“A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” < Back Jesus Gets Us! David Cowles Dec 1, 2024 “A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath; Jesus never changes.” There is an ad running on TV these days that includes the tag line, “Jesus, he gets us!” And so he does; but how? Jesus forms a perfect bond, a template, with each of us. Without undergoing any change himself, Jesus makes a unique version of himself available to every subject (e.g. you and me). Jesus templates us, and as we will see shortly, he is ‘template’ per se . Or, to paraphrase St. Francis, “It is in being for all that he is one.” Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, called the Son . Children do not choose their parents; they bond with them. With more or less fidelity (Jesus is 100% faithful) every child templates its parent(s). There is no better image of this than the ‘babe at breast’ and we see Jesus depicted as such in many Christian works of art. Ontologically, Jesus templates his Father. The relationship between the Father and the Son, i.e. the Spirit, is the paradigmatic relationship. But because it is Jesus’ essential character (Sonship) to template, Jesus templates whatever he encounters, beginning with his Father but extending to each of us. Christians see in Jesus Martin Buber’s eternal, universal Thou. Of course, every actual entity is specific and unique; but the template itself, to the extent that it is a faithful template, is the same in every case. So it is because Jesus forms a unique bond with everyone that he himself is unchanging. In Jesus, plasticity = identity. It is in being all that he is one. Of course, templating with Jesus is not accidental; it is ontological and genealogical: “Through him all things were made.” (John 1: 3) It is only because Jesus is that you are; for you, Jesus is the divine other, the perfect template. Like Buber’s Thou , Christ is universal and eternal as well as intensely personal. From our perch in spacetime, ‘relata’ precedes relationship; but from God’s perspective, outside of spacetime, relationship precedes relata. Actual entities are first and foremost relational. I am because you are: no you, no me, no He, no thee! Dear reader, you and I have a relationship. We touch each other in a single region of spacetime, i.e. the time and space it takes for me to write and you to read this post. My spouse and I have known each other for more than 50 years. We are ‘tangent’ over a much larger region; but even that is a postage stamp compared to the extent of our relationship with Jesus, the one eternal Thou present in every You . Jesus remakes himself for each of us. In that way Jesus never changes. He is the same in relation to me as he is in relation to you and yet he is unique to each of us. “And yet…”? No, “And so…” We both encounter the exact same Jesus; but we encounter him in two different ways. Each of us knows Jesus differently, i.e. personally, even though he himself is exactly the same, i.e. universal, for everyone: X : A :: X : B, C, D… Jesus is ‘the one who templates all others’, Father first! This resolves the so-called ‘Scandal of Particularity’ – “If God, the creator of heaven and earth, is incarnate in creation, why in first century Palestine on the 3rd rock from our Sun?” The traditional ‘solution’ to this dilemma is simply “Why not?” Things have to happen ‘some where and some when’ but according to Einstein, every ‘where and when’ is just like every other ‘where and when’, so it doesn’t matter when or where something happens; it is as if it happened every where and every when: Some where/when = any where/when = every where/when. But this argument is as dissatisfying as it is incontrovertible. The formula presented here would elevate why not to of course . In fact, the Incarnation had to occur ‘somewhere, some when’ to be real but it could have been anywhere, any when. Jesus templates me . A bond exists between us that unites who Jesus is essentially with who I am existentially. I change with every breath (Heraclitus) ; Jesus never changes (Parmenides). Is this the deeper meaning of the Musketeers’ “All for one and one for all”? Jesus is ‘all for my one’ and ‘one for us all’. It’s not that there are 8 billion Jesus on Earth today. There is only one, now or ever, here or anywhere. Jesus does not come in parts. Unlike a shared pizza, there is no ‘my slice, your slice’; each of us gets a whole pie but…and it’s the same pie for everyone. This is Loaves and Fishes on steroids. One pie feeds one, one pie feeds all! Once or twice a year, I get to enjoy the world’s greatest pizza, not in Napoli or Palermo, but in Randolph MA, at the Lynwood Café. On such occasions, ‘private property’ loses all meaning; the concept is unmentionable. Like Jesus’ disciples in the early Church, we enjoy all our goods in common. Nor is there any risk of shortage. As soon as someone imagines a new flavor combo, it is ordered and on its way to our table. At $12.00 per pie, we are restricted only by the depth of our imaginations, and the size of our stomachs, and not thankfully by the size of our bank accounts. Surely, this is a foretaste of Heaven! This relatively mundane theological speculation has transformative implications for cosmology and anthropology. The Second Person of the Trinity is a singularity. Jesus’ event horizon consists of ‘information’ that perfectly complements the information content of every tangent entity. There is no ‘right Jesus’ or ‘wrong Jesus’, but there is ‘my Jesus’ and ‘your Jesus’; both of course, are the ‘same Jesus’. Objectively, there is one Jesus, but subjectively, Jesus manifests uniquely for everyone. Our relationship with Jesus tips us off that there is more to reality than a 4 dimensional continuum. We are not just nodes in a social web. Each of us has a straight line connection to the singularity at the heart of Being itself (God). This gives new meaning to the 2nd half of the Great Commandment (“Love your neighbor as yourself”). How is it that my neighbor is also myself? There are two approaches to this question, both rooted in models taken from Structuralism. The experience of being-in-the-world is the same for everyone (who is in the world). Therefore, your being-in-the-world and my being-in-the-world are functionally and objectively equivalent, despite their accidental and subjective differences. Neither of our vantages deserves to be treated preferentially; therefore, our experiences are denotatively identical though connotatively unique. Everyone undergoes the same ‘childhood’, though no two childhoods are the same. The second approach may be more satisfying. Jesus actually forms a perfect template with you and a perfect template with me. Therefore, you and I must potentially form a perfect template with each other. This is a more familiar mathematical relation: If A = B and A = C, then A = C. The standard model of cosmogenesis is incredibly complex and arcane. Every day we have to adjust it to account for new data. The Christian model is a bit simpler: “Through him (Jesus) all things were made.” (John 1: 3) Where is Occam when we need him? David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 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 Pando David Cowles Feb 23, 2023 “How are you at riddles? Let’s see!” Riddle #1 : I’m black and white and red all over; what am I? Guess : A newspaper! Well, good try, but we don’t allow archaic constructions in this game, and nobody uses the word ‘newspaper’ anymore, so your answer is disallowed. (If we allowed ‘newspaper’, we’d have to allow Old English words from Beowulf , et al. and that would be quite messy.) Answer : A blushing zebra. Try again? Riddle #2 : I’m a living organism, I weigh 40 times more than a Blue Whale, and I’m at least 5,000 years old (but who’s counting?); what am I? Guess : A dragon? The Loch Ness Monster? The Blob? All good guesses but none correct. Answer : A Quaking Aspen. Get it? “A Quaking Aspen,” hilarious…right? Not so much? Well, no wonder; it’s not a joke. It’s a Quaking Aspen for pity’s sake! Not just any Quaking Aspen as it turns out; it’s a particular Quaking Aspen that answers to the name of, you guessed it, Pando . (Do all trees have proper names…or just this one? Do they know their own names like dogs and cats?) Being Pando : What’s it like being me? Well, I’m one tree, but I have more than 40,000 stems (you’d call them ‘trunks’). I cover 100 acres. And in case you were wondering, my pronouns are he and him , but my sexual orientation, sadly, is still unknown (I reproduce asexually). I’m 40,000 trunks, each trunk a clone of all the others, each tapping into a common root system, but each with its own bark, its own crown (foliage), its own lifecycle (not 5,000 years…maybe a few hundred), and each with its own personal survival challenges (weather, fire, predators, parasites, disease, human beings, etc.). So, what’s it like being Pando ? It is not easy to enter the intellectual life of a tree. There is little doubt that trees communicate with each other, recognize nuclear family members, care for the young, the sick and the elderly in their midst, and proactively share available resources (e.g., water). Nutshell : trees engage in eleemosynary behavior. Their motto: Do Ergo Sum . More than most members of a certain unnamed animal species I know well, they love their neighbors as themselves . But it is hard to imagine what sort of ideation accompanies this activity. Obviously, it would be non-verbal. The activity of trees seems clearly intentional…but is it conscious? To whatever extent Pando is ‘aware’, is that awareness solely at the level of the organism itself or is it distributed among its member off-shoots? Are we talking Federal Reserve (central bank) here…or are we talking Blockchain? (Lie quiet Hamilton, I mean that is Alexander Hamilton.) Or is it both? But back to Matthew : “Love your neighbor as yourself .” As yourself! ‘As’ is different from ‘like’. ‘Like X?’ I recognize the dignity and equality X (i.e., the other). ‘As X?’ I recognize myself in the other. For Pando , ‘as’ and ‘like’ are synonymous. Pando is simultaneously self and other. All of which brings us back to that “certain unnamed animal species” we met earlier. According to Jesus ( Matthew ), we are to love our neighbors as (not like) ourselves. Is that an ethical ideal? Or does it reflect an ontological reality? Am I Pando ? (Or at least Pando-like ?) Am I one among the 8 billion living stems of a single organism? (This has been an insight of mystics, East and West, for millennia.) Am I my sister as well as my sister’s keeper? Do I automatically do unto myself what I do unto others? On this site, we have repeatedly argued that reality is inherently recursive. Accordingly, we live in a universe with a curved (vs. flat) ontology – not ‘just’ a curved topology. Karma is real. It’s not a reaction to an action, it is embedded in the action itself. Well, food for thought all around. But whether we are Pando-like or not, we can agree that human beings have a lot to learn, not only from Pando , but from trees generally (trees which, BTW, share 50% of our DNA ). 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 Footprints in the Sand David Cowles Aug 20, 2024 “We are in awe of death. We dread it, and yet we never miss an opportunity to embrace it. We each build our own Taj Mahal and we begin construction early, very early.” “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and preserved the union”; Abraham Lincoln is dead. His legacy is a function of his mortality. “Now he belongs to the ages!” No one’s impact on the world is a ‘settled matter of fact’ until they are dead. Then it is irrevocable and immutable, albeit entirely unknowable and uncontrollable. So, we strive to make our mark, to leave footprints in the sand in the hope that others will come along and make plaster casts of them. As I write this essay, I expect that it will be published online, that it will be boosted on social media, and that it may someday end up printed in book form. Absent those aspirations, would I continue to write this article? Probably not! By the age of 3 we’re already ‘helping’ Daddy in the garden and Mommy in the house. Of course, we have no interest whatsoever in helping . Asked to do something that would actually be helpful, like putting my toys back in the toy box, I’d disappear faster than a snowflake in July. Our desire is not to ‘help’; it’s to ‘be someone’, to make a mark, to project some objectified version of ourselves into the world. It doesn’t concern us that we’re making more work for our parents; we are only concerned that our grimy fingerprints be on the final product. When Grandma arrives for her annual visit, I can’t wait to let her know: “I helped Mommy bake the cake… and I helped Daddy grow the veggies.” I am someone, someone to be reckoned with, a 3 year old Wunderkind . It certainly has not occurred to us yet, and it may never, that we are merely making the first shallow etchings on our gravestone. Appropriately, homo sapiens marks its dead with inert memorials: piles of stones, giant pyramids, grave markers, and mausoleums. We are in awe of death. We dread it, and yet we never miss an opportunity to embrace it. We each build our own Taj Mahal and we begin construction early in life, very early. “I just want to leave the world a little better than I found it.” What a wonderful sentiment! Who has not thought it…or said it aloud? Translation: “I want to be dead” (I want to be like Lincoln, I want to belong to the ages). I want to be mummified; I want to be a pillar of salt. Above all else, I want to endure and to get there, I’m more than willing to give up mortal subjectivity in exchange for objective immortality. Ridiculous? Yet true! I’m willing to give up my ability to experience the world in exchange for assurance that the world will experience me. Fame! My body is not what’s buried in the Blue Hills Cemetery; it’s not what’s sitting in an urn on some unlucky relative’s mantle. My body is ‘my body of work’ and it consists of all the wonderful contributions I’ve made to improve the dismal world I inherited; my efforts are deservedly memorialized in honorary plaques and dogeared birthday cards. Greco-Roman (classical) culture put enormous emphasis on ancestry, legacy, and fame. The rise of Christianity shifted the focus from ‘then and there’ (past & future) to ‘here and now’ (immediate) and ‘hereafter’ (eternal). Note : Immediacy and eternity are denotatively synonymous (‘one and done’), albeit connotatively distinct. Similarly, Roger Penrose has theorized that the Big Freeze and the Big Bang are denotatively (i.e., mathematically) identical. Ave Maria : “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” Now is the hour of our death! In essence, Christ abolished time. His coming is ‘perpetual’ as well as ‘historical’. Again, Incarnation and Second Coming are denotatively synonymous. Immediacy and eternity are two sides of one coin; history is the odd man out. Having discovered, like Oppenheimer and Hawking, that time does not preserve but destroys, it is remarkable that we would let ourselves sink back into a fascination with our ‘place in history’. Has no one read Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works ye mighty and despair…Nothing beside remains.” But put nothing past the lure of the Renaissance or the power of the Enlightenment! Beginning with Machiavelli and ending with Marx, the Western world once again placed itself under the grand illusion of ‘naïve materialism’. It is for this reason that I refer to the period from 1500 to 1900 as the ‘Real Dark Ages’. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment devalued the immediate and the eternal and shifted focus back onto the temporal. It is as if a cosmic hypnotist rang a tiny bell on the New Year’s morning, 1500 CE, sending Western culture into a deep collective trance from which we did not wake until an alarm clock went off, rudely and unexpectedly, on 1/1/1900. A 400 year snooze! The prolific novelists of the 18th and 19th centuries gave way to Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Newton and Laplace gave way to Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, and John Bell. Kant, Hegel, and Marx were replaced by Heidegger, Sartre, and Alfred North Whitehead. The art of David and Ingres was replaced by the works of Millet, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso and Matise. Light again…at last! Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Amy Toman Contributor Amy Toman has a B.S. in Early Childhood Education from Central Michigan University. She has been married to her husband for 13 years and they have four living children. Amy spends her days teaching her children, managing her household and writing as often as possible. She delights in engaging conversation and seeing children thrive in their curiosities and abilities. The Fight for Our Children's Hearts Starts at Home

< Back Events Don’t Just Happen David Cowles Nov 19, 2024 “An event is a real life, flesh and blood application of eternal values to present circumstances.” “Events happen!” Could any English sentence be more obviously true? And so totally false? Words can be funny things sometimes, and ‘to happen’ happens to be just such a word. Technically, it’s an active voice verb like ‘to kill’. But ‘killers kill’ sounds a whole lot different than ‘events happen’. The sentence, ‘killers kill’, is jampacked with information. ‘Events happen’ tells us absolutely nothing: “Something undefined emerges as a result of something unknown.” It is a pseudo-sentence. It’s the semiotic version of the null set! This is Edward Lear at his best. “Something happens to something, resulting in something else.” We call it happenstance – something happens to happen. Brilliant! For this I took out student loans! Although grammatically active voice, happen dissolves every trace of agency. An event that just ‘happens’ is a passive result, powered by chance, possibly unintended, perhaps unwanted, of an unspecified process. Consider Universe. It’s an event, a pretty big one, but an event, nonetheless. Did the event we call ‘universe’ just happen ? Some physicists think so, but what would it mean if that were the case? How can something come from nothing solely by chance? Consider my remarks, uttered in my best faux-Etonian , after a late night boozer in a London pub, “As it happens , I’ve left my wallet at home this evening.” When something just happens (like this, presumably), no one is responsible, no one is to blame. ‘It just happened ’. What was I to do about it? It’s as if the universe had somehow played a dirty trick on all of us…and gotten away with it. Bad universe, bad! But of course, this is very far from the case! Everyone at Goat & Griffin knows that I carefully removed my wallet from my pants pocket before I left home that evening. Events don’t just happen! Ok, how do they occur then? Universe is recursive throughout and on every scale from Cosmic to Planck. Recursion is in Universe’s DNA – it is a fundamental feature of its topology. It’s perpetually aware of itself at every scale. In fact, self-awareness itself is a defining feature of Universe. An ‘event’ begins as the world’s ‘critique’ of itself, conducted from the perspective of eternal values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. An event ends when Universe physically adjusts in response to that conceptual critique. In this way, an event satisfies Gregory Bateson’s ontological criterion: It is a difference (conceptual) that makes a difference (physical). The Gospel of John founds Being on the concept of logos . Often translated, not incorrectly, as ‘Word’, logos can be understood more broadly as anything that facilitates the communication of meaning. Every ‘word’ has a truth value as well as an aesthetic quality and a political tone . Every word is itself a pattern of meanings, but each word acquires its full meaning only in the context of its position in a ‘well-formed formula’ (sentence). We recognize eternal values like Beauty, Truth, and Justice. They are manifestations of Good. In fact, most of us experience Good primarily through these manifestations. Events then are a really big deal! They don’t just happen . Every event is ‘East meets West’, ‘North meets South’, Past meets Future. An event is a real life, flesh and blood application of eternal values to present circumstances. The World is a disorganized multiplicity of elements. Through universal recursion, an emerging event orders those elements and judges the whole through the prism of Value. Based on that assessment (critique), the emerging event is a praxis intended to enable Universe to better reflect Value. At conception, the event instantly organizes its field into a World (Past) which it then judges (Present) against the standard of the Good (Eternal). Guided by Value, the event proposes, modifies, and executes a concrete ‘fix’. That fix now becomes an element in the World of every subsequent event (Future). According to Alfred North Whitehead, the World consists of events and nothing but events. These events cannot emerge randomly, evolve chaotically, or happen accidentally. There is method in their madness…and that method resides in the Universe itself. Keep the conversation going. 1. Click here to contact us on any matter. How did you like the post? How could we do better in the future? Suggestions welcome. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back Call Me a Dinosaur, I Won’t Use ChatGPT Deidre Braley "The fact of the matter is, we will never be like God, nor will we ever be able to create a system that knows everything, is capable of anything, and controls all things." “Have you heard about ChatGPT?” my husband asked one night as we ate pad thai from our laps on the couch. “No.” I rolled my eyes. “Is that something you heard about on your talk radio?” I wiggled my fingers for emphasis on that last bit. He’s always bringing home hot takes on the latest news. “Well yeah, but it’s everywhere. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s gonna be the next big thing. It writes anything you want for you. You just put in a few keywords and bam! You’ve got your newsletter, your sermon, your website content, whatever.” As someone who writes content for a living, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with this new development. “Yes, and I’m sure it’s generic and basic and boring, too.” I took a giant, disinterested bite from my chopsticks. “Let’s try it.” Before I could finish chewing and object, he had ChatGPT pulled up, cursor waiting. “What do you want it to write?” “Maybe it can do basic copy, but I doubt it can write a speech. Tell it to write a sermon or something. I’m sure it’s got its theology all wrong.” He entered a few keywords: ‘sermon on John 15.’ Instantly, a message materialized. I peered over the edge of his phone. “Read it to me.” In truth, it wasn’t bad. But it did lack any personal elements, and I pointed that out. “The power behind any good speaking is the ability to relate with the audience on a human level. AI simply can’t do that.” My husband entered, ‘add personal story,’ to the keyword bank. In a matter of moments, the sermon had been adjusted to include a personal story of overcoming addiction that somehow tied to the central themes of the message. I grimaced. Well, there’s the beginning of the end of my writing career, I sighed. I ate more noodles. Since then, ChatGPT has been popping up everywhere. In my inbox, in personal conversations, in the articles I read and the content that I follow, people are, in general, here for it. They say it’s inevitable, that it’s helpful, that it can cut time and costs, and we might as well use it for good. That this evolution of technology is a tale as old as time, and that only dinosaurs would bother to resist it. But in our home, it’s boycotted. Call me a dinosaur. See, there’s this personal element that makes ChatGPT so offensive. It’s as though it has taken all eighteen years of my schooling, every ounce of constructive feedback I’ve ever received and grown from, and the sum of the hundreds of thousands of hours I’ve spent reading and writing to develop my craft, and laughed and said, “You can’t possibly compete with my efficiency and breadth of knowledge. Your humanity is a handicap. Go find a new day job. That is, until I find a way to do that better, too.” But there’s something deeper that rubs uncomfortably against my humanity, and it’s the way that AI seems to be moving steadily toward the goal of omniscience. Not only is the very technology that we’re creating moving on a gleeful path to render us obsolete, it is also beginning to seem like an unfortunate reenactment of the scene in the garden of Eden, except with robots. “No! You (your humanity, your jobs, your creativity) will not die,” the tech gurus assure society. “In fact, God knows that when you eat it (partake in it, accept it, rely on it), your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (see Genesis 3:4-5, parenthetical phrases mine). "You’re being so dramatic!" the AI proponents will cry. But just as the serpent was so eager to point out the fun points of being like God and failed to mention the rest—being expelled from the garden, being cursed with weary toil and painful labor, facing death—those who push the propaganda that AI is for the betterment of the human race are being irresponsible when they omit the possibility for any negative implications. The fact of the matter is, we will never be like God, nor will we ever be able to create a system that knows everything, is capable of anything, and controls all things. Our efforts to do that only result in a separation from what makes being human worthwhile: a dependence on Someone greater, an interdependence on one another and the giftings he has given each of us, and the spark of the Holy Spirit that reveals mysterious things that this world can neither see nor understand (1 Corinthians 2:10). Dependence as a Gift Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. How tempting it is—to see the possibility of creating systems that will make everything streamlined, instant, accessible, and unlimited—and want to lunge toward it, to bring humanity to a new level of efficiency and ease. To make a name for ourselves and to usher in an era of increased self-reliance. These were the people who brought us AI, people will say. Can you even imagine the world without it? It’s not a new temptation. Think of the Tower of Babel; the people who settled in Shinar realized one day that they could make bricks and mortar, and suddenly they began to take “the sky’s the limit” with shocking literalism: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4 NIV). I used to be a little miffed by God’s response. He saw what they were doing, realized that if they kept working together like this nothing would be impossible for them, and then confused them by giving them different languages and spreading them all over the earth (Genesis 11:5-9). Let the people have this! I’d think. Teamwork makes the dream work! And if they wanted to work together to build a really tall tower, well, where was the real harm in that? But God can see the implications of our actions far past our own nearsightedness. The people saw a tower, God saw their hubris destroying them. The people saw security in self-reliance, God saw them forgetting that security comes from him alone. The people saw a magnificent plan, but God saw the holes shot all through it and saw it fit to humble them. In his omniscient goodness, God scattered the people all over the earth before they could live out the lie that glory and self-sufficiency are superior to his love and security. While it’s unlikely they were thrilled with this outcome, they lacked the foresight and understanding to acknowledge that their forced dependence on God was a gift—he was protecting them from being destroyed by their own humanity. I haven’t a single doubt that ChatGPT will continue to grow and be refined. People will spend their entire lives working to perfect it, and they will be applauded for it. The tower will reach higher, the fortress of AI will be strengthened—but to what end? Will our own nearsightedness lead us into something we haven’t bargained for? The Value of Interdependence Speaking of nearsightedness, the self-checkout line at Target makes me sad. And the self-order kiosks at restaurants strike me as miniature tragedies—proof of a regression for humanity, rather than progress. They seem to be evidence that our society has moved away from valuing people as living, human beings to thinking of them instead as expensive roadblocks to growth. Of course, people are costly in every sense of the word: they cost money and time and emotional investment. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense to eliminate as many as possible. In terms of ChatGPT, for example, why take the time to sit down with a content creator and discuss the unique needs of your business when you can enter a handful of keywords into a website and have your content generated instantaneously? Plus, how can you compete with free? Human minds are expensive, unpredictable, and limited. They have feelings and opinions. OpenAI removes the need to deal with any of that. But come now. We aren’t so naive as to believe that there’s no cost to making decisions to cut expenses. When we decide to eliminate human interaction—whether in designing content for our websites or ordering french fries at Applebee’s—we are saying, in effect, that we can do it ourselves. That we’ve got our own talents and abilities, and whatever we haven’t got, our technology will make up for it. We’ve got this. I often think of an anecdote I once heard about a small village in Africa. Every day, the women of the village would go to the river to wash their laundry. They would talk and share and laugh and cry together while laboring over their wash. Over time, the women began to get washing machines in their houses, and they didn’t have to go down to the river anymore. They could push a button and move on with their days, right from the comfort of their homes. But, as the months and years progressed, something unexpected happened: the women realized they did not feel that their lives were enhanced by the efficiency and ease the laundry machines had brought, but rather noticed that they felt more melancholy, more anxious, and more alone. The new technology had eliminated the necessity of coming together each day at the river and, unintentionally, had unraveled the fabric of their community. We do the same every time we welcome new technology that allows us to keep our time, energy, and money to ourselves at the expense of human interaction. Just as Paul wrote, “The eye can’t say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ The head can’t say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ we cannot, in good faith, look at our fellow humans and say, “I’ve reached a point where I don’t need you anymore. I can do it all myself” (1 Corinthians 12:21). In doing so, we’re rejecting the inalienable truth that we’ve been designed for community, that we are, in fact, limited, and that it is when our giftings work in interdependence that we’ll feel most satisfied, supported, and successful. The Holy Spirit as Creative Genius Finally—and this is my coup de grâce—there is one thing that ChatGPT will never be able to replicate or harness, and that is the creative genius of the Holy Spirit. While AI might be more efficient, more expansive, and more cost-effective than the human mind, it will never be able to tap into this one superpower that is only accessible to humanity. And not for a moment should this power be mocked or dismissed. In a world where content is oozing out of our phones and televisions and radios and watches, information feels cheap. Much of it is formulaic, and even if the information is new, it is palpably devoid of any real spark or magic. The Holy Spirit can offer that magic. God says, “Call to me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). God—the creator of the universe, who is a well of deep mystery and creative brilliance—invites his people to ask him anything, and then promises to answer. And answer, he will. As a writer, I can attest to this wild and wonderful mystery. The level of originality and truth in my work is directly related to the amount of Holy Spirit it is infused with. And the level of connection it makes with my audience is a powerful indicator of how well I was able to tune into His whispers while I wrote. Work without the Holy Spirit falls flat. Work with it, however, rings magical and fascinating and unique and true. In this way, the human spirit wins. ChatGPT is a robot, and its lack of soul will forever be its downfall. I have this dream that one day society will step back from its advancements, look up and look around, and realize that its deepest and truest needs are not actually more knowledge, efficiency, or ease, but rather connection, thoughtfulness, and its ability to depend on God and others for nourishment. At the end of the day, the question of AI isn’t about the usefulness of ChatGPT or self-help kiosks; their value is easy to see. The real question is: Just because we can do it, does it mean we should? Is it worth it to eat the fruit, if it means we will lose the Garden? Deidre Braley is a freelance writer and editor. She lives in Maine with her husband and two children, and most days can be found savoring an overly cheesy bagel or drinking a second cup of coffee while working on her weekly newsletter, The Second Cup . She is a strong believer in the power of poetry, picking roadside flowers, and blowing past small talk at all costs. Follow her on Instagram @deidresecondcup or on Facebook — she loves meeting new friends. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Previous Next

< Back Xiako Can't Count David Cowles So, what’s up with the Piraha? How can they get by without numbers? Xiako is a typical teenager. Self-absorbed and rebellious, she would fit right in at any American high school. Not to say that she isn’t different. She is a member of the Piraha tribe, a small, self-isolating community in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. Imagine that she’s visiting the United States for the first time as part of some sort of cultural exchange program. She’s smart, hard-working, and enjoys taking care of younger children. Of course, language is an issue. Her language isn’t at all like English. (In fact, it’s not at all like any other living language.) But Xiako has a much bigger problem: Xiako can’t count! Because she can’t count, she can’t do even the simplest math. Her host family is making great progress teaching her English, but they’re having no luck at all with arithmetic. How come? You said she was smart, and I can see that from the progress she’s made learning English; so, what’s up with her numbers ? Well, for one thing, she doesn’t have any! (Yup, you read it right: she doesn’t have any numbers.) The Piraha don’t distinguish 1 from 2 or 2 from 10, so no wonder she finds math difficult. Try solving the simplest math problem without using numbers…See what I mean? Without a concept of number, all attempts to teach Xiako the simplest arithmetic were doomed to failure. Even 1 + 1 = 2 made no sense to her. There’s no 1 to begin with, so there’s no 1 + 1 and if there’s no 1 + 1, how than there be a 2 (whatever ‘2’ might mean)? So, what’s up with the Piraha? How can they get by without numbers? Turns out, the Piraha get along quite nicely thank you, that is, until they cross paths with folks like us, i.e., folks from ‘number enabled’ cultures like ours. When that happens, there’s trouble, not violence (the Piraha are a peaceful people), but trouble! For example, how can you conclude a modern commercial transaction when one party uses numbers, and the other party doesn’t? Imagine that I run a trading post several miles downriver from a Piraha village. I have a customer! And my customer wants fish. I’d like to be able to ask, “How much fish would you like?” or “How many fish do you want?” or “How much do you want to spend?” but I can’t say any of those things. I can’t put the fish on a table and count them; I can’t put them on a scale and weigh them, and I have no idea how to communicate what I mean by ‘price.’ Why do we have numbers while the Piraha don’t? Perhaps because we understand the world as a collection of objects and/or events. In mathematics, a collection of things is often referred to as a set . I immediately want to know the size of my set, how many members does it have? How many apples? How many oranges? The Piraha have no idea of sets. Each event stands on its own. “One is one and all alone and evermore shall be so.” But Being Piraha doesn’t mean being lonely . Far from it. The Piraha are extremely social. Many cultures have a less developed number system than ours. For example, there are cultures that rely on just 3 numbers: One, two, many. Inconvenient? Yes. Impossible to work with? No. With just the numerals 1, 2, >2, we can work through any transaction. It just might take a ‘bit’ (pun intended): remember, computers do all that they do with only two numbers: 0 and 1. Big Blue won Jeopardy using nothing but 0’s and 1’s. But Xiago has no 0 and no 1. We’re having great success teaching her English, why can’t we teach her math? The difference is that Piraha understand ‘language’ (they have one) but not ‘numbers’ (they have none). To move from Piraha to English is difficult but possible. To move from no numbers, not even a concept of ‘number,’ to the Set of Real Numbers might just be impossible. This total lack of numeracy in Piraha culture caught anthropologists by surprise. There are roughly 7,500 distinct human cultures. 7,499 apparently have a concept of number, one does not. Guess which one! 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 Beyond Gertrude Stein David Cowles May 11, 2023 “The agony of childhood is only incidentally related to bad parenting. The Prince and the Pauper are, above all else, children, and childhood is exile.” As ATM frequent fliers already know, we are big fans of Gertrude Stein. In my view, she is one of only a handful of truly original 20 th century prose writers. So the title of this article, Beyond Gertrude Stein , gave me pause. There’s precious little ‘beyond GS,' but here goes… Famously, Ms. Stein wrote, “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” No matter how old or young we are ‘objectively,' we feel ourselves as ‘young men and young women.' I’m 23 and free! I can go anywhere and do (almost) anything. In our culture, the range of so-called ‘age-appropriate’ behaviors is broadest during the period we define as ‘young adulthood.' Age consciousness is lowest and, therefore, so is age-related tension. This is our period of maximum chronological mobility . This is our golden age! Even so , society always has its expectations: “These are the best years of your life, don’t waste them; if you plan to have a family, you better start soon; I ran into Betty at the supermarket, her Mikey is already a junior partner.” Nuisances, no doubt, but a far cry from the boot camp of childhood or the super max of seniority. Still, even a nuisance can cause tension; that’s why I always keep a fly swatter in my desk drawer. When we were in nursery school, we were all pretty much the same; so it is again now that we’re all on Boot… I mean Shady… Hill. “Damn girl, is that you? Weren’t you in my play group at Humpty Dumpty Academy?” In fact, a bunch of us HD grads are matriculating at SH now, getting ready for that final ‘final exam.' From nursery school to nursing home, about 3.5 miles I’m told, but oh, the adventures we had on the way! We had a million different jobs; we traveled to a million different places; we met a million different people; we had a million different kids, some of whom still visit on holidays. At every stage of life, we experience age-related tension. We must be what we are not: a baby, a child, an adolescent, etc. Naively, we assume that people can and should just be themselves whatever their age, but, of course, you can’t ever ‘just be yourself,' not at any age. You must always ‘prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’ (Eliot). At least you’re in good company! These days even God ‘prepares a face.' He caught Moses’ attention in a ‘burning bush’; he confronted Job ‘out of the whirlwind’; and he revealed himself to Elijah as a ‘still small voice.' Imagine that the course of one’s life is like a sine wave. The peaks correspond to the periods of greatest age-related tension, the troughs are energy sinks . Once I am at rest in an energy sink, I’m ‘trapped’…but blissfully so, and young adulthood is the mother of all such sinks! From here, no matter which way I move, tension can only increase. This is as close as I’m ever going to get to my ‘Octopuses’ Garden in the shade’ (Beatles), and we cling to it…desperately. Growing up, I had a perfectly acceptable life. Nevertheless, when I left home ‘for good’ at age 18, I felt as though a tremendous weight had been lifted. I was surprised; I had not known that I was carrying such a heavy load. Many times over the next decade, I remarked to friends, “My worst day since leaving home was better than my best day before .” Had my parents overheard, this would have been hurtful. They did what they could to make my childhood a positive experience. In retrospect, nothing they might have done differently would have made much difference. The agony of childhood is only incidentally related to bad parenting. The Prince and the Pauper are, above all else, children, and childhood is exile. We sojourn in a foreign land! Like most ‘60s kids, I hungered for independence; even so, I did not anticipate the extent of the physical relief it would bring. At the age of 23, I found myself splashing about like an empowered infant in my newly discovered Kohler ‘energy sink.' From nursery school to nursing home, you’re prodded all along the way to ‘act your age.' But how? We’re not born with a sense of ‘age.' It might sound crazy, but you have to learn to be an infant (“be cute…or else”), a kid, an adolescent, an adult, a geezer. From this data, Stein concluded that ‘young adulthood’ is our ‘natural age,’ but there is nothing intrinsically special about it. Society has made it special by glorifying it. We have only minimal behavioral expectations of young adults. ‘Don’t shoot someone’ is a far cry from ‘drink your milk’ or ‘ring the nurse when you need to move your bowels.' It’s not so hard/being me/now that I’m finally/23! Of all life’s stages, young adulthood is when we’re least conscious of age. We’re old enough now to do most anything we want (except run for president), but we’re still young enough to ‘indulge our inner child’ when necessary. You can hobnob with septuagenarians at a morning board meeting and then join a pick-up basketball game with 14-year-olds in the afternoon. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for all our lives! Free at last…at least sort of. Stein takes this to mean that “we are always to ourselves young men and young women.” Actually though, we’re ageless! Being expected to “act your age” is tension-generating at every age, albeit least so in young adulthood. On the other hand, it sucks being five…or, God forbid, 75! Image: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973). Gertrude Stein, 1905–6. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946. (47.106) © 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 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. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . 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 Covid 20 David Cowles So we were told that COVID-19 came from bats. By the summer of 2020, it should have been obvious that this was wrong. COVID-19 has behaved in some very unique ways that most probably reflect the effects of ‘human engineering’. Now the scientific consensus is shifting. So we were told that COVID-19 came from bats. By the summer of 2020, it should have been obvious that this was wrong. COVID-19 has behaved in some very unique ways that most probably reflect the effects of ‘human engineering’. Now the scientific consensus is shifting. Even Fauci says that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan lab and President Biden, to his credit, is aggressively pursuing that hypothesis. If correct, it means that the Chinese are working on biological weapons they could use against the US and other countries in the future. If the uncompleted COVID virus did this much damage, think of what havoc the completed version might bring. Could COVID-20 be around the corner? Previous Next

< Back Civilization is Discontent David Cowles Jan 8, 2026 “Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair.” 1100 words, 5 minute read. Life is simple! Eat, sleep, have sex, and stay alive. For almost all species, tool use, if any, is situational: grab stick, hit hive, eat honey, discard. The tool does not become a ‘thing in itself’. Winnie the Pooh does not think to put his Rube Goldberg contraptions into a museum. Christoper Robin on the other hand… Eve ate the proverbial apple in search of knowledge – a brave if costly choice. But in expelling Earth’s First Family from Paradise, God got the last laugh. From the get-go, the need to nourish, rest, procreate, and survive stimulated the emergence of a Technosphere, an amalgamation of tools and techniques intended to facilitate the human project. Genesis tells us that Abel tended sheep while Cain grew veg, at least until he went off to build cities. (Apparently, the authors thought that the sedentary life of a farmer was more conducive to urbanization than the nomadic life of a herdsman.) In Eden, God protected his intellectual property via statue (Don’t Eat the Fruit). Post Eden, humanity is on its own (“everything is permitted” – Dostoevsky), but no bother – God can rely on us to build nearly impermeable ‘physical’ barriers between ourselves and gnosis . To begin, we make a fetish of our tools. They become things in themselves and we house them in museums to celebrate our achievements. ( True art cuts the other way – it pierces the veil. Here’s a simple test of artistic authenticity: Does this open-up the ineffable to me…or is it just another brick in the epistemological wall? We are unable to see the forest for the trees. We have devised a highly non-linear ego-centric model of the World. Whatever is closest to me in space and time takes on an outsized importance: my family, my ‘garden’, my nation, my planet, my ‘day’. We see the World as if it had been built by Escher. (Perhaps it was?) We form social groups: our families, our neighborhoods, parishes, clubs, unions, etc. and we endow each with almost mystical significance. That ‘manufactured mattering’ obscures the real communities behind them. Manufactured mattering leads us to adopt false and empty Values, the ‘idols’ of the Old Testament under a new guise. I refer, of course, to our twin desires for fame and fortune. Longevity masquerades as eternity, security as peace. Ingeniously, we build economic systems that positively enslave us. Marx was right: we’ve gone from plantation slavery to wage slavery. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” ( The Who ) Then we fine tune our economies to ensure that the vast majority of us, around the world and throughout history, remain in a perpetual state of want so that “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (Wordsworth) Socialism, capitalism, it makes no difference: we all live just below our own personal (floating) poverty line. Technology threatens the structural integrity of our cocoon. It develops geometrically and might soon outpace demand: Marx’ surplus. But ‘we’ are way too smart for Karl. We endlessly proliferate needs to exceed ever so slightly our accelerating ability to satisfy them. Supply will never catch up with demand. There is no such thing as ‘surplus’ in our world. Every so often, some ‘goodie two shoes’ (me?) comes along shouting, “Live simply that others may simply live.” But the relentless expansion of the catalogue of available goods and services makes a simple lifestyle unattractive. “’Tis the gift to be simple,” according to the Shaker hymn adapted by Aaron Copeland for Appalachian Spring ; but how many Shakers do you know? Culture is another symptom, and engine, of Civilization. On the one hand, it is a method of recording and preserving our advances toward Truth, but on the other, it forms a forbidding barrier, shielding Truth from experience. We acculturate our children, i.e. we train them to be the people we wish we had been. We prepare them for life…our life. We train them to fight the last war. Kultcha projects the past into the future and protects us from having to live in the present. We are always one generation out of sync. As further protection against the possibility of a satisfied citizenry, we have invented yet another ring of fortifications: Society - a new pantheon of needs, e.g. recognition, honors, social status, and fame, i.e. things that make us feel good about ourselves. We must feel good about ourselves; we crave it at all costs – which is why cyberbullying so often ends in self-harm. At the bottom of this particular rabbit hole, lies the mother of all delusions: our nearly universal desire to ‘leave the world a better place’ - as if we could know what’s ‘better’ beyond our immediate environs, and as if we could ‘make it so’ if we did. Add to that a litany of activities, euphemistically known as ‘hobbies’ (hobbles?). For example, many of us devote two days a week to a pointless pursuit known as golf . We hit a ball and chase after it like a dog playing fetch; from some vantage points, we must appear mad. Yet, we gladly trade family and career in hopes of a pewter cup at the end of the season. And those of us who can’t do, root. We rely on a team of professionals to do our ‘doing’ for us. Like bourgeois draftees during the Civil War, we pay others to perform in our place. We live and die for the Yankees and the Knicks, though most of us will never know George Castanza, or anyone else connected to either team. Every weekend, New Yorkers sit down to their TVs and joust with their peers in Boston and LA…Philly, Frisco, and Chitown if they’re slumming…virtually. We have measured out our lives with coffee spoons and yet we cling to the illusion that “there will be time…there will be time for all the works and days of hands.” (Eliot) And so we create bucket lists – things we want to experience ‘in the living years’, things we will remember, things we may record in journals or on photos, things we can share with others via social media…until the memories flicker out and the records decompose. How diabolically ingenious! Driven by our unquenchable thirst for sweet gnosis , we have erected virtually impregnable fortifications ( aka civilization) to protect the ‘pearl of great price’ from our probes. Look upon our works, O Ozymandias, and despair – “nothing beside remains…boundless and bare. The lone and level sands stretch far away.” (Shelley) *** Giorgio de Chirico — The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914) presents a deserted cityscape where elongated shadows, rigid architecture, and an unseen threat create a sense of unease beneath apparent order. A small child and a rolling hoop introduce movement and innocence, contrasting with the oppressive stillness and suggesting a world governed by hidden forces rather than human logic. The painting embodies metaphysical uncertainty, inviting the viewer to sense an underlying truth that is felt intuitively but never fully revealed. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! 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< Back Electricity “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” is a movie currently playing on Amazon Prime. Louis is an early 20th century English painter with zero artistic merit…but that’s not important. What is important is the way Louis experiences the world. From time to time, he encounters the ineffable in the course of his everyday living. He imagines that what he is experiencing is a form of ‘electricity’ that permeates the world but lies beneath the plane of ordinary sensory perception. Many of us have had a similar experience; but I doubt if any of us called it “electricity”. In my day, it was fashionable to call it “energy”; Star Wars called it “the force”. I wonder, what’s the current nom de jour? The ineffable is the ineffable because it is…well, ineffable. It is the ‘immanence of transcendence’ in our everyday world. If we must name it, we must name it metaphorically. It is, after all, ineffable. In classical times, it might have been called “beauty”; in the middle ages, “God”. But to Louis Wain, it is “electricity”. How come? Louis Wain lived in the final days of a dark age ironically known as The Enlightenment. Though long past, it still casts a shadow. The Enlightenment was rooted in materialism and mechanism and in the certain belief that technological progress would inevitably bring about Utopia. So “electricity” was the closest anyone of that era could come to naming the ineffable. We know better today; but we are still struggling to find our own metaphor for the immanence of transcendence in the world. David Cowles Share Previous Next

< Back Bryon David Contributor Bryon David is just one “weird” person and a sinner trying to do his best. “I believe Jesus Christ is the one true God and my only hope. I believe this after much time spent challenging this belief in many ways. He truly is the only way I know. I write when I feel inspired–fiction, true stories, thought trains, and prayers when they can help someone.” Finding Light: A Prayer for Wisdom and Forgiveness