< Back Who Dunnit? David Cowles Oct 4, 2022 “Was it Colonel Mustard in the Conservatory with the Wrench? Or…” Ever play the game of Clue ? Who dunnit? Was it Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the wrench? Or Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick? There are 324 potential combinations of suspects (6), weapons (6), and venues (9); and all 324 possible combinations (6 x 6 x 9) are equally probable. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to reduce 324 potentialities down to one actuality. The game of Cosmology is a greatly simplified version of Clue . You have no opponents! You play the game alone, and you play until you win… or give up trying. Bora-boring! Why is it then that the world’s best minds (carbon or silicon) have been playing Cosmology for at least the last 10,000 years (and probably for many tens of thousands of years before that)? Shoot, it even tops Dungeons and Dragons. “Why are things the way they are?” It seems we can’t help but ask this question. Apparently, M. Descartes, Sum ergo quaero (I am, therefore I seek). But when we do seek to unravel this mystery, it appears that the range of possible solutions is unexpectedly narrow. Consider the following two possibilities: #1 Whatever happens, happens! No further explanation is necessary or even possible. Happening is happenstance! Sidebar #1 : This does not mean that events must occur randomly. Causality and/or other forms of correlation could characterize certain subdomains (‘societies’ or even ‘epochs’ in the terminology of Alfred North Whitehead); also, events themselves have the capacity to form societies and epochs, but any such subdomains would have to be situated in a meta-domain, and the ultimate meta- domain would have to be happenstance. #2 Whatever happens, happens as a result of will (extrinsic or intrinsic). Extrinsic will : things happen according to plan or as directed ad hoc. Note: plan and ad hoc are only distinct in a spatiotemporal context. Otherwise, they are synonymous. Intrinsic will : things happen according to their own free will in the context of a specific actual world. Sidebar #2 : All things (events) are causa sui , but not all things are causa sui ex nihilo . Sidebar #3 : Freedom in the absence of an actual world is happenstance (above). It is the relevant presence of an actual world that enables an event to proceed according to will rather than chance. Will react to world! Amazingly, certain very popular conceptions turn out to be just sub-versions of the two models above: Whatever happens, happens as a result of the initial conditions of the Universe (Big Bang). If initial conditions are the result of happenstance, then see #1 above. If initial conditions result from will, then see #2 . Whatever happens, happens as a result of things that happened in the past (causality). If ‘things in the past’ occurred by happenstance, then see #1 above. If ‘things in the past’ occurred by will, then see #2 above. Whatever happens, happens in the service of a particular future (teleology). If ‘things in the future’ occur by happenstance, then see #1 above. If ‘things in the future’ occurred by will, then see #2 above. So, it turns out that we’re saying something pretty big here! Any cosmological model that relies on efficient causation (so-called cause and effect) or final causation (purpose, meaning) is merely a sub-version of either model #1 (happenstance) or model #2 (will) above. So, your universe comes with a choice of flavors, but just three flavors (don’t want to spoil you): · Vanilla (happenstance) · Chocolate (extrinsic will: God?) · Strawberry (intrinsic will: freedom!) So, pretty simple, right? Ok, but maybe not quite so simple! Have you considered the possibility of a hybrid model: Some events just happen; some events are willed extrinsically; and some events are willed intrinsically. There’s nothing intrinsically – pun intended – wrong with a hybrid model; it doesn’t undermine anything we’ve said above. On the contrary, we just extended our models’ reach… as long as you can figure out what goes where, i.e., how the different domains interact. Good luck with that. 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 What Christianity Got Right David Cowles Jul 25, 2024 “Christianity cannot exist as part of contemporary culture; it is an alternative to it. It is the antidote.” “All religions are essentially the same, right? I mean, they all believe in a higher power and they all urge us to behave morally.” There’s a name for this. It’s called syncretism , the belief that ‘all religions are compatible’. This way of thinking is well suited to today’s moral relativism and democratic anthropology. We want to build a tent so big that almost everyone…and everything…fits in. To say that someone is wrong or that someone is more right than someone else goes against the modern grain, unless we’re talking about politics – in which case I am always right and everyone else is always flat out wrong, right? From a Christian perspective, it is laudable to admire the spiritual practices of Eastern religions, the historicity of Judaism, and animism's respect for the natural world. But it is a great mistake not to recognize and appreciate the beliefs and practices that make Christianity different from all others. Christianity, especially Catholicism, is unique among the world’s faiths. I do not wish to debate whether various Christian doctrines and rituals have congruence with other religions. I will assert, however, that taken together, these doctrines clearly make Christianity unique…in very important ways. It is fashionable now to believe that all faith is superfluous. After all, science is close to giving us all the answers we need, isn’t it? And you certainly don’t need God to show you how to be ‘good’, do you? Sound familiar? We live in an anti-clerical age; in many ways the Church has brought this on itself. Church has lost the courage of its convictions; it no longer knows how to talk about what it believes. Like a shy middle schooler, it is desperate to fit in…which only makes its isolation more pronounced. In the Middle Ages, bishops sat next to nobles at the king’s banquet table. Oh, how the hierarchy hungers to regain such lost respect! But as any high school survivor knows, respect is won by having convictions and sticking to them, by standing up for yourself, and by living an authentic life, i.e. a life consistent with your professed beliefs. For Christianity, I’m afraid that that ship has sailed! While specific congregations hold on tenaciously to certain doctrines, the Christian Weltanschauung (world view) has all but disappeared. Christianity cannot survive by tacking its counter cultural doctrines onto secular scaffolding. Christianity is the most radical ideology extant in the world today. By far, bar none! Own it! You can’t hide it. But just how radical is it? Let’s take a peek at some of its greatest hits: Trinity – God is not some single minded despot. God is process and Trinity is the minimal structure necessary for process. (A > B > C > A) Logos – “In the beginning was the Word ( logos ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came to be through the Word… In him was life and that life was the light…and darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1: 1 – 5) The order of the Universe is not the product of chance but a manifestation of God. God is order and order God. Incarnation – ‘Godmen’ abound, demiurges that combine aspects of divinity with aspects of humanity. Christ is different; Christ is “true God and true man,” wholly human and wholly divine. Christ is the superposition of two distinct states of being. Apparently, the Council of Nicaea was hip to Quantum logic long before Schoedinger. Incarnation turns the Universe inside out...like an old sock. God created, sustains, and redeems the spatiotemporal world; he is the Alpha (Father) and the Omega (Son) and the Spirit that infuses every moment in between. But this same God is also a quantum (one life) within that world. The whole is a part of itself. Transubstantiation – The material world of ‘substances and accidents (qualities)’ is real; it is not an illusion. But neither is it ultimate reality . Neither time and space, nor matter and energy, nor substance and accident are immutable. Bread and wine can…and do…become the Body and Blood of Christ (Eucharist). “Never could learn to drink that blood and call it wine.” (Bob Dylan) The Great Commandment – Loving your neighbor as yourself is not just an ethical precept. It identifies the self with the other and with God. (Yet the crucial distinctions are not blurred.) Whatever you do for or to others, you do for or to God, and for or to yourself. Ethics is Trinitarian too. Every subject is its own object and every object its own subject. English verbs come in two voices: active and passive. Neither captures what is going on during an event. Expressing the Christian world view calls for a Middle Voice , a grammatical form that has disappeared from most Indo-European languages. How can we expect to sit at the cool kids’ table when we don’t even speak their language? Eternity – The spatiotemporal world is limited by space and time. It had a beginning and it will have an end. But whatever happens happens and cannot unhappen. To be is to be eternally. Being is eternal. Being is eternity. Resurrection – We endure, not as ‘shades’ but as ‘glorified bodies’, wholly material, wholly spiritual. Christianity is not an Idealism (Hegel) but a Materialism (Marx). Death marks the end of our temporal lives, but it clears the deck for eternal life. Apocalypse – “The last enemy to be destroyed is death…that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15: 25, 28) If these doctrines are true, they cannot exist as footnotes to contemporary, secular culture. To believe these things and then to live life as though they made no difference is madness. Christianity cannot exist as part of contemporary culture; it is an alternative to it. It is the antidote. We can’t do without it! 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. Keep the conversation going. 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 Will of God David Cowles May 18, 2023 “…Whatever injects beauty into the world…fills it with truth…restores justice…is the Will of God. Whatever happens will be redeemed and whatever is redeemed is God’s Will.” In most editions of the Bible, the Book of Job is suspended between Torah and the Gospels . Its position is apt. It is a lengthy (over long?) meditation on the Problem of Evil – a ‘problem’ introduced in Genesis but resolved in Revelation . If this sounds surprisingly simplistic, it’s because it is. Nevertheless, the Problem of Evil is cited by non-believers as the number one reason for their rejection of Judeo-Christian theology. It was also the rationale Bertrand Russell relied on in his best-seller, Why I am not a Christian. Why the disconnect? It begins, unfortunately, with our ( mis ) understanding of the story of creation itself. The popular image of God shouting commands into an abyss is anti-Biblical…and a bit ridiculous. No wonder folks don’t believe. It is important to remember that YHWH said, “ Let there be light.” ( Genesis , 1: 3) He did not say, “Be there, Light!” as most people seem to think. God is not auditioning for the role of ‘frustrated parent’ barking orders at a naughty child; nor is he a raging motorist, yelling, “Start, you sucker!” as his stalled automobile struggles to turnover. Rather, he is a compassionate curator ! Nor did he imagine that light would obliterate primal darkness (“…the earth was without form with darkness over the abyss…” – v. 2). Instead, we learn that God “separated the light from the darkness” (v. 3). Later, in the Gospel of John , we celebrate the fact that “the darkness has not overcome it.” (1: 5) Phase #1 of the creation process was not complete, however, until “God saw that it (the light) was good” (v. 4) and “Evening (darkness) came and morning (light) followed, the first day.” (v. 5) All of which raises an obvious question: Why would an ‘omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent’ God need to ‘wait and see’ before determining that created light was a good thing? Could God have created something that was not good ? Would God need to pause and assess developments before rendering judgement? In a sense the whole so-called Problem of Evil is addressed and resolved in these first 5 verses of the Bible. All the stuff about God’s ‘omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence’ comes later and, for our purposes right now, is beside the point. The testimony of Genesis is clear: God’s hands are clean! Not so, the Book of Job . Here God is put on trial, charged with ‘perverting the course of justice’. Job has quite literally staked his life, his health, his family, his fortune, and his reputation on the verdict. But our prototypical existential hero has a tough ‘row to hoe’. God is represented, albeit incompetently, by a ‘dream team’ consisting of three ‘wise men’ and a ‘fool’. Speaking of ‘fools’, Job appears pro se ; he has himself for a lawyer! Worse, God is not only the defendant but also judge and jury. God would happily recuse himself…but who is qualified to take over? Can anyone say, “Conflict of interest?” The trial raises every imaginable legal issue. Does Job have ‘standing’ to sue God? Can God even be sued? Can God be compelled (by subpoena) to come to court? If the court were to rule against God, how could it enforce its verdict? How could it impose a sentence on the Creator of Heaven and Earth? Now the matter of God’s ‘omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence’ takes center stage. Unlike Genesis , Job presents the Problem of Evil in its more familiar trappings. A full account of trial proceedings are available elsewhere on this site. The transcript is instructive. Job’s understanding of evil is one most of us will recognize: “(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) ‘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 intact on to future generations (this was before Estate Taxes). I, on the other hand, no longer have assets…or children to leave them to if I did. I live on a dunghill, my body covered with scabs.’ God, however, approaches the problem from a very different perspective: “Behold now Behemoth which like you I created (40: 15)...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) Job views Behemoth from a human perspective. He is fearsome, dangerous and destructive. He is the embodiment of evil. But that’s not God’s perspective. God sees things from Behemoth’s perspective as well as Job’s and God values Behemoth’s qualities, the very qualities that Job dreads. Even more importantly, God sees things from a cosmic, ecological perspective: “ 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) But Job is unphased; he will not budge. He meets God’s bluster with his trademarked ‘patience’. He has faith that justice will out: in the end the court will have no choice but to find in his favor. Clearly, God has a broader cosmological mandate than Job. He values Behemoth’s qualities per se , oblivious to the intermediate ends for which they’re used. That is the price we pay for our ontological freedom. God can afford to overlook the transient. He knows the Universe, as he created it, will ‘come round’ in the end. The coming of the Kingdom is inevitable. It is built into the teleological structure of Being. ‘When’ and how that Kingdom comes to be is undetermined; that’s up to us ! But that it comes to be and what it comes to be (divine values) are hardwired. We might sympathize with God’s predicament, but Job never takes his eye off the ball. He ignores God’s pleas for understanding; he stands his ground. Suffice to say, the procedural issues are ultimately resolved to the satisfaction of both parties and, in a stunning reversal of fortunes, God finds against himself and restores all of Job’s assets plus damages . But Job remains underwhelmed. He expected this outcome all along. His hurdles were merely procedural. Once the trial commenced, Job trusted that he would prevail. Even the obvious conflict of interest didn’t concern him. Job did not believe that God’s nature would allow him to act unjustly…and he was right! Right trumps wrong after all. But the court’s decision applies just to this one case; millions of Job’s fellow sufferers, while buoyed by the trial’s outcome, remain mired in pain. The final resolution, the cosmic solution, comes in the New Testament’s Resurrection narratives and in the Book of Revelation . Here we learn (after the prophet Isaiah) that God is our fellow traveler, that he suffers ‘the whips and snares of time’ alongside us, via compassion and ultimately, via Incarnation. He is born, tiny and defenseless, into our world at our level. He endures in full the pain of mortality, the dark night of despair, and a slow and painful death on a cross. Clearly, our God is no wimp! But had the story ended at Cavalry, we’d still be in rough shape; fortunately, it didn’t! Jesus overcame mortality, pain and death via his Resurrection and eventual Ascension into Heaven (where he sits at the right hand of his Father). Finally, the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation , describes in minute detail, albeit coded in symbolism, the process by which evil will be eradicated, root and branch, from the World, and our primal Paradise restored, fulfilling Paul’s assurance that God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15: 28), pan in panti ( Anaxagoras ). Once Scripture is understood in this way, i.e. on its own terms and not those imposed on it by non-believers, one can only ask, “What problem of evil?” 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 Football and Spirituality David Cowles Sep 19, 2023 “How can I give myself up to the sheer artistry of sport when I am so deeply invested in the outcome of every contest?” It’s not an easy thing to do - watch a game with no attachment to the results! Admire the pageantry, the strategy, the superhuman feats - the dance, both choreographed and improvised – but ignore the outcome. Even as small children, we are sucked into affinities. “We root, root, root, for the home team.” For such loyalty, we might conceivably be forgiven, but it never ends there. With every affinity comes a network of antipathies. “I root for two teams, the Red Sox and whoever is playing the Yankees.” When it comes to professional football, I root for the Patriots (don’t shoot me!). ‘We’re #1 ’ means that every other team is less than one. We hate them all, we wish them ill – competitively of course, not personally – but still, not very spiritual, is it? As soon as we profess affinity for one team in a league, we create antipathy toward every other team in that league. So tonight, the Falcons are playing the Chargers. As a member of Patriot Nation, I hate them both, but do I care who wins? You bet I do! The Falcons are in the other conference; unless we happen to play them during the regular season - or in the Super Bowl - their ups and downs are irrelevant to us. So the Falcons are rated (– 1). We hate them…but not that much. Sidebar : Note the frequent appearance of the pronouns ‘we/us’ in the paragraph above. In my mind, Robert Kraft, Bill Belichick, and I constitute a nexus – a nexus that can be the subject or the object of any sentence, a nexus where two members have never even heard of the third. Could this form the basis of a new Trinitarian theology? “Father, Son, may I introduce you to your biggest fan, the Holy Spirit?” – I don’t think so! So much for the Falcons; the Chargers are a different story. They are in our conference and likely to compete with us for a playoff spot. If we both make the playoffs, we are likely to face each other in post-season play. Sorry guys, you get a (– 3). So we’re all in on the Falcons tonight. We hate them less than we hate the Chargers, but we hate the Chargers less than we hate the other teams in our division: (– 5) for them! Very spiritual. Fandom is symmetry breaking. The instant we declare for any NFL team, all 32 teams crystallize into a hierarchy of preferences. Once symmetry is broken, every one of the 496 line segments potentially connecting teams instantly becomes a vector. Given any contest between any two teams, we know immediately who our favorite is. But the insanity doesn’t stop there! Some games are more important to us than others. From the perspective of a Pats fan, a game between two mediocre NFC teams is much less important than a game between two of our division rivals. Theoretically, each of the 496 potential matchups has its own unique ‘importance coefficient’…from the Patriot perspective. The direction of each vector and the relative strength of each coefficient will change when viewed from any of the 31 remaining perspectives. No wonder I like football so much! All this is part of what makes competitive sports so engaging, but it wreaks havoc on my spirituality. How can I give myself up to the sheer artistry of sport when I am so deeply invested in the outcome of every contest? There is, of course, only one right answer: Abandon the illusion that you are part of any nexus that includes any professional football owners, coaches, or players; focus on the divine virtues (gracefulness, persistency, harmony, etc.) that manifest during each game; detach entirely from the outcome. So, now that you know, can I count on you to put this new wisdom into action next Sunday? Of course not! Admit it, you’re addicted, and you can’t quit cold turkey. Would you consider Methadone withdrawal? In my basement, I’ve brewed up some ‘safer drugs’ that still let you admire all the divine virtues without necessarily sacrificing your ‘immortal soul’ in the process: Watch games that don’t interest you. They can’t be NFL games, obviously, but I bet there are some colleges you’ve never heard of, and thanks to ESPN, you can now watch high school football games as well. Off-season, watch XFL and USFL games. Watch NFL games, but only in ‘repeat’. Perhaps you know the outcome, perhaps you don’t. Either way, your cheering cannot impact the outcome the way it does when you’re watching games IRT. Added advantage: fewer commercials, no time-outs, no half-time nonsense. Or finally, you can move to a different planet… like England. Watch Premier League ‘Football’ instead of the NFL. Of course, being who I am, I’m still tempted to pick a favorite: ‘Manchester United’ because they are such a great brand, ‘Nottingham Forest’ because it evokes a childhood hero, or ‘Crystal Palace’ because how could you not root for a team with a cool name like that? But there’s a problem - given a choice between English Soccer and American Football, I’d watch my NFL teams every day of the week…and 5 times on Sunday. Yes, I’m addicted to American football; but more than that, I’m addicted to ‘caring’ – and that right there is the problem! The very existence of professional sports depends on its ability to induce fans to form attachments – otherwise players would be earning minimum wage – but ‘attachment’ is exactly what my guru says I should avoid. In fact, he wants the Commissioner to change the rules of the game. No more keeping score. Teams will execute plays for the sheer joy of completing them; but would you still spend $300/game and sit in snow to watch such a display? 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.

Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! < Back Ectaban David Cowles Oct 15, 2022 Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus; Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out. The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan, city of patterned streets; again the vision:” – Ezra Pound, Canto V Is it possible to present a fully formed Eschatology in just four lines of verse? After all, great works like Revelation require half a thousand verses to tell their tale. But surprisingly, the answer is, “Yes!” And we’ll see that Ezra Pound has done it (above)…once we unpack all the allusions and references contained in those four lines. Ecbatan (‘Ecbatana’) is an ancient city on the Silk Road, located in modern-day Iran. It was the capital city of the Empire of the Medes. In Canto LXXIV, Pound refers to Ecbatan as “the city of Dioce,” the first ruler of the Medes. It is at least remotely possible that this is also the city that the authors of Genesis attributed to Cain and his sons when Cain became a ‘wanderer’ and ‘settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden’ and ‘became the founder of a city’. But what makes Ecbatan so important is not primarily its great age, nor its role in history and mythology; what makes Ecbatan important is its layout. It is the apex of City Planning. Ecbatan consists of seven concentric rings, demarcated by walls. Moving inward, each wall is higher than the next and each a different color. The penultimate wall is silver, the final wall gold, and within that wall, the palace. Inside these walls run those “patterned streets.” The seven rings of Ecbatan call to mind the seven rings of the then known solar system. In Canto LXXIV, the first of the so-called Pisan Cantos, Pound confirms that association when he sets forth in a single line his entire cosmo-political platform: “To build the city of Dioce whose terraces are the colour of stars.” Ezra Pound’s Cantos are at least ab initio modeled after the 100 cantos that form Dante’s Divine Comedy. To understand Pound’s project, it is essential to understand Dante’s. Unlike Pound, Dante is the hero of his own epic. His ‘odyssey’ begins “in the middle of the journey of our life…within a dark wood where the straightway was lost.” He is then conducted by a series of ‘guides’ through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and finally Heaven (Paradiso). Along the way, Dante encounters persons from early Renaissance Italy, the classical world, salvation history, and the Church. Their life stories supply the stuff of his epic. Pound, likewise, weaves cultural and historical events on an eschatological loom. But compared to Dante, Pound casts a much, much wider net. There is hardly a region of the globe or a period of history that does not contribute content to Pound’s epic. While Dante tells the story of ‘Earth as it is in Heaven,’ Pound tells the story of ‘Heaven as it is on Earth.’ For Dante, the seven rings of the solar system were patterned after the seven rings of Paradise; but Pound turns that relationship upside down…and inside out: Ecbatan may share the seven-ringed pattern of the solar system, but Paradise shares the seven-ringed pattern of Ecbatan! If Ecbatan is ‘Enoch,’ the city of Cain, that would make Cain the world’s first urban planner. But even if there is no such association, being the first ‘founder of a city’ makes Cain responsible for developing and introducing the technology that would ultimately have made Ecbatan possible. Either way, Ecbatan (like all cities) traces back to Cain. The theological implications of this are enormous. In Genesis, Cain is presented as committing the first great sin in historical time (i.e., post-Eden). How fitting then, from the perspective of Judeo-Christian eschatology, that Cain be responsible, directly or indirectly, for building a post-historical Eden, Ecbatan! Ecbatan is the Judeo-Christian message of salvation in a nutshell. God does not just passively forgive the sinner; God empowers the sinner to become a co-creator of Paradise. We partner with God in the redemption of the world, and we are led in this venture by Jesus, aka the Christ, our Redeemer. This is the essence of the theological virtue of hope: not only that our sins will be wiped away, but also that our lives will be redeemed. With Job, we affirm, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust…(and) I will see God.” (Job 19: 25 – 26) In this context, it is useful to compare Cantos to another great work of literature, the New Testament Book of Revelation. Paul tells us that only three things will last: faith, hope, and love. Literature is full of books about faith and love, but hope sometimes gets short-shrift. What it lacks in quantity, it makes up in quality; hope is the central theme of three of Western civilization’s greatest works: the Book of Revelation, The Divine Comedy, and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. The Judeo-Christian tradition (including Dante) understands God as “the creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible” (Nicene Creed). Pound joins Alfred North Whitehead, perhaps Carl Jung, and a very few others in reversing that process. For these visionaries, the world in some sense ‘creates God;’ or, at least, there is a mutually creative relationship between the two! Ecbatan of the Cantos is Pound’s version of Dante’s Paradise. It is not a model for Paradise, it IS Paradise. There are no ‘models’ in Pound! The concept of a model necessarily introduces the notion of an ontological hierarchy (“the map is not the territory”). Pound rejects that idea categorically. In Cantos the mythological, the historical, the fictional, the experiential, the theological and the eschatological share a common ontological status. Anthropologists report that many aboriginal societies do not distinguish what happens in history from what happens in dreams or in spiritual experiences. (Read “Speaking Piraha” for reference.) Like Pound, they are ontological democrats! Of course, Ecbatan is Paradise seen from an eschatological perspective. Pity the lowly camel driver resting on the star-colored terraces of the Median capital, not understanding that he is living in Paradise; pity the frenzied investment banker racing across Manhattan in a cab, still not understanding. Christians are fond of saying, “Repent and hear the Good News!” Perhaps we might rephrase, “Read Pound and live the Good News!” Of course, Ecbatan is a once and future city, a once and future Paradise. Throughout Cantos, Pound rhymes the historical Ecbatan with other cities; for example, Wagadu, capital of the Ghanian Empire, four times rebuilt. The message is clear and consistent: Ecbatan is not just a place, it is a mission. Ultimately, we all share a common eschatological imperative, “To build the city of Dioce…” (Not ‘rebuild’ but ‘build!’) The city of Dioce (the Kingdom of Heaven) is only built once, for all time and eternity. Pound’s ‘Paradiso’ begins in earnest with the first Pisan Canto (Canto LXXIV). We now see Canto V (above) as the Cliff’s Notes version of Pound’s later cantos. Note that the map (Canto V) precedes the territory (Canto LXXIV & ff). But is it the case, stated above, that four lines from Canto V constitute a complete and fully developed eschatology? To make that case, we’ll need to unpack each line, beginning with: “Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus.” Parmenides, the first Western philosopher to leave extant a significant body of work, presented reality under two aspects: the aspect of Truth (Aletheia) and the aspect of Appearance (Doxa). These two complementary, but mutually exclusive aspects are both required in order to build a viable model of reality. Aletheia is Parmenides’ Eschaton; Doxa, his history. Parmenides describes Aletheia as follows: “It is not divisible…but it is full of what is…it is not lacking but if it were, it would lack everything…It is completed from every direction like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere, everywhere from the center equally matched…equal to itself from every direction.” The mini-Paradiso found in Canto V immediately links Pound to the philosophical tradition of Parmenides. Like Aletheia, Ecbatan is massive and symmetrical. Parmenides says that Aletheia lacks nothing because, if it lacked anything, it would lack everything. The same may be said of Ecbatan; above all else, it is complete! But while Aletheia is changeless, things according to the “way of appearance” (Doxa) “come to be and perish, be and not be, shift place and exchange bright color” (aka attributes). This behavior is at the root of all the dissonance and conflict in our everyday experience, but that conflict is the raw material of contrast, which is the source of all intensity. In the ‘Doxa fragments’ of On Nature, Parmenides dwells on the role that “naming” plays in shattering the homogeneity of ‘Truth’ into the seemingly endless variety of ‘Appearances.’ For example: “Thus, according to belief, these things were born and now are, and hereafter, having grown from this, they will come to an end. And for each of these did men establish a distinctive name.” Certain African and Australasian cultures believe that the process of naming (Namo) can actually make things come to be. Pound cites the story of “Wanjina” (Wondjina) whose father sewed up his mouth because he was ‘making too many things’. Parmenides would agree wholeheartedly. The “thrusting forth” of things that “come to be” (Fragment 11) is either caused by or chronicled by the development of the dictionary. The size of a dictionary is a good measure of the immersion of its readers in Doxa. Hence, thesaurus! Thesaurus is the antonym of dictionary. A dictionary records distinctions; a thesaurus, on the other hand, resolves those distinctions by finding common ground. On the one hand, dictionary smashes the crystal vase of Aletheia against the rocks of English Empiricism and American Pragmatism, reducing it to so many shards of glass (Doxa). Thesaurus, on the other hand, painstakingly matches those shards with one another until the vase is whole again (Aletheia). But the reconstructed vase is not quite the same as the original vase. While the shape and volume are still the same, and while the vase can still hold water, now you can see the outline of each and every shard that makes it up. The new vase is vastly more beautiful and interesting…and much, much more valuable; it is the product of negentropy. Reality requires both Aletheia and Doxa to optimize coherence and maximize intensity. Compare this with the creation narrative in Genesis. Words play an important role in God’s creative process: “Let there be light…God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’…God called the dome ‘sky’…God called the dry land ‘earth,’ and the basin of water he called ‘sea’.” Creation is the process of distinction; it is the living dictionary. Salvation reverses that process; it is a way of harmonizing apparent conflicts into mere contrasts. Salvation is the living thesaurus. “Ecbatan, the clock ticks and fades out” In Paradise there is no time; everything is atemporal (eternal). When the clock ticks for the final time, it fades out and eternity begins. Ecbatan, city of patterned streets, is that ‘final tick;’ it is the membrane between history and eternity. The pattern of its streets and terraces replaces the historical flow of events. A vertical architecture replaces a horizontal flow. Ecbatan is proof that process is not dependent on time. When we speak of Ecbatan, we are not just talking about an historical city or some ‘kingdom (to) come;’ Ecbatan is what it is, what there is, all there is, now and forever. Process is bi-directional. On one axis, process is change (Heraclitus), growth, evolution; on the other, process is harmonization (Whitehead), pattern building. Today, we rely heavily on clocks to help us get where we’re supposed to be, when we were supposed to be there. But when I was growing up, kids didn’t always have ready access to clocks (or watches). No matter, you were still expected to be home on time. So, without thinking about it, we built our own clocks: the progress of the sun in the sky, the changing colors on the horizon, the ‘gas man’ (sic) lighting the streetlamps every afternoon, the corporeal sense of time passing. For all the hours we spent each week in church, we were nothing but a bunch of pagans. These organic clocks worked just as well as any Timex, often better. Through all this, it never occurred to us that time might be nothing other than the clocks (natural or man-made) that we use to measure it. We took it for granted that time was something objective, that it formed the background of all things, that events occur in time. In recent years, however, cosmologists have suggested that this might not be the case. Roger Penrose, for example, suggests that when we are no longer able to construct a ‘clock’ to measure time, time will cease to exist. Others have suggested that objective time is nothing other than an abstraction from the variable organic ‘durations’ of events superimposed on one another. Pound predates Penrose by decades. Yet, he uses Penrose’s imagery. When the last clock ticks its last tick, time folds into eternity. “The bride awaiting the god’s touch; Ecbatan…” This evokes the image of Mary being touched by the Holy Spirit at the moment of Incarnation and of the Church as the “Bride of Christ”. Ecbatan is Mater Dei (mother of God); Ecbatan is Church. Ecbatan is the physical substructure of Paradise. Over and over again, Pound writes, “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel.” It must be physical and historical…it’s Mary’s womb, Christ’s Church, Ecbatan. While no Marxist, Pound wholeheartedly embraced materialism. “City of patterned streets; again, the vision:” The ‘vision’ Pound refers to is Dante’s vision in Canto XXXIII, the final canto, of his Paradiso: “O abounding grace by which I dared to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I spent all my sight upon it. In its depth I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light.” Dante rejects the Heraclitan model of continuous process. In Dante’s vision, all of the events, entities and aspects of the world are organized as “leaves.” Pound’s Cantos recapitulate Dante’s vision using Pound’s own seemingly inexhaustible treasure trove. Cantos consists entirely of such ‘leaves,’ ‘fused together’ into ‘a simple light.’ Rare among authors, Pound avoids the temptation to add personal commentary, emotional shading, ‘mere ideas,’ spin; instead, he literally lets the thing speak for itself (ipse loquitur). In the visual arts, the 19th century saw objects dissolve into impressions. Starting with Cezanne, progressing through the Cubists and culminating in Surrealism and Dada, the 20th century reversed that process. It focused on the thing itself, releasing the object from its utilitarian context and allowing it to tell its own story. Pound performed a parallel function in the literary arena. Ideally, to read the Cantos would be to have the ‘vision,’ Dante’s vision. Both Dante and Pound fixed their looks on the eternal light and saw that it contained that which is scattered in leaves; both Dante and Pound attempt to bind these leaves “by love in one volume…in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light”. Pound confirms: “I have tried to write Paradise.” (Canto CXX) To write Paradise, to ‘create’ light, to build the City of Dioce, that’s everyone’s highest calling. But it is the nature of the human condition that no one will ever succeed, at least not completely. It is for God alone to create light (fiat lux), to build Paradise, but that does not mean that we are not all called to do everything we can do in pursuit of that elusive goal. Like Cain, we contribute what we can to the Eschaton, and we humbly beg forgiveness for what we fail to do. In this context, Canto CXX is worth reproducing in its entirety: I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak That is Paradise Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made. Illustration taken from Buckingham, J.S. (1829). Travels in Assyria, Media and Persia . Page 159. London. 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. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Click here. Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, September Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back How to Destroy a Culture David Cowles Oct 20, 2022 OMG, what have I done? I’ve just given you "The Ultimate Imperialists’ Cookbook!" As you stand on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, it’s easy to imagine that you’re surveying human society’s universal floor plan. You’re not! It turns out that human society has developed along a number of different trajectories. The world you and I live in is just one of those trajectories, albeit the currently dominant one. What are the defining characteristics of our branch of the social tree? Here are my Top 10 (yours might differ slightly): Technology Private Property An Entrepreneurial Economy (even in titular socialist countries) Language (with recursive syntax and active voice dominance) Widespread literacy (most people can and do read) Universal numeracy (everyone can and does count) Law and law enforcement (police, courts, prisons, etc.) Nation states A Standing Military Democracy (or at least a nod thereto) It won’t surprise you to hear that these social structures are not universally applauded. Many efforts have been made to alter the fabric of society. Meet the Utopians, the Luddites, the ‘Reds’ (communists), the ‘Blacks’ (anarchists), and the ‘Greens’ (eco-terrorists). Each of these, and many others, have criticized the structure of the current social order; none has been able to effect substantial, long-term change. Ironically, many attempts at ‘reform’ end up reinforcing the very features of society that they were intended to modify. But it might surprise you to learn, unless you are a regular reader of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) and Thoughts While Shaving (TWS) , that there are numerous societies, thriving today, that have few, if any, of these defining characteristics. Are these the radical social experiments of superannuated hippies? Sorry to disappoint. With few, if any, exceptions, these are ‘traditional societies’ with long histories, some reaching back to the Stone Age. Many are resistant to change, not out of any sense of 19 th century ideological purity, but out of simple pragmatism: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it . Exposed to the wealth and ‘wisdom’ of today’s dominant culture (i.e., ours), some of these ancient societies have chosen to assimilate. Others have not. In previous ATM and TWS posts( “Meet the Piraha,” “Speaking Piraha,” and “Xiaco Can’t Count,” ) , we have introduced readers to the Piraha, a semi-isolated tribe in the Brazilian rainforest. Let’s evaluate their culture according to my “Top 10” (above): Technology? Hunter-gatherer. Private Property? Incidentals only. An Entrepreneurial Economy? No innovation. Language? Yes, but lacking ‘recursion’ (no subordinate clauses, etc.). Widespread literacy? Zero literacy. Universal numeracy? Zero numeracy (in fact, Piraha don’t have numbers). Law and law enforcement? None. Nation State? Irrelevant. A Standing Military? Are you nuts? Democracy? Consensual decision-making. The Piraha have had contact with the ‘outside world’ for many decades: Brazilian river traders, neighboring tribes in the process of assimilation, missionaries, and, of course, anthropologists. Because they are a small tribe and reasonably accessible, the Piraha have had every opportunity to assimilate. No dice! Sure, they value some of our ‘goods’ (chiefly medicines), but they don’t see this as sufficient reason to overthrow their social structure, to abandon their traditions…or to learn arithmetic! Now from the Stone Age to the Space Age! We’re following in the footsteps of that great explorer of worlds Jean Luc Picard. But times have changed. We are no longer governed by the prime directive. Instead, our leaders have adopted the ‘Columbian’ model of intercultural relations. Sadly, we’ve been told to suppress the indigenous cultures we encounter, forcing them to assimilate. OMG, what have I done? I’ve just given you The Ultimate Imperialists’ Cookbook (see above): everything you need to know to destroy a culture. As atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer said, paraphrasing the Bhagavad-gītā, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Must I spell it out? Create a desire for consumer goods and for the technology needed to create them. (Learn from the successful business models employed by the drug pushers at your middle school…and by Bill Gates: make people want what you have, and then make sure they can’t get it anywhere else). Private Property will evolve naturally from the proliferation of goods. Reward those who undertake economic initiatives. If lacking, introduce recursion and an active voice verb form into the indigenous language. (see below) Emphasize the 3R’s: universal literacy and numeracy. Introduce laws to protect emerging private property and to regulate burgeoning commerce. Enforce those laws via a system of police, courts, and prisons. Create a standing army to ward off attacks by neighboring planets jealous of your sudden material success. Replace consensual decision-making with ‘democracy:’ majority rule, representative government, universal suffrage, ‘free and fair elections’ and a secret ballot. I have said too much. Let me close with one clarification. Dominant culture requires language that includes recursion (the ability to relate unrelated concepts) and active voice. The first is necessary for propaganda (stereotyping, fake news); the second for production. 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 Proust, Derrida and La Differance David Cowles Aug 12, 2025 “Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric.” La differance ( Jacques Derrida ) may be understood as a bit of information or as a quantum of consciousness. Either way, it is irreducible. The ‘cold’ that I experience directly and the ‘cold’ that I experience through my being aware that I am cold are both the same and different. Whenever A = -A (same = different) we know we’re not in ‘Kansas’ ( aka the Set of Real Numbers) anymore. It is the same ‘cold’ but the different media of transmission means that my experiences of that same cold differ slightly. La differance is short for ‘infinitesimal difference’ and infinitesimal quantities lie outside the Set of Real Numbers. How ironic is it that our go-to model of the real world cannot account even for a quantum of actual experience! No wonder I want to repeal the Laws of Arithmetic . Marcel Proust shares a similar insight in his Remembrance of Things Past (RTP): “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…” And so it was! The Proust you know from the cafes was once the Proust of Italy and then the Proust of France but the Proust you know from RTP is the Proust of both Italy-then and France-now. Every there is, potentially, here; every then is, potentially, now and every now is eternal. Proust does not remember Italy, he relives Italy, which is perhaps to say, he really lives it for the first time…but in France. When Proust was in Italy, his attention was divided between his experiences of Venice and his experience of himself experiencing Venice. But when Proust relives Italy from France, his intermediary physical body disappears and now, for the first time, he can fully experience Venice. “Marcel, how was your trip to Italy?” “Fine, except for my traveling companion.” “Who was that?” “Me!” We spoil every experience by being there! (That was Sartre’s insight in Nausea .) When Proust relives an event, he does not recall selected, superficial qualia associated with that event, like a tourist with a smart phone; he recreates the event entire, and like an Ephesian Kierkegaard, he steps into it, re-experiencing all its qualia at once…not from outside-in, as perception and/or memory, but from inside-out, as something unknowable to Kant, noumenal experience . When Proust was in Venice, he was aware of Venice, but he was also aware of himself (as above) being in Venice. Quelle Domage! Likewise, when Proust is in France. But when Proust relives Italy-in-France, he is no longer aware of himself per se . Finally, he can be directly aware of experience itself. But he remains conscious. He does not lose himself in some sort of mystical union with the world. He remains conscious because the infinitesimal separation between Italy-then and France-now functions for him as la differance . Actually, the phenomenon of differance enters into Proust’s experience twice, once as the infinitesimal unevenness of the titles, again as the infinitesimal spacetime separation between France-now and Italy-then. Separated in spacetime, the two moments are united by something more substructural, i.e. experience itself; viva la differance! Effectively, consciousness effects/reflects a ‘fold’ in spacetime that invalidates the familiar Euclidean metric. A tiny difference in the pitch of the tiles, the tinier the better, ideally the tiniest perceptible difference possible, becomes a worm hole for Proust, bending spacetime to make proximate points ordinarily far distant from one another. I am reminded of p-adic numbers: the closer they are to zero, the larger the quantity they represent. In Proust’s case, the narrower the differance , the wider the wormhole it creates. I am also reminded of Bell’s non-locality (entanglement): two events indefinitely separated in space and time can nonetheless behave as one event. Is this a manifestation of the non-Archimedean structure of the real world? Check it out: If A is the combined experience of France-now and Italy-then, and B is the experience of ‘France-now’, and C is the experience of ‘Italy-then’, then both B and C are subsets of A but, counter intuitively, (B + C), France-and-Italy-now-and-then, has more value/weight/intensity for Proust than A itself…much more! A > B + C but (B+C) > A. In the real world, ‘operations’ are never commutative, transitive, associative, or distributive…unless by accident or coincidence. In every process, order is definitive! Or, for you fans of Doctor Who , the Universe is simply a collection of red ‘phone boxes’…tiny phone booths that house vast, hexagonal interior spaces, like the TARDIS . Either way, this potentiality for heightened intensity is a product of living consciously in a non-Archimedean universe. Revel in it! The competing cosmology is summarized critically by T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday : “Because I know that time is always time, and place is always and only place, and what is actual is actual only for one time, and only for one place, I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face…” I’d rather live in Proust’s world; how about you? Fortunately, we do ; and for that may I say, “Thank God!” For Proust, space and time are folded so that any two points may be arbitrarily close to one another. Events, no matter how far apart, may abut. While Proust’s epiphanies are dramatic, we all experience something similar most every waking moment of every day. Consciousness is the superposition of two images, slightly askew - differance as described above. 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. Does that mean that you are God? Far from it! But it does mean that you, and perhaps every conscious being, is ‘made in the image and likeness of God’…and that’s not half bad, is it? Trinity is not the esoteric mystery we have been (mis)led to believe. Rather, Trinity is a fundamental structure of Being itself. It is just one way, an important way, in which creation mirrors the creator and we are indebted to Proust, Sartre, and Derrida for pointing this out! *** Magritte, René. Time Transfixed. 1938, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.René Magritte’s Time Transfixed disrupts ordinary perception by merging incompatible realities, a locomotive emerging from a fireplace, much like Proust’s Italy-then and France-now collapse into the same experiential moment. Both challenge the fixed boundaries of time and place, revealing how consciousness can fold reality into unexpected juxtapositions. 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 Universal Theocracy David Cowles Nov 3, 2025 “The King (ruler) is responsible only to the people and the people are responsible only to God!” Democratic Republic, Constitutional Monarchy, Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Tyranny (e.g. Dictatorship) – Constitutional Theocra cy doesn’t make the cut, at least not according to most 21st century textbooks. Perhaps that’s because every form of government is a Constitutional Theocracy ! Whether acknowledged or not, every government, regardless of its form , has built into it certain guardrails…and an escape hatch. These extra-constitutional devices base their claim to legitimacy on a power higher than any mere political process. Existentialist theologian Paul Tillich defined Faith as ‘ultimate concern’. Whatever your ‘ultimate concern’, that is the Good as you conceive it, that is where you place your trust, and therefore that is your higher power, your God . It is everyone’s court of last resort; it is the common venue for every final appeal. Applying Tillich geo-politically, every ‘state’ grounds its claim to authority on something beyond itself. For example, consider how King James I of England (VI of Scotland), articulated the doctrine known as the Divine Right of Kings : “Kings are justly called Gods, for 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…And the like power have Kings...(to) make of their subjects like men at the chess, pawn to take a bishop or a knight…” Closer to home, consider the United States today. There is a complex system of checks and balances in place, a tri-partite separation of powers, a federal system of shared sovereignty with states, and a Bill of Rights bolted onto the Constitution itself. Even so, one wonders what would happen if these democratic processes produced a result that was perceived to be an existential threat to the nation itself or a radical and irredeemable violation of objective standards of Justice. Farfetched? Not at all! Turns out, the founders anticipated just such an eventuality…and provided several escape hatches : Private citizens have the right to bear arms; and They have the right to participate in well-regulated militias. Juries have the (much contested) right to nullify unjust laws at the time of their application. In fact, the Declaration of Independence , the nation’s birth certificate, confirms the right of people to take up arms against a government whose policies abridge divine principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men (sic), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it… it is their right, it is their duty , to throw off such Government…” According to this doctrine, the ‘King’ (ruler) is responsible only to the people and the people are responsible only to God! MMA Headliner : Jefferson takes on James for the soul of the millennium. (Catch it live on ESPN and ABC.) Speaking of the UK, a similar function is served by Common Law, the Magna Carta , the parliamentary system, and the constitutional monarch. Even so, freedom of speech was substantially curtailed during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and political participation by certain extremist political groups has recently been prohibited. In Iran, the secular authorities are subservient to the clerics. In Algeria, elections were cancelled when it appeared that a fundamentalist party ( FIS ) was poised for victory. In Germany, certain political parties have been outlawed and use of symbols and rhetoric invoking the Nazi era is considered a crime. In some countries, the military serves as the final court of appeal. Plus there is a trend, snowballing around the world, to bring legal actions, criminal and civil, against one’s political opponents. In some cases (e.g. France, Italy) certain politicians have been barred from participating in the electoral process as a result. Finally, during the death throes of the Soviet Union several ‘constitutional’ Eastern European governments simply stepped aside to allow a new wave of Western looking leaders to take charge. I pass no judgment, pro or con, on any of these arrangements. I cite them simply to demonstrate that all states, regardless of titular form, recognize some sort of ‘higher power’ to which their constitutional institutions are based and to which they are subject. In the perpetual shunting of the loom from process to policy and from function back to form, the space reserved for society’s constitutional organs varies…but it always exists within limits imposed by a transcendent standard from which they derive their ‘limited and contingent’ legitimacy. We all live in a Constitutional Theocracy . Acknowledge it! *** The Triumph of Marat by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1794) depicts the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat being carried triumphantly through a cheering crowd after his acquittal by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Painted during the height of the French Revolution, it captures the fervent idolization of Marat as a hero of the people and symbol of resistance against tyranny. Boilly’s composition, with its dense crowd and celebratory energy, reflects both the passion and the volatility of revolutionary zeal in a society on the brink of chaos. 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.

Philosophy, theology, and science merge in Aletheia Today, the magazine for people who believe in God and science. Process philosophy, scripture study, and critical essays bring science and faith together with western philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Jean-Paul Sartre. Deep dives into the meaning of the Old Testamant, the New Testament, and where the Bible fits into modern-day society. Is God real? Does Heaven exist? Find your answers to life's questions at Aletheia Today. Inside This Issue The Great Convergence Moore's Nativity “No need to study theology at university… (or) go to Sunday school. It’s all right there in front of us…and Henry Moore helps us see it: Christianity!” Football Math “At last, an opportunity to watch football in peace! … Just beer, pretzels and picking out the next Tom Brady.” Theology Christ the King “Sir, you are quite simply insane. We know exactly what holds our universe together; it is electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong force…not Christ.” Job vs. James, Rex “God is good because he’s good, not just because he’s God.” Philosophy Bakunin Nailed It! “Writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, 10 years before Nietzsche, and 50 years before Heidegger and Sartre, Bakunin got it right.” A Universe From Nothing I’ll take the wisdom of Yogi Berra over that of Bill Clinton any day: Whatever is, is! Culture & The Arts A Simple Christmas "There comes a time when our souls need more respite than even the traditions of Christmas can offer us." ‘Happy Holidays’ vs. ‘Merry Christmas’: A Twist "The argument for the “Happy Holidays” greeting is that because Christians have been imperialistic, and have erased everyone else (including Jews) from American culture, they now need to include us." Handel’s Messiah "There is only one full proof indication that Christmas is coming: the endless performances of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Yup, it’s that time of year!" That Time You Were Not Exceptionally Divine "They say that a watched pot never boils. That’s a lie. It does boil, but do you know what doesn’t?" Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults Job is My Superhero "No one has taken a bigger risk than Job, and no one has faced longer odds; and yet, Job has taken God to court and won!" Spirituality What the Shepherds Saw When the Light Shone Upon Them "What really is going on at that moment, which so grips the artist’s imagination, moving him to bend every effort of will and skill to re-produce, under the sign of paint, the precise reaction of the shepherds on first seeing the Holy Infant? " Burn the Candle "Are there things that are too precious to expose to real life? Things we’re afraid might get soiled? Maybe the most beautiful parts of ourselves? Maybe our faith?" The Leading Player of Memories When the reason for the season becomes your responsibility Readers React What's the buzz about? Our readers' reactions to Aletheia Today... Additional Reading Can't get enough of Aletheia Today's content? Check out the books that inspire our magazine.

< Back The Age of Sustainable Abundance David Cowles Mar 12, 2026 “We reject the status quo but we shrink from the future...” 1250 words, 6 minute read What are you waiting for? The Second Coming of Christ? (That’s been delayed.) The Apocalypse? (Mercifully postponed.) The Age of Aquarius? ( Hair notwithstanding, cosmologists tell us we have another 200 years to wait.) But according to Elon Musk, this is the dawning of the Age of Abundance…Sustainable Abundance! But that is, not everywhere, an occasion for celebration. “We are suffering just now from a bad attack of economic pessimism. It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterized the… (previous) century is over; that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down…The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labor absorption…” Does this sound familiar? Of course it does! You hear the equivalent every day. So would you be surprised to hear that this was written in 1930 by the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (JMK)? And that the previous century Keynes refers to is not the 20th but the 19th? The more things change the more they stay the same! “There’s nothing new under the sun.” It’s always about the Bulls and the Bears! And two things we know: (1) Discounting divine intervention, the Bears will ultimately win out; it’s called Heat Death; and (2) Until that time, it’s all Bulls! (Chicago, Pamplona, Wall Street) And yet… “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy…” (JMK) As a species, we struggle to imagine a future that is anything other than a thinly disguised version of the past. As a result, we form a vision of tomorrow that, so far as possible, recapitulates today, warts and all. And who isn’t dissatisfied with today? Who’s ever told a pollster, “I like things just the way they are?” ( Hint : No one!) ‘So far as possible’ – and to the extent that it’s not possible, we paint the future in the darkest colors possible. So we reject the status quo but we shrink from the future in so far as it differs from the status quo . It’s a wonder there’s ever been any progress at all…and it’s no wonder that so many cultures harbor the notion of a long lost Golden Age, before today’s problems became problematic. *** What we have here is a failure of imagination! Consider our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) . As far as we know, all living organisms on Earth are descended from a single DNA molecule that synthesized about 4 billion years ago. That makes you a distant cousin of some pretty unusual characters: bacteria and slime mold, mushrooms and mosquitos, palm trees and penguins, whales and water bears …and my personal favorite, the kitchen sponge (natural, not synthetic). Idea : Restage Hamlet Act 5, Scene 1 with the Prince of Denmark holding a sponge in his hand instead of Yorik’s skull. You also have some pretty impressive ancestors hanging off your family tree – kids with cool street names like Dino and Dodo, Raptor, Sabretooth, and the Great Auk. I went to High School with Tom Roberts, a boy who claimed to be descended from Blue Beard, the pirate. You’ve got Tom beat six ways to Sunday! We see that the process of evolution responds to variations in the environment with incredible morphological and functional diversity. Yet when we consider the possibility of life on other planets and their moons, we assume that it will be similar to our own. Therefore, we search the heavens for Earth-like conditions as if life chooses its environment. The fact is, if there is extraterrestrial life, there is every chance that it will assume forms and behave in ways that none of us have ever imagined. *** We believe that the laws of physics apply everywhere in the known universe. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s true. We also assume that any intelligent life form, exploring the universe from its vantage point, would adduce the same laws. But not so fast! Even if physical processes are universal, there is no guarantee, no likelihood even, that other intelligences will model those processes the same way we do. An article in New Scientis t (3/3/2026) by Daniel Whiteson, a particle physicist conducting research at CERN and teaching at the University of California, makes the case: “Lately I have started to wonder whether physics is less a window onto universal reality and more of a mirror, reflecting the particular kind of minds we happen to have…Would alien scientists, shaped by a different biology or culture , arrive at the same physics that we have? Or might they develop something that works just as well, but looks utterly foreign – built on concepts and assumptions we would struggle to recognize?” *** The Catholic Church has long placed the basic human need to engage in meaningful, healthful and justly compensated work at the heart of its Social Magisterium. The advent of Sustainable Abundance will require a rethink! Ironically, the two great ideologies of ‘the previous century’ (the 19 th ), Marxism and Catholicism, are both centered around an outmoded concept of work. Yet both are utopian: It’s hard to imagine wage labor in Paradise. In fact, the relationship between human labor and economic prosperity is already starting to fray. The collective need for our work will soon shrink exponentially. Accordingly, our idea of a ‘meaningful life’ must expand to include much more than just wage labor…and that will take work of its own, a lot of work! So, fast forward 100 years from JMK: the torch has passed to a new generation…and Elon Musk picked it up (September 1, 2025): “ The elimination of scarcity will require tireless and exquisite execution. Some will perceive it as impossible. And plenty of others will laud every obstacle and setback we inevitably encounter along the way. But once we overcome this challenge, our critics will come to see that what they once thought was impossible is indeed possible… “Today we are on the cusp of a revolutionary period primed for unprecedented growth. And this time it will not be a single step but a leap forward for Tesla (sic) and humanity as a whole. The tools we are going to develop will help us build the kind of world that we've always dreamed of—a world of Sustainable Abundance—by redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all.” As Industrialization was to the 19th century and Computerization to the 20th, so Artificial Intelligence is to the 21st. While a handful of pioneers are working to shape and extend this new technology, most of our energy will be spent debating and resisting its promise. According to our talking heads, we are to reject a Leisure Economy, fueled by Sustainable Abundance, in favor of a Labor Economy, motivated by economic insecurity and driven by Conspicuous Consumption. Yup, what we have here is a failure to imagine! A failure to imagine what is already coming…if only we’d let it. *** Giacomo Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–14) doesn’t just depict a car rushing forward—it imagines a world where motion, technology, and sensory overload become the defining forces shaping human experience. In many ways, its fractured lines and vibrating energy anticipate future movements driven by high‑speed travel, digital acceleration, and the increasingly blurred boundary between human perception and machine‑generated environments. 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 If He Chooses to Do So David Cowles Oct 14, 2021 My previous ‘thought’ concerned God’s dual role as ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ and ‘comrade-in-arms’. Further reflections: How can God be the creator of a radically free universe and yet play a role in the evolution of that universe? The answer lies in standing an old proverb (‘Man proposes, God disposes’) on its head. In fact, it is God who proposes but ‘man’ (i.e., worldly events) that disposes. Consider God’s words in Deuteronomy (30:19): “I set before you life and death (God proposes). Therefore, choose life. (Man disposes)” My previous ‘thought’ concerned God’s dual role as ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ and ‘comrade-in-arms’. Further reflections: How can God be the creator of a radically free universe and yet play a role in the evolution of that universe? The answer lies in standing an old proverb (‘Man proposes, God disposes’) on its head. In fact, it is God who proposes but ‘man’ (i.e., worldly events) that disposes. Consider God’s words in Deuteronomy (30:19): “I set before you life and death (God proposes). Therefore, choose life. (Man disposes)” This is also a solution to the famous ‘Problem of Evil’ (how can a good and omnipotent God tolerate evil in the world?). It is often said that my freedom extends only as far as the tip of your nose. Likewise, God’s omnipotence extends only as far as the edge of his creation. Beyond that edge God is a free actor among other free actors. In the dual acts of Creation and Incarnation, God sacrifices his omnipotence in order to share in the lot of mortals (pathos). It is important to note that this sublimation of power on God’s part is entirely voluntary; it does not diminish his omnipotence in any way. In fact, it is an expression of it. God chooses to place limits on his omnipotence so that he can be a true Creator and a ‘fellow traveler’. Remember the old adolescent paradox, “Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it?” Well, surprisingly, that paradox turns out to have an answer after all: “Yes, if he chooses to do so.” 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.

One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. < Back The Sultan and the Sea David Cowles Jul 12, 2022 One of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they are swimmers at all. And this is how it was on this island. (The events in this story happened a long time ago. We know about them only because the story has been passed down over the centuries by members of a religious group known as the Sufis.) Once upon a time, a young but very wealthy Sultan lived in a luxurious palace. He lived alone, but he was well taken care of by the palace staff - the folks who took care of the palace and kept things humming - including the Sultan’s Trusted Assistant and best friend, a man who had cared for the Sultan since birth. The Sultan’s life was lavish, but lonely…and, oh so boring! I mean, nothing ever happened. Nothing. No? Ok, did you ever see the movie, Groundhog Day ? Well, that’s what life was like for this Sultan. Each day was a nearly perfect copy of the day before. Things were so monotonous that the Sultan never knew whether it was Monday or Thursday, or even if today was still today and not yesterday…or tomorrow. “Who cares? What’s the difference anyway?” he thought. Today would begin for the Sultan just like every day began. Oh, did I mention that today was the Sultan’s 25th birthday? No matter, birthday or not, nothing would change, nothing ever changed, no matter what day it was. Sure enough, shortly after dawn, his assistant woke him up and poured a pitcher of warm water into a large basin so that the Sultan could wash his face and hands. Every day, the Sultan would immerse his face in the water for a few seconds; then his assistant would hand him a dry towel. “Today, will be just like every other day,” the Sultan thought, sighing. Did he just think that? Or did he mumble it under his breath just loud enough for his assistant to overhear? We’ll probably never know for sure. As expected, this day did begin just like every other day…until it didn’t! Something happened. Even though nothing ever happens in the Sultan’s world, something happened today! The Sultan immersed his face in the water as he did every morning, but today, when he lifted his face out of the water, he realized that he was no longer in his palace… not by a long shot. The Sultan found himself wet, naked, and gasping for breath on a deserted and unfamiliar beach. All alone – no Trusted Assistant to wipe his wet face. After laying there a while, trying to figure out what was going on and trying to gather his strength for whatever was to come, he spotted three young women walking up the beach towards him. Would these women be friendly or hostile? Or even worse, would they just ignore him and walk on by, unconcerned? But as it turns out, this might have been the Sultan’s lucky day after all. The women did stop, and they were friendly. One of them even-handed the Sultan her scarf so that he could tie it around his waist to cover his private parts. Of course, the women were all questions and of course the Sultan told them his story and of course they didn’t believe him, not one word. I mean, would you? They whispered among themselves and concluded that he must have escaped from a prison transport vessel as it passed through near-by waters. Even so, the women invited the Sultan to follow them home, and of course, he eagerly accepted. And what a home it was! It was a palace even grander than the Sultan’s own. Turns out, one of the women on the beach was a princess. As a guest of the King, the Sultan was bathed, fed, and offered a place to rest from his incredible adventure. But if the Sultan thought that this was going to be his new home, he was sorely mistaken. The King and the Princess had no idea their visitor was a fellow royal. Remember, they thought he was an escaped prisoner. He might have been a thief, a murderer even, or worse yet, a revolutionary…or God forbid, an anarchist. Yikes! Anyway, he was not welcome to stay for long in the King’s palace. Instead, the Princess took him to a small cottage at the outskirts of town. There, the Sultan met a couple whose business was making and repairing the large nets used on the island for fishing. At the Princess’ urging, they agreed to take him in and teach him their trade. In exchange, the Sultan agreed to stay and work for them for 10 years. Turns out, the Sultan was a good learner, and soon he was tying nets as proficiently as the other members of his newly adopted family. Thanks to the Sultan’s skill and hard work, his new family became quite prosperous. 10 years passed quickly, and the Sultan was finally ready to begin his new life. The net-makers were grateful to the Sultan for his hard work, and they gifted him a tidy sum upon his departure. The Sultan and the net-makers said goodbye, but only after a long and tearful embrace. The Sultan thought to himself, “This is the way goodbyes should be. I wish I had had a chance to say goodbye like this to my Trusted Assistant, my friend.” But there was no looking back for the Sultan. He hiked into town, rented a small room, and used the net-makers’ gift to open a small shop below it. The Sultan proved to be a gifted trader, as well as a skilled net-maker, and soon his shop was bustling; once again, the Sultan was prosperous. One day, while he was puttering around the shop, a woman walked in who would later become his wife. She walked straight up to the Sultan and began to ask very intelligent questions about his merchandise. It was love at first sight…for the Sultan! Not so much for the bride-to-be. But the Sultan had been through a lot. Though still young, he was beginning life from scratch, for the third time! He had finally found love, and he wasn’t about to give up on it now. Sure enough, his favorite customer soon became his fiancée. Once married, she gave birth to 6 children, 3 boys and 3 girls. The children grew, and eventually, they began having children of their own. Soon the Sultan was surrounded by a pride of children and grandchildren…and he loved every one of them with an intensity he never thought possible back in his Palace. One day, his 75th birthday as it happens, the Sultan decided to do something he hadn’t done since he arrived; he decided to go for a swim. It was the Jubilee (50 year) anniversary of his unceremonious arrival on the island. He invited his retinue of children and grandchildren to accompany his wife and himself as they retraced the Sultan’s first steps on the island. Now, one of life’s great ironies is that people who live near water are not always very good swimmers, if they swim at all. And that is how it was on this island. The Sultan had not been back to that beach, or any beach, since the day he arrived. Soon they were at the very beach where the Sultan had washed ashore 5 decades earlier. The Sultan walked slowly into the waves. Once the water was up to his waist, he dove in headfirst, but when he went to lift his head out of the water… We have all had unexpected, and sometimes unwelcome, experiences in our lives. They startle us at first, but for the most part, we muddle, though. The Sultan had two such experiences. The first occurred on his 25th birthday, when he put his face into the basin of water, only to find himself stranded on a foreign shore. I mean, has that ever happened to you? The second is happening right now. On this 75th birthday, surrounded by his family, the Sultan dove headfirst into the sea; but when he pulled his head up out of the water, guess what, he found himself back in his old Palace, a full wash basin in front of him and his assistant standing by with a dry towel…as usual. Suddenly, the Sultan caught a glimpse of his reflection on the surface of the water. What did he see? Challenge Answer the five questions below and be entered in a drawing for a $100 gift card. ( Hint : there are no right or wrong answers.) We will report the results in Issue #3 of AT Magazine (9/1/2022). The gift card drawing will occur on Labor Day 2022. 1. The Sultan disappeared from his Palace on the morning of his 25th birthday; he returned on his 75th. How old do you think the Sultan was when he got back to his Palace? (Choose one answer only.) He was 25 when he put his face into the basin of water, so he must still be 25 when he lifts his face back out. _____ He lived on the island for 50 years. He was 75 when he dived into the waves, so he must still be 75 when he picks his head back out. _____ Other (please comment): ________________________________ 2. How do you think the Sultan feels about what’s happened to him? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) He’s happy to be home in his palace at long last. _____ He’s angry that his life was turned upside down like this. _____ He misses his wife and kids and his life on the island. _____ He is grateful for this chance to live two full lives. _____ 3. What do you make of the Sultan’s Trusted Assistant? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) He had nothing to do with the Sultan’s disappearance from the Palace. _____ He is responsible for the Sultan’s disappearance? _____ He did it because he was angry with the Sultan. _____ He did it to teach the Sultan a lesson. _____ It was his 25th birthday gift to the Sultan. _____ When the Sultan returns to the Palace after 50 years, how old is the Trusted Assistant? He’s the same age he was when the Sultan was 25. _____ He’s 50 years older now than he was on the Sultan’s 25th birthday. _____ 4. Now that the Sultan is back in his Palace, will his life be different from it was before his great adventure ? (Check all the answers that you think are true.) No, nothing will change; things will go back to being just as boring as they were before the Sultan disappeared. ____ Yes, he will leave his Palace every day to look for the family he left behind on the island. ____ Yes, he will leave his Palace every day, looking for new romance, hoping to start a new family? _____ Yes, will adopt orphans to live with him in the Palace. ____ Yes, he will learn a useful and productive trade. ____ Yes, he will move out of the Palace entirely and turn it into public housing for the homeless citizens of his realm. ____ Yes, he will turn the Palace into a $1,000/night luxury resort. ____ 5. Our story occurs in two places: in the Sultan’s Palace and on the Island. Which is real and which isn’t? (Check one answer only) Only the Sultan’s palace is real; the island is not: _____ Only the island is real; the Sultan’s Palace is not: _____ Both the island and the palace are real: ____ Neither the island nor the palace is real: _____ Please feel free to elaborate on any of your answers (optional): Please submit your answers to editor@aletheiatoday.com. Be sure to put Sultan and the Sea Challenge in the subject line and tell us who you are and how we can reach you (name, email address, and phone number) so that your name can be entered into the $100 gift card drawing to take place on Labor Day. 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. Share Previous Next Do you like what you just read? 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