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

< Back Introducing - ATM 2025 David Cowles May 29, 2025 “Our goal is…to build a 21st century version of the Library at Alexandria.” Aletheia Today (AT) launched AT Magazine (ATM) on June 1, 2022. Since then, we have published more than 250 in-depth articles spread over 23 issues. We have supplemented those essays with approximately 300 shorter form Thoughts While Shaving (TWS), published twice weekly. Now it seems appropriate to change-up our format. Our site will no longer group articles by issue number and publication date; instead they will be separated into 10 topical groups (Philosophy, Culture, etc.) with 2 additional groupings for the contributions of Guest Authors and for Archived materials. Our goal is to make our site easier to navigate and more useful as a research tool; or as one of our members says, “To build a 21st century version of the Library at Alexandria.” Beginning June 1, 2025, each ATM will consist of a limited number of articles focused on a single topic. For example, this Sunday’s edition will focus exclusively on the Beatles , their function as modern myth makers and their many contributions to contemporary philosophy and theology. Many of the articles curated for these single topic issues will be drawn from our published inventory, edited and updated to reflect new developments and the current state of our thinking. A fresh overview will introduce each edition and brief article specific commentaries will be added as appropriate. In addition, we will also continue to publish Thoughts While Shaving but on an ad hoc rather than scheduled basis. Subscribe (at no cost) HERE (guaranteed FREE for life) to ensure you don’t miss a single ATM issue or TWS post. We are hoping these changes will make AT more accessible and more useful as a research tool. As always, we invite you to let us know how we’re doing (Click Here ). We appreciate your continued support and hope you are profiting from your engagement with us. 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 Deborah Rutherford Contributor Hi. I am Deborah Rutherford, a Christian wife, passionate about Jesus and her family. I am currently a writer, makeup artist, and sometimes singer. You can find me on my blog at www.deborahrutherford.com. The Sacred Pause of Autumn Embracing the Sacred Season of Summer: Who Will You Be at the End of Summer The Dance of Autumn Prayer for Resting in God's Timing, Ways, and Rhythm

< Back Groundhog Day David Cowles Jan 31, 2023 “You are not Joey...there are no magic kingdoms in your future. No, you are face-to-face with the darkest days of winter.” December 25, Christmas Day. We’ve been looking forward to it for months and it didn’t disappoint: presents and ribbons and trees and presents, Mall Santa and Real Santa and carols and cookies, and…did I mention presents? Later that afternoon, since you’ve successfully resisted your spouse’s (or parent’s) repeated pleas to help clean up, you find yourself with nothing to do. In fact, you’re bored…bored on Christmas! Is that even a thing? While you’re speculating on the metaphysics of boredom, you happen to look out the window… And it’s dark, real dark, the windowpane’s ice cold. The ground is frozen solid, if not snow covered, and you suddenly realize you have nothing to look forward to now until spring (Easter) – not like Joey across the street whose parents take him skiing every weekend and whose grandparents are taking him to Disney World in February. You are not Joey! (How often do you have to remind yourself of that each year?) No, you do not have to face ski lodges, hot cider and cocoa, and there are no magic kingdoms in your future. No, you are face-to-face with the darkest days of winter. Poor you! You happen to live in a liturgically impoverished culture. We celebrate just four points on the calendar: the two solstices (c. 6/21 and 12/21), days of maximum (or minimum) daylight; and the two equinoxes (c. 3/21 and 9/21), days when the durations of light and dark are equal. Think of that! At equinox, no matter where you live on the globe, north or south, pole or equator, the sun rises at 6 AM and sets at 6 PM (adjusted for the modern convention of time zones). It’s a marvelous thing. But I digress… Like most cultures, we cluster our important religious and secular holidays around the times of these astronomical extremes; we call them Christmas, Easter, Midsommer (July 4 th ), and various ‘early harvest’ festivals. But none of this relieves the tedium of long cold winters. Had you been born into a liturgically richer culture, you might be celebrating eight points on the calendar rather than just four. Many cultures recognize what we call Cross Days as major feasts. Cross Days occur, roughly, on the days that bisect the four intervals between solstice and equinox. Although our culture doesn’t recognize these Cross Days as ‘major feasts’, their shadows are still all around us. Halloween, for example, bisects the fall equinox and the winter solstice. Similarly, May Day in the spring. The remaining axis (2/1 and 8/1) is a bit more problematic. Lammas Day, August 1, is celebrated in the Celtic and Jewish traditions. February 2 is celebrated in Celtic tradition as Imbolc (Lambs’ Day, also St. Brigid’s Day), in Christian tradition as Candlemas (the presentation of Jesus in the temple), and in secular tradition as Groundhog Day . You know the story. The groundhog emerges from his hole and assesses prospects for the coming weeks. If he sees his shadow, then it’s back underground for another six weeks of winter; but if he doesn’t, then get ready for an early spring. Call it what you will, February 2 is a pivot point in the celestial calendar. It occurs right in the middle of the darkest, coldest period in the North American almanac. It is a time when hope is in short supply. We need something to keep us going. (Teacher friends of mine say that February is by far the hardest month for class management .) Are we there yet? No, but we are halfway. February 2 marks the end of the end and the beginning of the beginning. If nothing else, it delivers a psychological boost. We’re desperate for good news. We hope that the Groundhog will deliver but, if not, we’ve still enjoyed his festival. 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.

“Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” < Back Middle Voice David Cowles Mar 1, 2023 “Eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it…(but) it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t…have to be this way.” According to Benjamin Whorf, language is a record of how we see the world, and conversely, language conditions us to see the world in a particular way: a paradigmatic, if somewhat diabolical, example of non-linear, auto-reinforcing process. Take English, for example. When we speak, most of our verbs are either active or passive . We call that the “voice” of the verb. In an active/passive voiced language, we are always doing something to someone (or something) or someone (or something) is doing something to us: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. It’s a terrible way to live! But we’re living it. The Lex Talionis (‘eye for an eye’), literally the law of retaliation , is the paradigmatic expression of such an active/passive world view. Scotty broke the vase: active voice. Scotty is called the ‘subject’ and my poor Ming is called the ‘object’ of his action. This construction first separates Scotty from what he’s done. In fact, Scotty’s action itself assumes the status of an object; it is something Scotty possesses: “ his action”. Scotty acted, and the vase ‘reacted’ (by shattering). The flow is in one direction: it’s a vector. Alternatively, the vase was broken by Scotty: passive voice. It’s the same event but this time seen from the point of view of the victim, my precious artifact. The vase is now the subject, but the action is still unidirectional, still a vector. In one sense, the active and passive voices are opposites; but in another sense, they are really the same thing. (How often that is true in our world!) They both describe the same event, in the same way, but just from opposite viewpoints. So we can say that English is an ‘active/passive voiced language’. Syntax speaks volumes about how we understand events, and, therefore, how we understand the world. An action, according to our grammar, is a vectored relationship between two unequal participants, a terribly minor, in not null, subset of all that goes on in our world. The world consists solely of events. If our preferred way of defining an event is in terms of a unidirectional relationship between unequal participants, then for us the world will consist primarily of such actions. This will be the logos we impose upon the world, and our language will reflect that logos . Of course, it works both ways. To a large extent, we learn about the world through language. Our language teaches us to see our world in terms of unequal, unidirectional relationships. Our language creates our logos, thereby defining our world for us. Putting it another way, we create our world in the image and likeness of our language. Does this language serve our purposes ? You bet it does! It’s hard to imagine a Golden Gate Bridge without it. Our language essentially reduces Being to a schematic. But does such a language actually meet our needs ? Not so much! In the real world, action is rarely, maybe never , entirely one directional. “I hit the nail” is actually an abstract simplification of a much more complex process. When my hammer connects with the nail head, the nail moves (hopefully) and the hammer recoils (predictably) sending vibrations down my arm…and that’s assuming I didn’t also hit my thumb in the process. Syntax unravels the unity of being and displays it like a collection of butterflies pinned to the wall of a natural history museum. The fact is that every real action acts on the so-called subject as well as on the so-called object. In the example of Scotty and the vase, that reality is somewhat trivial and can probably be safely ignored…that is, unless I accept Scotty’s explanation that the vase jumped off the shelf and attacked him, possibly the act of a neighborhood genie. And why not, the very same thing happened at Billy’s house just last week. It’s a pattern you see. Better call Ghostbusters ! But did you notice the real ‘ghost’ in this story? It’s Scotty’s language. He translated what might have been an accident into the intentional action of a genie. But what if we’re trying to model a chemical reaction, or worse, a quantum mechanical process, or even worse, some sort of ecological phenomenon? How do we describe these events using just active and passive verbs? We can’t. At best, we can approximate clumsily in simple situations. “Two hydrogen atoms each lend an electron to one oxygen atom; or an oxygen atom borrows an electron from each of two hydrogen atoms.” (Hint: it’s water!) When we get into more complex interactions, language breaks down completely, and we have to resort to diagrams (e.g. Feynman diagrams) or equations or shoulder shrugs. Now imagine the difficulty of modeling complex human interactions using just active and passive voice verbs! No wonder we’re always at war with one another. And our politics? Of course, we see the world in terms of “us” and “them”; of course, we see social change in terms of class warfare. It’s the Golden Rule after all: she who has the gold, rules. Nonetheless, most of us are resigned to this state of affairs. It’s just the way things are. How could it be otherwise? Easily! And the fact is, it wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t necessarily always have to be this way. Many ancient languages had another voice which linguists call the Middle Voice . The middle voice is ideally suited to model situations where relationships are between equals and where action is reciprocal. Linguists disagree about the place of the middle voice in the evolution of language, but it is at least possible that the middle voice preceded both the active and passive voices. Modern linguists struggle to understand the middle voice. Conditioned by their own active/passive logoi , they want to understand this verb form as somewhere in between the active and passive poles. Hence, the term “middle voice”. In fact, the middle voice has nothing to do with its active/passive cousins. It is a completely different way of viewing the world. The middle voice verb form describes an action that impacts both subject and object simultaneously; or it describes a reciprocal relationship between two co-subjects who are also co-objects. That’s what process is; that’s what an event is. Anything else is just an abstraction. Analogy : If the active voice is the voice of the future and the passive voice the voice of the past, then the middle voice is the voice of the Present. Imagine what our world would look like if we viewed it in terms of reciprocal relations and omnidirectional events! Would that change the way the world is? Or would it just enable us to see it as it really is? Both. We’d see the world through a different filter, and in turn, we’d most likely act quite differently in such a world. How do we talk about love using active and passive verbs? The best we can come up with is something lame like, “Mary and Paul are in love with one another.” This turns love into a static state rather than a raging fire. The middle voice, on the other hand, is ready-made to describe the relationship between Mary and Paul in a way that does it justice. The active and passive voices describe the same event in the same way; they merely reverse the point of view. The middle voice defines that same event in an entirely different way. The active/passive voice sees the world from the outside; the middle voice sees the world from the inside: objectivity vs. subjectivity. Thus, we have two opposing world views: an active/passive view and a middle voice view. One sees the world in terms of will, struggle, domination, and power; the other sees the world in terms of mutuality. One is the syntax of war, the other of peace. One is the syntax of cause and effect, the other of evolution. One is the syntax of past and future, the other of the present. Unfortunately, however, most Western languages have lost the middle voice. Where the middle voice has been retained (e.g. Icelandic), it has been forced to co-exist with its active/passive cousins, and it no longer conveys the strong sense of reciprocity it once did. The poverty of an active/passive voiced language and the lack of a strong middle voice alternative is not just a linguistic problem; it’s a philosophical problem and ultimately a theological problem. One way to understand ‘the Christian project’ is as an attempt to reintroduce middle-voice consciousness to the world. Of course, I am not suggesting that the New Testament authors, much less Jesus himself, were budding linguists. Yet, they understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way folks viewed the world and, with incredible insight, they sought to change that view. When you view events and the actions that constitute them in terms of unequal, unidirectional power relations, it becomes easy to abuse or exploit your neighbor...and impossible to love her as yourself. Even today, certain sub-cultures will brand you a sucker or a wimp or a ‘goodie two shoes’ if you do not take advantage of the weaker folks in your orbit. “It’s just business!” Active/passive-voiced languages conflict with values like justice and kindness. It is difficult to inculcate an ethic of justice, reciprocity and love in folks who view the world according to the active/passive paradigm. In this sense, ‘bad language’ could be seen as humanity’s ‘original sin’: the second commandment is just an extension of the first. Christianity, especially in its early stages, sought to replace the active/passive world view with the world view that we are calling ‘middle voice consciousness’. In the Lord’s Prayer, for example, we read, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” 12 centuries later, Francis of Assisi built on this insight: “It is in pardoning that we are pardoned.” Whatever we do, we do to ourselves to the same degree and in the same way and at the same time as we do it to others. That goes for positive actions like forgiveness and negative actions like violence. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Why? Because in middle voice consciousness, your neighbor is yourself! Beginning with Leo XIII (1878 – 1903), modern Popes have railed against economic injustice, but they have done so from the middle voice perspective of universal love ( agape ) rather than class consciousness. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Spring 2023 Table of Contents 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. 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Explore Aletheia Today's Groundhog 2025 issue: where philosophy, theology, and culture intersect. From Mark’s Gospel to Parmenides, faith, and love—thought-provoking insights await! Mythology and The Beatles We All Live in a Yellow Submarine “The occasional dragon notwithstanding, we hardly ever see monsters in Liverpool anymore.” Eleanor Rigby “The Beatles were true revolutionaries. They called for the overthrow of the existing social order, replacing it with… a secular version of Galilean Christianity.” I Am the Walrus “Popular music is a treasure trove for the philosophically curious.” Dante and the Yellow Submarine “Yellow Submarine did for the Divine Comedy what West Side Story did for Romeo & Juliet…but I very much doubt the Beatles had any idea what they’d done!” Imagine “John’s Utopia is a 20th century version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s flat universe.” Science and the Yellow Submarine Part I Yellow Submarine is much more than just a delivery vehicle for the Beatles’ 1960s musical repertoire. The film addresses important ontological and cosmological issues, and it offers some truly remarkable scientific insights in the process. Science and the Yellow Submarine II In this issue of ATM, we will finish our journey. We will visit all the remaining “seas” (I promise), plus Pepperland itself. So, hang on tight! 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 Secret of the Bethlehem Shepherds David Cowles "In my research, I discovered that the shepherds were important to St. Luke for a simple reason: They were the primary eyewitnesses of the events in Bethlehem on the night of Jesus’ birth, and they passed down the story through established methods of oral transmission." Earlier this year, I had the privilege of spending a two month sabbatical in Jerusalem. The object of my study was to understand more about the shepherds of Bethlehem who play such an important part in St Luke’s infancy narrative. Why were they important to the gospel author? Some scholars opined that Luke was simply adding some local color—some quaint rustics—rather like Shakespeare’s “mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Others suggested that shepherds had a traditional place in Greek and Roman literature as simple sages—embodying a sort of peasant wisdom. Others observed that shepherds in first-century Middle Eastern culture had a reputation for being thieves and scoundrels and that the Jews considered shepherds to be ceremonially unclean. Thus. St. Luke was emphasizing the point that the Christ came to the lowly, the poor, and those suspected by respectable society. I discovered instead that the shepherds were important to St. Luke for a simpler reason: They were the primary eyewitnesses of the events in Bethlehem that night, and they passed down the story through established methods of oral transmission. To understand the importance of this, it is first necessary to review some of the theories of New Testament origins. In the early-twentieth century, the sciences of archeology, anthropology, and comparative religions developed. The discoveries in these disciplines influenced the newly-burgeoning industry of Biblical criticism. The form critics compared the findings of the anthropologists and mythologists and suggested that the gospels were formed in a similar manner to the cultural and religious development of myth. To put it simply, religious myth developed over time. It was the product, so the academics decided, of cultural evolution. The community gradually elaborated their stories into myth with full religious and cultural implications. This process, the form critics proposed, was the method whereby the gospels mutated and grew. The early church community, it was suggested, re-told the simple Jesus stories—the stories of a simple wandering Jewish rabbi—and elaborated them over time, adding supernatural elements. It was Rudolph Bultmann’s self-assigned task therefore, to weed out the supernatural “mythological” elements to discern the historical kernel beneath all the elaborations. This theory is extraordinarily leaky, and it doesn’t take a great scholar to point out the inconsistencies and absurdities. “There wasn’t enough time for the stories to develop in that way before they were written down.” “The theory doesn’t reflect what we do know about the composition of the gospels from the apostolic fathers. Why should a theory dreamed up in universities in Europe in the twentieth century be closer to the truth than the statements of writers in the Middle East in the second century?” “What evidence is there of this evolving mythology of the gospels?” “Do Christian faith communities do this sort of story-telling?” In his groundbreaking book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, British Bible scholar Richard Bauckman says of the form critics’ theories that “virtually every element in this construction has been questioned and rejected by some or even most scholars.” Indeed, in the 1960s there was a reaction to the form critics’ theory of an oral tradition that evolved within the community. The Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson researched Jewish methods of teaching and transmitting traditions. He discovered that “disciples of rabbis were expected to memorize their master’s teaching, and importance was attached to preserving the exact words.” While this may be true, the gospels themselves do not seem to be the result of word-for-word memorization. While some of Jesus’ sayings may be the result of his disciples memorizing his words, the stories are too loosely recounted and the variations among the synoptic gospels that tell the same stories would preclude any strict memorization. Instead, a middle way has emerged. Kenneth Bailey was a professor and pastor who lived and worked in Palestine for decades. He observed oral tradition at work among the local inhabitants and discerned three ways the locals passed on their stories and traditions: The first was informal uncontrolled oral tradition. This was simply informal anecdotes, jokes, or even gossip. The second form was formal controlled oral tradition. This was when the traditional story or passage of tradition has to be memorized, and the elders and teachers (along with the hearers) will audibly correct the person reciting the tradition if they make a mistake. The third category of oral tradition Bailey discerns is informal controlled. In this transmission of the tradition the community may be gathered around the fire, and someone tells a traditional story. The storyteller may elaborate and add drama or characterization, but if he departs from the essential facts, the elders and teachers (and the whole community) correct him. The shepherds of Bethlehem would have been part of the larger, ancient Bedouin culture of the Palestine. Another Bailey—Clinton Bailey—was an American Jewish scholar who also spent decades living in Palestine. He was a student of the Bedouin culture and observed and recorded how the Bedouin pass on their oral traditions. It is, not surprisingly, a match with Kenneth Bailey’s observations. The Bedouin pass on their history using narrative poetry, which is very formal and must be memorized, and they rely on genealogies that must also be memorized. In addition, they use prose storytelling which has some flexibility and allows for personal flourishes— adding humor or characterization. However, the additions or elaboration cannot alter the basic content of the story. The “prose storytelling” is essentially the same as Kenneth Bailey’s “informal controlled” oral tradition. In Luke 2:17-18 the evangelist actually tells us that the shepherds passed on what they had experienced, “When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.” The account is told in poetic form and therefore relies on word-for-word memorization, but the story itself adds characterization and dialogue: “Let us go into Bethlehem and see this thing that the Lord has told us about.” The repetition of the important phrase, “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” indicates a crucial element of the story that had to be memorized because it was a “sign.” It was also a sign that this part of the story could not be forgotten. Does this mean that St. Luke met the shepherds and heard their story? It is not impossible, but we must remember that Luke was writing at least forty or fifty years after the events. It is more likely, however, that the shepherds continued to share the story of their experiences that night, and that their essentially reliable method of oral tradition kept the story fresh within the Bethlehem community—and that it was from the next generation that Luke heard the tale. Would the local shepherd families have kept the story alive? We know that in the mid-fourth century when the Empress Helena discovered the birthplace of Christ (on which the ancient Church of the Nativity stands), the site was identified because the local people remembered where the Christ was born. This essay's source is the Imaginative Conservative and is an adapted version of a chapter in Fr. Longenecker’s upcoming book, The Secret of the Bethlehem Shepherds , to be published in November by Sophia Institute Press. Fr. Dwight Longenecker is Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative . A graduate of Oxford University, he is the Pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Church , in Greenville, SC, and author of twenty books, including Immortal Combat , Beheading Hydra: A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age , The Romance of Religion , The Quest for the Creed , and Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men , and The Way of the Wilderness Warrior . His autobiography, There and Back Again, a Somewhat Religious Odyssey , is published by Ignatius Press. Visit his blog, listen to his podcasts, join his online courses, browse his books, and be in touch at dwightlongenecker.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 Previous Next

< Back John Vianney David Cowles Aug 2, 2022 “He used to travel…to isolated barns for clandestine Masses…” (I am indebted to The Pilot , Boston, 7/28/22, for Vianney’s words and for the details of Vianney’s life.) Aletheia Today is all about seeing the world in different ways and living out those differences in our lives. Meet Fr. John Vianney. He saw things differently and he lived his life accordingly. On August 4, the Roman Catholic Church will celebrate the life of this 19th century parish priest, the cure of Ars in rural France. As a young boy during the bloodiest years of the French Revolution, John used to travel with his parents in the middle of night to isolated barns for clandestine Masses with hunted priests as volunteer sentinels kept vigil. The penalty for getting caught, for clergy, hosts, and attendees alike, was the guillotine. Nevertheless, the Vianney family deemed attending Mass, worshiping the Son of God made man in the Eucharist, and receiving him, important enough to die for. In Vianney’s mind, martyrdom was a small price to pay for the physical presence of Jesus. "All good works taken together do not equal the sacrifice of the Mass, because they are the works of men (sic), and the holy Mass is the work of God. The martyr is nothing in comparison, because martyrdom is the sacrifice that man makes to God of his life while the Mass is the sacrifice that God makes for man …" Roman Catholics (and members of some other Christian denominations) believe that in the sacrifice of the Mass, we participate in Christ's sacrifice on Calvary. In the consecration, bread and wine are totally changed into Jesus Christ, really, truly, and substantially present under sacramental appearances ... "He is there!" Vianney would often preach amidst tears, reminding his people that God himself was among them on the altar and in the tabernacle. "…We are like someone who dies of thirst next to a river, just needing to bend down the head to drink, or like a poor man next to a treasure chest, when all that is needed is to stretch out the hand." Image: St. John Vianney Credit: Joachim Schäfer - Ökumenisches Heiligenlexikon 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 XFL and Lent David Cowles Mar 30, 2023 “The XFL is just what a patient in withdrawal needs to ease the transition.” Riddle : How is Super Bowl Sunday like Fat Tuesday? Well, both usually fall in the month of February, but I’m guessing you’re looking for a deeper connection than that. How about this? Each is a final ‘blowout’ before an ‘implosion’: a celebration before a deprivation! Mardi Gras is Biblical: seven ‘fat’ hours before seven ‘thin’ weeks. The streets are barely clear of revelers when the first rays of sun tell us that it’s Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent and its 40 days of penance (i.e., fasting), starting with a major hangover on Day One. Ugh! Who doesn’t hate the month of March? It’s supposed to be spring, but it isn’t. In New England, March 21 st is keenly anticipated, not as the vernal equinox but as the anniversary of mega-blizzards past. And to top it off, you’re starving! This is bad, but not nearly as bad as when the referee blows the final whistle, ending the final play of the Super Bowl. Normally, when you’re watching a game, you turn the TV off the minute the game is over; not tonight. On Super Sunday, you remain in front of the TV for hours, hypnotized by the final broadcast of yet another spectacular season of College and Professional football. The winning coach has been doused in Gatorade, the final touchdown has been replayed for the two-dozenth time, the trophy has been awarded, the darn credits have even started to roll. You still can’t quite bring yourself to push the Power button to off . How come? Because this is day one of the winter of your discontent…and the spring, and the summer. Now begins the endless hiatus between Super Bowl and Training Camp. 5 horrible months – the butt-end of the calendar. Millennia ago, Celtic Druids anticipated today’s NFL calendar. Instead of the 4 calendar quarters we’re used to, they divided the year into 8 periods – one beginning 2/2 (Groundhog Day), another beginning c. 8/1 (Lamb Day) – one marking the end of one season, the other celebrating the beginning of the next. Our society is finally starting to pay long-overdue attention to mental health; and the NFL is determined to do its part. Traditionally, after the Super Bowl, 100,000,000 fans were forced to manage their addiction ‘cold turkey’: no maintenance doses, no Methadone, no counselling, no support groups! The consequences are well documented…and not pretty! Enter the XFL – the NFL’s answer to the crisis of withdrawal. 8 teams, 4 games per week for 10 weeks, followed by play-offs. By the time the XFL season ends (mid-May), the opening of NFL training camps is at least in sight. And the quality? Top-notch! These are not a bunch of NFL rejects. Many were drafted by NFL teams, and many have played on NFL teams, some for years. Some of these players are hoping to ‘get a second look’, some are undrafted ‘walk-ons’ who never got a full try-out, some are in the process of rehabbing prior to an expected return to the NFL. Others, like All-Pro receiver, Josh Gordon, are just looking for a ‘second chance’. Finally, there are a few skilled veterans, Tom Brady types, hoping to extend their playing lives by a season or two. All this and A-list coaches (Wade Phillips) as well. The XFL is just what a patient in withdrawal needs to ease the transition. But as any lifestyle coach will tell you, sobriety is not just about giving up (Lent); it’s also about rebuilding (Easter). Again, the XFL plays a role. Like a Broadway-bound play opening in Boston, the XFL season is an opportunity for Professional Football to showcase rules changes that might someday make their way into the NFL’s regular season. For example, this season we’re getting familiar with… A running clock that speeds up play. A super abbreviated half-time. New rules re kick-offs and punts, designed to foster more runbacks. College rules (one foot in) for pass receivers. The right of each coach to challenge any one play. By far the biggest change, however, is regarding the Point After Touchdown (PAT). Traditionally, teams have had an opportunity to add another point to their score by converting a chip shot kick. It’s almost automatic. The XFL rules eliminate the option to kick for a PAT. Instead, teams have a chance to add one, two or three points to a 6 point touchdown…but they must run or pass to get it. Score from the 2-yard line, get one point; score from the 5-yard line, 2 points; from the 10-yard line, 3 points. Now, a touchdown can be worth as much as 9 points; but the likelihood of having to settle for just 6 points is greatly increased. So, how are teams dealing with this extended palette? Poorly in my estimation. The new rules should have created a fascinating web of strategic considerations. In fact, some teams just routinely go for 2 points, almost regardless of the circumstances. It would be like playing Rock-Paper-Scissors and always throwing Rock. Others mix it up, but not always according to any transparent logic. Looking back at history from my vantage, we’d likely all agree that “something’s lost, but something’s gained.” Put XFL on the “gain” side of the cosmic ledger. Want more football content from Aletheia Today ? Just 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 Jean-Paul Sartre and Pope Leo XIII “Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization!” David Cowles Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist philosopher, prolific author, and perpetual social critic is not often linked with Pope Leo XIII, leader of the Roman Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903. Yet, these two men share an important intellectual legacy: a focus on freedom. Separated by c. 75 years, these men nonetheless faced a common challenge: Rebuild civilization! Sartre faced a Europe shattered by two world wars, the collapse of the liberal republics, the meteoric rise and gradual decline of fascism, and the rampant spread of Stalinism. He was at various times a communist, an existentialist, a ‘man of letters’, and a member of the French resistance. After WW II, Sartre wrote prolifically in an effort to influence the course of Europe’s reconstruction. And what of Leo XIII? The crisis he faced was more cultural than it was political. In fact, you can think of Leo as ‘politically agnostic’…and proud of it. Leo’s pontificate occurred at a dark time for European civilization; he inherited a ‘war’ on three fronts: Intellectually, the so-called Enlightenment had undermined belief in God; the promise of science and technology replaced the Good News and gave rise to colonialism, militarism, and the humanitarian horror known as the Industrial Revolution. Politically, a flurry of new ‘isms’, liberalism, socialism, communism, and anarchism, threatened to marginalize Leo’s ‘ism’ of choice, Catholicism. Morally, these were the early days of modern permissiveness. The cult of ‘license’ was rapidly replacing the practice of ‘morality’ as the foundation of Western civilization. To young people in particular, morality was associated with rules laid down by parents, teachers, politicians, and priests – rules that were enforced selectively…and often brutally. By 1889, the liberte of 1789 had become license. Freedom is not just ‘freedom from’ constraint; true freedom is also ‘freedom to’ create. Nor is free behavior to be confused with random behavior. Consider the Brownian motion of molecules: it is totally ‘unconstrained’…but it is certainly not ‘free’. In fact, randomness is the antithesis of freedom; it undermines free will just as surely as does determinism. In fact, it has been shown that it is impossible to distinguish, phenomenologically, between a thoroughly random world and a rigidly determined one. Both are infinitely susceptible to infinitesimal perturbations. Freedom is a function of ‘will’ and will is always a will to create (or to destroy only in order to create). That’s what will is. It is will that empowers human beings (and perhaps other entities) to formulate projects and carry them out. Will requires the freedom to execute a project once conceived; but it also requires the capacity and inclination to formulate the project itself. The essential element of ‘will’ that allows us to formulate projects is a set of ideal values, freely chosen, that we use (1) to evaluate the current state of our world and (2) to conceive projects to bring that current state into closer harmony with those values. To whatever extent our ‘ideal values’ are imposed on us or our ‘choice of projects’ is dictated to us, our subsequent actions are not a function of will. Nor are they if either our values or our projects pop-up randomly. ‘Whack-a-Mole’ is not chess. Will reWill requires freedom; in fact, freedom is the substance of will. The famous phrase ‘free will’ is redundant. Freedom is only operative in the context of will and will only exists in the context of freedom. When will, motivated by our ideal values, commits to some project, we implicitly designate that project as ‘good’. (‘Good’ is synonymous with ‘our set of ideal values’.) In doing so, we identify something outside ourselves and our world as ‘good’ and when we designate something outside ourselves as ‘good’, we affirm the reality of an objective, transcendent Good that qualifies our project as ‘good’. Example: every work of art aims to be beautiful. Beauty is a core value involved in the creation and appreciation of art. However, different artists and different cultures understand beauty in radically different ways. Furthermore, what is beautiful in one context might be much less so in another. But the value itself, beauty, never varies and never waivers! Without the value known as ‘beauty’ there is no art. When utility replaces beauty as the standard of measurement, art vanishes. “The Bali have no art; they do everything well.” Likewise, if a value is transcendent , it is not derived from anything in this world…or in any possible world. A value has its status a priori . In that sense, values exist before (logically, not temporally) the world exists. Even if there were no world(s), justice would still be justice, even if not yet interpreted or applied. Stated differently, it is impossible to imagine a world where ‘justice’ is not a value. It may be ignored, perverted, or even rejected, but the value itself never goes away. A society that ignores or rejects justice is simply…’wrong’. Let’s let Leo get a word in edgewise on this subject: “Liberty is a power perfecting man, and hence should have truth and goodness for its object.” Immortale Dei (ID) For Leo, ‘truth and goodness’ (in the person of God) is the summum bonum : “… The supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God.” Human Liberty (HL) Freedom “…is to be regarded as legitimate in so far only as it affords greater facility for doing good…” (HL) This controversial and counter-intuitive proposition should be understood as a tautology. The fact that it is not read that way is grand testimony to the crisis of intellectual life in contemporary Western society. Freedom is the opposite of slavery. When we choose a project that is ‘suboptimal’, we are giving-in to some compulsion (biological, psychological, or social). “… To exchange the unchangeable good for evil…is not liberty, but its degradation, and the abject submission of the soul to sin.” (HL) “… Whosoever commits sin is the slave of sin. (John 8:34)” (HL) So here we are, like little boys, imagining that when we are our naughtiest, we are our most free. In fact, the reverse is true. How incredibly distorted our view of reality has become! As Immanuel Kant wrote before Leo or Sartre, “… A free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.” If I were truly free, I would want to do good. Earlier still, the Psalmist began: “Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in company with scoffers. Rather, the law of the Lord is his joy; and on his law he meditates day and night.” Jean-Paul Sartre approaches the question of ‘freedom’ from a diametrically opposite point on the ideological spectrum. He denies the existence of God and, perhaps ‘worse’, states (like Lucretius) that even if God did exist, he wouldn’t be relevant. Like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ayer and Wittgenstein, Sartre rejects outright even the possibility of objective, transcendent values. Without God, “there could no longer be any a priori good, since there would be no infinite and perfect consciousness to conceive it… (If) God does not exist, we will encounter no values…that can legitimize our conduct.” Existentialism is a Humanism (EH) Even so, Sartre recognizes that life without values is impossible. In so doing, he accepts a major part of the Leonine thesis (summarized above). But according to Sartre, if there is no God to source our values, then it is incumbent on us to invent them. This view offers us an important glimpse into Sartre’s ontology. We will see later that for Sartre, human beings take on many of the functions reserved for God in other philosophies. But for now, let’s return to the subject of values: “… If I have eliminated God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values… To say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this: life has no meaning a priori . Life is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning we give it.” (EH) Brave talk! But this is little more than what children do when they play Cowboys and Indians (sorry, ‘Cowpersons and Native Americans’) or Pirates ( aka ‘non-traditional merchants’). They invent rules, establish values and act accordingly. At the time these values are held earnestly, but all is erased when mom calls, “Dinner!” These ad hoc rules have no objective validity, and the values they represent have no transcendent worth. They are ‘made up’ and they remain operative only so long as the ‘play’ continues. One is reminded of Shakespeare’s Tempest : “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air; and—like the baseless fabric of this vision— the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” However, to his great credit Sartre avoids the trap of moral nihilism that doomed Nietzsche, Camus, Ayer, and others. He finds a very clever way out. Sartre locates ‘value’ in ‘freedom’ itself. Earlier we noticed that ‘freedom’ has a unique property: it is the antithesis both of determinism and of indeterminism, even though they are antitheses of each other. How is this possible? In Sartre’s ontology, freedom is closely related to le neant , negation. Freedom negates both determinism and randomness. Sartre demonstrates that the determined and the random are fundamentally identical. They both characterize a world devoid of purpose, choice, etc. Morally, it makes no difference whether events are determined or random; either way, they are meaningless. They make no appeal to transcendence. According to Sartre, unique among the categories of existence, the concept of freedom entails its own value. This is eerily reminiscent of the ontological argument for the existence of God, according to which the concept of God entails the existence of God. But Sartre’s view raises questions: If freedom is a value in itself, from whence does it derive that value? After all, freedom per se (and by definition) has no content; it is merely ‘freedom’, right? Not so, says Sartre: “Freedom, under any concrete circumstance, can have no other aim but itself…(man) can will but one thing: freedom as the foundation of all values… The ultimate significance of the actions of men of good faith is the quest for freedom itself.” (EH) Let’s unpack this: Is freedom “the foundation of all values”? Well, values would have no relevance in our world if we lacked the freedom to conceive and execute (to the best of our abilities) projects that embody those values. On the other hand, freedom cannot be “the foundation of all values” per se . Those values must have a reality beyond freedom itself. Freedom wouldn’t be freedom if values were hard-wired or random. Earlier we observed that freedom empowers ‘will’ and is its essence. Now it is time to turn the tables: without will, freedom is meaningless. The concept of ‘meaning’ presupposes a ‘signified’ beyond the ‘signifier’, so ‘Will’ must be directed at something outside itself, and it is that direction that constitutes freedom’s meaning. ‘Something outside itself’ must possess intrinsic worth if it is to stimulate the will to act. (Why else would ‘will’ undertake action?) That worth must be a function of values embodied in a freely chosen end, values that are objective and transcendent. Let’s restate: Will operates only in the context of purpose (end). To will some ‘end’ is to endow that end with value. It is the values embodied in that end that give it worth; and it is those values and that end that give worth to will itself and therefore to freedom, which is its essence. The sum of all projects freely chosen by the will because of their intrinsic value constitutes the worth of ‘will’ per se, and therefore, the value of the freedom that empowers will. “Man is free. Man is freedom…… Man is nothing other than his own projects.” (EH) Wow! Humanity is not only ‘free’, but ‘freedom’ itself; it is humanity that injects freedom into the world. Yet, that freedom is simply the sum of the freely chosen projects that ‘will’ empowers us to undertake, and as we saw earlier, ‘projects’ imply choice and choice implies value. Traditionally, God is understood to be supremely free and, in some formulations at least, freedom itself. Sartre preserves this ontological structure but puts humanity in the place of Godhead. But he doesn’t stop there: “There is no difference between free being – being as project, being as existence choosing its own essence – and absolute being.” (EH) Again, God is traditionally understood to be ‘absolute being’, sometimes referred to as ‘the ground of all being’. Sartre defines God as an entity whose essence (good) precedes existence; he defines humanity as an entity whose existence (freedom) precedes its essence. God’s perfection does not compromise God’s freedom. Sartre misses this. For him, God is hardwired. He is not a free being who chooses good unfailingly; he is a being whose essence defines him as good and robs him of the freedom to choose. If that were true, perhaps the concept of God would indeed be irrelevant…but it is not! What makes God good, supremely good, is that God freely and perpetually chooses to embody the objective and transcendent values from which all worth is derived. God’s ‘good’ is active, not passive. Second, “God said: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” ( Genesis : 1:26). God and human beings do not form a template as Sartre imagined. Rather, human beings and God share a common ontological nature: freedom. We are co-creators. Remember Kant: “… A free will and a will subject to moral laws are one and the same,” and Leo: “… The supreme end to which human liberty must aspire is God.” (HL) Freedom is the ever new and ever active power to choose the eternal and unchangeable ‘good’. In popular consciousness, Leo is viewed as the archenemy of freedom (as it is popularly conceived, i.e., as license); Sartre, on the other hand, is viewed as its champion. Yet, Sartre’s ideology of ‘freedom’ leads away from the moral nihilism of Nietzsche, Ayer and Camus and back to objective, transcendent values a la Leo. So, two great men whose views are irreconcilably opposed? I think not! 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 Memory and Time David Cowles May 2, 2024 “Patterns persist! More generally, 'pattern' per se persists.” A recent article (4/23/2024) by Allison Parshall in the New York Times confirmed things we’ve known since childhood…and suggested others. Ms. Parshall reviewed the results of some recent studies comparing our subjective sense of time with its objective measurements: “Study participants looked at images for varying lengths of time, and then held down a key to indicate how long they felt they were looking at the image. For images that are inherently more memorable—a person’s face, for example—participants thought they looked at them for longer than they did. And they also remembered these time-warping images better the next day.” We all know that a minute can seem to pass by in a few seconds when we’re fully engaged in some project. We also know that a minute can feel like an hour when we’re in pain or when we are waiting for something time sensitive to occur (e.g. water to boil for pasta or the bell to ring at the end of a school day). In the first case, we say that time is compressed (‘blue-shifted’); in the second, that time is dilated (‘red-shifted’). Coincidentally, we use the same terms when discussing the motions of galaxies vis-à-vis Earth. When an object is moving toward us, the wave length (time) is compressed; when the object is receding, time is dilated. So what’s new in these findings? First, the subject’s experience of time dilation/compression tends to form a pattern. By reviewing past behavior, experimenters were able to predict whether a new image would be ‘red or blue shifted’ by a given subject. More interestingly, those patterns persist across subjects. For example, experimenters found that most participants ‘red shifted’ images of human faces as well as images containing fewer but larger objects. Even color mattered. Red images, conveniently but coincidentally, tend to be red-shifted and vice versa. Most interesting, however, is the relationship between time dilation and memory. Red shifted images turned out to be more memorable than blue shifted ones. Essentially, memory is a function of felt, subjective time, rather than measured, objective time. Bottom line: patterns persist! More generally, ‘pattern’ per se persists. Ms. Parshall conjectures that the relationship between memorability and time dilation is recursive. An inherently more engaging image will trigger time dilation which in turn will make us more likely to remember that image. In turn, we are more likely to time dilate those images that most closely resemble better remembered images. The local, mental process Parshall documents is recapitulated, physically, on a cosmic scale. In the first seconds after Big Bang, the cosmos was reasonably uniform. However, slight variations, possibly attributable to Heisenberg Uncertainty, appeared in the primordial CMB (‘Cosmic Microwave Background’). Inflationary expansion amplified those variations. The universe we know and sometimes love began as the amplification of fundamental uncertainty. As the universe expanded it cooled, allowing energy to manifest as massive particles (e.g. electrons, protons, neutrons). Faint variations in the CMB became ‘seeds’ for the formation of matter. In our patch we have massive discontinuity: matter, stars, solar systems, galaxies. These would not have formed, nor would living organisms, without something to offset the indiscriminately expansive force of Big Bang. That ‘something’ is Gravity! While inflation expands space, gravity contracts it. One quantum of mass requires c² quanta of energy (e = mc²). But note, gravity does not tend toward the restoration of the primal CMB. On the contrary, the attractive force of Gravity turns micro-fluctuations in the CMB into stars, galaxies, and eventually, black holes. Gravity ‘balances’ the expansive force of Big Bang, but gravity is a function of mass. More massive objects are more attractive, so they tend to accrete more matter over time. At the moment of ‘creation’, the universe was uniform - within the limits imposed by uncertainty. The push and pull, warp and woof of process, has given us a world consisting of unimaginably massive objects (or singularities) and terrifyingly expansive space (vacuum, void). The force of cosmic expansion should be offset by the force of gravity. But instead of returning the fledgling universe to its pre-Bang state, gravity has given birth to an enormous and largely empty spacetime, pock marked by gigantically massive celestial bodies. If Big Bang is the thesis, Gravity is the antithesis. The synthesis, the world we live in, bears little superficial resemblance to either. The first comprehensive work of Christian Systematic Theology is the Gospel of John. It begins, “In the beginning was the logos .” (The Greek ‘ logos ’ is usually translated as ‘word’ – not wrong, but excessively narrow. ‘Pattern’ better captures the universality of logos .) John tells us that logos was with God, ab initio , and in fact was God. All things that come to be, including life itself, come to be through logos . As we noted above, pattern is what’s substructural…and this is why the mashed potatoes we serve on Thanksgiving are lumpy…and proud of 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. 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< Back Bacteria Are People Too “I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisian café. They don’t need to study existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day.” David Cowles 1000 words, 5 minute read “ If I only had a brain, ” intones Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz . Of course, it turns out that Scarecrow didn’t need a brain! Neither do bacteria! Prokaryotic (non-nucleated) unicellular organisms, like bacteria, first appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago. Today, they cover the planet and fill nearly every ecological niche. All life on Earth is, or evolved from, a prokaryote. They survive naturally, or they can quickly evolve to survive, in almost any environment, no matter how hostile. Like us, they can even alter their environment to make it more habitable. Originally anaerobic on an oxygen poor planet, bacteria merged to form the first eukaryotic (nucleated) cells which in turn formed plants that produce the oxygen that bacteria later learned to breathe. Wrap your noodle around that one! But before there was sufficient atmospheric oxygen, bacteria used iron to power its cellular processes. “If I don’t have blue, I use red.” (Picasso) Bacteria are as close as nature has come to creating a ‘quantum of life’, i.e. the minimal configuration of molecules required to support phenomena we recognize as ‘living’. No surprise then that we view bacteria as irremediably stupid. “Dumb as dirt!” Of course…they are dirt! But how is it then that bacteria compete with us, and certain insects, for dominion over Earth? Like Scarecrow, they have no organelle that performs the functions we associate with a ‘brain’; but like Scarecrow, they apparently don’t need one. They have devised other ways to ‘think’. Everything wants to think. Sum ergo Cogito (I am therefore I think). But thinking does not require neurons; it can happen using a multitude of physical pathways. If things want to think, they’ll find a way to do so. Bacteria don’t need brains to think, just as they don’t need sex to reproduce. They freely swap genes with one another, no ‘dinner and a movie’ required. People say that Anarchism is an impractical political ideology. “For all its theoretical appeal, it simply won’t work.” Really? Bacterial society is paradigmatically anarchic, and it’s worked for 4 billion years. There’s no whiff of authority. Cooperation is spontaneous. Unlike some humans, they understand that they are ‘better together’. As for conflict, like unsupervised kids on a 1950’s playground, bacteria work stuff out…by themselves. In our finer moments, we humans recreate anarchic utopias too. A recent post on this site explored the Vinca civilization of central Europe, c. 5000 BCE. Sophisticated urban planning and a division of labor were apparently accomplished without a central government, a bureaucracy, a police force or a standing army. Later, between 1250 to 1050 BCE, we see another attempt at anarchic utopia, this time in Palestine. According to the Old Testament Book of Judges , “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” (21: 25) When circumstances required a coordinated response, charismatic leaders called ‘ judges ’ emerged ad hoc , and with the consent of the elders and the people, they provided the temporary leadership needed to address the immediate challenge…and then they returned home to tend their flocks. So, how do bacteria think? We still have a lot to learn, but s cientists have just discovered that bacteria can create memories by regulating the amount of iron in their systems. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin found that bacteria use iron levels to store information about different behaviors that can then be activated in response to certain stimuli. “Bacteria don’t have brains, but they can gather information from their environment, and…they can store that information and quickly access it later for their benefit,” said Souvik Bhattacharyya. Most intriguingly, bacteria pass that information along to their progeny, down at least to the 4 th generation. Humans pass along information two ways: long term via genes, short term via culture. Bacteria have it the other way around. They modify their genes on an almost daily basis but their ‘culture’ preserves memories for at least 4 generations. Single, free-floating bacteria have naturally varying levels of iron. Bacterial cells with lower levels of iron tend to swarm while the bacteria that form biofilms have higher iron levels. You may be forgiven for thinking that cells with low iron gravitate to ‘swarming’ while their high iron cousin prefer ‘filming’; after all, you think that smarter people become doctors while less smart people work at McDonald’s. But you’re wrong…on both counts! Any bacterium can swarm or film; it just needs to ‘decide’ what it wants to do; then it adjusts its iron content accordingly. When iron levels are low, bacteria form fast-moving swarms to search for new sources of iron. When iron levels are higher, bacteria are more likely to feel satisficed and so stay put and form films. “I know who I am and I know that I can be whoever I want to be.” (J-P. Sartre) I’ll bet a bacterium could hold its own in any Parisienne café. They don’t need to study Existentialism at the Sorbonne; they live it every day. So hats off to our unicelluar cousins… and don’t forget, bacteria are people too. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Share Previous Next