< Back That Time You Told a Sunrise Lie Annie D. Stutley "...words are also just hollowed statements to avoid the truth. It’s far too tempting a cover-up. We love ideals, but we don’t like what they require." I’m a snooze-a-holic. I’m as devoted to hitting that snooze button as I should be to Jesus, and I love an extra seven minutes of shut-eye as much as I love the Oxford comma. Nonetheless, starting around 2013, I began each year with the same half-assed promise. “This year, I will wake up an hour earlier than everyone else in the house. I will pray. I will meditate. Furthermore, I will exercise. I will enjoy a cup of hot coffee in solitude, and by the time I rouse my disheveled bunch from sleep, I will be energized from an hour’s worth of care for my needs. Then I’ll hit my goals and win the day.” Of course, this never happens. Not one year, not one month, week, and not even one day. So this year, I didn’t even attempt to make the promise, not to save face, but because I knew it was a lie. But not just any lie. A sunrise lie. ***** I spend much of my time in my car. I have one kid in junior high and two teenagers, a cheerleader, a football player, and a swimmer. I’m editor and writer by day, Uber mom after 4 pm. In the evening, I take the long way home whenever possible, turning west to see what colors the sky has painted for me and how different they are from the night before. Even the average sunsets catch my breath. I’ve toasted the sunset on many, many occasions. I also love long lingering dinners. I read far too late into the night. And if I get an idea for a blog, an article, or a book at midnight, I write it down immediately. Some of my best prompts have come to me while I’m slathering retinol and nighttime moisturizer on my face. Subsequently, some of my best work happens shortly after. All of this is to say that I cling to a day until the very last second more than I’m energized by its start. I don’t spring out of bed. Ever. I’m reluctant to say goodbye, though. Every evening. Always. In straight talk, I’m a classic night owl. But I’m also realistic. The bulk of my life happens before the sun sets, and I can’t be late. ***** As I mentioned, much of my life happens in the car. More precisely, to and from swim practice with the Golden Boy. After one December practice, he collapsed into the passenger seat. He looked like he’d just swum the English Channel. No, he looked like he’d just fought the English Channel. His face was flushed. His hair was more tousled than usual. His breathing was heavy, and I could tell buckling his seatbelt required extra effort. Yet strangely, his attitude was not that of someone who’d just fought the English Channel. “Ma!” he exclaimed. (It should be noted for purposes of future historic reference that it was at this moment when I was demoted from Mom to Ma. Mommy to Mom was years ago. Bruh has yet to find its way into the boy’s son-to-mother vernacular.) “I just swam a 200 Fly and guess what my time was? 2:29.” My usual silence followed as I studied his expression, gauging the quality of a 2:29 200 Fly. It’s a necessary swim mom skill. All signs pointed to “2:29 for his age is a good thing.” “That’s great!” I smiled. “Well, it’s not as good as some people, but I’ve just started on this event.” “Yeah, but 200 Fly? You must have been so relieved when you hit the wall. How exhausting,” I said. “I don’t really think about the wall, actually. I just focus on the stroke. I mean, eventually I’m gonna hit the wall.” “Yeah, but doesn't it hurt your shoulders?” “Ma, pain is temporary. I’ll get to the wall faster if all I worry about is what I’m doing and not where I’m going.” Well crap... Here comes Baby Buddha again with all the big wisdom. So, I drove my pocket Yoda home, wondering from which interview of which athlete he just pulled such an inspirational message or if he’s just that wise after all. Mostly, I thought about another year of not toasting the sunrise and being unproductive. Do I really need to be a morning person, I asked myself. Again. And then I thought of a new question: is my obstacle really the snooze button? A few days later, I realized my obstacle was even more seductive than that. ***** Over the holidays I watch a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies. I find the predictability comforting. Girl from big city finds herself in a dilly of a pickle. Girl goes home for the holidays to regroup. Girl’s high school boyfriend still lives there. He builds staircases and lives in a giant log cabin. They fall in love…. again, but tomfoolery just before the town’s annual tree lighting almost breaks them up... again. But then they find the other piece of a long-lost, broken Christmas ornament in the town curmudgeon’s attic. They know it’s a sign they should get married. Girl leaves the big city forever and cans homemade cranberry sauce in a log cabin for the rest of her life. The End. But one particular ending caught my attention. Just before the snow began to fall as our rekindled high school sweethearts locked lips, the boy (I think his name was Edmond or the like) said to the girl, (whose name was probably Celeste or... Noelle, haha) “I love you.” And she said, “I love you, too -- everything it means to love you.” Wait. What? Does she mean leaving the city to live in a log cabin and can cranberries? Was that a subtle dig at a guy for whom she uprooted her life? Or, is our Hallmark heroine simply doubling down, admitting the reality of the challenge but vocalizing its worth so she can’t back out? I’d never spent so long questioning the subtext of a Hallmark movie. But schmaltzy, formulaic plot analyses aside, why the tacked-on disclaimer, Noelle? ***** We know words are often just words, hollowed statements for the sake of having said something. How many times have you said the following to someone you haven’t seen lately: “We should get together soon,” knowing full well you probably won’t. How many times have you spoken about a charity you want to give to or volunteer for, or a project you want to complete in your home? How often do you actually follow through? We want to get together with friends until it's too inconvenient. We want to give more until we realize its cost. I want to embrace my day and be productive until I realize how hard it will be. More notably, words are also just hollowed statements to avoid the truth. It’s far too tempting a cover-up. We love ideals, but we don’t like what they require. Every year I make this empty promise not because I want to see the sun rise, but because I don’t want to fight my day anymore in order to keep up. I want to “hit the wall” -- lots and lots of walls -- day after day. Only, I likely won’t, whether I wake up early or not -- not if I continue to spew words, tricking myself into avoiding the truth. The fact is, I’m not committed to hitting the wall. I’m intimidated by all of it -- the good, the bad, and the pain (though temporary) that I must experience to hit the walls I want to hit before I watch my last sunset. Words imply a message, whether we mean them to or not. Words hurt, inspire, disgust, and heal. Words carry so much power that we censor them. Or they unite so gloriously that we preserve them. But words, as moving as they can be, are truly worthless when the one who speaks them has no intention of giving them any meaning at all. In those instances, they’re no better than a sunrise lie. Every dawn begins with the best intentions, but unless the people for whom the sun has risen embrace the day, should the sun have bothered rising at all? ***** So this year, I didn’t say anything about waking up early or making any promises about some personal Kumbaya hour in the morning. But I know enough to know that I’m a night owl living in an early bird’s world. Yet, as I embark on my next event, I’m not going to worry about walls to hit or labels to achieve. This year, all I told myself, and all I’m saying to you is this: “I’m just gonna do my work and do it well.” Or, as the woman from that tiny town in the middle of nowhere Mississippi so wisely put it last May when I fretted about how in Sam hill I was going to house-train the golden retriever puppy I’d just adopted: “Oh, Darlin’,” she said. “You’ll get ‘er done. Just get ‘er done.” I won’t publicly pledge to wake up much earlier than usual this year. I will likely continue my affair with the evening star. But I will get ‘er done — and everything it means. What I’m doing and how I’m doing it is more important than where I’m going. It’s the work, not the goal. If the work is lackluster, I’ll never hit any wall anyway, at least not in due time. The statements we make are hard to live out, but if we actually do love ourselves enough to know a sunrise lie when we tell it, we just might refocus our energy where we need it most. We’ll hit that wall one day, and when we do, we may even spring out of bed to celebrate. Annie D. Stutley lives and writes in New Orleans, La. She edits several small publications and contributes to various print and online magazines. Her blog, " That Time You, " was ranked in the Top 100 Blogs by FeedSpot. To read more of her work, go to her website , or follow her at @anniedstutley or Annie D. Stutley-writer on Facebook. Previous Next

“Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.” < Back Job Verses God: The Trial of the Epoch David Cowles Jun 1, 2024 “Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law.” Those of us old enough to remember 1995 know the impact a good trial can have on society. For nearly a year, business paused, and an entire nation focused on a Los Angeles courtroom: “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares! Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.” O.J. Simpson was on trial! Vietnam, Civil Rights, Rodney King, nothing polarized this nation quite like OJ. It’s appropriately known as the ‘Trial of the Century’ and it is certainly one of the seminal public events in my superannuated lifetime. But it pales in comparison to a trial that took place 3000 years earlier at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Middle East; I’m referring, of course, to Job v. God . Astonishingly, we have a verbatim transcript of those proceedings, virtually intact! The text is embedded in the Old Testament Book of Job. Here’s the ‘run-up’: Job, a virtuous man by all accounts, right in his personal conduct, just and generous in his dealings with others, suddenly loses his wealth, his children, his reputation, his social standing, and eventually, his health. He is the victim of an ‘Act of God’. That God acted capriciously in this matter is not in dispute. He admits it and shows no remorse. God is no Bill Clinton; he does not feel Job’s pain! The legal issue here is whether God, being God, the Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is entitled to act capriciously. I mean, he is God after all! That’s got to count for something, right? Or to put it the other way, is there a higher law that can bring even God to heel? The Book of Job is a 40 chapter epic poem bookended by a short prose prologue and epilogue. The provenance of the prose is suspect and its semantic relation to the poem itself is dubious, so we’ll focus on the OG epic itself. Job’s physical suffering is overwhelming, but surprisingly, that is not his biggest complaint, not by a long shot. Torture is nothing compared to existential angst. You know that. You’ve tossed and turned at 2AM, lying on Egyptian cotton sheets. “(Human beings) are quashed more easily than a moth, from daybreak to evening they are crushed; when it is not even nightfall, they disappear, forever unnoticed. The pegs of their tent are pulled up. They die without knowledge.” (4: 19b – 21) Job is possibly the most misunderstood character in all of Judeo-Christian literature. He is famous for his patience: he is anything but patient! He is about to lead an assault on Heaven, only slightly less ferocious than Lucifer’s…but enormously more successful. Job’s crusade is about to put an end to humanity’s dreams of an Imperial Deity. Job’s determination does not come out of any personal disrespect for God but rather out of profound ‘faith in the system’ (legal and cosmic). While society around him has accepted the notion of God as benevolent but erratic, Job holds out for a higher value: Justice. Job is joined by a cadre of ‘false friends’. They reject the notion that God can act capriciously. From Job’s ‘reduced circumstances’ they infer evidence of sin. They advise Job to ‘cop a plea’: Admit guilt (even if you don’t feel it) and ask God to commute your sentence to time served. Sensible advice, abhorrent to Job! Job will not debase himself, not even before God. And he will not corrupt the value of Truth with a false pleading. Rather than plead out, Job welcomes a trial: It gives him an opportunity to confront his opponent ‘face-to-face’ and a chance to question God directly. Job’s reasoning? If I cannot get my conviction overturned, at least I can gain a better understanding of ‘what makes God tick’. That alone would be worthwhile. Like many corporate litigants today, Job not only wants to win his suit; he also hopes to force God to divulge ‘trade secrets’. Job will use the trial to ask God for nothing less than a full accounting of himself and his activities: what did he have in mind when he ‘created the heavens and the earth’, why didn’t he do a better job, and why doesn’t he fix it…now? And so the trial begins. Job, the Plaintiff, appears pro se ; God, in absentia , is represented by a self-appointed legal team – the very same ‘friends’ that previously counseled Job to cop a plea. This is the Old Testament’s version of Johnny Cochran’s Dream Team…only much less competent . Pity any god who cannot afford better legal representation than this! Job carries a heavy legal burden. To defeat God’s application for Summary Judgment, Job must show that there is a court of competent jurisdiction, that he is the victim of a tort, that he has legal standing to bring an action, and that a potential remedy exists. (Note that God’s agency in Job’s tragedy is not at issue.) Job v. God opens with Job offering the court a detailed summary of the injustices done to him. Then, one by one, God’s attorneys attempt to “justify the ways of God to men (sic).” ( Paradise Lost ). Of course, God’s team resorts to the full bag of legal tricks. Can’t defend the assailant? No problem, put the victim on trial instead. God’s lawyers go to great lengths to demonstrate Job’s culpability…and they advance some novel legal theories in the process: Job is being punished, not for his own sins, not even for the sins of his father, but for the sins of his sons. Job is being punished now for the future crime of taking God to court. As in Through the Looking-glass , the miscreant first serves his sentence, then goes on trial (“Guilty!”), and only later commits the crime for which he has been convicted, sentenced, and punished. Surprisingly, Job finds a way to turn this argument against his adversaries later in the proceedings. One by one, Job effortlessly swats away his opponents’ arguments. Against the dogmatic deductions of his friends, Job appeals to empirical facts; here’s a ‘Cliff’s Notes’ version: “I have lived a righteous and just life; yet I am being punished most severely. Others, not nearly as upright as me, often in fact deliberate doers of evil, are not punished at all. They live lavish lives in good health and pass that wealth onto future generations, intact. I on the other hand, have no assets, and no children to leave them to if I did, and I live on a dunghill, covered with scabs.” That said, Job was not born last night. He realizes that he’ll struggle to meet his legal burdens. Most likely, a court will conclude that: No court has the power to compel God to answer charges…or comply with judgments; Job’s circumstances do not constitute a tort; No one can ever have standing to sue God; and No plausible remedy exists. So, Job decides to invoke the doctrine of ‘Jury Nullification’; he asks the court to look past the veil of law and judge the case based on its existential merits, on common law and natural law , based on universal values and empirical evidence, without regard to legal or religious pre-conceptions. Job’s argument for Nullification is complex…but ultimately irrefutable; note how it ingeniously puts the twisted logic of God’s attorneys (above) to purpose: God is assumed to be immune from civil suits because he is God. Even so, such immunity would not extend to a similarly situated defendant who was not God. Consequently, it is necessary to establish that God is God before the court can rule on his immunity claim. But how? “God is good (adjective) and Good (noun). God does not choose to be good; God is good by nature (it’s his essence ). As Jean-Paul Sartre frequently pointed out, God is the one and only being whose essence precedes his existence! “An important component of Good is Justice (along with Beauty and Truth). If it is shown that a ‘god’ deliberately engaged in unjust behavior, then this cannot be God. And a god that is not God can assert no valid claim for immunity.” Brilliant! Job is arguing that the court must decide the merits of the case first… before it can determine if the defendant is entitled to immunity. And the court agrees! An unjust God would be a violation of Natural Law ( aka the Good), a ‘law’ God created and later codified in Torah. So, there is a remedy after all: the court can simply order God to be God and God cannot refuse because God is God. The Job-poet anticipates Dante. In Inferno , folks are sentenced to ‘be themselves’, eternally. Could a more fearsome punishment possibly be imagined? Did I mention that Job went ‘all in’? Consider this: We are used to a legal system where the burden of proof falls squarely on the Plaintiff. In Job’s world that burden is shared but the preponderance falls on the Defendant. “Prove you didn’t do it!” Hence, the importance of an alibi. However, Job can overcome this presumption of guilt, and even reverse it, by swearing an ‘Oath of Innocence’. According to the common legal customs of the ancient Middle East ( The Egyptian Book of the Dead ), when one party swears a proper Oath of Innocence, that party is immediately presumed to be innocent. Job so swears. Now, if God still wants to contest Job’s claim, he must appear in person and accept that the burden of proof is now on him. But there’s a downside for Job. If a party offers an Oath of Innocence that is later judged to be untrue, the ‘taker of false oaths’ will have earned himself additional punishment, too severe to be detailed in this article. Excerpts of Job’s oath are worth a read (note its highly structured legal form): “If ever a poor man would extend me his hand, if in time of disaster he cried out to me…If I’ve ever thwarted a poor man’s desires…or ate a loaf by myself so an orphan could not eat of it…If I ever saw a vagabond with nothing to wear or the needy with nothing to cover him...If I ever raised my hand to the fatherless…If I ever made gold my reliance and called pure gold ‘my precious’…If I ever rejoiced at my enemy’s ruin and exalted when evil befell him…If ever my land has complained of me, if ever it’s furrows cried out…” (31) Job seals his oath: “Here is my mark, let Shaddai respond! … Complete are the words of Job.” (31: 35-40) God can ‘read a room’ as well as the next guy. He sees that his team is losing. Hoping to avoid an adverse judgment, he takes over his own defense and decides to testify after all. He appears “out of the whirlwind” and takes the stand. Is there a more exciting moment in all of literature? Almighty God, summoned to court by a man who lives on a dunghill; God complying, furiously raging, tail between his legs. “Oscar! Oscar!” God imagines that he can dispose of Job with a simple display of pyrotechnics ( aka majesty and might). That usually does the trick where muggles are concerned! But Job is no muggle, far from it in fact, as God is about to learn to his everlasting dismay. God is supremely confident, over-confident as it turns out, that he can prevail in Earl Stanley Gardner’s Case of the Pesky Plaintiff . He decides to approach the challenge as an American Presidential nominee might approach a debate with her opponent. God begins by questioning Job’s ‘real world’ experience. But first, he sarcastically calls on Job to put on his big boy pants: “Who is this who obscures good counsel, (using) words without knowledge? Bind up your loins like a man! I will ask you – and you will help me know !” (38: 2-3) Job bears God’s condescension silently…but, as we shall see, he files it away for future use. God has a keen sense of humor! ( ditto Job.) God suggests that he is here to learn from Job. In fact, of course, his questions are designed to demean Job, to demonstrate that Job has no business being on the same stage, much less giving instruction: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? (38: 4) …Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea and walked on the bottom of the Ocean? Were you ever shown the gates of Death?” (38: 16-17) “Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak? Made known to the dawning its place, holding the earth by its corners so the wicked would be shaken from it?” (38: 12-13) As sarcastically as possible, God highlights Job’s inexperience; then he questions Job’s competence. Can Job do the things that God does? Can he do them better? If the answer is negative, then what’s the point of Job’s ridiculous lawsuit? And what’s the remedy? “Do you hunt down prey for the lion and quell the hunger of beasts?” (38: 39) “Can you tie the wild ox by rope to a furrow?... Do you give the horse its bravery…Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom?” (39: 1-7) Here God pauses, thinking his work is done. Confident that he has put forward irrefutable arguments, he takes one last swipe at his opponent: “Should Eloah answer (such) an accuser (Job)?” (40: 2) In God’s opening discourse, he attempts to bully Job into submission; but Job is well aware that God has not answered a single one of his complaints. Plus, Job cannot let God’s sarcastic taunts go unanswered; he cannot back down to the school yard bully. Against that background then, what follows seems surprising: “Lacking respect, how can I answer you? My hand I place over my mouth. I have spoken once and I will not repeat; twice, and I will no more.” (40: 4-5) This is traditionally interpreted as Job dropping his suit. It is easy to see how these words could be read as an ‘Act of Contrition’. Job placing his hand over his mouth could be interpreted as a gesture of submission. But does that meaning make sense? Would Job confess to disrespecting God when he had only the greatest respect for the Deity? Or did he cover his mouth as if to say, “I have said all there is to say, and you have not refuted any of my allegations. Why should I talk?” If this was to be Job’s resignation, then why did God feel the need to deliver a second full throated defense? Remember, God does not want to be here. Had Job truly conceded, God would have been out of there in a flash, secrets intact. So how else might the verse be read? Could it be it’s God who’s disrespected Job, that Job is the object of the disrespect, not its subject? Therefore, Job’s original testimony should be more than enough to secure judgment for the Plaintiff. Job need not talk past the close! The first God/Job exchange boiled down to taunting, bullying and name calling. (Good thing nothing like that could ever happen today!) But now the time for posturing is past; it’s time for God to ‘get real’. God wants a settlement, but to get it, he will have to ‘open his books’. He will need to share with Job deep secrets regarding the process of creation and the structure of the world. He must grant Job’s request for knowledge! Unlike Adam, Job will be allowed to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Remember, Job has not asked God to abdicate; he has not asked for restitution, much less reparations; he has not even asked God to end his suffering. Job is clear, he’s in this for one thing only: knowledge! In his 2nd speech, God first challenges Job to work with him to rid the world of injustice: “If you’ve an arm (as strong as) El’s…look for the proud and lay him low…crush the wicked where they stand. Cover them all in dust; in dust wrap their faces! Then I myself will praise you as your right hand brings you triumph.” (40: 8-14) This time God challenges Job, not to do something cosmic, something absurd on the face of it, but to do something that is local and conceivable but just very, very hard. God is happy to join Job’s Crusade, but first he needs to give Job a ‘heads-up’: the problem is not as simple as it seems, nor the remedy as easy as it looks. The balance of God’s testimony concerns two of his more ‘monstrous’ creations, Behemoth and Leviathan, introduced as a way of explaining to Job the ‘ecology’ of the world: “Behold now Behemoth which like you I created...Can you pull out Leviathan with a fishhook? Can you bind his tongue with a rope? ...Will he make a pact with you? Will he be your slave forever? Can you toy with him like a bird? …Who has ever confronted him and survived?” (40: 15 – 41: 3a) “Of all that’s under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…He has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king.” (41: 3b - 26) Even if God could rid the world of Behemoth and Leviathan, he wouldn’t do so! He’s proud of his creatures, he loves them, and he knows that they have a role to play in the ecology of creation. And besides, he’s crushing on Leviathan. We’re transported to the 18th century (Leibniz). This is not the best world imaginable ; it is just the best world possible . And that world includes Leviathan (or his functional equivalent)…sorry! Such ‘beasts’ are an integral part of nature; they have unique qualities (genes) of their own. True, their behavior may appear ‘evil’ from the perspective of creatures with conflicting interests (like us) but just imagine what other species would say about homo sapiens ! So ends God’s defense! The Job-poem ends with Job’s ‘final speech’…and this time it really is final. Job gets the last word…and just listen to what he has to say: “Who is this hiding counsel without knowledge? Truly I’ve spoken without comprehending – wonders beyond me that I do not know. Hear now and I will speak! I will ask you and you help me know. As a hearing by the ear, I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on ‘dust and ashes’ (i.e., humanity).” (42: 3-6) Notice that Job’s closing lines (38: 1-3) nearly duplicate God’s opening… complete with the dripping sarcasm. But now, it is Job, relishing victory, who mocks God, not the other way around. We’ve come full circle and there can no longer be any doubt about the outcome of this trial. But before we ‘call’ the contest for Job, we’d better check to see how the media is spinning it. Oops! In a review of 17 independent commentaries on Job that were written over the past 150 years, Job scholar, Stephen Vicchio, found 15 calling the judgment for God and only 2 calling it for Job. Like Job’s ‘friends’, and the Chicago Tribune , we see the evidence of the world through the filtered lens of our preconceived notions: “Dewey defeats Truman!” Job v. God is the Marbury v. Madison of theological law. It confirms and codifies the structure of Being itself. It affirms the absolute universality and supremacy of Value (Good – Beauty, Truth, Justice). It answers once and for all the perennial question: Is Good ‘good’ because God wills it or does God will good because it is Good? The verdict of the court: God is subject to the same objective ethical values and standards as the rest of us; they are enforceable; he enjoys no privileged immunity. “Who’d a thunk it?” ( Hairspray ) 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 Summer 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! 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< Back Language…or Logic? David Bowles Jul 13, 2026 “Don’t you just hate it when real-physics spoils meta-physics?” 1500 words, 6 minute read Few ideas in Intellectual History remain constant across diverse cultures and through successive eras. One exception? The privileged relationship between Language and Logic. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel directly connects our ability to solve physical problems (logic, engineering) with our use of language. In the creation narrative (Genesis 1: 3), “God said , ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” Across the Bosporus, the father of Western philosophy, Parmenides ( On Nature , 5 th century BCE) also linked speaking with being: “What there is for speaking and knowing, there is for being.” (Fragment 6) . Apparently, physis (being) and logos (language) are two sides of one coin on both sides of the Strait. 500 years later, the Apostle John retold the creation story from the Christian perspective, incorporating material from the Old Testament and from the Pre-Socratics, resulting in an even heavier emphasis on the linguistic component: “In the beginning ( arche ) was the Word ( logos )…through whom all things were made and without whom nothing came to be. In him ( logos ) was life and that life was the Light of the world.” (John 1: 1 – 4) Now fast forward a few millennia and see various schools of North Atlantic Analytic Philosophy, from Logical Positivism through Deconstruction, attempting to ‘reduce’ philosophy to linguistics once and for all. Do names like Ayer, Wittgenstein, Austin, Derrida and Chomsky ring any bells? But it’s all for naught! (Don’t you just hate it when real-physics spoils meta-physics?) A recent study conducted at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research concludes that “language isn't necessary for logical reasoning.” Wow! That’s 2500 years we’ll never get back! Our ability to induce from experience and deduce from assumptions is neurologically unrelated to our ability to use language. Brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not involved in logical reasoning. In research published in the journal PNAS , and reported by Medical Xpress (July 9, 2026), researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko showed that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. Researchers presented participants with challenges involving geometric shapes, numerical sequences, etc. As participants solved increasingly difficult puzzles, it became clear that people don't need language for this kind of reasoning. Patients with language impairments solved the problems as well as the ‘verbo-typical’ control group. The MRI scans showed the brain's language system was not engaged for either inductive reasoning (when participants identified hidden rules) or deductive reasoning (when they assessed the validity of syllogistic arguments). How come? Why don’t the language and logic functions converge, or at least overlap, neurologically? For one thing, language is naturally, and probably necessarily, fuzzy . Wittgenstein (above) spoke of word meanings as familial relationships . We’ve all experienced frustration when talking with someone whose speech is unwaveringly literal. Logic, on the other hand, is inherently precise. Much blood has been shed, figuratively and literally, because someone applied rigorous logic to an imprecisely defined concept (language). Plus, language is multifunctional. It can ‘compare thee to a summer’s day’, it can talk you through an IKEA assembly maze, and it can inspire soldiers at Agincourt. Logic is, well, more logical. Finally, most languages are linear in structure, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions often requires thinking along several tracks at once, connecting those tracks via reciprocity and recursion. The closest thing we have to that in English is the work of James Joyce, especially Ulysses and Finnegans Wake . In these ‘novels’ the narrative follows multiple story lines simultaneously: Leopold and Stephen in Dublin, Ulysses and Telemachus in Ithica, King Hamlet’s ghost and the Prince in Denmark, YHWH and his Christ in Roman Catholic Liturgy. As in polyphonic music, each line maintains its integrity but harmonizes with others. These extraordinary works are to the rest of literature as Beethoven is to Gregorian Chant…or as today’s quantum computers are to their analog ancestors. In truth, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are exceptions that prove the rule. They demonstrate both the limitations and the potential of linear language foe modeling non-linear reality. When we approach the whole with language, we necessarily break the entirety into a sequence of stages (so-called causes and effects); we think horizontally. By contrast, Logic is threadbare; but it is also inherently holistic and recursive. We conceptualize our problem as a whole and then break it down into discrete modules, each modifying and being modified by the whole. We reason vertically. We trust that we can gain information about the whole by understanding its self-similar parts ( aka fractals). Because I know that 1 + 1 = 2, I can calculate x + y for any values of x and y. *** "(This research) really upends a(ny) theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities." Yes, it does…and it upends more besides. For example, I no longer have any reason to assume that my poor pussy cat, who struggles mightily but unsuccessfully to participate in family conversations, is any less conscious than I am (and perhaps even more so after I’ve had a couple of bone dry martinis). Fedorenko’s team has provided a major boost to advocates of panpsychism and/or animal rights. On the other hand, the implications for AI are less sanguine. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are trained entirely on text and use text as their output—yet they convincingly simulate some kinds of human reasoning (Turing, Searle). My LLM bot, for all its apparent genius, relies exclusively on language to reach logical conclusions. Knowing that, it is hard to assign any logical validity to its output. Is this the greatest con job in history? Like many a fast talker I’ve known (and one I’ve caught sight of in a mirror), does Claude use language facility to mask logical inadequacy? Does he have a career in politics in mind? Earlier we smirked that physics was overturning metaphysics; could it also be said that rhetoric (LLM) is overturning logic? Or is it just possible that at the performance extremes achieved by today’s AI, horizonal reasoning (language) genuinely reproduces the results of vertical reasoning (logic). If so, can we treat that confluence as significant or must we consider it mere coincidence? I am reminded of Aristophanes’ Clouds . In this play, the students in Socrates’ Thinkery are trained to apply logic to nonsense…with predictably hilarious results. Are today’s LLMs extensions of Socrates’ academy? Could it be that Kitty is conscious and Claude is not? And what of Turing’s Test ? And Searle’s Room ? These philosophical paradigms draw their power from an assumed relationship between Logic (reasoning) and Language (communication). But what if there is no such relationship? *** “What if there is no such relationship?” What if? There is none! (assuming we trust the research of course) So now what? What can we say we know? And how do we live? Imagine a triangle. Label the apex R for Reality. Label the base points L1 and L2 (L1 is Language, L2 Logic). This figure lies, unrecognized of course, at the foundation of all of our conceptions of the World; no more! R ↙ ↘ L1 ↔ L2 We have concluded (above) that Language and Logic provide irreconcilable accounts of Reality; our triangle is inherently unstable. That leaves us with a choice of three possible models: (1) The world of Lewis Carroll ( Alice and her Lookingglass ): Language but no Logic. (2) The world of Jacques Ellul ( Propaganda ) and George Orwell ( 1984 ): Language and Logic but no Reality. (3) The world of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco: Logic and Reality but no Language. (Of course, all three employ language masterfully in their works but it has no agentic force, it does not advance the narrative, its function is subservient to Logic and Reality.) Hold up! If there are three models of the World that fit the data with equal fidelity, don’t we have to conclude that ALL of them are true? Yes indeed, we do! No single model of the World that includes Logic, Language and Reality can be stable; but no model can be complete without all three. So, we must accept that we live in a world of wave-particle duality, of quantum complementarity, of Feynman’s Sum over Histories, or Bell’s entanglement. No single model can account for the World as it is but multiple models, applied separately but simultaneously, just might; but you’ll have to stay on your toes to make sure that they never meet. And they say Atlas had a tough job. 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“Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.” < Back The Theology of Mikhail Bakunin David Cowles Jul 15, 2023 “Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points.” 250 years ago, philosophical atheism came into its own. Judeo-Christian hegemony, though often honored more in name than in act, had dominated Europe since the closing centuries of the Roman Empire. Now, for the first time, it had a worthy challenger. Rather than reform Christianity (again) or import yet another new religion from the East, Europe’s intellectual elite began to question and then dismantle the entire theological enterprise. The process occurred unevenly over various nation states, ethnic groups, and social classes; it’s still very much a work in ‘progress’ today. The early success of Christianity must be attributed in part to specific conditions operative in Mediterranean society at the time. Likewise, its demise! The early advances justly attributed to the Scientific Method ‘made the world safe’ for a new, secular, and empirical concept of truth. Likewise, the identification of the Church with Europe’s Ancien Régime put it squarely in the crosshairs of emerging pro-democracy movements. If the king must go, why not the bishops? While the newly emergent atheism came in a Baskin and Robbins-array of flavors, Dialectical Materialism, i.e., Marxism, became dominant in the later half of the 19 th century. And why not? As the name suggests, this new philosophy took process away from the providence of God and placed it squarely in the province of Nature and Society. It also fiercely denied the reality of a transcendent realm or of any non-material substance (e.g., spirit). Judaism was quicker to respond to the threat of secularization than Christianity. By the middle of the 18 th century, Hasidism had taken root and begun to grow; it was not until 1880 (the Papacy of Leo XIII) that Christianity first put forward a cogent response. Valuable time was lost. Since Leo, the intellectual engagement between the two competing world views has been torrid. However, it has for the most part been unproductive. (Exceptions: Teilhard de Chardin, Liberation Theology). Like eight-year-olds in the school yard, the rival gangs never tire of screaming insults back and forth. For the most part, though, they’re not even speaking the same language. Imagine a ‘charter school’ in Belgium where half the kids are hurling insults in Flemish while the other half prefer to insult in French. That’s approximately the state of ideological discourse today. Mikhail Bakunin is a notable exception to this over-simplified version of intellectual history. Often called the Father of Anarchism and a leading 19 th century thinker in his own right, Bakunin was fierce in his profession of atheism; but unlike his Marxist counterparts, he was not shy about using the language of Judeo-Christian theology to make his points. This allows theists to engage with Bakunin in a way they often can’t with other 19 th century atheists. Our interest in Bakunin’s theology is rooted in the hope that it might serve as the basis for a dialog between Judeo-Christians, and Modern Secularists. Anarchism has much to teach Christians, and the Judeo-Christian tradition has a lot to contribute to the exposition of modern political theory. Together, we envision these two ideologies as the twin bases of a new spirit of intellectual cross-fertilization, so desperately needed now in the tumultuous 21 st century. By comparison, 12 th and 13th century Europe was a Golden Age in the intellectual history of the West. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam generously cross-fertilized, allowing the emergence of towering intellects like Aquinas, Maimonides, and Averroes. Could the same happen in our time? Written in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, Bakunin’s God and State is the clearest statement of his theological principles; let’s sample some of his ideas: “Humanity is nothing other than…the highest manifestation of animality…The power to think and the power to rebel…constitute(s) humanity in man (sic).” “But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him…urging him to disobey and eat the fruit of knowledge.” Bakunin anticipates Sartre in defining human beings in terms of their existential freedom ( aka free will). In this, he preserves what is foundational in Judeo-Christianity as well. “God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice…man is falsehood, iniquity… God being master, man is the slave…The idea of God…is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and in practice…For if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and if such a master exists, man is a slave.” Here Bakunin is a victim of his epoch. He understands social process primarily as conflict, and he cannot imagine a relationship between God and the world (humanity) that is anything other than an instantiation of the ruler-subject, master-slave paradigm. Bakunin appears to present a ‘zero-sum’ model of society. If one is free, another must be enslaved; if one is prosperous, another must be poor. Bakunin applied the ideas of certain liberal economists (e.g., Malthus and Riccardo) to anthropology, cosmology, and theology. In these areas, I think Bakunin misses the mark. After all, as an anarchist he is ‘duty bound’ to believe that social order can emerge unforced, based on cooperation and justice. However, he apparently cannot imagine such organic order emerging alongside Judeo-Christianity. Of course, Judeo-Christians offer a very different account of things. God and humanity are on the same side; they cooperate in pursuit of common goals (values). In a sense, they (i.e., we) are symbiotic. As an anarchist, Bakunin detests any form of human authority; but as a scientist, he enthusiastically embraces the authority of natural law: “Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery, there is no humiliation, or rather, it is not slavery at all.” Here again, Bakunin is anticipating Sartre, this time with a notion akin to ‘facticity’, i.e., being-in-the-world. “For slavery supposes an external master…while these (natural) laws are not outside of us, they are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being…” Did Bakunin realize that he was echoing a theme that occurs throughout both the Old and New Testaments? “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33) The first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, considered together, are an uninterrupted exposition of Natural Law. The Written Torah (Scripture) is meant to be a reflection of the Oral Torah (Nature): as above, so below! “The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he himself has recognized them as such…” The best way to attack an ideology you disagree with is to mischaracterize it, to build a proverbial straw man . Doctrinaire Communists did this to Christianity; Christians did the same to Communism. The ‘Commies’ we feared and hated in the 1950s were for the most part phantoms created by the imperial state and by a church playing defense. Marxists’ characterization of Christianity is often likewise distorted and prejudicial. In a few spots, Bakunin seems to give in to this temptation. He pretends not to understand ideas like Incarnation and Trinity; but for the most part, Bakunin presents a reasonably accurate summation of Judeo-Christian theology. Potentially, it could form the basis for some serious dialog: “…Divinity (is) lost and scattered in the matter which it animates…but each man considered individually…can contain only a very small particle…these divine particles, human souls…are irresistibly drawn toward their whole; they seek each other, they seek their whole.” This is remarkably close to the Hasidic doctrine of Shekinah , God existing in all things as a divine ‘spark’, each spark seeking reunion with its whole. But, ultimately, of course, Bakunin’s theology is defective from a Judeo-Christian perspective. The problem, though, is not so much doctrinal as it is methodological. The 19 th century was the stage set for the Industrial Revolution. As such, its world view is incurably linear and mechanical. The world is imagined through the lens of grade school arithmetic. A product of his times, Bakunin has an overly simplified, overly Euclidean, notion of wholes and parts. “If God entire could find lodgment in each man, then each man would be God…” But God ‘lodging’ in each and every human being does not transform those humans into gods. The unique perspective of Christianity is that the ‘whole’, God, can be present in some or all of its parts – e.g., as Incarnation, as Spirit, as Eucharist, as Church, as Shekinah. Yet, God is never divided; God is always whole and entire. Unity and simplicity are God’s nature. (Aquinas) This model of embedded being is alien to the world of industry with its division of labor and its assembly lines . The 19 th century is hopelessly linear ; the Judeo-Christian world view is fundamentally non-linear : The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; The whole is reflected in each of its parts; Each part is reflected in the whole. Conceptually, and understandably, this was a bridge Bakunin could not cross. Bakunin carries his arithmetic model of reality even further: “…The infinitely small is equal to zero. God is everything; therefore man and all the real world with him, the universe, are nothing.” This, of course, Judeo-Christian doctrine categorically denies. Metaphysics is not a ‘zero-sum’ game. The whole does not eclipse its parts; it is reflected in those parts. Parts are not irrelevant to the whole; each part enriches the whole. Now, in the 21 st century, organism is replacing mechanism as the prevailing model of reality and Judeo-Christianity is inherently organic. Finally, Bakunin’s attitude toward religion itself is ambivalent. In one place, he calls religion “collective insanity”; but elsewhere he lauds Jesus as “the preacher of the poor, the friend and consoler of the wretched, of the ignorant, of the slaves, and of the women…” and he refers to the early Church as “the first awakening, the first intellectual revolt of the proletariat.” Today, we live in a world that is superficially divided between economic liberalism (capitalism) and political democracy (universal suffrage) on the one hand and various forms of political and economic totalitarianism on the other. Neither path leads to the emancipation of the world. What is needed is a new initiative, heavily informed by the Anarchism of Bakunin and others and by Judeo-Christian tradition. Combining these influences, we can look forward to a world that respects the absolute freedom of the individual, that welcomes the organic emergence of social structures, and that honors in word and in deed the fundamental, divine values of Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Is that too much to ask? 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 Beach Read 2023 Table of Contents 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 King James David Cowles Nov 15, 2022 “We’re not in Kansas (or even Kensington) anymore, are we?” We’ve recently posted several Thoughts on ‘legitimate government’ and on the proper relationship between church and state: The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg Too Election Day 2022 We hoped to point out that things we take pretty much for granted can be viewed in very different, but still coherent, ways. King James I of England ( aka James VI of Scotland) succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603. We are indebted to him for the most famous book ever published, the King James Bible . King James had a view of government that is different from anything we’ve reviewed so far. We can take a peek at his 1609 speech before Parliament; but caveat lector : this did not come from The New Yorker or from the editorial pages of The Guardian . “Kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods... “Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king… “God hath power to create, or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none. To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure… “And the like power have Kings: they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting down: of life and of death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only... They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess. A pawn to take a bishop or a knight… “As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do…” Wow! We’re not in Kansas (or even Kensington) anymore, are we? (Notice how James cleverly manipulates the threat of class warfare to scare the nobles in Parliament into submission!) James is an ultra-nominalist. He rejects the idea that God does what he does because it is objectively ‘good’; James believes that things are ‘good’ because God does them. Nominalism is the theological equivalent of every parent’s last refuge: “Because I said so.” Similarly, laws are ‘just’ solely because the king wills them. Forget about ‘Church and State’, welcome to ‘Church of State’. In a theocracy, Church rules: the State is merely a ‘functional department’ of Church. In a Republic, Church and State are distinct, albeit overlapping, entities with distinct, but also overlapping, jurisdictions. Messy, but... In the world of King James, however, State rules: the Church is a ‘functional department’ of State. None of the 20th century’s greatest tyrants (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, e.g.) would have dreamt of asserting such bold a claim to legitimacy. Today’s world is full of Theocrats and Republicans (above) leaving few to champion James’ Absolutism. His 1609 proclamation deviates from the developing political philosophy of Europe (500 to 1600), but it also reverses a basic tenet of Judeo-Christian theology that dates back at least to Genesis (2,000+ years before James). In fact, you’re only three verses into Genesis when you see the problem: “Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good.” According to James, God acts without regard to ‘good’. Why then does he check to see if the light he created passes muster? God acted, but he immediately evaluated his act in reference to a pre-existent standard (Good). According to James’ theology, God has no truck with Good. He acts however he acts and by that ‘acting’ he creates Good…for us. It would be ridiculous for God to check to see if his action was good since Good did not exist before he acted. How do you get around this? I only see three alternatives: (1) God is ridiculous, (2) God is delusional, (3) God is ignorant - his right hand doesn’t know what his left hand is doing, (4) “ It’s just Genesis! ” It’s true that we need to read Genesis with a different eye then we would use when reading a book like Maccabees , but arguably the two most important books of the Old Testament, Job and Psalms , are devoted to the idea that ‘God is Good’ (not ‘Good is God’). Perhaps we’ll take a look at those sources in a later edition of TWS . Image: James I, oil on canvas by Daniel Mytens, 1621; in the National Portrait Gallery. 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 Think like an Octopus David Cowles Aug 3, 2026 “The cosmic showdown, Homo vs. Octo, may be overhyped. Rumors of a $250,000 ticket price are exaggerated… My advice to scalpers: stick to Taylor Swift!” 1200 words, 6 minute read 2.5 million years ago was ‘just last week’ in life of our 4.5 billion year old planet (Earth)… but what a week it was! Back then, the genus Homo , our genus, first evolved in East Africa. At the time, your ancestors didn’t make much of a splash. Standing 4 feet tall, weighing 90 pounds soaking wet, and having few natural defenses, Homo failed to put the fear of God into the giant hyenas, crocs, hippos and saber tooth tigers that shared Africa’s horn. But we weren’t stupid: “There’s a whole lot of killin’ and eatin’ goin’ on here and we can’t compete. So let’s follow the Alpha predators, at a respectful distance of course, and feast on their leftovers.” And so we became scavengers of the plains. Of course, the proto-Marxists among us complained that we were living off ‘crumbs from the table of imperialism’… but Tiny Tim will have his Christmas pud’! Liberal lions were happy to leave some choice morsels (not too many of course, they’re liberals, not anarchists) for the pathetic scavengers but the Leonid Lords warned against the practice: “Your generosity may fuel a revolution of rising expectations. One day, you may face these beggars across the barricades.” These well-considered warnings only provoked laughter. Misguided whelps would continue to ‘feed the wild animals’ (as they called it). But surprisingly, the Lion scouts, the hunters, backed the idle Lords (politics sure does make strange bedfellows). It seems the Homo community included a seer who’d been overheard delivering an oracle to his followers: “One day lions will live in cages, and your descendants will feed them their leftovers.” Even then, members of the genus Homo were known for their keen sense of humor, so the Pride shrugged off this second warning too, albeit a bit more nervously. The seer had noticed what everyone else had overlooked…or disregarded: Homo thinks differently from Panthera (‘big cats’) and eventually that difference would deliver an unstoppable evolutionary advantage. Well “it’s yesterday once more” and now it’s my turn to play prophet. There are genera (plural of genus for those of you who skipped Latin) today whose members think differently from us and that difference may one day translate into a new round of evolutionary advantage…at our expense. “Meet the new boss!” (The Who) Better than the old boss? Researchers have discovered a mutation, unique to Octopus, that allows their cells to produce certain proteins, critical in the thought process, with remarkable fidelity. According to an article in Scientific American (7/29/2026), Richard Han, then a graduate student in the lab of Harvard Medical School cell biologist Amy Lee, was examining Octopus RNA—the molecules that carry the genetic instructions that cells use to build proteins—when he noticed an unusual break in the genetic sequences that formed ribosomes, the cell’s protein-makers. This segment of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is identical across every other animal species that’s been studied, so Octopus’ unique deviation jumped out. To figure out how this mutation affects ribosome function, the researchers engineered it into certain bacteria. The altered bacteria made fewer protein building errors. Neurons, being long-lived, are especially vulnerable to protein production errors which slow thought and increase the incidence of error. So next time Junior brings home a bad report card, don’t be surprised if he tells you that your RNA is to blame. If he’s precocious, he may even suggest that gene therapy (CRISPR), rather than the usual punishments, would help him raise his grades. The advantages of this mutation are obvious, so it’s unclear why this evolutionary step should have been confined to Octopus genera and specifically to those species of Octopus (shallow water) that split off from their deep-water counterparts roughly 100 million years ago. Octopus’ prodigious intelligence is all the more surprising when you realize that they don’t have a central nervous system. Rather, their whole body functions as a decentralized data processor. The left tentacle literally doesn’t know what the right tentacle is doing. As Scarecrow discovered in the Wizard of Oz , brains do not create consciousness, consciousness configures brains (and/or other cognitive organs). While vertebrates’ evolution of a central nervous system was a big deal, a leap forward that the genus Homo exploited to obvious advantage, it is not the whole story. Powerful as they are, brains are very inefficient. They are remote, fragile, and super sensitive. Processing takes place far from where ‘boy meets world’. Plus, brains need to be protected, and temperature controlled, so a heavy, thick skull and a semi-permeable membrane are required. It seems that Octopus has found a better solution. The cognitive function is distributed throughout the body. As in Roman Catholic political theory (subsidiarity), decisions are made locally , i.e. as close to the action site as possible. But the cosmic showdown, Homo vs. Octo , may be overhyped. Rumors of a $250,000 ticket price are probably exaggerated. One of Homo’s signature traits is its ability to adapt. Already there is evidence that we are starting to think like our Cephaloid cousins. Blockchain is a form of distributed intelligence that auto-corrects errors; it already supports segments of our financial industry. My advice to scalpers: stick to Taylor Swift! Now we learn that the European Union is adapting Octopus neurology and blockchain technology to create an automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web…Project ASGARD” (from Norse mythology). The system has been cobbled together over the course of four months—an astonishing pace for weapons development usually measured in years. Its purpose is to connect directly everything that looks for targets (‘sensors’ in military lingo) with everything that fires on them (‘shooters’). Say a reconnaissance drone spots an enemy tank. In conventional operations, the soldier operating that drone would pass the intelligence through a centralized chain of command to a decision making authority. But a targeting web like ASGARD operates more like an octopus, whose tentacles act autonomously while also collaborating in pursuit of collective strategic goals. Consider some post-WWII military engagements in this light. In 1970, Nixon unleashed an invasion of Cambodia’s Parrot’s Beak in an unsuccessful effort to disrupt North Vietnam’s logistical command and control. 5 years later, Saigon unexpectedly fell to a well-coordinated attack. Now fast forward to the Gulf Wars. The allies knocked out Iraq’s central command structure at the beginning of each conflict. ‘Blinded’, Sadham was unable to anticipate or counter US troop movements. Had Iraq developed and deployed an ASGARD system prior to its invasion of Kuwait, Gulf history might have played out differently. But the lessons of the Octopus transcend warfare! Alzheimer’s and dementia are associated with plaque deposits in the brain which may result from protein production errors. It is conceivable that we will soon be able to harness Cephaloid biology to eliminate these scourges from the repertoire of human tragedy. Don’t count us out yet! Or we may end up serving new, hopefully benevolent, eight limbed masters. 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 What Did John See? David Cowles The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why? In the Christian tradition, the climax of cosmic history is the advent of the New Jerusalem, the triumph of the Kingdom of God. Paul said it best: “Then comes the end, when he (Christ) hands over the kingdom to his God and Father, when he has destroyed every sovereignty and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet . The last enemy to be destroyed is death…When everything is subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God may be all in all .“ (I Cor. 15: 24 - 28) That’s the climax. But, of course, there are mini climaxes all along the way, events best described as the eruption of the eternal Kingdom of God into history. Just glance over at God’s ‘Highlights Reel:’ Creation Exodus Torah Incarnation Resurrection Ascension Pentecost Not too shabby! Is it too much to hope that some NFL team might draft God in the first round? I wonder if he needs an agent? The final book of the Christian Bible, The Book of Revelation (sometimes called Apocalypse ), is a book of climaxes . The ultimate cosmic climax comes in the final chapter (Rev. 22): “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end…I am surely coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” This is the climax, not of the Book of Revelation , but of all Scripture, of all history, of the universe itself; but the climax of Revelation itself comes much earlier (6:1 – 8:1) with the breaking of the seven seals. That is Revelation ’s pivot point. While John of Patmos (the self-proclaimed author of Revelation ) looks on, the Lamb (Christ) opens the seals. As each seal is broken, an aspect of reality is revealed: First Seal – Crown (authority) Second Seal – Sword (power) Third Seal – Scales (judgment) Fourth Seal – Death and Hades Fifth Seal – Martyrdom Sixth Seal – Cosmic Catastrophe John “watched (and listened) as the Lamb broke open” each seal in turn. Each seal brought new and terrifying sights and sounds: a voice like thunder, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Death and Hell itself, the blood of martyrs. Then, with the breaking of the sixth seal, “there was a great earthquake, the sun turned as black and dark as sackcloth, and the whole moon became like blood. The stars in the sky fell to Earth like unripe figs shaken loose in a strong wind. Then the sky was divided, like a torn scroll…” But even this is still just preparation for the great event yet to come, the breaking of the seventh seal, the fulcrum on which Revelation balances. The first five chapters (Rev. 1 – 5) brought us up to the breaking of the seals. In Chapter Six, the first six seals were broken. Chapter Seven specifically prepares us for the climactic breaking of the seventh seal. No doubt, the breaking of the sixth seal is a tough act to follow. What can the Lamb possibly do for an encore? What do you think? What do you think happened when the seventh seal was broken? Write your own ending to cosmic history! Ok, spoiler alert , here goes: “When He (Christ/the Lamb) broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven for about a half an hour.” Not what you were expecting? We are told that John of Patmos ‘watched’ as each of the first six seals was broken, and his watchfulness was rewarded each time with a fantastic vision. Undoubtedly, John watched as the seventh seal was broken as well. The Bible doesn’t tell us what John saw, but it does tell us that the breaking of the seventh seal was followed by half an hour of total silence. Why? It is finished! The sound and the fury of life is spent. Now it is time to learn what, if anything, it signifies (Macbeth). The seventh seal is like the seventh day (Sabbath), the seventh year (Sabbatical), the seventh cycle of seven years (Jubilee). It inaugurates a period of life-affirming rest. (Imagine, a religion whose highest value is rest – Requiem Aeternam !) Silence speaks ‘louder’ than any ‘sound’ ever could. Revelation is not lacking in special effects. Normally, we experience sound against a background of silence; in Revelation, we experience silence against the cacophony of the Apocalypse. Silence becomes figure. Consider the final chorus ( Amen! ) of Handel’s great oratorio, Messiah . Midway through this varied but bombastic summation of the ‘greatest story ever told,’ the orchestra and the chorus suddenly fall silent and stay silent for several measures. This is the pivotal musical moment corresponding to the pivotal moment of salvation history in Revelation . The ’rest’ in Handel’s Amen! is one of the most profound moments in all of western music. Is this the effect John of Patmos was going for? Perhaps, but we have not yet answered the question, “What did John see ?” He saw something, even if that something was nothing (e.g., the abyss). Whatever John saw, it must not have been anything like what he was expecting. For 30 minutes he stared in silence. And he was not alone; his silence is echoed by the angels and saints attending the Lamb. Could it be that the seventh vision was so profoundly shocking that no one, human or angelic, could manage to eke out a single sound? So, shocking that long afterwards, recalling in tranquility all his visions, John still could find no words to express the seventh? What about you? What do you think John saw? In any event, with the breaking of the seventh seal, our story must be done. Nothing more than a short doxology could possibly be needed to bring the story of the Bible to its momentous close, right? Well, not according to John of Patmos. He needs 15 more chapters to get to “Amen! Come Lord Jesus!” (Rev. 22: 20) Whatever for? Not that these 15 chapters are boring…far from it! These are the chapters that casual readers usually think of when they think of Revelation . This is the time of trumpets, scrolls and bowls, the time of plagues and beasts, and even a dragon. It is the age of the Antichrist. Undoubtedly, these are the most violent 15 chapters in all of scripture. What can be going on here? To answer that , we’ll need to skip just a bit ahead, 1,750 years ahead that is. Prior to 1848, European revolutionaries believed that Utopia lay just behind the veil. Properly align the political (democracy) and economic (socialism) stars and Utopia will emerge almost immediately from the shadows, where it has been lingering for millennia, waiting to be born. This was the tacit assumption behind Enlightenment sociology. Do we still believe some version of this today? Karl Marx knew better. So did Engels and Lenin. They understood that Rome was neither built nor destroyed in a day. Political and economic asymmetry is deeply ingrained in our Atlantic culture. By the time Marx appeared on the scene, the euphoria of 1776 and 1789 was gone. The rosy optimism of Kant, Hegel, and the Utopians had been dimmed by the harsh realities of power politics . This was neither the bourgeois republic of Franklin, nor the ‘minimal state’ of the Bakunin. The United States was headed toward a civil war, partially fought to defend the institution of slavery, while France was still in the throes of a series of restored monarchies, self-proclaimed empires, revolutionary councils, and state organs of terror. Marx et al. saw that the anciene regime would not go away quietly. The founders of modern communism anticipated a tumultuous transition. They called it the Dictatorship of the Proletariat . Just as the Church was the vanguard of Christianity, so the party would be the vanguard of communism. Sidebar : We all know how that worked out, don’t we? The proletariat ended up being the object of the dictatorship rather than its subject. Being in the vanguard is never easy. Today, we rightly find fault with some of the church’s behavior. Well and good, but charity asks us to remember that other vanguards have fared no better. This insight of Karl Marx (1848) was shared by John of Patmos 1,750 years earlier. Living toward the end of the first century and/or at the beginning of the second, John did not have the luxury of hoping for a peaceful transition of power. He knew exactly how high a mountain needed to be climbed, and he knew that could not happen without blood and tears. But he never doubted that the world would get there eventually. A ragtag bunch of fishermen and itinerant preachers from Galilee, a section of the empire disdained both by Rome and by Jerusalem, would overcome the mightiest political, economic, and military power in the history of planet Earth. Of course! What else? Image: Matthias Gerung - Ottheinrich-Bibel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 8010. Page 287r: John's Vision of Heaven, Revelation 4:1-11, 5:1-14. Public Domain. 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. Previous Next

< Back Shame David Coles Dec 13, 2022 “Shame comes in two flavors: episodic shame and existential shame. Episodic shame can be habit-forming; it can turn into existential shame.” Shame is one of the most powerful of all human emotions…and perhaps the most pernicious. Other emotions are directed, at least in part, at things outside us. We fear ‘something’; we are angry at ‘someone’. Not so, shame. My shame is directed solely at myself, by myself. I only feel shame in the context of an outside observer, actual or potential; but the observer does not ‘shame me’. I shame myself. Furthermore, I cannot feel shame unless I allow myself to be shamed, so, end of day, I cannot be shamed by anyone else but me. When we were kids, our father used to threaten us, “I’ll shame you!” And he did, or at least he tried to; and he succeeded, but only because I let myself be shamed. I looked at myself through his eyes. I internalized his disgust. Likewise, I didn’t know then that shame was optional. I didn’t know that no one could be shamed by anyone but themselves. Example: I’m 10 years old and on my way to school I see a friend being balled-out by his mom in front of several of our classmates. Figuratively, I ‘feel his shame’; literally, I feel sorry for my friend, but I don’t feel ashamed, not really. Now reverse roles. It’s my mom, and I’m the boy on the receiving end of the stick. Of course, I’m ashamed, but why? What’s changed? A boy is being shamed in either case. In either case, I’m sorry that it’s happening. It’s wrong in both cases. (Shaming is always wrong, regardless of the provocation.) But in neither case am I the boy ‘being shamed’. I’m watching myself be shamed, just as I watched my friend being shamed; but there’s no reason for either of us to feel shame either time. We didn’t do anything wrong, or at least we didn’t do anything shameful. The only people in this story who might legitimately feel shame are the two moms, but even then, only if they allow themselves to feel shame, which I’m guessing, they won’t. Self-righteousness is a powerful protection against self-criticism. So, let’s review. IRT, I watched my friend… from the outside; IRT, I watched myself from the inside; now I’m watching the moms, but from my memory, i.e., outside of real time. Different scenarios, no doubt. But it’s still me watching. It’s the same me. I haven’t changed. Hint: I never change; I am ageless and timeless. I’m watching, always watching, watching me, watching you, watching me watching you. Watching is what I do, ‘watching’ is what I am. Observo ergo sum. Shame is an instance of Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’, which itself is just another way of saying ‘Idolatry’, the first sin condemned in the Torah and throughout Judeo-Christian-Islamic history. When I feel shame, I mistake myself for myself. I confuse something ageless and timeless, me watching, with something time bound and aging, me being watched. I mistake the perpetually perishing me for the eternal me. Fear and anger erupt, often in response to outside stimuli, but always from the inside out. On a camping trip, I hear a bear outside my tent. I am terrified. My fear is my response to the bear-threat. The bear ‘occasioned’ my fear, but she did not cause it. Fear was my response to a well-intentioned bear innocently looking for a midnight snack. Plus, if I am afraid, I’m afraid whether anyone knows it or not. Shame is totally different. It is imposed from the outside. Shame presupposes the existence of a judgy observer. That could be a loved one, a neighbor or a casual passer-by; it could be your pet or even ‘God, his angels, and his saints’. Nor does this potential external observer need to be present IRT. The anticipation that a present act may be uncovered in the future is enough to trigger shame if we let it. Shame comes in two flavors: episodic shame and existential shame. Episodic shame can be habit-forming; it can turn into existential shame. You begin to identify with your shame; you allow yourself to become ‘shameful’. You feel you deserve to feel shame, not just once in a while, but all the time. You’re no longer ashamed of what you’ve done; now you’re ashamed of who you are. You’re a fish out of ontological water, and somehow, you always manage to turn up naked. So, congratulations, you’ve graduated from episodic to existential shame. Now your Christmas goose is truly cooked. All we’re waiting for is Tiny Tim…but if he’s otherwise occupied, you could try spending a year with a Harley Street therapist instead. Or, if all else fails, just remember who you are…and who you are not. 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 The Riddle of Job David Cowles If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who “stoppeth one of three." You’ll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who’ll listen. Ask absolutely anyone, and they'll gladly tell you that the Old Testament Book of Job is a treatise on the Problem of Evil ('POE'): Why Bad Things Happen to Good People (Rabbi Harold Kushner, 1981). But is it? Is it possible that everyone (well, nearly everyone) is wrong about Job…and has been wrong for more than 2,500 years? Not very likely, I'll grant you…but possible, yes. Proceed at your own risk, reader! If I do my job in this essay, you may become a modern-day version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who "stoppeth one of three." You'll be spreading the truth about Job to anyone who'll listen. No? Still with us? Then let's get started: Simply put, the Problem of Evil (POE) asks why God, presumed to be all good and all-powerful, would allow injustice to infect his creation? It is his creation, after all, correct? Then fix it already! The author/compiler/editor of the Book of Job attacks POE head on, but so do most other philosophers and theologians. Job showcases many potential solutions to POE, but tough questions remain: Are any of the solutions mentioned in Job satisfying? Does the author/compiler/editor of Job endorse any of these answers? Or does he (sic) offer a solution of his own? Or is POE not what the Book of Job is about after all? And if not POE, what? No proposed solution has achieved broad acceptance, and non-believers often cite this as the #1 reason for their disbelief. 20th century philosopher, mathematician, and social activist, Bertrand Russell, based Why I am not a Christian on POE. The Problem of Evil is often viewed through the prism of Job, and rightly so! The Job-poem, which makes up 95% of the Book of Job, is one of the world's great epics. Even in translation its language is dazzling, but more importantly for our purposes, the poem catalogs more 'POE solutions' than any other comparable source. But we have a problem: the poem debunks every one of the solutions it 'proposes,' and it does not seem to offer any new solution of its own. Odd, don't you think? It is customary for philosophical writing to critique prior opinions, but it is also customary for it to propose solutions of its own. The Job-poem does plenty of the former, but none of the latter: 40 chapters and still crickets! From the earliest times, commentators have struggled, unsuccessfully, in my view, to tease a solution to POE out of the Job-text itself. But what if the Job-poet never meant to propose a solution to POE in the first place? What if Job is not about the Problem of Evil at all? What if that's just its 'narrative skin?' In that case, understanding Job as a treatise on POE would be roughly equivalent to understanding Joyce's Ulysses as a Dublin travelog. Job is not about POE; just the opposite. In fact; Job asks questions like: What is the nature and origin of Good? What makes something, anything, 'good,' and what makes one thing better (more good) than another? Is something subjectively good because it is God's will; or is it God's will because it is objectively good? (For more on this, check out The Problem of Good , elsewhere in this issue of AT Magazine.) To this last question, the Book of Job gives a clear and unequivocal answer: God is subject to the same objective ethical values and standards as the rest of us! This is what the book is really all about. Be skeptical, dear reader, but please; hear me out! The Book of Job consists of three parts: an epic poem (the 'Job-poem') that spans more than 40 chapters and makes up 95% of the total text; a short prose Prologue (1:1 – 2:13), and a very short prose Epilogue (42: 7-17). The two prose sections were almost certainly not part of the original text, but were added later. They function as 'bookends,' creating out of whole cloth a possible context for the poem; but in fact they amount to an early (and not very good) commentary on the epic The Job-poem is structured as a dramatic dialog. There are six main characters: Job, four so-called 'friends'… and God! (What would an epic be without God?) Over a very short time, Job, by all accounts a virtuous man, right in his own conduct, just and generous in his dealings with others, has lost his wealth, his children, the respect of his community, and ultimately, his good health. The Job-poem opens with Job sitting on a 'dunghill' covered in boils, lamenting his fate: "Let the day disappear, the day I was born and the night that announced: a man has been conceived. As for that day, let it be darkness…let darkness, dead darkness, expunge it." (3: 3 – 5a) Job asks, "Why couldn't I be a stillborn?" and then goes on to extol the benefits of 'being dead:' "There, no more restless are the troubled…all prisoners are at peace. They hear no more the voice of their oppressor. The small and the great, there are the same; and the slave is set free from his master." (3: 17 – 19) Then, stunningly, Job's understandable self-pity turns into unexpected curiosity: "Why give light…to a man whose path is hidden from God, who screens him off from his sight? (3: 20 – 23) Job can't help himself. As he recounts his sad tale, he stimulates his own sense of wonder. Job's focus shifts from 'why did I have to be born' to 'why does anyone have to be born' to an even bigger question: 'why create a universe at all, if it's going to include so much suffering.' Job's opening speech ends with a further meditation on the human condition, followed by an astounding conclusion: "They (human beings) are quashed before twilight, from daybreak to evening they are crushed; when it is not even nightfall, they forever disappear. Their tent-pin is pulled up on them. They die without knowledge." (4: 19 – 21) Job has just given a detailed description of his plight (and ours) in language worthy of Dante's Inferno . He ends by lamenting the fact that humans 'die without knowledge?' Of all the tortures he's endured, is it possible that the worst is the prospect of 'eternal ignorance?' The Job-poem is structured as a legal proceeding. Job feels that his current sufferings are unjust. He has lived a righteous and generous life; so why is it that so much evil has befallen him? And even if he did inadvertently commit some sins along the way, those sins cannot possibly justify the enormity of his suffering. Job will not feign guilt and throw himself on God's mercy, as his friends suggest. Instead, he decides to bring legal action against the Deity. As we will see shortly, Job's determination does not come out of any disrespect for God, but rather out of profound faith. Job does not imagine that he has the power to divert God's will; and he knows that no court can compel God to appear and make an answer, much less force him to comply with its final judgment. But even with no real hope of prevailing, Job wants to be heard, and he wants to hear from God; and a legal proceeding offers a most conducive venue for such an exchange. Like so many lawsuits today, Job's is not so much about winning as it is about forcing the defendant (God in this case) to divulge some of his trade secrets. And as we will see shortly, in that respect, at least, Job is successful. So, Job asks God for nothing less than a full accounting of himself. What did he have in mind when he 'created the heavens and the earth,' why didn't he do a better job, and why doesn't he fix it now? In this proceeding, Job is the plaintiff, appearing pro se , God the defendant initially in absentia; and the so-called 'friends' are an ancient version of Johnny Cochran's Dream Team…but self-appointed, and much less competent . Pity any god who cannot afford better representation than this! Job bears a heavy legal burden. To defeat God's application for Summary Judgment, Job must show that he has probable cause, that there is a court with jurisdiction, that he has legal standing, and that a potential remedy exists. Job v. God opens with Job offering the court a detailed summary of the injustices done to him. Then, each of the four 'friends' attempts to "justify the ways of God to men" (Milton, Paradise Lost ). They take turns defending God, reprising all the usual POE arguments, but then adding some new ones of their own; these are two of my 'favorites'…not: Job is being punished, not for his own sins, nor for the sins of his father, but for the sins of his sons. Job has been punished (past) because he was eventually going to take God to court (future). Job's friends reason deductively; they accept certain things a priori and they reason from those axioms to the analyses and remedies they offer. That most of their so-called solutions make no sense (e.g., the two above), is of no concern to them; common sense is irrelevant in the face of divine revelation. One by one, Job effortlessly swats away his friends' arguments by appealing to concrete experience. Job is the ultimate empiricist, long before there was any such thing as empiricism. Against the dogmatic deductions of his friends, Job appeals to empirical facts; here's a 'Cliff's Notes' version: I have lived a righteous and just life; yet I am being punished most severely. Others, not as upright as me, often deliberate workers of evil, in fact, are not punished at all. They live lavish lives in good health and pass that wealth onto future generations, intact. I, on the other hand, have no assets, and no children to leave them to, and I live on a dunghill covered with scabs. But Job can read the handwriting on a wall. He realizes that he can't meet a single one of his legal burdens: no one has standing to challenge God, no court has the power to compel God to answer, no one can ever have probable cause to sue God, and even if all these things were otherwise than they are, no plausible remedy exists. So, God-4, Job-0. "There is no joy in Mudville…Mighty Casey (Job) has struck out." Or has he? Job invokes the legal doctrine known as 'Nullification;' he asks the court to look behind the veil of legal procedure and judge the case solely on its merits, i.e., based on universal values and on empirical evidence, without regard to pre-conceived religious dogma. This is a big ask. Job is asking the court to acknowledge Natural Law (as well as written law) as an element in its ruling. Job is also asking the court to rewrite the rules of evidence. What drove Job to challenge God? Had his faith waned? Did his agony finally drive him to blasphemy? Quite the opposite! It is Job's extreme faith that gives him the wisdom and the courage to proceed: "I know that my vindicator lives and that he will rise -p upon the earth…While in the flesh I'll see Eloah…my eyes, not a stranger's, will see." (19: 26-27) Job can challenge God because his faith goes beyond God. Job has faith in a 'higher power,' a power that transcends even God - to wit, 'the Good,' which we experience as Beauty, Truth, and Justice. Bottom line: God cannot be unjust and still be God. 'Being just' is not a choice that God makes from moment to moment (as we do), nor can he choose not to be himself; i.e., not to be God. (Jean-Paul Sartre repeatedly asserted that God is the being whose essence precedes his existence. Unlike us, he cannot be other than he is.) Being Justice, per se , he cannot act unjustly! Therefore, Job and a court of competent jurisdiction, can hold God accountable after all. An unjust God is a violation of Natural Law (the Good). So, there is a remedy: the court can simply order (or remind) God to be God! God cannot refuse to be God because God is God. The legal process must grind on. But Job is 'all in.' He decides to go nuclear! Like Truman (Hiroshima) Job has saved his WMD until the very end…and now he decides to unleash it. Job closes by offering an 'Oath of Innocence.' According to the common legal customs of the ancient Middle East (e.g., The Egyptian Book of the Dead ), when one party swears a proper Oath of Innocence, that party is immediately presumed to be innocent. If God still wants to contest Job's claim, he must now appear in person and accept that the burden of proof is now on him. The downside of this strategy for Job? If a party offers an Oath of Innocence that is later shown to be untrue, the 'taker of false oaths' will have earned himself severe additional punishment. Let's listen to some excerpts from Job's oath: "If a poor man would extend me his hand, if in time of disaster he cried out to me (30:24)…If I've ever thwarted a poor man's desires…or ate a loaf by myself, so an orphan could not eat of it (31:16-17a)…If I ever saw a vagabond with nothing to wear or the needy with nothing to cover him (31:19)...If I ever raised my hand to the fatherless (31:21a)…If I ever made gold my reliance and called pure gold 'my security' (31:24)…If I ever looked at the light (starlight) as it shone or the moon as it moved so nobly (i.e. if I ever engaged in pagan worship) (31:26)…If I ever rejoiced at my enemy's ruin and exalted when evil befell him (31:29)…If ever my land has complained of me, if ever it's furrows cried out (31:38)…" Job seals his oath: "Here is my mark, let Shaddai respond! … Complete are the words of Job." (31: 35-40) God's defense team panics, as well as they should. Fearing defeat, they allow a fourth 'friend,' young Elihu, to deliver their closing argument on God's behalf. Perhaps new blood will shake things up…it doesn't! God can 'read a room' as well as the next guy. He sees that his team is losing. Hoping to avoid an adverse judgment, God takes over his own defense. He decides to testify after all; he appears "out of the whirlwind" and takes the stand. Is there a more exciting moment in all of literature? God imagines that he can dispose of Job with a simple display of majesty and might. That usually does the trick where muggles are concerned! But Job is no muggle, far from it, in fact, as God is about to learn, to his dismay. God is supremely confident, over-confident as it turns out, that he can prevail in this Case of the Pesky Plaintiff . He decides to approach the challenge as an American presidential nominee might approach a debate with her opponent. God will begin by questioning Job's 'real world' experience. But first, he calls on Job to put on his big boy pants: "Who is this who obscures good counsel, (using) words without knowledge? Bind up your loins like a man! I will ask you – and you will help me know !" (38: 2-3) Job's God has a keen sense of humor! (So does Job, as it turns out.) God suggests that he is here to learn from Job. In fact, of course, his questions are designed to demean Job, to demonstrate that Job has no business being on the debate stage, much less giving instruction to God: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations? (38:4) …Have you ever reached the sources of the Sea and walked on the bottom of the Ocean? Were you ever shown the gates of Death? (38:16-17)" "Have you ever in your days summoned daybreak? Made known to the dawning its place, holding the earth by its corners so the wicked would be shaken from it?" (38:12-13) As sarcastically as possible, God highlights Job's inexperience; then he turns attention to Job's competence. Can Job do the things that God does? Can he do them better? If the answer to both these questions is negative, then what's the point of Job's lawsuit? And what's the remedy? "Who cleaves a downpour's channel and a path for the thunderstorm to rain down on land without people, on wilderness with no human in it, drenching utter wasteland and sprouting grassy growth." (38:25-27) Note that God is concerned for all creation and for all creatures, not just human beings. When God 'created the heavens and the earth,' he created an ecosystem. What happens 'off camera' is just as important as what happens 'center stage.' Is this the first clear reference to 'ecology' in Western literature? Is it the first conscious attack on anthropocentrism? "Do you hunt down prey for the lion and quell the hunger of beasts?" (38: 39) "Can you tie the wild ox by rope to a furrow?... Do you give the horse its bravery…Does the falcon take flight through your wisdom?" (39: 1-7) Chapter 39 offers a litany of animals, each with its own special characteristics and needs – needs that are met by God through the medium of his creation. If Job were to be awarded custody (of the universe), could he do as well? Here God pauses, thinking his work is done. Confident that he has put forward irrefutable arguments, he takes one last swipe at his opponent: "Should Eloah answer (such) an accuser (Job)?" (40:2) Prior to Elihu's rant, Job finished his summation, closing with the words, "Completed are the words of Job." (31:91) Job did not expect to address the court again. Notice that he did not rebut Elihu, but that was before God appeared and testified on his own behalf. In God's opening discourse, he attempts to bully Job into submission (and most commentators think that he does just that). But Job is anything but submissive; he is furious and frustrated. He is not cowed by God's bluster, and he is well aware that God has not answered any of the points in his complaint. Job cannot let God's sarcastic taunts go unanswered; and he cannot back down to a bully. "Lacking respect, how can I answer you? My hand I place over my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not repeat; twice, and I will no more." (40: 4-5) It is easy to see how these words could be read as an 'Act of Contrition.' Job placing his hand over his mouth could be interpreted as a gesture of submission. If this were the actual end of the poem, it would be one of the greatest anti-climaxes in all of literature. This epic is beautifully composed and intricately constructed; it seems unlikely that it would end with such a thud. But how else could the text be read? Could it be that it is God who's disrespecting Job (not the other way around), that Job is the object of the disrespect, not its subject? God's sarcastic tone demonstrates his lack of respect for Job. God sounds like any adult lecturing, and demeaning, a small child. Job's placing his hand over his mouth may be a declaration of victory, rather than a gesture of defeat. Lacking God's respect, what point would there be in Job's talking further. Nor does Job need to speak. He already set out his case in detail during the trial, and God has not addressed, much less rebutted, a single one of his arguments . Therefore, Job's original testimony should be more than enough to secure judgment for the plaintiff. Job will not talk past the close! Is that a quizzical look I see you wearing, dear reader? You're not totally convinced? You're thinking that you might stick with the traditional interpretation after all? Please think again! If the traditional reading were right, the trial would have ended when Job said, "I will speak no more": Game. Set, Match, God! But that's not what happens, is it? Seeing that Job is bloodied but unbowed, God doesn't miss a beat. He launches right into Phase Two of his defense. He no longer expects an outright victory, but he still hopes that an amicable settlement might be possible. The first God/Job exchange boiled down to taunting, bullying and name-calling. (Good thing, nothing like that could ever happen today, right?) But now the time for posturing is past; it's time for God to 'get real!' God has underestimated his opponent – his intellect and his courage - and God knows it! God realizes that he will need to do more if he wants to resolve this matter. He is not going to get away with the parental classic, "Because I said so." God wants to pursue a settlement, but to do so he needs to give Job as much of what Job wants as God can give, safely. God will have to 'open his books.' He will need to share with Job deep secrets regarding the structure and the process of the created world. He must grant Job's request for knowledge! Remember, Job has not asked God to abdicate; he has not asked for reparations or restitution; he has not even asked God to end his suffering. Job is clear, he's only in this for the knowledge! God can no longer get away with talking to Job as if he were a child; he can no longer name call or taunt, and he will not defeat Job by asking him if he has ever summoned daybreak, etc. In his second speech, God treats Job as his equal, and he challenges Job to work with him to rid the world of injustice: "If you've an arm (as strong as) El's…look for the proud and lay him low…crush the wicked where they stand. Cover them all in dust; in dust, wrap their faces! Then I myself will praise you as your right hand brings you triumph." (40: 8-14) This time God challenges Job, not to do something cosmic, something absurd on the face of it, but to do something that is local and conceivable but just very, very difficult. God is happy to join Job in the pursuit of justice; but first he needs to give Job a 'heads-up:' the problem is not as simple as it appears, and the remedy is not as easy as it looks. The balance of God's testimony is given over to Behemoth and Leviathan, two of God's creatures. Traditionally, Behemoth has been identified as 'Hippopotamus' and Leviathan as 'Crocodile' or 'Sea Monster.' God introduces the beasts as a way of explaining to Job the 'ecology' of creation: "Behold now Behemoth which, like you, I created!" (40:15) The creation of Behemoth was not secondary to the creation of Homo Sapiens . The process of creation is the same for both! All creatures are ontologically equal; and Behemoth is a worthy exemplar of creation. And Leviathan? "Can you pull Leviathan (out) with a fishhook? Can you bind his tongue with a rope? ...Will he make a pact with you? Will he be your slave forever? Can you toy with him like a bird? …Who has ever confronted him and survived?" (40:45 – 41:3) "Of all that's under heaven, he is mine. I cannot keep silent about him, the fact of his incomparable valor…Even 'gods' live in fear of his majesty; they're in terror of the ruin he wreaks…He has no match on earth, who is made as fearless as he? …Over beasts of all kinds he is king." (41:43-26) So ends God's defense! He will speak no more. Job has twice promised not to speak further…but once again he changes his mind. God had hoped to convince Job that the process of creating and managing a world is much more difficult than Job imagined. Job cannot rid the universe of evil (he is no superhero), but then neither can God! No one can pull Leviathan out with a fishhook; he is part of the ecology of the universe. But even if God could rid the world of Behemoth and Leviathan, he wouldn't do so! These beasts are an integral part of creation; they have unique qualities of their own. True, their behavior may from time to time appear to be 'evil' from the perspective of creatures with conflicting interests, but that's all part of the ecology of creation. Imagine how human behavior would be judged, if judged from the perspective of other species! The Job-poem ends with Job's 'final speech'…and this time it really is final. Job gets the last word…but listen to what he has to say: "Who is this hiding counsel without knowledge? Truly, I've spoken without comprehending – wonders beyond me that I do not know. Hear now and I will speak! I will ask you and you help me know. As a hearing by the ear, I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on 'dust and ashes' (i.e., humanity)." (42: 3-6) Notice that Job's closing lines (38: 1-3) nearly duplicate God's opening, complete with the dripping sarcasm. But now, it is Job who mocks God, not the other way around. We've come full circle and there can no longer be any doubt about the outcome. But before we 'call' the contest for Job, we'd better check to see how the media is spinning it. In a review of 17 independent commentaries on Job, written over the past 150 years, Stephen Vicchio found 15 calling the fight for God and only two calling it for Job. With the publication of this article, I'm staking my claim to be number three; can I put you down for number four? "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." This famous quote is traditionally, but dubiously, attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln or not, it's apparently wrong. A survey of Job commentary reveals that you can fool almost all the people almost all the time. How come? People hear what they expect to hear! We might all just as well have been members of God's discredited defense team. Like Job's 'friends,' we see the world through the lens of our preconceived notions of what's real: "Dewey beats Truman" and "God beats Job." Image: Job by Léon Bonnat (1880) 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. Previous Next

< Back Is Childhood a Crime? David Cowles “Parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process.” I’m sure Art Linkletter (d. 2010) was a wonderful person. Actually, I’m not sure, but shouldn’t we give people the benefit of the doubt? That said, his iconic TV Show, Kids Say the Darndest Things (‘KSDT’), is emblematic of the criminal institution euphemistically known as ‘childhood’. KSDT assembled a panel of pre-school children; the host then posed questions designed to elicit ‘cute’ responses. If some of these responses were also embarrassing, so much the better! And, of course, those questions were designed to provoke loud laughter from the studio audience. Where was PETA when we needed them? (Even circus animals are treated better than Linkletter’s kids.) There are two things you can say about very young children: They know fewer facts about the world than you do, but they think about that world more frequently and more deeply. Being an adult is thinking you have all the answers when you don’t. Being a child is thinking you don’t have any answers when you do! Children instinctively know things about the world that almost every adult has forgotten; they just don’t know they know. My high school had a motto: mortui vivos docent (“the dead teach the living”). Of course, we interpreted ‘the dead’ as a derisive reference to our still very much alive teachers, not to Homer and Plato as originally intended. But we, too, knew more than we realized! Our motto should have read, “adults teach children.” That could be the motto of every K – 12 school in America. Curious children ask adults to teach them; for the most part, they are told lies. Sometimes the lies are intentional, but most often they are just occasions of well-meaning adults passing on heartfelt but imaginary ‘facts’ about the world. I helped raise 4 children and 10 grandchildren, every one of whom dazzled me with feats of intellectual prowess: A 5-year-old explained the difference between immortality and eternity as well as Augustine. A 6-year-old presented a convincing ontological argument for the real existence of Santa Claus; lie quiet, Anselm. An 8-year-old showed me a model of Trinity, far more cogent than St. Patrick’s famous clover. A 9-year-old pointed out a heresy embedded in a popular Christmas hymn. A 10-year-old came up with a novel and elegant algorithm for calculating the area of a square. An 11-year-old wrote a play. I could go on… and on! If any of my adult friends had done any of these things, they would have immediately sent their work off for peer review…or for publication. Children do these things routinely while playing with Legos and watching Phineas and Ferb . An adult’s world is densely forested with facts. Well-worn paths (memes) facilitate travel. Few adults ever wander off these professionally maintained trails; the forest is thought to be impenetrable…and very, very dangerous. “Here there be monsters!” To continue the metaphor, a child’s world would then be a garden of wildflowers: new shoots rising every night out of rich, moist soil; new buds forming daily on the tips of old stocks. There are no pathways here! In fact, the entire garden is virgin; no one has ever set foot in it before… except perhaps the ‘gardener’ from the Book of Genesis. You are free to wander, and wonder, to your heart’s content (just don’t eat the fruit). It’s no surprise then that kids and adults can’t communicate. They live in the same, but totally different, worlds. Imagine you sitting down for a chinwag with a stoned stone-ager from c. 50,000 BCE. Sorry, that’s what it’s like for a child to talk with you . Adult or child, we each have our patch, and apparently that patch ages as we do. You grow, your garden fills in. By the time you’re an adult, your world is enshrouded by the forest canopy. Today, adults are discouraged from beating children in their charge; if only they were similarly discouraged from humiliating, ridiculing, belittling, and mocking those same children! Older children and adults tease each other from time to time; for the most part, it’s water off a duck’s back. But young children don’t have enough experience to know what’s real and what’s not. If someone says, “you’re stupid,” then that child is stupid, or silly, or naughty, or ‘the bane of my existence’. Almost every adult I know says that their children are their jewels, the loves of their lives, but you’d never know it. In my day, for better or worse, children were largely ignored. For the most part, we only connected with our fathers when we were being disciplined. Today, parents dote on their royal highnesses…and rarely miss an opportunity to damage them in the process. It’s a wonder anyone escapes childhood in one piece; many don’t! But it would be too easy to blame the adults. Grown-ups are people too! They have their own lives and their own needs. They are damaged products of their own inadequate upbringings. Plus, supporting a child today, physically and financially, is more than a full-time job. Few adults have any energy left to ‘feed Sally’s spirit’. It has often been said that youth is wasted on the young. That’s like saying that the Titanic was a big boat; it’s just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. (Too soon?) Instead, we are dealing here with a total generational mismatch. Kids are tiny and defenseless and do not always know the ways of the world. Adults are huge and ferocious and know the precise location of every lever. Yet we place our children under the supervision and control of parents, grands, teachers, cops, and social workers. Who says child sacrifice is a thing of the past? Did I mention that I raised 4 children? “I did the best I could,” which means, according to my standards, “I did an absolutely horrible job.” The ‘best I could’ wasn’t even close to ‘good enough’…not even close! Some of my children have forgiven me, “You did as good as could have been expected under the circumstances,” whatever they were; others have not. (I agree with the ‘have-nots’ BTW.) And just for the record, no, I didn’t beat them! Children are not just ‘shorties’; they are not miniature adults. Children are an entirely different phenomenon from parents. A few decades ago (I date myself), it was popular to say that men and women were from ‘different planets’ (e.g., Mars and Venus). Today, we can say something similar about children and adults. What makes one planet different from another? Time, for one thing. A year on Neptune lasts 60,000 Earth days. It’s a long wait from one Christmas to the next. On the other hand, a day on Jupiter or Saturn is only about half as long as a day on Earth. As soon as your head hits the pillow, it’s time to wake up again. It would be foolish not to realize that such massive differences in time measurement affect the way sentient beings live and how they understand their worlds. Children and adults experience time differently. By my calculations, a 75-year-old’s week is subjectively equivalent to a 5-year-old’s day. Failure to understand this simple fact leads to insurmountable conflict. But time measurement is only one difference. I’m sorry to say it, but children are much, much smarter than you…or me. That’s why they’re so much fun to be with…for short bursts of time. Children never shut down. After about 12 hours, their bodies just give out. You on the other hand… Now, if you’re waiting for me to end this article with “How to” fix these problems, you’re going to be disappointed. These problems are evolutionary and anthropological, not political. About the best we can hope for at this point is an awareness of the cultural disconnect and a sensitivity to its consequences. As in many aspects of life, whether we are theists or atheists, we can learn from Scripture: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Mt. 18:3) 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 Previous Next

< Back Memories… David Cowles Aug 14, 2025 “Memories light the corners of my mind, misty watercolored memories…scattered pictures of…the way we were.” (Streisand) Why settle for memories? The corners of my mind, misty, scattered, baloney! Give me the real thing! “Don’t dream it, be it!” ( Rocky Horror Picture Show ) Turns out, there are two ways of remembering – there’s the misty watercolored kind, enjoyed by muggles everywhere; and then there’s ‘re-membering’, enjoyed by Marcel Proust…and now you! Unwittingly of course, Heidegger set the stage. He distinguished Dasein (that it is) from Wassein (what it is). Sartre translated, as he does: ‘Existence and Essence’. I remember going to what turned out to be ‘the game of the century’: Harvard-Yale, 1968, 28 – 28, both teams ending the season undefeated. (Havard scored 16 points in the final 58 seconds.) Exciting time…and I remember it. I remember the game and how I felt at the end. I remember the people I was with. But I don’t remember ‘being there’. Of course, I know that I was there, I know that I watched the game and emoted at the outcome, but I don’t remember ‘being there’. I don’t remember what it felt like to be me at that moment in time. On the other hand, I do re-member looking out my grandparents’ bedroom window at the blinking red lights atop a local TV tower…and I even remember thinking, “I’m going to re-member this.” And I do. I re-member looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at a friend’s house. I re-member standing at the window of my first apartment looking out at the ‘forum’ below. In these cases too, I thought to remember. But not all re-membering needs to be scheduled in advance. There are hosts of other scenes from my past that, accidentally, I re-member and then there are others that I merely remember. The contents of every memory ( Wassein ), like every experience, are unique. It’s forever thumbtacked to a particular spot on the spatiotemporal grid. What is ‘eternal and universal’ about any experience is its transitory nature: “This too shall pass!” Re-membering is something altogether different. ‘Being there’ is, well, being there! And being there is being there – one and done, now and forever, Amen. Dasein itself is unique. Translated into ‘modern geek’: Wassein = ∞, Dasein = 1. Dasein is one, simple (it has no qualia), eternal, and universal. Hmm, sounds a lot like someone else I know…but that’s a different essay! For now, let’s hear Proust describe his experience: “The sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the Baptistry of St. Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, been restored to me, complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation… “…the past was made to encroach upon the present, and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other … The moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment…” ‘Seemed to me to be the present moment’, and so it was! Wassein is a function of spacetime. Being at the right place at the right time (or wrong) = experience now, memory later. Dasein , on the other hand, occurs outside of spacetime. It is the universal and eternal present whose shadow we see across our continuous, bright-lit, and potentially infinite timeline. While every quantum of experience/memory has a specific spacetime address, the Being that underlies all experience is homeless, a citizen of nowhere, a denizen of everywhere. (Like Jesus in Bethlehem?) As Proust put it, “…(What) had reawakened in me had no connection with what I frequently tried to recall to myself…with the help of an undifferentiated memory…those quite different images that preserve nothing of life… (and) I knew that Lost Time would not be found again on the Piazza of St. Marks… “There is a vast difference between the real impression that we have had of a thing and the artificial impression of it that we form for ourselves when we attempt, by an act of will, to imagine it…” (i.e. to remember it). Surprisingly, consciousness can be easily and simply modeled using just the lowly triangle, the fundamental building block of the material world according to Plato ( Timaeus ). Consciousness can be modeled simply by treating the ordinarily static triangle as a dynamic process: X ↙ ↘ X’ → Z In this diagram, X is directly aware of Z and of itself (X’) being aware of Z. We could say that ‘X’s experience of Z’ proceeds from X’s awareness of Z and from A’s awareness of being aware (X’) of Z. In which case we would be characterizing ‘consciousness’ using the language adopted by the Council of Nicaea (c. 325 CE) to describe ‘God’, i.e. Trinity. In short, ‘re-membering’ reveals something fundamental about experience. It is timeless. I am now just as much sitting in my 5 th grade classroom as I am sitting at this computer typing out this essay. Nothing passes, everything endures, not as mere memory, but as it is. *** Giorgio de Chirico’s Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a haunting, dreamlike scene where empty streets and long shadows evoke a timeless stillness. This atmosphere reflects the essay’s exploration of memory as something elusive and misty, contrasting with the vivid, immersive re-membering that brings past experience fully into the present moment. 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 Today is May Day David Cowles May 1, 2025 “May Day has roots in Norse Mythology, Pagan Cosmology, Christian Theology, and Marxist Ideology, as well as a link to ancient fertility rights.” A very, very long time ago, when I was young, our favorite days of the year were Christmas and Halloween, not necessarily in that order. At Christmas, we were dependent on the kindness of others; but on Halloween we were allowed to make our own fun and express our primal pagan spirits, perhaps for the only time that year. Other holidays made our ‘best of’ lists: Turkey Day, Valentines, St. Pat’s, Easter, the 4th. May Day was not on anyone’s list. Yet, a survey of Western traditions suggests that the First of May may have been the most important day of the year for a broad cross section of Western societies. May Day has roots in Norse Mythology, Pagan Cosmology, Christian Theology, and Marxist Ideology, as well as a link to ancient fertility rights. Before there was a Christian Easter, there was an annual celebration of new life…on May 1st. Each holiday has a special link to a particular virtue. Thanksgiving is gratitude. Christmas is generosity. Valentine’s is love. The 4th is independence. What about May Day? What’s its defining virtue? Justice! (Specifically, socio-economic justice.) The May Day tradition in all its forms is a celebration of Natural Law ( aka Oral Torah, Logos), a fundamental ordering principle in Universe that underlies everything from astronomy and biology to culture and ethics. In recent centuries, the Zeitgeist has focused on ‘man’s conquest of nature’, a concept far removed from the spirit of Natural Law. In Judaism, the law is twice manifest, once in the Written Torah and again in the Oral Torah. The Written Torah consists of 613 mitzvahs found in the first 5 books of the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to Moses. The Oral Torah is that same Law inscribed in the processes of nature and on the hearts of men and women. According to the pre-Christian calendar of Northern Europe, May 1 is the first day of summer. While this may not make sense from the point of view of the weather, it makes great sense astronomically. The summer solstice falls right in between May 1 and August 1 so why shouldn’t that 91-day period be labeled “summer”? In pagan lore, the eves of May 1st and November 1st are special times because that is when the spirit world is closest to our physical world. On those two eves, it is as though a ‘portal’ opens that allows direct communication between the two realms. The Christian celebrations of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day are extensions of this theme. Many of the activities that we now associate with October 31 were once also associated with April 30: Bonfires, wild merry-making and trick-or-treating, for example. Robert Graves ( The White Goddess ) wrote: “Christmas was merry in the Middle Ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned Maypoles…” And why not? Roughly, Maypoles are to May Day what Christmas Trees are to Christmas. Each links the respective festival to fertility ( phallus ). Like Christmas trees, a maypole may be a living tree or one that has been cut down for the occasion. It can even be ‘artificial’ in the sense that a bare log (or some aluminum wire?) may be decorated with greenery to suggest a living tree. Trees are powerful symbols, and important examples, of the fertility of the earth and the Maypole’s shape connects human sexuality and reproduction with the more general fertility theme represented by trees. In Tudor England, it was customary for people to spend May Day Eve making love in the fields to promote the fertility of the land. Children conceived on such occasions were known as ‘Merry-be-Gots’. In Norse mythology, a single tree, Ygdrasil , structures the entire cosmos. Separate ‘homelands’ are allocated to humans, gods, elves, giants, trolls and others; but the branches of one giant tree, Odin’s ash tree (Ygdr = Odin or Woden), link these semi-autonomous regions into a coherent Universe. The Maypole symbolizes Ygdrasil, the mythological backbone of the world. Beyond mythology, the Maypole also expresses an important astronomical concept. Early on, humans discovered that the periods of the Earth’s rotation and revolution were trivial compared to a cycle known as the Precession of the Equinox. The Maypole symbolizes axis mundi , the Earth’s axis, whose ‘wobble’ defines this 26,000-year celestial cycle. Does James Joyce reprise this theme in Ulysses , where Stephen Dedalus lives in a tower which he calls Omphalos , the belly button of the world? ( Sidebar : That S.D. lives inside the axis mundi, the navel of the universe, is a pretty good clue to the meaning of this supposedly impenetrable novel.) Finally, trees played a crucial role in early European religion and spirituality. Recall the ‘oak worship’ of Celtic Druids, for example. Across Europe, individual trees or whole species of trees were once regarded as divine and only later became associated with anthropomorphic deities alleged to live inside them (e.g. tree nymphs, hamadryas). According to Sir James Frazer ( The Golden Bough ), Teutonic words for ‘temple’ derive from words denoting ‘sacred grove’ and ‘sanctuary’. At one time it seems groves and glades were our churches and cathedrals. More recently, the 20th century poet Ezra Pound recaptured the association between nature and spirit in his Cantos : “The grove needs an altar.” This theme first appears in Canto LXXIV, the opening of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, the beginning of his Paradiso . From LXXIV on, Cantos is Pound’s blueprint for building (rebuilding?) “The city of Dioce” (Paradise). Perhaps anticipating by several decades today’s ‘Green movement’, Pound prescribes the reunification of nature and spirit. He would have been at home among the Druids. Along with fertility, mythology and cosmology, ancient May Day rites share an economic theme. Again, according to Frazer ( The Golden Bough ): “At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called Little May Rose, dressed in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song…In the course of the song a wish is expressed that those who give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn… “In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May, young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in which mention is made of the ‘bread and meal that come in May’. If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and no bread to feed them. “…In some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide…the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a bride…They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present, and tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they themselves will have something the whole year through; but if they give her nothing, they themselves will have nothing.” How should we understand this pan-cultural focus on May Day giving? In few, if any, cases are the gifts substantial. They seem to be symbolic, but symbolic of what? First, there is the magical element. It is spring and over the coming months, we will be expecting the earth to give of itself for our benefit. According to the ‘principles of magic’ like begets like. If we expect nature to give, we also must give; just as in England, May merry-makers reproduced (Merry-be-gots) to encourage the land to reproduce. (Lie quiet Malthus!) On another level, the welfare of anyone is understood to be dependent on the welfare of everyone and the welfare of everyone must include the welfare of everyone. In a society where everyone has the necessities of life, the overall economy will be more prosperous. Obviously, the practitioners of early May Day rituals were not trained economists, but they may have intuitively grasped the nature and necessity of social solidarity. It is only in recent centuries that we have lost sight of this essential truth. As the ‘natural economy’ (fertility) benefits everyone, so must the ‘human economy’ (generosity) benefit all. It is here, of course, that these early May Day rites intersect with later day Christian and Marxist versions. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, the month of May is dedicated to Mary, the mother (fertility) of Jesus. May 1st, May Day, stands at the head of Mary’s special month. In many Catholic areas, it has traditionally been a day of brightly colored, florid processions, reminiscent of the pre-Christian festivals (Maypoles) mentioned above. Controversially, in 1955 Pope Pius XII designated May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, underscoring yet again May Day’s universal economic aspect. Mary speaks sparingly in scripture but when she does, she packs a punch. In her Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 – 52), for example, Mary says of Yahweh, “He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things but the rich he has sent away empty.” Are we reading Luke…or Lenin? Mary of the Magnificat is every bit as radical as Marx of the Manifesto …in fact, much more so! Compared to Christians, Communists are wimps! Even so, Communists and Socialists are primarily concerned with questions of economic justice so it cannot be overlooked that they elected, ostensibly for other reasons, to schedule their own chief annual celebration ( May Day ) on the very day that pagans and Christians choose to celebrate their commitment to economic justice. We have drawn material from anthropology, mythology, cosmology, theology, and economics; out of all of these cultural expressions, we can, I think, distill a common core: there exists a body of Natural Law that spans ages, continents and cultures…and economic justice is integral to that law. Happy May Day to all our readers! *** Spring. Johann Georg Platzer, 1704–1761. Oil on copper, 43.8 x 57 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by Julia Anne Bonnor (née Ricketts), 1901. Accession no. 367-1901. 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.