colonial expansion across the vast continent of North America, displacing and murdering its native inhabitants.

The political Zionists (whether secular or “Orthodox”) claim ideals and are apparently willing to commit any evil deed in the service of these ideals, as if any ends could ever justify these means. Similarly, the US military has bombed and interfered with the countries of Latin America more than 600 times since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and the US has destroyed or overthrown the government of country after country (many at the behest of Israel) since it became the world’s hegemon in 1945. Recently, with the urging and participation of Israel, they have destroyed the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as continued oppression of the Palestinians.

Instead of recognizing the Infinity in the human face and treating each person as a “You,” rather than an “It,” the US and Israel have worshiped finite wealth and power in egoism and idolatry (saturated with ersatz “values”) that excludes all genuine religion and genuine value. Their ethics is that of utility: the end justifies the means, since if they held genuine ethical principles such as Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: “Always treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means,” they would be unable to murder, torture, lie, or plunder.

Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence declared that the Colonists’ rebellion was in the name of God-given rights, and therefore, he claimed, was morally justified. But Western idolatry of nationhood goes back much earlier than the creation of the US. After the bloody religious wars of the 17th century, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 in effect transferred religious loyalty from this or that religious sect to the emergent nation-state. With the assumption of the nation as a “natural” condition (as Gutkind calls it above), the idolatry of nationhood began to fester among human beings, emanating from Europe: Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and British self-glorification and imperialism. Citizens who found themselves born within each nation were expected to treat their nation as a little god to which one had to be loyal and for which one must be willing to die. Otherwise one became a “traitor” to be shamed and hanged by the neck until dead.

From the point of view of any of these great world religions, this orientation constitutes “idolatry.” Yet human beings appear to need something finite to worship. Something bigger than their individual selves, yet not so big as to threaten ego identifications. To be open to the groundless-ground (the Infinite) threatens all ego identifications. It threatens the ego itself, which in Hinduism and Buddhism is considered a troublesome illusion, and in the three Western religions is considered self-idolatry that must be transcended (St. Paul declares, “It is not I that live but Christ lives in me”).

The human ego grasps for something small that it can substitute for the living God (the groundless-ground). It often prefers the idolatry of racism, nationalism, partisan religious identity, literal revealed “truths,” or individual egoism. In both India and the USA, I have seen billboards demanding “Be part of something larger than yourself: join the army.” The idol declares a false promise of salvation from being part of “something larger than oneself.” It tells you there is a redeeming greatness about sacrificing your life for your nation. You will be honored as a fallen hero. False gods are everywhere: money, nation, sensual indulgence, personal arrogance. The 47th President of the United States has been repeatedly diagnosed as a “malignant narcissist.”

But there is another dimension of idolatry that must be made explicit here if this analysis is to be relatively complete. Many human beings refuse to move beyond fundamentalist, literalist religious beliefs. With the birth of the social, cultural, and historical sciences in the 19th century, religious scholars began to understand the factual historical frameworks behind the creation of scripture: the cultural, linguistic, ideological, and political circumstances of ancient times. Along with natural science that discovered the world as billions of years old (rather than about 5000 as the Bible implied), thoughtful persons recognized the need to rethink religion, not to eliminate it, but to open up for humanity the true depths and dimensions of existence covered up by literalist readings of the ancient texts.

Today, we live in a truly exciting time of discovery and recovery of the depth and truth of authentic religions, both East and West. Thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, Carl Jung, Henri Bergson, Paul Ricoeur, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich, or Thomas Berry have opened up vast vistas and depths of our human situation far beyond what many of the ancient thinkers could even dream. The revolution is now with the world itself, with existence itself, as both Eric Gutkind and Martin Buber have elaborated. As Teilhard put it, “we are the leading shoot of evolution,” with the responsibility for self-transcendence toward cosmic awareness.

The fundamentalist Christians who surround President Trump, hoping for the use of nuclear weapons to bring on the Last Judgment, or the fundamentalist Jews claiming to the President that they own the land symbolized as the “Greater Israel” that was granted to them by God 2000 years ago, represent an abomination of human decency and integrity. The finite ancient texts are idolatrously worshiped by these intellectually dishonest and corrupt clingers to ancient ideas that are nonsense if taken literally. All forms of religious fundamentalism are idolatrous.

Professor Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and political scientist, known for his work on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His work is free of fundamentalist nonsense, and he has written a number of books on the conflict. His last book is titled Israel on the Brink and the Eight Revolutions that Could Lead to Decolonization and Coexistence. Perhaps the world is changing, he reflects. Perhaps the world is growing up and is finished with the US and Israel as rogue nations wreaking havoc everywhere. There are eight signs of progress:

Pappé first describes the internal divisions within Israel that portend the collapse of a unified “greater Israel” project. Second, he describes an “unprecedented support for the Palestinian cause around the world.” Third, he says that “Jews across the world do not identify with Zionism.” Fourth, Israel’s economy is in shambles from all the wars, from boycotts of Israeli goods worldwide, and from hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens leaving the country to find more “security” than Israel’s endless wars can provide.

Fifth, the Israeli army has been shown not to be invincible (a conclusion strongly reinforced by the current ongoing war with Iran). Sixth, the Israeli government is in a state of political turmoil, and the civil state is unable to perform all the functions that a good government should be performing. Seventh, a new, more unified, more cohesive Palestinian liberation movement has been forming that is getting the world to pay attention to the urgent need to address this horrific situation of Israeli state and citizen violence, chaos, and endless war. Eighth is the combined effect of all of the above that is giving hope to the vision, he claims, of a new era of a single state with the right of return that establishes the political equality of all its citizens.

Perhaps he is right, but when will the nations and peoples of Earth move to a higher level of maturity beyond worship of the sovereign nation-state? Do people in Russia, China, or Iran idolatrously worship their nation-states? We may have a long way to go in this regard. Nevertheless, given the ongoing chaos of the Middle East, other than the analysis that I have sketched out above, how else can we explain the insanity of our current world situation in which fundamentalists deny the collapsing climate all around us, press for nuclear Armageddon, spew forth endless lies and absurd conspiracy theories, and declare preposterous land claims from 2000 years ago against the people who have lived in Palestine for centuries?

Any political solution to the world’s crisis must respect the “Infinity” at the heart of our human dignity, whose practical application is universal human rights. The Constitution for the Federation of Earth makes no religious claims, thereby embracing all religions as having equal rights to flourish. For the first time in history, it founds a global society on human dignity and universal human rights. This is not to identify the world democratic government as the source of dignity and rights, but rather to place dignity first and conform our institutions to this universal light of Infinity within our common humanity.

It is these rights and freedoms that a political entity can embrace, recognizing that they do not come from the entity itself (which is finite and contingent) but may embrace an Infinity in the human face that allows us to transcend egoism for a higher level of awareness. Such a universal Earth Federation (for all human beings share this equality before the Infinite) could free us from the idolatry of “sovereign” nation-states and make possible a renewed awareness of the groundless-ground (Infinity) that permeates our humanity and potentially lifts us to genuine transcendence, to Earth Federation, and possibly to authentic religion.

References

Buber, Martin (1970). I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Touchstone Books.
Buber, Martin (1952). Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. Humanities Press.
Gutkind, Eric (1969). The Body of God: First Steps Toward an Anti-Theology. The Collected Papers of Eric Gutkind. Eds. Lucie B. Gutkind and Henry Le Roy Finch. Horizon Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1969). Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Duquesne University Press.
Martin, Glen T. (2024). Human Dignity and World Order: The Holistic Foundations of Global Democracy. Hamilton Books.
Pappé, Ilan (2025). Israel on the Brink: And the Eight Revolutions that could lead to Decolonization and Coexistence. Beacon Press.
Petras, James (2014). The Politics of Empire: The US, Israel and the Middle East. Clarity Press.