< Back 03/15/2022 For 25 years, give or take, you learn to live. My mother called it ‘learning to be people’. “David,” she would say, “You’re just not people!” And she was right; I wasn’t. Then, after 25 years of learning to live, of learning to be ‘people’, you finally are ‘people’. Now at last, you can begin to live…other people’s lives. You’ve learned to be ‘people’, but the people you have learned to be are ‘other people’. So congratulations, you just spent 25 years of your life learning how to be someone you’re not…and be really good at it! That’s what we call ‘culture’: learning to be ‘people’, other people, and learning to live other people’s lives. If the purpose of acculturation is to limit behavioral variety across a species, I’d say ours is working very nicely, thank you. More later… -David For 25 years, give or take, you learn to live. My mother called it ‘learning to be people’. “David,” she would say, “You’re just not people!” And she was right; I wasn’t. Then, after 25 years of learning to live, of learning to be ‘people’, you finally are ‘people’. Now at last, you can begin to live…other people’s lives. You’ve learned to be ‘people’, but the people you have learned to be are ‘other people’. So congratulations, you just spent 25 years of your life learning how to be someone you’re not…and be really good at it! That’s what we call ‘culture’: learning to be ‘people’, other people, and learning to live other people’s lives. If the purpose of acculturation is to limit behavioral variety across a species, I’d say ours is working very nicely, thank you. More later… -David Previous Next

< Back The Fight for Our Children's Hearts Starts at Home Amy Toman For a culture that values education, we seem to forget that our children need to be educated in the Word, not just the world. Our culture puts a high value on the education of children. We have preschools that require entrance exams, schools that earn money based on students' test scores, community colleges, and universities with graduate and postgraduate degrees. For a culture that values education, we seem to forget that our children need to be educated in the Word, not just the world. The repeated theme in western education is one of “sending." We send our kids away to be taught academics at schools. We send children to be taught discipline and endurance through structured sports programs led by trained professionals. We send them away to be taught morals and truth at church. The continually reinforced reality is that we send them away. This pattern reveals a tremendous lack. We as parents are not equipped to be teaching our children. It is due to our lack that we send our children to those who have a supply. Our children must be taught by someone who has the correct credentials. We see this broken theme within every sphere of our society. Do we wonder why so often our youth abandon their heritage in culture and faith? We need to look no further than our own habits. They haven’t wandered away; we have sent our children away. The prevalence of youth and young adults leaving the church is astounding. If you look around at churches today, you will see that there is a significant age group missing: young adults. Our children are being won over by the culture of the world, not Christ. This can be changed for future generations. For a problem to be rectified, it must first be identified. There is time to bring our children back to Christ, and it starts at home. The training of our children to love God and contend for the faith starts at home. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 says, “And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart: and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” Scripture doesn't tell us that our children will learn about God from their private school teacher, their pastor, their youth group, their friends, or their youth pastor. Scripture tells us our children should be learning about God primarily from their homes. God’s word should be in their hearts daily and heard in their homes. But how do we as Christian parents do this? How are we supposed to teach our children daily in the instruction of the Lord? We are all super busy people. We may work, our kids are in school all day, then there is homework and sports and bed. There just isn’t enough time in the day, or is there? There are many ways that we can train our children in the Word, one of which is family worship. Worship is paramount in the life of a Christian. The definition of worship is the “feeling and expression of reverence and adoration for God," according to Webster's dictionary. Worship is about God. Worship is our expression of reverence and adoration to God our Father, our maker and creator. But what exactly is family worship, and how are we to start worshiping the Lord daily in our homes as a family? Family worship is a specific time when your family comes together to read God's word, pray, and sing. No elaborate sermons or messy crafts are required. Starting family worship is a lot easier than it seems. First, talk to your spouse and pray together about how best to spend time together in worship as a family. Second, choose a book of the Bible that you enjoy and start at chapter one. Start with reading a few verses every night, and as your family is able, increase your reading to an entire chapter. As you are reading, pause and ask basic questions about the passage: what just happened? Why do you think this passage is in the Bible? Who are the people in this passage, and did anything stick out to you? There is no need for any special devotional book, just your Bible. Reading scripture is the first step to family worship, but it is not the whole thing. During family worship, you should also sing and pray to God. Make a list of some of your favorite hymns and rotate through them regularly. Singing together may seem scary to many of us. I know I am not the best singer! I take comfort in the statement from Psalm 100:1: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord”. It is important to remember that throughout Scripture we have references to the Israelites and Christians singing praises to God. The entire book of Psalms was originally set to music. It was the songbook of God’s ancient people. We should sing praises to God whether we think we have a great voice or musical talent. Scripture reading and singing are two of the three components of family worship. The last component is prayer. It is important that we as families pray together. James 5:13 says, “Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise.” God calls us to pray regardless of what is going on in our lives. Praying with our children teaches them how to pray and how to rely on God. We cannot expect our children to have a personal prayerful relationship with the Lord if we do not show them how. Praying together will bring your family closer, as you share joys and struggles with each other and bring them to the Lord. Family worship does not guarantee that our children will not leave the church, but it will make an impression. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it.” It is God’s work to save our children, but it is our job to train them according to God’s Word. The hearts of our children need to be won at home. They need to be shown the love of Christ within the context of their family. They must see and hear how God's Word applies to every aspect of their lives. Spending time in worship, singing, and prayer as a family will change who you are and will change your children. Scripture shows us several other instances of children being taught the ways of God through their parents as primary instructors. I encourage each of you to look at your daily schedules and see if you are teaching your children the ways of God. Our children will be sent out eventually. Maybe it’s for educational reasons, or maybe just because they have spread their wings to establish their own home. What will be their foundation when they are sent out? Will the truths of God’s Word be their firm perspective of reality? What values will our children treasure, and what values will future generations wish they had been taught? As a society that puts such a premium on education, prioritizing our children’s faith education is an effort that will see benefits wherever they are sent. Amy Toman has a B.S. in Early Childhood Education from Central Michigan University. She has been married to her husband for 13 years and they have four living children. Amy spends her days teaching her children, managing her household and writing as often as possible. She delights in engaging conversation and seeing children thrive in their curiosities and abilities. Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Should I Vote? David Cowles “What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened!” Today (1/15/2024) marks the official ‘opening’ of the 2024 Presidential Election season. It’s the night of the Iowa Caucuses! If you are a US citizen, even if you don’t live in Iowa, sometime in the next few months you will be called upon to make a decision: “Should I vote in my state’s Presidential Primary or Caucus?” Well, why would you? To demonstrate your support for democracy? To ensure that the best (or better) candidate is elected? To advocate for a particular set of public policies? Heck no! These all ‘sound’ like good reasons to vote…but none of them makes any sense! Dictatorships hold elections too. In some countries, folks are required by law to vote in elections. It confers an aura of legitimacy (often where none is deserved) while simultaneously ensuring that the votes of any one person or group are maximally diluted. Saddam Hussein ‘eked out’ a win…with just 99% of the vote. You’re told, “Every vote counts!” But pro-democracy propaganda notwithstanding, no one vote ( your vote) ever elected anyone ! Sure, very occasionally, the ‘official’ tally may reflect a difference of a single vote, but long before we get down to that one ballot, the process has become judicial rather than political. Just ask Al Gore! At some point, the counting of ballots has to stop (e.g., on 12/12/2000) so that judges can take over. A two-word summary of Bush v. Gore : “Stop counting!” You’ve been told that every vote counts; in fact, no vote counts! Voting is one way to communicate a political position – but the signal is usually drowned out by the noise. You don’t get to explain your vote. Maybe you voted for candidate A because she is a staunch defender of personal liberty, or maybe you voted for her because she is a racist. No one will ever know which message you meant to send. “To…to…to,” is it precisely that purposefulness that can make voting meaningless? What if there was an election where everyone was eager to vote…but nobody cared who won? It’s happened! “This is a book about…people who have come to believe that voting is meaningless and useless because politicians or those who influence politicians are corrupt, selfish, and beyond popular control.” – Murray Levin, The Alienated Voter . No, Professor Levin’s book is not about the current national political landscape…though it certainly could be. Rather, it’s an analysis of a local election that took place 65 years ago, in Boston! Boston is famous for many things, baked beans, cod, and crème pie, for example. Not to mention Ted Williams, Larry Bird, and the GOAT (Tom Brady). But these Boston icons fade compared to a certain Massacre (1770), Tea Party (1773), and Midnight Ride (1775). After all, Boston was home to the Shot Heard ‘round the World …twice as it turns out, once in 1775 and then again in 1959! If you were a fan of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, perhaps you owe their success to ‘the strange events’ that happened in Boston in 1959. The self-proclaimed ‘Hub of the Universe’ heralded the start of a multi-generational political epoch in the US and beyond. This is what Professor Levin chronicled in his 1960 book. Let’s set the scene. Boston’s popular incumbent mayor (John B. Hynes) is not running for reelection. The runner-up in the previous mayoral race, State Senator John E. Powers, has been designated ‘mayor presumptive’ by the Boston media. Nevertheless, five candidates have entered the non-partisan primary. Perhaps the least well-known is the Registrar of Deeds, John Collins. As expected, Powers won the primary easily, with more than a third of the votes cast. Surprisingly, Collins finished second, but with less than a quarter of the total vote. Powers scored 50% more primary votes than Collins – an insuperable gap to close in just six weeks. Accordingly and appropriately, the Boston media promptly declared the election over and promoted Powers from ‘mayor presumptive’ to ‘mayor elect’…but someone forgot to tell Collins. Still, the outcome of the final election was never in doubt. Every poll, every pundit, told the same tale: “Powers Landslide!” until about 8:45 PM on the evening of November 3. The media pundits had been right all along. The election was not going to be close, not even close to close. Only one problem: the ‘wrong’ candidate had won! Final tally: Collins 56%, Powers 44%. Let’s put this in perspective: FDR averaged 56% of the vote in his four election victories; Eisenhower averaged 56% of the vote in his two campaigns against Stevenson. No US presidential candidate has won 56% of the vote in 40 years - not since Ronald Reagan defeated Walter Mondale in 1984. What’s that you say? “So an underdog won a race: big deal; upsets happen all the time!” No, they don’t! Not like this one. Both candidates received more votes in the final election than they had in the preliminary. Powers doubled his primary vote total, and Collins quadrupled his. The Primary voters split 3 to 2 for Powers; the ‘new votes’ split 2 to 1 for Collins. Powers received 50% more votes than Collins in the preliminary…and 20% fewer votes than the same man just 6 weeks later. A stunning turnaround! Most astonishingly, 10% of those who voted for Collins in the final had voted for Powers in the preliminary. Expressed another way, one of every six of Powers’ primary voters switched to Collins sometime during the six weeks leading up to the general election. What had happened to cause such a shift? Nothing! No scandal, no gaff, no new policy proposals, just politics as usual. The verdict of Boston’s voters was loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore. Power elite, take us for granted at your peril.” A few pundits predicted Brexit’s 2016 victory in the UK and a handful predicted Trump’s election, but nobody predicted Collins victory in 1959, not even this overly precocious pro-Collins 12-year-old. Nobody! Sidebar : My father was away on business. He called me from the road. “Who won?” Collins…in a landslide. “No, seriously, tell me the truth.” Collins. “Boy, you are in big trouble when I get home.” I told the truth…but the truth was unthinkable. On the weekend after the election, Professor Levin and his team interviewed 500 Boston voters, drawn from all across the city. Levin’s study showed that religion, income, and ethnicity played no significant role in the election’s results. Collins won the votes of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, high and low-income residents, Irish, Italian, Yankee, and African American voters. Somehow, a consensus emerged without anyone (not even Collins) calling for it. It happened under the radar, at bus stops and in barrooms, and it cut across the city’s fiercely independent neighborhoods. Today, Boston is Yuppie Paradise, and neighborhood identity has by and large vanished, but in 1959, things were very different. At that time, East Boston High (Italians) played South Boston High (Irish) in an annual Thanksgiving Day football game that always ended in a West Side Story rumble. People walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods were routinely assaulted, only to be told that it was their own fault for ‘playing away from home’. These were just the facts of life in Boston in 1959. It turned out that Boston voters had something in common that was strong enough to overcome their past and future animosities, rooted as they are in religion, class, ethnicity and race. According to Murray Levin, that mysterious X factor was ‘political alienation’. May I ask you a question? The last time you voted in an election, did you think your preferred candidate would do a better job in office than their opponent? Not necessarily a ‘good’ job, but at least a ‘better job than the alternative’. Of course, you did…unless the last time you voted was in Boston in 1959. Professor Levin’s most astonishing finding was that the majority of voters in Boston’s Mayoral election that year did not think their chosen candidate would be a better mayor than his opponent. This tendency was especially prominent among Collins voters! And so, ‘wave voting’ was born…in Boston, the Cradle of Liberty! Folks voted for Collins, not because they believed he’d be a better mayor, but because they refused to be taken for granted. Voters didn’t care who won the election; they cared about sending a message. “ This is our chance to poke the power elite in the eye.” And so they did! Where does that leave you? Are you going to tonight’s caucuses…or not? Voting is an existential act. It’s the moral equivalent of a ‘tush push’ or a ‘goal line stand’ in football. It’s not about electing a certain candidate; it’s not even about advancing a certain policy proposal. It’s about drawing a line in the sand: “ No Mas! This far and no farther!” Voting is a matter of taking a stand. It’s about joining a crusade, putting your shoulder to the wheel, ‘taking your place on the great mandala’, (and apparently) compiling an encyclopedia of clichés. R U Blue…or Grey? R U Collins…or Powers? How you answer defines who you are . That’s why you might choose to vote, not just to elect the lesser of two losers! If you decide to vote, don’t do it with your head down; do it waving your arms in the air! (Is that why they call it ‘wave voting’?) And if you decide not to vote, make sure everyone knows why! 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 above to return to Winter 2024. Previous Next

< Back Childhood Lost David Cowles “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but children are from the planet Mercury.” Everybody ‘loves’ children, well almost everybody. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of raising a baby to adulthood. Then they spend tens of thousands of dollars to hire others to raise that baby for them: baby sitters, nannies, au pairs, governesses, teachers, camp counselors, scout leaders, coaches, etc. I was loved as a child, but I was bundled off to camp (day, then overnight) for a full 8 weeks every summer for 11 long and lonely years (age 3 through 13). At the time, I was told that it was ‘for my own good’ but later my parents admitted that it was really ‘for their own sanity’. Do you ever watch YouTube videos of competent adults interacting with children? Some of them are awesome! But have you noticed that they all have one thing in common? They never run more than 20 minutes! Because that’s the maximum amount of time that an empathetic and motivated adult can interact happily and constructively with a child. How come? Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but children are from the planet Mercury. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, “They’re hot!” Mars and Venus have ‘years’ roughly similar to Earth’s; Mercury’s ‘year’ lasts only 88 days! Yup, children are from Mercury…definitely. Objectively, children ‘move and grow’ (not just physically) 4 times faster than we do (365/88 > 4), but that means subjective time flows 4 times more slowly for them than it does for us. What we call ‘an 8 hour day’ feels like 32 hours to a child. Alternatively, a child works a full 8 hour shift just between the hours of 9 and 11 in the morning. No wonder child labor is so profitable: 4x the productivity, ½ the cost (wage)! Suppose someday we do find intelligent life elsewhere in our Universe; now imagine that life operates with a sense of time that is ‘distorted’ (vs. ours) by 400%. Can you envision any problems? Well, we don’t have to wait for SETI to find out; it’s already happened. Every day, flocks of storks bring babies from Mercury and deliver them to Terrestrial parents to ‘raise’. My maternal grandmother told the story of an elementary school teacher who said to her, “Marguerite, I know you mean well…but you don’t do well!” For the most part, Earth parents do ‘mean well’…at least they mean to mean well…but almost all of us fail to ‘do well’. John Lennon captured the gist of the problem on his Working Class Hero album: “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.” My parents gave me plenty of time…sometimes more than I would have liked. But 100% of my parents’ time only accounted for 25% of my time. That left plenty of opportunity for anxiety, depression, sadness, boredom and, of course, my favorite, mischief. Children are born virtually immobile and 100% dependent ‘on the kindness of strangers’ (that’s us , BTW). They have no map of our world; they do not know our customs or our language. They don’t even know what language is, or what it does. Children are ‘barbarians’ – not just metaphorically, but also literally (they don’t speak a word of Ancient Greek). Six Mercurial years (18 Earth months) later, most children are mobile, communicative, and incipiently self-sufficient, leaving their parents bewildered and spent…and advertising on Indeed for Help! Yet as every parent knows, 18 months is still early innings . According to the anthropology of the Hopi, children are born (or stork delivered) with two questions in mind: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Big questions! You may still be asking those same questions, even at your overly advanced age. At best, these questions are not easy. So, of course, we want to help. We want to help our children know themselves and fulfill their purpose in the world. But to help, we would need to know ourselves and our purpose, and of course, we don’t! So instead, we teach our kids what we were taught. Our parents failed us, and we want to make sure our children get no less from their parents than we got from ours. Sounds reasonable? Ok, how’s this for a home mission statement: “The purpose of life is to make a constructive contribution to society…to leave the world a better place. The purpose of childhood is to learn to be an adult who can make such a contribution.” Put this on the fridge instead of a list of rules (and consequences). Harry Chapin said it best, “He’d grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.” ( Cat’s in the Cradle ) Unlike many of us, Chapin’s hero-narrator ultimately realizes his own life’s failures; he regrets them as they appear in him but especially as they are reflected in his son. Be careful what you wish for. Chapin’s hero wanted a son who would grow up to be just like him and he got just that! Too late, he realizes that he failed to make the most of his own life’s opportunities, and much worse, he realizes now that he has ensured his son will never optimize his own life potential either. What hubris we display, wanting our children to relive our lives! As youngish adults ourselves, we ask (force) them to internalize our own still unexamined ethos: “Grow up, get an education, raise a family, earn a living, make a career, contribute to society, leave a legacy.” And how did that work out for you ? Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Next

< Back Time David Cowles Aug 4, 2022 Contemporary views of Time include such ideas as: ‘there is no such thing; it’s an illusion; it’s a giant block and every moment is a slice; time is just one more dimension in spacetime,' etc. Our lead article in ATM Issue #2 ( The Beach Issue , 7/15/22) was titled Yesterday, the Very Tomorrow . This is a great kick-off piece for what we hope will be an ongoing discussion of Time in upcoming issues of ATM. Scientists and philosophers have mostly moved away from the idea that ‘time’ is substructural, that it is a hardwired feature of Being itself, that it just is. Contemporary views of Time include such ideas as, ‘there is no such thing, it’s an illusion, it’s a giant block and every moment is a slice, time is just one more dimension in spacetime,' etc. Whenever any fundamental assumption in science or philosophy is overthrown, it triggers a blizzard of new ideas and models. (That’s where we are right now with the concept of Time.) The goal of any new theory is always the same: account for everything we thought we knew and did; account for everything we thought we knew but didn’t; and account for the new ‘data’ that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere. What better forum is there than Aletheia Today Magazine for such a conversation. ATM Issue #3 will kick off with an article outlining the principal theories of time, current and past. It will include at least one article about the Piraha tribe of the Amazon (Brazil) and their very unusual conception of time (just one piece of their unique model of reality). I believe it was Augustine who said something like, “Everybody knows what time is, but nobody can describe it.” We are calling on all independent writers with an interest in Science & Philosophy: Do you know what Time is (or what it is not)? Can you describe it? We want to hear from you as we plan for future ATM issues dedicated to the discussion of Time. Please visit the Write for Us! section on the Aletheia Today site home page, follow our guidelines, etc. Let’s work together. “It’s time for time” – The Beatles ( Yellow Submarine ). Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! 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.

< Back “And Who is My Neighbor?” David Cowles Jul 24, 2025 “The recognition of consciousness in various non-human species has put the law student’s fame in a whole new perspective.” The question and Jesus’ famous answer (the Parable of the Good Samaritan ) ring just as poignantly and just as urgently today as they did 2000 years ago. We are often told that the Bible was written at another time and by a civilization very different from our own. The implication is that it has little to teach our sophisticated selves. This student’s question alone should be enough to debunk such criticism. In fact, there is no more pressing question for us in 2025 than this one! Let’s go back 3000 years. Asian cultures got there first, then Semitic, then Native American: Animals are sentient beings deserving of respect and care. Yes, they are a source of labor and food, necessary at times to support human life, but minimally we have an ethical duty to give them the best possible life and minimize their suffering in the process. The industrial revolution and newly popular plant-forward diets have lessened our economic dependence on the Animal Kingdom. Yet today’s factory farms would have been morally repulsive to traditionally observant Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Native Americans, among others. How did we get from there to here? What happened to extending the 7 th day rest (Sabbath) to livestock, as well as slaves, servants, and citizens? To granting Sabbatical years to farmland, allowing it to lie fallow? To trace the decline of humanity’s ethical intuition ( aka Natural Law, Oral Torah, etc.) would require a multi-volume work. Perhaps we would find the roots of that decline in Roman Imperialism or in the so-called Humanism of the Renaissance (aka Mercantilism, Colonialism ) or in Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. These cultures were economically and sociologically dependent on the enslavement of human beings ( de facto and de jure ) and on the brutal exploitation of nature, including animals. Many factors contributed to the Fall of the Roman Empire and the continent-wide depression that followed (500 – 750); some of those factors were ecological but some were avoidable (e.g. over-farming). As for Humanism , it gave birth to magnificent art, music and literature, perhaps the greatest the world has ever known, but, as the name suggests, it also fostered an extreme form of anthropocentrism. The social contract of the Middle Ages (a just wage and a just price) was gradually replaced by market economics : get the most for the least. A 20 th century Fortune 100 company summed up the ethic of this age with its iconic slogan: “Get the Max for the Minimum…” Shrewdness has replaced generosity and compassion atop the pyramid of virtues. Far from tending to the rights of non-human species, this new ideology denied basic rights to most humans. Other races? Proto-humans! Other nationalities? Barbarians! Other religions? Pagans! Heretics! Other social classes? Pariahs! Other genders? Inferior! Children? Adults-in- training, best neither seen nor heard. It is hard to argue for the rights of endangered species when human cultures are routinely being trampled into the dust of history. A century ago, even teenagers were considered ‘not fully evolved’, i.e. pre-human. (Hmm…imagine that!) The most prominent proponent of this idea was G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist and educator at Clark University who in 1878 had received, from Harvard, the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States. According to Hall, adolescent development was a recapitulation of proto-human evolution. Emphasis on ‘proto’. Hall’s recapitulation drew on the work of Ernst Haeckel, a German embryologist, who coined the catchy: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” He noted that the embryos of more ‘advanced’ species, e.g. human beings, resembled, at various stages, the embryos of more ‘primitive’, ancestral species — fish, salamanders, chicks, hogs, rabbits. It was as if the developmental growth, or ontogeny, of an organism manifested the evolutionary history, or phylogeny, of the species. But this extreme intellectual chauvinism was not the biggest part of the problem. That honor was reserved for its ethical corollary: “ontological ‘inferiors’ (i.e. all of the above) may be treated with unrestrained brutality.” Greco-Roman culture relied heavily on slavery as a source of cheap labor, but Spartacus notwithstanding, it was relatively benign compared with plantation slavery in the ante-bellum South and child labor in industrializing Europe. No extended period in human history was as anathematic to the welfare of living things, human and otherwise, as the period from 1500 (Machiavelli) to 1900 (Hall, above), and we’re still digging out. If PETA or Greenpeace or Me Too or BLM or AIM sometimes seems to go too far, it’s an effort to overcome centuries of exploitation and abuse. While aboriginal cultures understood the world as a continuum, embracing physics, biology, and sociology, modern Euro-American society was strictly stratified: Lowells spoke only to Cabots and Cabots spoke only to God. Needless to say, no one ever spoke to ‘inferiors’ (e.g. blacks, workers, women, children, adolescents), except to bark orders, and no one ever listened to them, ever. For their part, animals were considered unconscious, insentient automata. Were? In this decade a member of the US House of Representatives contended that ‘birds’ aren’t really birds but animatronic spies! Animals’ expressions of pain were considered instinctive reactions, not accompanied by any real sentience. Children, for their part, were thought to have no memory of events before age 7. If they cried out in pain, they were probably faking it: “Speak roughly to your little boy and beat him when he sneezes; he only does it to annoy because he knows it teases.” (Lewis Carroll) Hopefully, few parents implemented the letter of Carroll’s childrearing advice, but it certainly caught the spirit of the times. And plants? Forget about it! The sickle was replaced by the gas powered lawn mower…and Agent Orange. It suited us to see animals, children, and other races as unconscious automatons. How else could we justify the cruel slaughter of live animals to produce food and other by-products? How else could we justify the routine brutalization of children? How else could we come to terms with slavery? If the 21 st century is ultimately known for anything, i.e. if there is anyone left to know and anything left to be known, it will for its fresh take on the law student’s question. It is hard to believe today that just 100 years ago, our culture granted ‘full sentience’ only to semi-affluent adult white males. “Blacks, children, women, and laborers just don’t feel things like we do!” And lest you become too smug and self-congratulatory, may I remind you that during the collective nightmare known as the Vietnam War (c. 1960 – 1974) we were told that ‘Asians don’t value life the way Americans do’. Fortunately, the real Dark Ages (1500 - 1900) are finally behind us - more or less. Today we do not debate varying levels of consciousness among different demographic groups. Now we debate how deeply consciousness permeates the biosphere. Most of us, for example, now acknowledge consciousness among bonobos and chimpanzees, dolphins and whales, parrots and corvids, octopus and cuttlefish, etc. With the help of AI, scientists have recently found semantic patterns in the sounds and gestures of numerous species: dolphins and whales, marmosets, elephants, cuttlefish and corvids. In some cases, a rudimentary syntax has even been detected. We have long considered the use of ‘symbolic language’ to be a defining characteristic of human beings and a prerequisite for residence in our tightly gated community, our neighbor hood. But according to an 8/25/2025 article by Chris Sims in New Scientist , “ Humpback whale songs have statistical patterns in their structure that are similar to those seen in human language .” An earlier study of Sperm Whales identified an acoustic alphabet of 156 clicks which are combined to form 18 characteristic propositions ( codas ) but novel combinations are possible and do occur. Evidence of new ideas? But it would be typically anthropocentric of us to look only for acoustic languages that resemble our own. In fact, there is evidence that structured communication in the animal kingdom takes place across a variety of media: hand signs, gestures, birdsong, pitch modulation, and whistle tones are all used to encode information. Nor can these phenomena be dismissed as unconscious ‘reactions’ to immediate environmental stimuli. Some species seem to be able to talk about past events as well as present conditions and future dangers. Elephants and dolphins appear to name the individual members of their herds/pods. We are unlikely to uncover a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to help us match various animal languages with our own. Instead, we are deploying AI to search for algorithms that will allow us to communicate with other species. With many species of animals now securely inside consciousness’ Big Tent , t he debate now centers on whether to extend the NFL Franchise Tag to trees and/or their forests, to fungi and/or the Wood Wide Web, to coral and/or their reefs, to sponges, to bacteria, to the eukaryotic cells that make-up our bodies, to the prokaryotic cells which power our guts. And that’s just for openers! In the next 75 years we will probably answer the question of whether conscious life exists off Earth and whether organisms composed of silicon rather than carbon can be sentient and intentional. Apparently, 2001: A Space Odyssey is no longer considered probative. When I leave this world, I will leave a place vastly different from what I found on entry. Not all the changes have been for the better! But nothing has been more welcome or more significant than this broadening recognition of ‘consciousness’. The recognition of consciousness in various non-human species has put the law student’s fame in a whole new perspective. *** Rembrandt van Rijn. The Good Samaritan. 1633, etching, 25.3 × 20.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rembrandt’s depiction of the Samaritan lifting the wounded man into an inn visualizes the essay’s central claim, that true neighborliness is found not in status or proximity but in the selfless, often inconvenient act of mercy. 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.

< Back Read My Mind! “What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts.” David Cowles A recent article by freelance writer Fletcher Reveley, published in Undark , highlights our emerging ability to read a person’s thoughts using AI. Reveley cites a study in which a volunteer is asked to read a particular sentence: “ Although I’m twenty-three years old, I don’t have my driver’s license yet, and I just jumped out right when I needed to, and she says, well, why don’t you come back to my house, and I’ll give you a ride.” Note : the sentence is more or less ‘well-formed’ but the meaning is ambiguous, to say the least. Not to worry! My Mighty AI Mouse to the rescue! A system of external electrodes is connected to an AI-powered ‘decoder ring’; is it 1955 again? The bot ‘reads’ the subject’s mind as the subject reads the text. Here’s what AI makes of it: “I am not finished yet to start my career at twenty; without having gotten my license, I never have to pull out and run back to my parents to take me home.” Three things are startling. First, Eureka! It’s happening. We are finally, literally, able to read minds…or ‘get close enough for government work’. And does anyone doubt that we will achieve greater clarity and fidelity in the not-too-distant future? Just as Voice Recognition has improved, albeit slowly, so Idea Recognition should improve as well. Second, while ‘thinking’ seems to us to be a linear process, it isn’t! At a certain level, our thoughts are a jumble of words, images, etc. Our thoughts do not follow a sequential, logical, or syntactic order. Such order as there is, is emergent. As we have long suspected here at Aletheia Today , thinking is fundamentally holistic. As William James suggested, every thought is a “bud." Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this experiment demonstrates how the brain, apparently any brain, supplements information from its environment with input of its own. The question here is, “Whose brain?” English majors are familiar with this phenomenon: Reading is not the passive absorption of information; it’s a dialog between the author and her audience. She brings her words, and you bring your associations. Together, you generate text . The AI-decoded brain activity roughly reproduces what the subject reads, but it adds details, makes connections, and imposes ordering not suggested by the text itself. Where does that come from? (1) Is our AI accessing the subject’s associations at a level she may not even be aware of? (2) Or is it revealing things that were on the subject’s mind but that she chose to edit out? (3) Or is it imagining how the subject might be feeling based on what it knows about 23-year-olds? (4) Or is it supplying associations of its own: “This is how I think I would feel if I were 23 and had to move back in with my parents…and if I was not a damn machine?” Of course, there’s an even deeper question here: Are these really four independent possibilities, or will it turn out that two or more of these alternatives are the same thing, just dressed differently? But that’s beyond the scope of this article. Too bad! Any way you slice it, this is scary! What you’ve most feared since early childhood is on the cusp of becoming a reality: people reading your thoughts – thoughts generated not by a text or image but lifted from your own, ‘private’ bank of associations. Imagine the Rorschach tests of the future. The examiner says a word, and an image pops up on a screen, revealing your unfiltered association. Nervous? You should be! Breaking news : A pedophile is on the prowl in Peoria, and the police have no leads. No problem. Just ‘scan’ the brains of all area males between 15 and 65 to see who harbors these kinds of sexual feelings. Your pool of suspects just shrunk, probably by several orders of magnitude. So is that a good thing? Well, it could help get a pedophile off the streets, and it could dissuade other would-be offenders from turning desires into deeds. On the other hand, it would expose the DNA-driven sexuality of folks who would never dream of harming a child…or committing any serious crime for that matter. And then there’s the matter of false positives ! Just how much credence will be given to a machine? Is its accuracy like that of a Lie Detector (pretty good), or is it much less reliable? We could virtually eradicate the crime of pedophilia, but at a cost: everyone will know, at least potentially, what everyone else is thinking all the time. Our already overly large prison population would quadruple overnight. Vast numbers of legally innocent people would be subject to preventive detention . Lives would be ruined, careers ended, marriages jeopardized, kids taken into care. It's a nightmare scenario! On the other hand, thousands would be spared the horror of child sexual abuse, and the overall crime rate would be near zero! Is it worth it? There’s every chance you’ll have an opportunity to make that decision…soon! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Share Previous Next

< Back Europhilia to Europhobia David Cowles Oct 29, 2025 “How Europe digs itself out of its cultural morass is unclear… until it does, you can color me Europhobic…though I do miss a good espresso.” Remember when we all wanted to live in Europe? We were mesmerized by the slower pace of economic activity, and we admired the communitarian values. Today, I’m guessing fewer of us with US or UK passports are looking to swap them for EU docs, at least not anytime soon. Relative to China and the US, Europe is on a long term trajectory of economic decline. Recently, a big pharma CEO brought attention to the trend: “AstraZeneca plans to invest $50 billion to boost US manufacturing and research by 2030 to shore up its position in the crucial market. The US accounts for over 40% of revenue, which CEO Pascal Soriot said Thursday could be “half of our potential revenue by 2030.” He also issued warnings to Europe and the UK , where R&D spending lags behind that of the world’s two largest economies, that they might lose their health sovereignty. A recent editorial by Lidia Borrell-Damian in Science Magazine (October 16, 2025) summarized weaknesses in the European approach to the global innovation economy. Let’s reprise her article, highlighting Europe’s ‘fault lines’ as we go: “The European Union (EU) has the world’s largest funding program exclusively for research and innovation (R&I)—Horizon Europe—which is now preparing its 10th edition for 2028–2034. ”The good news is that the EU aims to raise Horizon Europe’s budget by 83% and (1) continue the trend of supporting all types of institutions and partnerships, including universities, research institutes, small-and medium-sized enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and a widening circle of international collaborations . “Horizon Europe is the nickname given to both the 9th and 10th EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation, with goals that require a careful (2) balance among long-and short-term gains, security and openness, and economic growth and social well-being . “Horizon Europe will be structured across (3) four ‘pillars’ ( Excellent Science ; Competitiveness and Society; Innovation; and European Research Area ) for continuity with previous programs . The first pillar … will continue to fund projects that embrace scientific curiosity and freedom of inquiry exclusively on the basis of scientific excellence. (4) Safeguarding their governance and independence from policy-driven objectives is essential… “The new Framework Programme is meant to (5) coordinate with the European Commission’s European Competitiveness Fund, a merger of multiple funding initiatives primarily focused on scaling up the EU’s industrial and economic development. “Horizon Europe’s continued commitment to (6) reduce persisting disparities in R&I capacity across Europe through its “Widening” program promises a more integrated and cohesive European R&I environment. Here, more focus should be placed on “brain circulation” to increase the research capacity of regions and countries that lag behind to achieve a level playing field across the continent… “There are other important issues in Horizon Europe that require more detailed consideration, such as (7) administrative simplification, environmentally sustainable research practices, and inclusivity .” Sounds great! So what’s my problem? Ms. Borrell-Damian is endeavoring to defend Europe’s technology initiatives and, if possible, to push them toward an even greater emphasis on pure science. However, postmodern as we are, she can’t help but betray cultural biases (above) that will likely undermine her project: It is not the job of science to promote institutional diversity or democratization. It is not for science to achieve ‘balance’; at most, that is a regulatory function of government. The job of science is discovery. Four pillars, only one of which includes the word, ‘science’; one pillar (‘curiosity…innovation…excellence’) would suffice. Politics has no place in science. Of course, that’s naïve…but it’s a goal. ‘Coordinate…with a merger of…multiple funding initiatives.’ How many times can you step on ‘product’ before it becomes just talcum powder? It is not the job of science to reduce sociological disparities or to level the economic playing field. Once again, it is not up to science to ensure inclusivity. That is not to say that these points lack merit. On a number of these issues society does have a legitimate interest which it should promote through appropriate organs of government. But these are not the proper burdens of theoretical physicists, research biologists, or lab technicians. They have their hands (and minds) full creating the next century for us. But cheer up, this dark cloud has a charcoal lining. Not only is the EU allowing sociological concerns to erode the energy, resources, and enthusiasm of its brightest scientists, it is also trivializing the very socioeconomic issues it purports to prioritize. Consider: (1) Strengthening the research infrastructure, (2) balancing short and long term goals, openness and security, productivity and well-being, (3) optimizing the research milieu, (4) insulting science from politics, (5) coordinating with other programs, (6) managing and mitigating economic disparities, and (7) ensuring the efficiency, sustainability, and inclusivity of all projects. Don’t these concerns merit the concerted attention of their own dedicated professionals? Does it make sense to think that these issues will be taken seriously by scientists for whom such matters are afterthoughts at best? Just as it is foolish to leave the waging of war to the generals, so it is counter-productive to burden research scientists with the task of correcting society’s structural flaws. Whether and how Europe digs itself out of this cultural morass is unclear. Suffice to say, until it does, you can color me Europhobic…though I do miss a good espresso. Lidia Borrell-Damián is the secretary general of Science Europe, Brussels, Belgium. lidia.borrell-damian@scienceeurope.org *** The Astronomer (1668) by Johannes Vermeer portrays a scholar deeply absorbed in the study of the heavens, symbolizing humanity’s quest for knowledge and divine understanding. The soft, directional light from the window illuminates both the man and his instruments, emphasizing enlightenment through reason and observation. Vermeer’s meticulous use of detail and composition transforms this quiet interior scene into a meditation on science, faith, and intellectual discovery. 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< Back Football Math David Cowles “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Introduction: Who doesn’t love football? Every autumn, every week, there are dozens of games, good games, on national television. Often, you have no allegiance to either team and, mercifully, for once, neither team is depending on your armchair cheering to tilt the outcome of the game in its favor. At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! No responsibilities. Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady. Incredible feats of strength and speed, paradigms of grit and determination, and coaching stratagems worthy of a chess master. What’s not to love! And then there’s the game itself, the ebb and flow, the score. Early score differentials (‘spreads’) are sometimes amplified as the game progresses, but just as often they are dampened, and in some cases, they are actually reversed. Football is a 21st century cultural phenom. In this age of social fragmentation, it’s just about the only thing we still have in common. Almost everyone speaks football. If baseball is our national pastime, football has become our national language and every fall weekend we celebrate our secular liturgy in the vernacular. A football game is all about the unfolding of patterns (every ‘play’ is really a pattern), and after watching dozens of games this season, it occurred to me that while there are numerous patterns inside each game, the games themselves might also form patterns. For example, can the scores of multiple games between various opponents tell us anything? Or do they just vary randomly? Do scores evolve arithmetically over the course of a game; or is there something else, something non-linear, at work? Football Math: To explore this, I looked at score differentials at the end of the first half and compared them with score differentials at the end of the same games. Easy-peasy, right? Well, no! In fact, solving the problem requires us to develop (or deploy) a whole new mathematics. A football game is an example of a discontinuous process. We deal with whole numbers only (no fractions). Plus, unlike most other sports (soccer, baseball, e.g.), those numbers do not increase iteratively. Say a team scores 5 times in the course of a game (5 runs, 5 goals, etc.). In most sports, that would result in a score of “5” for that team. Not in football. In ‘football math’ there are only 3 digits: 2, 3, and X where the value of X can be 6, 7, or 8. Crazy? Yes, but if you are a regular reader of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) and Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM), you already know about civilizations that ‘play the game of life’ with number systems very different from the one you learned in grade school . In fact, we’ve studied one culture that has no numbers whatsoever . Other cultures have limited inventories of numbers (e.g., 1, 2, X where X refers to any collection of 3 or more items). Hot Link Compared to these societies, ‘football math’ gives us a lot to work with. Granted, we only have 3 digits (2, 3, X), but one of those digits (X) can represent any one of three different values (6, 7, or 8). So, in essence we have 5 digits (2, 3, 6, 7, 8), Plus, we can ‘add’ those digits together to generate higher, ‘secondary’ numbers. So far so good, but please, don’t get too comfortable! It turns out that the score of a football game is much like the result of a road race, according to Zeno . Zeno-math applies in universes, like football games, where quantity is not infinitely divisible. In our search for patterns, we need to look at an event (e.g., the game) from 3 perspectives: pre-game, game, and post-game. Pre-game began at Big Bang and won’t end before kick-off. (If you’re tailgating, you might want to take an Uber…and invest in a port-o-potty. 15 billion years equates to a lot of Budweiser.) Pre-game, the so-called ‘score’ is always 0 – 0, of course. But ‘0 – 0’ is just a short way of saying, ‘The game’s not afoot yet, my dear Watson’. 0 – 0 is not a score; it looks like a score but in fact it denotes the absence of a score. Rather, it’s a state of Being, i.e., pre-being. A whistle blows: the kick-off –finally, a play that could result in points. Seemingly, we’ve moved from pre-game to game…but in fact, we’ve merely transitioned from pre-game to potential-game, ‘being-in-waiting’, which is still a flavor of pre-being. Remember, for the purposes of this exercise, we are not concerned with a 60 yard rope, a one-handed snag, a blocked punt, or a pick-six. We are only tracking score and so far, we have no score. We say that the score is still 0 – 0 but again, that is just a convention. As we saw above, a score of 0 – 0 corresponds to the state of being we call ‘pre- game’. The ‘game’ begins when pre-game ends and pre-game ends when someone scores points. As Yogi Berra might have said, “We have no score until we have a score.” Now suppose the game ends in a 0 - 0 tie (after overtime): then for our purposes, there was no game. Disagree? Check out the standings. A team with a tie in its record is the same as a team that has played one less game. Eventually, sometimes mercifully, the final whistle blows, the stadium clock reads 00:00 and there are no flags on the field. The game is over. No further points can be scored…this week. Only now can we talk about a winner and a loser. The final score is not part of the game itself; it is part of the post-game. Let’s check the time. Pre-game began at Big Bang and post-game doesn’t end until Big Crunch (or Heat Death), so I recommend you head home as soon as the game ends. The Game: Blue scores: the game has begun. And Blue leads, right? Wrong! Blue does not lead. As long as there is still time left on the game clock, the game is still ‘statistically tied’. How come? After Blue scores, the scoreboard reads 2 – 0 or 3 – 0 or 6 – 0 or 7 – 0 or 8 – 0. But either team can score 8 points on any one play, and there is at least one play left. So, a lead of 8 points or fewer is actually no lead at all because it can be erased at any second so long as the ball is still in play (i.e., the game clock reads something other than 00:00). British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, ‘the process philosopher’, describes every event in the real world, the way we just described a football game. What we call pre-game, he calls ‘the actual world’; what we call post-game, he calls ‘objective immortality’. Every event (game) arises out of an actual world (pre-) and dissolves into an objective world (post-). Every football game begins at the end of pre-game and ends at the beginning of post-game. Assume there is an 8 point differential heading into the final play of the game. The final score will reflect a differential somewhere between 14 points and 0. (A Touchdown scored on the last play of a game can only be worth 6 points to the leading team.) In the language of statistics, e.g., political polling, we would say that the so-called ‘score’ at any point in the game has a margin of error of up to 8 points. Therefore, when the ball is still in play and Blue leads Red by 8 points, the game is statistically tied. The Search for Patterns: Ground rules in place (and hopefully agreed), we can now get back to our search for patterns; I examined the box scores of the 13 FBS games played during week #7 of the season in which at least one of the teams playing was ranked in the Top 25 (quality control). Of those 13 games, 5 ended with a differential of 8 points or less (one score), 6 ended with a differential of 16 points or less (two scores) and 2 games ended with a differential of more than 16 points (three scores or more). Now let’s look at the scores of those same games at the end of the first half. Hypothesis: On average, the differential in points at the end of the first half should be half of what it is at the end of the game. If so, 11 games (out of 13) should have been ‘statistically tied’ (point differential of 8 or less) at the half. Observation: The total number of points scored was roughly the same in both halves, as expected; but only 9 games were statistically tied at the half (vs. the 11 anticipated). This means that there is a centripetal force at work in a football game that offsets, at least in part, that ubiquitous centrifugal force we know as ‘time’ (or duration). In English, please? Ok, scores tighten, not absolutely but relative to time played. Confirmation: Unwittingly, Miami Dolphins head coach, Mike McDaniel, recently gave Football Math a big boost. In a 2022 game against the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo scored a touchdown at the end of the first half, making the halftime score 21 – 13. The announcer asked McDaniel for his reaction, which I paraphrase: “It doesn’t matter; it’s still a one score game.” In other words, the game is still within the 8 point margin of error, so it remains statistically tied. Hear what McDaniel had to say in his own words: https://youtu.be/7bTAjZ728eI Application: Can we learn something from this analysis that we can apply beyond the universe of football? A football game is an example of a single event with conflicting objectives. Like any system in a state of quantum coherence, it often manages that inherent conflict by delaying its ‘winner reveal party’ until after the last play of the game. While ‘there can only be one winner’, the game itself is shaped by both sides. Objectively speaking, it doesn’t matter which team wins; it’s a zero-sum game. Subjectively speaking, of course, it makes all the difference in the world; it’s an all or nothing proposition! Process is self-modifying. Things diverge less than expected, based on traditional arithmetic. Interaction favors convergence, not divergence. W. B. Yeats notwithstanding, things do not fall apart as rapidly as expected. Interactivity inserts another variable into the cosmic equation. Hope, even in the face of inexorable entropy - that’s the hidden meaning of football. Previous Next

“An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” < Back Idolatry David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” Moses Maimonides (c. 1200 CE) wrote: “We are commanded ( Deuteronomy ) to demolish all idols and their places of worship with all kinds of demolition and destruction — breaking, burning, dismantling, and cutting down. Each method is to be used where most effective, where it will achieve the most complete and speedy destruction…there should not remain any remnant.” (That’s the 185 th Mitzvah.) Maimonides is not alone. Others have spoken out concerning the need to destroy injustice at its roots: Barry Goldwater (1964): “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Jean-Paul Sartre (1948), Franz Fanon (1960) and Malcolm X (1964): “…by any means necessary!” Jesus of Nazareth (30): “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (Luke 12: 49) Interesting bedfellows, no? And yet, if Jews and Christians agree on anything, it’s peace! “The lamb shall lie down with the lion.” (Is.11: 6–9 & Rev 21: 1-4) But how do we get there from here? Tolerance of sin? Not according to Scripture! We are commanded to rid the world of sin - root and branch. (Job 18:16) Mercy for the sinner? Absolutely! “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (John 8:7) Is idolatry sinful? Of course, it is! “Thou shalt not have other gods beside me.” (Ex. 20: 2) But idolatry is not just a sin, one sin among others; idolatry is sin itself! To put it another way, all sin is, at its root, idolatry . In fact, anything and everything is sinful precisely to the extent that… and only to the extent that …it functions as an idol, that it displaces God. Nothing is sinful in itself (everything is good to the extent that it is); it is only made sinful when we turn it into an idol (something it is not). Gold jewelry is not sinful, but it becomes sinful when we melt it down and form it into the likeness of a calf for us to worship. In the cosmology of Hasidic Judaism, everything this is, animate or inanimate, contains within it a divine spark. When we treat what is as it is , we release that spark and allow it to ascend home to YHWH. When we use what is as it is not , we further bind the spark in its spatiotemporal prison. The Judeo-Christian God is not merely ‘truthful’ and ‘just’; YHWH is Truth and Justice! Therefore, we commit a sin, a sin against God, whenever we engage in behavior contrary to what is true or just, i.e. whenever we practice idolatry. Every sin honors our own perverse will at the expense of God’s transcendent values, i.e., at the expense of God, who is Value, who is the Good. For our sophisticated selves, golden calves have lost their luster. No problem! A modern-day idolater may confer ultimate value on his personal safety, comfort and prosperity, on her schedule, agenda and career, all in lieu of God. No surprise here. Whenever we fashion a golden calf (or purchase a new Lexus) and place it on an altar (physically or metaphorically), we substitute what is inert and irrelevant for what is living and true. The Judeo-Christian tradition is built on mercy…up to a point; we are told that sins against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven. Why not…and what is a ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ anyway? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (God’s Spirit) and therefore the foundation of what is real. When we deny what is real, we turn our backs on the Holy Spirit; and when we affirm what is false in place of what is true, we commit the sin of idolatry. We place the object of our false trust and belief on the altar in our hearts that should have been reserved for God alone. So why unforgivable? To sin against the Holy Spirt is to sin against Truth itself, to substitute an inert and decomposing idol for the living God. Our sins cannot be forgiven as long as we maintain personal maps of the world that are not congruent with God’s logos . i.e., do not conform to reality. It is a commonplace both of home discipline and social jurisprudence that a miscreant cannot be forgiven until he accepts responsibility for his misdeeds. Until we internalize God’s logos ( aka Torah), we are condemned to practice idolatry. There can be no question of forgiveness because, without an acceptance of logos , there can be no sincere resolution to ‘amend our lives’. Those who ignore logos persist in the practice of idolatry; they cannot accept responsibility for their actions, and therefore they cannot be forgiven. This is the sense in which it is correct to say that all salvation comes through Jesus: Jesus is the incarnation of logos . (John 1: 1 – 3) But all is not lost! When we do adopt logos , our idols literally vanish into thin air. They were no-thing to begin with, they are nothing now! Where there was once a golden calf, there is now just a lump of gold. Our past sins are not forgiven…because they don’t need to be. They are well and truly ‘forgotten’: it is as though they never were! Again, according to John (8: 31-32), “…The truth will set you free.” To the extent that we reject what is true, we forfeit that ‘freedom’ and choose slavery. We roll back the Exodus. We willingly return to Egypt, ‘that house of bondage’ (Ex. 20: 2), just as the early Hebrew idolaters urged us to do. When we practice idolatry, we crawl back to Pharaoh with our tails between our legs, “We apologize for the seditious acts of Moses and Aaron, and we regret the disloyalty we exhibited by following them instead of you, O Great Ruler! Please let us build your pyramids again. (You’ll have to admit, nobody builds pyramids like we do!) So let us build for you again – and we’ll gladly make our bricks without straw as a way of showing you just how sorry we are.” In a famous movie, Cool Hand Luke (1967), the sadistic warden determines to torture Paul Newman until Newman’s character ‘gets his mind right’, i.e., until he conforms his will to that of the warden. It is not enough for Newman to obey; he must adopt his captor’s map of the world. Likewise, we are called not just to obey commandments, but to adopt our savior’s map of the world. That is what the Great Commandment (Matthew 22: 35 - 40) is all about…a map of the world: God…and neighbor. Per Jean-Paul Sartre (above), freedom is a precondition of every virtue and value. A value is only valuable to the extent that it has the potential to influence events as they unfold in the world. Likewise, an action can only be virtuous if it is performed freely . Per Barry Goldwater (also above), “Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice.” In 1941 ( Escape from Freedom ), Eric Fromm argued that there is a basic human tendency to trade freedom for comfort (physical & existential). Is that tendency what we refer to as ‘original sin’? Is our fascination with idols our original sin ? The heroes of scripture are those who traded comfort and security for wisdom and understanding. Adam & Eve, for example, traded Paradise for the knowledge of Good & Evil. Abraham, Moses, Solomon, the prophets, John the Baptist and, finally, Jesus all traded comfort and security for wisdom and knowledge. In the 20 th century, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, coined the phrase: “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” ( Process and Reality , et al.) Idols are nothing if not concrete! And yet, as substitutes for God, they are illusory. They represent conceptually something that does not exist materially. Therefore, to idolize anything is to ‘misplace concreteness’. An idol is that with no this , there with no here, then with no now; an idol is the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body, or to borrow a line from the modern American political scene, “all hat, no cattle!” Idolatry is just exactly what it says it is: the substitution of ‘not-God’ for God and ‘not-neighbor’ for neighbor. We all have our own idols, the things we either confuse with God or knowingly and willingly place above God according to our own, personal hierarchy of values. For example, if you’re living in Canaan in the 2 nd millennium BCE, you might confuse Baal (a local god) with YHWH (the maker of heaven and earth). If you’re living in America in the 21 st century A.D., you might be placing certain ‘material things’ above God on your ‘altar’. You know they’re not God, but at the end of the day, they exert more influence on your behavior than God does. We believe in God, but we put our faith in idols : alcohol, drugs, sex, money, power, affluence, notoriety, and fame…to name just a few. To be clear, these things are not ‘bad’ in themselves. We make them ‘bad’ when (and only when), we place them above God in our own personal ‘hierarchy of values’. All true values subsist in God’s essential being. In fact, those values are God’s essential being, but they are God’s essential being according to an order, a logos . When I substitute my personal hierarchy of values for the hierarchy of values that is logos , I create an idol. The logos (ordering) of God’s essential values optimizes the role each value plays in the whole. Logos is the expression of God’s values in the context of creation, in terms of the World. When we say that God exists, we assert the reality of God’s essence (values) and his logos (Christ). Idols are not just not God; they are not-God ! They do not instantiate the values we associate with God, nor do they project his logos onto (or into) the world. The philosophical journey of the Israelites began with God’s self-revelation to Moses: “I am what am.” (Exodus 3: 14) Which begs the question: “What is?” And now we are in a position to answer that question! (Drum roll please.) ‘What-is’ is God’s values, ordered via his logos and experienced in concrete actual entities that occur in the world for the benefit of others. ‘What-is-not’ is idols! Paraphrasing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “idols, idols, everywhere but not a drop to drink,” not a drop of the living water that is, i.e., the spring that is the source of eternal life. 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 . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Click here. 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! 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, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

“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.” < Back I'm Ageless and Timeless David Cowles Mar 1, 2024 “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.” My parents were members of The Greatest Generation, not me! I was born into the Who Am I Generation , aka the Baby Boomers. For some reason, ‘Who am I?’ seemed like a sensible question to us, and we allowed it to permeate every aspect of our lives. My parents couldn’t understand me, nor can my children. So 75 years on, I’m motivated to return to the defining question of my generation: at the end of the day, “after the cups, the marmalade, the tea” (Eliot), who am I? Well… I am an organism : I am a unique member of the species Homo sapiens , one out of 100 billion humans who have lived on Planet Earth. I am a society : I am 30 trillion organisms (cells), each harboring another organism (nucleus), some harboring up to 1,000 additional organisms (mitochondria). I am an economy : The 30 trillion cells that form my body share a common code (DNA); yet they differentiate into tissues and organs that perform vastly different functions, all in support of the host organism, me; they practice an extremely sophisticated version of division of labor . I am a polity : My body houses, protects, and provides for 100 billion, mostly symbiotic, bacteria. I am a citizen : I participate as a member in various overlapping human societies and in one overarching society, the biosphere, which encompasses all terrestrial organisms. I am topos : I am a fissure in the fabric of spacetime. I hold a mirror up to the world. I am how the universe experiences itself. I am consciousness . I am a black hole : I have no hair , i.e., I have no qualia . I just am. I am the collapse of space and time. I am a singularity. I am a monad – I am unchanged since the moment of my conception, and I am unchangeable… at least until the moment of my death. Nothing about me that can change; anything that can change is not about me. I am an ouroboros : I am not what I am, and I am what I am not. I am forever chasing my tail. In Exodus 3, YHWH says, “I am what am.” I, on the other hand, “am not!”. I am everything…but in the mode of not being it. I am not anything; I am not everything. I am la différance – a neologism contributed to the French language by late 20th-century philosopher Jacques Derrida. I am a quantum of difference. A ≠ A’ but A – A’ = 0 or A = A’ but A – A’ ≠ 0. I am not myself, yet there is nothing between me and myself. I am myself, displaced. From my earliest memories, I have always felt that something was out of place. I never felt quite ‘myself’…and it turns out that that’s because I am not ‘quite’ myself. I am separated from ‘myself’ by différance . As a child, I felt a powerful disconnect between who (or what) I really was and the things I was doing, the person I was being, and the roles I was playing - a disconnect between ‘who I am’ to myself (nothing) and ‘who I seem to be’ to others (a float in the Macy’s Day Parade). I am 5. I am standing at the far corner of my posh pre-school’s front lawn. I am gazing outward, across a field of wildflowers, over a distant row of shops, onto the horizon. I am lonely, anxious, and terribly sad. As I stand and gaze, I feel that I’m not supposed to be here, but somehow, I am. I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong body, but what can I do about it? Who can I go to for help? “Mommy, I’m not supposed to be here!” – I don’t think so. I don’t know enough yet to imagine that this angst might be the first stirring of philosophical insight or spiritual awakening. It just hurts…like most everything else at age 5. But I make a mental note: “Whatever happens, I will always remember this moment,” and so I do! In fact, thanks to Marcel Proust ( Search for Lost Time ), I’m still standing at the far corner of that lawn right now. Nothing has changed; no time has passed. I know that I’m supposed to be me. I mean, who else am I going to be? And I desperately want the me that I am to be ‘something or someone’. I confuse Being with Being X . Of course, to be something or someone is to be someone or something else , something I’m not, someone I can’t be. But I don’t know any of this at the age of 5! Imagine the loneliness…and the terror. I’m growing up among a bunch of ‘aliens’ (‘alien’ to me, not because I imagine they came from outer space, but because they appear to be something I’m not - persons.) I am a human baby, utterly defenseless, being raised by ‘wolves’. No wonder I have anxieties; no wonder I can’t breathe. I am a spy; I can sense it, but I have no spy craft, no James Bond tech, and no ‘should you choose to accept it’ mission. I am at the mercy of all that surveys me. Now I am 10; my ‘10-year-old boy’ identity is impressed upon me by every adult I encounter, by the way they treat me. But I am not a 10-year-old boy, and instinctively, at least, I know that. But again, what am I to do? Should I say, “Daddy, there’s been some mistake? I am not who you think I am. I am not 10; I am ageless and timeless. I’m just pretending to be 10. Please treat me as your equal, not as your 10-year-old son?” Gertrude Stein said that we are all always to ourselves, young men and young women. She was only partly right. Young adulthood is the time in life when we feel our age least. We are no longer too young for things, and we are not yet too old for other things. We are in the ‘opportunity zone’. We come to identify this period of minimal age with agelessness . Whenever we feel ageless and timeless, we imagine that we feel the way it feels to be a young man or woman. And so, I set off on a knight’s quest, determined to reunite my Peter Pan self with my shadow. Like generations of lords and ladies before me, I am in pursuit of the Holy Grail, aka ‘me’. Fortunately, I’ve always had friends in low places. My friends don’t treat me like a 10-year-old because they don’t see 10-ness in me anymore than they see it in themselves. To ourselves, we are ageless, and our friendship confirms this. Friendship is an agent and consequence of age-blindness. Why are peer groups so important to tweens and teens? Because they offer a safe space, free of toxic age consciousness. It’s the only thing that keeps us sane. 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 . 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“Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” < Back The 7th Day David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away.” Before apes discovered Darwin, Christian children’s knowledge of the Old Testament was spotty at best – a pinch of Able, a dollop of Noah, a morsel of Moses, a whiff of David. But every student knew, almost by heart, the first 34 verses of Genesis. Today, almost no one would introduce Judeo-Christian theology this way. Genesis is no longer something that explains; it has become something that has to be explained away . Teachers, myself included, are now inclined to begin with the heroics of the Exodus, the politics of Joshua and the Judges, the poetry of the Psalmist, the wisdom of Solomon and Job, the eschatology of Daniel and Ezekiel, or the social commentary of Isaiah and Jeremiah. No doubt, much is gained by this approach, but something is lost as well. The first verses of the Book of Genesis describe the state of Universe at the moment of Creation: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” Note that the authors and translators of Genesis carefully avoid using the term ‘before’ in discussing the state of Universe at Creation. Of course, there was no ‘before’; time itself began at Creation. Plus, Judeo-Christian theology makes it clear that God created the Universe ex nihilo : he did not just rearrange deck chairs. So, how could earth, abyss, wind, and waters exist at the moment of Creation? To understand the complex cosmology of Genesis, it is necessary to define what we understand by the term, Event . An event occurs whenever order is injected into disorder. Creation, “Fiat Lux!”, Big Bang, is an event like every other event. It infuses chaos with order. But it is also an uber-event : it is the locus for virtually every other event in Universe. From the perspective of any emerging event, the pre-existent Universe is disordered. It does not matter whether that Universe is ‘perfectly disordered’ (whatever that means)…or whether the emerging event is ‘perfectly ordered’ (whatever that might mean). What matters is that Universe is relatively disordered from the perspective of the event, and that the event is relatively ordered from the perspective of Universe. In any case, an event is the injection of relative order into relative chaos, and that’s all that matters. We know that Universe is becoming progressively disordered; it’s called entropy (2 nd Law of Thermodynamics). Events are islands of order in a torrent of chaos…but sea levels are rising…and not only because of climate change ! Therefore, the emergence of a novel event is not only counter cultural, it’s ‘counter cosmological’. So then, why are there novel events? Why isn’t Universe content to wind down gracefully, to die with dignity? Here Nietzsche and I agree; there is only one possible answer: Value , a concept that has acquired a bad name in our hyper-secularized culture. You see, values can be construed as imperatives and, like two-year-olds everywhere, we hate imperatives. We would rather wallow in ignorance than admit that there were compelling, objective norms beyond our prized, subjective tastes. Contemporary culture encourages us to say that we want to leave the world ‘a better place’ than we found it. But ‘better’ how? More beautiful, more truth-filled, more just? And so we’re “singing songs…and carrying signs” (Buffalo Springfield); but later on, in private conversations with friends, we affirm that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and we echo the immortal words of that great savant, Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” There’s a clinical term for this constellation of symptoms. It’s what your doctor was referring to when she pronounced, “You’re all messed up!” Events are motivated by Values that are transcendent and eternal: e.g., Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Events begin as an evaluation of what is from the perspective of what might be : “I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” (Robert Kennedy) Values are a perpetual lure to Being, to Creation, to Eventuality. Universe is disorder with respect to the ideal order defined by Values . Today, we find it convenient to imagine the pre-history of Universe as vacuum or void. But if Creation is an event (it is) and if an event is the infusion of order into disorder (it is), then we are mixing our metaphors. Void is not the antonym of order, chaos is, though the two are functionally identical. Gregory Bateson defined ‘Mind’ as ‘a difference that makes a difference’. I would propose that we apply that definition to ‘Being’ itself and treat Mind as a subset of Being. According to 20 th century British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead , Universe consists exclusively of events. In fact, Universe ( aka Creation) is an event, an uber-event that both pre-conditions and embodies all other events. God exists; therefore, God is an event like every other event. The eternal Values are available to all events only because they are aspects of the primal event that we call ‘God’. Therefore, every event originates with God – not via some serpentine historical route, but immediately, as access to Values . To be is therefore to be created de nuovo by God! Every novel entity begins with an evaluation of the World and a resolution to improve it. That evaluation and that intention reflect and are guided by eternal, transcendent Values that, according to the Book of Job, precede even God (ontologically, not historically). All of which brings us back to those first 34 verses. All told, there are 31,102 verses in the King James version of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Arguably, 30,068 can be read as commentary on the first 34. Those 34 verses by themselves present a 'complete cosmology’ but they in turn can be further broken down into three asymmetrical subsections: “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters…” This is the primal disorder into which God injected order: “Then God said, ‘ Let there be light’ .” (Genesis 1: 1 – 3) “Ya da, ya da, ya da.” (Genesis 1: 4 – 31) “Thus the heavens and the earth and all their array were completed. On the seventh day, God completed the work he had been doing; he rested on the seventh day from all the work he had undertaken. God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, he rested from all the work he had done in creation.” (Genesis 2: 1 – 3) We are living in the 7 th Day of Creation. Every event is a unique expression of the entirety. Past events contribute legacy, but not causality, to subsequent events. Of course, most such contributions are negligible; but ‘relevance’ is not hardwired. Each novel event determines into own gradations of relevance. Conversely, every novel event becomes an element in the World of every subsequent event; that’s what defines it as ‘subsequent’. Bumper Sticker #1 : Everything influences everything, but nothing causes anything! Bumper Sticker #2 : Everyone is responsible, but no one is to blame! But this is not how we see the world, is it? It may be the way the world works, but we don’t see it that way. According to our conventional view, freedom and responsibility are largely illusory. I am overwhelmingly the product of my DNA (nature). Beyond my genes, I am the passive outcome of my upbringing (nurture). Beyond even that, I bear the scars of life’s vicissitudes – all the things that have happened to me in the course of everyday living. Finally, I am the product of chance, fate, destiny, physics, or the will of God – take your pick…or mix and match. This conventional view can be quite comforting: I AM NEVER TO BLAME FOR ANYTHING! The ‘Devil made me do it’, quite literally. On the other hand, while I have little or no control over my own actions, I have amazing, almost magical power to control things in the external world. I can turn my child into a ‘mini-me’; I can reverse climate change and save the planet; I can make sure that my favorite NFL team performs up to its potential on Sunday afternoon. Imagine going through life like this! Well, imagine being us! We have turned the Serenity Prayer on its head. We are totally responsible for things entirely out of our control, but we bear no responsibility for the things we can influence. It worked for Merlin, perhaps it will work for me too! 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 . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Click here. 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! 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, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue