< Back Faith vs. Belief David Cowles Jun 27, 2022 “Courage is how 'who you are' overcomes 'what you are.'" A family member recently shared with me some thoughts about the relationship between Belief and Faith…and it got me thinking. We often use the two words as if they were interchangeable, but are they? Consider two sentences: ‘I believe in you’ and ‘I have faith in you’. Interchangeable? In most contexts, yes, but not in all. ‘Belief in you’ might mean, “I believe you have the ability to succeed at the specific task at hand.” On the other hand, ‘Faith in you’ might mean, “I believe that you will do the best you can, now and always because that’s the sort of person you are.” Both ‘I believe’ and ‘I have faith’ tell you about the state of mind of the speaker only. “I believe” means that I think there is better than even chance that what I’m saying about the world will turn out to be true. “I have faith," on the other hand, tells us nothing about the odds…or the world. My ‘faith’ is a personal decision I’ve made to live my life as though certain things were so. Example: “I believe that the New England Patriots will win the 2023 Super Bowl.” Questions: (1) What is the foundation for my belief? (2) What is the Truth Value of my belief (i.e., do they end up winning the Super Bowl or don’t they)? Both questions are ‘empirical.' On the other hand, “I have faith in the New England Patriots” means that (1) I root for the Patriots, always have, always will (identity or ‘habit’); or (2) I’ve done a deep dive into the Patriots’ player personnel and management team (information), and I am very impressed; or (3) the Patriots usually win the Super Bowl so why not this year (induction)?” When I say, “I have faith”, I’m usually not looking for either verification or falsification. In fact, I might find someone’s attempt to falsify, or even to verify, the content of a statement of faith to be offensive. When I say, “I believe” and you say, “not so”, you are disagreeing with something, I think. But when I say, “I have faith” and you say, “not so”, you are disagreeing with something I am , something I’ve chosen to be . (I am whoever I’ve chosen to be.) I have chosen an identity for myself. In choosing, I have selectively and critically incorporated (1) what I’ve inherited (biologically and culturally), (2) what I’ve learned , and (3) what I’ve done in my life. Choosing my identity translates into living my life ‘as if XYZ were true.' If I’m wrong, it’s no skin off my nose, or at least it shouldn’t be. I never promised you a rose garden! I just told you how I would be living my life. How you respond to that, if at all, is entirely up to you. Faith, whether it be faith in God, faith in comrades, faith in family, etc., is not directly concerned with empirical results; belief, on the other hand, is all about the results, the falsification (or provisional verification) of hypotheses. Faith is not immediately concerned with ‘truth’'. Faith is not a hypothesis; it can neither be verified nor falsified. Faith is a choice. Of course, Faith cannot be ‘blind faith.' What is called ‘blind faith’ is not faith at all; it’s superstition. I choose the content of my faith, but I must make my choice ‘in good faith.' For example, you can imagine someone saying, “I believe the earth is flat.” You might shake your head in disbelief, but your interlocutor’s ‘I believe’ does not make you angry; why should it? Now check the outtakes. In an earlier version, your interlocutor said, “I have faith that the earth is flat.” Feel the hair on the back of your head stand up? Now it is no longer a matter of opinion. ‘Your thoughts are incompatible with mine’ suddenly becomes ‘your being is incompatible with me .' When I say, “I believe that the earth is flat,” I am implicitly allowing for the possibility (1) that it might not be flat and (2) that others may sincerely and legitimately hold a contrary view. I declare myself open to empirical data that might confirm or debunk the contents of my belief. This is what I believe; prove me wrong! But when I say, “I have faith that the earth is flat,” I ignore the possibility that you might believe something different or that empirical evidence might better support an alternative hypothesis; and I certainly am not inviting you to ‘prove me wrong.' Faith has nothing to do with evidence. It is possible for a person’s faith to change, but that change cannot be directly tied to a piece of empirical data. 20th century positivists (‘logical’ or otherwise) measure truth by result. Does it work? Does it conform to the data? Not so faith! I once heard ‘courage’ defined as the determination to act in a certain way, even though there’s no realistic possibility of success. (Take that, positivists!) Courage is how who you are overcomes what you are : Be courageous, take the leap. Dream it? Be it! Faith…not just Belief!* *Credit to The Rocky Horror Picture Show 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 Our Three Horrible Years David Cowles Jul 15, 2026 “Puberty is death and birth, the death of a child and the birth of an adult.” 1250 words, 5 minute read By most accounts, my parents had tolerable lives: average longevity, average health, above average income, a suboptimal offspring (but that’s a subject for another day). In both cases, however, the last year of their lives was pretty awful, not the worst possible, but bad, really bad. They were warned! Nature came calling years before their final demise, but they elected, or someone elected for them, to soldier on. With the ‘help’ of modern medicine, they put the Reaper on hold…and he was not well pleased. Why hang on? Did they anticipate some marvelous event that would make up for a year’s worth of suffering? Or were they, like all of us, understandably afraid of death? No less a figure than Hamlet considered whether it was better “to be or not to be.” He got his answer centuries later from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, “Life is worth living!” But neither Hamlet nor Sheen was in his last year of life. (Well, actually, Hamlet was…but he didn’t know it at the time!) *** I am 78 years old and in ‘suboptimal’ health (there’s that word again). I can hear Eliot’s bar man calling, “Hurry up please, it’s time.” I’m in no rush; but I’m prepared to let nature take its course. I mean, what am I waiting for? Another Patriots’ Superbowl? I’ve done it all…more or less. I have a forever spouse, the best, and wonderful children; and my grands and greats are just beginning to make their marks in the world. I had a career that allowed me, don’t puke, to ‘do well while doing good’. So what am I missing? The meaning of life? (For that I have Aletheia Today .) Yet when I tell my doctors that I wish to be listed as DNR, they are shocked and appalled. “You have years of life left.” Well, maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but it is almost certain that the sentinel event of those years will be my death. Can anything top it? (Maybe a Lynwood pizza…but other than that) I doubt it. I expect and accept that the last year of my life will be my worst. Should kindly Nature offer me a quicker resolution, I certainly won’t say, “No.” I won’t do anything to shorten the runway but I won’t extend it either. *** This will not be my first rodeo. 78 years ago, I exited my mother’s hopefully nurturing womb and entered your world as a tiny, helpless, mucus covered blob, unable to articulate my needs or to address them on my own. Plus, “What is this? Where am I? What am I?” I am told that I cried most of my first year. Things only improved once I was able to move around on my own and utter my first words. Makes sense: I haven’t stopped moving, or talking, since. Case in point! You’re probably not surprised to see the last year of life on my list of anni horribiles and the first year of life makes sense too when you think about it. But I promised you 3 horrible years. Where’s the third? Is it age 6 when you start school, 21 when you have your first hangover (as if), 35 when your first divorce is finalized, or 65 when they drag you kicking and screaming out of the office where you’ve worked for 40 years at a soul destroying job? None of the above… something much worse! The magic number is 12 (give or take) and the event is full onset puberty! Ok, not great memories, but is puberty really in a class with death and birth? Yes, it is! In fact, puberty is death and birth, the death of a child and the birth of an adult. You’ve been trained to think of age as a continuum; it’s not! We age in stages . Quantum like, we leap. Age 12 marks the end of one such stage and the beginning of another. And because this is our first re incarnation (second incarnation), it is the most traumatic. Adolescence is our version of metamorphosis Once a caterpillar entombs itself in a chrysalis, it does not then ‘grow’ into a butterfly as children imagine. Rather, it dissolves into a biotic soup, reorganizes into a fresh organism, and emerges as the proud Monarch of the garden. You should be so lucky! Unlike the caterpillar who gets to reincarnate in the privacy of its chrysalis, your chrysalis is Middle School. Plus when the butterfly emerges, it enjoys all the perks of adulthood. When you emerge from puberty, you’re still a child, at least in the eyes of society. Every child is unique. That said, up to the age of 12 children share a lot in common. Every child is a polymath bursting with imagination, creativity, and energy. After 12, differentiation accelerates. Just look at the social organization of any large suburban high school: Athletes, mathletes, freaks and geeks, drama kids, drama queens, and just queens, s/h/it and they, goths and sweat hogs. It is no accident that cultures throughout the world celebrate the onset of puberty with a variety of initiation rituals. Consider the Jewish rite of Bas/Bat-Mitzvah. It marks your becoming an adult in the eyes of the religious community…except of course you’re still treated as a child on everyday matters. After puberty you are physiologically able to start a family, hold down a job, and care for yourself, and many young teens do so, even today; but sociologically, you’re still ‘just a kid’. The cognitive dissonance is literally unbearable and an adolescent’s reaction to the disconnect is likely to be life-defining. We constantly read about young teens starting businesses (or charities), performing in Carnegie Hall, leading political movements, etc. Sadly, we more often read about substance abuse, delinquency, and self-harm. Jack and Jill grew up together and they sit next to each other in 7 th grade homeroom. “Peas in pod”, their proud parents/teachers say, approvingly. Unbeknownst to everyone, Jill will graduate MIT at 20 while Jack will drop out of school immediately following his 16 th birthday. When the time comes for Jill to celebrate her 10 year high school reunion, she already has a Fields Medal to her credit while Jack is still working on his GED…following a brief stint in jail and two rounds of rehab. Society has a problem; it’s called adolescence . How do we get our pre-teens across the roiling waters relatively unscathed? We build bridges, of course: activities meant to mimic adulthood but without the irreparable consequences: High school sports, science club, debate team, model UN, volunteer work, summer jobs and internships, and even ‘college’ itself. Unlike sandlot pick-up games, these socially sanctioned activities have a certain ‘importance’… but normally they are not life defining. Rabbit notwithstanding, you can drop a forward pass and still go on to own a successful car dealership in your home town. But on the flip side, these activities can appear fake…which to some extent at least, they are. So how do we fix it? After all, “philosophers only interpret the world…the point is to change it.” (Karl Marx) So…how do we fix adolescence? Well, tell me how we fix ‘birth and death’ and I’ll let you know. But step one is to recognize age 12 as our ‘third horrible year’. 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 Greenland II David Cowles Apr 24, 2025 “Right now, Russia and China control 52% of the shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean…the US just 6%...” Americans love success…or so we’re told. Actually, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. We hate the 1%ers, even as we idolize them. We excoriate ‘the old white men’ who expanded the continental US from Plymouth Rock to Alcatraz and from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Shoreline. Of course the culture of those times tolerated the worst forms of racism, exploitation, and ‘ethnic cleansing’. Don’t white wash that! But just as poorly as these expansionist administrations scored on human rights , they scored just that well on business acumen . Today, we have an opportunity to do something new. We can make strategic deals, and we can protect and even enhance human rights in the process. We no longer live in an age of ‘either/or’; this is the era of ‘both/and’ and for the sake of all parties concerned we need to take advantage of the opportunity this provides. In the meantime, let’s review some past transactions for guidance: Louisiana Purchase (1803) Purchased from France for $15 million (about $340 million in 2024 dollars) Covers all or part of 15 states Fiercely opposed by the Federalist Party (Washington, Adams, Hamilton): Unconstitutional (the President has no authority to acquire new territory) Too expensive ($15 million was 30% of the 1803 Federal budget) A threat to the party’s political power Incorporates more French and Spanish speakers into our population. Whatever you may think of the Federalists’ motives, their arguments were not factually wrong. But imagine how different world history might have been if their narrow mindedness had prevailed! Florida (1819) Acquired from Spain through the Adams-Onís Treaty Cost: $5 million (about $115 million in 2024 dollars) Today, Florida's real estate alone is valued at over $1.5 trillion Mexican Cession (1848) Result of the Mexican-American War Cost: $18 million (about $650 million in 2024 dollars) Spans California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming Today, California’s real estate alone is valued at approximately $7 trillion Gadsden Purchase (1853) Acquired from Mexico for $10 million (about $330 million in 2024 dollars) Includes southern Arizona and parts of New Mexico Opposed by politicians from Northern states: Too much to pay for “worthless desert land” Might strengthen the political power of the Southern (slave) states Gadsen’s opponents succeeded in scuttling a proposed $50 million deal for a much larger block of land. Alaska (1867) “Seward’s Folly”, purchased from Russia for $7.2 million ($140 million in 2024 dollars) Too much to pay for “frozen, worthless wilderness”. And now there’s Greenland (2025), a vast land mass rich in natural resources, strategically positioned to benefit from the New Northwest Passage across the Arctic Ocean, and vital to the defense of North America in the age of ICBMs. A European colony at least since 1721, Greenland is not likely to emerge from Danish custody anytime soon, despite a robust national independence movement. No surprise! It was the Europeans who first introduced the Western world to the phenomenon of colonization; and how did that work out? And what about the Greenlanders themselves? The 90% indigenous (Inuit) population ‘enjoys’ a median household income about half that of the Danes and Americans fighting over it. And what do these Greenlanders want? First, let me be clear: none of my best friends are Greenlanders. So far as I know, I’ve never even met a Greenlander! (I did have dinner once with the commander of NATO forces in Greenland but he, of course, was Danish.) But that won’t stop me from speculating, will it? (Hint: it never does.) I can do that because I’m willing to assume that Greenlanders want what almost everyone else on Planet Earth seems to want, the nationalist Trifecta: Cultural Identity Political Independence Economic Prosperity If I’m wrong, I apologize. But if I’m right, the way forward consists of three ‘simple’ steps: Political Independence from Denmark An economic and strategic ‘special relationship’ with the Unites States The option to choose Commonwealth Status or Statehood when and if desired Of course, it goes without saying that the Greenlanders themselves will be driving this bus every step of the way. For our part, the US would make a binding and verifiable commitment to preserving and strengthening the indigenous Inuit culture and its dominant language (West Greenlandic). We would extend our ‘iron dome’ strategic umbrella over the island, and we would take immediate steps to bring Greenlanders’ standard of living up to North American norms. This last step would be achieved primarily through massive investments in mining, manufacturing, and tourism (‘luxury’ as well as ‘eco’ - I hope I’ll be able to travel to Nuuk to see the ribbon cut at a new Four Seasons hotel and resort). However, realistically, there would probably need to be some initial investment of public funds toward ‘income support’ – not a big deal considering it includes fewer than 60,000 inhabitants, about the same size as Grand Forks, North Dakota. Unfortunately, the ‘forces of reaction’ in the US are at least as strong now as they were in 1803, 1853, and 1867. As a result, it is uncertain whether these steps will be undertaken any time soon. So what if they aren’t? Right now, Russia and China control 52% of the shipping lanes in the Arctic Ocean; Canada controls 23%, Denmark 17%, and the US just 6%...an intolerable situation. Given these strategic considerations, we must ask, “Who are those in the US who oppose closer ties with Greenland?” The answer’s easy: progressive politicians, university academics, members of media editorial boards, late night talk show hosts, and Hollywood A-Listers. Which begs the question, “Why?” Perhaps reason #1 is Donald Trump. He favors it so it must be bad. But this is a misreading of history. In 1940 FDR defended Greenland against Nazi Denmark and in 1943, in the midst of a war in Europe and the Pacific, he diverted resources to build the giant Thule Air Force Base there. Nor is the incorporation of Greenland a Trump idea. It was first proposed by Harry Truman (1946), a Democrat, who offered the Danes $100,000,000 in Gold for the island. (That’s 1.5 Billion 2025 dollars, 100% of Greenland’s current annual GDP.) Denmark should have taken the deal! Today, it is costing the Danish government more than half a billion dollars a year to prop-up Greenland’s political and economic regime. So if you take Trump-phobia off the table, anti-Greenlanders need to ask themselves which of the following reasons account for their opposition: We are willing to strengthen Russia and China at the expense of American interests We should direct all available resources to fund the progressive social agenda We already have too many non-English speaking people in the US Greenland could become the first US state with a majority non-white population We don’t like cold weather…and nobody else should either All of the above. **** 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 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 Viktor Frankel David Cowles Jan 27, 2022 “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —— These words are attributed to Viktor Frankel, holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author. “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —— These words are attributed to Viktor Frankel, holocaust survivor, philosopher, and author. It appears that Frankel is limiting this idea of a ‘space’ between cause and effect to human decisions; but there is no reason to be so restrictive. From Hasidic rabbis to modern philosophers (e.g., Alfred North Whitehead), there is an alternative view that inserts Frankel’s ‘space’ between every cause and every effect, whether ‘animal, vegetable or mineral’. Of course, this is a radical rejection of deterministic philosophies that assume effects follow directly, and inexorably, from their causes. Not so! Between every cause and its effect(s) there is always a ‘space’. In some cases that space is infinitesimal (e.g., when two billiard balls collide); in other cases, it can be considerable (e.g., when a human being consciously chooses one behavior out of a range of optional behaviors). In the case of the billiard balls, we can predict the momentum of the struck ball with enormous accuracy. The space between cause and effect is exceedingly small, so the ‘freedom factor’ can for all practical purposes be ignored. Not so, of course, with human behavior, and perhaps to a lesser extent, with the behavior of other living organisms. How do we experience this ‘space’? As physical space? As a period of time? Certainly not. There is no physical space between two colliding billiard balls; there is no period of time over which the balls exchange momentum. The very idea of a spatiotemporal separation between cause and effect seems absurd. Yet when we are agonizing over whether to order the steak or the lobster, the decision making process can seem interminable. But this confuses deliberation (the agony) with decision (the ecstasy). When we finally decide to order the sea bass, that decision may be instantaneous, no matter how long the deliberation lasted. In my view, Frankel’s ‘space’ is not to be found on the spatiotemporal continuum. It takes place outside of spacetime, in a dimension perpendicular to spacetime; we sometimes call this dimension ‘eternity’. Eternity is what’s left when you take space and time out of the equation. 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.

“I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.” < Back Sacramental Priesthood David Cowles Apr 15, 2024 “I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others.” Prior to 1800, it was more or less taken for granted that human life had some sort of transcendent purpose or value. After 1800…not so much! Popes Leo XIII, Pius X, and John XXIII each made a valiant, but largely unsuccessful, effort to win back the hearts and minds of the ‘once faithful’. The high water mark of this renewal was Vatican II (V2), the Church’s 20 th century effort to reinvent itself. For all its good intentions and fine documents, V2 did not accomplish its objective. In retrospect, JP2 probably did more to make the church relevant . Today, the Church is adrift. Even a generally popular Pope like Francis seems oddly out of touch. The Church’s structural and institutional problems are serious and well known but they are not the root cause of this cultural schism. That goes to something much deeper: Christians believe… or are expected to believe, things that fly in the face of everyday common sense : that God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, is also a human being, born of a virgin to a working class family in first century Palestine; that he cured the sick, raised the dead, turned water into wine, wine into blood, and bread into his body; that he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Non-Christians… believe in science. See the problem? Believers and non-believers do not just disagree about things like Abortion; they disagree about what the World is ! What the meaning of ‘is’ is! Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, science and religion coexisted, albeit uneasily. Science had its realm, religion had its, and never were the twain to meet. If this ‘two state solution’ ever worked, it certainly doesn’t today. Science strives to be a Theory of Everything (TOE) and, frankly, Theology should do the same, not excluding science, not co-opting it, but incorporating it. The scientific world view - logical, empirical, material and practical - has permeated every nook and cranny of civilian life. 8 year olds today are doing science that was unimaginable for 80 year olds a generation ago. It is hard to imagine a role for religion in such a world. However, we also know that the scientific world view is ultimately unsatisfying. Despite stupendous material progress, people are at least as unhappy today as they ever were. Stress, anxiety, depression, boredom, and self-harm are symptoms of an even deeper malaise – the loss of meaning and purpose. I mean a universe that comes into being spontaneously, evolves randomly, and vanishes without a trace is hardly reassuring. May I be excused for at least asking, “Could something else be going on?” I mean, if it turns out that everything is worthless and nothing has any meaning, then fine! But don’t expect me to go gentle into that no good night. Science offers no ultimate explanations; it can’t. It’s not in its nature. Now don’t get me wrong: science does an outstanding job of explaining things , one thing at a time, in terms of other things, one thing at a time. Any Best of Science highlight reel must include a shot of a billiards table. But why are there things to explain in the first place? Not a cue! (Oops, clue.) We have everything…we are nothing! Materialism has proven to be the first cousin of nihilism; so re-enter Christianity? Most Christians believe in science – deeply! It’s Nature after all. It’s the Mind of God. In 1000 CE, Pope Sylvester II was said to be the finest scientific mind in all Europe. In Jewish tradition, the Torah is thought to have been given twice: once as Written Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) and once as Oral Torah (nature, logos , the cosmic order). One law, two expressions! Science and religion don’t conflict…or even complement; they reinforce. A knowledge of science can and should lead to a deeper understanding of religion… and vice versa! But this is 2000, not 1000, CE, and it’s certainly not 500 BCE. Science reigns, religion is in exile. The priesthood itself, the scaffolding of the hierarchical Church, is an endangered species. There are no priests! And religious? Forget about it. What can a priest do? He (sic) can educate, heal, counsel, administer; he can perform the Works of Mercy…but so can others . A priest can ‘also’ facilitate the Seven Sacraments. These are 7 ‘moments’ or ‘stages’ in someone’s life that can bring a person into closer contact with the Transcendent. Generally speaking, this is something others can’t do! Beyond the 7 Sacraments, most of what the Church does can be laicized, subbed out, or snubbed out. Much can and should move to the public sector and/or to non-denominational charities. Where the Church wishes to retain a role, e.g. in education, there is no need for ordained clergy to be involved. Imagine a Church with two ‘tracks’: (1) the lay track for those primarily interested in public service, education, administration, charitable work; (2) the ordained track for those wishing to devote themselves to manifesting God’s presence through the Sacraments. We are all called to be Priest, Prophet, and King . Absolutely! But perhaps in our professional lives, we should be priest, prophet, or king. For example, reimagine the priesthood as a loose confederation of men (sic) welcoming newborns and converts, strengthening faith, hearing confessions, celebrating Mass (Eucharist), marrying couples, ordaining clergy, and easing the way for the sick and the dying. Not the worst job description! To whom could we compare such a ‘reformed’ clergy? To Robin Hood’s Merry Men, to Worker-priests, to Medieval troubadours, to Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums? Wait, I’ve got it, how about we compare the new priesthood to Jesus’ band of disciples (Gospel of Mark), wandering the border regions of Galilee, performing good works and manifesting the presence of God. In other words, the Church as Jesus and the Apostles lived it. How about that? Of course, in the process of carrying out these spiritual functions, priests would overlap with lay practitioners and even civil servants as the latter perform their material and/or social duties: caring, counseling, educating, et al. It could be no other way! Each Sacrament is not only an encounter with Christ; it is also an encounter with, and an unmasking of, the world ( Aletheia ). Sacraments strip away the world’s phenomenal veneer to reveal its noumenal essence. They hijack Parmenides’ Doxa and shine its ‘bright light’ on Aletheia . This is Neant without Etre , Dasein without Wassein , the unheard sound of a tree falling in a forest, the unheard sound of one hand clapping. Imagine officiating at these moments of sacramental epiphany…and doing it for a living! Doesn’t appeal to you? You’d rather shuffle papers? No problem. I’ve got plenty of work for you . But I’m willing to bet there are some people out there (actually, a lot of people) who would literally love to spend their careers revealing the presence of God to others. And if I’m right, Eureka! We have priests again! Maybe John Webster was right, “Better days are coming,” after all! 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 Holy Days 2024. 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

< Back Causes of the Civil War “Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess.” David Cowles When I was a bit younger, it was almost guaranteed that any major high school exam covering American History would include the question, “What were the causes of the American Civil War?” In those days, if you wrote “Slavery” across your exam paper, handed it in and headed for the beach, you probably weren’t going to get college credit for your efforts. Today…? But the question is a good one for several reasons: It concerns something we still care about. It allows for weighted consideration of economy, technology, ideology and culture. It encourages the precocious student to reflect on the nature of causality per se , especially in the context of historical process. The American Civil War did not spring unheralded from the head of Medusa but neither did it evolve with billiard-like efficiency. Two hours into exam time, you think, “Everything caused the Civil War…and nothing caused it,” and now you’re on to something! Now you’ve earned that college credit. Marxists call this ‘over-determination’ – events are the intersections of multiple causal chains. Like peaks and troughs on the screen of an oscillator, some waves reinforce, others dampen, and some cancel. You are face to face with the ‘3 Body Problem’, dumbed down for us social science majors. On one hand, history is not magic. It does not rely on spells and incantations; nor does wishing make things so, not even “when you wish upon a star,” Pinocchio. On the other hand, spells and incantations need to be studied as phenomena in their own right and the wishes of various population groups can be a powerful historical force. Yup, it’s the 3 Body Problem, for sure. Everything interacts with everything else. We understand each interaction on its own, but we are flummoxed by the search for an overarching algorithm. For all our erudition, we are ultimately forced to conclude that anything could have happened…and been explained in terms of everything else. This leads to an odd cognitive state in which we can predict nothing…but explain everything. The eyes in back of my head see 20/20; my other eyes…not so much. The 2024 US Presidential election is a case in point. Long expected to be the ‘closest race ever’, it wasn’t close at all. But no one knew that 5 days before. Sure, some may have guessed right, but guessing is not knowing…even if you think it is. It’s impossible to know the future; that’s what makes it future . So no one knew ! No one, that is, except a certain woman in Iowa. She had been polling Iowans for decades and had a reputation for uncanny accuracy. Iowa was not even one of the so-called Battleground States . It was Trump +8% in 2016 and in 2020 and in most 2024 polls. Suddenly, on the weekend before the election, pollster Ann Selzer announced in the Des Moines Register that she had detected a major groundswell of support for Harris: Iowa was now Harris +3%. If that had happened in Iowa, TV networks would have been able to call the nationwide race for Harris by 10PM EST. Suffice to say, they didn’t! The Harris-Walz Wave turned out to be a trough. Iowa ended up Trump +13%. Selzer was off by a whopping 16%. How’s that for a margin of error? The first polls close in some states at 7PM EST. We were on the edge of our seats. If the Selzer Effect were real, it would be evident in the first returns from Indiana and Kentucky. Could one person be so right and everyone else so wrong? 7:05, 7:20, 7:35 – nothing unexpected in the data! No sign of any last minute migration from Trump to Harris…because there wasn’t one. But if there had been such a shift, would that have meant that Selzer was ‘right’? Not necessarily. A broken clock displays the exact time…twice a day; but referring to those moments, we don’t say ‘the clock was right’. A football co-captain calls, “Tails” and it is tails! But we don’t say that the captain ‘got it right’. Being right is more than just being correct. Right is anchored in reason. Why did you think what you thought and was that reasoning valid and/or supported by the relevant evidence? Back to Iowa. Had it gone Harris’ way, folks would have said that Selzer was right. But note, it’s the same Selzer. The outcome , unrelated to her work, just happened to be different. Now libraries are filling up with articles explaining Trump’s triumph; but no one was prepared to publish such a column on the Monday before. The fact is, we are always flying blind into an unknown and undetermined future; looking back, ‘it was always obvious all along’. But to whom? God? Or not even? Science has a name for this state of affairs; it’s called Kaos (chaos)! Chaos is not an absence of causality, as is generally supposed, but an excess . Our Civil War exam taker figured it out: if everything causes everything else then nothing causes anything! Anything overdetermined is everything undetermined, and by the exact same amount. Yet events do not seem entirely random either. They relate to one another but not in mutually reinforcing causal waves. But what’s the alternative? Short of pure mysticism, how else can we account for the regularities of experience? Every event is an expression of the entire Universe. It is a synthesis of what has been and what is coming to be. The event itself samples and weights everything that is and projects it forward into what is to become. Every event is a dissipative membrane, templating settled matters of fact with pure possibility. Events live in the space between what has passed away and what may yet come to pass. The event itself includes no past or future but the event swims in a sea of time. ‘Event’ then is what we mean by ‘Present’. As such every event must begin by executing judgment on the world it inherits (the past). To act as judge, our event must include elements of a different ontological order. We can only judge the contingent from the perspective of the necessary, the actual from the perspective of the ideal. This realization was Plato’s greatest gift to Western philosophy, and it is what connects Plato to Nietzsche , strange bedfellows indeed. A box of Cracker Jacks cannot execute judgment on a Beethoven symphony. Judgment must be from the transcendent perspective of eternal and universal values (e.g. Beauty, Truth, Justice). Only ‘what is not of this world’ can judge ‘what is of this world’. Jesus nailed it during his brief interview with Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the Truth.” (John 18: 36 – 37) Scripture doesn’t give Pilate his due. He was no slouch. He answered Jesus in his best Oxbridge accent: “What is truth?” thereby earning himself posthumous degrees emeritus from 3 Ivy League colleges. The creative advance is always fueled by the desire for Good. “I set before you life and death; therefore choose life.” (Deut. 30: 19) However, we live in an alienated, entropic, post-utopian world. Our goals are pure, but our pursuit of those goals may not be. We do not always follow through on our good intentions. Because of this, there’s often “a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.” In other words, we can’t get out of our own way. Accordingly, as we pursue our initial objective, we entertain new objectives along the way. We get distracted. “What I wish to do, I do not do; what I hate, I do.” (Romans 7: 19) Our beautiful sweater ends up more like a bundle of yarn. And so the academic discipline known as History is born. 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 dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 Previous Next

< Back Enlightenment! David Cowles “It is often said that victors write history. That is even truer when the war is cultural rather than political.” Whenever history decides to grade itself…beware! ‘Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment’ – see a pattern here? it all sounds so cheery. And why shouldn’t it? Someone turned European History into a ‘self-graded class’, and like any self-respecting fifth grader (think Bart Simpson), History’s given itself an A. What about what went before? What happened between Rome and Renaissance? We’re talking religion before it was ‘fixed’ by Martin Luther, art before it was ‘fixed’ by the introduction of perspective, and the feudal system before it was ‘fixed’ by capitalism and the idea of constitutional government. This year, Sister Martha Mary decided to change again the way students are graded in her class. Instead of students grading themselves, each student is now graded by another member of the class. Guess what? Not an A in sight…but lots of C’s, D’s and, oh so many F’s. Does it surprise you that 10-year-olds are harder on others than they are on themselves? (Guess you never had siblings!) Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment: consider the words carefully! Now what would you call periods of history that were none of those things? Why you’d have to call them ‘Dark Ages,’ obviously. And History has obliged. It is often said that victors write history. That is even truer when the war is cultural rather than political: Our culture is who we are, our politics are what we are. (My apologies to Karl Marx.) In the June 27, 2022, edition of Thoughts While Shaving (TWS), we explored the difference between Faith (who we are) and Belief (what we are) . We are grandchildren of the Enlightenment. Sir Isaac Newton (c. 1700) flipped a switch, et voila, “Fiat Lux” . At that moment, the clouds were swept away and for the first-time humanity was able to see the world ‘as it is,’ without the camouflage of religion: No God, no Spirit, no Soul…this world is Nietzsche’s sand box. If you’re into science and technology, the Enlightenment is your era! It was a period of unparalleled invention and discovery, but also a period of war, tyranny, and myriad atrocities. But I digress. I said earlier that the Enlightenment was a period of invention… Was, not is! The period misnamed ‘Enlightenment’ is mercifully over…though our politicians, generals and terrorist leaders apparently missed the memo. The Enlightenment turned out to be an ouroboros. Like the Vacuum Monster is the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine , it consumed itself. Most often, epochal shifts occur when a ‘better idea’ replaces the current paradigm. That could have happened here…but it didn’t. Revolutionary discoveries in science (1900 – 1930) were a death sentence for the Enlightenment…but gracelessly, it insisted on exhausting every avenue of appeal. And it’s not done yet! Like President Trump, it’s still looking for 12,000 votes in Georgia. Enlightenment’s paradigms of materialism and causality were demolished by the discoveries of Planck, Einstein, and the ‘Quantum Mechanics.’ But instead of ‘exiting stage right’ as scripted, Enlightenment has refused to leave, even though its final scene is long since played out. Unlike the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the Enlightenment did not “go gentle into that good night;” it raged against the dying of its imaginary light. Enlightenment refused to leave the stage before ‘the fat (sic) lady (Brunhilda)’ sang; and boy did she ever sign! Fittingly, Brunhilda’s final aria in Wagner’s “Ring” also heralded the collapse of a civilization preserved now only in Norse Mythology (The Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda )…and Marvel comics. The demise of the Enlightenment played on two stages. Stage right: Fascism. Stage left: Stalinism. Though mortal enemies on paper, these two ideologies both see the world through the paradigm of mechanization. Human beings are essentially machines and human society is akin to an assembly line: an arrangement of resources designed to maximize the production of goods and services…especially goods. Think nuclear! An atomic bomb can be understood as the self-annihilation of matter. Now think the self-annihilation of Enlightenment: Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Gulag archipelago. Hitler, Stalin and their ‘gangs’ were determined to make the world safe for mechanization, i.e., the transformation of human beings and their social systems into ‘machines.’ To do so, they needed to rid the world, or at least Europe, of competing ideologies: Judaism (especially Hasidism and Kabala), Catholicism, Orthodoxy, tribalism (allegiance to smaller, more culturally focused groups), and individualism (in philosophy, in art and in lifestyle). Image: Reading of Voltaire 's tragedy of the Orphan of China in the salon of Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin in 1755, by Lemonnier , c. 1812. 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 Next

< Back JK Rowling and Pliny the Elder David Cowles "What about werewolves, giants, trolls, and dragons? We don’t believe in them; they’re not real! Are they?" What does the creator of Harry Potter have in common with a 1st century CE Roman historian? Simple, they share a passion for Beasts! Arguably, Rowling and Pliny are responsible for the two greatest European Bestiaries of the Christian Era. They provide bookends to a tradition that spans 20 centuries and that appears in some form in every culture and in every era. First, some background: What is a ‘Beast’ ? Any life form other than Homo sapiens could be considered a Beast . ‘Beasts’ include our fast friends: lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! They also include Spot, our family’s best friend . But that barely scratches the surface. ‘Beasts’ include proto-humans from Neanderthal to Yeti. They include dragons, centaurs, and other supposedly mythical creatures. They include all manner of chimera, e.g., unicorns, griffins, and merpeople (known as ‘ mermaids ’ before the gender revolution). Push out the envelope to include flesh eating plants, pernicious bacteria and unclassified life forms like fairies, elves, and leprechauns. We live in the universe of a small child. We live in the company of fellow human beings. Beyond that, we know Spot the dog, Puss the cat, and Elsie the cow. We have stuffed giraffes, rhinos, hippos, et al. We trust that these puppets have real-world prototypes, even though few of us have ever actually petted one. What about werewolves, giants, trolls, and dragons? We don’t believe in them; they’re not real! Are they? Like our neighbors’ bratty children (but unlike our own cherubs ), we are terribly spoiled – so spoiled in fact that we actually have the chutzpah to complain about conditions in our habitat. Let’s take stock: we live alongside other, mostly peaceable humans in a civilized society. We’ve domesticated our pets and tamed our ‘beasts of burden’ (horses, oxen, etc.). As for the rest of the animal kingdom, as noted above, we’ll take ours stuffed, thank you… and not by a taxidermist. Most of us will be born, grow, live, and die without ever hearing a dragon roar (Puff notwithstanding)! We live in a well-designed zoo. Our enclosure is virtual - but virtually impermeable. We imagine that we are the zookeepers but in fact we are the exhibit. And yet, we complain: “The food could be better, it gets chilly at night, the sheep bleat too loudly, etc. If ‘zoo management’ really cared about us, they’d do something about these deplorable living conditions, right?” It’s that darn old Problem of Evil coming back to bite us again, albeit in a new guise; but Pliny and Rowling turn the ‘problem’ on its head by asking, “What if there was no Zoo? What then?” Whining, we ask, “Why aren’t things better than they are?” Clearer eyed, Pliny and Rowling asked, “Why aren’t things much worse?” IRL, Sally and Spot are your playmates…but it could just as well have been Behemoth and Leviathan. Pliny and Rowling both take a page out of Wonderful Life – no, not the Jimmy Stewart movie, the Stephen Gould book. Life could have, and may have, evolved in many different ways, almost all of which would have been much less hospitable than what we’re used to. Why did life evolve the way it did? Or did life evolve in all sorts of horrible ways, with us somehow sheltered from the worst results? Is there cosmic censorship? Did the horrible monsters of our imagination just never evolve? Or did they evolve in all their pomp and fury but behind some sort of invisible barrier, a cosmic filter perhaps, that protects us? If so, is that evidence that there is a ‘bias toward good’ in the universe that saves us from fates far, far worse than mere death? Is that ‘bias toward good’ a manifestation of what we call God ? Can we ask anything more of God than such a tilt ? Who even asks questions like these? Well, how’s this for a NY Times Best Seller list: Job, Pliny, Augustine, Einstein, Tolkien, Hugh Everett (physicist), and Rowling? Our questions put us in good intellectual company. Perhaps Augustine said it best (paraphrasing): I don’t know whether proto-humans exist or not but if they do, then they must somehow also be descended from Adam and Eve (Genesis 6: 1-4). Pliny and Rowling turn the classic Problem of Evil on its head. In their hands, it becomes a Problem of Good : If life on earth could have evolved in such horrible ways, why didn’t it? Or, if it did, how is it that we are sheltered from its worst effects? Who made Middle Earth ‘safe for humanity’? Note : We explored this Problem of Good in more detail in ATM Issue #1. The so-called Problem of Evil has led many to deny, or at least question, the existence of a benevolent God. The great Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote an entire book, Why I Am Not a Christian, to broadcast his conclusion. If so, the discovery of the Problem of Good should have the same effect…but in the other direction. How is it that things are not very, very much worse than they are? Could that be evidence of some sort of ‘divine influence’? Ponder that a while, if you will, but while you ponder, perhaps you’d like to meet some of my cuties : According to Pliny, the Scythians feed mainly on human flesh. The Anthropophagi drink out of human skulls. The Psylli expose their newborns to deadly serpents to prove the mother’s chastity and test the father’s paternity. Calingi women conceive at 5 years of age and don’t live beyond the age of 8. The Asmoths have no mouths and live only on odors. Rowling picks up where Pliny leaves off. She takes full advantage of 20 centuries of geographic exploration, and scientific discovery to expand Pliny’s menagerie and to give her creatures greater definition. Her bestiary includes all the usual suspects: Centaurs, Griffins, Dragons, Pegasus, Unicorns, Werewolves and, of course, Yeti. She also includes some relative newcomers to the beastly scene: Erklings, for example, are three-foot tall, elfish creatures native to the Black Forest; their preferred diet, of course, is the flesh of young children. On the other end of Rowling’s genetic spectrum is the Acromantula, a spider-like creature, capable of human speech, now native to Borneo. It is thought that the Acromantula may be the product of genetic engineering…by humans. Like COVID-19 perhaps? When we were very young, we believed that monsters lived in unseen spaces: under our beds, in our closets, etc. Gradually, we outgrew such beliefs. But what if we were right in the first place? What if the monsters were there all the time, but somehow something protected us from them. Was it the trusty nightlight? Or Daddy’s always thorough ‘sweep’ of my room at bedtime? Or was it the benevolent bias of being, aka God? 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 Spring 2023 Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Kids and Curiosity David Cowles Jul 1, 2026 “No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty.” 1500 words, 6 minute read In a short reflection in Scientific American (August 29, 2025) Andrea Tamayo accurately observed that children, as they age, seem ever less interested in exploring the world around them. She reasons that this might be due to linguistic cues coming from adults. For example, when talking to children, we might say “Let’s be scientists today” or “You’re such a good scientist!” This language focuses on science as an identity, a role, something you play at or perform, rather than something that is an integral part of daily living. Andrea is right, of course! No parent or grandparent fails to notice that their kids’ insatiable curiosity wanes with the onset of puberty. And yes, adults’ language can be spirit robbing and demotivating. But at most, the two phenomena are loosely connected and identifying one with the other denatures both. First, face facts: adults have a deeply felt need to infantilize the children in their orbit. In Andrea’s example, we make it abundantly clear to our charges that they are not doing real science (whatever that is), that they are not being real scientists…they are just playing . Adults are bigger and stronger and know more than most kids, so why do we feel a need to marginalize them and trivialize their contributions; why do we damn them with faint praise? My hypothesis : Consciously or not, adults realize that their rugrats are orders of magnitude smarter than they are and that makes us insecure and defensive. Wait, smarter than we are? My kid is smarter than me? You bet! Here’s how it works: A 10 year old’s brain processes information 4x more efficiently than a 40 year old’s. Raw mental acuity declines in what approximates a straight line (i.e. arithmetically) from birth to death. However, learning is predicated on what we already know (we stand on the shoulders of giants) and the average 40 year old knows 4² (16x) more than the average 10 year old. Knowledge increases geometrically: the magic of compound information . In one year, a 40 year old will learn 4x as much as a 10 year old, even though the 10 year old is learning 4x faster than we are: 1/4 x 16 = 4. That’s how it is that superannuated ‘know-it-alls’ can’t keep up with their size 10s. Memorize the periodic table? You have an edge. Find an imaginative solution to a unique problem? Don’t even bother! Let’s break this down. Studies show that the central nervous system ‘reorganizes’ according to a timeline that doesn’t map neatly onto the milestones we typically celebrate (6, 16, 21, etc.). For one study, scientists compared MRI diffusion scans of more than 3,800 people, ranging from newborns to 90-year-olds; they found that our brains ‘molt’ 4 times, once at around age 9, and then again around 32, 66, and 83. I am reminded of how caterpillars totally reassemble in the chrysalis as they become butterflies . Our brain’s connections wire themselves in a certain way from birth to nine years of age. Our neural architecture reorganizes as we prepare to enter adolescence and that pattern persists into our early 30’s, marking our transition to full onset adulthood . This is the point at which intelligence plateaus and personality crystalizes. Since Plato, Westerners have thought in terms of classes and their members. There is a class of objects known as ‘chairs’; they all serve a common function though no two of them are identical. Organizing experience into classes and members is a form of data compression; it is our way of adjusting to declining metal acuity. It works…but at a price: we are now one step removed from the material world as it actually happens. Children know no classes. They only learn how to ‘classify’ from adults. Initially, every object is its own class, a class of one. When I was a child, our house was filled with all sorts of interesting furniture. Each piece had its own unique name. I had no idea that what was called the Winged Chair was simply a chair that had wings . Children routinely nominalize adjectives. Ab initio , every noun is a proper noun. To the extent that we internalize Plato’s categorial scheme, tangible things become the intersections of abstract qualities; we lose contact with the concrete . Children have no role in society. They serve no function (unless ‘being cute’ qualifies). When children age from day care through kindergarten into first grade, they begin to understand their day to day experiences in the context of a ‘role’. How many parents have said, “Our job is to go to work and earn; your job is to go to school and learn?” And so learning becomes a scheduled task, not a spontaneous response to one’s environment. As we age further, we become immersed in our roles. We are players on a Little League team, members of a Cub Scout den, voices in a church choir. Later, we are in the cast of a high school musical, we play right guard on a football team, and we write for our school newspaper. We not only break down the external world into classes and their members, we define ourselves in the same way. Our roles abstract us from naked experience. We gain competence…but at the expense of the concrete contact that promotes curiosity. It doesn’t have to be this way! There’s nothing wrong with competence per se ; in fact, it’s a good thing and it is a prerequisite for survival in this world. The problem comes when we identify with the roles associated with those skills. We do not just ‘play’ football, we are football players; we do not just ‘write’, we are authors. And yes, Andrea, we do not just ‘do’ science, we are scientists. In fact of course, we are none of those things. We’re not anything in this world. We are, potentially at least, much, much more! We are the world transcending itself. We are not just conscious, we are consciousness . We are stereoscopically aware of our environment and of ourselves being aware of that environment. We are not just recursive, we are recursion . We are how the Universe looks at itself, judges itself…and adjusts itself. We are right to be terrified. The power is awesome…and we are totally alone with it. Unbearable! And so, like tweens on their first day of middle school, we sand-down our rough edges and cover-over our identifying marks. We yearn to be ‘just like everybody else’, someone who belongs, a member, one who plays role, an adult . As we get older, we ask, “Who am I?” and we expect an answer! Of course, Odysseus ( via Homer) gave us that answer 3000 years ago: we are Nemo , we are no one! More recently, we were reminded by Jean-Paul Sartre that we are Neant . We are the subjects of our lives, not artifacts of a civilization. We are like sleeper agents of a foreign power - not the USSR this time but God ( Kosmos or Gaia if you prefer). Our MO is to blend in, to attract no notice, to be as much like everyone else as possible. And just like sleeper agents during the Cold War, we are almost certain to go native . We forget all about our existential mission and we focus on lowering our handicap (golf talk). As we age, we become ever more identified with our roles. We become spouses, parents, employees, managers, entrepreneurs. Gradually, these are no longer things we do or even roles we assume; they become who (or what) we are. The pressure of living in our aspirational society is all consuming. We are 100% invested in making a living, raising a family, saving for retirement. Work/Life Balance is a meme without meaning. Or, if it means anything, it refers to balancing different roles , e.g. cutting back on the job so that we have time to coach our kids’ sports teams. There’s no question of making any room for us . So we gradually become what we are here to observe and correct; we become the problem we were meant to solve. And, of course, we eagerly perpetuate this cycle of doom with our own offspring; our fondest hope is for a mini-me. Once we’ve bought in, most of us will not have a realistic opportunity to pull back until we reach seniority (or senility, whichever comes first). Then we’ll yearn to reinvent ourselves, but by then we have no idea where to begin. Perhaps Social Security benefits should include a free class: Reawakening the Kid in you . 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 Spiritual Bypassing David Cowles Jul 4, 2024 'Spiritual Bypassing is a species of bad faith. It relies on platitudes to mask feelings; it flees conflict and tolerates injustice.” A colleague recently introduced me to the concept of ‘Spiritual Bypassing’. The phrase was unfamiliar, but the practice itself required no introduction. I immediately recognized myself as a regular practitioner. Once upon a time, the world was Voltaire’s Garden ( Candide ). Except for the excesses of the industrial revolution, like child labor, crushing poverty, and environmental degradation, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. Then came the existentialists! Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus showed us just exactly how horrible life really is. It’s absurd; and we must face it with dread, nausea, and angst – unless we succumb to soporific bad faith . Spiritual Bypassing is a species of bad faith . It relies on platitudes to mask feelings; it flees conflict and tolerates injustice. It appears to follow the trajectory of the Serenity Prayer… “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” …but it doesn’t. It settles for ‘resignation’ (instead of serenity), ‘apathy’ (instead of courage), and ‘spiritual pride’ (instead of wisdom). According to John Welwood ( Toward a Psychology of Awakening ), Spiritual Bypassing is a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks." Proper spirituality has a lot to contribute to our quality of life. It does not inoculate us against anger, sadness, or grief but it places such experiences in a broader and more hopeful context. Ideally, spirituality can prevent anger from turning violent, fear from becoming dread, sadness from becoming depression, grief from becoming despair, and frustration from becoming anxiety. Spiritual Bypassing, on the other hand, represses so-called ‘negative emotions’. Worse, it makes the person feel unworthy because they have such emotions. It’s a vicious cycle: I feel bad and now, on top of that, I must feel bad for feeling bad. False spirituality can exact a heavy toll. Healthy spirituality, on the other hand, lets me experience my emotions as wisdom helps me situate the events triggering those emotions in a broader context. How do you know if you’re a Spiritual Byepasser? Well, ask yourself, “Do you ever say any of these things?” I avoid feelings of anger because Scripture mandates forgiveness. I thank God that I am not like those cretins that are tormenting me. She’s in a better place now. She’s here with us, watching over us. You (or I) must have done something to deserve this ill fortune. Think positive thoughts only. I am not focused on the here and now; my mind is on the hereafter. This (tragedy) is God’s will…part of his plan. Everything happens for a reason. It’s a blessing in disguise. Or just ask yourself, “Is my spirituality helping ease someone else’s pain or burden or is it just making me feel better?” There is a persistent thread in Western culture linking good fortune with virtue. In the Grail Legend, the devastation of the land and the infirmity of the King go hand in hand. In the Book of Job, the so-called ‘comforters’ never cease trying to link Job’s misfortunes to imaginary misdeeds, past or future, his own or his children’s. Sidebar : In the end, Job’s comforters are severely chastised by God: “My anger blazes against you…You have not spoken rightly about me as has my servant Job.” Even today, though we know better now, we can’t help ourselves. We instinctively link material prosperity, physical beauty, and good health with God’s favor and/or our own virtuous living. Our bodies are no longer ‘temples of the Holy Spirit’; now they are idols to be worshiped. So, we buff them, tan them, oil them, and then gaze upon them lovingly. 80 is the new 40! Dreaded negativity plays a crucial role in the World according to both Existentialism and Process Philosophy, two of the 20th century’s most important philosophical movements. Novelty begins with the realization that the Actual World of events falls short of the Ideal World of values. Liberation (e.g. the Exodus) begins when judgment is executed ‘on the gods of Egypt’. Sidebar : Spiritual Bypassing is often accompanied by an excessive focus on self-actualization. The term itself implies that a ‘self’ existed prior to its being actualized. A neat trick. It also suggests that it might be possible to actualize something other than ‘self’. Like what? True : I do actualize myself; but my ‘self’ is whatever I actualize. There is never the slightest disconnect, not even la differ á nce , between what I actualize and what I am. Spiritual bypassing can have a variety of adverse effects in the real world – on ourselves, on others, and on the relationships we have with others. Spiritual Bypassing isolates its practitioner from the real world, from the experience of agency, from real emotion, and from the feelings of others. As such it is a powerful barrier to personal growth; it functions as anti-spirituality in our psyches. Remember, there are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ emotions so avoid labeling them as such. Remember too that the World cannot move forward, towards Value, without rejecting aspects of the status quo. There’s no Exodus without the plagues! Anger is a normal emotion and a perfectly reasonable reaction to many events and situations. It means that there is something wrong and that action needs to be taken to fix a situation or mend a relationship. Authentic spirituality doesn't suppress valid emotions just because they're uncomfortable. Most perniciously, Spiritual Bypassing can be used to justify the status quo: “Everything has a reason, it’s God’s will, it’s part of the plan.” In one stroke the deep emotions of another have been trivialized and your own apathy and quietism have been justified. My ‘neighbor’ is suffering but guess what? It’s all about me…as usual. Welcome to the Spiritual Bypass. 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 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. 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< Back Rebbe and Chassid David Cowles Dec 26, 2023 “The Torah mandates just acts; the Prophets demand right intentions, but the Wisdom writers honor just acts performed by righteous people.” When the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Sholom Dov Ber, was a small boy, he played a game with his older brother, Reb Zalman Aaron. The game was “Rebbe and Chassid.” Reb Zalman Aaron, who was a year older, played the Rebbe, and Rabbi Sholom Dov Ber played the Chassid. Reb Sholom Dov Ber asked the “Rebbe” for advice on how to correct a shortcoming. “This past Shabbat,” he confessed, “I cracked and ate nuts, but then I learned that it’s best not to eat nuts on Shabbat because the shells are muktzah (forbidden to touch).” The “Rebbe” thought for a second and then gave advice. “You should look into the siddur (prayer book) when you pray. Do not pray by heart.” Reb Sholom Dov Ber responded, “You’re not a real Rebbe, and your advice won’t help!” “Why not?” asked Reb Zalman Aaron, puzzled. “I gave you good advice, didn’t I?” “When a Rebbe gives an answer, he lets out a sigh first. You didn’t sigh first, so you’re not a real Rebbe!” To Reb Zalman Aaron, a Rebbe is a wise man who gives advice. If his advice is correct, his job is done. But Reb Sholom Dov Ber, the future Rebbe, saw it differently. A Rebbe doesn’t just give advice. He bonds with the other person and deeply feels his plight. Whatever pains the other pains him too. Therefore, before giving advice, he sighs. (Like Bill Clinton, he feels your pain.) Not every reader of TWS comes out of the Hassidic tradition, but we can all learn from this story. Who am I? Am I what I do? Or am I what I am? Most people, myself especially, build a firewall between these two versions of the self; we exploit the protection that the firewall confers to maintain a bloated assessment of our own virtue. One day: “I know I’ve done some bad things (objective), but I am fundamentally a good person (subjective).” As my grandmother’s teacher said to her one day, “Marguerite, I know you mean well; you just don’t do well!” Or my middle school football coach, “No offense, Sonny (subjective), but you stink (objective).” Next day: “I regret that I am not a better person…but I’ve tried to ensure that my subjective deficits don’t corrupt my objective behavior.” AA has a slogan that applies here: “Fake it ‘til you make it.” A similar message comes from psychologist Wilhelm Reich: the best way to cure sexual inhibition/dysfunction (subjective) is to engage in as much sexual activity (with or without a partner) as possible (objective). The Old Testament distinguishes two related but distinct concepts: Justice (what is done: objective) and Righteousness (who does it: subjective). To greatly oversimplify, the Torah mandates just acts, the Prophets demand right intentions, while the Wisdom writers honor just acts performed by righteous people. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The goal of all religious practice is the same: to promote both justice and righteousness, and to make them coincident: Just acts performed by right actors. In the end, justice and righteousness are not substantially different; they are one substance pointed in opposite directions. Justice points away from the person toward the world; righteousness points away from the world toward the person. When a righteous actor performs a just act, the universe grows one step closer to God, in whom just action and righteous being are one. 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 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 You are the Elephant! David Cowles Sep 23, 2026 “And so it is that in some cultures even today, elephants are considered sacred.” 1400 words, 6 minute read You’ve heard the story a million times and you enjoy it every time. Sometimes you nod in quiet appreciation, sometimes you smugly snicker: Long ago, a group of blind scientists (or monks or travelers) on tour encountered an elephant for the first time. Curious, they approached the willing subject and they each satisfied their curiosity by petting the pachyderm. One felt the trunk and declared, “An elephant is like a thick snake." Another touched the ear and said, "No, it's like a large fan." A third put his hands on a leg and insisted, "You're both wrong — it's like a tree trunk." A fourth felt the side of the elephant and said, "It's like a wall." A fifth grabbed the tail and argued, "It's like a rope." A sixth touched the tusk and said, "It's a spear." Each was certain they’d grasped the true nature of the elephant, and each thought the others were either mistaken or lying. They were scientists after all, empiricists by trade; they trusted their powers of observation, and they were trained to doubt the unverified testimony of others. Ever eager to broker peace, the tour’s leader and her assistant, both also blind, listened to the various reports and suggested possible syntheses. One thought they were dealing with Proteus , a shape shifter from Greek mythology. The other went further: “The elephant is God!” And so it is that in some cultures even today, elephants are considered sacred. This story can be understood in several ways - as documentation of the dangers of dogmatism or, more commonly, as a demonstration of the risks we take when we mistake a part for the whole or, similarly, when we generalize based on limited data. We are all looking at one world, the same world (e.g. the elephant), but each of us sees that world differently, and none of us is wrong. These are great life lessons taught gently and with good humor, but they are not what’s important about this fable! When you hear this story, you probably identify with the scientists…as you should. You’ve imagined your intrepid self, reaching out timidly to pet the colossus before you. You don’t think at all about the elephant; for example, you didn’t even notice that the elephant was also blind. Shameful anthrocentricity! But what if you’re not just the scientist in this story; what if you’re the elephant too? Our aspiring ‘elephantologists’ think they’re probing the pachyderm for the benefit of the world; they are, but they are also probing the world for the benefit of the pachyderm. Our scientists are the probes and their probing goes both ways. The number of scientists probing the elephant is potentially unlimited. But there is just one elephant, experiencing its world anew through each individual touch. Each touchpoint is a portal connecting the otherwise solipsistic animal to its universe. Compare the relationship between the elephant and its world with that of an octopus and the sea. As an octopus uses its tenacles to probe its world, so the world uses its scientists to probe the elephant. But unbeknownst to us, the elephant is also probing back, using the very same scientists as its instruments. Essentially, the elephant is turning the tenacles inside out. The probed becomes the prober with the scientists as the probes. That is why the elephant is such a willing subject; it craves human touch because it is through that touch that it learns about its world. The octopus analogy goes even deeper. Each pachyderm-scientist interface is its own data processing center. Our elephant’s intelligence, like that of an octopus, is distributed; think blockchain. Each tentacle is the site of a unique experience of the world. So how come we experience the world probing the elephant but not the elephant probing the world? We do! In fact, it’s just about the most fundamental experience we have; we just don’t recognize it. What we call our ‘body’, complete with brain and nervous system, is what probes the elephant; what we call ‘mind’, i.e. consciousness itself, is what probes the world. Consciousness is recursive. It’s how the universe learns about itself: it’s how we experience the elephant probing. Note : 20 th century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre went beyond this body/mind dichotomy. He divided the entirety, Universe itself, into en soi , being-in-itself (body), and pour soi , being-for-itself (mind). Our bodies are part of the world, en soi ; consciousness is pour soi . Body is the world probing the elephant; consciousness is the elephant probing the world. A reciprocal relationship? Not quite. There is one elephant, one consciousness, but there are many scientists, many bodies. While there is only one elephant, one universal consciousness, the contents of mind are ‘scientist specific’, i.e. local. Consciousness does not emerge independently in multiple bodies, as we have supposed, but consciousness is spread across multiple bodies, each with its own ‘local’ mind. Just as each scientist probes a different part of the elephant for the world, so each probes a different aspect of the world for the elephant. We may choose to assume that the elephant somehow processes the inputs of the individual scientists into a unified picture of the external world…or not. You can’t know. You only have access to what the elephant experiences at one location…and that location is you! You and I are ‘of two minds’ – always – but we share one consciousness. (Good thing too because there is only one consciousness to spread around!) Thought experiment : If you are reading this article, you are probably not 8 years old anymore. Almost nothing about you resembles your 8 year old self; most of your body’s cells have recycled several times. Your only tangible connection to that 8 year old is in the form of imperfect and elusive memories. But the experience of you-being-you has not changed. When you think back on an experience you had as an 8 year old, you can hardly imagine yourself in such a situation; but you have no doubt that it’s you experiencing it. The experience is different but the act of experiencing is the same. The contents of your mind change moment by moment but your consciousness, your awareness of yourself, never changes. As Gertrude Stein wrote, “We are all always in our own minds young men and young women;” in other words, our perception of ourselves as ourselves never changes. Now apply this to the person sitting next to you. You are certainly ‘of two minds’ and you have no memory of your companion’s prior subjective experiences, but your sense of being yourself is exactly the same as his sense of being himself. You share consciousness in common. That consciousness is what gives you your sense of being ‘you’ and him his sense of being ‘him’. You are of two minds but you have in common ‘the sense of you being you’: one noumenon, two phenomena. In fact, you share consciousness with every entity in Universe that experiences itself as conscious. How far that extends beyond humans is a matter of intense debate: primates and sea mammals, probably, but it is not out of the realm of possibility that you share consciousness with single celled bacteria and/or with each of the 30 trillion cells that make up your organic body. Farther afield, and not a topic for today, is whether you do or could in the future share consciousness with an artificial life form, a bot, e.g. your new best friend, Claude. But rest assured, if little ‘Claudius’ (only his mother calls him that) is or ever does become conscious, he will share that consciousness with you. ‘Consciousness’ has no plural. So what are we to make of this consciousness? God, spirit, atman, chi? Why do we insist on putting a label on it? Any such a label would be meaningless anyway. Almost by definition, labels concern parts; you cannot pin a label on the whole. The whole transcends its parts; it is ineffable! 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.