< Back Where the Time Goes “I need have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present.” David Cowles “Hello.” ( Psst : It’s the 5 th century BCE calling.) “How can I help? Ok, understood, and thanks for checking in.” Some guys from Ancient Greece just called. They want to know how we’re coming along with their ‘problem’. They’ve certainly been patient, so I didn’t have the heart to tell them that it’s been almost 100 years since anyone seriously looked at their issue. It seems that 2,500 years ago a bunch of guys (sic) began asking, how is it that there is both motion and rest in the world, change and continuity, novelty and tradition, etc. The last person to take a serious look at this was British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality , Whitehead’s magnum opus and a crowning achievement of Western systematic philosophy, quoted a popular verse from the Anglican hymnal to illustrate the paradox: “Abide in me/Fast falls the eventide.” After Whitehead, the matter lay mostly dormant…until the ‘60s. (Of course… the ‘60s! Nothing slept through the ‘60s.) English folk-rock singer and songwriter Sandy Denny and American music icon Judy Collins expressed the problem this way: ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ Let’s listen in! Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving . But how can they know it’s time for them to go? With this opening verse, Denny and Collins introduce what will be a master class in Time . Their song will reference four competing concepts of time: (1) linear time, (2) duration, (3) rhythm, and (4) atemporality, the total absence of time, i.e., eternity. We seem to be immersed in linear time . Things that are not come to be and things that are come to be not. Heraclitus: “You can’t step in the same river twice.” Lewis Carroll: “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” (i.e., couldn’t reverse linear time). Most often when we refer to ‘time’ in conversation, we mean linear time: I’m getting older by the minute! But that is only one side of the story. There are three other perfectly valid notions that fit securely under time’s conceptual umbrella. (1) Linear time is like a straight line, bidirectional and infinite, or perhaps a ‘ray’, unidirectional and infinite. (2) Duration is like a ‘line-segment’. It has an origin and an end point, and we are mainly concerned with the distance in between. (3) Rhythm is like a circle, or a spiral, or a sine wave: what goes around, comes around. Karma. Nature’s cycles: the seasons of the year, the tides, the phases of the moon, the precession of the equinoxes. (4) Eternity is like a point: it’s real, but it has no temporal extension. If things that are ‘eternal’ have any internal structure, that structure unfolds along a dimension other than spacetime. Denny and Collins begin with linear time. The birds are leaving. Somehow, “they know it’s time for them to go.” It is, and they do. Nature demands it…and the birds play out their appointed role in the cosmic dance. Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming ; I have no thought of time. Contrasting herself with the birds, the artist lives in a dream-like state. While the birds “know it’s time for them to go”, hers is a state in which there is “no thought of time”, just as there is no concept of time in the pre-conscious mind. Sidebar : One of the defining criteria of art is that the artist is in close contact with ‘what is’ (e.g., nature) with minimal mediation and distortion from ‘civilization’. We sometimes refer to people in close contact with ‘what is’ as being ‘in the zone’. By contrast, for the engineering mind , everything is bound up with space and time. ‘To be’ is to occupy a defined region of the spacetime plane. According to the logic of linear time, things that are not come to be and things that are come not to be. But where do these things come from in the first place, and where do they go when they are done being ? (And what does a question like that even mean?) Because no one knows ‘where the time goes’, and because the phenomenal world seems hopelessly time-bound, no one knows what becomes of such entities and events once they are no longer present. In the 1950s, a TV show called Howdy Doody was a big part of ‘kid culture’ in the US. The show would always begin with the emcee (Buffalo Bob) calling out, “What time is it?”; and kids lucky enough to be in that day’s ‘Peanut Gallery’ would dutifully respond in unison, “It’s Howdy Doody Time!” ‘Howdy Doody Time’ meant that time was suspended. For 30 minutes, a kid could descend into the timeless, preconscious world of make believe, free of ‘real-world concerns’ like homework, chores, and parental nagging. So, “What time is it?” Today’s adult version of yesterday’s Peanut Gallery might respond, “It’s Present Time!” (Ram Dass: “Be Here Now!”) What other time could there be? We think and talk a lot about the ‘past’ and the ‘future’, but we never actually experience either (except as shadows in the form of memories, dreams or inertial momenta). We always and only live in the ‘present’. Sidebar : A defining characteristic of a ‘shadow’ is that it is not the thing itself. So, where does the time go? It doesn’t go anywhere. If it isn’t here and now, it just isn’t. And if it isn’t now, it’s not going to pop up at some other time in some other place. Being is one and done. It’s a single shot: you either are or you are not. Being takes place only at the buzzer. If you are, you are here, now; and if not… Events bound to the flow of linear time may also be assumed to go nowhere . Once no longer present, it is just as though these things never were. That’s what makes time the great eraser, the mortal enemy of life, of being, of purpose, of meaning. Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving . Ah, but then you know it’s time for them to go. Nature is not perturbed by the processes that unfold within it. It depends upon them. There is no sense of loss. Everything is as it is, as it should be, ‘just right’. One is reminded of words from Ecclesiastes (popularized in the 1960s by The Byrds ): “There is an appointed time for everything… A time to give birth and a time to die; a time to sow and a time to reap… A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them… A time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away.” Sidebar : Notice how the wisdom-poet converts the passive voice process of loss (“a time to die…a time to lose”) into the active voice process of “casting away”. We cast away so that we may seek; we lose so that we may find. But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving. I do not count the time. The artist does not ‘think of leaving’. To ‘think of leaving’ is to position oneself inside time and to bind oneself to time’s peculiar linear progression…and so to self-immolate. If we are to be (i.e., not erased), we must not ‘think of leaving’. Sidebar : Not all artists paint, write, compose, etc. Be the artist of your own life. Live presently! “The Bali have no art; they do everything well.” And I am not alone while my love is near me, I know it will be so until it’s time to go. I am not a bird; I am not the deserted shore. Am I then doomed to be merely an isolated observer of natural processes? A lonely scientist? A frustrated anthropologist? Fortunately, no! There is ‘process’ that is naturally appropriate for us humans: It’s not thought, but love! Love is the antithesis of time. Time is the great eraser, but love dissolves time. Rock-Paper-Scissors. It has often been said that love makes time stand still. More accurately, love does not impact time directly; love is a process that occurs outside of time. When I love, I go on autopilot. I give myself over to nature’s timeless rhythms. And so for me, too, eventually it will be ‘time to go’. But I will not discover that using a watch or a calendar; it will discover me and take me entirely unawares. The birds know when ‘it’s time for them to go’, and as far as we know, they don’t mind . I don’t know either, but if I did, I’d ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. Love binds us to one another; it blots out linear time…'until it’s time to go'. Love knows only two states: ‘here/now’ and ‘time to go’. Is this ‘time to go’ what we call ‘death’? Yes and no. It’s not the terrible annihilation that may be the fate of time-bound entities but the peaceful fulfillment of nature’s purposes. So, come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again, I have no fear of time. For who knows how my love grows? And who knows where the time goes? In the arena of time, things appear and disappear, wax and wane; but do they ever just simply ‘be’? In time, things are past…or future…but never present. The present is at best an infinitesimal point. Therefore, present events must have vanishingly short durations, durations many, many orders of magnitude below the duration required for conscious awareness. And yet, I believe I am conscious. I am even conscious of being conscious. In timeless nature, on the other hand, everything that exists, exists in the present (and only in the present). As long as it exists, it is its own present; and as long as it is present, it exists. There is no waxing and waning, but there is process; process in the present is called ‘growth’. Therefore, love, which is always and only present, grows. Growth replaces waxing and waning. And what grows endures. Because my love grows, I need to have no fear of time, that ‘great eraser’. I don’t live because of the past or for the future. I live by and for the present. Love has no cause; it is sui generis . Likewise, it is its own end ( telos ). It exists because of itself ( causa sui ) and it exists for itself ( pour soi ). It is its own raison d’etre . In his First Letter to the Corinthians , Saint Paul writes concerning the Eschaton (the end of time): So, three things remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. Faith is the shadow of the past experienced in the present. Hope is the shadow that the future casts on the present. But love is the present; it is experience; it is being. It has no past or future. While it is, it just is. It is where the time goes. Love is a conservative force. It brings time to a standstill. It creates entities of indefinite duration. Yet love is also revolutionary . “It stands in the hallway; it blocks up the hall” (Bob Dylan). Love rebels against life’s ‘getting and spending’ (Wordsworth), against the inexorable process of ‘growth and decay’. It undermines every established structure including the uber-structure of spacetime itself. In a world where change is the steady state, permanence is rebellion. Ever been in love? Were you anxious for things to change? Didn’t think so! You wanted it to last forever and for a time at least, it seemed as though it would do just that. Love is the pinnacle of life. It’s all downhill from there. So be the King of your Castle, not an Eddie Haskell. 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

< Back Is 65 the New 45? David Cowles That’s conventional wisdom…and in this rare case, conventional wisdom is not wrong…but neither is it perfectly right. At 65, we do feel about the same as we did at 45…maybe a step slower on the basketball court, but otherwise pretty much the same. So, does that mean that 75 is now the new 55? No way! I’m not sure 75 is even the new 65. 75 might just be the new 75! So, what’s going on here? Gertrude Stein wrote, “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” Ms. Stein points out that subjective time is very different from objective time. Objectively, we age one year, every year. Subjectively, we don’t! Suppose I’m 65, objectively. According to conventional wisdom my subjective age is 45. But why 45? Why not 35 or 25 or even 15 or 5 for that matter? Ms. Stein anticipated this question…and answered it. At 65 I can be 55 or 45 or 35 or 25…because all of them are really ‘25’ (young men and young women). But 65 can’t be the new 15 or the new 5. Why? Because 15-year-olds are not 15, nor are 5-year-olds 5. Both are ‘25’ too: “We are always to ourselves young men and young women.” How would you graph your age? As a straight line running at a 45 degree angle from birth (0,0) to death? That’s time all right, but it is objective time: y = x. However, subjectively, time is mostly a flat line segment, parallel to the x-axis, running from x = 25 to x = 65. From birth to 25 and from 65 on, subjective age follows a curvilinear track, convex before 25, concave after 65. Is it possible to do an equation for that? In the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine , John, Paul, George, and Ringo find themselves in ‘the sea of time’. Objectively, they regress to infancy and then advance to old age, all in the space of just a few minutes. But through it all they remain “young men”, i.e., circa 25. They live in ‘Stein-time’. To explore further the wisdom of the Yellow Submarine , stay tuned for Issue #1 of AT Magazine, scheduled for publication on 6/1/22, and check out the feature article, Science and the Yellow Submarine . Bookmark aletheiatoday.com . Society never tires of telling us to ‘act our age’. But which age? We are our own age only three times in our lives: once at birth (or before), once when the two temporal trajectories (subjective & objective) intersect, and finally at the moment of our death. Otherwise, our subjective age is always different from our objective age. How can I act my age if I don’t know how old I am? I’ve always admired children who could accept being children and old folks who could accept being old. Trouble is, I’ve met very few of either! I can’t remember a time when I thought of myself as a ‘child’. My childhood was an unbroken struggle to escape - escape from parents, escape from school, escape from childhood itself! I can’t remember a time when I did not want to be 25, and did not think of myself as 25, until now. I am 75, like it or not, and I’m starting to think of myself as 75, or close to it. My trajectories are converging…for the last time. Previous Next

< Back Psilocybin “If I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me?” David Cowles You first wondered about this when you were 12. Then you put it aside while you made your first million. Now you have some breathing room and can consider existential questions once again: “When we have what we call ‘an experience’ how much is that experience a reflection of what’s actually out there in the world, how much is refraction of the world based on our ‘intentions, projects and purposes’ in that world, and how much is a projection of our cerebral architecture onto that world?” You probably already suspect that it is a ‘little bit’ of all three and that’s likely true. But it leaves unanswered, “How little is a little?” In other words, what portion of our experience is reflected , what part refracted, what projected ? And how can we be sure which is which? Recent experiments with a hallucinogen known as ‘sillycybin’ have shed new light on this existential problem. Whenever crazy philosophy types (like me) persuade otherwise sensible people (like you) to think more deeply about the nature of experience, three aspects of experience seem to catch everyone’s attention: Events seem to occur in space, Events seem to occur in time, Events seem to be experienced from a unique perspective we call ‘the self’. Only academic philosophers waste time thinking about what it’s like to be ‘blue’, but most everyone at some time or other wonders about the nature of space, time, and self. The last time you got high on psychedelics, did you notice rectilinear, Cartesian space getting all gooey? “Professor, how am I supposed to measure things down to the fourth decimal if everything is continuously moving…and my ruler is some sort of squiggly snake?” And time? “How long have I been sitting on this beach? Did I just get here? Or have I been here all day? How to tell – check how sunburned I am. Ouch! That’s going to peel.” And who is this ‘I’ that’s been sitting on this beach all day? “I am the sand, the ocean waves, and the sunlight; I am the sparsely scattered sunbathers kindly sharing their beach with me. Where do I begin and end? What’s me and what’s not? And why am I channeling Walt Whitman?” On an ordinary Monday, the neurons in your brain fire in coordinated waves. You experience these waves as thoughts or perceptions. In our culture at least that experience is likely to include a spatial aspect and a temporal aspect and a sense of self. But come Friday, you have a date with some psilocybin . When we take hallucinogens, neurons desynchronize and some stop firing altogether. But at the same time, our neural networks become less distinct from one another: the boundaries between them blur. The walls of ‘the box’ just got thinner, so now it’s easier for us to think ‘outside’ it. Overall, the brain’s process becomes more chaotic while its output becomes more creative. As a result we may struggle to perform habitual tasks (like tying shoelaces) but we may also generate amazing new ideas and gain insights into seemingly intractable problems. This experience is also likely to challenge your everyday conception of space, time, and self. Note that the effects of psilocybin are a double edged sword. If we were high all day (like in the ‘60s), we would have neither the motivation nor the ability to get much done (like in the 60s). But if we never got high (like in the 50s), we’d sacrifice a lot of creativity… As is often the case with living organisms, the sweet spot is a happy medium. But how to make that happen? Hint : we didn’t have to wait for Timothy Leary; evolution takes care of us…though it takes its sweet time. The human genome evolved to include CYP2D6, a gene that allows our bodies to synthesize certain psychoactive substances, including psilocybin, naturally. Recent studies have shown that psilocybin enhances cognitive function . It would have sharpened early humans’ visual skills, supporting their hunting and gathering activities. The compound also could have boosted sexual stimulation, thereby increasing chances of mating, a boon to reproductive rates. Consequently, natural selection ensured that the ability to generate psilocybin would be hard wired in the human genome. So human beings get high naturally! Deal with it. Everyone’s microdosing on psilocybin all the time…or at least they could be. Even Grannie! But ‘some’ is never enough for us apex predators; we always want more! More money, more power, more drugs. Early hominids—our extinct ancestors—picked “magic mushrooms” as far back as six million years ago. Mushrooms originally evolved to produce psychoactive substances as a defense against pests and predators; humans repurposed them. Now those in the know rely on them for protection against cognitive pests and emotional predators. Among human cultures, there is an almost universal sense that there is more to this world than meets the eye . Nietzsche notwithstanding, something transcends the world as we perceive it. Call it Aletheia , noumena, dialectics, the Upside Down ( Stranger Things ), or God ( Torah ), there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies. Perhaps organically synthesized psilocybin gave our species its first look at the Transcendent. That would likely have spurred us to attempt even deeper raids on the ineffable. Shamanic practices and religious rituals, sometimes preceded by a ‘tiptoe through the tubers’, allow those who ingest the fungi to have experiences we would otherwise never know. Today, a well-attended church in Colorado Springs offers members of its contribution the option of a consuming magic mushroom before the services. This is another case of convergent evolution. Fungi evolved the ability to secrete psylocibin as a survival mechanism, humans did the same but for entirely different adaptive and reproductive advantages. Wanting more, early humans foraged for the precious caps, no doubt spreading spores far and wide in the process. Later, humans cultivated these same mushrooms and took steps to protect their habitats. Finally, hippies consumed them, ensuring a market and securing the funding needed to keep the cycle humming. So, if I decide to take a ‘trip’ someday, would you care to join me? 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

“Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” < Back Proof of God: The Empirical Argument David Cowles Jun 1, 2024 “Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere in our World, we perceive that God is present everywhere…” In the this Issue of ATM (6/1/2024), we attempted to resurrect a 12th century Ontological Proof of God’s existence . We performed our feat of prestidigitation by standing Anselm of Bec on his tonsured head. Anselm et al. argued that ‘existence’ is a ‘perfection’, that being is an improvement over not-being. (Lie quiet, Hamlet!) Since God is perfect by definition, God therefore exists by definition, i.e. among all his other perfections, God must possess the ‘perfection’ of existence. Anselm argued God’s case logically. We rescued Anslem by showing that it is not necessary to treat ‘existence’ as a ‘perfection’ or even to posit God as ‘perfect’. All that is required is the ability to recognize gradations of Value. Whenever you can say that A is objectively ‘better’ (more beautiful, more true, more just) than B, you are saying, “God exists,” because without God, no gradations would be possible. At the end of the day, God is Value and therefore the ground of all values. God is Beauty, God is Truth, God is Justice. Therefore, if we say that one painting is more beautiful than another, one proposition more true than another, one law more just than another, we implicitly assert the existence of God. As long as ‘actual entities’ manifest varying gradations of various values, they testify loudly to the existence of God. Of course, if all things perfectly reflected God’s Value (Good), they would still testify to the existence of God…but we wouldn’t hear it. A world in which everything is maximally Beautiful, True, and Just, i.e. maximally Good, is called the Kingdom of Heaven . Had we been born directly into the Kingdom , we would be co-terminus with God. We would enjoy God, but we would not ‘know’ God. We would be ‘reduced to the state of Eden’, i.e. ‘Eve before Apple ’, forbidden to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Or reduced to the state of a fish in water. A fish cannot prove the existence of water empirically. It is only by contrast that we perceive and for a fish, water is ubiquitous. Likewise, it is only by variations in value that we can detect the universal presence of God. A bit of a paradox, this! Because God is not perfectly manifest anywhere* in our World, we are able to perceive God everywhere in that World. (*exceptions may apply) According to Genesis, Adam and Eve ‘paved paradise and put up a parking lot’ (Joni Mitchell); they traded Eden for gnosis and ended up with techne (technology). What is the first thing the first family did after leaving Eden? You guessed it: Cain went East and built cities. We did the same at Babel. Seeking to be ‘more like God’, we built infrastructure and became less like God in the process. “The nearer your destination the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.” (Paul Simon) Do these stories seem far fetched to you? Then how about our own very recent so-called Enlightenment ? We set our caps for gnosis and, like the Babylonians before us, we ended up with techne . Before I turned 25, I thought I knew everything; since turning 75, I realize I know nothing now...and knew even less then. In 1900, the cognoscente thought they knew almost everything about almost everything. Spoiler Alert : They didn’t! In retrospect we see that they knew almost nothing about anything – anything important that is. Conjecture : The more important something is, the less sure we can be of it. (Call it the ATM Uncertainty Principle ?) Therefore, the most we can know about the most important subject, God, is nothing. Wittgenstein labeled a certain family of propositions, Important Nonsense – a rare example of redundancy on the part of this great thinker. The more important the info the less likely it is that the proposition will be meaningful according to our criteria; therefore, Wittgenstein’s famous meme is redundant. Knowledge is like the Cosmos. The frontier is receding from us so rapidly that no matter what we do, our patch will continue to shrink relative to the whole. Metaphorically speaking, the noosphere is imploding at about a billion km per hour. We occupy an increasingly small fraction of spacetime…and of the noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin). What we know is an increasingly small fraction of what is knowable. Like various non-human life forms from the Star Trek franchise, the citizens of Eden were willing to accept the horrors of mortality to gain knowledge. But you don’t need to belong to the Q-Continuum or the Borg Collective to value knowledge. We find the same spirit in a very human story that dates back almost 4,000 years. Of course, I’m speaking of the Book of Job. Bereft of family and fortune, Job, covered with boils, taunted by neighbors, living on an ash pile, has the incredible courage to say that the worst fate that could befall a person is to ‘die without knowledge’. Sidebar : When a university professor (sorry, profs), whose closest encounter with pain was a hangnail, ranks ignorance as the worst fate, we are entitled to a bit of an eyebrow lift. But Job has street cred – as does Jesus after him! When Job confronts God at the end of the epic, he does not ask God to restore his fortunes; he simply asks for knowledge. Whether or not he gets that knowledge is a matter of debate . In any event, I wonder how many of us would sacrifice ‘paradise’ for knowledge. When confronted with a choice, a challenge, or a problem today, how many of us ask the appropriate question, “ WWJD – What would Job do?” Speaking of knowledge, what is it that we know? We know contrasts. We know A because we are not A and because A is not B (~A). A is the classic Neti, Neti (Not this, Not that). And what is the currency of contrast? Attributes, qualities, values. When we say A contrasts with B, we mean to say that A and B manifest various qualities in differing proportions. If God is Value, and if Value characterizes every actual entity and manifests as a variety of values in those entities, then God is manifest in every actual entity. We just need to find him, to recognize him. When we do we release the spark ( Shekinah ); literally or figuratively, we reunite the mortal world with the eternal godhead. Now at last, we can restore poor Anselm (above) to his upright position…but we need poor Descartes to take his place. His famous Cogito ergo sum is reconceived: Percipio ergo Deus est . “I perceive, therefore God exists.” This is the famous, elusive, empirical proof of the existence of God. I perceive because there are contrasts. There are contrasts because God exists. A world without God would be monochrome; neither we, nor any sentient being, could exist in such a world. So have we done what no one has seriously attempted to do since before Socrates? Have we proven the proposition, ‘God exists’, empirically rather than logically? Take our Reader Survey here. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to Summer 2024 Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. 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< Back Love Thy Neighbor David Cowles Aug 16, 2021 A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following: “This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours. If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole. A subscriber to Thoughts While Shaving recently sent me the following: “This moment that humanity is living through can be considered a door or a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the door is yours. If you consume information 24 hours a day, with negative energy, constantly nervous, with pessimism, you will fall into this hole. But if you take the opportunity to look at yourself, to rethink life and death, to take care of yourself and others, you will go through the door. Take care of your home, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual home. When you take care of yourself, you take care of others at the same time. Do not underestimate the spiritual dimension of this crisis. Adopt the perspective of an eagle that sees everything from above with a broader vision. There is a social demand in this crisis, but also a spiritual demand. The two go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. Without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and futility.” (Hopi Indian Chief White Eagle) There is a lot of wisdom here. But I would offer one additional perspective re: – – When you take care of others you take care of yourself at the same time. Christian doctrine centers on, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ‘As yourself’, not ‘like yourself’. Note the difference. Your neighbor is not a copy of yourself; your neighbor IS yourself. Christian cosmology is a cosmology of reciprocity. Unlike the active/passive verb forms hard wired in most Indo-European languages, Christianity contends that whatever you do to another, you do to yourself. So, taking “care of yourself” can only occur in the context of taking care of others. With Christianity, there is always only one world and whatever you do modifies all of Creation. Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The End of All War David Cowles Jun 22, 2026 “ It is a pleasure to announce that we are the generation that ended warfare once and for all on Planet Earth.” 1000 words, 5 minute read It’s official. Our 5 millennia love affair with ‘intertribal’ warfare is finally over. The first recorded war was about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but it is likely that there were wars before then, probably going back all the way to the time when Homo Sapiens (HS) crowded out the more dovish Neandertals and Denisovans . In any event, since the first recorded arrow was shot into the air, it is barely an exaggeration to say that we have been continuously at war. So much so that we classify conflicts by their duration: the 100 Years War, the 30 Years War, etc. The US apparently has a preference for 20 Year Wars: Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Afghanistan. Peace has come to mean those rare periods of rest, reconstruction, and rearmament that inevitably punctuate martial history. War by whom, against whom, for what? Hardly matters! By everyone against everyone for only temporary advantage. We have met the enemy and he is us . - Pogo So it is a pleasure to announce that we are the generation that ended warfare once and for all on Planet Earth. All those peace signs, sit-ins, and protest marches from the ‘60s and ‘70s apparently paid off. To quote the infamous Neville Chamberlain: We have “peace in our time!” This doesn’t mean that all shooting will stop tomorrow, or that new skirmishes won’t break out. It does mean that war is no longer a viable, long term foreign policy option. It would be nice to think that humanity has at last acquired wisdom and virtue, that we have heeded the call of the prophet Isaiah to turn our swords into ploughshares; it would be nice… but it would be wrong. Sadly, our appetite for battle has not subsided, not even a little bit. (Does the discovery of recoverable Neandertal genes in our DNA offer hope?) And no, the international football pitch has not taken the place of the local battlefield. Sport, even American football, has not sublimated, much less satisfied, our thirst for blood. The ‘problem’ is much more practical. The wave of warfare empowering technology has finally crested. Social scientists debate whether war is the mother of technological progress or whether technological progress whets our appetite for conflict. Most probably, warfare and technology constitute a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing feedback loop, a vicious cycle . Putting on our best imitation of Karl Marx, we can say that material conditions conducive to war no longer exist. Much as we might like to obliterate our neighbors, we lack the technology to do so effectively . Hmm, that sounds strange, doesn’t it? Certainly, if I want you gone, I have more ways to accomplish that today than ever before! But if CSI is to be believed (and why wouldn’t you believe something that’s on TV?), I would almost certainly be caught, tried, incarcerated or executed. So I can kill you…but it’s no longer an effective way for me to deal with the nuisance you’ve become. Similarly, our technical ability to wipe out another nation has never been greater but our practical ability to do so has been permanently compromised. (Those who decry the advance of technology, take note!) Consider the evidence. Since World War II, major wars have rarely had unambiguous outcomes. Korea, for example, ended with armistice and partition, Vietnam with a temporary peace, Iraq I with Al Quada, Iraq II with ISIS, Afghanistan with the Taliban. As always, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Our ultimate weapons of mass destruction are too expensive to build, maintain, upgrade, and replenish; and their consequences make them too expensive to deploy. Our technology has made itself obsolete. At the other end of the spectrum, for the price of a used car I can buy technology that will take out an entire neighborhood. Unexpectedly, war has democratized. Marx’ means of destruction are finally in the hands of the proletariat. The Carnegies and Vanderbilts of warfare (US, Russia) have become ineffectual figureheads, worthy of a deferential nod but little else. Consider Russia’s war with Ukraine, two sides killing each other, soldiers and civilians alike, in the most horrible ways possible. But Chernobyl is off limits and fighting must stop from time to time for grain ships to leave Odessa (or the world would starve), for oil and gas to pass through pipelines (or Europe would freeze), and, most of all, to keep Europe’s largest nuclear power plant safe and operational (or the entire region would risk annihilation). Consider the US war with Iran, massive damage to infrastructure, assassinations of political and military leaders, retaliatory strikes on civilian neighborhoods, but the main focus is on getting oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The local human and material losses take a distant back seat to the global economic cost. And that cost is borne by people who have no interest in the war whatsoever, as well as the combatants. We still have the illusion that the physical impact of wars can be contained in small corners of the planet; we conceptualize war as if it were a movie and we the passive but blood lusting audience. We have no such illusions about the economic costs. They affect Norwegian fishermen and Argentinian ranchers alike; and the costs are not minimal…or sustainable…or even supportable. Ergo , it is no longer economically feasible to engage in warfare. War has become, not impossible, but impractical! Animals kill members of other species for food. They may fight with members of their own species over conjugal rights, etc. but those conflicts are rarely group affairs, and they rarely result in death. Plants and fungi have a symbiotic relationship. They can’t live without one another. Plus, animals and plants are engaged in a planet wide symbiotic pageant as they recycle each other’s carbon and oxygen. Homo has been the odd genus out… until now! Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

< Back The Probability of Nothing David Cowles “Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, ‘God is outside the numbers’.” Riddle : How is language like Willie Mays? Answer : It rules center field! Of course, I am referring to ontological ‘center field’: the tiny, daily transactions (like photon exchange) that bind society (or the world) together. But language can play tricks on us…especially when it deals with stuff at the ends of the ontological spectrum. Take the word itself, ‘nothing’, for example. ‘Nothing’ is a noun and, as we know from primary school, a noun represents a ‘person, place, or thing’. Which of these does ‘nothing’ represent? None, obviously. The word itself tells you all you need to know about its meaning: ‘nothing’ = ‘no thing’. Now we have a word that fails to meet the definition of a noun playing the role of a noun in ordinary speech. What could possibly go wrong? Well, because we use the word, ‘nothing’, as a noun, we could begin to think of Nothing per se as something (some ‘thing’). This is an instance of what Alfred North Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” - the fundamental fallacy of Western metaphysics. Then what is ‘nothing’? Today, we have a number for it: zero. But we didn’t have that number until the 13th century (Fibonacci) and it wasn’t universally accepted into arithmetic until the 18th century (Leibniz). If zero is a real number like other real numbers, then is nothing something? We also have another mathematical symbol for Nothing, ø, the null set. This notation insulates Nothing from the domain of real numbers. We are used to the idea of ‘Ineffable God’: God so far transcends our world that nothing we say about God can be true or even meaningful. Divinity is a language unto itself, or as a five-year-old grandchild once explained to me, “God is outside the numbers.” We’re not used to the idea of ‘Ineffable Nothing’. And yet, ‘nothing’ transcends all things just as God does. God, aka Being, Value, Love, is the ontological opposite of Nothing, which is the absence of ‘I am’ ( Exodus ), ‘it is’ ( Genesis ), ‘you are’ ( Gospel of John ). We begin, as all serious philosophical essays must, with Robert Frost , the ‘Quantum Poet’. In his best known poem, The Road Not Taken , he sets out the quintessential existential dilemma: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” Happens a million times a day, every day! Frost, subject to the human condition , must pick a path, ‘sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler’. Frost makes his choice, ‘I kept the first for another day’; but hero that he is, Frost realizes that this is a forever decision, that the universe bifurcates at this point: ‘Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted I should ever come back’. Nor does our hero hide behind the rationalization of ‘objectivity’; he knows that the road chosen is in no way superior to the other, for ‘both that morning equally lay’. Standing at the point of divergence, at the moment of choice, both roads are equally real, equally attractive, equally effective, and therefore ontologically identical. Frost’s choice is apparently unconditioned. He is as likely to choose A as he is B. Initially, each option has a probability of P ≈ 50%. Since each P > 0, both exist! But whenever Frost’s choice of one path becomes irrevocable (P = 100%), then the alternate route (P = 0) ceases to exist…for Frost. It is no longer part of his Actual World. Proposition : ‘X exists, iff P(x) > 0’. Once P = 0, the alternate path no longer meets Gregory Bateson’s existential criterion: it’s no longer ‘a difference that makes a difference’. When there was no longer an option for Frost to pursue ‘the road not taken’, it ceased to exist… chez Frost. Much of Western philosophy is based on a false conception of Nothing. When we say ‘nothing’ we often have in mind something: a void or a vacuum, ‘nothing’ relatively speaking, but not absolutely nothing . Our ‘nothing’ tends to be ‘something…dimly lit’, a bit like Hades in Homer’s Odyssey . It’s even been called ‘a receptacle’, ‘a womb’, an ‘ether’, ‘pure potentiality’. Today, the cognoscente call it ‘negative vacuum pressure’. Nothing can’t be any of those things, not even metaphorically. Nothing can only be nothing. Nothing has no hair. It’s not a depression left in the fabric by ‘something’ when it departs. It’s not negative space, negative energy or negative vacuum pressure; it’s not positive or negative, it’s nothing. It’s good to know that we are not alone in our thinking. Perhaps we’re not mainstream (yet) but we’re definitely not flying solo . In fact, we share our perspective with Parmenides of Elea, the father of Western philosophy: “It is not to be said or thought that ‘it is not’…It is or it is not…let go the one (it is not) as unthinkable, unnamable, for it is not a real route.” ‘The road not taken’ cannot be ‘said or thought’ or even named because ‘it is not a real route’. When Frost reaches his destination, he is surrounded by reporters all with a single question: “Why did you choose that path?” To which Frost answered, “There was more than one path?” Parmenides viewed the World as both the ‘Realm of Things as they Appear’ ( Doxa ) and the ‘Realm of things as they Are’ ( Aletheia ). In the realm of Doxa , Frost confronts an apparent existential choice. In the realm of Aletheia , the apparent ‘choice’ is without consequence and so does not ‘exist’; it’s not a ‘difference that makes a difference’ because ‘both that morning equally lay’ and both led to the same destination. There was no objective reason to prefer one over the other. So there never was an existential dilemma because there was really only ever one path (a path and its mirror image). This perspective pops up all across ‘the fruited plain’ of Western philosophy, but for now, let’s stick with Quantum Mechanics (QM)! Hugh Everett’s ‘Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics’ states (roughly) that everything that can happen does happen…in its own universe. Corollary : Whatever did not happen could not have happened, because if it even might have happened, it would have happened. Try saying that 10 times! An entity’s worldline is its ‘route’ but apparent routes that pass through ‘counterfactual space’ are not real routes; their probabilities are all equal to 0. If it isn’t now, it never was, it could not have been, and it cannot come to be in the future. Only real routes are ‘real’. Everett channels Parmenides…2400 years later. There is ‘is’ and that’s all there is…no might, no should, no would, no could, just is. Let’s apply this way of reasoning to questions involving probabilities, beginning with a traditional Hasidic folk tale: Once upon a time, a certain Rabbi was on his way home from Schule when he encountered an elderly widow crawling on her hands and knees under a streetlamp. Not wanting to play the part of passer-by in a future production of The Good Samaritan and eager to perform one last mitzvah before going to bed for the night, the Rabbi offered to assist. "I've lost my shiny penny, the only thing I have left in the world," the widow wailed. "And is this where you lost it?" the Rabbi inquired innocently. "No," she replied. "I lost it over there." The quizzical Rabbi, still hoping to be helpful, asked, "Then why are you looking for it here?" "Because the light is better!" This story is often presented as a commentary on the widow's folly, but in fact, the widow is the hero of the story. She defies conventional wisdom. Why look for a lost penny in pitch darkness where there's no hope of finding anything? Unlit space is not part of the widow’s world; from her perspective it is Nothing. So the only ‘rational’ thing for her to do is to search under the lamplight where P > 0. Let’s rephrase: the probability of the penny being under the light is actually 100% (P = 1) because the penny has to be somewhere (P=1), and every other possibility has zero probability (P = 0): 1 – 0 = 1. But the probability of her finding the penny under the light is much, much less (P < 1)…but not zero (P > 0). Ok, this sounds officially crazy. How can the probability of the penny being under the lamp be 100% when we said earlier that the penny is probably not there? Once again, we find our answer in Quantum Mechanics. According to QM, everything is everywhere all the time and anywhere you look there is a finite possibility (however low) that you will find your quantum there…as long as you’ve confined your search to places that exist for you. Now that we’re comfortable applying Parmenides’ ontology to situations involving probabilities, we’re ready to apply it to the greatest floating craps game of all: ‘Pascal's Wager’ (1670 CE). Confronted with the God Question , French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, employed a forerunner of what is today called ‘Game Theory’. Pascal divided a sheet of paper into four quadrants. Across the top of the page, he wrote, “I believe that God exists;” down the left-hand margin, he wrote, “God does exist;” and then he filled in the appropriate truth values: (0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1). Pascal reasoned that one of four things must be true: (1) I do not believe that God exists, and he doesn’t; (2) I do not believe that God exists, but he does; (3) I believe that God exists, but he doesn’t; (4) I believe that God exists, and he does. So God is ‘free’ to exist or not and you are free to believe or not. Yet, scenarios 1, 2, and 3 are effectively identical. They amount to the same thing. Believe whichever one you choose; it makes no difference. They are interchangeable because they each produce the same incremental value: (0*0) or (0*1) or (1*0), i.e. Zero. Only #4 (1*1) is different; only #4 generates incremental value. Quadrants 1, 2, and 3 do not meet Gregory Bateson’s criterion (for ‘being’, above). They produce zero incremental value so there is no ultimate value difference among them and their contribution of value to the world is null (ø). Since all other options generate 0 incremental value, P(4) must be 100% (P=1): 1 – (0 + 0 + 0) = 1. To quote a medieval Irish poet, “Naught (0) is all else to me save than Thou art!” Centuries later, Pascal proved that this is not just a statement of subjective faith…it’s a statement of objective reality. 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 ress, Literary Journal Spring 2023. Return to Harvest 2024 Previous Next

< Back ChatGOD "ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as." Steve Gimbel and Stephen Stern Ph.D. A lawyer was recently exposed for using the artificially intelligent chatbot, ChatGPT, when the brief he submitted was discovered to be filled with precedents that do not exist. ChatGPT is capable of writing like us, incorporating the collective beliefs of humanity as they appear on the World Wide Web. The problem, of course, is that some of what is out there on the Net is not true, and ChatGPT is incapable of filtering out the false. The ability to mirror our linguistic capacity without our critical faculties is dangerous if we use it as the lawyer did, for matters of fact, but it is wonderful for other uses, specifically sparking spiritual insights. ChatGPT and its artificial brethren may make lousy lawyers, but they can be fantastic prophets. Traditionally, we conceive of reality as having three distinct levels. The objective domain is comprised of all the things of the world—tables, chairs, human bodies with complex eyes… all of the perceptible objects. Above the objective stands the metaphysical realm, consisting of that which lies beyond our ability to observe, including necessary entities like God. Below them both sits the subjective dimension, consisting of the lived inner experience of conscious beings like us. Philosophy and religion for centuries have been dogged by a persistent problem: if we are trapped in our minds, only having direct access to our inner thoughts and experiences, how do we know anything beyond our own thoughts? Couldn’t all of the objective and metaphysical entities just be figments of our imagination? Couldn’t we be nothing but brains in vats with false ideas pumped in by an evil demon? Can we know anything true about material reality and what supposedly resides beyond? American Pragmatism is the philosophical movement based on the central ideal that metaphysical truth is grossly overvalued. What matters is not what is necessarily true, but rather what has “cash value,” that is, what works in the world. Metaphysical truth is just so European. We Americans don’t care for the high-falutin’ abstract conceptual essences of things, but rather for the practical, the effective, the operational. We are in a world with things to do. Forget the abstruse, embrace the tools that actually get stuff done. So, when pragmatist William James looked at religion in his Varieties of Religious Experience, he eliminated the European concern for objective justification for religious belief and focused just on the experience itself. Get rid of the question about the validity of Aquinas’ and Anselm’s proofs for the existence of God and start from the undeniable fact that people have spiritual experiences that shape their lives. The question James examines is not whether these experiences are true or false, but rather one of meaning—what are these experiences like and what are the effects they have on people’s lives. Some religious experiences occur in moments of quiet solitude: when praying, meditating, or at random times when we are unexpectedly struck by something we cannot explain. But some come from interactions with people we seek out exactly for their ability to help us experience them—spiritual guides like Hindu yogis, Jewish tzaddikim, Buddhist sages, Muslim hakims, Zoroastrian magi, and Christian prophets. They lead us to epiphanies, to spiritual awakening. These insights are not mere facts describing the world, but rather experiences of appreciation and realization. It is not that we leave knowing something we did not know before, but rather experience a shift in our perspective. We still see what we saw, but now we see it differently; we see it more clearly, we see it as more interconnected, we understand it at a deeper level. ChatGPT as an e-being, as a virtual intelligence, is the ultimate pragmatist. The essence of its artificial existence has severed all connection to the true and false because it does not live in the material world of chairs, tables, and beer mugs where truth resides. ChatGPT is caught in the Web. Its “truths” are the beliefs expressed on the wide-open internet, where anything can and is said. It cares not for the reality beyond its reality but is built to do one thing and one thing only: figure out how language is used to accomplish human tasks and perform them without humans being involved. Human students write essays, so go write an essay without the student needing to do the class readings. Human journalists write stories about events, so go write stories without humans having to research them themselves. Human lawyers write briefs, so go write them without human lawyers needing to do anything but bill their clients. But now, consider this one: human spiritual guides create sermons that lead other humans to have cherished insights about religious matters. Figure out what sorts of word combinations lead to generating understanding and create new combinations that will have this effect. If we see the purpose of our spiritual teachers as making us think in a way that generates wisdom and allows us to live more meaningful lives, that is something a chatbot could actually do quite well. They can see which sorts of passages have the most influence on us and create new versions. They can figure out how we are inspired and continually inspire us. This strikes us as cheap, as dirty, as mere spiritual manipulation. We prize the wise because we believe that their ability to stir our souls comes from the fact that they have a superior connection to the Divine. They provide penetrating astuteness because they have access to the truth that we lack. They are sagacious because they are holy. ChatGPT can be smart, but it can never be holy. In being an e-being, precisely because its intelligence is artificial, it is necessarily alienated from the Divine. It can only be 'as if,' never truly as. And thus, it can only give us virtual facsimiles of wisdom, not the real deal. It is like the false prophet, the huckster pretending to be sacred when they are, in fact, profane in order to profit from being thought a prophet. ChatGPT is built precisely to be this sort of fraud, to be a fake human whose work we can substitute for our own, pretending to have done the necessary labor so that we can get the reward without breaking an intellectual sweat. But that is the opposite of what happens when we use it as an e-prophet. When we read an inspirational passage from ChatGPT and are truly inspired, gain spiritual insight, see the world differently, then we have actually done the real work. Regardless of the source of the passage, we really are changed. In this case, unlike with the plagiarizing lawyer or student, it is the effect, not the cause, that is important. William James’ brilliant philosophical move, transferring talk of religious experience out of the realm of the metaphysical and into the purview of psychology, is transformational. Religion is no longer about truth or faith but about feeling and human-lived experience. If we adopt the pragmatic perspective that inspires that move, then the fact is that the origin of enlightenment, the source of our new wisdom, the cause of our ability to see the world in a deeper and more interconnected fashion is irrelevant. All that matters is that we are changed for the better, not how we came to be changed. And the one thing that artificial intelligence coupled with big data is good at is figuring out how to get humans to predictably react to words. It can figure out what sort of disinformation will get us to vote certain ways and what sorts of triggers will get us to buy certain products. Yes, we ought to be very concerned about these misuses. But that is because these are matters based on facts. But if we are talking about images that inspire awe, jokes that make us laugh, or in this case, inspirational passages that give us insight, then the case is completely different. When it comes to the cases of generating human emotions, what matters are the emotions. If James is correct in moving our understanding of the religious into the realm of the experiential, then we should welcome the rise of our new e-prophets. Steve Gimbel is a Professor of Philosophy and affiliate of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Gimbel has authored Einstein’s Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion & Isn’t That Clever: A Philosophy of Humor and Comedy ).” Dr. Stephen Stern is the.co-author with Dr. Steve Gimbel of Reclaiming the WIcked Son: Finding Judaism in Secular Jewish Philosophers, and the author of The Unbinding of Isaac: A Phenomenological Midrash of Genesis 22 , Associate Professor of Jewish Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies, and Chair of Jewish Studies at Gettysburg College. Return to our AI Issue Table of Contents Share Previous Next

< Back Mark A. Villano Contributor Mark A. Villano has an MDiv from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He has ministered at parishes and campus ministry centers across the country, including at the University of Texas, UCLS, Ohio State University, and Yale. He has an MFA from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC and served as Director of Creative Development at Paulist Productions. Currently, he is Director of Mission and Ministry at Marymount California University, south of Los Angeles. Burn the Candle

< Back Surviving Nuclear War David Cowles Aug 3, 2023 “Instead of preventing all wars, or at least all nuclear wars, we’ve decided to focus on surviving one.” It’s not Fuzzy-Wuzzy! It’s an eight-legged animal called ‘Water Bear’, aka ‘ Tardigrade’. It’s reputed to be Earth’s smallest animal (at 0.5 mm)…and one of the Earth’s oldest (a mere 600 million years old, older even than my high school classmates, but who’s counting). Perhaps not surprisingly, it also appears to be the Earth’s most durable animal…and that’s saying something! While its normal lifespan is only 2 or 3 years, it’s almost impossible to kill . Not for lack of trying! Water Bears have been boiled in water for over an hour, frozen down to -200°C, and sent off into anaerobic space, all without loss of life. Like cocky miscreants everywhere, the Water Bear taunts us: “Is that all ya got?” The life of a Water Bear is not all wine and roses, but it’s not nearly as bleak as you might suppose. Water Bears appear to be sentient; they seem to respond to environmental stimuli. They appear sociable; in fact, water bears crave physical contact with one another. Like my grandchildren when they were toddlers, they like nothing more than smashing into each other. And they communicate with one another! In fact, given that their average age is 2, these moss dwellers are remarkably verbal. Apparently, they communicate by secreting ‘semantic molecules’ which are in turn ‘smelt’ by the rest of their gang. It’s very similar to how Uncle Harry ‘communicates’ with us after Thanksgiving Dinner. Check out this YouTube link if you’d like to see more of your Nth cousin, N times removed (N = 10^8): https://youtube.com/shorts/aOfSlgodlTk?feature=share (and contact me offline if you’d like an audio tape of Uncle Harry.) But don’t get too attached to your new friend; we have big plans for that ball of fur. Like kids, everywhere, we’re tired of hearing adults say, “Why can’t you be more like your cousin Smokey?” Well, if it’s Smokey you want, it’s Smokey you’ll get. We can’t beat him…so we’ll do the next best thing – we’ll co-opt him! We’ll figure out what makes this critter tick and then we’ll splice the relevant genes into human DNA. If all goes well, and it will, Marvel and DC superheroes will be living in your neighborhood in just a few years’ time. Don’t be a NIMBY! This is symbiosis on steroids. Few Water Bears live more than 3 years ‘in the wild’, but inside human DNA, their genes can ‘hope’ to live up to 30 times longer. And in exchange for that, they will make us – well, some of us – virtually indestructible. Meet the Bionic Man…without his hardware. Crowds are already gathering outside #10 , hoping to have a say in Water Bear policy. Their message: everyone gets Water Bear genes, or no one does! How naïve! Of course, not everyone will get Water Bear genes, at least not immediately. Passengers with First Class tickets will still get to board first…and get a free pre-flight cocktail. And who do you think these First Class ticket holders will be? If you said 1%ers, you’d be wrong! Oh, an occasional billionaire may sneak in, but for the most part, the First Class passengers on this flight will be all military. It’s heartening to see our soldiers treated so well. But not so fast! These troops are not headed for well-deserved R&R. They’re en route to becoming the first ever race of Super-Soldiers. These fighting men and women will be ‘treated’ with Tardigrade DNA; they will be made virtually indestructible. That’s nice, I guess. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be invincible. On the other hand, I’m not planning on a dip in boiling water or a trip to anaerobic space or a sleep over in a room where the temperature is kept near Absolute Zero…at least not any time soon. But there’s a darker purpose at work here. For at least 10,000 years human beings have been engaged almost continuously in armed conflict . After WWII, many thought the time had come to put an end to war. But these early ‘peace-pioneers ’ were quickly branded as naïve . So the focus shifted: find ways to keep inevitable future wars survivable, i.e., non-nuclear. Non-proliferation treaties, pauses in the arms race, various SALTs, cold war containment, the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe, the New World Order, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – yup, we’ve tried everything! And it’s worked…sort of. No nation has used a nuclear weapon since the end of WWII. So self-congratulations might be in order, except that almost no one expects this tenuous situation to last much longer; I’m just hoping I get to finish this article. Russia’s designs on Ukraine, China’s on Taiwan, North Korea’s on its neighbor to the south, Iran’s on Israel and the rest of the Middle East, not to mention Hindu/Muslim violence on the Indian Sub-continent - do these conflicts not beg for a nuclear solution? So in the face of all this, we’re apparently giving up the so-called peace process . Instead of preventing a war, at least a nuclear war, we’ve decided to focus on surviving one. Soon all the superpowers will begin breeding their own races of super-soldiers, genetically engineered to fight, win, and survive a nuclear holocaust. Interested? I have a lot of Frequent Flier miles. Maybe you’d like me to try to get you on one of these flights? Just let me know. I’d be happy to help. Keep the conversation going! 1. Click here to comment on this TWS. 2. To subscribe (at no cost) to TWS and ATM, follow this link . 3. We encourage new articles and reprints from freelance writers ; click here to view out Writers’ Specs. 4. Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM) will be devoting its entire fall issue (released 9/1/23) to artificial intelligence (AI). What are the philosophical, theological, cultural and even spiritual implications of AI powered world? If you’d like to contribute to the AI Issue, click here . Previous Share Next Do you like what you just read and want to read more Thoughts? Subscribe today for free! Thoughts While Shaving - the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine. Click here.

“An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” < Back Idolatry David Cowles Oct 15, 2023 “An idol is that with no this…the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body; all hat, no cattle!” Moses Maimonides (c. 1200 CE) wrote: “We are commanded ( Deuteronomy ) to demolish all idols and their places of worship with all kinds of demolition and destruction — breaking, burning, dismantling, and cutting down. Each method is to be used where most effective, where it will achieve the most complete and speedy destruction…there should not remain any remnant.” (That’s the 185 th Mitzvah.) Maimonides is not alone. Others have spoken out concerning the need to destroy injustice at its roots: Barry Goldwater (1964): “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Jean-Paul Sartre (1948), Franz Fanon (1960) and Malcolm X (1964): “…by any means necessary!” Jesus of Nazareth (30): “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (Luke 12: 49) Interesting bedfellows, no? And yet, if Jews and Christians agree on anything, it’s peace! “The lamb shall lie down with the lion.” (Is.11: 6–9 & Rev 21: 1-4) But how do we get there from here? Tolerance of sin? Not according to Scripture! We are commanded to rid the world of sin - root and branch. (Job 18:16) Mercy for the sinner? Absolutely! “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” (John 8:7) Is idolatry sinful? Of course, it is! “Thou shalt not have other gods beside me.” (Ex. 20: 2) But idolatry is not just a sin, one sin among others; idolatry is sin itself! To put it another way, all sin is, at its root, idolatry . In fact, anything and everything is sinful precisely to the extent that… and only to the extent that …it functions as an idol, that it displaces God. Nothing is sinful in itself (everything is good to the extent that it is); it is only made sinful when we turn it into an idol (something it is not). Gold jewelry is not sinful, but it becomes sinful when we melt it down and form it into the likeness of a calf for us to worship. In the cosmology of Hasidic Judaism, everything this is, animate or inanimate, contains within it a divine spark. When we treat what is as it is , we release that spark and allow it to ascend home to YHWH. When we use what is as it is not , we further bind the spark in its spatiotemporal prison. The Judeo-Christian God is not merely ‘truthful’ and ‘just’; YHWH is Truth and Justice! Therefore, we commit a sin, a sin against God, whenever we engage in behavior contrary to what is true or just, i.e. whenever we practice idolatry. Every sin honors our own perverse will at the expense of God’s transcendent values, i.e., at the expense of God, who is Value, who is the Good. For our sophisticated selves, golden calves have lost their luster. No problem! A modern-day idolater may confer ultimate value on his personal safety, comfort and prosperity, on her schedule, agenda and career, all in lieu of God. No surprise here. Whenever we fashion a golden calf (or purchase a new Lexus) and place it on an altar (physically or metaphorically), we substitute what is inert and irrelevant for what is living and true. The Judeo-Christian tradition is built on mercy…up to a point; we are told that sins against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven. Why not…and what is a ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ anyway? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth (God’s Spirit) and therefore the foundation of what is real. When we deny what is real, we turn our backs on the Holy Spirit; and when we affirm what is false in place of what is true, we commit the sin of idolatry. We place the object of our false trust and belief on the altar in our hearts that should have been reserved for God alone. So why unforgivable? To sin against the Holy Spirt is to sin against Truth itself, to substitute an inert and decomposing idol for the living God. Our sins cannot be forgiven as long as we maintain personal maps of the world that are not congruent with God’s logos . i.e., do not conform to reality. It is a commonplace both of home discipline and social jurisprudence that a miscreant cannot be forgiven until he accepts responsibility for his misdeeds. Until we internalize God’s logos ( aka Torah), we are condemned to practice idolatry. There can be no question of forgiveness because, without an acceptance of logos , there can be no sincere resolution to ‘amend our lives’. Those who ignore logos persist in the practice of idolatry; they cannot accept responsibility for their actions, and therefore they cannot be forgiven. This is the sense in which it is correct to say that all salvation comes through Jesus: Jesus is the incarnation of logos . (John 1: 1 – 3) But all is not lost! When we do adopt logos , our idols literally vanish into thin air. They were no-thing to begin with, they are nothing now! Where there was once a golden calf, there is now just a lump of gold. Our past sins are not forgiven…because they don’t need to be. They are well and truly ‘forgotten’: it is as though they never were! Again, according to John (8: 31-32), “…The truth will set you free.” To the extent that we reject what is true, we forfeit that ‘freedom’ and choose slavery. We roll back the Exodus. We willingly return to Egypt, ‘that house of bondage’ (Ex. 20: 2), just as the early Hebrew idolaters urged us to do. When we practice idolatry, we crawl back to Pharaoh with our tails between our legs, “We apologize for the seditious acts of Moses and Aaron, and we regret the disloyalty we exhibited by following them instead of you, O Great Ruler! Please let us build your pyramids again. (You’ll have to admit, nobody builds pyramids like we do!) So let us build for you again – and we’ll gladly make our bricks without straw as a way of showing you just how sorry we are.” In a famous movie, Cool Hand Luke (1967), the sadistic warden determines to torture Paul Newman until Newman’s character ‘gets his mind right’, i.e., until he conforms his will to that of the warden. It is not enough for Newman to obey; he must adopt his captor’s map of the world. Likewise, we are called not just to obey commandments, but to adopt our savior’s map of the world. That is what the Great Commandment (Matthew 22: 35 - 40) is all about…a map of the world: God…and neighbor. Per Jean-Paul Sartre (above), freedom is a precondition of every virtue and value. A value is only valuable to the extent that it has the potential to influence events as they unfold in the world. Likewise, an action can only be virtuous if it is performed freely . Per Barry Goldwater (also above), “Extremism in defense of Liberty is no vice.” In 1941 ( Escape from Freedom ), Eric Fromm argued that there is a basic human tendency to trade freedom for comfort (physical & existential). Is that tendency what we refer to as ‘original sin’? Is our fascination with idols our original sin ? The heroes of scripture are those who traded comfort and security for wisdom and understanding. Adam & Eve, for example, traded Paradise for the knowledge of Good & Evil. Abraham, Moses, Solomon, the prophets, John the Baptist and, finally, Jesus all traded comfort and security for wisdom and knowledge. In the 20 th century, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, coined the phrase: “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” ( Process and Reality , et al.) Idols are nothing if not concrete! And yet, as substitutes for God, they are illusory. They represent conceptually something that does not exist materially. Therefore, to idolize anything is to ‘misplace concreteness’. An idol is that with no this , there with no here, then with no now; an idol is the sound of one hand clapping. It is Alice’s Cheshire Cat – all face, no body, or to borrow a line from the modern American political scene, “all hat, no cattle!” Idolatry is just exactly what it says it is: the substitution of ‘not-God’ for God and ‘not-neighbor’ for neighbor. We all have our own idols, the things we either confuse with God or knowingly and willingly place above God according to our own, personal hierarchy of values. For example, if you’re living in Canaan in the 2 nd millennium BCE, you might confuse Baal (a local god) with YHWH (the maker of heaven and earth). If you’re living in America in the 21 st century A.D., you might be placing certain ‘material things’ above God on your ‘altar’. You know they’re not God, but at the end of the day, they exert more influence on your behavior than God does. We believe in God, but we put our faith in idols : alcohol, drugs, sex, money, power, affluence, notoriety, and fame…to name just a few. To be clear, these things are not ‘bad’ in themselves. We make them ‘bad’ when (and only when), we place them above God in our own personal ‘hierarchy of values’. All true values subsist in God’s essential being. In fact, those values are God’s essential being, but they are God’s essential being according to an order, a logos . When I substitute my personal hierarchy of values for the hierarchy of values that is logos , I create an idol. The logos (ordering) of God’s essential values optimizes the role each value plays in the whole. Logos is the expression of God’s values in the context of creation, in terms of the World. When we say that God exists, we assert the reality of God’s essence (values) and his logos (Christ). Idols are not just not God; they are not-God ! They do not instantiate the values we associate with God, nor do they project his logos onto (or into) the world. The philosophical journey of the Israelites began with God’s self-revelation to Moses: “I am what am.” (Exodus 3: 14) Which begs the question: “What is?” And now we are in a position to answer that question! (Drum roll please.) ‘What-is’ is God’s values, ordered via his logos and experienced in concrete actual entities that occur in the world for the benefit of others. ‘What-is-not’ is idols! Paraphrasing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “idols, idols, everywhere but not a drop to drink,” not a drop of the living water that is, i.e., the spring that is the source of eternal life. David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com . Return to our Harvest Issue 2023 Share Previous Next Click here. Do you like what you just read? Subscribe today and receive sneak previews of Aletheia Today Magazine articles before they're published. Plus, you'll receive our quick-read, biweekly blog, Thoughts While Shaving. Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! Return to Table of Contents, Winter 2023 Issue Return to Table of Contents, Holiday Issue Return to Table of Contents, Halloween Issue Return to Table of Contents, Fall Issue Return to Table of Contents, Beach Issue Return to Table of Contents, June Issue

< Back Drumming to Inner Peace Magesh The biggest connection I made between music and spirituality was that they both focus on the present moment. When I managed to stay in the present moment in both the song and in life, I realized there was no time for anxiety. I've had a great career as a session musician. I played the drums for Lionel Richie, Rhianna, Ricky Martin, Nelly Fertado, Kimbra, and many other pop stars. I have also taught the drums and piano for over 20 years. (Although now all my teaching is online...thanks, Covid!) Playing music has taught me many things: the discipline of practice, how working hard yields results, and that, if you get lucky enough, your dreams may come true. Although I have done many cool things like playing on television, performing in multiple countries, and appearing in magazines, there was one thing that trumped all of these: playing music gave me inner peace. Here is how that happened… As an adolescent, my mind always moved quickly with racing thoughts. Looking back, it was probably teen angst and a good dose of old-fashioned anxiety. My older brother played music, too, and one day, he took me to the concert of a famous drummer. I can still vividly remember the performance. The drummer played to a sold-out auditorium of 1,000 people. His performance was so outstanding by the end, he received a standing ovation. I was mesmerized by it and also by the crowd’s reaction. At 14-years-old, I didn't know many things; what I did know was that I, too, was going to be a famous drummer. After convincing my parents that my school grades would improve if they bought me a drum kit, (they didn’t!), I sat down in my bedroom to start my first practice session. As soon as I hit the snare drum, all my racing thoughts stopped. Just like that! There was no worrying about what was going to happen at school tomorrow, nor any worry about if the girl on the bus liked me; in fact, there was no worrying about anything. What there was, was the present moment each time I hit that drum. I remember feeling incredible peace as I launched into a basic rock beat. (The irony was this beat probably filled my neighbor with anxiety because it was as loud as a jackhammer!) I've read stories of Buddhist monks who achieved a blissful state of mind through constant meditation. I don't know if I reached that state of bliss, but my teenage angst definitely disappeared. By playing music and literally concentrating on one note at a time, I didn't have the time to be concerned about problems outside my bedroom door, and, after playing for just a few months, my self-esteem and confidence improved tenfold. This was simply because I was starting to sound great…or so I thought. My older brother was a professional musician. After I had been playing the drums for ten months, he opened my bedroom door and quite calmly said, “Your timing sucks. You should get some drum lessons.” After picking up the shards of my shattered self-esteem off the floor, I realized that maybe he was right. I booked a 30-minute lesson with a famous Australian drummer. I really thought this teacher would be impressed with my ability to play several types of drum beats. However, as I sat down to play, he said, “Your posture is all wrong.” How could I screw up sitting down? He then asked me to play something I was comfortable playing and to pretend that he wasn't there. I played a basic rock pattern, which, I thought, was decent. The instructor had a look on his face as if someone had just insulted his mother. Slightly in shock, slightly angry, he said something I didn't understand at the time: “How do you go about breathing?” “I usually just breathe in and out,” I replied. This actually made him laugh out loud because what he meant was how I breathed when I played the drums. After carefully explaining to me that drumming was an extremely intense physical activity, he suggested I breathe two counts in, two counts out. This changed everything for me. I don't know the science behind it, but the exercise slowed down both my heart rate and my mind, which, in turn, made me feel incredibly calm. I would go on to have lessons with this teacher for 13 additional years. I would be performing with some of the biggest artists in the world, and still, I’d go to my weekly drum lesson. When people asked me why I was still taking lessons as a top professional, my answer was always the same: “It makes me feel good.” The biggest connection I made between music and spirituality was that they both focus on the present moment. When I managed to stay in the present moment in both the song and in life, I realized there was no time for anxiety. I remember being 16-years-old and saying to my teacher, “What happens if I'm on stage playing a concert and I make a mistake?” Without hesitating, he said, “Once you make a mistake, that moment is over. You have to leave it in the past. If you focus on that mistake, it will only lead to more mistakes.” If that isn't a metaphor for life, I don't know what is. * Editor's Note: Music can play an important role in how we experience the world and communicate that experience to others. Be sure to check out The Meaning of Music in this issue of AT Magazine. Magesh has written for “Lessonface,” “Aeyons,” “The Modern Rogue,” “Euronews,” “The Roland corporation,” “Penlight,” and “Elite Music.” He writes several monthly publications on music education. In the past, Magesh has written for parenting, humor, mental health, and travel websites as well. Previous Next