< Back Growing Into Pentecost James Bratt "In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix." When I was a kid, I never got the big deal about Pentecost. For one, it didn’t come along with any special songs or meals. Compare that to Easter, where you could get both of those in one package: “ Low in the Gravy Lay .” Actually, you didn’t really want the gravy my mom served with her Easter ham dinner, although we offset that salt-special with her lime jello concoction that combined all four food groups: pear chunks, shredded carrots, chopped walnuts, and a Kool-Whip topping for your bit of dairy. If it was Aunt Jen’s turn to host the extended-family gathering, you could count on treats my parents tried to avoid for the sake of dental bills, hyper-activity, and uncomfortable fertility symbolism: chocolate eggs, marshmallow chicks, and unlimited jelly beans. For Christmas, of course, we had several family reunions, with jello (there’s a pattern here), chips, and pigs-in-the-blanket sure to pop up along the way. Plus carols at church and home, gift exchanges, and enough sentiment stirred up to suffuse the heart against all pain and doubt. Weird and Discomfiting But Pentecost? Nuthin’ . No canonical hymns, no special dinner (except your beef roast and mashed potatoes were always special, Mom), no family gatherings, only weirdness topped by discomfiting admonitions. The weirdness lay with those tongues of fire and mighty wind. Hey, springtime in Michigan is tornado weather, so ixnay on the turbulent atmosphere already! The Sunday School pictures of bearded, berobed guys whose heads were suffering from mis-directed charcoal lighter inspired distaste rather than the tears evoked by Baby Jesus or the awe attending the Risen Lord. Plus one heard rumors of crazy people who used Pentecost as a label, “holy rollers” who handled snakes and claimed, against all reason and scientific evidence, that they could perform miraculous healings. Not that we Dutch Reformed types denied miracles—just that you shouldn’t bet on them or have the audacity to command God to deliver them on cue. Or really expect one for yourself. As for the discomfiting admonitions, well, the Pentecost sermon was bound to urge us to go out and “witness,” which to me meant cold-calling strangers door-to-door or confronting random persons on the street and asking them where they would be spending eternity if they died tonight. Christian Reformed people tended not to be very good at that, and—it still seems to me—for very good reason. Nor did I yet know Mark Twain’s response to that question: “I’ll take heaven for the climate and hell for the company.” Why does that advice seem so apropos today? Junior Partner/Tag-Along Child? The biggest problem with Pentecost, however, seemed to be that there just wasn’t much for the Holy Spirit to do. I mean, how did this guy merit inclusion in the Trinity along with the Father and the Son, who obviously carried out some pretty heavy lifting? Wasn’t the Trinity really a 2+-ity, the alleged Third Person really qualifying as a junior partner, something like the trailing child born to a couple who thought they were done after #2? After all, the Spirit gets only one Q&A in the Heidelberg Catechism while the Father gets three and the Son twenty-four! And however rich the answer to Q&A 53 may be, what I took out of catechism class was that the Holy Spirit had just two jobs: to comfort us when sad and to inspire the writers of the Bible so that their texts were infallible. That is, all those unpredictable, unsettling actions hovering around the Holy Spirit package were stripped away so that God was back in the box of words bound within black-leather covers. Back in the text. Our sure and perfect text-box. Calvin–Theologian of the Holy Spirit? People my age and of similar background have told me they learned it very differently, so part—much?—of my truncated understanding probably reflects bad reception rather than bad teaching. In any case, my real education on the point has come in three parts. It began in grad school when I dove into The Spirit of the Reformed Tradition by Eugene Osterhaven, late professor of theology at Western Theological Seminary. I was astounded to come across a line describing John Calvin as a—perhaps the premier—theologian of the Holy Spirit. And to see that characterization attributed to B. B. Warfield of all people, co-inventor of the theory of biblical inerrancy. But as I read on, there and in other sources, of Calvin’s teaching about the testimony of the Holy Spirit—the action that transforms the dead page of scripture into the living word of God in our hearts—various old doubts and conundrums in my head began to be resolved, and the Third Person took on a richer role, something of a mentor and companion. Not a miracle-worker, maybe, although keeping me from behaving down to my worst level might sometimes be miracle enough. Kuyper, too? Things got richer yet in doing research for my biography of Abraham Kuyper. In his Work of the Holy Spirit (1888-89; E.T. 1956) Kuyper ties the Spirit’s role closely to his own favorite themes of creation and culture. Out of the chaos attending the human fall into sin the Spirit has been, is, and unto the end of time shall remain busy bringing out a new creation that will finally sing perfect praises to its Maker, as was the divine intention in the first place. Meanwhile, Kuyper continued, all along the Spirit has been bringing forth the first notes and sounding forth the big themes of that grand symphony. Included here are the well-known tasks of working sanctification among the saints—more accurately, conveying Christ’s perfections to them—as well as inspiring the Scriptures, conceiving the person of Christ, and building the church as Christ’s representative on earth. But the Spirit’s sweep goes far beyond the elect and the familiar tropes of redemption, Kuyper insisted. Every human gift, every talent, every good work is the Spirit’s work. The vocation of every person, redeemed or not, and the “genius” of every nation are the Spirit’s gift. The “work of the Holy Spirit,” Kuyper even said, “touches every creature, whether animate and inanimate”—those butterflies and bears and rocks and trees and skies and seas are charismatic that way. Nor is the Spirit’s work in creation a once and done affair; it is still active today, “quickening and sustaining life” in every creature’s “being and talents.” (E.T. 45-46) This Incredibly Benevolent Force All these reflections were called back up but also re-set when I recently read This Incredibly Benevolent Force: The Holy Spirit in Reformed Theology and Spirituality (Eerdmans 2018), the published version of the 2014 Warfield Lectures given at Princeton Theological Seminary by my friend Cornelis van der Kooi. As a professor at the Free University in Amsterdam, Kees stands literally in Kuyper’s line; but with additional duties as director of the Center for Evangelical and Reformation Theology there, he has also taken on the role of being a critical friend of the ongoing charismatic movement, both at home and abroad. Cornelius “Kees” van der Kooi Kees trims back some of Kuyper’s enthusiasms; the master was too enamored of secularization and technology, as well as dualistic as to spiritual-material distinctions. At the same time, This Incredibly Benevolent Force is a tour de force on the state of play between Logos and Spirit Christology, bringing Christ down out of the clouds of Greek philosophical abstraction into the living, learning, suffering, and finally triumphant life of Jesus. It is the Spirit who made and makes him Emanuel, the one who is “with us”—and for us. At the same time, it is the Spirit that bears the love of God into the unfathomably far reaches of a cosmos that would otherwise remain a blank space, the big empty. From down here to the farthest out there, the Spirit is active, inviting us indeed to bear witness to the wonderful works of God. To me that “witness” means mostly watching and living accordingly, using words, á la St. Francis, only when necessary. In any case, Pentecost turns out to be a big deal after all. Reformed folk can join with those claiming to be a “full-gospel church”—maybe even remind the others of some overlooked elements in that mix. I’ll pass on the charcoal lighter and snakes, though; just settle for a decent meal. Hmmm, maybe some bread and wine. This piece is republished with permission from the author. It was originally published on Reformed Journal . James Bratt is professor of history emeritus at Calvin College, specializing in American religious history and especially the connections between religion and politics. Starting in Fall 2016 he took a break from blogging on The Twelve to teach in China and on the Semester at Sea, which venues afforded him some welcome distance from the USA’s descent into its current mortal illness. But now he’s back in the States, looking for hope. His most recent book (which he edited and completed for the late John Woolverton) is “A Christian and a Democrat”: Religion in the Life and Leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Return to our Holy Days 2023 Table of Contents, Previous Next

< Back Everybody Loves Grammar David Cowles “If the physical world isn’t structured according to the rules of grammar, the social world certainly is.” No, not Gramma…and not Kelsey Grammer either; I’m talking about boring ol’ fifth grade Grammar. By the time you were two, you were probably already talking in more or less grammatically correct sentences. By the time you were six, you were probably learning to write. Now that you’re (finally) 10, you’re ready to learn what turns a particular jumble of words into a grammatically correct sentence. First, you’ll learn that a sentence represents (or is) a complete thought; then you’ll learn that all complete thoughts break down into three primary elements (stated or implied). Paradigmatically, a sentence consists of a subject (a noun, an actor, i.e., a person, place, or thing) and a predicate consisting of a verb (action or state of being) and a second noun (an object, direct or otherwise). You’re only one month into Grade Five, and you’ve already swallowed an entire ontology. Congratulations! You are the superhero (or monster) you’ve always imagined yourself to be! You swallowed a cosmos…but ironically, you narrowed your own world in the process. In the language of the schoolyard, your world now consists just of ‘bullies bullying the bullied’. Everything you needed to know about the world you learned in fifth grade. So, buoyed by your working knowledge of grammar, you are now well poised to become a slave owner, a colonial governor, a robber baron, a politician, or a gang leader. You understand the food chain, and you’d rather be near the top than at the bottom. Thank you, Miss Landers. If the physical world isn’t structured according to the rules of grammar, the social world certainly is. Better to be a subject than an object, right (wink)? Still, you’ll probably need to be even older before you think to ask Jane Banks’ question: “ Are the stars gold paper, or are the gold paper stars?” ( Mary Poppins ) In other words, is grammar (paper) the way it is because it reflects the structure of the real world (stars), or do we perceive the world the way we do (stars) because we perceive it through the ‘lens’ of grammar (paper)? Does art (tech) imitate nature or nature art (tech)? Grammar may or may not have anything to teach us about the structure of the cosmos, but it has much to teach us about the nature of an event. “Johnny hit Billy.” Hitting, per se, is an action, but it is not, in itself, an event. An action (hitting) only becomes an element in an event when it ‘acquires’ (designates, manifests, includes) a subject (Johnny) and an object (Billy). In our world, a virtual S-V-O sentence exhibits the minimum level of structural complexity needed to represent an event. While specific elements might be missing from particular sentences, they remain implied by the structure itself. Every event needs to designate, if only virtually, an action (or state of being), its genesis (subject, alpha point) and its terminus (object, omega point). That said, we must be careful not to let the ‘external world’ bleed into the event itself. ‘Genesis’ does not include history, ancestry, or etiology; ‘terminus’ does not include consequences. In “Johnny Hit Billy,” the origin is ‘Johnny’, not the history of Johnny’s relationship with Billy, the ongoing abuse Johnny endures at home, or the fight Johnny had with his sister that morning. None of these is an element in the event itself. At the other end of the barbell, a ‘cryin’ Billy’ is the conclusion of the event, not Billy’s tattling nor his retaliation or revenge. I’ll grant you, it can be difficult sometimes to say just when a given event begins and leaves off, but it’s necessary to be as precise as possible. An event is like Douglas Adams’ Michelin-starred Restaurant at the End of the Universe . Beyond the plate glass (membrane) lies sheer, chaotic multiplicity – a far cry from the order and studied intentionality within. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ontology turns out to be yet another expression of the famous Serenity Prayer . From the perspective of any given event, there is much that cannot be controlled. I cannot change my childhood, nor can I determine my children’s future. But between these two endpoints, there is much that I can and should influence. Order and chaos constitute a continuity, but a massively non-linear continuity. Think Gestalt ! I can only perceive the duality of the image to the extent that I can clearly distinguish figure from ground and ground from figure. Likewise, I need to be aware of the clearly defined border separating holistic events from the chaotic multiplicity that surrounds them. If I fail, I might find myself teaching in the Sociology or Psychology Department at some university. Wisdom, for its part, is the osmotic membrane between serenity and courage; it is the great gatekeeper, regulating the flow of information between the two domains. In our example, the event begins with angry Johnny and ends with crying Billy. It does not include the things that ‘caused’ Johnny to be angry, nor the things it ‘caused’ Billy to do afterward. Ontology requires us to walk a very, very fine line. The slightest wobble is likely to be fatal; there are no safety nets where you’re going! On one hand, we have a tendency to focus on the punch itself, forgetting the fact that there is no punch without Johnny and Billy. On the other hand, we are tempted to swell the event to include details from boys’ pasts, etc. We need supernatural wisdom to let us know when a new event is beginning…and when it’s ended. So maybe grammar wasn’t your favorite subject in elementary school after all. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. Previous Next

< Back Colossians David Cowles Jul 30, 2024 “…Any modern day cosmology claiming to be a successful TOE (Theory of Everything) must at a minimum meet the criteria cited by Paul 2000 years ago…” St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. It offers just the conceptual framework we need to understand Universe as a whole: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation , for in him all things were created… God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order) – it would be, wouldn’t it? Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle in fact, as well as order itself ( logos ), the general precondition necessary for the emergence of entities. “All things were created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together … Christ is universal and eternal. Christ is the locus, the origin, and the destiny of whatever is (was or will be). Therefore, Christ conditions everything that comes to be. Because all things (events) share a common origin (Christ) and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; but because Christ is also the locus of all events (above), all things hold together in him . “He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead . For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him…" Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order; you can’t be any deader than dead! Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order ; so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enriching contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmony. Today, academia is engaged in a search of TOE – a Theory of Everything. Needless to say, this search is not taking place in the context of Christian theology. However, it would be well to keep in mind that any modern day cosmology claiming to be a successful TOE must at a minimum meet the criteria cited by Paul 2000 years ago in Colossians : It must account for the diversity of entities (events) amid the solidarity of the Universe and the solidarity of a Universe that consists solely of diverse entities (events). It must explain how and why entities (events) emerge in the first place. It must model entities as unique, holistic events and Universe as a nexus of co-modifying entities. It must explain how things that decay can yet endure. It must allow entities (events) that become and perish in spacetime to be eternal. It must explain how conflict can be resolved into contrast and contrast into harmony. Do you have a pet TOE that meets these criteria? Write it up (under 2,000 words) and we’ll consider it for publication in a future issue of Aletheia Today Magazine . ( Authors will be compensated if published .) Upload your submission here . 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 Cordoba 999 David Cowles Dec 6, 2022 “…the city had 260,000 residential units, 80,000 shops, 13,000 looms, 5,000 mills, and 4,000 open air markets… the central library contained over 400,000 volumes (allegedly more than the library at Alexandria before the conflagration.)” It is customary to trash the Middle Ages (500 – 1500 CE). Historians used to refer to this period as the ‘Dark Ages’, and when we wish to describe an incident of extreme violence, we call it going medieval . There is some truth to this characterization, but as we shall soon see, not much . For example, it is true that both the per capita GDP and the literacy rate declined precipitously after the Fall of Rome (476). But these things did not happen in a vacuum. The last 100 years of the Roman Empire had been a ‘feeding frenzy’ as Northern tribes broke through Rome’s defenses, invaded Italy, and sacked Rome, denuding her of her wealth. The economy of the late Roman Empire was undoubtedly bloated. It was a ‘bubble economy’, based in large part on plunder and slavery. It was unsustainable. To make matters worse, the period from 500 to 800 CE was a period of ‘climate change’; drought ravaged the agricultural economy. Then, the advent of Islam in the 7 th century closed the Mediterranean to ‘international’ commerce and put military pressure on Europe’s southern borders. A perfect storm! The meteoric rise of Christianity didn’t help…at least not at first. These pesky goodie-two-shoes were uncomfortable with slavery, had little taste for war, and failed to place ‘personal wealth’ on its proper pedestal. They were, in a word, more concerned with the economy of heaven than they were with the economy on earth. What’s the Federal Reserve to do? All in all, it was undoubtedly a tough 300 years! “A great time to visit, but…” By the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 CE, however, Europe was once again in growth mode, and with growth comes opportunity. The world is being reborn; get in on the ground floor! This is going to be bigger than Microsoft and Apple combined. So begins a 700-year period of progress: social, economic, and intellectual. This was the golden age of Middle Earth, before the Twilight of the Gods , Götterdämmerung ( aka Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment). Shorn of Roman authority, society clearly needed to reorganize, top to bottom, to reflect the new facts on the ground. The resulting feudal system is a work of ‘cosmic genius’…but that’s not the subject of this article. Hint : stay tuned to ATM and TWS for more! Sadly, this cannot be a complete account of the achievements of the Middle Ages; but rather than risk ‘damning with faint praise’, I will limit myself to a single data point: Welcome to Cordova, 999. It is widely assumed that urbanization was a late and ‘imperfect’ development in Medieval history, so let’s just test that hypothesis. Take the money you saved by cancelling your first-class ticket to Lhasa and travel in coach to Cordova, Spain. (Cordova is a more expensive destination because to get there, you need to travel more than 1,000 years… as well as 5,000 miles.) The year is 999, the midpoint of feudal society’s ‘middle age’. Are you expecting a sleepy village with pack animals roaming the streets and residents lounging in precious shade? Disabuse yourself! In 999, Cordova had a population of at least 500,000. To put this in context, that’s more people than live right now in Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, or St. Louis. To serve this massive population, the city had 260,000 residential units, 80,000 shops, 13,000 looms, 5,000 mills, and 4,000 open air markets. Lest you think this teeming metropolis neglected public works, Cordova had 300 public baths, wide, paved streets, lit every evening by oil lamps, an underground sewerage system, and raised sidewalks to facilitate pedestrian traffic. Farmers relied on irrigation and crop rotation to optimize yield. Nor did Cordova neglect the life of the mind. It has been said that books were more highly prized there than jewels; the central library contained over 400,000 volumes (allegedly more than the library at Alexandria before the conflagration.) “Ok, this is amazing. How come everyone doesn’t know about it this?” It is said that history is written by the winners. True, but more than that, history is written by the would-be winners. The first spin-doctors were historians. The primary purpose of ‘History’ is to provide the now current social order with an appropriate ‘origin story’, one that explains and justifies the world that is . History is first and foremost Mythology. Marx said that the purpose of Philosophy is not to explain the world, but to change it. He might have said the same of History. History has a dual function: to justify the world that is and to shape the world to come. History is Propaganda! 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 Prayer for Forgiveness of Self in Difficult Times Gurnoor O Almighty Father in Heaven, Thank you for always loving me unconditionally. Today, I ask for forgiveness for all the harmful acts and immature decisions I took against my own self. I still carry the load of guilt and shame in my heart. I do not want to indulge in self-sabotage any further. There were decisions and actions that I took which were not in my favor. Teach me to learn from them and take them as stepping stones. Help me forgive myself for the sins I committed knowingly and unknowingly against myself. Forgive me for harboring feelings of anger, fear, and jealousy in my heart. Forgive me for the times I compared myself to others, and forgive me for longing for harmful things outside of you and your kingdom. Please forgive me for my resentful attitude when situations don’t go as my plan. Forgive me for the times I have indulged in harsh words against myself. Forgive me for believing things which are negative in nature. "Forgive me for doing wrong, as we forgive others." (Matthew 6:12) O Almighty Father, forgive me when I allow anger and bitterness. I know as my Divine Father that you are always besides me. Help me model your ways when I make my amends for the times I’ve hurt myself, and also offer forgiveness for times when I have hurt myself. Help me focus on my own responsibility in the issue, so my actions won’t be conditional. Amend my thoughts and help me understand how marvelously you have made me. Help me accept myself unconditionally. Hold me in the hollow of thy hand and shower your choicest blessings on me; I know your love knows no boundaries. I ask thee to help me let go of anger, bitterness, and resentment towards myself and others. Help me learn how to face every storm with confidence, knowing that you are giving me courage to move forward. Help us to set our eyes and our hearts on you afresh. Renew our spirits; fill us with your peace and joy. Teach me to forgive myself like you forgave those who sinned against you. Please fill my heart with Holy Spirit, and help me be your dutiful servant. Help me live in a state of complete surrender to You, my merciful and Almighty God. Thank you for each new day, each new chapter, and every new beginning. Amen. Gurnoor is from India and is a seeker. She is on her journey to discovering herself and her relationship to God. You can connect with her on Instagram, @niftyshadesofnoor. Previous Next

< Back The Eternal Present David Cowles “The Present is…a series of concentric circles, with its axis perpendicular to linear spacetime…” At first glance, our lives seem to be strings of bead-like events. No sooner have we experienced one sensation, one thought, one feeling, one action than another takes its place. We have a vague, naive sense that we can string these events along a timeline labeled, “Past, Present, Future”. But on further reflection, it is clear that this model is too restrictive. Events seem to overlap. I am all at once aware of many sensations, thoughts, feelings, and acts; it is often unclear when one stops and another begins.  Events are not points…or beads. Events have durations, and in a Euclidean cosmos, durations may overlap. But do they really? (Stay tuned!) We do not directly perceive the full richness of the natural world because the human nervous system is attuned only to ‘events’ whose durations fall within a very narrow band, i.e. from one second down to one-tenth of one second. One may think of durations as the ‘wave lengths’ of their respective events. If an event has duration of less than one-tenth of a second, we don’t consciously register it though it may still impact our behavior because of an unconscious, subliminal effect. If an event has duration of more than a second, we must either break it up into multiple events, sequentially ordered…or remain entirely unaware of it. Our naïve sense of event duration has everything to do with our cognitive apparatus and absolutely nothing to do with the nature of events themselves. There is no reason to doubt that the universe is ‘eventing’ across all 60 known orders of magnitude – from Planck scale to the Cosmic Event Horizon. To bastardize Stephen Hawking’s quip, “It’s events all the way down,” or in our case, all the way up! We can only directly perceive events within a single order of magnitude. Accordingly, we shoehorn the Heraclitean flow into relatively tiny packets of perception. This is the origin of our sense that events occur as beads strung along a timeline and it explains our felt need to categorize events as past, present or future. It’s seems to be our only way to make sense of the tidal wave of sensations pouring over us every moment of our lives. We need to ask two different questions: First, what are the ways in which events seem to relate to one another? Then, what are the ways in which events do in fact relate to one another? As soon as we contrast ‘do in fact’ with ‘seems’, we find ourselves hanging out with Parmenides in the 5th century BCE. His distinction between being (Aletheia) and seeming (Doxa) has informed philosophers from Plato to Kant to Whitehead. It seems that events can relate to each other in a number of different ways: First, obviously, they may not relate at all; they may be disjoint, in which case neither exists in the other’s universe. They may be tangent: A billiard ball rolls across the felt with a certain momentum; it impacts a second ball and imparts momentum to that ball. This is the paradigm of what we call causality. They may overlap: While listening to a particular melody, a memory occurs which lingers long after the melody has played out. Or one may be embedded in the other: While washing my car, I’m also listening to some Bach on the radio and day dreaming about the time I threw a no-hitter for the Red Sox in a World Series, or not. Euclidean Geometry allows any two events to be related in any of these four ways. For those of us with only a high school education in geometry, Euclid may seem to be the only game in town. I mean, what else could there be? a² + b² = c², right? The angles of a triangle always add up to 180°, etc. Obviously! Obviously…but not actually! It turns out that Euclidean Geometry is just one way to organize space. It is one of a family of Archimedean geometries that includes Hyperbolic, Spherical, and Projective Geometries plus geometries named after their founders, such as Riemannian and Minkowski Geometries. Suffice to say, the angles of a triangle do not always add up to 180°. How about 540°? Strange as that may seem, reality might be even weirder. All of these geometries (above) are ‘Archimedean’, meaning roughly that you can measure any distance using just Real (plus Complex) Numbers. But Archimedean Geometry is not the end of the story. Still other geometries are modeled on systems involving ‘Unreal’ Numbers (e.g. hyperreal or p-adic numbers). Non-Archimedean geometries share a common feature: if two events intersect in any way, one event must be entirely embedded in the other. No two events (A, B) can be merely tangent or overlapping. Either A is embedded in B, or B is embedded in A, or A and B are disjoint. How does our cherished ‘past-present-future’ model of time fare in a non-Archimedean universe? It doesn’t! Every event has its own duration. To be an event is to endure, i.e. to constitute an extensive Presence. That duration can be dozens of orders of magnitude less than a second…or it can span cosmic history. The duration of each event is that event’s own unique Present. These presents are not arranged sequentially on a timeline but are embedded in one another hierarchically. So the Present is not a fixed region of time. Each event is present to itself. Each event establishes its own Present. In fact, Presence is a defining characteristic of Event. Every event must be embedded in at least one other event, or it must be disjoint from all other events and therefore not part of our Universe at all. To be is to embed or be embedded. The naïve notion that the Present is a point or region of time located somewhere between Past and Future on a linear continuum turns out to be a fairy tale. It is better to understand Presence as perpendicular to linear spacetime. From any point on the past-future timeline, we can use a virtual compass to draw a series of concentric semi-circles, each including broader and broader segments of that timeline, each potentially corresponding to the Present of some event at some order of magnitude. A, B, and C are three events in a single universe. A and B can be disjoint with respect to each other but embedded with respect to C. Or A may be embedded in B which is in turn embedded in C. There are even systems that permit circularity: A is embedded in B, B is embedded in C, and C is embedded in A. The perpendicular axis appropriate to the hierarchy of embedded events (the ultra-metric) measures the duration of each event relative to the events it embeds and the events in which it is embedded: The ultra-metric does not measure an event’s sequential position relative to other events (because there is no sequence in Presence). Nor does it measure the duration of any event relative to the durations of events disjoint from it (because they are not part of its present universe). Nor does it measure gaps between such disjoint events because the concept of ‘gap’ implies a species of metric continuity that is not permitted in non-Archimedean systems. As we measure magnitude along the hierarchical axis, we subsume ever longer segments of what was once considered serial time into single events each with their own unique presents. Ultimately, the timeline itself, time itself, is embedded in an uber-Present, and this uber-Present is the event we know as Universe. What holds the universe of events together is not the weak bond of temporal succession but the ironclad bond of embeddedness. The result is an ever broadening Present. All events are present to themselves; Universe is an event; therefore, Universe is present to itself. To be present to oneself in a universe present to itself, is never not to be, never not to have been. Therefore, all events, including Universe, are eternal, because presence is atemporal. Ultimately, it is the single, common uber-Present, aka Eternity, that holds universe together and constitutes the unity of all that is. The concept of the uber-Present closely resembles the concept of logos in pre-Socratic philosophy (esp. Heraclitus) and early Christian theology (esp. the Gospel of John and the Letter to Colossians ). It refers to the fundamental ordering principle of the cosmos. Image: Dalí, Salvador. The Persistence of Memory. 1931. Oil on canvas, 24 cm × 33 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York City. Accession No. 162.1934. 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 Life on Mars David Cowles “Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" We estimate that Planet Earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago. A mere 500 million years later, its first and only ever living molecule (DNA/RNA) concresced. Today, organisms descended from that one molecule cover nearly every inch of the planet and manage to survive, nay thrive, in unimaginably hostile environments. A single human body consists of 30 trillion of these resilient little critters. Planet Earth is infested, infested with life ! Like a ball of popcorn, soaked in honey and left lying out in the hot sun, we can no longer see the ball through the swarm of ‘beneficiaries’ covering it. “Its first and only ever ?” There is no evidence that life evolved more than once on Earth. Had it, its various forms would probably not have been compatible. Perhaps none of those forms would have survived. Best case, a single architectural design would have quickly won out (as it did?). Given the state of things on Planet Earth 4 billion years ago, it is natural to wonder how likely it was that a living cell would have emerged? But probability doesn’t enter-in to this discussion! It happened once, period. There’s no guarantee it will ever happen again; make the most of it! We’re left trying to construct a probability matrix based on a sample of one; can’t do it! Imagine you have never seen a deck of playing cards before. Your terrestrial life coach invites you to ‘pick a card, any card’, and you do. Ace of Clubs. Now, what’s the probability that the next card drawn will also be an Ace of Clubs? We know that the answer is 0. But we know that only because we know how the deck is constructed. Absent that information, the question itself is meaningless. Of course, once we start finding life forms ‘off-Earth’, it will be a whole different ball game, but that time is not now. Which means biogenesis on Earth (x) could be just shy of ‘infinitely likely’, or of ‘infinitely unlikely’, to have occurred. So all we can say about P(x) is that P(x) > 0 but < 1. Given that life has evolved only once on Earth in 4 billion years and, as far as we know, nowhere else in our solar system, it is impossible to assert that biogenesis (x) has any real probability at all: i.e. that P(x) є {R}. Sidebar #1 : If {R} > P(x) > 0, we can say that P(x) is hyperreal . While we cannot say that x is possible, we cannot say that x is impossible either. Is this the statistical model of agnosticism? Sidebar #2 : If {R} > P(x) > 0, is (x) the mathematical definition of a miracle? Given what we know (a lot) about conditions on Earth over the subsequent 4 billion years, how likely is it that such a life form would have survived ? Common sense says that if life only evolved once on Earth, it could easily have been wiped out early on, perhaps never to evolve again. Common sense also suggests that states-of-affairs will likely arise in the future that are incompatible with life as we know it today. So life then is suspended between ‘what is barely conceivable’ and ‘what is virtually certain’. It occupies the space between ‘not yet’ and ‘not still’. If so, then the bio-verse itself is a ‘logical dispensation’. It is a single fecund oasis perched above a giant sinkhole. It shouldn’t be…but it is! We can say that life on Earth did evolve, and we must anticipate its eventual extinction, so the only variable here is the time span. Time span is quantifiable but like all quantities, it is comparative. Is a liter a lot or a little? Neither? Both? Once you understand the terms, the question itself makes no sense. What then is the comparison between time and no time? What is the significance of ‘one’ in a universe already known to span at least 60 orders of magnitude? About all we can say, objectively speaking, about any ‘time span’ is that it is neither instantaneous nor eternal. A grandson once referred to a now deceased friend of ours (appropriately called Big John) as ‘giant’. Was John a speck of dust (“All we are is dust in the wind” - Kansas) or the Colossus of Rhodes? Both! Conditions on Earth vary. They vary by temperature and tempest, by the density and chemical composition of the atmosphere, and by the availability of water. Yet from the top of Mount Everest to the mouth of a thermal vent on the ocean floor, there is life. From arid desert to arctic glacier, there is life. ‘Give us any gas, we’ll breathe it’ – Laverne & Shirley. O₂? It’s a breeze. CO₂? A-OK. Terrestrial life has even evolved organisms that breathe methane! Once evolved, life is amazingly durable and adaptable. The tenacity of its survival contrasts with the fragility of its birth. Can’t live without it, can’t live with it, can’t kill it! The biosphere is omni-recursive . It gradually terraforms its physical environment to make it more bio-friendly: e.g. stone becomes soil. It experiments with innumerable distinct survival strategies, called species . Finally, it creates Artificial Realities (Culture, Society) that confer additional resilience via epigenetic adaptation. The existence of ‘life’ is extremely improbable but once here…it’s here to stay! Hypothesis : The conditions necessary for the emergence of a living molecule are much more stringent than the conditions necessary for its survival. Once life happens, it’s almost impossible to snuff it out. Of course, individually, we’re all only one stray bullet away from the boneyard and even as a species, we face eventual extinction. But as far as life per se is concerned, we’re not sure what it would take to kill it off. Consider Pando , the largest organism (by mass) on Earth. (It’s a tree!) It is at least 15,000 years old but none of its constituent organs (trunks) lives more than a few hundred years. That said, the conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago were anything but bio-conducive: Heavy asteroid bombardments, high levels of radiation, zero oxygen, superabundant methane. It’s hard to imagine that conditions on Mars, even today, are any less propitious for the emergence of life than that. Martian Bio-skeptics (that’s humans skeptical of life on Mars, not Martians skeptical of life on Earth) blame the planet’s sterility on its lack of heat, air, and water. But this argument is tired. We just flew 72 helicopter missions over the Martian surface. If the planet’s atmosphere is thick enough to support flight, it’s certainly sufficient to support some form of life. Even today, conditions on Mars are probably sufficient to support biogenesis, but if not, they certainly were at some time in the past. From what we know about life, it should have emerged and evolved on Mars at more or less the same time it did on Earth. We’re looking for life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and I hope we find it – in my lifetime, please; but isn’t it much more likely that life would have emerged on our twin planet? Based on what we think we know about biogenesis, there should be life on Mars. If it turns out that there isn’t, somebody’s “got some ‘xplainin’ to do, Lucy.'" David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com . Return to Yuletide 2024 Previous Next

< Back King James David Cowles Nov 15, 2022 “We’re not in Kansas (or even Kensington) anymore, are we?” We’ve recently posted several Thoughts on ‘legitimate government’ and on the proper relationship between church and state: The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg Too Election Day 2022 We hoped to point out that things we take pretty much for granted can be viewed in very different, but still coherent, ways. King James I of England ( aka James VI of Scotland) succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603. We are indebted to him for the most famous book ever published, the King James Bible . King James had a view of government that is different from anything we’ve reviewed so far. We can take a peek at his 1609 speech before Parliament; but caveat lector : this did not come from The New Yorker or from the editorial pages of The Guardian . “Kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods... “Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king… “God hath power to create, or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accountable to none. To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure… “And the like power have Kings: they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting down: of life and of death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only... They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess. A pawn to take a bishop or a knight… “As to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do…” Wow! We’re not in Kansas (or even Kensington) anymore, are we? (Notice how James cleverly manipulates the threat of class warfare to scare the nobles in Parliament into submission!) James is an ultra-nominalist. He rejects the idea that God does what he does because it is objectively ‘good’; James believes that things are ‘good’ because God does them. Nominalism is the theological equivalent of every parent’s last refuge: “Because I said so.” Similarly, laws are ‘just’ solely because the king wills them. Forget about ‘Church and State’, welcome to ‘Church of State’. In a theocracy, Church rules: the State is merely a ‘functional department’ of Church. In a Republic, Church and State are distinct, albeit overlapping, entities with distinct, but also overlapping, jurisdictions. Messy, but... In the world of King James, however, State rules: the Church is a ‘functional department’ of State. None of the 20th century’s greatest tyrants (Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, e.g.) would have dreamt of asserting such bold a claim to legitimacy. Today’s world is full of Theocrats and Republicans (above) leaving few to champion James’ Absolutism. His 1609 proclamation deviates from the developing political philosophy of Europe (500 to 1600), but it also reverses a basic tenet of Judeo-Christian theology that dates back at least to Genesis (2,000+ years before James). In fact, you’re only three verses into Genesis when you see the problem: “Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light. God saw that the light was good.” According to James, God acts without regard to ‘good’. Why then does he check to see if the light he created passes muster? God acted, but he immediately evaluated his act in reference to a pre-existent standard (Good). According to James’ theology, God has no truck with Good. He acts however he acts and by that ‘acting’ he creates Good…for us. It would be ridiculous for God to check to see if his action was good since Good did not exist before he acted. How do you get around this? I only see three alternatives: (1) God is ridiculous, (2) God is delusional, (3) God is ignorant - his right hand doesn’t know what his left hand is doing, (4) “ It’s just Genesis! ” It’s true that we need to read Genesis with a different eye then we would use when reading a book like Maccabees , but arguably the two most important books of the Old Testament, Job and Psalms , are devoted to the idea that ‘God is Good’ (not ‘Good is God’). Perhaps we’ll take a look at those sources in a later edition of TWS . Image: James I, oil on canvas by Daniel Mytens, 1621; in the National Portrait Gallery. Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine ( ATM) . To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back On your Way to San Jose…Turn Right! David Cowles Aug 6, 2024 “An alliance of positive thinkers against the malaise of wokeism is natural…and most welcome.” In a 7/19/2024 edition of The New York Times , columnist Ross Douthart wrote about the convergence of High Tech and the Religious Right. Natural enemies on culture and lifestyle issues, techno-elites and religious conservatives are surprised to find that they have common ground after all. There’s philosophical overlap on “a set of premises held in common about the nature of the universe and the condition of America today”. First, they share faith in the cosmic order, “a belief that the world is still a puzzle waiting for solutions” and not just a collection of random events or a permanently indecipherable mystery. BTW, these later two gnoses are equivalent – they’re just dressed differently. Second, they share the belief that “human beings have some important cosmic destiny, that we aren’t just doomed to blink out in some entirely meaningless apocalypse”, like Heat Death. Finally, there is a shared recognition of the sorry state of Western civilization. How could we have allowed something so incredibly beautiful and profound to devolve into an amoral collection of trinkets? Business as usual will not produce the cultural earthquake needed to rescue us from the malaise of all pervasive despair which threatens productivity and spirituality alike. As is often the case in politics, the two ends of the spectrum find common ground against the middle. But this goes deeper. Our two groups share a common, if unpopular, anthropology: Human beings matter! It’s hard to believe that we’ve reached a state where this proposition must be stated…with the expectation of strong opposition from the cultural elite: “Dust in the wind/All we are is dust in the wind.” ( Kansas ) Strange as it may seem, this convergence is only ‘new’ now; in prior generations, the confluence of religious and economic interests was taken for granted. While Karl Marx labeled religion ‘the opiate of the people’, JP Morgan never failed to attend Sunday services…with full fanfare, of course. Critics view religion as industrial propaganda: “Work hard and endure privation for you will have your reward (back wages?) in Heaven.” But that is not it at all! The cosmology embedded in most religions spotlights human behavior. Sloth is a waste of God’s great gifts. We have talents and resources, not so we can wallow in them, but so we can put them to use for the glory of God and the service of humanity. The urge to build, to discover, to innovate is innate. Not to do so disrespects not only God but humanity as well. I think most entrepreneurs would agree with this sentiment; at one time the entrepreneurial class and the religious community overlapped (recall Max Weber’s iconic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ); not so much today! But if we are to believe Ross Douthart, that may be changing. Of course, this admittedly facile analysis carefully obscures a number of crucial issues. Marx and his followers went to great lengths to point out these chinks in the argument, but they made the ‘mistake’ (IMHO) of throwing the baby (religion) out with the bath water (injustice). Imagine the impact they might have had if they’d chosen to revolutionize religious institutions, making them the vanguard in the struggle to bring prosperity and justice to the world…just as Moses, Joshua, David and Jesus intended. Instead, communism divided economic revolutionaries from spiritual revolutionaries, turning the Church reactionary and the State totalitarian. Any rapprochement between Silicon Valley and Vatican City (symbol of the institutional locus of Western religions) must be grounded on some basic principles: The ‘work ethic’ cannot be used to conceal or excuse economic injustice. Workers own their labor and are entitled to retain it (for their own benefit) or sell it (for wages) as they see fit. In any case, workers are entitled to a generous share of the fruits of their labor. Work must produce goods and services helpful to other human beings without harming the biosphere…or the planet. As long as these four principles are scrupulously accepted, there is no reason why productivity and spirituality should not converge. The notion that production needs to be rapacious and spirit quiescent is peculiar to the 19th/20th Centuries. An alliance of positive thinkers against the malaise of wokeism is natural…and most welcome…in Century 21. 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 Nietzsche and the Book of Genesis David Cowles Sep 21, 2025 “What is Value? Does it exist, is it for real? Or is it something we make up to justify our capricious behavior?” What is Value? Does it exist, is it for real? Or is it something we make up to justify our capricious behavior? After all, we do what we do. Attaching value to what we do just makes us feel better about ourselves, right? But is that so bad? Bad Faith , you bet! Bad Bad , maybe not. The concept of Value has been on the defensive in Euro-American culture ever since dear Nietzsche called it out: “…One belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!” ( Twilight of the Idols ) Value is inherently hierarchical. Values motivate us to act and empower us to evaluate our actions. To do so, values must be on a higher ontological plane than the events they regulate. Nietzsche was an ontological democrat ; he abhorred any sort of hierarchy. Therefore, being intellectually honest to the end, he rejected the concept of Value per se . But did Nietzsche go too far? Is ontological democracy really incompatible with Value? Not necessarily. For example: You don’t get your report card from another student in your class and, if you do, who cares? It has no value! Only a teacher can confer value on a report card and teachers have a hierarchical relationship with their students, right? Well, yes…and no. Teachers and students are coequal partners in a single ecosystem called school . Broadly speaking, “No teachers no pupils/No pupils no teachers!” But within that democratic ecosystem, teachers have a hierarchical relationship with their students. Hierarchy at one level may be resolved as democracy at another. Equality and hierarchy are not necessarily incompatible when they are viewed in the context of process. We can model this with the help of a simple equilateral triangle. Extrinsically, nothing could be more democratic with its equal sides and equal angles. Intrinsically, however, an equilateral triangle can model a dynamic process. Consider: A ↙ ↘ B → C Let A be Valuation, B Proposition, C Realization. Valuation stimulates and regulates the process by which what is proposed comes to be what is real. But the three phases work together to create one, indivisible event. The model of hierarchy within democracy is all around us. An all-volunteer army has a rigidly hierarchical chain of command, but it is in service of a single, ultimately democratic, enterprise: national defense. Multimillionaire athletes willingly place themselves under the authority of middle class managers in pursuit of a loftier goal, e.g. winning a World Series. This event structure and the embedding of hierarchy within democracy were detailed, possibly for the first time, in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis : “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. Evening came and morning followed – the first day.” (1: 3-5) This primordial event, creation, is the paradigm for events generally, from Big Bang to present day. According to the text, creation is a process with three distinct phases, as outlined above: Proposition , “Let there be light”; Valuation , “God saw that the light was good”; Realization , “God separated the light from the darkness.” Sidebar : It is important to note that these three phases are logically, not chronologically, sequential. The primordial event (Big Bang) occurred outside of time as will the ‘Ultimate Realization Event’, whatever that turns out to be. According to the Genesis model, Valuation oversees and empowers Proposition and Realization, although the three phases are coequal in the constitution of a single concrete event. Hierarchy exists in the service of higher level democracy. The concept of Value is rehabilitated and ontological democracy is preserved. What does it mean to ‘get real’. Drawing on Gregory Bateson, we can say that ‘realization’ occurs when ‘a difference makes a difference’. The process of creation ‘began’ within the introduction of the potential for difference, i.e. Let there be light . But that potential difference was only realized as actual difference, i.e. an event, once that difference made a difference , i.e. when the light was separated from the dark. Now the potential difference is actual; it has made a difference. It is a permanent part of the fabric of the world. Sidebar : We all yearn to ‘make a difference’; but why? Do we really care that much about the world? Sadly, no. We want to make a difference because It makes us feel real. According to Bateson, that is not an illusion. Making a difference is how you get real. Footprints in the sand, ripples on the pond! Of course, the value of those differences, if any, is another matter entirely. Not all differences are good, but all differences are real. Only now do we have a settled matter of fact, an Event (“evening came and morning followed”), and the birth of Time, the beginning of cosmic history (“the first day”). The first chapter of Genesis is incredibly dense. It condenses 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to the evolution of Homo Sapiens , into just 31 verses. Even so, the author understood that it was not possible to conflate the three phases of the creative process. They are logically disjoint, ontologically incompatible! As Genesis goes on to point out, these three phases structure, not only the primordial event (creation) but every other event as well. Perhaps surprisingly, Nietzsche accepted the logic of Genesis , though he was unable to accept its implications (e.g. Value). Still, to make his system work, he needed to replace the function of Value. In place of evaluation, Nietzsche introduced the somewhat vague concept of Fate. It is fate , not measurement ( aka evaluation), that collapses the wave function. Fate, in Nietzsche’s scheme of ontogenesis, is a so-called hidden variable . It fulfills the function of ‘the implicate order’ in David Bohm’s quantum physics. Unfortunately for Nietzsche, hidden variables have fallen into disrepute since the work of Stephen Bell (1964). But it would be myopic to think that the final word has been spoken on this matter. So far, we have been referring to Creation as the primordial event. But that, of course, is wrong. The primordial is God himself. Happily, in the Christian doctrine of Trinity, we see that the event called ‘God’ shares the same structure (above) as the event called ‘Creation’. Once again, our equilateral triangle may serve a purpose. A ↙ ↘ B → C Understand B as Christ, the only begotten Son of the Father, A ; understand C as the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father ( A ) and the Son ( B ). (Nicene Creed) So we are indebted to Nietzsche’s searing critique of the concept of Value for helping us see the deeper, tri-polar structure of events and for opening new windows into the nature of Trinity and into the ontology of Genesis . Nietzsche declared God ‘dead’ and that declaration helped us see God in new ways and in new places. (Not sure Nietzsche' would be pleased!) *** Quentin Massys’ The Moneylender and His Wife (1514) shows a moneychanger carefully weighing coins while his wife, who had been reading a devotional book, leans in to watch the transaction. The gleaming scales, coins, and rich still-life details emphasize themes of wealth, commerce, and the lure of material gain. Subtle symbols—a mirror reflecting passersby and the neglected prayer book—suggest a moral tension between spiritual devotion and worldly preoccupation. 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 Happy Samhain! David Cowles Oct 26, 2023 “On Samhain, everything is possible and everything is permitted...” Are you familiar with this image? Do you immediately associate it with Halloween? Probably not. The modern ‘Christian Era’ (CE) calendar breaks the year into quadrants, which we call seasons . Each season begins or ends at a solstice (maximum darkness or light) and at an equinox (equal darkness and light). The two solstices and two equinoxes provide the four nodes of the calendar. Graphically, the CE calendar can be represented as an equilateral diamond with its four nodes situated, two each, on the horizontal and vertical axes. On the other hand, the traditional Celtic calendar (BCE) consists of eight nodes: the four nodes of the CE calendar (above) plus an additional four nodes, each one located at the mid-point between two CE nodes. Graphically, the BCE calendar is the CE ‘diamond’ (above), plus its reflection, skewed 45°. We (CE) define a ‘season’ as a period of time bounded by both a solstice and an equinox, but according to the Celts, we should define a season as a period of time bounded by either a solstice or an equinox. It’s Symbolic Logic 101(a): {E} ˅ {S} vs. {E} ʌ {S} - the move from conjunction to disjunction doubles the number of seasons. 4, 8, 16—who cares how many seasons there are? After all, they’re just arbitrary divisions of a cycle defined by the revolution of Earth around the sun, right? Yes, and no; yes, they are just divisions of a cycle, but no, those divisions are not arbitrary. They are defined by astronomical events that are highly correlated with overall weather patterns. Inuit languages are purported to contain as many as 50 words for snow; English has just one. Our snow is just snow, a delight for all children, and an annoyance for most adults. To the Inuit, however, snow is substructural: it dictates daily activity and is both life-enhancing and life-threatening. Living close to nature and utterly dependent on the predictability of its cycles, the Celts needed a more detailed map of meteorological time. A calendar with eight nodes just made sense. When referring to the Celtic calendar, it is customary to refer to the additional 4 nodes as ‘Cross Days’, typically celebrated on February 2, May 1, August 1, November 1 – Samhain , later Christianized as All Saints/Souls (Hallows) Day, and its famous ‘eve’, Halloween. Sidebar : Note that we still celebrate secular analogs of these days: e.g., Groundhog Day, May Day, and Halloween, for example. Many pagan cultures imagine that there are two ‘worlds’ separated from one another by a cosmological membrane. On the one side – all that was, or might have been, or may yet be, a world populated by the souls of the dead and other spirits; on the other side – the actual world – the world as we know it, what is. Past and Future vs. Present. The significance of Samhain is that on this ‘liminal’ day, the membrane separating the material from the spiritual is at its thinnest. If you or an ancestor of yours ever wishes to make the jump, this is the day to do it. That’s why spirits and demons roam abroad on Halloween. There is a narrow launch window roughly spanning Halloween, All Saints, and All Souls days on the CE calendar. If this window is missed for any reason, it is best to wait a full year before trying again. Samhain is emblematic of all life experience. On the one hand, it is the moment of celebration (everything is possible now); on the other, it is a moment of dread (everything is possible now). We disguise ourselves on Halloween so that teleporting spirits will not be able to recognize us. This custom protects us, both on the astral plane… and on the plane we know as ‘civil society’. Our costume conceals our identity from neighbors as well as from demons. On Samhain, everything is possible and everything is ‘permitted’, de facto if not de jure ; ergo, ‘Trick or Treating’. What you will not share with me voluntarily, I will take from you involuntarily. Note the Marxist tone. Each of the feasts accompanying the eight nodes of the pagan calendar includes a call for socio-economic justice. It is not surprising then that the celebration of Samhain goes back at least 4,500 years…possibly 6,000. Because we are disguised, concealed, and anonymized, our actions have no ‘consequences’, social or metaphysical. We have returned to the state of nature . As a result, Samhain celebrations often include a reversal, or at least a suspension, of the usual social hierarchy. The nobles wait on their servants at the table. Children escape their parents’ control, making this holiday #1 for many in the 6-to-12 set. The Sufi Bible, Mary Poppins , talks of one day each year when the cages at the zoo are opened, leaving the animals free to roam and their human attendants locked in their cages overnight. We have entered the period of the earth’s Sabbath. The old year ends at Samhain, and the new year begins at Yule (Christmas, Festival of Lights). In between, the earth lies fallow, metaphorically and, most often, literally as well. 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 . 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