The Arts Art is how we express philosophical and theological insights beyond merely denotative language. We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Read More The Owl and the Pussycat “The entire story makes no sense…unless there’s something special about that ring, something you can’t get at Harrod’s at any price.” Read More Dante and the Yellow Submarine “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” Read More Marcel Proust “Who has not dreamed of reliving a cherished moment, not through the ghostly shadows of mind but, like Job, in the flesh?” Read More Robert Frost “Anyone can go for a walk in the woods; only Frost can ‘walk this way’.” Ask any English teacher. The Road Not Taken is a perennial favorite, especially among young readers, who often understand it as an anthem of non-conformity and adventure - Jack Kerouac in verse. But is this really what the poem is about?" Read More Do You Noh? “In the eternal present, not only is every historical event preserved in real time, but every possible event is preserved as well.“ Read More I am the Walrus “Popular music after World War II is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious… Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes, there’s a time to wind and a time to unravel, and now is the time to unravel.” Read More Messiah Redux “Were Handel and Jennens dog whistle revolutionaries?... It is one thing to criticize the secular State, yet another to call for dashing it to pieces.” Read More Handel’s Messiah "There is only one full proof indication that Christmas is coming: the endless performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Yup, it’s that time of year! Read More Moore's Nativity “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” Read More Kandinsky: The Painter of Other Worlds The role of the artist is to challenge “common sense,” to point out the unrecognized assumptions that underpin naïve realism and to suggest certain directions we might travel in pursuit of deeper truth. Read More Alice In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now. Read More Mary Poppins, Sufi Master The story of Mary Poppins is the story of one small boy’s initiation into the teachings of Sufi spirituality and the secrets of Sufi mysticism. When the initiation of Michael Banks is complete, Michael has come, at least in some measure, to know the mind of God. Not bad for seven-years-old! Read More The Meaning of Music We pray the Psalms hoping to conform our minds, our values, our wills to God’s. Remember, God is his essence; we, on the other hand, are each free to create our own essences. Unfortunately, most of us are making a hash of it! Music elucidates the pre-verbal, non-phenomenal structures of the real world. Its meaning is not subject to logical analysis, scientific verification, or mathematical proof. The only test of music’s validity is its beauty. Read More

Science and Technology Science delivers the raw material that becomes Philosophy and Theology; then it tests their propositions against data from ‘the real world’. Bacteria Are People Too “I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisian café. They don’t need to study existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day.” Read More My PCP Should Be a BOT “Dr. Bot would handle patient in-take, conduct the initial interview…order appropriate tests, and offer a preliminary diagnosis…” Read More How to Build a Warp Drive “Buckle up! While your friends are lining up for a trip to Mars, you’re headed for Alpha Centauri…and beyond!” Read More Psilocybin “If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?” Read More A Brief History of Motion “Zeno exploited the continuity of Real Numbers to show…that motion is incompatible with Arithmetic.” Read More Out of the Mouths of Bots “Our Bot has understood IRT something that took our species millennia to grasp: Life is absurd…” Read More Pando and Me “Pando is Pando because Pando isn’t ‘Pando’ anymore!” Read More Genesis and Quantum Computing “Quantum Mechanics is the secret code that unlocks Genesis and when it does, we are surprised to discover that Genesis may be ‘literally true’ after all.” Read More Life Imitates AI “We trained our bots to imitate us and now, voilà! We are imitating our bots.” Read More The Problem of Waste “(Theology) will have to account, not just for the evil in the world, but for something much worse in modern eyes…the inefficiency of the world.” Read More What Is Time? An astronomer explains the search to find its origins... Read More Read My Mind! “What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts.” Read More Of Mice and Mirrors “On a deeper level than you know, your neighbor is yourself…and you are your neighbor.” Read More Follow the Science “Every event is novel, and no event causes any other event. Every event is free, causa sui, and sui generis. But the universe is also conservative…” Read More Causality & the B-Gita “Because every event is sui generis, no event causes any other event! That said, every event contributes to the Actual World of every subsequent event.” Read More Time for a New Turing Test “…This modified Turing Test is designed to root out ‘Carbon Privilege’, the unstated but nearly universal assumption that carbon-based life forms are somehow ‘better’ than their silicon siblings.” Read More To Bot or Not to Bot “Now I can choose whether I want to be deceived by a carbon-based life form or a silicon-based life form; how cool is that?” Read More AI, Justice, and Job “Can a Bot go beyond its programming and our inputs to devise unique solutions to novel problems - solutions that exhibit Justice as their determinative Value?” Read More Navigating the Nexus of AI "Imagine if AI had its own commandments, like 'Thou shalt treat all data equally.' Encouraging ethical principles in AI programming can keep its decisions in line with virtues like fairness, justice, and empathy." Read More ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Read More Do Bots Know Beauty? “I…propose…that we make this the test, not Turing’s, of whether a bot is conscious." Read More AI for Healthcare “Boka, is it true you used to drive 10 miles to see a doctor once a year and called that healthcare?” Read More Think Like a Bot “We developed AI to simplify the process, and expand the potential of thinking. We did not set out to dictate the content of thought itself…” Read More SETI “It may turn out that life is every bit as ubiquitous in the universe as it is on Earth, but it may also turn out that we are utterly alone.” Read More AI and Marxism “Marxism’s stated goal is to transfer ownership of the means of production to the producers. Dare I say, Mission Accomplished?” Read More Artificial Intelligence “Aletheia Today Magazine will devote its entire Fall Issue (9/1/23) to Artificial Intelligence…and we’d love to include YOU in the conversation.” Read More Where the Time Goes “I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.” Read More Our Visitor From Andromeda “'Distributed intelligence' challenges our ideas of God and of Nature; but it may offer a pathway to a new and better theory of cosmogenesis.” Read More Pando “How are you at riddles? Let’s see!” Read More Our Inanimate Neighbors “Awareness is always dynamic; it has no spatio-temporal location… Awareness is not a property of entities, or even of organisms; it is a property of networks.” Read More Who Invented the Internet “Al Gore claims the honor, but research shows that proof of concept testing began in 802 AD...” Read More Be a Bee Why ‘milk and honey?’ Why not ‘sour grapes and corn mash?’ Turns out, it’s all about the honey! Read More Science & the Yellow Submarine – Part II In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight! Read More Common Sense Academy Routs Info Tech, 97 - 3 "Imagine that the Borg Collective and Jean Luc Picard had a baby…" Read More Science and the Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Read More Vacuum Monster Is there any such thing as Vacuum Monster in our universe today? Sure, there is! Read More Electricity “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world. From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception. Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour? The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable. In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come? Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable. We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world. Read More Entropy The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (aka ‘entropy’) ensures that the universe will meet with a bad end: oblivion! Our lifelong battle against evil (the absence of order, i.e., the absence of being) is ultimately hopeless. Evil will triumph in the end…gradually, sporadically, but inexorably! But this all takes place in spacetime; what if spacetime is not all there is to Being? Spacetime represents an unrelenting progression from past to future; we know it as ‘aging’ (mortality). But there is a problem with this model. If everything is either past or future, then nothing is present, and if nothing is present, then nothing actually is. Bottom line, if there is being, there must be a ‘present’. But there is no present in spacetime (and if there is, it is infinitesimal and so of no consequence). If there is Being, there must be a Present. That is where Being resides. To be is to be present. The Present is a dimension perpendicular to spacetime. It is what people mean when they talk about ‘God’. The world consists of events. No event is 100% evil and only one event (God) is 100% good. The Present (God) preserves what really is (i.e., the good) and harmonizes every such good into a single event which, per Alfred North Whitehead, is God’s Consequent Nature. So, the battle against evil is ultimately hopeless, but the struggle itself is the source of all hope – the fruit of all faith and the expression of all love. Read More Hidden Life An earlier “Thought” introduced “The Hidden Life of Trees”, the reflections of a career forester. The book focuses on communities of trees. In these communities, trees demonstrate the ability to communicate, to share resources, to perform selfless, eleemosynary acts, to recognize and care for progenitors as well as offspring. Are these activities enough for us to ascribe a type of consciousness to these communities? Read More Trees According to life-long forester Peter Wohllben (The Hidden Life of Trees), trees communicate via electrical signals transmitted through their roots. Fungi connect the roots and form a “wood wide web”. Communication is at 220 Hertz and signals travel at 1/3rd of an inch per second…not exactly the speed of light. Read More

Win prize money or the chance to be published in Aletheia Today magazine by taking of the AT Challenges. Challenges Are you clever? Good at riddles, a poet, a writer, a math whiz, or just a sharp critical thinker? Take one of our AT Challenges and you may win prizes or see your work published in a future issue. The Sultan and the Sea Challenge First, read The Sultan and the Sea in this issue of Aletheia Today magazine. Next, take the Sultan and the Sea challenge. Read More Winner of the Haiku Challenge Find out who is our first ATM Haiku Challenge Winner! Read More The Haiku Challenge Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry usually consisting of 17 syllables, arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Take the Haiku Challenge today! Read More The Faith Chaplain Challenge Inspired by this issue's Being Faith Chaplain in a Secular World, tell us how you navigate not just your faith in the workplace, but also how you share your faith with others in places where your personal beliefs aren't always popular or even welcomed. Read More

Society Society is the way we live together. It is the concrete manifestation of Culture in interpersonal behavior and institutions. Christian Anarchism “An unjust state is not a bad state…An unjust state is no state at all. There are no ‘bad states’…only states and pseudo-states.” Read More From Marx to Mark “The Gospel of Mark is no biography…It’s a call to action, a manifesto, a How to manual for non-violent guerilla warriors everywhere, 1st century…or 21st.” Read More Fifth Grade Slump, Eighth Grade Cliff “We must surrender the notion that adolescence is a dress rehearsal for adulthood. It’s not; it’s real life! Read More Jesus Christ Revolutionary “He cured the sick and fed the hungry…because it was the right thing to do, here and now, and because it demonstrated what might be possible, universally, in a time to come.” Read More The End of History “Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ with a celebratory flourish. But be careful what you celebrate!” Read More The Wonder School “Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes.” Read More Leviticus and the Fed "The Fed’s 2% inflation policy is a modern version of the Levitical program. It pays for the social safety net that is our way of redistributing wealth.” Read More Home Alone “Macaulay Culkin is ‘every boy’ and his Home Alone family is ‘America’s family’ – except it’s not!” Read More Satan, Mary, and ‘Da Judge’ “Satan glorified political power for its own sake. He defended the socio-economic status quo…Jesus’ mother proclaimed a political and economic revolution...” Read More Political Alienation “Marx’s hypothesis that a person’s voting habits would be determined by their relationship to the means of production was blown out of the water…” Read More How Moses Saved Egyptian Civilization “…Walk through the streets of Jerusalem, through the marketplace at Mahane Yehudah, and find distinctly Judaized foods, dress, music, and customs from every part of the world.” Read More The Lottery “The state lottery is just about the only financial vehicle that offers some folks a realistic opportunity to materially impact their economic circumstances.” Read More Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope Leo XIII “Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization!” Read More Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Read More Job vs. James, Rex “God is good because he’s good, not just because he’s God.” Read More

What happens when we converge a completely unlike pair of ancient and modern influencers? Converge This! Converge This! Articles exploring the 21st century convergence of philosophy, theology and science.

Alethia Today magazine essays relating to contemporary beliefs and values in today's society Culture Articles on contemporary society--its beliefs, values, and accomplishments; plus, original poetry and fiction BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different News Title “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

Deep dive into the crossroads of theology, philosophy, and cosmology. Cosmology is where Science and Philosophy converge in their search for a Theory of Everything (TOE). The Eternal Present “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” Read More Life on Mars “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" Read More The Probability of Nothing “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Read More Is the Universe Real “The most important thing we’ve learned is that we know so much less than we thought we knew.” Read More Playing with Blocks “Everything I needed to know about cosmology, I learned watching my grandchildren play with blocks.” Read More The Frost Diamond “God is ‘special’ only to that extent that in God, A and Ω are the same event.” Read More Determinism…or Entanglement? “Take Vegas! The casino’s ‘edge’ is as little as 1% on some bets. At those odds, I should be able to play forever…but probability is not actuality.” Read More Returning to Andromeda “What sort of God would throw candy wrappers on a pristine beach? I mean, burning someone at the stake, well maybe, but littering, no way!” Read More Past, Present, Future "So, it turns out that the universe did not have a lot of options when it came to structuring time." Read More A Universe From Nothing I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is! Read More Cosmic Crossroads You say, "Big Bang;" we say, "Genesis." You say, "Constantine;" we say, "Ascension." Read More A Theory of Everything (TOE) Thirty years after the death of Jesus…St. Paul quoted an already ancient Christology…a TOE. Read More The Nature of Time Confining events within a single order of magnitude reinforces our tendency to categorize events as past, present, or future. After all, if a quantum of experience can be no more than one second long, almost everything must seem past or future from that perspective. Read More Quark Soup “I once filled the entire universe, but for less than a second. I am 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun, but I am still a liquid. I am denser than anything in the universe, except a black hole, but I flow 20 times more easily and smoothly than water. Who am I?” Read More

Culture Culture Culture is the way we live out Philosophy and Theology in community. Pontius Pilate “Pilate could be the avatar of an entire class of folks in the post-industrial West, society’s so-called middle managers.” Read More What’s the Matter with Santa Claus? “Do you remember when and why you stopped believing in Santa?” Read More The Seven Pillars of Wisdom “Kabbalah kept the pre-Socratic tradition alive until it could be born anew in the Age of Aquarius.” Read More Don’t Teach Your Kid to Count! “Our own number system is based on a highly specialized, and not necessarily privileged, concept of quantity.” Read More The Great River “What the Cross is to Christianity…the River is to Process Philosophy.” Read More Self, Inc. “You’re the CEO of Self, Inc…What’s your mission statement?” Read More Childhood Lost “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but children are from the planet Mercury.” Read More Be Half There “'Be Here Now,’ cried Baba Ram Dass in the ‘60s. But was that good advice?” Read More Alphabet “Reciting the alphabet is like peeling layers off of a prize-winning red onion.” Read More Arithmetic “I want to repeal all the fundamental laws of Arithmetic.” Read More Just One More Beer “…Regretting your actions would mean disclaiming the entire forward course of world (cosmic) history.” Read More Everybody Loves Grammar “If the physical world isn’t structured according to the rules of grammar, the social world certainly is.” Read More Mythology Before Marvel Comics “Sturluson searched for the universal patterns that connect all times, all places, and all scales…and, Glory be to God, he found them.” Read More Should I Vote? “What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!” Read More The Paradox of Childhood “…We treat children…as pets, slaves, snuggle bunnies and proto-adults”. Read More Is Childhood a Crime? “Parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process.” Read More Vanity “Every day for 80+ years, we imagine ourselves to be someone we are not, and we work tirelessly, and fruitlessly, to become that person. 'That' is Vanity.” Read More Bacteriology…and American Football “…Will it surprise you to learn that not every bacterium is a team player?” Read More Kabbalah and Thomas the Train “Children and tank engines are not so different from the rest of us. They crave meaning! They only settle for pleasure when…they lose hope.” Read More Deconstructing Popeye “…then I am basically an automaton. I am carbon-based AI. I am the product of nature (inherited traits) and nurture (upbringing)…my parents’ mini-me.” Read More Age is an Algorithm “We systematically suppress our actual experience and replace it with whatever it is we think we are supposed to experience, and we call that reality.” Read More Chess “A recent headline in the 'New York Post' read: King Castles!” Read More Football and Quantum Mechanics “This is what we do on Sunday nights and Mondays during football season: we play 'what if' and 'if only'.” Read More May Day “This one day converges mythology (Norse), cosmology (Pagan), theology (Christian) and ideology (Marxist) with ancient fertility rites. And for my next trick…” Read More The Lego Movie and John Stewart Bell “This movie includes a huge twist with cosmological implications.” Read More Middle Voice “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” Read More JK Rowling and Pliny the Elder "What about werewolves, giants, trolls, and dragons? We don’t believe in them; they’re not real! Are they?" Read More Dante and The Beatles “If a world can or must…self-annihilate…then that world does not exist, never did exist, never will exist, cannot exist.” Read More Football Math “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Read More I Led Three Lives “Modern physics is right now living at least three lives and possibly a fourth.” Read More I Wasn't Anything Every day is Halloween…Every day I get to make the decision anew: who am I going to be today? Read More Mommy Math Part One If counting is such a powerful tool, how is it that for the most part, we don’t count? Read More Pronouns Next time someone asks you for your ‘pronouns,’ try telling them, ‘you/you’…see what happens. Read More Ectaban Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! Read More /ˈdjuːti/ Why can’t a monarch wear whatever shade of nail polish she wants? Read More Learn to Swym “Language Endures. We Don’t” – now that is a bumper sticker! Read More Alice In Looking-glass world, there’s plenty of there and then, but not a whiff of here and now. Read More Imagine! “John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.” Read More BeHukkotai: Why Land is Different Land is imbued with holiness, which means that, like God, it is beyond human measures of usefulness or control. Read More Xiako Can't Count So, what’s up with the Piraha? How can they get by without numbers? Read More Speaking Piraha The hidden grammar censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Why did the speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence, unless they are somehow connected?” A major fallacy that comes with a huge price tag. Read More Enlightenment! “It is often said that victors write history. That is even truer when the war is cultural rather than political.” Read More How to Coach an Undefeated Football Team “Team is not a collective noun; it’s a verb: to team.” Read More Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine. Read More I'm Bored! “We are co-responsible for the world. We are all always our siblings’ keepers!” Read More Believers Need Not Apply We’ve constructed a super-elaborate cosmology to explain how ‘it is’ arose spontaneously from ‘it is not.’ (If that doesn’t make any sense to you, trust me, it doesn’t make sense to me either.) How did the universe come to be? It just did! How did the ratios of the masses of subatomic particles get so finely tuned? They just did! Read More Offense Taken! There is nothing more self-satisfying or self-aggrandizing than ‘taking offense’. Read More Is 65 the New 45? That’s conventional wisdom…and in this rare case, conventional wisdom is not wrong…but neither is it perfectly right. Read More Everybody's Autobiography Is it possible to write an autobiography of everyone, to somehow incorporate the wildly varying events of different people’s lives into a single story? Absurd, right? But not so fast! Read More Can Subject/Verb Agreement Make the World Go Round? We imagine that our world is made up of ‘things’ (nouns), their accidental qualities (adjectives), and the relationships between them (verbs). We imagine this because just such a classification system is embedded in our native tongue: modern English, for example, or most any other contemporary Indo-European language. Read More Voice Verbs “I am stuck on Band-Aid ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me!” So says the jingle for one of the world’s most iconic products. But more importantly, and quite unexpectedly, this slogan is one of the best examples of ‘middle voice thinking’ in American pop culture. Read More Antonyms Antonyms. No such thing! Not-X includes the shadow of X. Example: ‘Pretty’ and ‘Ugly’. ‘Pretty’ refers to the totality (gestalt) of a person, place, or thing. ‘Ugly’ refers to those elements of the aforementioned that are not consistent with a ‘pretty’ whole. ‘Pretty’ and ‘ugly’ appear to be antonyms…but they’re not. In fact, they operate on two entirely different syntactic levels. ‘Ugly’ actually derives its meaning from the concept of ‘pretty’. Therefore, we can say ‘ugly’ includes “the shadow of ‘pretty’”; but not so the other way around. Read More Covid 20 So we were told that COVID-19 came from bats. By the summer of 2020, it should have been obvious that this was wrong. COVID-19 has behaved in some very unique ways that most probably reflect the effects of ‘human engineering’. Now the scientific consensus is shifting. Read More Amazon Amazon provides reliable, rapid, and inexpensive delivery service; and the US Postal Service? Well, to be kind let’s say ‘not so much’. So who is being sued by the feds? You guessed it…Amazon. Apparently, success today is automatically an anti-trust violation. Read More Culture

Essays in Aletheia Today magazine relating to scripture and how to incorporate scripture into family, life, work, and daily life. Plus, original prayers, reflections, and meditations. Spirituality Mar 1, 2024 I'm Ageless and Timeless “I am a spy; I can sense it, but I have no spy craft, no Bond-tech, and no ‘should you choose to accept it’ mission.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Is Techno-Optimism a New Religion? “This is the first time I’ve seen AI presented with all the trappings of a new Aquarian theology.” Read More Mar 1, 2024 Happiness “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” Read More Jul 15, 2023 Ave Maria “Of course, no one needs to invoke Mary’s intercession… (but) imagine OJ without his Dream Team.” Read More Jun 1, 2023 The Our Father “This tiny prayer…is a cyber-wonks dream. The density of information content is out of this world, quite literally!” Read More Jun 1, 2023 The Structure of Prayer Formal Christian Prayer is a cornucopia of spirituality. Yet in the Roman Catholic tradition at least, two prayers stand out: Jesus' prayer, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary (Ave Maria). Read More Apr 15, 2023 My Breastplate Read More Oct 15, 2022 St. Paul’s Lord’s Prayer “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to entire prayer. Read More Oct 15, 2022 St. Paul’s Lord’s Prayer “But deliver us from evil,” this last verse is the key to entire prayer. Read More Oct 15, 2022 Faith, Hope, and Love This excerpt from the writings of St. Paul is among the best-known passages in Judeo-Christian scripture. But what does it really mean? Read More Sep 1, 2022 Serenity Prayer Is the Sermon ‘in the can’ after all? Read More Jul 5, 2022 Teaching Physics in the 21st Century Schools will soon be reopening with kids returning to begin a new school year. Now is the time to begin thinking about the fall curriculum. In this article, we outline a 10-unit physics curriculum for grades four through eight, all based on The Yellow Submarine. Read More May 29, 2022 Being a Faith Chaplain in a Secular World As a chaplain, I am allowed to talk about faith or pray with a client if that is what he or she wants. Like many people in our secular and even religious society, I am to be there for ‘those of all faiths or none.’ Read More Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue Spirituality is the practice of Philosophy and Theology; it is the ‘How To’ for those who “walk in the valley of the shadow of death.”

You Are the Elephant explores the hard problem of consciousness and Aletheia Today’s proposed solution, rooted in a framework dating back 2,500 years. Consciousness October 1, 2026 Issue It is routinely referred to as ‘the hard problem’; consciousness is the one thing that even committed scientists acknowledge may never be fully explained. Yes, it’s tricky; but a model framework exists…and has existed, at least in embryo, for 2500 years. You are the Elephant defines the problem and outlines AT’s proposed ‘solution’: You are the Elephant There is an ancient Hindu story of blind monks attempting to describe an elephant; but what if you are the elephant? Consciousness & Genesis Amazingly, a framework for a possible solution to the dilemma of consciousness is embedded in the Judeo-Christian creation story. What’s it Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel theorized that consciousness must extend beyond homo sapiens because ‘there must be something it is like to be a bat’. He was right…but for the wrong reason. Virtue or Freedom Much of what we do we do unconsciously. But that does not necessarily mean that we are not responsible for our actions. Bot Conscious Whether AI is or can become conscious is a topic of intense debate. But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps what matters is whether my Bot thinks it’s conscious. Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back JD Salinger vs Wally Shawn David Cowles May 18, 2026 “Rather than reject Salinger’s derogatory depiction, Shawn leans into it… He dismisses the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic and lifestyle as fantastic, illusory, arbitrary and magical.” Any mildly competent Intellectual History of the US post WW II would have to recognize the contributions of J.D. Salinger (JD) and Wallace Shawn (Wally). (Although we’ve never met, I feel as though I grew up, culturally, alongside Mr. Shawn so referring to him as ‘Wally’ does not seem irreverent.) JD, of Catcher in the Rye fame, is known for his eccentricity, his physical isolation, and his meagre, if cherished, literary output. Wally, on the other hand, seems to have two fingers in every cultural pie. Actor, director, author, critic, and TV celebrity, Wallace Shawn is an iconic member of the post-War literary scene. Respecting your time, dear reader, I will mention just a few of Shawn’s many credits: My Dinner with Andre , Vanya on 42 nd Street , The Princess Bride , voice roles in Toy Story and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , and of course, the olive in every martini, Young Sheldon . He’s collaborated with everyone from Woody Allen (6 films) to Louie Malle ( Atlantic City ), Bill Cosby ( The Cosby Show ), and Noam Chomsky. Nor did the apple fall far from the tree. For several decades, Wally’s father, William Shawn, edited America’s literary magazine of record, The New Yorker . During that period the elder Shawn was close friends with Salinger and they dined regularly at the Algonquin. JD was not yet 25 when Wally was born. It is likely that he followed his maturation closely and was no doubt aware of his emergence as a cultural icon in his own right. How JD felt about that, however, is unknown, at least by this commentator. In 1961, in the third of his four published works, Franny and Zooey , Salinger gives Wally a cameo role that I don’t think was meant to be flattering. JD presents Wally as unmemorable, as someone who looks, talks, dresses and acts like everybody else. He has the sort of face that you keep seeing, but not seeing, in every crowd. Salinger presents Wally as a charmer and a gossip, one who drops a name only to disparage its nominee. “It’s not just Wally…it’s everybody. I mean everything everybody does is so…tiny and meaningless,” says Franny Glass, JD’s anti-hero. According to Franny, Wallace Shawn is a poster boy for banality; but worst of all, Wally is introduced to us, and to Franny, as a friend of Lane, Franny’s foil, a shallow, entitled, prep-school frat boy living a life utterly devoid of authenticity. 20 years later (1981), almost to the day, the world got Wallace Shawn’s reply in the form of a full length feature film, My Dinner with Andre (Louie Malle, director). As you know, the film consists almost entirely of conversation over dinner between Wally and fellow director, Andre Gregory. Trust me, you’ll be on the edge of your seat for the full 110 minutes. There is no direct connection between Gregory and Salinger, except for a shared eccentricity that borders on the anti-social and a total disdain for the ordinary and the everyday. However, there are certainly notes of similarity between Salinger’s version of Wally and Malle’s kinder, gentler treatment. That said, Wally’s apparent identity across 2 decades begs us to seek a parallel identity between his interlocutors, Salinger and Gregory. In a style fully suggestive of Salinger, Gregory savages the mundane. For an hour and a half, Gregory holds court, only briefly interrupted by the baffled Shawn and their slightly annoyed waiter. But reminiscent of Molly in Ulysses , Wally gets the last word with a 10 minute virtual soliloquy that shreds the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic: “I’m trying to earn a living. I’m trying to pay my rent and my bills… I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook, and I enjoy going through my list and carrying out the responsibilities and doing the errands and then crossing them off my list… I don’t feel the need for anything more than this… A delicious cup of coffee and a piece of coffee cake, why is it necessary to have more than this or to even think about having more than this? “You seem constantly to be finding a significance in these things that to me are just facts…that things in the universe are there for a purpose, to give us messages. Whereas I believe that things in the universe are just there. They don’t mean anything.” Here, Wally is aligning himself with such luminaries as Epicurus, Voltaire (“tend your own garden”) and Solomon (traditional author of Ecclesiastes ): “I know that there is nothing good for man (sic) except to be happy and live the best life he can while he is alive. Moreover, that a man should eat and drink and enjoy himself in return for all his labors is a gift of God… “Go to it then, eat your food and enjoy it, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for already God has accepted what you have done… Whatever task lies to your hand, do it with all your might.” Rather than reject Salinger’s derogatory depiction, Shawn leans into it. He turns vice into virtue and in the process he dismisses the Gregory/Salinger aesthetic and lifestyle as fantastic, illusory, arbitrary and magical. Truth to tell, there is much to admire in the works of Salinger and Gregory… but no more than in the work of Wallace Shawn. Ecclesiastes can be read as a commentary on Deuteronomy : “I set before you life and death…” becomes “I set before you the fantastic (nihilism) and the mundane (quietism); therefore choose…” What world do you live in, dear reader? ‘Wally World’ (Solomon & Shawn) or its ‘Anti-World’ (Salinger and Gregory)? Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” < Back Happiness David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar.” In the Yule 2023 Issue of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), we pointed out some issues with the doctrine known as Utilitarianism , popularized in modern Western philosophy by the liberal John Stuart Mill and the socialist Jeremy Bentham. Classically, philosophical Utilitarianism has been based on an ethical imperative, usually formulated as ‘the greatest Good for the greatest number’. In our earlier article, we avoided the temptation to weigh in on the nature of the Good itself. Instead, we discussed issues related to the generation and distribution of that Good according to the utilitarian formula. According to Mill, happiness is ‘the Good’, the Summum Bonum ; we know this because no one would ever choose to be unhappy rather than happy. Some people choose chocolate over vanilla (no idea why), but no one ever chooses to be unhappy rather than happy, do they? Of course they do! They enter monasteries, they go on fasts, and in extreme cases, they even self-flagellate (figuratively…or literally). The problem with this counterargument is that these apparently unpleasant practices do, in fact, make their practitioners ‘happy’. In rare cases, we’re talking masochism; in most cases, we’re talking about a willingness to endure ‘superficial’ unhappiness (pain) in service of some ‘deeper’ happiness, ‘beyond the Pleasure Principle’. This semantic ‘trick’ makes it impossible for me, or anyone, to refute Mill…but it also robs Utilitarianism of its heuristic power. If I do X, then by definition, doing X must be calculated to make me happier than not doing X. Therefore, every time I do anything , I substantiate utilitarian theory: I always choose the option calculated to make me happiest. Otherwise, why would I choose it? And so in reality, I substantiate nothing. If that makes you uncomfortable, as it does me, you may ‘phone a friend’ for assistance. Patched into a gathering of Logical Positivists , in Vienna (1925–1935), you will hear that no proposition is meaningful unless it can be falsified. The basic premise of Utilitarianism, GGG#, cannot be falsified: it is impossible to imagine any objective, empirical data that would disprove it. How would I go about proving that some people choose to be unhappy rather than happy? What sort of instrument would I need to measure the quantity (not to mention the quality ) of someone’s happiness ? Let’s test this hypothesis with two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum: First, when I was barely yet a tween, I recall my grandmother going on about all the ‘sacrifices’ she made each day for the good of our family. She did a lot, no doubt! But cheekily, I countered, “You do what you do because doing it makes you happy.” Unwittingly, I was channeling Mill…at 10. No big deal: an even younger Mill channeled Plato…in the original Greek! The things she did, admittedly often repetitive and strenuous for a person her age, nevertheless gave her purpose and her life meaning. Watching TV game shows, hanging out in bars, or engaging in prostitution would probably not have made her happy. She would have been much less happy had she chosen not to do the things she did. None of which makes her any less virtuous! My second example requires us to travel back a bit in time. You may not remember it, but I was once burned at the stake, by John Calvin, no less (not to drop a name). Make no mistake, it hurt…a lot, but it came with the satisfaction of knowing that I had been true to my beliefs. Had I recanted and been spared, I would have had to endure a lifetime of shame, self-doubt, and regret. I chose the option that made me less unhappy …no matter how painful. All of which begs the question: “What is happiness anyway?” Is it a positive state that one can aspire to and even work to bring about? Or is it merely the absence of unhappiness? Consider the example above: “Recant or burn!” Neither will make me happy ‘happy’ but, I suppose, one might make me ‘less unhappy’ than the other. Reading Mill, you get the immediate sense that you are measuring unhappiness (e.g., poverty) rather than the much more elusive quantity known as ‘happiness’. It is the avoidance of penury that makes one happy, not a surfeit of riches. We are often reminded, correctly, that money does not buy happiness, but the myth of the ‘happy hobo’ is just that…a myth. As human beings, we are much better at defining what makes us unhappy than what makes us happy. We know what we don’t want; we have a harder time deciding what we prefer instead. But rest assured, whatever we choose to do, we will have chosen the option intended to make us happiest…always, every time, 100%. In the earlier article, we argued that the utilitarian formula for the distribution of Good was vacuous; now we’re arguing that the utilitarian definition of Good is itself meaningless, and beyond even that, that the concept of happiness itself has no meaning. It is as if we added the words, “…and it makes me happy,” to the end of every declarative sentence. Because we add this meme to every available utterance, it is utterly meaningless. It is impossible to devise a set of circumstances in which it doesn’t apply. Some folks are ‘happy’ living their lives on a beach; others need a boardroom; some need a bar. What makes each person happy is not the venue; what makes them happy is the conviction that they are doing ‘what they ought to be doing’ at the time. Don’t let that ‘ought’ scare you! I’m not talking the 613 mitzvahs of Torah here. At any point in time, you have a sense of what you ought to be doing, or at least what you ought not to be doing. We are not here proposing any objective criteria for ‘ought’. In fact, this is where the concept of happiness becomes relevant after all. We are happy at those times when we’re doing what we feel we ought to be doing. But BYOO – Bring our own ‘ought’! It won’t be my ought…but so what? Be an Old Testament judge: Do what is right in your own eyes (Judges 21:25). But laying such analysis aside, Mill still faces insuperable hurdles. How does one define ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’? Is it a simple matter of arithmetic? Ʃ A+B+C…Z. In that case, a solution in which one person monopolizes 100% of the Good is at least conceivable. Of course, that is not what the liberal Mill or the socialist Bentham had in mind. They assumed some sort of distributive calculus – which is all well and good, but not part of Utilitarianism per se . Sidebar : If the meaning of life is ‘42’, then perhaps we can say the sum of all possible Good is ‘10’. Our job as philosopher-monarchs is to determine the distribution of that Good among, say, 10 beneficiaries. Turns out, the Utilitarian test, greatest good for the greatest number , can be satisfied using any distribution formula whatsoever, provided that 10 units of Good are distributed over 10 potential beneficiaries. Literally no one thinks this! And that fact alone demonstrates the absolute vacuity of Utilitarianism. Every practical version of Utilitarianism conceals another value (or set of values) which is the real driver. For Bentham, that value might have been ‘equality’, for Mill it might have been ‘liberty’ (including opportunity and the pursuit of happiness); for someone else, it might be ‘monopoly’, and for yet another, ‘productivity’ (whatever distribution of goods will generate the most total value). These are real driving values. The utilitarian formula is the veneer that attempts to clothe these values with invisibility, to hide them under the transparent mask of irrefutability. Mill and Bentham did not appreciate the full significance of the Industrial Revolution. Quantities are not fixed. They can grow (or diminish). A workable economic system needs to be concerned with the aggregate quantity of ‘goods’ as well as the just distribution of those ‘goods’. A professor of mine, John Rawls ( A Theory of Justice ), made a valiant attempt to reconcile Mill and Bentham and rescue Utilitarianism in the process. He proposed a system under which everyone would be guaranteed a certain minimal quantum of ‘happiness’ (goods), with the balance allocated among the beneficiaries in the way most likely to generate the greatest aggregate quantity of goods. The effort is valiant and no doubt correct, as far as it goes, but does it have any real content? Basically, Rawls states that there are three ‘goods’: (1) liberty (personal, civic); (2) prosperity (economic sufficiency); and (3) opportunity (economic freedom, the pursuit of happiness). I didn’t need to spend $250,000 on an Ivy League education to know this much. In fact, I can fit it on a bumper sticker for my next presidential run: “Liberty, Prosperity, Opportunity”. Curious to see what my opponents come up with! Would “Slavery, Poverty, Despair” be too much to hope for? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Click the cover image to return to Spring 2024. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue